Scott Niederjohn, PhD

In August’s primary, Wisconsin voters flirted with nominating an advocate of socialism as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor. Elsewhere in the region, national elected officials openly embrace socialist ideals, while the U.S. senator-elect in neighboring Michigan has drawn significant attention for his radical views.

Whatever one’s political affiliation, these developments raise an important question: Is it time for Wisconsin to adopt statewide education standards that ensure students understand the history of communism and the dangers it has posed to freedom, democracy, and human dignity?

There are two distinct variants of socialism, and candidates have not always been clear about which kind they favor. Some favor Sweden as their model, failing to recognize that Sweden today is not socialist — but, rather, a strong market economy with an extensive social safety net. Others do not favor a market economy at all and insist that the government must own the means of production. They are reluctant to name an example nation, however, because the examples have been obvious failures, such as Cuba and North Korea, or growth stories that only happened when the state retreated from central planning, such as China and Vietnam.

According to an old saying, you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out — but that is not quite right. Swedes voted for an extensive welfare state but then pulled back democratically, especially during a 1990s fiscal crisis. Today Swedes enjoy such policies as school vouchers and a larger private role in health care. But when Venezuelans empowered Hugo Chavez to centralize control, they found the system he started could not be voted out. When they tried in 2024, the regime declared itself the winner anyway.

Alicia Nieves:

In the months leading up to this moment, national and state progressive advocacy groups applied intense pressure on Thierry, going as far as to threaten to unseat her in a primary. Other members of the Democratic caucus discouraged her from breaking ranks, with one Democratic lawmaker urging her to “hold your nose” and vote against it with the rest of the party, particularly as the legislation would require no Democrat to pass through the Republican-controlled legislature. But Thierry made her decision clear. Her religious convictions and her own research required her to vote in favor of the legislation. Less than a year after that vote, progressive groups and aligned unions poured more than $1 million to help a hand-selected challenger defeat Thierry in a heated primary and runoff campaign. 

As I watched the relentless campaign against Thierry unfold, I struggled to understand why the state party failed to defend one of its own from the progressive groups. The newly elevated issue of medical transition treatments for minors was far removed from the traditional positions of Democratic officials, such as civil rights, worker protections, and public education. But in this instance, it was treated as a defining test of loyalty. The party’s decision was made all the more perplexing by who Thierry was. 

Shawn Thierry would seem to embody the modern Democratic Party: an African-American woman, a lawyer, and the daughter of a city maintenance worker and an English teacher. The generations of African-Americans who built her district of Sunnyside, Houston’s first black community, were working-class, Christian, and loyal to the Democratic Party. They helped deliver Texas for Kennedy and Johnson, under whose terms the Democrats passed sweeping civil rights legislation. But African-Americans, particularly older voters who form a significant share of the Democratic base, tend to be more socially conservative. Rather than see Thierry’s vote in favor of the ban as one that reflected the will of voters in her plurality-black district, the state Democratic party determined that allowing the progressive groups to remove Thierry was less costly than defending her. 

Shortly after her loss, Thierry released a statement announcing she was leaving the Democratic Party. “The Democratic Party has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss,” she wrote. “This is not the party I grew up with. I have witnessed firsthand how the so-called ‘liberal’ left now stifles thoughtful debate, silencing dissent with an iron fist—demanding blind allegiance to ideology, where one must comply or be cast out.”

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I have observed this here: “I will be primaried and taken out if I do that.”

Jeff Yass

Every time the market falls, the pundits come out with the same diagnosis: It was a bubble, speculators lost their minds, and somebody should have stopped them. This time the pundits are early. They decided artificial intelligence is a bubble before anything had fallen. Really? Why would rational investors suddenly lose their minds?

Start with the word itself. What is a bubble? The bubble callers mean a price that hype has pushed above fundamental value. Notice what that assumes: that there is a true price, that the market has lost sight of it, and that when prices come down, reality is correcting a delusion.

This totally misunderstands prices under uncertainty and volatility. There is no true price to lose sight of. The value of a new technology is uncertain, and a price isn’t a verdict on what it is worth. It is the market’s best guess: every possible future weighted by its likelihood of payoff, made by millions of people with their own money on the line and more information than any pundit can hold. The market isn’t “right.” It’s just a much better instrument for predicting value under uncertainty. When prices fall, that isn’t a delusion correcting. It’s uncertainty resolving.

Go back to 1999. An internet stock trades at $100 a share. If it turns out to be the next Amazon, it goes to $1,000. If it turns out to be the next Pets.com, it goes to zero. Say the market puts the chance of becoming Amazon at 15%. Do the arithmetic. Fifteen percent of $1,000 is $150, so at $100 the stock isn’t expensive. Buying it is a sensible bet.

Now it turns out to be Pets.com, and the stock goes to zero. Was it a bubble? No. The buyers were betting on a 15% shot, and the 85% came in. The best guess of the stock’s value was $150, and the most likely outcome was zero. Both were true at once, but most pundits can hold only one of those ideas in their heads. And 15% isn’t rare. A random day is a Tuesday about 14% of the time, and nobody is shocked when it’s Tuesday.

“It’s Not Real”

Defection from experts is inherently unsophisticated and can become an autoimmune response. Vaccine skepticism and raw milk are two good examples of over correction against the Noble Lie.

This blue wave was fueled by suspicion of the elites and their surveillance apparatus and another facet of civilization is being ravaged by an autoimmune disorder. There is no CCP psyop. There is no voter fraud.

Ultimately, these concerns could have been ignored or mitigated by a more positive economic situation, but the rising cost of fuel/diesel ruled that out. The economy was already stressed from tariffs and this just pushed the center over the edge.[‡]

I’m not sure yet what the Republicans should do in response. They cannot unbomb Iran (and the Democrats are already signaling that they will keep funding the Iran war????[8]). The diesel deal with Russia will likely be undone. Domestic fossil fuel production will likely be curbed or become more costly under the new Texas Railroad Commissioner. The NIBMY portion of the electorate isn’t going to approve more refineries. The data center build out and AI growth are (soon to be were?) fueling the economy, even in blue collar trades; if that gets shut down then you’re going to see declining wages with rising costs. The economy will just get worse.

——-

It can be hard for upper middle class pollsters to figure out what questions to ask the working class.

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Messaging, media, and communication count, so note:

Four years ago GDP growth was lower than today—even though the pandemic was about over and there was a dramatic return to work and spending.

The inflation rate was almost three times higher in 2022 than now.

Daniel Buck

Simply put, there are way more administrators, instructional aides, janitorial workers, and other support staff than teachers. Consider the growth of students, teachers and other staff since 1959, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics:Increase in… Student enrollment47%Teachers139%Principals and assistant principals210%Instruction coordinators631%Guidance counselors779%Instructional aides1,476%

In six decades, staff growth has bloated far beyond actual student growth. To put the numbers another way, in 1949, teachers were 70.3 percent of all school staff. In 2022, they were only 47.5 percent. Herein lies the explanation for the discrepancy: Districts hire lots of new people, while classes themselves remain the same size.

Any functional system requires non-instructional staff such as cafeteria workers, janitors, administrators, special education aides, and front office staff. But currently, the system resembles a construction site where one man digs with a shovel and five others mill about, shouting unsolicited advice.

If we line up staffing trends alongside two other trends, salary growth and academic outcomes, the correlations (or lack thereof) introduce compelling questions about the past six decades of policy decisions.

Regarding pay, in the same time that staff rosters ballooned, teacher salaries increased 38 percent in constant dollars (and per pupil expenditure over 300 percent). Instead of investing in teacher salaries, schools expanded personnel rolls. We could have instead kept staffing rosters lower — even increased classroom sizes slightly — and doubled or even tripled teacher pay.

Elizabeth Sander

Texas voters sent mixed messages Tuesday when it comes to funding public schools.

At the top of the ticket, they strongly backed Democratic candidates who campaigned on support for public education. But farther down the ballot, they rejected nearly all school tax rate increases and bond proposals.

Across the five biggest cities in Texas, two dozen school districts pitched a bond or tax increase to voters. Only two saw their proposals pass, and even then, barely: Schertz-Cibolo ISD in San Antonio and Manor ISD near Austin.

And Spring ISD, which just avoided state intervention, saw a proposal to increase property taxes fail for the second time in two years.

Since school ballot proposals are usually scrutinized most heavily by fiscal conservatives, their widespread defeat coinciding with a historic blue wave in Texasconfounded experts. 

“It’s just so surprising to see this happen,” said Jon Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

Superintendent Maine:

I’m a public school superintendent in Florida. And I believe in school choice. Some people find that surprising.

They shouldn’t.

I believe in free markets and I believe competition makes everyone better.

Florida has given parents real power to choose where their children learn. Charter schools, private schools, virtual options, scholarships that follow the child.

I don’t see that as a threat to public education. I see it as the push public education needed.

When a business knows its customers can leave, it gets better. It listens. It innovates. It earns loyalty instead of assuming it.

Our customers are students and parents. And in my district, we compete for them every day.

That means:

→ Building programs families can’t find anywhere else
→ Responding to parents like their time and trust matter
→ Measuring ourselves by whether families choose to stay
→ Never treating an enrollment as something we’re owed

 Aaron Garth Smith:

Making matters worse is nearly $400 billion in teacher pension debt that states have amassed, about $9,300 in debt per public school student. Pension debt crowds out dollars available for things that drive results—like competitive salaries that would attract and retain the best teachers—and states are on the hook for their pension promises, which are constitutionally protected, regardless of how many students are in classrooms.

Another challenge for educators is mission drift. Even before the pandemic, non-teaching staff such as counselors, social workers, and instructional aides were on the rise, and now comprise over half of all public school employees. Much of this “staffing surge” can be attributed to special education, but competing priorities—such as spending on community schools and social-emotional learning—also divert resources from core academics.

Finally, public schools are in a learning recession, with math and reading scores declining for more than a decade. Pre-pandemic trends, including large and sustained K–12 funding increases, suggest that states can’t simply spend their way to better student achievement. Policymakers need to find ways to get more from the $1 trillion spent on public education each year, including boosting the supply of meaningful alternatives for families.  

To address these and other challenges, a new era of K–12 finance reform should focus on three policy goals. These aims, and eight ways state policymakers can get started, are described below.

Policy Goal #1: Improve financial performance through transparency and accountability

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Because guess what happens when schools get money? I’ll give you a hint they don’t hire teachers.

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“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Jack Henneman:

Thoughts on a wide range of topics by the host of The History of the Americans Podcast. There may occasionally be evidence or facts, but mostly just spitballing! Subscribe if you’ve always wanted to pay for the ad-free podcast!

In early 2024 I went to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, the “AHA” to the cognoscenti, that year held in San Francisco. In its aftermath I was a bit grumpy, and dropped the one and so far only purely “editorial” sidebar episode of my podcast, The History of the Americans. This piece is adapted from the script for that episode, with some elaboration and a fair amount of new thinking.

The formal part of the AHA annual meeting consists mostly of panel discussions, which are known as sessions. These address some unifying topic, and typically involve three or four historians who have recently published arguably related papers, and a “chair” of the session that helps organize the discussion. During any given time slot – say, 8:30-10 on Saturday morning – there are 20-25 simultaneous sessions, so even if one fills his entire calendar, going to some session for every time slot, you’d only get to see 4-5% of the sessions on offer. Therefore, the rank generalizations that follow are actually based on a very small sample, and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt. Think of them as the start of a discussion, rather than the end of it. Some would say I’m just spitballing.

There are also “plenary sessions,” which are intended to accommodate all the attendees, a president’s address, which in the past has been the occasion for some really notable talks by leading American historians, some “workshops,” such as how historians might find non-academic jobs, the academic job market sucking so much, and a trade show floor. This last was actually my favorite part, since it consisted of displays set up by university presses featuring the history books that they have published recently. I spent hours prowling the trade show floor taking pictures of books to buy via the miracle of Amazon, which, it must be said, is absolutely not the socially acceptable way to buy books among this crowd.

As it happens, there were very few sessions that covered my main area of interest for this podcast, early American history. That led me to a topic that does interest me – how the teaching of history has evolved in our schools and universities since, shall we say, my day. I went to sessions with such titles as “Historical Inquiry in History Classrooms,” “Teaching History in Polarized Times,” “Historians and the Culture Wars in Higher Ed,” and “What is the Civic Value of a History Education?” There were any number of competing sessions I did not see along these general lines. My impressions, such as they are, come from the sessions I attended. I have reduced them to a couple of hot takes which may or may not be fair.

The first is that academic historians feel under siege, especially if they live and work in one of the states, such as Florida or Texas,1 that has responded to the conservative campaign to bend the teaching of history away from the seemingly dominant critical narratives of the last generation to something more closely approximating a “national heritage” approach. This is a complicated topic, and I have mixed and still incomplete opinions about it, so I am not going to get into it substantively here. In the spirit of transparency, my broad opinions are two. First, I am opposed to government interference with the curriculum in colleges and universities, even those run by the state and even when I sympathize with the problem that red state legislators – and, now, the Trump administration – are trying to address. I just believe that this is not a problem that can be effectively addressed by laws or regulation without trampling on academic freedom, which I believe is a critically important value, especially in public universities. This should come as no surprise to people who have listened to my podcast or followed me on the socials – they know that I serve on the board of FIRE,2which has opposed and even sued to overturn content-based regulation of university curricula, such as Florida’s “stop woke” act and, this year, the federal attacks on Harvard and other universities.

Amelia Ferrell Knisely:

West Virginia officials are asking the state Supreme Court to wait until next spring to consider a lawsuit that alleges inadequate public school funding.

The time gap could give the state Legislature time to rework the state’s school funding formula, which is the crux of the lawsuit. 

The state’s seven-step school funding formula, which hasn’t been updated for years, largely relies on headcount to determine funding. West Virginia is dealing with a population loss and a wave of school closures; school officials point to the funding formula’s outdated method.

A new filing by the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office on behalf of leaders in the legislative and executive branches asks for delay in the school funding lawsuit until next April. 

Lawmakers’ next 60-Day session will begin Jan. 13, 2027.

“Petitioner asks this Court to order the political branches to rewrite West Virginia’s school aid formula. But the political branches are already engaged in discussions. The Department of Education has delivered an overhaul of the formula to the Governor and legislative leadership. The Joint Standing Committee on Education plans to hear the Department out on Nov. 9,” said the attorney general’s filing.

Consideration of the school funding formula is expected during the session, the attorney general’s office added. 

Gov. Patrick Morrisey has already said that public school funding issues will “dominate the next legislative session” in January. 

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“THE CHALKBOARD MAFIA.” Coleman Hughes and Bill Maher take on teachers unions protecting failure instead of students.

Hughes says the Brooklyn school they’re discussing spent $50,000 per pupil: “The problem isn’t the funding, it’s that you can’t fire anyone bad.”

Maher to MS NOW’s Ali Vitali: “I think this is the kind of thing I will never hear on MS Now.”

Her response, and Hughes’s case for rewarding good teachers, follow.

Jill Tucker, Hanna Zakharenko:

San Francisco’s Bret Harte Elementary School offers performing arts, before- and after-school programs, taiko drumming, a principal who’s been there 13 years and a fully staffed wellness center that for years had a therapy dog named Peggy.

What it doesn’t have is a single white or Asian American student.

That’s because the 96 Asian American and four white San Francisco Unified School District students living in the school’s current attendance zone in the Bayview have all enrolled elsewhere.

It’s a pattern replicated at many schools across the city given the district’s current student-assignment system, which lets families apply to any school they want, with assignments based primarily on a lottery system.

Often, that means families choose long commutes over the school down the street. But that system is set to change. After a school board vote last month, the district is on track to overhaul the policy for enrollment in fall 2028, focusing on neighborhood-based assignment instead.

To provide a snapshot of the current enrollment patterns the district hopes to shift — and a preview of what schools might look like in two years when the new student assignment system is in place — the Chronicle obtained never-before-published enrollment data from the district.

Gaurab Aryal, Manudeep Bhuller and Fabian Lange:

This paper considers the use of instruments to identify and estimate private and social returns to education within a model of employer learning. What an instrument identifies depends on whether it is hidden from, or transparent (i.e., observed) to, the employers. A hidden instrument identifies private returns to education, and a transparent instrument identifies social returns to education. We use variation in compulsory schooling laws across noncentral and central municipalities in Norway to, respectively, construct hidden and transparent instruments. We estimate a private return of 7.9 percent, of which 70 percent is due to increased productivity and the remaining 30 percent is due to signaling.

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More.

Tricia

Louisiana isn’t starting from zero on aerospace.

Across the state, schools are teaching aerospace manufacturing, aircraft maintenance and engineering, with more space-focused offerings on the way.

Sydney Lake:

“Gates spokesperson said the tools will be tested in schools serving high shares of low-income students, paired with teacher training, and evaluated by independent researchers” so it’s okay to experiment on poor kids?

“Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them,” he wrote. 

The skepticism is already shaping policy. On Sept. 2, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced what the city called the nation’s broadest moratorium on student-facing generative AI. It’s a one-year pause for students in 2-K through 8th grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the system.

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” Mamdani said in a statement. “We do not see it that way.” He added the city would spend the year studying the technology’s impacts.

Yet, major philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation continue to pour money into introducing more technology in schools. While the Gates Foundation’s stated intention is to close gaps in access to AI, not everyone is convinced of how effective it will be or how necessary it is for student success. 

However, a Gates Foundation spokesperson told Fortuneits approach is built around those very concerns. The spokesperson said the tools will be tested in schools serving high shares of low-income students, paired with teacher training, and evaluated by independent researchers before being scaled. Plus, the foundation’s own strategy warns “too many tools have been adopted without evidence they work” and insists teachers “remain central.”

Shannon Osaka

On Tuesday, Americans voted overwhelmingly against data centers and artificial intelligence growth. In 40 of 41 local ballot races around the country, many in the state of Ohio, voters opted to restrict or prohibit new data center constructions in their areas. 

Much of the growing opposition to data centers has come from rising electricity prices, which are squeezing Americans in a time of already high prices and cost of living. 

But, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices. The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4 percent of the utility rate increases over the last five years. 

“Even to me it was somewhat surprising,” said Serguei Netessine, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors. 

In the run-up to the elections, Democrats pointed to data centers — and Republican support for their development — as key drivers of electricity price increases. In one campaign ad, Democrat James Talarico, now senator-elect of Texas, said that Texans were “paying the price with skyrocketing utility bills.” Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator-elect of Ohio, similarly argued that state residents were facing higher electricity bills due to the build-out of energy-hogging data centers. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

There are certainly some areas — like in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and other states covered by grid operator PJM — where data centers have skyrocketed demand, pushing some costs onto residential customers.

Roshan Fernandez:

It is a growing scourge for colleges, a phenomenon they call “melt.”

The term refers to students who commit to an institution in the spring, then don’t show up in the fall. Some placed deposits at multiple schools and went elsewhere; others might not be attending anywhere because of financial challenges. Melt has become enough of a problem that administrators are developing strategies on how to fight it year-round.

“They were saying, ‘Yup, I’ll be there. I’ll be there.’ And all of a sudden, they’re not here,” said Ken Woods, vice president of enrollment at Whittier College near Los Angeles, which had a 17% melt rate this year. “It’s like, what happened?”

The problem is growing nationwide, with some schools seeing 20% of their students disappearing after placing their deposits. Amid enrollment pressures driven by a shrinking student population, colleges are implementing anti-melt tactics—known as “freeze” strategies—to prevent competitors from poaching their committed students and to keep young people engaged with them throughout the year. 

Typically, to commit to a school, a student pays a nonrefundable deposit of a few hundred dollars, later credited toward tuition. But in recent years, more students are placing deposits at two or even three schools, research shows.

Their mentality: “Let me ‘optionality’ all of this till the very last minute,” said Ana Homayoun, academic adviser and author. “I used to think May 1 was the finish-line, decision day, and now, almost in some cases, I think it’s like halftime.”

Some families double-deposit so they can continue negotiating aid packages through the summer. Students submitted an average of 1.4 deposits each for the class that started in 2025, up from one in 2019, according to a report from consultant EAB. Higher-income families are more likely to place more than one deposit, the report said.

“That wreaks havoc for colleges,” said Angel Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “You don’t know who’s coming until they actually show up in September.” 

Miryam Naddaf: 

One of the world’s top professional societies for scientists and engineers has retracted 1,417 conference papers in one go.

The move was announced in a 28 October statement by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. It is the largest single bulk retraction issued by any scholarly publisher, research-integrity specialists told Nature.

The IEEE announcement did not identify the affected papers. However, Nature’s news team has verified that IEEE retracted at least 1,417 conference papers on 23 October. All of them were previously identified by a study of research works that can be traced to social-media advertisements by paper mills — businesses that sell authorship slots for papers which, in turn, often describe low-quality or fake research.

That study — originally posted in April as a preprintand published this month in the journal Accountability in Research — listed 2,062 papers published in 366 IEEE conference proceedings between 2021 and 2026.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, November 5, 2026 –

An internal review by Robert Brech, Executive Director of the Supreme Court of Arkansas’s Office of Professional Conduct and Programs, has uncovered extensive irregularities involving the Court’s Office of Professional Programs and the administration of the Arkansas Bar Examination. The matter was turned over to state and federal authorities.

As of today, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for the Sixth Judicial District filed formal criminal charges against Nancie Givens for 65 counts of tampering with a public record under Arkansas Code Annotated section 5-54-121 in connection with the alleged altering of numerous Arkansas Bar Examination scores and the deletion of files purportedly intended to conceal that misconduct.

The charges followed a criminal investigation initiated in April 2026 by the Arkansas State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As always, all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Matt McGue, EliseL. Anderson, Emily Willoughby, Alexandros Giannelis, William G. Iacono, James J. Lee

• Individuals with low levels of GCA who complete college experience the same benefits as those with higher levels of GCA.
• •Personality factors and socio-economic status may partly compensate for the impact of low GCA on college attainment.

Abstract

In a longitudinal sample of 2593 individuals from Minnesota, we investigated whether individuals with IQs ≤ 90 who completed college experienced the same social and economic benefits higher-IQ college graduates did. Although most individuals with IQs ≤ 90 did not have a college degree, the rate at which they completed college had increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation. The magnitude of the college effect on occupational status, income, financial independence, and law abidingness was independent of IQ level, a finding replicated using the nationally representative NLSY97 sample. Additional analyses suggested the association of college with occupational status was consistent with a causal effect and that the educational success of individuals with low-average IQs may depend in part on non-ability factors, family socioeconomic status and genetic endowment. We discuss our finding in the context of the recent expansion in college attainment as well as the dearth of research on individuals with low-average IQs.

Mike Nichols

 — and who — matters most:

• Eighty thousand kids in parental choice and public charter schools who won’t have hope for the future if those schools are defunded and forced to close.
• Hundreds of thousands more children in public district-run schools who want a better life but need higher standards and committed teachers and cops in the hallways.
• Millions of taxpayers who can’t afford to give even more to the ever-growing government, or to unions should politicians overturn Act 10.
• Thousands of people working in jobs made possible by policies such as right-to-work.
• Tens of thousands more who will never be able to afford a place to live if the state imposes rent caps or doubles down on regulations that increase home prices.
• Thousands of teenagers who will not be able to enter the work force if the minimum wage is hiked to $20 an hour, a surefire way to eliminate jobs.
• Countless retirees and small business owners who want to stay here but can easily follow their friends to Florida, where the sun shines and the taxes are far lower. 

These are just some of the people impacted by policy decisions in the state that we so love — and the reason we’ve spent the last year working on the 2027 Mandate for Madison.

Four years ago, our initial Mandate for Madison was chock-full of research and ideas that have helped make Wisconsin a better, more prosperous place. The 300-page book helped set the stage for dental therapists, putting cops back in schools, a more stable justice system and more funding for choice and charter schools.

As you’ll see in the preface penned by our vice president of policy and research, Ben Eisen, we’re publishing a lot of new ideas and research this time around but also reminding all Wisconsinites that we cannot afford to abandon key, free-market victories like Act 10 and right-to-work and school choice.

Brian Mann

The scale of decline is daunting. According to the U.S Department of Education, the number of kids in public schools nationwide peaked in 2019 and fell by roughly 1.5 million students as of the 2024 school year. 

Based on data gathered before Trump’s immigration crackdown began, federal researchers project enrollment will decline by at least another 2 millionstudents by 2030. That would mean a 7% national decline in roughly a decade.

——

Deeper dive on  abortion & adoption data here. [data dictionary]. More.

Megan Menchaca:

From state takeovers to religion in classrooms to who’s overseeing public schools, Texas is poised to see a profound shift in K-12 education priorities after Democrats swept statewide elected offices, including the governor’s race, attorney general’s office and control of state House.

Gina Hinojosa, a former Austin ISD school board president, became the first Democrat to win the governor’s seat since 1990 after campaigning on a platform of “saving” Texas public schools. She pledged to remove Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath from his role on her first day in office, as well as eliminate state takeovers of districts.

“We are taking our children’s education back from a government that has failed them,” Hinojosa said in her victory speech. “Schools will not be taken out of our control, shuttered or suffocated. Being a parent is hard enough without carrying the burden of a government’s failures.”

However, Hinojosa cannot single-handedly reverse years of Republican-led policies during the upcoming legislation session. Several of the issues she campaigned against are enshrined in state law, requiring help from the Legislature to alter or overturn. 

Hinojosa will have help advancing her agenda from Democrat Lt. Gov Vikki Goodwin, who will oversee the Senate, and a Democratic majority in the state House. However, Republicans lawmakers maintain a majority in the state’s upper chamber, where they have the authority to approve or reject Hinojosa’s appointees as well as the ability to impact Democrats’ priority legislation. 

The end to GOP dominance in several other statewide offices — including the attorney general and comptroller — is likely to have major implications for millions of students. By Wednesday evening, Republicans were in jeopardy of losing control of the 15-member State Board of Education that recently adopted conservative measures such as requiring Bible stories in reading lessons.

Tyler Kingkade: 

Sitting in an atrium on Google’s campus, a group of K-12 educators imagined the worst response they could receive when they tried to persuade their colleagues to use artificial intelligence.

They pictured a veteran English teacher who was still upset that cursive is no longer taught. Perhaps she would yell that AI is “just another shiny tech fad.” What’s next, she might ask — robots teaching kids how to read?

The educators asked Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, for advice and soon had a role-playing plan. They would win over this skeptical English teacher by explaining what generative AI could do for her: create classroom materials for phonics lessons, reducing what would normally be hours of work to just two minutes. The key, the educators agreed, was to avoid getting into an argument or letting this AI critic unload all her fears uninterrupted.

“Well, it’s not cursive, but it did save me an hour of typing tonight,” they predicted the English teacher would eventually reply.

Seventy teachers and school technology directors selected for their interest in Google’s education technology products traveled to the company’s headquarters last week for a free two-day training program on how to use AI — and how to urge their colleagues to use it, too. The Google Educator Series is part of the company’s long-standing effort to put its products in schools, and this training signaled the company’s growing focus on AI.

Ann Althouse summary:

 Republicans will work every day to protect those strengths, highlight what is working, and prepare for the moment when voters again choose balance and results over one-party control….”

———

“Act 10 is a goner”

———-

Because guess what happens when schools get money? I’ll give you a hint they don’t hire teachers.

———

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Don Surber:

But Last is not calling for the nationalization of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or RTX (née Raytheon), all of which are much more vital to the defense of our nation.

He is calling for nationalizing the company that owns Twitter. Musk bought it, renamed it X and made it part of SpaceX. That in hindsight was a genius move because any attempt to nationalize SpaceX now becomes a First Amendment issue.

There is a Fifth Amendment issue as well—“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Where will Congress find the $2 trillion to take Space X?

Twitter may be the real target of their disaffection.

Sultan Mehmood  & Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

We link high-frequency geocoded protest data during Bangladesh’s 2024 Monsoon Revolution, Facebook measures of protest activity and social connectivity, university enrollment and demographics to establish: (1) student-linked protests precede off-campus mobilization; (2) student concentration predicts both on- and off-campus protest, while non-student youth, educated adults, urbanization, and locations of “placebo” universities authorized but not yet operating do not; and (3) social connectivity to student protest locations predicts off-campus diffusion one week later. Universities appear to incubate mass uprising by making dissent visible, coordinated, and capable of spreading beyond campus. Such patterns are also evident in U.S. Vietnam War protests and in global data. That universities facilitate broader political mobilization can explain why governments often seek to restrict student activism.

Emmanuel Peralta Castro; Antoine Peralta Castro

In 1988, I visited the Soviet Union on a high school trip during the heady days of perestroika. Trying to buy matryoshka dolls in a Moscow department store, I reached for my rubles, only to be redirected by the saleswoman to a second line to pay, and then a third line to collect them. It was a frustrating, inefficient system, but it kept many people employed and busy-seeming.

As a New York City public school parent, I too often see our school system run on that same make-work logic: employ as many adults as possible—at ever-increasing salaries—regardless of whether their services are redundant, unnecessary, or failing students.

Case in point: on October 28, the Panel for Educational Policy voted to retroactively pay $8.7 million to the United Federation of Teachers for supposedly creating “positive, nurturing environments” during the 2020–22 school closures and remote learning.

Set aside the grift of paying people again for work done years ago—they did no such thing. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” Orwell wrote in his novel 1984. The UFT clearly took notes.

Every parent who had children in NYC schools during COVID knows there was no “nurturing environment.” Raising four kids in city schools throughout the pandemic, I saw student disengagement fueled by absentee teachers, canceled extracurriculars, rank hypocrisy from union leaders, and the complete abandonment of educational standards: tests and grades canceled, homework and attendance optional.

Chris Rickert:

Criminal charges against a Madison School Board member will be dismissed if she completes a deferred prosecution program, a Dane County Court determined Thursday.

Maia Pearson, 38, was charged in February with misdemeanor resisting police and disorderly conduct after a parking-related dispute in Downtown Madison on Dec. 19. Madison police say she and Brandi Grayson, the CEO of social services agency Urban Triage, had to be forcibly removed from Grayson’s vehicle after ignoring police orders to leave the car.

Under the agreement with the Dane County District Attorney’s office, the DA would move to dismiss the charges in about six months if Pearson completes programming as part of the deferred prosecution program and avoids any other criminal charges.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the programming would consist of. Pearson declined to comment after Thursday’s hearing, and her attorney, William Sulton, would say only that Pearson and the DA’s office had reached a deal.

Grayson and Pearson were arrested after Grayson refused to move her vehicle from a no-parking area near the Majestic Theatre and then argued with theater employees. When police arrived and reached into Grayson’s GMC Yukon to turn it off, Pearson reached over and tried to restart it, a criminal complaint says.

———

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Bobby Fijan:

And this occurred long before vouchers were introduced.

Vouchers let more families stay in neighborhoods where they would otherwise leave

Yes, make public schools better, but not by removing choice for families who aren’t wealthy.

Local neighborhood schools should be good enough that parents willingly choose to send their kids to them

———

Madison: Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

By Marcela Rodrigues and Christopher Huffaker:

They come to this Dunkin’ so often the girls will turn tables into vanities, plugging in curling irons and passing around tubes of scented lotion. Some get to school late, but others never show up at all.

Kids have always skipped class, but this is signaling a much larger problem, here in Chelsea and just about everywhere else in Massachusetts. Since the pandemic, the number of students missing school has surged in a widespread trend that jeopardizes the education of a generation of young people. 

In Massachusetts, more students across all demographics are ditching, from those in lower-income immigrant communities to those in wealthy suburbs, high achievers to chronic truants on the cusp of dropping out.

They’re missing for all kinds of reasons. In Boston, a parent pulls a first-grader out of class to visit family in the Dominican Republic when plane tickets are cheaper. In Lowell, a freshman works 30 hours a week bagging groceries at Market Basket and struggles to keep up in school. A star soccer player in Wellesley misses dozens of classes for out-of-state competitions and clinics.

In just the first few weeks this school year, 62 percent of Chelsea students had already missed at least one day. Absences had also begun piling up in New Bedford (48 percent of students had missed a day), Milford (45 percent), Lenox (44 percent), Arlington (24 percent), and Needham (22 percent).

Jeremy Wayne Tate:

— AP Biology cut 40% of its material
— Required lines from the Aeneid in AP Latin halved
— Spanish Lit reading list cut from 56 works to 38

Then the questions themselves have become absurdly easier. Readability measures show English passages have fallen multiple grade levels, and some now include footnotes defining basic words…

A 2025 AP English prompt included footnote definitions for words like “optimism” and “pessimism.”

At the same time, scoring was recalibrated so that more students pass: guessing penalties disappeared, rubrics grew more generous, readers were told to give students the benefit of the doubt, etc. — “no one at College Board had any incentive to maintain rigor.”

College professors are now seeing students arrive with AP credit who lack basic content knowledge and writing ability. The College Board insists the exams have not become easier, but everybody familiar with them knows they’ve become an absolute joke.

Advanced Placement is no longer advanced. This is not college level.

It must be replaced.

The attempt to fix “too much content” and remove rote memorization was to emphasize “depth over breadth.” And this is the result. Look at this example of AP History multiple-choice questions.

“What prior knowledge would an AP student need in order to guess that a picture of women building an airplane in the early 1940s shows that World War II mobilized American society?”

———

The Decline and Fall of Rigor in Advanced Placement

Once a standard-bearer for college readiness, AP Exams today are a shadow of their former glory

Iván Marinovic:

Critics of the modern university system contend that these institutions have shifted their mission from the pursuit of truth to the promotion of social justice; yet systematic evidence on what universities teach is scarce. In this report, I measure curricular language directly, applying two fixed keyword lists to the titles and descriptions of 7.3 million course-year records from 111 universities between 2000 and 2025. One list covers progressive themes such as race, gender, identity, equity, and social justice; the other covers the authors, texts, and traditions of the Western canon. The share of courses using progressive language more than doubles, from 4.8% to 10.8%, while the Western-canon share drifts from 4.8% to 4.4%. Scaling by catalog length sharpens the contrast: progressive words per 100 catalog words rise by 118%, and canon words fall by 23%. The progressive course share rises in every broad academic area and more than triples in professional schools. The increase persists among universities observed throughout the period. Universities differ widely, and the differences survive adjustment for catalog length and field composition.

Introduction

On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson joined a Stanford campus march over the university’s Western Culture course requirement. Demonstrators chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go!”[1] In March 1988, the Faculty Senate approved reforms that replaced Western Culture with Cultures, Ideas and Values, broadening the curriculum’s treatment of minority perspectives and questions of race, class, and gender.[2] The episode drew national attention, but little is known about how curricula have changed since.

Since then, researchers have learned much more about who teaches than about what is taught. Studies based on party registration and self-reported ideology find a pronounced and increasing leftward tilt among university faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences.[3] Whether those preferences shape what universities teach is much less clear, because evidence on course content is scarce and rarely comparable across institutions or over time.[4] This report measures that content directly, using the language of university course catalogs.[5]

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Michael J. Petrilli:

It’s hard to feel sorry for the College Board, so let’s not. But let’s also try to understand an enormous dilemma that this enormous organization faces.

The Advanced Placement program is its biggest revenue generator and, along with the SAT, its showpiece. But where the SAT is little more than a measuring-and-comparison tool, the AP operation has long served as an indicator of educational quality and performance, often seen as the “gold standard” of high school achievement.

We at Fordham haven’t always gone quite that far. Our big review of AP and the much smaller International Baccalaureate (IB) program back in 2007 concluded that “AP and IB deserve most of the esteem in which they are held. Parts of the two programs are 24-karat…while others are less pure…. But they’re mostly gold and mostly worthy of emulation.”

We’ve been defenders and advocates for AP in the years since—and have sometimes declared without reservation that it is indeed a “gold standard.” One of us co-authored a well-received book that praised AP while also calling attention to the challenges it faces.

The challenges—and challengers—have, for decades now, included much debate over whether AP continues to deserve anything like a “gold standard” reputation. Or has it succumbed to “dumbing down” and “inflating up” like so much of the rest of American education, both K–12 and higher? (See this new Education Next article by John Moscatiello for the evidence of AP’s drift from excellence.)

We recognize some compelling reasons why it shouldsuccumb. Three come quickly to mind.

First and foremost, if “passing” an AP exam (traditionally a score of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale) is tantamount to passing an introductory college course in that subject—hence the long-standing expectation that one would be awarded credit upon arrival within the ivy gates—and demonstrating readiness to succeed in a more challenging college course in the same subject, then how should the College Board respond to the plain fact that it’s getting easier and easier to pass those college courses, indeed to get honors grades in them? Should the Board make it harder to pass a college-level course than the colleges do? Bear in mind that 19 of its 31 trustees have day jobs in higher ed, often engaged in “enrollment management” for individual institutions.

Scott Miller:

There are a lot of good points being made in this thread. I have had a theory that it is in part related to the funding available for lab equipment and computers. During the latter half of the 20th century, in Russia you were very lucky to get access to a “real” computer.I spent some time in 1992 in Protvino, RU, a science city of (at the time) some 20,000 scientists and engineers.

The city hadn’t been listed on any official map from the USSR, even though it had existed since 1958; it was devoted to a large synchrotron. I was really struck by the contrast between the super-abundance of material resources to get the job done in the US and EU, vs. the creativity and thought by the Russians.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I noticed that because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to think rather than experiment, whether with computers or accelerators; it was often all that was available to them.For instance, there was much more of an effort in Protvino to repurpose equipment than to have new equipment machined as I had seen at FermiLab or CERN.

The rank and file Russian engineers that I saw in the ’90s were using a home-grown knockoff of the Intel 8088 series. The managers got imported IBM XTs. At the same time in the US working on the SSC, on my desk I had a SuperSPARC minicomputer, a Mac, and an HP 80486 Windows machine, as well as access to a twin Hypercube.

Cosmos Institute & Jessica Hullman

In his essay on the role that rigorous proofs play in mathematical advances, Bill Thurston writes that the measure of success in math research is “whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about mathematics.” Many recent discussions of AI for science hinge on a tension between understanding and answers. Is science about humans achieving insight, or the archiving of verifiable solutions?

One side prioritizes outputs. Progress is implied to be evident in verifiable proofs of longstanding conjectures and cures for diseases, whether humans were involved in their making or not. The other side argues that human understanding is paramount, because it drives integration of new findings into the canon, because it shapes and inspires the next generation, and so on. But the first side, those who emphasize correct outputs, dismisses this as gatekeeping or nostalgia.

When Terry Tao posed a thought experiment in a recent talk, asking how comfortable people would be taking a cancer treatment produced by AI, complete with a formal certificate of correctness and a passed phase 3 trial, but without any human understanding how it was found, critics suggested that Tao’s reasoning missed the point. Of course a patient with stage 4 cancer would welcome the treatment.

Peter Arcidiacono,  Cory Dowd  & Matthew Lilley

There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, we show that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the most moderate views who self-censor the most. This pattern is associated with confidence and salience — students who are more confident in their views or who see an issue as especially important tend to hold more extreme views and to self-censor less. At the same time, conservatives self-censor at higher rates than liberals, and the same individual is more likely to self-censor on the views where they are relatively more conservative than on those where they are relatively more liberal; conservatives are also far more likely than liberals to cite concerns about social exclusion as a reason for self-censoring, and report self-censoring less outside the university community. Groups perceived as marginalized self-censor less than majority groups, and especially so on issues salient to them (e.g., Black students on BLM).

——-

Commentary.

Eva Moskowitz:

Public education in the United States is known as a K-12 system, but it is nothing of the sort. That phrase conjures images of children moving along a coherent 13-year educational path. What they encounter, instead, are three disconnected institutions — elementary, middle and high schools — that share a district and superintendent but not the responsibility of preparing students for the next phase of learning.

Philip Monagan:

This paper explores the channels and mechanisms by which a child’s genetic endowment influences the processes of human capital development during adolescence; I investigate the interplay between genes, parental investment, and the environment, and how they shape skill formation and ultimately educational attainment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I estimate how differences in genetic predisposition for educational attainment causally influence years of schooling, college attendance, and earnings, and how the causal effects are mediated through parental investment and the environment. A one-standard-deviation increase in a child’s polygenic score is associated with a 0.66 year increase in completed years of schooling; when I account for gene-environment correlation by controlling for parental education and household income, the increase is attenuated to 0.42 years; I find this estimate is robust to a specification leveraging strictly random within-family variation. Applying the same controls, the same increase in polygenic score causes four-year college completion to increase by 7.8 percentage points and projected present discounted lifetime earnings to increase by 9.3 percent; this finding is again robust to the use of strictly exogenous within-family variation: the analogous estimates are 6.8 percentage points and 10.8 percent. Next, I decompose the endowment-education relationship, and its attenuation, by analyzing the reduced-form relationships between the endowment, skill accumulation and parental investment, and how they change across different stages of adolescence. However, this analysis of parental choices is not policy invariant; further, the reduced-form coefficient obscures the degree to which the investment response represents a change in total parental investment or a within-family sibling reallocation. To deepen understanding of parental choices, disentangle the margins of investment response, and tease out policy implications, I develop a two-child model of parental investment as an optimal resource allocation problem, and jointly estimate the dynamic structural model of skill production and household choice using the Simulated Method of Moments. Finally, I use the structural parameter estimates to evaluate the counterfactual welfare effects of different policy interventions.

C. Bradley Thompson:

For the last 50 years, serious academics have lamented the indoctrination, censorship, and bureaucratization of American higher education. Rarely have they been able to do anything about it.

Those days are over. At my school, South Carolina’s Clemson University, we are pushing back. The Clemson University Board of Trustees recently approved the creation of a new kind of academic department. Over the course of the next year, we will hire faculty, create courses, and build a degree program. I have the honor of serving as acting department chair.

The name of our new department, The Lyceum, is borrowed from Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens. Our mission is simple: to revolutionize American higher education. The Lyceum will use a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American Founding, and the principles of moral character. Together, our faculty and students will explore the relationship between ideas and action; the history of human accomplishment; the political and cultural architecture of free societies; the economic principles and institutions of the free-enterprise system; and the requirements of character formation. We aim to inspire our students to pursue intellectual and moral excellence through a rigorous engagement with the great philosophical, literary, historical, and economic texts of Western civilization.

Zack Cooper:

Americans voters say affordability is their top concern. The rising cost of health care is one of the main reasons life feels so expensive right now — and it’s about to get worse.

Open enrollment began this week, and people buying coverage through the individual market are seeing premiums that are up about 13 percent on average — and that’s after they increased by 26 percent last year. Employer-sponsored coverage is expected to be up 10 percent, coming in at more than $10,000 per person per year.

High out-of-pocket costs are already keeping Americans from getting the care they need. Rising health care costs are also an immense drag on the national budget and contribute to the growing debt that’s fueling inflation and putting the federal government on shaky fiscal footing.

When politicians in Washington talk about fixing health care, they’re quick to talk about sweeping, one-shot solutions. One example is Medicare for All, which is front and center in the Michigan Senate race. Regardless of the midterm results, neither party is likely to have the margins to pass such broad reforms. Indeed, comprehensive health care reform is unlikely to be on the docket until after the next general election in 2028, at the earliest. And even if it passed, it could take years to carry out. We need to find ways to curb the costs that are hurting people today.

The emphasis on big health reform can give a false impression that there is one health system in the United States, with one problem that only comprehensive reform can fix. It’s not. Focusing on silver bullets understates the complexity of the health system.

Mary Kekatos:

As Americans prepare to vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections, rising healthcare costs are among the top financial and economic concerns, according to recent polling.

A quarter of voters say they are “very worried” about being able to afford healthcare costs and more than one-third say they are “somewhat worried,” according to a KFF poll earlier this month.

Those who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) saw their average monthly benchmark premium jump from $497 per month in 2025 to $625 in 2026, according to KFF, particularly after enhanced premium tax credits expired at the end of last year.

A new analysis from KFF published Friday found that finalized benchmark silver premiums for healthcare plans under the ACA will rise by an average of 13% next year, marking the second year in a row of double-digit percentage increases.

Premiums have risen even for those with employer-sponsored health insurance. Workers are paying nearly 10% more for their premiums, according to a new KFF survey published earlier this month.

The average single-coverage deductible for workers increased by 43% since 2015, according to KFF, reaching $1,886 in 2025.

Prescription drug spending rose in 2025 by 12.7% to $915 billion and is on track to surpass $1 trillion in 2026, a report from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) found.

Jennica Pounds and Joshua Lisec:

Recall how a handful of people on 𝕏 outperformed an entire polling industry backed by universities, media networks, and billion-dollar institutions. Why? We could accept feedback; they could not. We could take in disconfirming evidence; they could not. We could adjust our models; they could not adjust their worldview.

This is Conway’s Law in action. The polling industry wasn’t wrong because of incompetence; it was wrong because its architecture made it impossible to be right. A closed epistemology produces closed directives, which produce closed organizations, which eventually produce closed institutions. Closed institutions do only one thing when confronted by reality: they break.

We are already building parallel institutions, because the old ones cannot metabolize truth anymore. Because the people, unlike the Complex, can still course-correct.

• 𝕏 became a parallel media.
• Passage Press became a parallel publishing house.
• DataRepublican became a parallel analytics engine.
• DOGE became a parallel government institution.
• The early-vote community became a parallel intelligence service.
• Starlink became a parallel communications grid.

In a world where our rulers cannot accept feedback, the people who can will inevitably win through building, iterating, testing, and improving until the parallel becomes the primary. The collapse of our trust in institutions is the collapse of their power through institutions. We do not need permission or prestige to build our own institutions.

The autopoietic system cannot change its form. But we can. We already are. And as sovereignty is shifting downward to the individual, so, too, is the battlefield.

…..

The sovereign-debt supercycle is simply carrying the process to its conclusion. As fiscal power slips away from the nation-state, the administrative empire loses the vessel it depends on. When the vessel goes, so does the legitimacy. And when legitimacy goes, authority follows.

Joe Hong:

Parent teacher associations may conjure images of read-a-thons and fun runs, where grandparents and relatives pledge to pay their grade schooler for every page they read or lap they jog. And of course, there’s the iconic PTA bake sale.

But in New York City, PTA fundraising efforts vary from hawking homemade muffins and pastries for a few hundred dollars to running sophisticated, self-sustaining nonprofits that operate like small businesses and take in millions in revenue.

P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, raised about $2 million in donations and revenue, more than any other school last year, according to data from the Department of Education. In second place was P.S. 158 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which raised $1.7 million. Both schools enroll between 600 and 700 students. New Explorations into Science, Technology & Math, a K-12 school on the Lower East Side, which enrolls about 1,600 students, came in third, raising $1.4 million.

Each school in the city is required to have a parent association. In total, they reported nearly $70 million in revenue and savings in the 2024-25 academic year, which helped their schools pay for beneficial after-school enrichment programs, field trips, support staff and in some cases even building maintenance.

“We find evidence that PTA money above and beyond any public resources actually do boost achievement in reading and math,” said Brittany Murray, an education professor at Davidson College who researches PTAs. “But it tends to help those that are more affluent.”

Sydney Lake

This week, the Gates Foundation announced a $1 billion commitment to build and deliver equitable AI tools to schools, frontline health care workers, farmers, and more. Of that commitment, 40% will go toward education, including AI tutoring to individualize learning in classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad. 

That’s a whopping $400 million infusion into schools for a tool that’s only been around (at least commercially) for a handful of years. The AI push is part of a broader U.S. education strategy the foundation laid out in July, which aims to help up to 10 million more Americans earn “credentials of value” by 2045, the year the foundation plans to close.

And it comes at a time when the value of classroom technology is being questioned.

Test scores have dropped among some students over the same time period since computer assessments were widely implemented. Meanwhile, research shows that ever since the U.S. spent $30 billion to swap textbooks for laptops, Gen Z has shown to be less cognitively capable than previous generations, according to written testimony by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce earlier this year. 

“Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them,” he wrote. 

The skepticism is already shaping policy. On Sept. 2, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced what the city called the nation’s broadest moratorium on student-facing generative AI. It’s a one-year pause for students in 2-K through 8th grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the system.

Kelsey Piper, Freddie deBoer

The Sold a Story podcast is only the latest vehicle advancing the notion that we could fix our schools if we only choose to.

This contention has been a constant in American educational debates for decades, exemplified by the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman” and its triumphalist narrative about charter schools. Unfortunately, this attitude runs into a stark reality: Schools and teachers just don’t have that much impact on relative student outcomes.

I’m afraid that the evidence shows that student academic talent is more or less static. Nothing is more predictive of a student’s future success than their past success. In large majorities, individual students gravitate to a given level of academic performance at an early age and tend to stay there throughout their academic life, as this 2025 meta-analysis demonstrates.

There are many other studies we can pull from. As far back as the 1960s, pioneering large-scale federal studies (like Project Talent, the Coleman report, and Project Follow Through) supported the notion that most students stay in the same performance band over time. Data collected the summer after kindergarten provides useful predictive information about how students will perform in high school; a student’s third-grade reading level is an effective indicator of who will go to college and who won’t. Standardized tests administered at age 12 or 13 tell us not only which students will go to college but which will earn a doctorate, hold a patent, or get tenure. The basic reality is that our rank in the academic hierarchy is largely fixed.

Douglas Detterman has summarized the research record by saying “only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers.”

Interventions that are often treated as transformative just don’t appear to matter. Promising early results inevitably fade out in educational research, and I use the word “inevitably” carefully.

Phonics-based reading instruction is currently undergoing a period of immense hype, but the advantages students see from phonics at age 5 are dramatically reduced by age 7 and nonexistent by age 11. For years, liberals championed pre-K schooling as a magic bullet, but study after study shows little or no positive effects as children age.

Past hype is no predictor of future performance. Class size reductions were ballyhooed, then over time their effects were revealed to be inconsistent at best. Many high-quality studies have shown that coveted “exam” high schools in large cities make no difference for student outcomes.

Rachel Adams-Heard, Joe Lovinger:

Welcome to Hallsville, Texas: population 4,628. Home to one of the biggest public schools in the country.

Almost 25,000 third through 12th graders attend the Texas Virtual Academy, part of the Hallsville Independent School District (ISD), and the vast majority of them will never step foot in this small East Texas town. They don’t start their days with biscuits and gravy at Miss Minnie’s Place or cheer under the Friday night lights at Bobcat Stadium. Instead, they log in for class from hundreds of miles away.Hallsville, home of the largest public school in Texas.Photographer: Jake Dockins for Bloomberg Businessweek

Nationally, about 612,000 public school students, or 1 in every 80, were enrolled in an online school in the 2024-25 academic year, the most recent period for which data is available. Nowhere has the expansion happened so quickly as in Texas. Two dozen virtual public schools operated in the state during the last school year, enrolling almost 75,000 students. Changes to state law have made it easier for kids as young as kindergartners to receive their education entirely online.

Stride Inc., the publicly traded company that runs Texas Virtual Academy, has carved out a lucrative niche in the years since pandemic lockdowns lifted, capitalizing on a school choice wave that has contributed to the decline of public school enrollment across the country. During the 2025-26 school year, Stride was responsible for educating more than 240,000 students nationwide, the vast majority in public schools. Some 43,000 of those were at the company’s schools in Texas, making it the biggest operator in the state by a long shot.

The Texas Legislature gave virtual schools a tremendous boost last year when it mandated that virtual schools get the same per-pupil funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. That’s despite their lacking the physical plants, maintenance staff and bus fleets, and many of the extracurriculars, that make up a big chunk of the costs of a neighborhood school. Stride doesn’t need to put unspent money back into its schools as traditional public schools would. That gives the company more for things such as advertising and executive compensation — and for a healthy operating profit, about $450 million across the whole company in the most recent academic year.

Joel Kotkin:

Take the judiciary. Despite two Trump terms, much of the judiciary retains a left-wing bias that comes naturally through progressive control of the bar and especially law schools that churn out activist, woke judges. Similarly, nothing Trump has done has fundamentally altered the almost total subservience of the education system to the ideologies of the left.

Even the corporate elite, notably Wall Street and Silicon Valley, will likely welcome the Restoration with glee. Even though some genuflected to Trump, their hearts were never in it. Certainly, the AI megagiants like Anthropic and Meta have continued to pour money into the Democratic Party. Their employees, reliably progressive, will be singing hosannas as they donate to left-wing candidates. The much-ballyhooed tech shift to the right, suggests the San Francisco Chronicle, turned out to be ‘a mirage’.

Most of the media will also breathe a sigh of relief. Even with the Ellisons’ capture of CBS and CNN, which has terrified progressives, the bulk of major outlets – NBC, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post – remain firmly committed to the Democratic Party’s various agendas, even including that of the Democratic Socialists of America.

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Tyler Cowen:

If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur Okun, Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley, Otto Eckstein, and Walt Rostow into government. Those were all names with significant academic heft who could count among the world’s leading macroeconomists. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson served as a consultant to the government. Heller and some of the others helped to shape the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964.

That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent. Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet. With the Cold War raging, Americans felt their government had to get it right…

Most of this respect was still in place by the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan appointed Martin Feldstein to chair his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Feldstein being a Harvard professor and one of the leading market-oriented economists of his time. Two of the junior economists working for Feldstein were Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers—before they became famous, but the intellectual firepower was already there. Michael Mussa and William Niskanen were other notables in the administration, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek were standing sources of inspiration.

——-

More.

Jia Lynn Yang

And yet Hinojosa scarcely utters a word on race or gender — hers or anyone else’s — and insists she wants to steer clear of “culture wars.” Instead, she has risen in the polls with a disciplined message of economic populism.

“Is this going to be a Texas that is by and for the people?” Hinojosa said at a recent rally. “Or is this a billionaire’s world and we just live here? That is the one fight. It is the one fight of this election. It is the fight in America. And it is the fight for Texas.”

Whether or not Hinojosa wins, her campaign signifies a strong consensus in the Democratic Party this year: Race and gender are out. Class politics are back in.

This is a strategy born of defeat. President Trump reclaimed the White House two years ago largely by promoting himself as the stronger steward of the economy. For Democrats, one of the most humiliating aspects of this loss was that the president nearly doubled his support among Black voters between 2020 and 2024, and he nearly came even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters. Asian Americans also shifted right, and Trump’s support among women held even.

The return of Trump was the death knell for a presumption that had dominated American life since the 2010s — that identity was a stand-in for societal progress. Now, the very notion of identity politics is in retreat.

Ethan Harper

A class instructor reported an Oregon State University student to the bias response team after he argued there are only two sexes in a final course project.

The incident report, obtained by The College Fix through a public records request, reveals that an instructor (or teaching assistant) flagged the male undergraduate student for holding views critical of gender theory.

The incident was among 20 bias reports filed at Oregon State at the start of the Fall 2025 semester.

While specific details, dates, and course titles were heavily redacted by university public records office the remaining narrative makes it clear that the student’s offense stemmed from disputing that gender is on a spectrum.

According to the report, the student was enrolled in an eight-week summer Canvas course within the university’s College of Education. As part of the course requirements, students were tasked with submitting an “action project” designed to identify a local issue, outline potential collaborators, project a timeline, and take an initial step toward a solution.

Tommy Schultz:

America’s K-12 crisis in a nutshell: The average 18 year old student scores at the same level as a top 10% 9 year old in Reading

Via NWEA. Backup link.

——-

Dissident Teacher:

Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw your kid reading to prepare for the next day’s lessons at school?

Not for a long time, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.

Jon Marcus:

Now Skidmore and a small number of other institutions have taken a surprising next step: enlisting faculty to help recruit new students — a role they previously left entirely to the admissions office — by meeting with and opening their labs and classrooms to prospective and admitted applicants.

“It creates a feeling of what it would be like to be seen, valued and to find a place of belonging on a campus,” said Jess Ricker, the college’s vice president for enrollment. And that, Ricker said, can help distinguish Skidmore from the other schools on students’ lists.

Admissions leaders are looking for any advantage. Two-thirds of them had trouble meeting their enrollment targets in at least one of the last two years, according to a survey by the ratings platform Niche. Ninety-seven percent expect the competition to increase.

The reality they face: The supply of traditional-age freshmen nationwide is projected to decline by 13 percent over the next 15 years, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The proportion of high school graduates choosing to go on to college is also down, from 70% in 2016 to 63% in 2024, the most recent year for which the figure is available, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Jennifer L. Jennings:

Professor Jennings is the author of “The Scarcity Loop: How School Choice Reshapes the Rationing of Public Education.”

Good news, American parent!

Welcome to this year’s opportunity to choose your child’s school. Depending on where you live, you may now choose neighborhood schools, magnet schools, charter schools, Christian schools, virtual schools, microschools, homeschool and schools that are neither fish nor fowl, which meet in a trampoline park.

This is educational freedom.

Let’s get started. Create an account. No, not the account you use for everything else in the school district. We are a district of many accounts. Add your child using the code issued by the school’s guidance counselor. We’re sorry! That code is invalid. Please review the instructions. Codes are case-sensitive.

You are ready to choose now.

What kind of school would be the best fit for your child: STEAM, STEM, project-based learning, International Baccalaureate, performing arts, college preparatory, early college, career and technical education or a school with a website that just says “INNOVATION”?

You know your child best. Please be sure to research the options carefully.

However, you do not know the schools best. To that end, please attend your preferred school’s Open House. Open House begins at 10 sharp on Tuesday morning. Just that one Tuesday. We understand that you have a job, but our school is a good fit for parents truly committed to their child’s education.

At Open House, please determine whether the school has engaged teachers, a healthy culture, good leadership and a 21st-century bathroom. You will have 47 minutes.

A ninth grader named Madison will be your tour guide. Please ask Madison about the comparative effectiveness of the ninth-grade mathematics teachers. Next, please determine whether your child is choosing the school or the school is choosing your child. Sometimes you choose the school. Sometimes the school chooses you. Sometimes you choose the school, the school chooses you, and then an algorithm chooses whether the two of you were correct.

via email: Kaylee Jackson:

Last month, I shared Wisconsin’s progress in literacy and the work that remains ahead. While statewide policies, investments, and initiatives are important, meaningful and lasting improvement requires something more: a shared commitment to literacy in every Wisconsin community.

At the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), our responsibility is to establish clear expectations, provide guidance, and support schools and districts in strengthening literacy outcomes. But the work of improving literacy cannot belong to DPI alone. It requires local leadership, collaboration, and a collective belief that every child can become a strong reader, writer, thinker, and communicator.

This fall, Wisconsin schools completed their initial literacy screenings for the 2026–27 school year under Act 20. These screenings provide important information about students’ reading development and help identify those who may need additional support. What happens next matters most. How will schools use this information to strengthen instruction? How will families understand their children’s progress? How will local leaders galvanize the community to support literacy growth?

These are not questions for educators alone. They are questions for all of us.

School boards and district leaders make decisions about priorities, resources, and instructional support. Families bring essential knowledge about their children and play a critical role in supporting learning. Community organizations, libraries, and local partners create additional opportunities for children and families to engage in literacy.

When these efforts are connected, we create stronger conditions for student success.

We recently convened the Reading Advisory Council for its first meeting of the school year. Council members will provide input and feedback on DPI’s work as determined by Wisconsin’s Statewide Literacy Plan. Their engagement reflects an important principle guiding our work: the strongest statewide direction is informed by the people and communities it is intended to serve.

As this work continues, I encourage every Wisconsin community to consider its role in improving literacy outcomes.

Ask your local school leaders how students are progressing in reading and what supports are available. Find opportunities for schools, families, and community organizations to work together. Celebrate progress but remain attentive to students who are not yet experiencing the success they deserve.

Most importantly, recognize that improving literacy is not simply the responsibility of a classroom teacher or a state agency. It is a shared responsibility that requires sustained attention and action.

Wisconsin’s literacy future will be shaped not only by what we decide at the state level, but by what we commit to doing together in communities across our state.

Warmly,

Kaylee Jackson
Director, Office of Literacy
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

MIT:

This report is a call to action.

Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.

In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us¹ specifically to:

• Assess current AI use at MIT.
• Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.
• Propose an AI use policy.

However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.

Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.

In this report, we:

• Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.
• Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.
• Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.

As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.

Anna Brandenberger, Hanna Mularczyk and Dora Woodruff:

We’ve heard a lot about AI in math from Fields medalists, AI labs, and established professors. However, the personal stakes are highest for early career researchers.

Hoping to provide a platform for graduate students and postdocs to voice their opinions, concerns, and experiences, we wrote and distributed a survey on AI in math.

In this article, we share the responses to our survey. All responses are anonymous, and respondents came from almost 60 institutions and at least 5 countries. Our survey included both multiple choice questions and more open-ended free response questions.

If you are a senior mathematician or university administrator reading these survey results, our goal is for you to understand the concerns of the younger generations and use your authority to take action accordingly. If you are an early career mathematician reading these survey results, we hope you find comfort in the knowledge that your experiences are shared by many others. If you are not a mathematician, we hope you come away from this article with a deeper understanding of the goals, values, and concerns of the community.

Greg David:

Freddie Mac has paused new loans, and Fannie Mae is baking in the cost of the rent freeze, making it difficult for landlords to get financing, multiple real estate sources told The City Reporter.

Fannie Mae’s new requirements assume that rents will not increase on rent-stabilized units for four to eight years, covering Mamdani’s current term and a potential second term.

Fannie Mae and lenders like Community Preservation Corp. are also assuming that expenses increase each year by at least 5%, which means the operating margin for buildings will decline by at least that amount each year.

Numerous landlords, advocates and nonprofit housing executives, some with direct knowledge of the current terms, confirmed the changes in the loan standards. Many agreed to discuss the issue only if they were not identified, fearful of retaliation from either the government-backed lenders or the Mamdani administration.

Fannie Mae did not return a request for comment, and Freddie Mac said it “continuously reviews market conditions and makes real-time adjustments to offer responsible, risk-adjusted lending aligned with mission-driven objectives.”

Terell Wright:

Students at Williams College pay less to attend on average than the in-state cost at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Those at Grinnell College pay less than Iowans going to the University of Iowa.

And at Swarthmore College, the average student pays roughly half of what peers fork out at Penn State.

A growing group of elite liberal-arts colleges long known for eye-watering price tags is turning out to be quite the bargain for many students—and the schools want you to know it. They have been rolling out expansive financial-aid policies for families of all income levels in a bid to stand out to a shrinking pool of college applicants.

Eugene Scalia:

Fast-forward to today, when the Burger court’s empowerment of IRS regulation-writers has an unlikely champion in the Trump administration. In a rule proposed in September for a public comment period ending Tuesday, the IRS seeks a vast expansion of its ability to deny tax exemption to universities and other private schools that discriminate based on race.

Bob Jones’s policies were contemptible, open and notorious, and—in the court’s view—so integral to the school that they defined the institution’s “purpose.” A university with such a wretched purpose, the court said, lacked the charitable character necessary for federal tax exemption

Bryan Alexander

Quick post today, as I travel across several American cities:

United States attitudes towards higher education soured yet again, according to a new Gallup poll.  The main question asked this time was “How important is a college education today — very important, fairly important or not too important?”  It’s one Gallup has asked regularly for decades.

Here are the results, measured against annual reports dating back to the late 1970s:

Erin Gretzinger:

The Cap Times asked all public school districts in the county about their current approach to district-issued devices and screen time in schools, finding several school districts have adopted changes this school year and others are contemplating adjustments. 

“Within the last year, we’ve really thought at the district level about what access our students have to technology,” said Brian Miles, director of technology services in the Middleton-Cross Plains school district.

The Verona Area School District this fall stopped allowing students in grades K-5 to take their Chromebooks home. The School District of Cambridge is in the early stages of discussing whether to prohibit students in grades 6-8 from taking Chromebooks home. The McFarland School District no longer provides students in kindergarten through second grade laptops at a one-to-one ratio and is evaluating whether to stop letting students take devices home until ninth grade.

“We are intentionally pausing to reflect on technology and student learning based on research regarding when technology is helpful for learning and when it hinders learning,” Aaron Tarnutzer, McFarland’s district administrator, wrote in an email.

David Blaska:

Who voted against sending another $315 million for special education and an additional $300 million on general school aid as part of a $1.8 billion taxpayer relief bill? Democrats! What party preached Defund Police (now abridged to “reimagine policing”)? Democrats!

Who required schools to teach phonics, the one proven pedagogy? Republicans! Who told the Dept. of Public Instruction to quit cooking school test scores? Republicans. Who uncovered the graft and corruption in the state universities’ DEI scam? Republicans. Who gave a lifeline for black parents escaping Milwaukee’s failed schools? Republicans! 

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Blaska thanked the heavy law enforcement presence at Sunday’s Republican rally for keeping us safe. Blaska’s Law of Politics #219: If you need a bullhorn to be heard you have nothing worth hearing.

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Hugh Pope:

One factor above all is fuelling riots in Europe and threatening a looming fiscal crisis in the United States: a growing shortfall in funding for basic services and social security. Fragmented and polarised traditional governments – based on political parties constantly seeking re-election – are failing to come up with long-term solutions to the problem.

So it’s refreshing to see a top French institution, an influential US voice and smaller-scale European and other municipalities turning to citizens’ assemblies to try to break their budgetary logjams.

Indeed, the convening of groups of randomly selected citizens for a deeply informed, one-off deliberation may be the best democratic technique available to find ways to share all the inevitable future financial pain. A new broom is vital to establish a credible, equitable, and legitimate path: it is the old system of elected decision-makers, after all, that over the past half-century has pushed the welfare systems of these states close to bankruptcy.

In November in France, the government’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) – an institutional bridge between elected parliamentary bodies and citizens and civil society – is convening 150 randomly selected citizens to deliberate on all aspects of policy to fix the country’s budget. “This novel approach aims to engage citizen participation at the heart of the current debate on public finances, while simultaneously initiating a long-term reflection on the country’s future,” the CESE says.

Gary Rubenstein:

So I did some digging into the data on the two schools in question, PS221 North Hills Elementary and MS67 Louis Pasteur. If they are just inflating student’s grades this would surely show up on their math state test scores. But here are the numbers for the 2024-2025 school year.

PS221

MS67

Looking at these scores it is hard to say that the school is guilty of rampant grade inflation on their report cards. So these state test scores are excellent and if you’re the New York Post and that’s all you care about, you cannot trash these schools because one kid forgot some of his math skills over the summer. And if The New York Post now thinks that state test scores are not a true measure of the quality of a school well, there goes all their Success Academy stories from now on.Now this parent actually is involved in the school system and even got to confront the Chancellor on this issue with her son recently, so let me try to think about how to assess this situation for her based on my 35 years teaching Math.

The parent says that except for 7th grade, her son had passed all the math state exams so that is some kind of objective way to gauge grade inflation. And the one test he didn’t get a 3 on, how much did he miss by? Since her characterization that he never understood anything about math does seem very exaggerated.

If he’s in Algebra now, I’m curious what sorts of fractions he’s dealing with. Because a kid can know fractions really well from elementary school and can do something like 1/2+1/6=3/6+1//6=4/6=2/3 but might have trouble when in an Algebra course the questions are like 1/(x+2)+5/(x+3)=x/(x+2)(x+3). Making that transition might be hard even if the student had mastered fractions back in elementary school. So I would have to see the work the son did to see if he really had not learned any math in his 9 years of K-8.

The most accurate yet accessible Starlink and SpaceX explainer I’ve seen to date. Good primer into how Starlink works and why matters for SpaceX if you’re newer to the company. Good idea for investors to understand it. https://t.co/WTxm2aKiak

— Aaron Burnett (@aaronburnett) November 1, 2026

A. Brooks Bowden, Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten:

Education is widely recognized as the primary driver of human capital accumulation. However, policies designed to promote educational attainment often overlook students’ endogenous responses. This paper provides empirical evidence of the causal impact of relaxed academic standards on student effort and achievement. We find that academic leniency results in mechanical GPA increases, but significant reductions in effort among lower ability students based on lower attendance and lower numerical grades. These heterogeneous effects compound and exacerbate gaps in engagement and achievement throughout high school, ultimately worsening deficits in human capital accumulation as measured by ACT scores.

More:

Jill Tucker:

Oakland schools are at the highest risk of fiscal insolvency, its pattern of bad budgeting habits and unabated deficit spending resulting in significant instability, according to an independent fiscal analysisobtained by the Chronicle.

The conclusion reached by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT, contradicts months of upbeat messaging by Oakland school officials who have insisted the district’s finances are not only fine, but in fact something “worth celebrating.”

Among the biggest issues flagged by the analysis were deficit spending, insufficient reserves to address economic instability, lack of planning and monitoring of the budget as well as the approved labor agreements that lack a way to pay for them, according to the FCMAT report finalized this week.

The analysis, conducted in August, “identified significant concerns” related to financial management and the insufficient information used to support fiscal decision-making,” the study team found.

One of the biggest concerns is a budget promise to address a $40 million shortfall even though the school board and administration have provided no specifics on how they will do it, according to the report.

District officials did not address specific findings as requested by the Chronicle, but said in response that the FCMAT analysis is focused on deficiencies and doesn’t include improvements. 

Fight4Illinois

That’s exactly what Illinois education officials did in 2025. Magically, reading proficiency spiked to nearly 52%, a massive 21 point jump.

At Fight for Illinois, we’re fighting for higher standards. For an end to social promotion. For a 3rd-grade retention law. For an obsession with phonics in the classroom. For an end to DEI and a return to merit and excellence. For true accountability to parents. For the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit program.

And for a statewide, Universal School Choice program that gives every Illinois kid access to an Education Savings Account.

That’s how it should be. Via Fight for Illinois

WGBA:

Schools across Northeast Wisconsin planned for growth for decades. Now, many districts are planning for the opposite.

In Green Bay, some classrooms are getting quieter. 

Green Bay Area Public Schools has lost more than 1,200 students in the past three years, and leaders say the decline is continuing.

Public schools are shrinking across Wisconsin. Here is why

“Similar to almost every other district in the state and nationwide, we are seeing a decline in enrollment and the decline continues,” said GBAPS Superintendent Vicki Bayer.

District leaders say fewer students mean difficult choices now and even tougher decisions ahead.

“We have closed seven schools, and we have been consistently decreasing our staffing at the same rate of enrollment decline,” Bayer said.

——-

More.

Garry Tan:

California has managed to spend 34% more per student since 2019, yet fewer of them can read and do math at grade level.

California spent $18,798 per student in fiscal 2023, 14% above the national average. Its 4th graders scored below the national average in math, no better than average in reading, and below several states that spend far less. Only 7% of California’s Black 4th graders read proficiently. From 2018–19 to 2022–23, per-student spending rose 34% while the share of students meeting state standards fell. From 2014 to 2022, California schools lost 382,000 students and added 41,000 non-teaching staff.

What California spends

• Total. The 2025–26 state budget puts TK–12 funding from all sources at $137.6 billion, about $25,155 per student.
• Day-to-day spending. On the Census Bureau’s standard measure, California spent $18,798 per student in fiscal 2023. That is 14% above the U.S. average of $16,526 and ranks 15th of 50 states.

What lower-spending states are getting

Mississippi and Florida spend about $6,700 to $6,900 less per student than California. Both changed how they teach reading. Mississippi’s 2013 literacy law required phonics-based instruction, reading coaches for teachers, and extra help and possible retention for 3rd graders who can’t read. Florida made similar changes starting in 2002. Results from the 2024 Nation’s Report Card:

• 4th grade reading. Mississippi 219, California 212 (average scores). The national average was 214.
• 4th grade math. Mississippi 239, California 233. The national average was 237. California scored below 31 states and jurisdictions.
• 8th grade. The two states scored about the same.
• Low-income 4th graders proficient in reading. Mississippi 24%, California 18%.
• Latino 4th graders. Mississippi 26%, Florida 31%, California 19%.
• Black 4th graders. Mississippi 19%, California 7%. In California, 72% scored below NAEP’s Basic level.

——-

The State of Reading: 2026

Paragon Institute:

Federal health programs are the nation’s largest fiscal challenge, consuming a rapidly growing share of federal tax revenue while failing to deliver commensurate improvements in health outcomes. This paper argues that Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA exchanges, and related federal policies share a common flaw: their financing structures reward higher spending, cost shifting, consolidation, and enrollment growth rather than value, competition, accountability, and efficiency. In Medicare, payment distortions, growing reliance on general revenues, and the Inflation Reduction Act’s Part D redesign have increased costs and weakened sustainability. In Medicaid, provider taxes, intergovernmental transfers, and state-directed payments have encouraged states to maximize federal reimbursements rather than obtain value, though the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted major reforms to limit these financing schemes. The ACA exchanges similarly rely on open-ended subsidies, weak eligibility verification, and automatic reenrollment, contributing to improper enrollment and rising federal costs. Additional policies, including the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance, the 340B program, and the ACA’s medical loss ratio rules, further increase spending and consolidation. The paper recommends reforms across these programs to strengthen program integrity, reduce payment distortions, improve incentives, promote competition, and place federal health spending on a more sustainable fiscal path.

——-

Obamacare notes & links.

By Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz

Across the private and public health sectors, the increases have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices, according to benefits consultants and industry analysts. Several large employers also pointed to a rising bill for expensive specialty prescriptions, like cancer drugs and GLP-1 medicines.

—-

….. and what Americans can learn from healthcare systems in Britain and Canada.

AG:

———

Obamacare.

Via the Rabbit Hole:

You’re standing in a crowd on Saturday. You look around and think yeah. No Kings. This is what democracy looks like.

Bro.

You’re holding a sign made by a communist billionaire who lives in Shanghai.

You live in a constitutional republic.

Elections. Term limits. A free press that spent four years calling the president a fascist without one journalist being arrested.

The modern left’s definition of fascism:

You love your country? Fascist.

You want to enforce the border? Racist.

You think parents should raise their kids? Bigot.

You want to know who’s voting in your elections? Jim Crow.

Being patriotic is fascism to the modern left.

But every country has borders and enforces them. 176 countries require ID to vote. That’s the definition of a country.

But the Democratic establishment told you otherwise. And you believed them.

Congress has a 15% approval rating. 80% of Americans disapprove. 97% of incumbents got re-elected.

Chuck Schumer. 46 years. Longer than Stalin.

Steny Hoyer. 45 years. Longer than Mao.

Mitch McConnell. 42 years. 5x more than Napoleon.

Nancy Pelosi. 39 years. Longer than Henry VIII.

Maxine Waters. 35 years. Longer than Mussolini.

Bernie Sanders. 35 years. Triple Hitler’s entire reign.

Trump. 5 years and 3 months. Won the popular vote and the electoral vote.

But Trump is the king. Okay buddy.

You don’t hate kings. You hate kings that aren’t yours.
And they have you in the streets carrying their water.

Alexander Rosenquist:

It’s a tough time to be a college president. Free inquiry has been corrupted by ideological orthodoxy, enrollment has shrunk, and trust in higher education has plunged to an all-time low. What will it take for leaders to get their house in order and win back public trust? 

On Monday, Vanderbilt University’s acclaimed chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, visited AEI to talk through his answer to that question. Diermeier has been tagged“higher ed’s most divisive chancellor” for his unsparing challenges to the sector and his insistence that its leaders work to restore foundational principles of merit, free inquiry, and academic excellence. During the fireside chat, he opened up about weak-kneed leadership, problems in the humanities, what it takes to build a culture of open discourse on campus, and more. Here are five key takeaways. 

“There needs to be a willingness to take some arrows.” Diermeier was highly critical of disciplines where scholarly standards have eroded, especially in the humanities. But he argued that problems with mediocrity and politicization can be addressed by campus leaders who are willing to champion merit, promote heterodoxy, and hold the line on hiring and tenure. His stance has drawn ferocious pushback from academics, media figures, and even some of his fellow college presidents—and has earned him the sobriquet “handmaiden of the Trump administration.” Diermeier said leaders seeking to make similar changes must learn to shrug off the attacks and stick to their guns—a task made much easier when they have a board of trustees that has their back. 

“What are you about? What are your values?” Diermeier said that other universities should cease worrying about what Ivy League institutions are doing and should instead lead with their own values. He allowed that it’s understandable that people pay attention to what happens in the Ivy League—as when protests on campuses like Columbia’s and Harvard’s “put the problems that we see on campus into stark relief”—but he argued that such goings-on should not shape the future of the sector. He urged leaders to “act with consonance, confidence, and alignment” based on their own institutional values and priorities. 

“Academic freedom in the classroom doesn’t mean you can indoctrinate and doesn’t mean you can be incompetent.” Diermeier referenced a 2025 working paper by Claremont McKenna College scholar Jon A. Shields and his colleagues, which found a stunning progressive bias in syllabi readings across a range of contentious subjects. Whether the problem is that faculty aren’t aware of competing perspectives or are simply choosing not to assign them, Diermeier argued that it’s academic malpractice. “You can’t competently teach” a course on a subject in which you’re not well versed, he said. And if faculty are only assigning readings from a perspective that they endorse, he noted, that’s a matter of indoctrination—not academic freedom. 

Katrine Mose, Susanne K. Kjaer and Allan Jensen

Question  Are children conceived through assisted reproductive technology (ART) at increased risk of childhood cancer?

Findings  In a Danish nationwide cohort (N = 1 086 136), children conceived using ART had higher cancer incidence than those not conceived using ART (23.6 vs 18.3 per 100 000 person-years; hazard ratio, 1.26), with the highest incidence observed after frozen embryo transfer (41.1) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (27.9). Associations with selected cancer types were observed for these treatments but not for in vitro fertilization, and findings were similar using alternative comparison groups.

Britannica:

Reformation Day, anniversary of the day Martin Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany (October 31, 1517), later identified by Protestants as the beginning of the Reformation. (See Researcher’s Note: The posting of the theses.) Lutherans observe October 31 as Reformation Day and may keep the preceding Sunday as Reformation Sunday. The liturgical color is red. Many churches in the Reformed and the Evangelical traditions also mark the day, often with special services focused on the Reformation and its effects.

History of the date

The European Lutheran territorial churches at first commemorated the Reformation on various days, among them the anniversary of Luther’s birth (November 10), his death (February 18), and presentation of the Augsburg Confession(June 25). The centennial celebrations of 1617 focused attention on October 31. In the sesquicentennial year (1667), Elector of Saxony John George II decreed this date as annual Reformation Day in Saxony. German Lutheran and Union territorial churches have gradually come to follow this example and specify October 31 or the Sunday following (or preceding).

White House:

From the earliest days of our Republic, prayer and faith in Almighty God have stood as the foundation of our strength, the source of our unity, and the fount of our greatness.  This Reformation Day, I send my best wishes to the countless Christians across our country commemorating the Protestant Reformation and its enduring message of salvation by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

Five hundred years ago, William Tyndale—inspired by the work of Martin Luther—advanced the Protestant Reformation’s devotion to Holy Scripture through the publication of the first New Testament printed in English, shaping the language of the Bibles that would fortify the faith and resolve of America’s founding generation.  The Sacred Scriptures helped form the religious convictions that formed our young Nation’s founding ideals of God-given rights and individual liberty, a spiritual inheritance we honor as we continue to reflect on 250 glorious years of American Independence.  The Bible remains a cornerstone of our Nation’s character and upholds our steadfast devotion to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

David Spector

For 13 years, Adriana Aviles, a fierce education advocate and former NYPD cop, has been the ultimate insider in New York City schools. As a powerful leader on the Citywide Council on High Schools, she championed Queens District 26 as one of the best in the city. She knew the principals and the teachers — and trusted them. She was gratified that her son consistently received good grades, especially in math, throughout his K-8 years. Then, two weeks ago, she sat down with her 14-year-old son to help him review for his second math exam. What happened next left her stunned and the high school freshman devastated — and prompted her to publicly confront Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a town hall last week. She shared her family’s experience with The Post’s David Spector.

All through middle school, my son was, at least on paper, a numbers whiz. His report cards consistently showed A’s — his lowest grade was a B plus.  But when he slid down to a 78 on his first exam at a top high school in Queens this fall, I pulled up a chair to help him review for his next test.

———

Everyone is running a scam and families like mine are paying for it. It’s no wonder so many of my peers left and despite living in NYC for coming on 30 years, I probably will too at some point.

A Study from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy for Thomas Aquinas College

1980, 1987, and 2026 Practice Tests

Introduction

This report compares the SAT’s reading (verbal) section across nearly half a century, using three released forms: one from 1980, one from 1987, and a current paper form (Bundle 6), which we refer to throughout as the SAT 2026 test. Our central question is not simply whether the test has become easier or harder—a question that content analysis alone cannot settle—but how the College Board’s conception of college-ready reading has changed: what the test now asks students to do and what it no longer asks.

We examine the three forms along a common set of dimensions—test structure, vocabulary demand, text complexity, passage length, type of reading, topical coverage, prerequisite background knowledge, and depth of knowledge—and, where the newer form has no counterpart in the older ones, we say so rather than force a comparison.1

This analysis matters for several reasons. First, the SAT is among the most consequential assessments in American education: scores shape college admissions and scholarship decisions and are widely read as a signal of college readiness. Yet public discussion of the test’s recent overhaul has centered on format— that it is now digital, shorter, and adaptive—rather than on what its reading section actually asks students to know and do. A careful, like-for-like comparison of reading content across eras is scarce.

Admissions offices and researchers often treat scores as comparable over time; if the test now measures a different mix of skills than it did on the 1980s forms, a given score may not mean quite what it used to.

Second, this high-stakes test shapes what schools, tutors, and families emphasize, so a change in the reading section ripples back into classrooms. It is important that this consequence be accounted for.

Third, the specific things a test assumes—rare vocabulary, cultural and historical background, the ability to read a chart—bear directly on equity, because they advantage students with particular kinds of prior exposure. Documenting exactly what changed is a precondition for any informed judgment about whether the change is an improvement.

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More.

Corrinne Hess:

The Board of Regents announced Johnson’s appointment Friday.  

Johnson, 57, will be the first person of color to lead the system since its creation in 1971. 

“My goal is to help our remarkable UW universities become even stronger, more connected, and more consequential to the future of Wisconsin,” Johnson said in a statement.

Johnson was one of three finalists for the position, along with Steven Gareth Holley, executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at the University of Mississippi, and Bernard  Savarese, vice president for academic affairs, research, and student success at the University of Tennessee System.

She replaces Jay Rothman who was fired in April in a unanimous decision by the Regents.

Ben Rothove

More than a decade after Yale University sparked national controversy for a memo that warned against culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, universities continue to promote similar guidance.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison shared a “Halloween Cultural Awareness” article from University Housing on its Instagram story on Oct. 30.

“Costumes that are culturally insensitive can negatively impact others,” the guidelines warn. “Before choosing a costume that represents a culture or an identity that you don’t hold, think about the significance of culture and how we can appreciate and learn from differing backgrounds rather than appropriating other identities in a harmful way.”

“Cultural Appropriation” is “when someone adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own,” according to the article. It is “viewed as disrespectful when cultural elements are copied from a marginalized culture by members of the dominant culture and used outsize of their cultural context.” Examples included “Katy Perry’s approach in several music videos” and “stereotyped costumes.”

Students are encouraged to think about whether their costume comes “from a culture that has been historically or currently discriminated against or oppressed.” They are also encouraged to think about the significance or sacredness of costume items. For example, “Eagle feathers are earned in certain indigenous communities and gifted to individuals by elders of communities.”

John D. Sailer:

On September 29, 2025, a group of nonprofit leaders and university insiders gathered at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., to talk through how to defend America’s embattled colleges and universities. Over three days, the group discussed how to make higher education “a right for all,” how to “protect and/or rebuild DEI,” and—more practically—how to collaborate on upcoming elections. 

The event was the soft launch of the Alliance for Higher Education (AHE). The group, which debuted publicly in January, represents those who believe that higher ed should fight back against its critics and would-be reformers. This resistance includes political activism: “Our tradition of institutions not speaking out about politics has simply backfired,” Mike Gavin, the alliance’s inaugural president, wrote in a whitepaper I obtained. At the meeting, the group planned student voting campaigns that would, according to other documents I obtained, “focus on opportunities to flip.”

This wink-and-nod partisanship was an odd fit for many at the gathering, which featured a who’s who of higher-education nonprofits, including senior leadership from PEN America, the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and the American Council on Education (ACE). As nonprofits, these groups are not conventionally partisan.

It likewise represented a new strategy from AHE’s key backer. Also present at the meeting was Carolyn Dinshaw, a senior program officer at the $7.8 billion-endowed Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her attendance was no surprise: the event, as one email I obtained put it, was “Mellon-backed.” Though the relationship has never before been made public, the Alliance for Higher Education is Mellon’s brainchild. Mellon played a critical role in forming the group.

——-

More.

Mark Levine:

Today my office has released a major new report on student enrollment in NYC.

We found that k-12 enrollment in our public schools has fallen by 187k since 2013, with a projected decline of an additional 128k students by 2034.

As total enrollment declines, NYCPS is serving a student population with growing needs. The number of students with disabilities is increasing. In the most recent school year, approximately 73% of students were in poverty and 14% were homeless or living in temporary housing.

Our report finds the drop in enrollment is driven by declining births and families with children leaving NYC, with a particularly notable drop in public-school enrollment as students transition from elementary to middle school.

These trends have massive implications for our schools that we have only barely begin to grapple with. My hope is that this report will spur a long overdue conversation about what the era of falling student enrollment means for NYC, and what we can do to reverse or slow it. 🧵

Natalie Winters:

The restricted documents show how that coordination translates into public messaging. Both were accessible through Local Progress’s public resource page for elected officials, despite their distribution restrictions.

Contact with officials. A script for everyone else.

The April memo followed a Justice Department demand for Wayne County’s 2024 ballots and related records. 

Michigan officials disputed its premise, saying the prosecutions demonstrated working safeguards and that allegations from a 2020 civil lawsuit had been rejected.

ESRN’s memo describes national and state partners preparing for escalation. It then identifies their connection to government:

“Partners on the ground are monitoring developments closely and maintaining open lines of communication with election officials.”

The next section, titled “What You Can Say,”points to messaging guidance and a social media toolkit. It says partners should amplify statements from Michigan’s statewide election officials and support local clerks and election workers.

Isaac Robinson:

Today, researchers from Stanford, Mercor, and O*NET Resource Center, and the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paperdescribing TaskNet, a new open-source catalogue of tasks across six different occupations in the US economy, updated to reflect the impact of AI on professional work. TaskNet builds off the structure of O*NET, the US Department of Labor’s widely used map of occupational tasks. O*NET provides standardized descriptions of the tasks, skills, and knowledge associated with different occupations, helping both researchers and workers better understand occupations. TaskNet extends O*NET with a fast, scalable interviewer for identifying new tasks that will allow it to keep up with the rapid pace of change. TaskNet focuses on speaking directly to workers in order to better understand a profession, while also eliciting worker judgment on task features relevant to automation like how hard is it to judge the quality of their output or how easy it is to define success a priori.

Power The Future:

KEY FINDINGS

• Arnold’s foundation ended 2024 with approximately $4.77 billion in assets.
• Arnold has directed millions toward climate, clean-energy, carbon-pricing, and conservative-branded energy organizations.
• In Ohio, national clean-energy philanthropy helps fund conservative-facing energy advocacy.
• In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt entered a formal partnership with Arnold Ventures involving up to $10 million in matching funds.
• In Indiana, the leader of an Arnold-funded health-policy organization entered the governor’s cabinet as the state adopted policies using Medicaid reimbursement to influence commercial hospital prices.
• John Arnold also has private investments in transmission and geothermal companies operating in sectors his philanthropy supports.

Miranda Devine:

Two of the FBI agents most closely identified with the FBI’s politicized operation to smother the Hunter Biden corruption scandal are facing their first taste of accountability.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were chargedFriday with allegedly lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I don’t have any knowledge of said laptop,” Floris testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 when asked about Hunter Biden’s MacBook, which the FBI seized in December 2019.

Yet she had been intimately involved in every aspect of the FBI’s handling of the laptop from the start, prosecutors allege in stunning detail.

Floris had been the deputy assistant director of the FBI and “functional head” of the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which ran a covert operation before the 2020 election called “Round River,” specifically to collect all derogatory reports about Hunter Biden from FBI informants and falsely flag them as “Russian disinformation.”

Benavides was the Section Chief of FITF, and he and Floris were “active participants in regularly classified briefings they hosted for the FBI agents and prosecutors on the Hunter Biden case, prosecutors allege.

In March, Berkeley’s Hung-Hsi Wu asked the European Mathematical Society a question that sounds too simple to need an hour: what is the mathematics we teach in school? His answer is that what American textbooks have carried for seventy years does not deserve the name — it defines almost nothing, explains almost nothing, and rarely says why any of it matters. Three reforms tried to replace it and fell short, he argues, because nobody had written down the alternative in enough detail for a teacher to use. So he spent twenty years writing it: six volumes, 2,402 pages, K through 12. The five principles he says any replacement must satisfy fit on a single page.

Our overview, with a link to the full talk: [link]

——

2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Erin Gretzinger:

Some high schools, including the Madison school district, use unweighted GPAs, which award equal points for all courses regardless of difficulty. Others, like Middleton-Cross Plains, employ weighted GPAs that give more points for more rigorous classes like AP courses.

Depending on the approach, different challenges arise. With unweighted GPAs, some worry about having to break ties or creating perverse incentives for students to maximize their GPAs. Other school officials doubt weighted GPAs account for differences in students’ access to advanced coursework and feel the approach may discount the value of other experiences like arts or career-focused courses.

Nearly two dozen school districts, including 10 in Dane County, have sought exemptions from the state Department of Public Instruction to use different ranking methods and create tiebreaker policies, according to records obtained by the Cap Times under state transparency laws. Districts secured approval to use a range of tiebreaker criteria, including ACT scores, attendance records, extracurriculars and, as a last resort, randomly drawing names.

While early research indicates the Wisconsin Guarantee isn’t making a significant differencein who applies to and enrolls at UW-Madison — the state’s public flagship university — the patchwork landscape of the law’s implementation underscores the admission promise’s ongoing effects in communities.

“It’s a little bit like the Wild Wild West,” said David Lang, a dean at California State University at Sacramento who’s studied rankings systems. “It’s not just kids and families that are going to game the system … but school districts at large are also trying to kind of game this out and try to figure out how to play within the rules.”

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Scott Carlson:

What does Cowen predict? In a nutshell: Hyperselective colleges will be fine — at a minimum, they will remain valuable as an elite matchmaking service. Big public universities will also by and large be OK — diminished in academic quality but still desirable as a social experience. Small private institutions are in for a world of pain. At all colleges, real learning will increasingly take place between motivated students and their AIs. And the value of a degree will continue to slide.

Commentary.

Corrinne Hess:

Public school officials say state-imposed revenue limits make it impossible for districts to fund day-to-day operations. But opponents say school districts receive more than $18,000 per pupil — slightly above national averages — so the problem is how that money is being spent. 

Green Bay, Middleton-Cross Plains and Janesville have the three largest operating referendums on the ballots this year at  $158 million, $119 million and $98 million, respectively. All three are non-recurring. 

There are 16 school districts that had a failed referendum in April and are trying again on Tuesday. 

Damian LaCroix, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, and Dan Rossmiller, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, penned an op-ed this week saying schools aren’t asking for a “blank check.”

…..

Will Flanders, research director with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, says districts will have to reconcile that enrollment increases are not likely to happen anytime soon. 

“So in many instances there is going to have to be more severe belt tightening than we usually consider,” Flanders said. “We have districts that are on the very high end of spending that are going to referendum, and we have districts that are at the opposite end of the low end of spending, going to referendum.The nice thing in Wisconsin is that we leave it up to voters to decide.”

In April, more than 60 percent of school districts saw their referendums approved. But polling shows voter fatigue. 

———

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Sarah Sparks:

“The largest evaluation of an instructional coaching program to date…found no benefits to either teacher retention or student test scores from an intensive, expensive coaching model used in hundreds of schools”

Commentary.

LA Local:

From street sweeping to tree trimming, LA residents are seeing less of the basic services they rely on.

With the mayoral race heating up, candidates are promising to fix the problem. But LA is spending more and getting less — and whoever wins will take on a system that limits how much they can actually change.

In five years, LA’s budget grew 34%. The number of sidewalks it repaired fell 33%.

And residents are feeling the effects in their neighborhoods. In 2021, LA cut street sweeping from weekly to every other week. In Westlake, a group of volunteers responded by picking up trash the Bureau of Sanitation left behind, said Elaine Alaniz, president of the Westlake North Neighborhood Council.

When asked how she felt about the decline in services, Alaniz hesitated to speak for herself.

“I don’t even want to put feeling [into it]. Let me just tell you by the responses that I’m getting from the community,” she said.

As most Angelenos see, these aren’t isolated complaints. They point to a bigger problem: LA is struggling to keep up with the work residents expect their city to do.

LA went eight months without repaving a single stretch of road

Ila Deshmukh Towery:

With the midterms days away, all signs point toward Democrats carrying one, if not both, houses of Congress, an outcome that would be good for civic health and hygiene but could complicate education reform at the federal level. The stakes may be even greater in states, where the lion’s share of education policy is made and most education dollars are spent. Governors wield outsized influence, appointing key leaders, shaping policy agendas, and coaxing reluctant legislatures to act. Of the 36 governors’ races on tap, three will be particularly consequential for ed reform: Texas, Ohio, and Oregon. Each state has experienced extended periods of one-party control. The elections could send their education systems in sharply different directions.

Texas

Nowhere is the divide over education policy starker than in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott is seeking a fourth four-year term and Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in more than 30 years. Abbott is locked in a surprisingly tight race with State Representative Gina Hinojosa, a former Austin ISD school board president. A skeptic of standardized testing, school choice, and state takeovers, Hinojosa has pledged to fire Texas’s long-serving and effective education commissioner, Mike Morath, on “day one.” Her proposals for what would replace the current approach are less developed, but Hinojosa’s stated priorities point toward a sharp break with Abbott and Morath: a retreat from the current testing and accountability regime, an end to the state’s nascent education savings account (ESA) program, and more deference to local districts. She would, however, face stiff headwinds from a Republican-controlled legislature.

Sarah O’Connor:

What would you think if you were asked in a job interview to hold up three fingers in front of your face? Perhaps you’re doing so badly that they’re checking you’re not concussed? More likely the recruiter is trying to check that you’re not an AI deepfake.

Employers are trying all sorts of things to combat fraudulent AI use in the recruitment process. There are jobseekers who use chatbots to bluff their way into jobs they’re not capable of, or pay “interview mules” to complete assessments for them. More dangerously, there are hackers who try to get hired with false identities in order to access internal systems, and even remote IT workers who turn out to be based in North Korea. The research company Gartner has predicted that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028.

All this is leading to a culture clash inside companies. The warm and fuzzy realms of HR and recruitment are having to learn to work with the suspicious minds of the cyber security world.

One example: the HR platform Deel acquired AI cyber security company Clarity in August in order to “embed continuous identity security across the entire hiring and workforce lifecycle”.

Kimberly Wethal:

Two Canadian citizens have been charged with illegally voting in recent federal elections, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Madison.

Monique Gignac-Yochum, 60, formerly of Hayward, and Robert Dedrick, 66, of Stoughton, have both been charged in federal court for voting in either the November 2022 or November 2024 election, or both. Both made their initial appearances in federal court Thursday.

Gignac-Yochum was charged with two counts for voting in both the 2022 and 2024 elections and faces up to a year in prison if convicted. Dedrick has also been charged with falsely claiming citizenship in August 2024 when registering to vote and then voting in the November 2024 election. If convicted, he could face up to six years in prison.

Both people were charged after investigations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, a statement from the Western District Court of Wisconsin said.

According to a criminal complaint, Gignac-Yochum has been legally living in the U.S. since 2012 and illegally registered to vote in April 2018. Gignac-Yochum then voted by absentee ballot to the town of Bass Lake, according to voting records from the town and the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

In an interview with a Homeland Security agent, Gignac-Yochum said she had voted in several Wisconsin elections, Chadwick M. Elgersma, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, said in a statement.

Trisha Powell Crain:

Alabama’s improvement in reading has been getting a lot of national attention lately. A new report examines how the state went from last in the nation in fourth-grade reading in 2019 to nearly matching the national average five years later.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s 40-plus-page report traces nearly three decades of Alabama’s literacy efforts, from early successes and setbacks to the changes that followed passage of the Alabama Literacy Act in 2019. 

It offers both a history lesson and a look at what educators are doing differently today.

There’s much more in the report than can be covered here, but these five findings are a good place to start. 

Alabama is making gains while much of the country struggles

Alabama was one of just two states, along with Louisiana, where fourth-grade reading scores actually improved between 2019 and 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card.

Alabama third graders, who were reading about six-tenths of a grade level below the national average in 2019, were slightly above it by 2025, according to an analysis of state test scores.

The report doesn’t claim any one policy caused those gains. Instead, it points to several changes that appear to have helped.

Harry Crane & Koleman Strumpf:

Curiously, polls, the other leading forecaster of elections, haven’t received anything like this level of scrutiny. Yet unlike prediction markets, we now have two examples of fraudulent polls from the current election cycle.

Over the summer the pollster Median Strategies was found to be fabricating polls, most prominently overstating the chances of a far-left candidate in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. The firm said it was conducting a “short-term social experiment” to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Last week Wedgewood Polls admitted most of its polling numbers were also an “experiment.” This one had at least one documented effect in changing election outcomes. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary when Wedgewood’s fake numbers showed her lagging. This led donations to dry up and demoralized staffers. “It killed us,” she wrote on X. Abdul El-Sayed won the nomination and is in a tight race for the seat. Wedgewood’s phony poll may be one reason why.

Mary Anne Pazanowski:

Illinois can no longer offer in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to immigrants who are illegally in the US after a federal judge held the program unconstitutional.

A federal law that prohibits states from granting immigrants unlawfully in the country secondary education tuition breaks unless they give those same benefits to all US citizens regardless of residency expressly preempts the provisions, Judge David W. Dugan of the US District Court for the Southern District of Illinois said July 24. 

The federal law “is an exercise of the federal government’s exclusive authority ‘over the subject of immigration and the status of aliens,’” Dugan wrote. It doesn’t run afoul of the anti-commandeering doctrine because it doesn’t dictate what a state may or may not do education-wise; it acts solely to limit private individuals’ eligibility for certain benefits, Dugan said.

“Put simply, U.S. citizens or nationals must be treated no worse than illegal aliens,” Dugan said.

The state provisions provide eligibility for in-state tuition benefits to such immigrants so long as they resided in the state or proved they resided there at one time, such a graduation from an Illinois high school.

Scott Shafer

Voters across the Bay Area will weigh in on more than 100 school board races in next Tuesday’s election. As many school districts face declining enrollment, tight budgets and difficult decisions about the role of technology in classrooms, the make-up of school boards is critical. But voters often have very little information about the candidates, what they stand for or who supports them. This year, to address that void, KQED sent questionnaires to close to 400 school board candidates to better understand their positions. We’ll talk about the issues facing school boards, how to make an informed vote and the key races in San Francisco, Oakland and beyond.

Daniel Buck:

Last spring, Milwaukee Public Schools committed to reducing class sizes, setting new guidance that schools should include no more than 22 students in kindergarten classrooms, increasing up to 32 by middle school. Earlier, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran its own analysis, finding that the majority of the district’s classrooms were already well within district recommendations. The average kindergarten classroom size was 22, for example.

At the same time, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s database reports that MPS has only seven students for every staffer. What do we make of this discrepancy? How can we explain the large gaps between class sizes and student-teacher ratios?

There will, of course, be variability due to basic enrollment differences. The Journal Sentinel’s own reporting, for example, found a spread of kindergarten classrooms ranging from as few as nine students and as many as 34. When I was a teacher, my classes varied because of scheduling constraints, students testing into or out of various classes, and enrollment differences across grades.

But how can there be one staff member for every seven students and yet classes as large as 34?

Simply put, there are way more administrators, instructional aides, janitorial workers, and other support staff than teachers. Consider the growth of students, teachers and other staff since 1959, according to datafrom the National Center for Education Statistics:Increase in… Student enrollment47%Teachers139%Principals and assistant principals210%Instruction coordinators631%Guidance counselors779%Instructional aides1,476%

In six decades, staff growth has bloated far beyond actual student growth. To put the numbers another way, in 1949, teachers were 70.3 percent of all school staff. In 2022, they were only 47.5 percent. Herein lies the explanation for the discrepancy: Districts hire lots of new people, while classes themselves remain the same size.