Ian Leslie:

Following the confrontation in the car, and after much soul-searching, Hannah-Jones decided to let Najya choose which high school to go to. Najya identified the top-performing schools in the area as her preferred options. This meant a heavily white, middle class school, and one with academic selection: the kind of school to which Hannah-Jones was opposed on principle. “By letting Najya make the decision, I was allowing my child to attend a school that was a beneficiary of the inequality that defined the city’s educational landscape.”

Najya got the school she wanted, but was almost overwhelmed by the amount of work she was asked to do. Low on prior knowledge and having never learnt the skills of independent study, she floundered, failing test after test. “Suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.” After Hannah-Jones intervened, the school’s teachers put in a lot of extra work with Najya to bring her up to speed, and Hannah-Jones paid for private tuition. Najya got there in the end. But it was clear to Hannah-Jones that Najya’s middle school, which is called Unison, had left her woefully under-prepared, and that less fortunate kids would not have been able to recover from it.

The essay has triggered a firehose of commentary. Much of it has focused on the decision of its author to choose a school on ideological grounds at the expense of her daughter’s education. I’m going to put that to one side here, since I want to focus on the underlying questions about education. I’ll just say that, firstly, whatever you think about her decision, it was not hypocritical in the manner of progressives who talk about social justice but send their kids to a fee-paying school. Hannah-Jones paid a cost for her principles. The question she explores, quite unflinchingly, is whether it was fair to impose that cost on her daughter. Secondly, this is a very good piece, grippingly written and genuinely, almost painfully self-lacerating. Read it if you can. Finally, I note that Hannah-Jones responded patiently and with good grace to her critics in the comments.

Anyway, let’s look at what it tells us about schools and politics

…….

Hannah-Jones interviewed the principal of Unison, Emily Paige, for her piece. That must have been a tricky one for Paige – “Hey, would you like to talk to this high-profile journalist who believes your school failed her daughter?”. But Hannah-Jones is sympathetic. She notes that unlike a lot of state schools in New York, Unison is not selective. Children arrive at it having been educationally neglected. It has a disproportionate number of students who are poor and who are diagnosed with learning disabilities. In fact, Hannah-Jones ascribes almost all the blame for the low standards of schools like Unison to a system that “segregates” children by ability, and shoves black children from poor families into underfunded schools.

There is certainly something to this, but she exaggerates the contribution of school funding to inequality, and, crucially, underweights the agency of individual schools and teachers. She leaves out the “educating” part of education policy altogether.

Hannah-Jones notes that schools in predominantly non-white districts received less funding; what she doesn’t say is that, while that may be true at the national level, it isn’t in New York, which gives extra funding to schools with disadvantaged students. In fact, Najya’s schools probably receive more money per pupil than their predominantly white counterparts. According to official data, her abysmal elementary school spends $52k per pupil and has an average class size of 10. If nobody is on duty at lunchtime, and nobody is properly marking or grading work, that is not down to a lack of money or staff.

——-

“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 Despain Zhou

Parents should fight for their children in education, not against them.

There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.

The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.

But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.1 She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private. She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.

It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories. 

——-

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

Julia Merola:

Why Should Delaware Care? 
For nearly a decade, Delaware schools have been struggling with poor test scores from students. Many critics have sought greater accountability measures for school districts that aren’t showing progress fast enough, and now the Department of Education has put forward such a draft plan.

As Delaware continues to grapple with concerningly low average test scores from students, the state Department of Education has drafted a plan that could see it take over low-performing schools or even hold back third-graders who are far behind grade-level reading and writing.

According to annual proficiency scores released by the state last month, less than half of Delaware’s third through eighth graders read and do math at a proficient level. And just 18% of 11th graders were proficient in math.

But Education Secretary Cindy Marten told state board of education members that Delaware must have a clearer, more-defined answer for what happens when a school, or its students, consistently do not show test score improvements. 

“We can’t just say, ‘Well, they didn’t get it. Oh well, move on next year,’” she said during last week’s state board meeting.

Tyler Cowen:

The postmortem will be this. Many people panicked about the possibility of strong AI models killing us all. That fear was not based on peer-reviewed scientific research showing a high chance of doom, nor was doom indicated in any market prices of the time, including measures of risk. It was a story, just like this is a story, and it was spread on social media. The key point of the doom story was that, if America keeps the No. 1 spot in AI models, the models will be so strong they will do us all in, or lead to unimaginable catastrophes. We were too afraid to have America keep the lead, forgetting that if truly destructive AI is our fate, the doomer scenario can come from Chinese AI as well.

Today, we cannot say for sure that the AI doom scenario is false. But is it a story we wish to live by? Is belief in it a good way to protect and extend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Will it help us much, or for long, if it is Chinese AI that turns on us and does us in?

In my view, successful societies accept challenges and meet them. Solving problems, bit by bit, is the best way to ensure that we have the capabilities to meet big and truly existential risks, should those risks come along. Debating the chances of our doom, ex ante, on a highly speculative basis, is unlikely to provide the same kind of expertise and talent cultivation. It is instead more likely to demoralize and immobilize us.

So which America are we going to choose?

———

More.

Roshan Fernandez:

A growing number of private colleges are reassessing how much they charge families to attend.

With the cost of college under scrutiny, some universities are deploying a fresh wave of financial moves to lure students—like slashing tuition by nearly half, offering “in state” rates to compete with public institutions, and promising loan-free aid to certain families.

“It does feel like a sea change right now,” said Jennifer Glowienka, the president of Carroll College in Montana, which announced a 40% tuition reduction starting in fall 2027.

Experts say these strategies generate buzz, but some don’t translate to a sustainable enrollment boost. In some cases, critics say, cutting tuition is a marketing move that doesn’t change much if few students were paying full price in the first place.

Schools are thinking not only about competitors, “but just to get families to sit up and pay attention,” said Brett Schraeder, vice president of financial aid optimization at consultant EAB.

For years, families have associated price with quality. A tuition cut used to be risky because a school giving out $10,000 scholarships seemed more prestigious than one whose sticker price was $10,000 cheaper. Students “feel good, because they got a scholarship,” said Sandy Baum, a higher-education economist and senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Now, higher-ed analysts say that posture might be shifting. More colleges are asking: Is it better to tell families their school is cheaper, instead of being more expensive but handing out big merit scholarships? “This is the tug of war in the higher-ed space,” said Schraeder.

Many of the changes are playing out at smaller colleges, but even high-profile elite schools are pondering new tuition models. Cornell University’s recent report on the future of higher education called for a task force to examine whether tuition should be lowered and merit-aid introduced.

Administrators at Carroll College spent years discussing how—or whether—to change its high-price, high-discount model. The perception that the school was financially unattainable had built up. Administrators realized that students were “self-selecting out” by opting not to apply and see their aid package.

Wall Street Journal:

It’s remarkable how much coercion the Biden Administration resorted to in the name of climate change. Ending it takes effort, so full marks to the Trump Agriculture Department for no longer forcing dairy farmers to pay for environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives.

“American dairy farmers pay mandatory checkoff assessments to build demand for milk, cheese and butter—NOT to bankroll radical climate (ESG) agendas,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote recently in announcing the decision. “Washington bureaucrats should not be using farmers’ own dollars to regulate cow burps, make it harder to raise cattle or push fake meat onto American dinner tables.”

The change is the result of a lawsuit filed in June by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) on behalf of three Badger State farmers. The suit alleged that forcing dairy farmers to subsidize ESG initiatives violated the Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedure Act. WILL argued in federal court in Wisconsin that compelling farmers to subsidize speech they don’t agree with impinges on their First Amendment rights.

America’s more than 20,000 dairy farmers have long been required to pay a portion of their sales into the Dairy Checkoff, which collects funds for advertising or promoting dairy products. But over the years USDA funneled the money to environmental groups working against dairy farmers’ interests.

Joanne Jacobs

Many of his precalculus students claim they earned A’s or B’s in precalculus — or calculus — in high school, Rutgers math professor Steve Safran told Aldeman.Another instructor complained about students who arrive in college “unable to add fractions without a calculator” or understand a problem with a variable. 

Rutgers is seeing a slight increase in well-prepared students who test into advanced calculus, Aldeman writes. But there’s a surge in elementary algebra, intermediate algebra and other classes normally taught in high school. 

New Jersey students are supposed to pass algebra, geometry and at least one more math class to earn a high school diploma, writes Aldeman. But there are lots of alternate paths to a diploma. “Even as state officials celebrate a record-high 91.8% graduation rate, 40% of this year’s graduates failed to pass the state’s high school math exam last year.” 

It’s not just New Jersey, he writes.”Most states have large gaps between graduation and math proficiency rates,” he writes. 

Math is cumulative, Aldeman writes. Students who don’t learn their times tables will struggle with fractions. “If they are shaky on fractions and decimals, they’re likely to have a hard time with algebra.” 

Lowering standards boosts graduation rates, he writes. “But if math gaps aren’t addressed early, catching up is harder and costlier, and students pay the price.” 

“Among students designated as college-ready by their high school coursework, only 47.6 percent are projected to pass intermediate college algebra,” they write. “Consequently, colleges nationwide, including elite institutions such as Harvard University, have had to establish introductory and remedial math courses to close foundational algebraic skill gaps.^“

———

HUANG: “.. Try getting a kid to do long division right now. Multiplication tables are starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. ..

.. Does it matter? .. I don’t think it does.”

———-

This 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

Bekah Stolhandske McNeel:

After the letter went out, the district took aggressive action to overhaul its most chronically struggling campuses. Meanwhile, Craig and other parents in the district formed an alliance to try to spare their neighborhood schools from the heavy-handed reforms they’d heard about in Houston ISD and several other Texas districts the state had taken over. Some organized a group, Families Organized and Resisting Takeover, or FORT, and launched their campaign to stop the takeover, speaking with any elected leader who would take their calls.

None of it would be enough.

Public school advocates and parent organizations fearing state intervention often point to Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, where a TEA takeover has led to the departure of 21,000 students. In 2023, Morath installed Mike Miles, a former Dallas superintendent, to lead the district and gave him broad authority to remake it using his philosophy of reform. Miles quickly rolled out his New Education System, or NES, a highly centralized instruction model built around scripted curriculum, tightly timed lessons, frequent testing, and intensive teacher evaluation. It started on a few targeted campuses, but by the 2024–25 school year, NES was in operation on 130 of the district’s 274 campuses. Teachers and parents fiercely resisted the changes, citing staff turnover, library closures, and the fact that the reforms were imposed by an unelected, state-appointed administration; Houston Public Media reported that 633 HISD teachers had resigned by early 2024, nearly twice the number the previous year, while a standing petition demanding Miles’s removal gathered more than 21,000 signatures.

The Economist:

NDIA IS talking about education. After a hot summer dominated by youth protests that toppled the country’s education minister, attention has stayed on the schools, colleges and universities in which almost 300m Indians are enrolled. The fatal collapse of a student hostel in Delhi on September 6th quickly became another symbol of neglect. Meanwhile the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which led the protests, has encouraged its supporters to report on schools across the country, turning the gaze of millions on social media onto the shoddy conditions in which Indian children are supposed to learn.

The spark of street action was an exam leak. But the fuel was rage at a system that has become what Yamini Aiyar of Brown University calls a “misery machine”. In what are probably the world’s most selective exams, tens of millions of poorly taught students compete for a tiny number of golden tickets into elite universities and government jobs. Their families fork out for private coaching, schools and colleges. But for most it ends in disappointment. Only 7% of graduates find a formal job within a year, according to Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Most are unemployed for years, thanks to a yawning gap between the numbers of graduates and jobs (see chart).

——-

The State of Reading

Philip Greenspun:

It’s tough to understand how the Ivy League universities, even with top scholars such as Claudine Gay, have managed to retain prominent faculty. The lifestyle of a Stanford professor is so far superior that it is tough to understand why Stanford hasn’t recruited all of the world’s smartest academics. Yes, the California government spends tax dollars in ways that are offensive to some Americans, e.g., performing trans surgery on minors, but roughly 94% of elite academics are progressive Democrats (Harvard Crimson). Tax rates are higher in California than in the states where most elite universities are, but progressive Democrats should be happy to pay their “fair share”. Speaking of “fair”, it looks like the folks who purport to champion female rights and achievement and decry the unfair gender pay gapchoose to pay women substantially less (source):

See also, from stanford.edu, “Countering Masculine Defaults to Close the Gender Pay Gap” (“organizational cultures can counter this tendency by equally valuing qualities traditionally associated with femininity, like warmth and agreeableness”), “Women paid less than men even at highest levels of academic medicine”: “These women are at the top of their game,” said Eleni Linos, MD, MPH, a professor of dermatology at Stanford. “They are skilled leaders, outstanding managers and experienced negotiators who have reached top positions in their medical schools. Gender pay gaps are often blamed on women’s personal choices to reduce work hours or leave the workforce, household responsibilities, childcare or suboptimal negotiation skills. This study challenges these traditional explanations because our sample of medical department leaders have navigated these complex challenges and broken through the ‘glass ceiling.’ Yet they are still paid less than their male peers when controlling for many factors. Our study shows the pervasiveness of gender inequities at all levels of academic medicine.”

Robert Pondiscio:

Roland Fryer observes that “resources alone can’t explain disparate outcomes among schools serving similar children with similar budgets” (“The Education of Nikole Hannah-Jones,” op-ed, Sept. 24). He’s right, but we should follow that insight where it leads.

For decades, education debates have focused nearly to exclusion on structures and inputs: funding, segregation, poverty, class size, governance and school choice. These things matter. But if similarly situated schools produce dramatically different results, our curiosity must extend inside the schoolhouse—to what adults do with the children we entrust to them.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s account of her daughter’s education makes this point painfully clear, although it seems lost on her. Bluntly, Najya didn’t fail to learn fractions because her classmates were black. Her teacher didn’t repeatedly fail to show up because the school was segregated. Assignments didn’t go unread, unassessed or ungraded because affluent children attended elsewhere. Teachers failed to teach. Grades misled students and parents. Leadership failed to ensure that the basic functions of schooling occurred reliably. These are failures of institutional competence and a devastating challenge to Ms. Hannah-Jones’s theory of change.

———-

“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

Karol Markowicz

1619 Project founder expresses regret over education choices for daughter

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo reacts to 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones admitting she regrets her public education choices. Writing in an essay, Hannah-Jones states she feels she failed her child by enrolling her in a high-poverty Brooklyn school. Rufo argues progressive ideals created a gap between political rhetoric and practical realities for families.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, has written a blockbuster piece, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” on the reality of sending her daughter Najya to failing schools in New York City. 

Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights, had tried to live out her progressive values and sent her child to the local, deficient public school. Writing in 2016 for the magazine, she noted that her neighbors in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant were opting out of the local school. “I didn’t know any of our middle-class neighbors, Black or White, who sent their children to one of these schools,” Hannah-Jones shared.

Hannah-Jones did. Now, 10 years later, Hannah-Jones’ latest piece shows that her project had been a failure, at the cost of her child’s education.

It’s a difficult read. Hannah-Jones wanted to live out her values, especially the belief that children should go to their local school and that school choice is unacceptable. But those ideas failed when they hit reality, and Hannah-Jones spent nearly a decade coming to accept that.

———

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

Joseph Henrich

The Task

This document represents a supporting chapter in our Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Our interdisciplinary panel was charged with assessing the epistemological health of several disciplines on the more humanistic side of the university. The Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, tasked our panel as follows:

• As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.
• The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.
• To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified. We are concerned that, without such an examination, the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.

My role was to assess my own field, Anthropology, with a focus on scholarship within U.S. institutions. I accepted this charge out of a love for my field and a belief that anthropological insights, approaches and methods can and should play a central role in developing ideas that will help improve the lives of individuals and communities around the world. I’ve been thinking about anthropological epistemology for many years. In 1993, when I arrived at UCLA to pursue my graduate studies in cultural anthropology, I found a field already sinking into a quagmire of epistemological conflict (D’Andrade 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995) and drifting in a direction that would make it increasingly difficult to develop theories capable of addressing social and economic problems. Nevertheless, I committed to continuing because I saw profound value in anthropological perspectives. To develop my own approach, I began engaging with ideas and methods from economics (Kagel & Roth 1995), political science (Ostrom 1990) and psychology (Kahneman et al. 1982). UCLA’s 4-field breadth requirements meant I had to take a course in biological anthropology. This course showed me how ideas from evolutionary biology could help us think more clearly about culture, cultural change, and the emergence of phenomena such as social norms, institutions, rituals and cooperation (Boyd & Richerson 1985). Much of my career has focused on bringing the richness of anthropology to other parts of the social and biological sciences (Bergeron et al. forthcoming; Blasi et al. 2022; Henrich 2000; Henrich et al. 2010b; Henrich & Henrich 2010; Henrich & Muthukrishna 2021), while learning how these other fields generate knowledge — harvesting insights and techniques to integrate into our work. The framework that emerged from the efforts of many people in several disciplines is now a major enterprise, the field of ‘cultural evolution,’ which has its own society and biennial meetings. My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology.

Kayla Huynh:

• State Superintendent Jill Underly called for increased public school funding in her annual State of Education address.
• Democrats praised Underly’s speech, agreeing that schools have been underfunded for decades.
• Critics argued the focus should be on improving student outcomes rather than simply increasing spending.

State Superintendent Jill Underly’s call for increased school funding drew praise from Democrats following her annual address Sept. 24, but critics said the state should focus more on improving student outcomes rather than spending additional money.

Underly spoke Sept. 24 at the state Capitol in Madison for her 2026 State of Education address. Ahead of the November election, Underly called on Wisconsin residents to choose leaders “who are pro-public school, pro-child and pro-Wisconsin.” She also urged lawmakers to increase investments in the state’s public school districts, which she said have cut programs, increased class sizes or relied on taxpayers due to “decades of below-inflation funding.”

A running theme throughout Underly’s speech was the connection between public schools and America’s 250th anniversary. “If we didn’t have public schools,” she said, “we really wouldn’t be celebrating 250 years of democracy.” 

In a statement, state Rep. Robyn Vining, D-Wauwatosa, said Underly “highlighted the understanding our founding fathers had nearly 250 years ago, that public education plays a pertinent role in democracy.”

“We must honor our founders and our constitution by ensuring Wisconsin’s children receive an adequately-funded public education so we can move forward, together,” Vining said.

Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, said he appreciated Underly “calling out what is wrong and what is needed.”

————

“Overfunded”

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

Gary Frankel:

Anyone involved in higher education reform might recognize a very particular pattern—an “elite” university, often one of the Ivy League schools, does something inane. Reformers, usually but not exclusively conservatives, then call attention to the issue, and give it considerable press. Numerous elected officials make statements and/or issue public condemnations, and the university in question quickly tries to do damage control. Ultimately, very little truly changes. Repeat ad nauseam. 

None of this is to say that these efforts are pointless—far from it. When elite universities discriminate againststudents that they do not feel are sufficiently oppressed, they need to be called out. When universities repeatedly fail to protect students from angry mobs that hate them because of their religion, they should be forced to explain themselves before Congress. And when the supposed crème de la crème of our higher education system flirts with radical ideological activism, conservatives should be ready to confront them. 

But whatever the merits of this approach may be, conservative reformers heap far too much attention on a very small number of schools. Private, highly selective schools serve only about 4% of students, yet they tend to dominate the higher education reform conversation. Community colleges, regional public universities, and even many state flagship universities, all of which have far more bearing on a far greater number of Americans, garner a fraction of the scrutiny, ink, or outrage. For a movement that aims to speak to Middle America, this is a bizarre misallocation of resources.  For a movement that aims to speak to Middle America, this is a bizarre misallocation of resources.

That said, it’s easy to understand the fixation. For hundreds of years, Americans of all stripes have been told that elite universities are something they should aspire to. That to be a “Harvard Man,” or to have that prestigious pedigree more broadly, means something. And, in this era of extreme political polarization, a conservative with a shiny degree is seen as someone who walked into the Labyrinth of Crete and returned home having slain the Minotaur. 

Peter Herman:

Incredibly, no-one holds Arday responsible for lying and plagiarizing. The Good Law Project ignores Arday’s multiple lies, and the NEJM author actually says that Arday’s behavior doesn’t matter: “I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true.” Nor is she alone: “I have no idea if, how, why, or to what degree Jason may have done or not done what he is accused of having done. And I do not care. At all,” writes Steven Thrasher, a journalism prof at Northwestern University.

Depicting Arday as an innocent victim of White supremacy forgets how Arday did his level best to silence the critics. After Prof. Davis Harris about “puzzling similarities” between one of Arday’s articles and an earlier study by someone else, Arday told him that he should pay more attention to dismantling racism, and to not contact him again. But Arday wasn’t done. He reported Harris to the police, who, to their credit, took no action.

Jack Grove was not so lucky. After Arday found out about the article Grove was writing for the Times Higher Education about Arday’s plagiarism, Arday hired Carter-Ruck, a law firm known for intimidating journalists and whose previous clients include Qatar and Russian oligarchs. Grove’s article was spiked. Someone then reported Grove to Scotland Yard, which spent four months investigating before closing the case. Who paid for Carter-Ruck’s services remains a mystery.

Some of Arday’s defenders go off the wall entirely. The distinguished political philosopher Jason Stanley asserted that plagiarism isn’t “the mere overlap of sentences,” even though that’s exactly how universities define plagiarism.” Others fall back on conspiracy theories.

David Freedlander

Whenever Democratic political operatives gather to drink these days, they talk about three things: their chances in the midterms, who will be the nominee in 2028, and if they have read — or are in — “the book.”

The book in question is Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, by Evan Barker, a onetime fundraiser who has written something between a tell-all and a cri de coeur about her time inside the Democratic Party. Barker, who worked mostly for candidates and groups associated with the insurgent left that sprung up in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, writes that Democrats’ priorities have been taken over by elite and highly pedigreed campaign staff who don’t realize how ridiculous they sound to the rest of America. But for many Democrats the book has been candy less because of its call for reshaping politics and more because, while peeling back the curtain on the inner workings of political campaigns, it names (some) names.

A newly elected representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is described as a slightly overwhelmed, slightly paranoid political tactician who is reluctant to support a white progressive over a more moderate female candidate of color for fear of the backlash she will receive online. Senator Bernie Sanders is a gruff diva who flies private to a rally and insists that the labels be peeled off his water bottles and requires a bathroom to be a certain number of feet from the stage.

Others are anonymized. There is the wealthy New York City donor who lives alone in an apartment overlooking Central Park but who scarcely leaves his home except for the only meal he eats each day: a bowl of soup at a nearby café. And there is a first-time congressional candidate in New Jersey, a suburban resistance mom running in 2018, whose husband worked for Lehman Brothers during the financial crash (at times dressing in a cape and top hat) and did not want to discuss healthcare in-depth.

“You want to tell the truth, and you want to tell people what happened, but at the same time my intention was never to just burn people needlessly to be vindictive,” Barker told me from her home north of San Francisco. “At the same time, it’s like, yeah, I knew that some of the stories in there might hurt some people’s feelings, but sometimes people need to get their feelings hurt.”

Evan Barker:

Well. @NYMag profiled my book today. I think what the article misses is that I left the party and wrote the book not because I wasn’t listened to, or felt slighted, but because democrats and progressives invested in policies that were morally wrong

Until there is a true reckoning inside the party, these past problems will continue to haunt them

Video link

In a conversation moderated by Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler, Prof. Cornell William Brooks, HKS Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and 18th President and CEO of the NAACP, will sit down with Dr. Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation and a key architect of the “Project 2025” presidential transition blueprint, to debate the role of diversity in higher education and American life more broadly.

Following the conversation, Julia Minson, HKS Professor of Public Policy and author of How to Disagree Better, will lead the audience in a facilitated debrief of how the session unfolded.

Apple Support (UK)

Impersonation Risk Detection helps protect against active social engineering scams. In these scams, an attacker might pose as a bank, government agency, or someone you trust to pressure or guide you into making a payment or changing your account details. Traditional security measures like two-factor authentication can’t always detect this kind of scam. That’s because you’re taking the action, even though you’ve been tricked or pressured.

Impersonation Risk Detection analyzes information about your device and Apple Account to help detect signs of an active scam. Based on this analysis, it returns a risk level to the app. The app receives only the risk level, not the underlying information used to generate it.

The app decides what to do next. For example, it might ask you to verify your identity, add a delay, or show a warning.

Impersonation Risk Detection is available starting with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. It’s available only in apps that support it.

Walter Russell Mead:

With the apparent end of history and of serious geopolitical competition in the 1990s, patriotism became an embarrassing relic of earlier times to large chunks of American business. Technology, finance and manufacturing companies operating in what Thomas Friedman called the “flat world” of the post-historical era increasingly saw themselves as citizens of the world rather than American companies with a stake in the success of the American project.

In that kind of world, companies like McKinsey and Google didn’t necessarily want a bunch of superpatriotic American employees. On the contrary, the ability to function in a global and cosmopolitan culture mattered more for corporate and therefore individual success than the depth and degree of an employee’s patriotism or commitment to American civic values and norms.

That world is dying, nowhere more quickly than in the tech industry, where U.S.-China competition is the name of the game. The idea that software engineers would refuse to work for the Pentagon or only do so under duress might once have been tolerable, but no more. This isn’t only because defense contracts are and will remain important to many Silicon Valley firms. It’s also because the greatest threat to many enterprises is intellectual-property theft by Chinese firms. Tech CEOs losing sleep over IP security want patriotic workers who wouldn’t dream of selling out their country or employer to bad actors overseas.

In finance, the change is coming more slowly, but as banks approach opportunities in China with caution, patriotism is beginning to matter more on Wall Street. It will likely matter more as international frictions increase along with the reputational costs and financial risks associated with business in China. In manufacturing, as Mr. Friedman’s flat world yields to the more rugged landscape of our time and supply-chain security looms larger as a factor in corporate investment, we are likely to see a similar intellectual reshoring of the American elite.

The Heartland Post Staff:

The Wisconsin State Fair has updated its youth attendance policy and will no longer allow unaccompanied teenagers to attend following a violent mob takeover that ruined the fair’s final night this year.

“When the policy is in effect, Fairgoers 17 years of age and under must be accompanied by a parent, guardian or chaperone age 25+ to enter Wisconsin State Fair Park after 5pm,” State Fair representatives said in a Facebook post Thursday. “Each adult chaperone may accompany up to four minors per day and must remain at State Fair Park when the Youth Admission Policy is in place.”

Multiple fights and disturbances erupted on the final night of the 2026 Wisconsin State Fair, turning the last hours of the 11-day event into chaos near the Spin City rides and prompting a large multi-agency police response. Seven people were arrested, one officer was struck, and a security team member was also hurt.

Wisconsin State Fair Park Police said the trouble began when some people tried to enter without authorization while groups already on the grounds started fighting. 

Cellphone videos and later-released bodycam footage showed crowds running, punches and kicks flying, officers deploying Tasers, and mounted patrols helping clear areas as thousands tried to exit. Dispatch audio captured calls for backup and reports of large fights involving dozens of people.

Brian Fraley:

If you tuned into State Superintendent Jill Underly’s “State of Education” address at the Capitol Thursday, you witnessed a classic (and predictable) display of bureaucratic deflection by a feckless leader who appears to be auditioning for her next gig rather than focusing on her current job. 

Underly delivered a sermon accusing taxpayers and lawmakers of abandoning Wisconsin’s public schools. “Our schools are not the problem,” she insisted. “Our teachers are not the problem. Our students are not the problem. The problem is that we have asked them to carry the weight of decades of political decisions.” She went on to claim the school funding formula has failed children, offering her single, predictable cure-all: write a bigger state check.

Throughout her address, Underly spoke far more about funding formulas, referendums, and school systems than about restoring student achievement. Underly’s speech treated schools as institutions to be funded, protected, and sustained at all costs, without regard to performance. Missing was any serious discussion of why so many students continue to struggle academically despite decades of increased spending. In her telling, the primary crisis facing Wisconsin education isn’t the racial achievement gap, literacy rates, or the failure to prepare students for a future beyond high school. No, the problem is that lawmakers are only spending moretaxpayers’ money, and not a lot more taxpayers’ money.

It is the exact same script Department of Public Instruction chiefs have read for twenty years, straight through Tony Evers and Elizabeth Burmaster. Underly isn’t an exception; she is just the latest product of a failed bureaucracy. In her worldview, a child isn’t an individual with potential to be cultivated; a child is a vessel for more money to feed the bureaucratic beast, part of a headcount used to justify the next budget request. DPI routinely conflates spending with compassion, measuring its commitment to kids not by whether a third grader can read, but by how many tax dollars flow into the agency.

The data obliterates her argument. Wisconsin isn’t starving its schools. As documented by the Badger Institute, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending by Wisconsin school districts now exceeds pre-Act 10 levels, climbing past $17,400 to nearly $19,000 per student across federal, state, and local funding. Total K-12 spending tops $15 billion annually. Yet as funding marched steadily upward for decades, academic performance collapsed. When throwing record cash at a broken apparatus failed to produce results, Underly rented out a waterpark to lower standards, limit expectations, and tried to hide the truth from parents.

———

Kayla Huynh:

Similar to previous years, Underly made school funding a central issue in her address, urging lawmakers to increase investments in the state’s public school districts, which she said have cut programs, increased class sizes or relied on taxpayers due to “decades of below-inflation funding.”

———

“Overfunded”

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

Rebecca Cunningham:

Good morning,

For 175 years, the University of Minnesota has fueled progress, delivering academic excellence, groundbreaking research and an enduring impact for Minnesota, our nation and the world. We are proud of the strength and excellence of our mission, and we are deeply committed to preserving and amplifying that mission, not diminishing it.

Like colleges and universities all across the country, we face shifting enrollment trends, unpredictable state and federal funding, and rising costs. These issues are part of long-term sector trends that will continue for the foreseeable future. This is not a temporary change — this is an institutional inflection point that asks us to think about our work in new and bolder ways. The solutions must include our core value of providing an affordable, accessible education and our ongoing commitment to invest in the people who deliver that mission. By approaching these challenges with our values forthrightly and together, we have an opportunity to shape a vibrant, resilient future.

———-

“Overfunded”

Richard Lowery

A cautionary tale from Iowa shows that civics schools need independence from universities in order to succeed. 

Conservatives and other reformers are finally showing cautious optimism about higher education. In red states, the proliferation of “civics schools,” designed to provide a separate home for ideas outside the academic mainstream, has led to a perhaps naïve overconfidence that the tide has turned.

What just happened in Iowa shows why that confidence is premature. Eleven other academics and I just resigned from the advisory council of the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, in protest of the efforts of the Board of Regents and the university to undermine the new center. The legislature created the center in 2025 to teach and research the ideas behind the American constitutional order and to promote free speech, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity on campus — and on the terms the regents have now set, it cannot do what the law created it to do.

This center, though smaller than better-known efforts like the School of Civic Leadership at UT–Austin and School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC, was poised for success. Its structure drew on the lessons of other attempts, above all genuine independence from the University of Iowa’s academic leadership and bureaucracy. Many such centers are plagued by the fact that the very people who caused the problems they were meant to address are put in control of them. Iowa’s design was meant to avoid exactly that.

Stuart Loren:

Inflation-adjusted spending per student is up 74% since the 2002 enrollment peak – and is on track to rise to 84% based on next year’s budget.

1/ CPS enrollment continues to decline, while spending rises – obviously this is not sustainable and there’s a reason why CPS carried a junk credit rating…

Compiled a bunch of CPS operational info. Lots of charts in this thread.

First: Enrollment history

Nader Issa:

Chicago Public Schools enrollment has declined once again by another 11,500 students to about 304,700, officials said Thursday in announcing preliminary data, the lowest number in more than two decades.

Enrollment had stabilized for two years — even increasing briefly — with the arrival of thousands of immigrant students in 2023 and 2024. But the trend proved short-lived as the district’s 20-year enrollment freefall resumed last year and again this fall, dwindling from its high of nearly 439,000 students in the 2002-2003 school year.

Declining enrollment — and, subsequently, underenrolled schools — have become a key issue in the city’s first-ever school board president race as some candidates suggest revisiting school closures. The district has a moratorium on closings until after this school year. Community groups rallied Thursday morning to call for the prohibition to be extended.

CPS officials are pointing to declining birth rates locally, nationally and globally, in addition to families leaving the city for the suburbs and immigrant population declines spurred by President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

DHH

It’s pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don’t you dare black pill this beautiful moment!

There’s nothing kind about letting good people live in a fantasy world that no longer exists. You have to tell them, even if it hurts. Because the sooner they accept reality, the sooner they can adapt to the future.

“Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” — Galatians 4:16

don’t think for a second that because you are an ‘alarmist’ that you are doing a social good – Jensen Huang

Parnita Avala

Bachelor’s degrees in humanities were awarded at a significantly lower level compared to the past decade in 2025, according to a Sept. 8 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project. UT’s numbers over the same period dipped even further, according to University data.

The humanities are defined as the “knowledge, skills, and activities that help people interpret and engage with language, culture, history, and the ongoing search for meaning and connection in human life,” according to the organization behind the report. Examplesof humanities degrees offered at UT include cultural, ethnic & gender studies, history, philosophy and religion.

Colleges and universities across the United States awarded about 164,000 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities in 2025, down 30.4% from about 236,000 degrees awarded in 2012, according to the report. At UT, students were awarded over 300 degrees in English, history, philosophy, linguistics and classical studies, and languages other than English in 2025, compared to over 800 in 2012, according to data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

The drop does not suggest that humanities do not teach transferable skills, but is part of a larger problem, said Robert Townsend, the report’s author and program director for humanities, arts and culture programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“With a humanities degree, you’ve developed a lot of really great skills that can take you pretty much anywhere in today’s world,” Townsend said. “It’s not always clear to a lot of students what skills they’ve developed out of a humanities class. … We just need to do a better job of helping students figure out how to say that (and) put it in a cover letter.”

Daniel Shea, a philosophy graduate student and assistant instructor at the University, said the skills students gain in a philosophy class have proven to be transferable for him.

“The ability to formulate an argument, the ability to evaluate an argument, the ability to read a bit of text and extract an argument from that text; I think these are really skills that …  are going to come in handy,” Shea said.

Zoe Lynch, a classical languages and Plan II sophomore, and Rileigh Buttle, a philosophy and Plan II freshman, said they both intend to go to law school and that they know what skills will transfer over from their degree toward their career path.

Buttle said that in college, she has let herself study what seems interesting, like humanities, rather than focus exclusively on what degree will earn the most in her future.

The Economist:

Many parents have heard of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds worldwide on maths, reading and science. The 2025 results, released this month, were a disappointment for many countries. But the 12,385 mainland Chinese who sat the tests made their parents proud. They scored better than any other contingent in maths and science and came second only to Singaporeans in reading.

Real devotees of the programme have also become familiar with another four-letter abbreviation: BSJZ. These unpronounceable initials stand for Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the only parts of the mainland that took part. The four locations (two mega-cities and two eastern provinces) have a combined population of almost 200m. But they are sadly not representative of China as a whole. Enrolment in academic high schools and universities exceeds national rates. And disposable income per person averages almost 70,000 yuan a year ($9,700), about 60% higher than the mainland average.

——-

The State of Reading

PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) “Future-Ready Students”

Amanda Geduld:

Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse.

Going to high school in Dutchess County, New York, in the 1960s, there was no late bus. For one star athlete at Our Lady of Lourdes High School, that meant regularly hitchhiking the 25 miles between school and home after practice.

It was during those lonely treks, he said, that his new coach and gym teacher, Vincent Dutkowski, would stalk him in his car, offering to give him a ride, trying to coax him back to his apartment. By this point, Dutkowski had already sexually molested him multiple times, he said, grabbing his buttocks and his testicles in pickup basketball games in the school gym, plucking out his pubic hair. A few times, when he was alone with Dutkowski in his office, the coach would pull down his gym shorts and his jock strap and fondle him. 

“I’d be walking down Market Street in Poughkeepsie and he’d pull up next to me,” the man, in his 70s, told The 74 in March, asking not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of his story. “He called me Irish. ‘Irish. Get in the car.’ And I’m a 17-year-old kid trying to maintain my varsity status, starting status, and he’s the coach. Also he is — was — 6’3”, 240 pounds. At the time, I’m barely 6 feet and 160. So he’s a huge man.”

Once trapped in the car, he said, Dutkowski’s hands were everywhere, groping his genitals through his clothes and “talking all sorts of really filthy sexual talk.” The young athlete started altering his route home, taking different downtown streets so his coach wouldn’t find him. But sometimes he did. 

The last ride he took, he said, Dutkowski turned left toward his own apartment instead of right toward the bridge and flipped open his coat to expose his penis. The student yelled at the 36-year-old man to stop the car and let him out and he scrambled away. 

——-

More.

Joe Hovde:

As a bright-eyed college freshman, I was astonished and intimidated to learn that Sidwell, the DC prep school where the Obama daughters went, had sent ~10% of its graduating class to Wash U my year. I figured that anyone who’d gone to school with the President’s kids must be hyper-intelligent and competitive.

It took a month or two of classes for me to realize that the kids from the best prep schools tended to be much less academically impressive than the best students from my public high school in Cincinnati, several of whom had been rejected by Wash U.

It was rather eye-opening to realize that what felt to me like an elite college1 was in fact a safety school for the graduating classes at the fanciest high schools in America.

I was reminded of this revelation last week, when this tweet came across my desk:

Alex Tabarrok

An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman:

• Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history.

To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.

Thus, it’s not just that the models are getting smarter. A given level of intelligence is also requiring dramatically less inference expenditure. This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance. Smarter and cheaper.

Will Oremus: 

In recent months, a tool called Pangram has emerged as the gold standard for AI detection. But in higher education, the most commonly used tool is made by Turnitin, which offers AI detection as an add-on to its popular plagiarism checker. About 1,400 colleges and universities in North America have purchased Turnitin’s detection tool, which can automatically scan students’ work when they submit it, Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer, told me. 

In the past academic year, she said, Turnitin detected at least some AI writing in nearly half of all student submissions across U.S. universities. Since its release in 2023, the tool has drawn scrutiny for its propensity to make mistakes. The company claims that its detector has a “false positive” rate—that is, mistaking human writing for AI—of less than 1%. Its “false negative” rate, meanwhile—mistaking AI writing for human work—is about 15%. Like some other AI detectors, Turnitin’s tool is intentionally tuned to give students the benefit of the doubt.

Those numbers might sound low. But as Vanderbilt University noted when it disabled Turnitin’s AI checker in 2023, even a 1% false-positive rate can cause trouble. If Vanderbilt runs some 75,000 student papers a year through Turnitin, that could equate to as many as 750 being mistakenly flagged.

If the main objection to AI detectors is that they make too many mistakes, Pangram might seem like the answer. The startup claims a false-positive rate of one in 25,000 (0.004%) in internal testing; last year, a working paper from researchers at the University of Chicago found that Pangram essentially never mistook long passages of human text for AI. (It occasionally errs on shorter snippets.) Like Turnitin, Pangram can connect to course-management systems such as Canvas. “Education has become a significant part of our business,” Alex Roitman, Pangram’s head of growth, told me.

Charlie Barone:

The midterm elections are exactly six weeks away, with implications not only for control of the U.S. House and Senate but also for 39 governorships and more than a dozen state legislatures. So it seems like a good time to take stock of what Democratic leaning thinkers are advocating for when it comes to K-12 education.

Within the last year, we’ve seen several sets of policy proposals put forth by those on the left and center-left. I review four of them here:1

• Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) (centrist think tank): “A New Compact for Educational Excellence,” (September, 2025) by Rachel Canter
• Third Way (centrist think tank): “The New Normal in K-12 Education,” (August 2026), by Ellie Cash
• Josh Cowen (left-leaning academic and former Democratic candidate for Congress): What Should the National Democratic Education Plan Really Look Like? and An Education Plan for Democratic Governors” (August 2026)2
• Jennifer Berkshire (progressive journalist): “Democrats Must Embrace a ‘Mom Populist’ Education Agenda,” published in The New Republic, (August 2026).

There are some areas of consensus but, mostly, a lot of variability. Overall, one can characterize PPI and Third Way as embracing traditional centrist reforms such as those advanced by Presidents Clinton and Obama albeit with a few twists, some of them involving newly emerging policy contexts, such as the science of reading and tech/AI. Cowen and Berkshire are much more in the union-friendly, status quo realm, although Berkshire is stridently so while Cowen is much more pragmatic. Here is a rundown:3

Top lines:

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats from Wisconsin to Maine are promising to raise taxes, and not only on billionaires. Among those who would get walloped are high-earning professional athletes, and don’t think they and their agents aren’t aware. Now there’s even a new online “jock tax” calculator they can consult.

The website, created by Tax Foundation senior fellow Jared Walczak, lets users look up the estimated tax burden for NFL players, plus it shows how transferring to a different team would change the numbers. The tool counts federal, state and local taxes, as well as income that athletes must pay other states when they travel for away games.

Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson earns about $51 million, giving him a total liability of $24 million on that money, including $5 million in state and local taxes, the calculator says. At least he isn’t playing in California for the Los Angeles Rams, where the state and local take would be $6.8 million. But in zero-income-tax Tennessee, he’d owe only $257,920 in state and local taxes on those earnings, all of that for away games.

The Economist:

HE “WOKE”, race-and-gender-focused ideology that peaked in 2020 had no leader, but Nikole Hannah-Jones has a strong claim to be its defining intellectual. A journalist for the New York Times Magazine, she wrote “The 1619 Project”, a revisionist history of America centred on slavery, and won plaudits for a story in 2016 about sending her daughter to a school with mostly poor, non-white pupils. Her latest article, published on September 20th, is a partial mea culpa that has triggered a torrent of anti-woke schadenfreude. It recounts her daughter’s subsequent ordeal of absent or neglectful teachers and rowdy classmates, and rage at the sacrifice of her education in the vain hope of fixing a broken system one child at a time.

Yet even as Ms Hannah-Jones takes personal responsibility for this “betrayal” of her child, she says little about the progressive-backed education policies that arguably contributed to the dysfunction of the schools her daughter attended. Moreover, the main explanation she provides for the schools’ failings is decades out of date.

Ms Hannah-Jones cites a study from 2019 by EdBuild, an advocacy group, reporting that “nationally, schools in predominantly non-white districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts”. From this she concludes that such schools’ poor test scores merely “reflect” this financial “disadvantage”. She could hardly have picked a worse example to support this claim than her daughter’s own Public School (PS) 307 in New York, which spent $52,349 per pupil in 2024-25, making it one of the best-funded schools in one of America’s highest-spending districts. And PS 307 is no exception, but rather an extreme example of the national pattern: state schools with the lowest shares of white pupils actually receive the most funding.

——-

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

Bruce Baker has been sharing “taxpayer funding k-12 adequacy” maps:

Interestingly, Madison at > $28,000 per student appears rather “blue”, in the overfunded zone.

—————

Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment

The Economist:

Schools for the poor are not poor schools: A viral personal essay leaves its political implications unsaid

—————-

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

wiseye:

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

Lucas Vebber

State law requires that budget requests from agencies be submitted by September 15. But DPI only submitted “part” of their budget, and says the next part won’t come until after November (i.e., after the elections).

For the last budget, DPI requested more than $4 billion in new spending. Odd that they’ve decided to “delay” their request this cycle until after the election…

——-

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

Douglas Murray

It is rare that someone caught in a charge of hypocrisy throws their hands in the air and says, “Yes, I’m a hypocrite.” It reminded me of the old truism that if the men in white coats come along to section you for insanity your worst line of defense is to say, “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not mad.” Much rarer but more honest is the person who says, “Gosh I’m glad you’ve finally caught up with me. I’ve been a lunatic for years.” My point is that there is something refreshing about honesty. Especially when it is embarrassing.

Which brings me to the matter of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Some readers might be fortunate enough never to have heard of her but Hannah-Jones made her name some years ago with the “1619 Project.” This was an attempt – backed by the New York Times – to reframe the American national story.

It started from the premise that the United States began when the first slaves were transported across the North Atlantic. The aim of Hannah-Jones’s project was to claim that absolutely everything in American history was the result of slavery and white supremacy and that everything in the American national story – including emancipation – should be viewed through this remorselessly negative light.

Among the claims of the 1619 project was that capitalism is white supremacist because people who ran slave plantations used bookkeeping and numbers. Thus any American worker sitting in front of a spreadsheet in the 2020s is unwittingly perpetuating a system founded in slavery. Of course they are also perpetuating a system that goes back to Ancient Mesopotamia, but let us, like Hannah-Jones, not let facts detain us.

In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a cultural battering-ram

During the American cultural revolution of the past decade Hannah-Jones was a fixture. She was retained by the NYT on a six-figure salary, though her workload does not seem to have been especially onerous.

Yet this week Hannah-Jones broke her silence and wrote something honest. Specifically she wrote an essay about the choice she had made to educate her daughter. Ten years ago she had written about how she was determined to educate her in the American state school system and accused that system – like everything else in America – of “perpetuating whiteness.” In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a sort of cultural battering-ram.

——-

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

Sam Freedman:

England took a different path, retaining a curriculum that set out the core knowledge all children should know. There was also more focus on behaviour, high-stakes assessment, and synthetic phonics for younger children learning to read. All of this was considered by many to be backwards-looking, Gradgrindian, and likely to disengage students.

———-

The State of Reading around the world

PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) “Future-Ready Students”

Roland Fryer:

My heart sank. Aggregate scores couldn’t tell me whether her daughter was learning. But I knew it wasn’t a good school. One of the hardest things I did on the board was explain that we—the system—had lied to her. She had done everything we asked: monitored her daughter’s progress, saved the report cards, trusted the school. Yet those cards said her daughter was thriving, while state assessments said nearly every child in her school was behind.

I thought about that mother as I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York Times essay about her decision to send her daughter, Najya, to segregated, high-poverty public schools in Brooklyn. Najya earned strong grades, took honors classes and believed she knew algebra. At a selective high school, she failed an algebra exam she expected to ace. A tutoring assessment revealed gaps in fractions and long division. Her grades said she was succeeding. She wasn’t.

I pass no judgment on Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice. She faced an excruciating decision familiar to many minority families: how to balance the cultural and social education they want for their children against the academic preparation they need. My wife and I faced our own version. I am black and she is an Austrian immigrant. Our daughters spoke German before English, so we considered a German school in Boston. We also considered public schools with more racial and economic diversity. But the schools that best matched our cultural and social preferences weren’t necessarily those that would best prepare our daughters academically.

In the end, we made academic preparation our top priority. Our decision rested on robust social science. An additional year of schooling raises earnings about 10% on average, and quality matters. Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff found that students assigned more-effective teachers were likelier to attend college and earned more as adults. Replacing a bottom 5% teacher with an average one for a year, they estimated, increases one classroom’s combined lifetime earnings by $250,000 in present value. Education also improves health and civic participation.

———

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

A running, public-record accounting of every dollar billionaire JB Pritzker has personally spent to shape Illinois elections, courts, and public opinion — because buying outcomes with private wealth should not be invisible.

Steve Austin:

Alex Soros:

Always inspired when I see my friend, Illinois Governor @JBPritzker, demonstrating that a different type of leadership is possible, and delivering the results.

Glad to see him at #CGI2026 and UNGA speaking frankly and boldly about what real American leadership looks like.

——

Didn’t run a headline about Pritzker, Hoffman and Soros though… 🤔

———

Illinois Policy:

Only in Illinois can a governor hike taxes 63 times, drain $85.6 billion from residents, and then throw himself a parade for “financial responsibility.”

It is totally fair for @GovPritzker to brag about any state credit rating upgrades that take place on his watch. Any other leader would undoubtedly do the exact same.

But at least be honest about the means by which you are signaling to credit agencies that Illinois’ books are closer to balanced: $86 billion in tax hikes.

This is the opposite of fiscal discipline.

———

Jen:

Pritzker: “Democrats want to cut taxes for everyday people.”

Also Pritzker: 7% statewide tax on Netflix, concerts, and sports, on top of Chicago’s 10.25% tax on streaming at home.

House Democrats pushed that last fall. In Chicago, it would have meant about 17% on streaming and nearly 19% on tickets. Lollapalooza said the tax threatened the festival.

Under Pritzker, Illinois now has the highest combined state and local tax rate in America. At least 63 tax and fee hikes. $77 billion in cumulative costs to taxpayers over 8 years. About $1,400 more a year for the median household.

———

AJ Manaseer:

Ah yes, Illinois… a famous Republican stronghold.

We’ve had 4 years of a Republican governorship since 2003 and even he had Democratic supermajorities in the House and Senate.

Illinois is world famous for terrible Democratic governance. This is a truly absurd comment.

Jenisha Watts:

Since before he could even talk, I’ve been worrying about where to send my son to school. I know that having a choice to make at all is a mark of status: I am part of a group of parents who have enough money, time, and education to decide what is best for our children. And the fact that I can make a choice means that I can make the wrong one. So whenever I meet an educated Black parent, I inevitably ask for their advice about school. I remember one person answering, “We took the Nikole Hannah-Jones approach.”

I knew exactly what he meant. A decade ago, I read the cover story Nikole wrote for The New York Times Magazine about her and her husband’s struggle to decide where to send their daughter, Najya, to school. They ended up putting her in a “high-poverty, all-black school” because they believed that middle-class families had a responsibility to such neglected institutions. Parents like them could advocate for less fortunate students. And, she wrote, “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.” This week, she published a new article, in which she wrestles honestly with her daughter’s feelings of anger and loss about spending years in schools that failed her. In the end, she writes, she agreed to let her daughter go to any high school she wanted—no matter how selective and segregated.

I have always admired Nikole’s writing, and over the years, she has become a confidant and friend. Although many on the internet have accused Nikole of sacrificing her daughter for her ideals, I think she’s courageous. Still, as my son approaches school age, I realize that I could never make the choice she made. I know too well what can go wrong. I’m sending him to a private preschool, and I plan to apply for private kindergarten too.

Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, I received an abysmal education. I always loved to read and write, yet I was in college before I realized that I’d never learned basic rules of grammar. I spent two years catching up on math. I’m still dealing with the shock of realizing how little I was taught. When my son was learning to talk, I started using the pronunciation feature on Dictionary.com because I didn’t want him to inherit the southern accent that syrups over my words. “Say it like the voice,” I’d tell him. Just last week, I purchased a grammar book from a thrift store. I’m a staff writer for The Atlantic, and I’m writing a memoir, and I still can’t shake off my poor education.

Rotman:

Artificial intelligence can generate predictions, analyze information and reason through increasingly complex problems. But it can’t decide what matters, weigh competing priorities, navigate uncertainty or take responsibility for the consequences.

This collection of articles from Rotman faculty members explores the essential role of managerial judgment in an AI-enabled world. As AI becomes more capable and widely available, the responsibilities of management do not disappear. They become more important — and more valuable — than ever.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Sitting on a train and listening to a gaggle of Gen Z’ers carry on is among life’s most painful experiences. The vocabulary is so limited as to be unfavorably compared with a primitive tribe. The inability to form a basic sentence is alarming. The relentless use of “like” and “you know” and “whatever” is painful to the ears. I’m no fan of AirPods or headphones but they are essential on these occasions.

The problem is broader than a single generation. Most podcasts I find unlistenable simply because whatever language they are speaking is not English. It’s something else entirely and barely coherent. My complaints are not traceable to some kind of grammatical snobbery. There is much more at stake here: the very capacity of humanity to communicate.

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Reflecting on this problem—it affects everything from movies to popular music—I was curious how people long ago came to develop literacy and erudition. That sent me on a search for the “McGuffey Reader” of the old times. They are still widely available in physical and digital forms. I confess to never having picked one up before. I had heard of them and maybe even owned one when I was young but had never actually opened it or read it.

The first reader was published in 1836 as edited by William Holmes McGuffey, an English professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The famed novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe had recommended McGuffey to the publisher. The result consisted of sections of stories and poetry for grades one through six, one book for each grade. They became the core textbooks for most American kids—all over the country—for nearly a century, selling 150 million copies.

I fully expected that they would be written at a higher level than you see in newspapers today, to say nothing of typical prattle one would hear on trains or podcasts. Nothing could have prepared me for what I found in them. I decided not to game my quest by going immediately to the sixth reader. Instead I chose the reader for the fourth grade, the one published in 1901.

Alan Blinder:

University of Oregon leaders have long been accustomed to big checks from Phil Knight, a Nike co-founder whose surname is splashed on everything from the library to the law center. When Mr. Knight called Oregon’s president this year, though, he and his wife, Penny, had a greater gift in mind: the largest known contribution to a public flagship university in the United States.

Oregon announced the donation, which will go toward starting an engineering college, on Wednesday, bringing the Knight family’s known total giving to Oregon to more than $2 billion.

But the contribution underscores how even the biggest gifts rarely erase financial strains at places like Oregon, which is weighing millions of dollars in fresh budget cuts as enrollment ebbs. Declining birthrates suggest a darkening outlook for colleges in the coming years as the number of children drops, and the Trump administration is pursuing a vigorous campaign to overhaul — and reduce — federal research funding.

Sophia Cope

The petitioner argued in his opening brief that the court should evaluate the legality of the flight restriction even though it was withdrawn. Drone pilots could still be punished for violations that occurred when the flight restriction was in effect. And the FAA could reinstate the flight restriction at any time, given that the rescission did not seem to reflect “a true change of heart” but rather an effort by the agency to avoid judicial review. 

The amicus brief, filed in support of the petitioner, noted that drones are unique because they provide “perspectives that cannot be captured by ground-based imagery,” and they “are far more maneuverable than ground-level cameras, and they are both much cheaper and much safer than using a chartered plane or helicopter to record newsworthy events from above.” The brief highlighted that drones have captured “bird’s-eye images of protest activity” and “police uses of force against protestors,” and have “allowed journalists to provide the public with up-to-the-minute information about natural disasters without putting themselves in harm’s way.” 

Zach Weissmueller:

Anthony Fauci once claimed that an attack on him is an attack on the entire field of rational, empirical inquiry. 

“It is very easy to pick out an individual and make them a target,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation in 2021, “but you’re talking about systems. You’re talking about the CDC; you’re talking about the FDA; you’re talking about science in general.”

The publication of Fauci’s private diary revealed a man consumed not with reaching objective truth, but with politics, bureaucratic processes, and most of all, his own image. 

“Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering,” he wrote as COVID-19 deaths surged. “It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.” He bragged about Joan Baez texting him about her outfits and Julia Roberts fawning over him. He wrote about holding up his cellphone to his Alexa so that Barbra Streisand could hear he was listening to her music. She “absolutely loved it,” he wrote. 

“The diaries showed a man completely in love with himself in an extraordinary and narcissistic way,” says Matt Ridley, a science writer who has investigated COVID-19’s origins.

The revelation of Fauci’s self-obsession is gossipy and embarrassing, but it’s not the most important takeaway from his personal diaries, which were written on a federally owned computer and released to the public by Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in July of 2026.

Fauci’s diary also revealed that he was seeking cash prizes by prodding scientists whose work he funded to nominate him for prestigious awards. 

“Every person in the field receiving NIAID support understood that Fauci ran NIAID as his personal fiefdom,” says Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and longtime Fauci critic. This is also damning of his character. But it’s not the main thing to focus on.

————-

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Mark Koyama:

Advances in AI mean that academic journals are already getting bombarded by fake papers. We all know this. But there are fake papers, and there are fake papers. And a recent submission to Explorations in Economic History definitely falls into the latter category and I thought it was worthwhile sharing. 

This paper is called “Did Textile Industrialization Amplify Electoral Support for the Radical Left? Evidence from the 1918 Ottoman Constitutional Elections” and on the surface it looks like a plausible paper. There is a valid research question and an identification strategy, so I was about to send it out to trusted Ottoman experts to referee . . . 

Angelina Chapin

As the winter rush season got underway, Laura, Claire, and Marie jabbed themselves with a GLP-1 every week to try to lose the freshman 15. They all wanted bids from the top sororities at their prestigious southern school, where the girls looked not just skinny but “coke skinny.” They tucked their vials behind a Brita filter in a mini-fridge so none of their other friends would accidentally catch a glimpse while reaching for a can of Alani. At first, Claire felt weird giving herself an injection as her roommate put on eyeliner. It wasn’t exactly how she pictured her college experience. But soon, it became normal to casually poke herself in the stomach while they talked about their crushes. Sometimes, there were reminders that it wasn’t normal, as when one of their guy friends knocked on Claire and Marie’s door just as Laura was about to give herself the shot. She quickly pulled up her pants and shoved the syringe in a drawer. As he lingered on the couch, Laura became increasingly fidgety until Marie said, “We need 15 minutes of girl time. Can you go away?” “It almost became like a secret society,” Marie says now. “We wouldn’t tell our other friends about it.” They hoped to look effortlessly thin in bikini photos, surrounded by their sorority sisters on a beach during spring break.

The life of a sorority girl has never been more aspirational. In the years since #BamaRush and RushTok turned the recruitment process into a cultural phenomenon, teenagers’ feeds have been flooded with girls sharing their outfits of the day (“Skirt from Aritzia, stack from Amazon”) and doing elaborate choreographed dance routines in front of their sororities’ neoclassical mansions while lip-syncing to “Mambo No. 5.” Their outfits are always coordinated: matching extra-small Alo sets, LoveShackFancy florals, and so much butter yellow. They are almost uniformly white, blonde, and very, very skinny.

Every generation of college girls has been obsessed with being thin, but never before has there been such an effective, accessible way to lose weight. In dorm rooms and sorority houses across the country, women are stashing Wegovy pills under their twin beds and sharing vials of compounded retatrutide they ordered from China with their roommates, hoping if they shrink down enough they will get into the sisterhood of their dreams. Students told me there’s an “Ozempidemic” on campuses in which everyone is taking it but nobody is talking about it. When someone comes back from vacation 20 pounds lighter, rumors start flying that they’re “on the Big O.” But many would rather risk being discovered than stand out in a house full of double zeros.

Dion Thompson-Davoli

As the core city of a large metropolitan area, Kansas City is designed around — and financially reliant upon — the cluster of white collar office employment in its downtown. Office towers pay a huge share of our commercial property taxes and the people who work in them live in our neighborhoods, go to our schools, and contribute to our earnings tax. They generally choose to live in the city in no small part because it’s where their jobs are. Office towers are a critical anchor of the city, fiscally, demographically, and socially. 

And yet this anchor has been eroding for a long time and is now in some trouble. The long-run shift of white collar workplaces to the southwestern suburbs, the explosion of remote work after 2020, and the ongoing pivot of suburban office parks to a model that competes more directly with downtowns are all serious headwinds for KC’s office base. 

For just one datapoint, this chart from a 2025 Federal Reserve of Kansas City report shows that occupied office space in downtown has shrunk by nearly 10% since covid while it has grown by nearly 5% in the suburbs

Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment

Wall Street Journal:

The Freedom Foundation communicates with tens of thousands of workers, including mailings that encourage them to leave the union and avoid paying dues. The mailers are sent by the foundation or its educational outreach program, Opt Out Today, but Democrats think union members aren’t capable of judging their own union’s value proposition. The mailings don’t impersonate, or claim to represent, a union.

The Freedom Foundation says some 7,500 public union members have responded to its mailers by opting out. But the cost for the nonprofit to keep operating will now be steep, and that’s the law’s point. The law says the state Attorney General can bring an action if she believes a person “has engaged or is about to engage in the false impersonation of an employee organization.” About to engage? That provision lets the state punish groups that haven’t even made contact with union members.

Each alleged offense could garner a $1,000 fine. Attorney General Letitia James will be on the case to file complaints and subpoenas to torment the think tank. Smart union members might ask what their union bosses are so afraid they might hear.

Will Flanders, Cory Brewer, Lauren Greuel, Brooke Smith and Kyle Koenen:

Education in Wisconsin stands at a crossroads. Wisconsin has a strong educational foundation, an established system of public schools, and educational options that give families choices beyond their assigned district schools. But Wisconsin should aspire to more. After important reforms in the 2010s, progress on student achievement has slowed, and the state has lost ground on several national measures.

At the same time, Wisconsin faces renewed efforts to roll back policies like school choice and Act 10 that have expanded opportunity and strengthened the state’s educational system. For decades, Wisconsin was regarded as one of the nation’s strongest performers on measures of academic achievement. The goal should be to build on Wisconsin’s strengths and ensure that the state is once again among the nation’s leaders. The Wisconsin Education Comeback offers an optimistic agenda for doing exactly that.

In terms of raw national rankings, Wisconsin continues to perform respectably. But Wisconsin’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have declined from their pre-pandemic levels, reflecting a broader national decline in student achievement.

1 Wisconsin remains above average in eighth-grade performance, while in some earlier grades and subjects it has fallen behind its previous performance. Wisconsin’s relative performance also does worse when results = are adjusted for student demographics. Wisconsin continues to have one of the largest black-white achievement gaps in the country.

2 Wisconsin’s recovery from pandemic-era learning losses also has been slower than in many other states. Wisconsin’s approach to COVID of closing public schools has been devastating for Wisconsin students. Among states with available data, Wisconsin ranks 33rd of 38 states in math recovery and 30th of 35 in reading recovery since 2022.

3 Wisconsin students remain roughly a third of a grade level behind their 2019 peers in math, and more than half a grade level behind in reading. Wisconsin is hardly alone in confronting these challenges, but the experience of states recovering more quickly provides an opportunity to identify policies that could accelerate improvement here.

At the same time, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has made it increasingly difficult for Wisconsinites to understand where the state stands academically. In the past, Wisconsin aligned its state assessment (Forward Exam) proficiency standards with NAEP proficiency benchmarks, providing a useful point of comparison with a consistent, independent national measure. In 2023-24, the DPI altered this approach and since the new proficiency levels are not directly comparable with prior years, it is more difficult to evaluate long-term trends in state assessment results. Wisconsin should prioritize transparency and comparability so that parents and policymakers can accurately understand both the state’s progress and the opportunities for further improvement.

Wisconsin is also confronting significant demographic and financial changes. The state’s school-aged population has declined by 5.8% since 2013–14, and state demographic projections forecast an additional 11% to 16% enrollment decline over the next decade. Despite this fact, the number of non-charter public schools has declined by only about 2%, while public school staffing has actually grown by 13.5% over the same period. Districts have also gone to referendum at record rates to raise additional local revenue, while meaningful school district consolidation is avoided.

4 These trends raise important questions about how Wisconsin can organize and fund its schools most efficiently as enrollment continues to decline. Wisconsin is addressing these issues from a position of substantial investment in public education. Average revenue per student across the state now stands at $18,746 annually, putting Wisconsin in the middle of the pack nationally in education spending.

5 The experience of states like Utah and Mississippi demonstrates that strong or improving academic results do not necessarily require the highest levels of per-pupil spending.

6 Mississippi, which spends well below the national average per pupil, moved from 49th to 9th in the nation in fourth-grade reading between 2013 and 2024.

7 Utah spends less per pupil than almost every state in the country, yet consistently ranks among the top states nationally for education quality.

8 Both examples, and a plethora of research, suggest that how education dollars are used matters more than how much is spent.

—–

Preview of tomorrow’s speech from DPI: https://t.co/9D4sXdgtqT

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) September 23, 2026

More.

——

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

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I’ve known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: “Is this the end of us?” My answer was, “Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I’ve spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn’t quite right. I’ve sat in screening rooms where four years of people’s labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there’s really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don’t care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

Joanne Jacobs summary

In 2025, South Carolina’s high school graduation rate hit a high of 87 percent, reports Hechinger’s Ariel Gilreath. But only a third of seniors were college ready by graduation, based on their test scores and classwork. “More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic.”

South Carolina is trying to raise expectations. A new state law bans schools from setting “grade floors,” which set a minimum of 40 or 50 out of 100 instead of zero, even if no work is turned in. The idea is to persuade students who get a slow start not to give up on a passing grade.

But students have figured out they can pass with very little work, says Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school history teacher.

“At any high school graduation, I promise you, there will be a child who walks across the stage where every teacher in the room is going to go, ‘Wait, how did they graduate? They didn’t do anything,’” said Kelly.

Preston Cooper

Key Points

• Four-year colleges where entering students have higher SAT and ACT scores tend to have higher completion rates.
• When entering students have a lower-bound SAT score (or equivalent) of 1300, colleges have a predicted completion rate of 90 percent. But when entering students have a lower-bound SAT score of 900, the predicted completion rate falls to just 51 percent.
• The relationship between standardized test scores and college completion rates remains strong even after controlling for other factors, such as the student body’s socioeconomic and demographic distribution and institutional resources.
• The recent movement toward reinstating standardized testing requirements may help colleges ensure that the students they admit are academically prepared to complete college.

Executive Summary

Most selective colleges and universities stopped requiring standardized tests in admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have now begun to reinstate them. These policy changes highlight the role academic preparation plays in college completion outcomes. This report links the standardized test scores of students in the entering class of 2018—one of the last entering classes before the test-optional movement gained steam—to six-year college completion outcomes as of 2024.

Test scores and college completion have a strong relationship. Institutions where admitted students’ test scores are higher tend to have much stronger completion rates. For example, an institution where entering students have a 25th percentile SAT score of 900 has a predicted completion rate of just 51 percent. But an institution with a 25th percentile score of 1300 has a predicted completion rate of over 90 percent.

Erin Gretzinger

Panelists also pointed to the competition Madison schools are facing from other public school districts, charter schools and private schools.

———

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

Charles C. W. Cooke

‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

————

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

Washington Free Beacon:

The initiative’s website states that it is ‘historical material,’ and its leaders no longer list it as their employer on their LinkedIn pages

A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.

The center’s sudden closure comes as a surprise: It continued to update its public database tracking state attorney general actions relevant to its climate priorities until Aug. 31, the date of its apparent closure. It also released an episode of its in-house podcast, Recharged with the State Impact Center, less than three weeks prior to that date. And in its 2025 “year in review” report released last December, the center indicated that it would continue operating throughout 2026.

But prior to its closure, the center was coming under increased pressure for effectively paying the salaries of state law enforcement agencies that were pursuing lawsuits in line with the center’s priority of going after energy providers.

The center, which did not announce the closure in a press release or social media post, now states on its website that it is “historical material as it existed on August 31, 2026.” While much of the website remains intact, its contact email is now listed as a private non-NYU address, and a page identifying members of the center’s advisory board has been removed. Its now-former executive and deputy directors no longer list the center as their current place of employment on LinkedIn, according to a Washington Free Beacon review.

Katherine Bindley:

The storied venture-capital firm is investing $35 million in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22. Though named the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, the school will operate as an independent business led by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy.

“The idea is to create an AI-native education offering so that these students can be ready for jobs at the top leading tech companies, or to start their own tech company,” he says. “In the modern world, knowing how to build and ship things is even more important than it’s ever been.”

John Friedman, dean of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and an economist who has studied long-term outcomes from college, says having top industry leaders speak to students is an obvious plus from which students will benefit.

Douglas Belkin:

“Judgement is the skill that learning produces,” the committee wrote, “and it is the university’s most important contribution to a modern democracy.”

The report described a risk-averse student body anxious about the cost of college and finding a good job. Employers, the committee wrote, hold a “jarring” skepticism about the current generation’s ability to handle workplace demands, solve problems without clear answers, and recover from setbacks.

In many instances, the committee recommended a return to the basics. That includes more project-based learning and teaching time management strategies such as “navigating competing priorities, assessing workload, anticipating expectations, and adapting to personal and academic circumstances.”

Cornell students who pay full-cost spend nearly $400,000 for an undergraduate degree. The committee found expense along with opaque pricing to be a source of public distrust. But it advised against shortening the time to a degree to three years or leaning in to online education, and instead suggested establishing a task force to develop a new tuition model.

For the university’s own finances, the report urged school leaders to push for robust federal and state funding, following the Trump administration’s attacks on research dollars. Regarding research, the committee recommended examining “publish-or-perish incentives that emphasize quantity over quality.”

Nicole Wizman:

The whole operation ran for just 203 days, was managed under a no-bid contract (awarded directly, without competition) by Cherokee Nation Management & Consulting (CNMC) — which is owned by the Cherokee Nation, a tribe headquartered in Oklahoma. According to Pomona whistleblowers, CNMC may have released children into the hands of labor and sex traffickers.

Breaking the $782 million down: CNMC received around $707 million through a no-bid contract to set up and run Pomona. HHS then paid the Fairplex another $75.65 million for the site itself. Roughly 8,450 kids passed through the facility, where they each received a cot, meals, clothes, a medical screening, case management, some schooling and recreation, and a ride to their sponsor. Divide the CNMC contract alone by the number of children that passed through the facility, and it comes to $83,656 per child — or $92,608 if you include the separate Fairplex payment. HHS said children at its emergency intake sites spent an average of about two weeks in care, which would put Pomona’s implied cost at roughly $6,615 per kid, per day — or $3.85 million for every day Pomona operated. 

“In California, every child goes to sixth grade camp,” Herb Morgan, the Republican candidate for California State Controller, told Pirate Wires in an interview. (For those outside the state: this is a common California rite of passage.) “You get on a bus, you go to the camp with all your classmates. There are adults there that supervise. You do crafts, you shine a rock, you make a wood box, you shoot a bow and arrow.” The two weeks costs $800 to $1,100 total, food and lodging included. 

“So the question is,” Morgan asked, “what is this money for?”

Ariel Gilreath:

Two days after South Carolina’s grade floor law was signed, faculty at Harvard University passed a policy capping the number of students who can receive A’s to 20 percent of an instructor’s class plus four students. The move was a response to perceived grade inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic: A report from the college showed A’s made up two-thirds of the grades given to undergraduates at Harvard in the spring of 2025. 

Some education experts blame grade inflation in K-12 classrooms for contributing to the problem at the college level. 

“It’s hard to hold the line at the higher ed level if you have kids coming into higher ed who are less prepared than they used to be,” said David Griffith, national research director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

This spring, testimony from educators and advocates on grade floor policies alarmed South Carolina legislators. The state is “hurting these kids” by having grade floors in schools, Rep. James Teeple, R-Charleston, said during a committee meeting.

In 2025, South Carolina’s on-time high school graduation rate was nearly 87 percent, a 10-year high point for the state. At the same time, only 33 percent of seniors were considered college ready by graduation — a metric on the state’s report card based on college admissions test scores and advanced classes. More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic. 

Robert Pondiscio

Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade¹ is not just a book—it’s a requiem. It’s a mournful recounting of a moment when the education-reform movement, particularly the “no excuses” charter school model, seemed poised to deliver on an audacious promise: With focus, energetic effort, and commitment, schools could close the achievement gap between black and white students, lift low-income children out of poverty, and rewrite the script of American education.

For a brief, shining moment, we had it right. And then we lost our nerve. Wilson’s book, a meticulous autopsy of this rise and fall, is both a sympathetic chronicle and a call to a reckoning. The tragedy isn’t that “no excuses” failed—it’s that we convinced ourselves that it did.

Let’s rewind the tape. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the first charter schools were opening and promising to be “engines of innovation” that would shake American education from its somnambulance, a new breed of inner-city school emerged: unapologetically rigorous, laser-focused on results, and built on the insistence that poverty need not be destiny. Schools like KIPP (the “Knowledge Is Power Program”), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and the Noble Schools didn’t just talk about high expectations—teachers and staff embodied and enforced them. Stealing a page from the era’s “broken windows” policing model, these schools sweated the small stuff. There were crisp school uniforms, homework assignments every night, students sitting up straight with eyes tracking the teacher, along with carefully crafted lessons and an ambitious curriculum. No more hand-wringing and no more alibis to explain away our multi-generational failure to adequately educate minority children and lift families out of poverty. More than a charter school model, no-excuses was a rallying cry: No child is a failure. We, rather, have failed children.

Wall Street Journal:

In a letter to Berkeley’s lawyer, the Justice Department says Berkeley Law violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Asian and white applicants during the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles. Those two admissions years were after the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that race preferences are unconstitutional.

“This discrimination is apparent from the significant disparity in objective academic metrics between racially preferred applicants, and applicants from non-preferred races,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote. In 2025 black law school applicants were 5.8 times more likely to be admitted than white applicants with comparable applications. In 2024 the black candidate was 6.5 times more likely to be admitted.

The appearance of deck-stacking gets worse with the LSAT scores. Between 2021 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of admitted applicants, disaggregated by race, hardly budged. The median Asian score was 172 in 2021 and in 2025. The median white score was 171 in 2021 and 172 in 2025. The median black score was 165.5 in 2021 and 167 in 2025.

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has suggested schools should use proxies for race in the admissions process as well as in faculty hiring. A school could use “unstated affirmative action,” Dean Chemerinsky said, and keep quiet about it. “What if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements, but still wants to do it,” he remarked about faculty hiring, according to the Justice letter.

By Natalia Mochernak and Amanda Velasco:

Seven current and former UCLA employees alleged in at least 22 separate whistleblower and retaliatory reports that the university’s head of strategic communications fostered a toxic work environment and mismanaged department funds, according to court documents. 

Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications since 2019, filed a lawsuit against the UC Board of Regents on Aug. 26 to block the release of an investigative report that she claimed would damage her reputation. The investigation – which was conducted by Grutman Law, P.C. and commissioned by the UC Board of Regents – includes details about Osako’s conduct and workplace relationships, according to court filings. 

UCLA posted in its whistleblower portal Feb. 20 that Grutman’s investigation substantiated multiple allegations brought forth in the whistleblower reports and that they forwarded the findings to Chancellor Julio Frenk’s office, according to court documents. Osako has remained in her position since.

Veronica Dagher and Anne Tergesen:

Many Americans dream of relocating in retirement to stretch their nest eggs, and they often do it by moving to low-tax states.

Choosing a state with no income tax, like Florida, or lower tax rates promises relief for retirees tapping 401(k)s. But such moves are rarely just about savings. For some, total spending remains almost the same, or even rises, but funds shift toward upgraded amenities or travel.

About 60% of retirees who move after retiring went to a more affordable area, and pocketed capital gains from their houses, according to a 2023 Vanguard study. It found these retirees can also typically unlock around $100,000 in home equity by doing so.

But lower-cost areas aren’t always what they seem. While state income-tax burdens might shrink, property taxes can jump, or vice versa. Many states exempt Social Security from state income tax, but only a few offer similar treatment for retirement-account withdrawals. Other costs, such as homeowners’ association dues or home insurance, may rise.

Seven retirees opened up to us about their finances, the tax breaks they gained, the costs that surprised them and how their new ZIP Codes changed their lives.

Daily Dodge:

The Beaver Dam Unified School District has received a $125,000 grant through Meta and the ChangeX grant program to support the second phase of its research-based mathematics curriculum.

The funding will help strengthen math instruction focused on problem-solving, critical thinking and real-world applications. It also will provide teachers with additional curriculum resources and instructional support.

The grant follows a $50,000 award BDUSD received through the ChangeX program in June to support technology resources and robotics. The district applied for the additional funding in August to address curriculum needs.

Ryan Cashman, BDUSD director of business services, said the district will continue seeking opportunities to bring additional resources into its schools.

“We are very appreciative of this contribution and will continue to look for opportunities to maximize resources and bring additional investments into our schools that directly benefit students,” Cashman said.

Danielle DuClos:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction faces a backlog of 150 license misconduct investigations and is asking state lawmakers to double its team dedicated to reviewing and gathering evidence.

The request follows a Cap Times report last fallthat revealed the department has investigated hundreds of educators following allegations of sexual misconduct and grooming, and the department dedicated scant resources to conducting those probes.

Department spokesperson Chris Bucher said last year the agency had one full-time and one part-time investigator, and he called those staffing levels inadequate to handle the 113 investigations conducted each year, on average.

Lawmakers later questioned State Superintendent Jill Underly about the staffing levels and why the department she leads hadn’t previously requested more funding or positions specifically for licensing investigations. Lawmakers called Underly and other top education officials to testify following the Cap Times report.

At one hearing, Underly told lawmakers the Department of Public Instruction would welcome additional resources to move faster through investigations but she didn’t know how many more investigators would be helpful.

Department officials are now asking lawmakers for two more full-time paralegal positions dedicated to license investigations in the 2027-2029 state budget. The positions would cost $350,000 over the two years.

———-

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

Coleman Hughes

It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter Najya to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.

At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.

Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.

When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”

————

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

Alex Tabarrok:

Nikole Hannah-Jones famously sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.

The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false. The problem isn’t funding. The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.

Nationally, there haven’t been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades. NHJ has reckoned with her failing her own child but she has not yet reckoned with the failure of her entire educational philosophy.

The role of ideology in blinding NHJ is dramatic. NHJ’s daughter earns high grades in her math classes but she fails standardized tests. Most parents, especially conservatives, know what that means. The classes are a lie. But NHJ is blinded by ideology and assumes it’s the standardized tests that are biased. It’s only when her daughter demands to go to a better school that she and her daughter confront the truth:

Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.

The confrontation is almost disastrous:

My child’s confidence wilted like an unwatered plant. She started to develop an almost debilitating anxiety around taking tests. She became sullen at school and began to act out. For the first time ever, I got messages from teachers about Najya’s behavior.

Fortunately, Najya battles back and recovers but much more could be said here about the costs of social promotion, DEI and mismatch on the so-called beneficiaries.

Ironically, NHJ invokes the heroic history of Black Americans integrating schools to justify keeping her own child in a segregated one. Painful.

————

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

Rich Calder, Susan Edelman, Deirdre Bardolf:

Failing the New York State teachers’ exam really paid off — especially for a Queens man who learned this month he’s getting a $2 million windfall over it.

Roughly 5,200 black and Hispanic ex-Big Apple teachers and once-aspiring educators are expected to collect more than $1.8 billion in judgments after the city stopped fighting a nearly three-decade federal discrimination lawsuit that found a certification exam was biased.

It’s the largest legal payout in city history.

As of Friday, 225 people who failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test used for teacher licensing from 1994 to 2014 had already been notified they’re getting settlements of at least $1 million, according to an analysis of Manhattan federal court records. 

Court rulings found the exam violated civil-rights laws, allowing far more white candidates to pass.

The case is expected to generate hundreds of other future million-dollar awards.

Herman Grim, 64, of Queens, on July 5 was awarded the biggest judgment to date — a jaw-dropping $2,055,383. 

It includes $1,583,114 in back pay for time never clocked, lost interest accrued, and other compensation.

————

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

————-

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

Andrew Rotherham

In my view, given her profile, previous writing and past statements, Hannah-Jones deserves credit for doing this in public rather than sweeping it under the rug one way or another. Few would have noticed if she didn’t revisit her choice this way, or if she quietly used the various carve outs available to people with power to get her kid into a better situation and move on. Much of the criticism coming at her since the article published is just people who don’t like her taking the chance for an easy dunk. It’s about priors, not the case she’s making here. 

I get it. Even besides the various internal Timesdramas she’s had a hand in, the stealth revisions The Times did to 1619 Project text as well as the walk back of its central claim are a problem. Some aspects of that project are questionable—is there really a direct line from plantation economics to Excel spreadsheets?—even as overall it raises questions people should reckon with. (Sloppy consumption of that work helped fuel the debilitating performative adult politics circle jerks in education non-profits that shoved a focus on improving academic outcomes for underserved kids to the sidelines not to mention actual public policy activity in the same vein). And Hannah-Jones has been no friend of many school improvement efforts anyway. (I don’t have a dog in the, in my view reductionist, 1619 v. 1776 fight because I think America wasn’t truly one country until 1865 when the issues of slavery and secession were settled.) Still, it never hurts to have some grace, and this is a noteworthy article for her to write. You should read it. 

That said, there are problems with it worth exploring. The article is less compelling for what it says than for what it doesn’t. (And on the theme of credit where it’s due, Derrell got there first. In 2017.)

Broadly, yes, this is a first-person testimonial not an analysis of the system, but she does nonetheless implicate the system and its structural issues in ways familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with her work. So it’s odd and fair game that she then fails to discuss reform or the broader context in New York City schools. Successful models in the public system that aren’t simply the result of skimming never come up. Neither do the successful and popular charter schools (some so successful officials are fighting to squelch their data.).

———

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

Eugene Volokh

In Magistrate Judge Lara Eshkenazi’s opinion Monday in Mercante v. Tarzia (E.D.N.Y.), defendant’s counsel (Coleman) filed an exhibit containing “wire transfer instructions to [plaintiff’s counsel’s] firm’s bank account”:

Exhibit F purports to be redacted, and a white box with the word “REDACTED” covers the bank account information.  The exhibit cover page also states that the bank account information is redacted.  However, Mr. Coleman failed to adequately redact and remove the sensitive financial information, as the text is accessible by copying and pasting, or by clicking and moving the white box covering the text.

The court concluded that this didn’t qualify as contempt of court (based on of its failure to comply with a protective order, “which prohibits materials marked ‘confidential’ from being filed on the public docket”):

While the mistake reflects some carelessness on Defense counsel’s part, his initial attempt to redact the information and immediate acceptance of responsibility for his error leads this Court to conclude that Plaintiff has not carried her burden of demonstrating by clear and convincing evidence that Defense counsel was not reasonably diligent in attempting to comply with the Protective Order.

But the court granted sanctions against defense counsel, in the form of having to pay expenses for “data breach mitigation” services:

Joe Tabor, Riya Kapoo

Reforms could diminish the risk of new crimes committed on pretrial release.

Three years ago today, Illinois became the first state to entirely eliminate cash bail.

The measure was part of the larger crime bill known as the SAFE-T Act. For Chicago, the results of ending cash bail have been mixed.

Here are three things to know about the end of cash bail in Chicago:

• Almost half of all defendants arrested in Cook County cannot be legally detained after their first court appearance.
• When comparing similar defendants, more were released, and more were charged while on release, after cash bail ended.
• Overall crime has dropped, but that is in line with national trends.

Reforms such as easing the process for prosecutors to file a petition seeking detention and allowing detention for repeat offenders or those deemed a threat to animals or property would mitigate the problems with the measure.

Why 50% of Cook County arrestees avoid pretrial detention

Gregory Gundersen:

Intermediation

Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract unit of value, called money. They reason that if everyone uses stones to represent value, then people can transact when they would like, rather than when both parties are willing and able to barter. The villagers have abstracted value.

Supply. The villagers picked special gray stones to be money because the stones were portable, durable, and most importantly hard to collect. The only way to get them was to walk an hour outside of town and spend all day sifting through the riverbed. Sometimes, a villager would do this and only find one or two special stones. And so like any other job—winemaking, farming, cobbling—the job of collecting stones was self-regulated by the value of the activity. If the villagers collected too many stones, like they did after a flood cut open a new seam of special stones in the riverbed, then the cost of goods would go up and the relative value of stones, and thus collecting them, would go down. Or vice versa. So the villagers decided that anyone could collect stones, just as anyone could forage for berries or dye cloth. More or fewer people would do it as demand changed.

Debt. The rancher has a problem with money. He raises cows, but this takes a long time, much longer than it takes the dairy farmer to gather fresh eggs. He must go long periods of time without earning more stones. So the villagers decide that some people can simply pay for goods later. The two parties just record the details of the trade on a piece of paper and settle up later. The person who owes money is said to have debt, while the person who is owed money is said to have credit. For example, the woman who owns the general store in town is happy to let the rancher buy on credit, since she has known him since they were both children. However, she does not sell on credit to strangers or to people who do not pay their debts.

Wall Street Journal:

The federal program soon will let Americans get an Education Freedom Tax Credit of up to $1,700 for donating to scholarship organizations. “Illinois residents: Take Advantage of Indiana’s EFTC Program,” the billboard says. “Turn your donation into opportunity for students and a tax credit for you.” The sign shows two smiling students, framed against Lake Michigan, with the Chicago skyline behind them.

Sponsoring the ad is the Institute for Quality Education, based in Indianapolis, which plans to participate in the federal program as a scholarship granter. Luring donors from across the state line could be a windfall: Illinois residents are as eligible as anyone to take the federal tax credit, but they can’t make those donations to local scholarship groups as long as Mr. Pritzker refuses to opt in.

Signing up for the scholarships shouldn’t be a hard choice for states. Colorado’s Democratic Governor describes it as “free money.” Funds can be used at schools both public and private, including for tuition, tutoring, after-school programs, uniforms, or support services for students with disabilities. Yet Mr. Pritzker has dithered, not wanting to cross the teachers unions.

Leaders of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association signed a letter urging Democratic Governors to reject the federal program. Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said accepting the scholarship money would “normalize a voucher scheme that Illinois has already rejected.” She means the state’s defunct Invest in Kids tax credit, which funded thousands of scholarships, and had a waiting list of more than 24,000 children, until Illinois Democrats killed it in 2023.

Dan Rockmore:

As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward.

When I’m in New York, I take spin classes on the Upper East Side. The students—it’s a class, after all—pack into a dark, humid room. The music is loud. The air reeks of effort. When the black light hits, our towels fluoresce. “I can do that!” we shout, answering the instructor’s call. Everyone is working.

It is not especially pleasant. It is not supposed to be. We have chosen, quite deliberately, to subject ourselves to forty-five minutes of physical discomfort for benefits accrued down the road: better health, greater strength, a future version of ourselves that will justify the soreness tomorrow morning. Moreover, we are doing this by engaging in an activity that, in the real world, we might very well avoid because there are perfectly good machines to do it for us. A car or an e-bike can more easily get you from point A to point B. Yet no one in the class doubts that what we are doing is necessary. No one would dream of outsourcing it. It wouldn’t make sense.

I’ve been thinking about that room a lot lately, because I spend most of my professional life in a different kind of room entirely—the university classroom—and, as with the spin class, we now have machines that can do much of what we ask students to do in the name of training. Unlike with spinning, the effect has been to call the whole enterprise into question. Rather than “I can do that!,” the refrain I hear most often from students and colleagues is: “Why are we doing that?” I’m starting to think that the gym, of all places, might have some answers.

I teach mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth, and, on the first day of a large introductory course, I always ask the students to tell me, by a show of hands, how many of them are skilled at a sport or an instrument. It’s usually all of them. I ask whether they had to practice to become good, a question that is met with lots of nodding and a hum of general assent. The same is true for math, I tell them, and by extension for critical thinking, for writing, for argument. They nod. They understand the analogy immediately and completely.

On September 15, three New York Times journalists spoke at UW–Madison’s Pyle Center about why trust in the news is low and what they do about it: editor Patrick Healy, White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Chicago bureau chief Julie Bosman.

They explained how they decide what to cover, from Wisconsin’s governor primary to a two-hour Oval Office interview with President Trump. They talked about why they ask pointed questions instead of trading insults, and how they tell fair criticism from bad-faith attacks.

Students pressed them on bias, money, and the paper’s opinion pages. Note that an ID was required to enter and visitors had to pass through security screening.

The full transcript and photos are here.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released Know My School: Wisconsin’s School Performance Dashboard, a new and improved interactive school data explorer, which provides parents, taxpayers, and policymakers with the clearest picture yet of how Wisconsin’s school districts perform, spend, and grow. The dashboard can be accessed at KnowMySchoolWI.com.

The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “While most of the data displayed on our dashboard is available on the Department of Public Instruction’s website, it’s often disjointed and difficult to draw conclusions from. Our updated dashboard will serve as an important resource to districts, parents, and taxpayers. WILL values transparency and accountability for schools regardless of sector. This dashboard helps achieve those ends by demonstrating how taxpayer money doesn’t drive student outcomes; student proficiency remains low despite DPI’s lowered standards, and that more families continue to choose alternatives to traditional public school.”

Erin Gretzinger

In setting a $609 million preliminary plan for this school year’s budget, the Madison school district is counting on lawmakers to fulfill their promise to boost how much the state reimburses school districts for providing special education. ### Note that total spending is far higher: $989,102,432 for 25,003 students or $39,559 per student.

June, 2026 Madison School District Budget Book.

In the current state budget, lawmakers pledged to up the reimbursement rate from 38% to 45% by this school year. But the state has fallen short of fully funding that increase because lawmakers set aside a pot of money that’s too small to keep up with all the costs schools are reporting.

Public schools are required by law to provide special education services to all students who need them, meaning schools must divert money from other places if needed to pay for special education costs not covered by the state and federal government. Over the past 25 years, state aid for special education increased by about 82%, but the costs reported by schools grew by about 103%, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Last school year, the Madison school district set aside about $62 million from its general fund — which is fueled by local property taxes — to pay for special education services. About 4,260 Madison students, or 17% of the district, had a disability last school year, according to state enrollment figures.

This year, the stalled boost in state aid for special education has created unpredictability for Madison schools and others trying to craft balanced budgets, said Bob Soldner, the district’s assistant superintendent of financial services. Fulfilling the boost would provide more than $5 million for the district, he said. That amount of money could cover scheduled pay raises for all staff, for example.

“Our hope is … the new Legislature and the new governor are going to live up to the commitments and fully fund what they said they’re going to fund,” Soldner said. “That’s a big uncertainty, and it’ll continue to be an uncertainty until the spring of 2027 when we get a sense of, is there going to be some legislation to come through, and is the state going to meet its commitment to reimburse special education costs?”

f higher state aid levels don’t come to fruition by the end of the school year, Soldner said the School Board could tap the district’s budget reserves meant for emergencies to cover the pay raises, but that move would have “immediate negative consequences.”

“Once we use that one-time safeguard, it’s gone,” he said. “The way the state has backed away from its commitment to share in the cost of local public schools has put our district in a bind anywhere more than this past this school year.

…..

Last year, the district raised its property tax levy by 20.4% — the largest hike in more than three decades — after voters approved$607 million for two referendums.

……

Over the last decade, the district’s staff levels have risen faster than enrollment, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Budgeted positions for non-union professional staff made up the bulk of the increase, while budgeted positions for teachers and student support staff slightly decreased.

———

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

Teagan King:

If the software flags a student’s reflection as concerning, the school principal and student services team are alerted, and district staff will decide on the appropriate response, Leia Esser, the district’s executive director of student and staff supports, said in an email.

Responses can include a teacher check-in, family contact, connection with a school mental health provider or community services and other resources.

“If a response suggests an immediate safety concern, staff follow the same safety and crisis response procedures they would use if a concern were shared in person,” Esser said. “Sown to Grow supports identification and communication, but MMSD educators remain responsible for every decision about follow-up.”

———

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

Nicholas Bagley, Robert Gordon

The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can savegovernments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

Although few in number, the worst employees in most jobs are very bad — worse than the bell curve would predict. These “bad apples” can also spoil morale and productivity for others.

JD Busch:

For example, The Latin School of Chicago tells parents that its nearly $50K tuition only covers 85 percent of the school’s overhead, and that giving pays for one of every five school days. Yet the US Department of the Treasury is moving to kill the tax exemption entirely for schools like Latin and Francis Parker, institutions which are “flagrantly violating the law, by their own admission,” according to a local philanthropist with close ties to the Chicago private school community.

The proposed regulation (REG-119986-25) observes that a private school is not operated for charitable purposes if it “adopts, maintains, or enforces any policy or practice that discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin” in any educational policy, admissions policy, scholarship program, athletic program, “or other school-administered or school-supported program.”

“The operative concept here is ‘any purpose,’ and good intentions are not an excuse,” the donor suggests. The proposed regulation suggests that racial discrimination in education is against fundamental public policy “regardless of the intent behind it,” including where it is “defended as serving remedial or diversity-related objectives.”

18,000 schools are in scope

Wall Street Journal:

Empire State high schoolers have been measuring their knowledge on Regents exams since 1878. They must take five exams—English, math, science, social studies and “any additional” test. But starting in 2028 they’ll no longer have to pass the exams to graduate. A Board of Regents commission recommended this change in 2023, and on Monday the Regents voted to instruct the state Education Department to move ahead.

State officials insist they’re not rejecting rigor, but their ideas for replacing the graduation standards aren’t reassuring. Though details aren’t final, a state Education Department statement notes that state tests will be one of “multiple sources of evidence” that schools and districts use to assess students. Others include teacher observations and “performance-based learning experiences.”

Districts will also have to find a way to measure students for graduation by a new “portrait of a graduate,” who can be only 1/6th “academically prepared.” His other five attributes can include “reflective and future focused” and a “global citizen.” You can’t make this stuff up. This graduation overhaul is about “creating deeper, more meaningful educational experiences,” said state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.

Allysia Finley:

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have been matched by an astonishing decline in student learning. More evidence arrived last week from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures skills of 15-year-olds around the world every three to four years.

Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three-fourths of countries. U.S. math and reading scores fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning and trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Canada and Australia.

“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?

This American Life:

Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an essay about her decision to send her daughter to a segregated, low-income school. The essay was influential on parents and policymakers, and Nikole spent a decade hearing from people about how it changed their thinking. Now, she hears from one more person: her daughter, in a conversation ten years in the making. 

———

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

Jim Zellmer:

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level.”

Flash forward 28 years to a July 29 Rotary Club event. Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard highlighted recent improvements in literacy in district schools. But he pointed out that proficiency rates still hovered around just 40% at the elementary, middle and high schools he listed.

“We should not be sitting in a place where we can say 60% of our students are not proficient at their grade level in reading,” Rebecca Kundert, the district’s senior executive director of curriculum and instruction, said in follow-up remarks.

As Wisconsin embarks on another major effort to improve reading, the history of previous initiatives shows why sustained attention matters.

“It’s complicated,” one retired teacher said at the Rotary talk. Many factors add complexity, including readiness to learn, distractions, leadership turnover, attention spans and civic malaise.

Nearly three decades have passed without Madison reaching that goal, even as the district spends substantial money. It has a total budget equivalent to about $26,000 per enrolled student — far above average.

But Wisconsin doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Other states have significantly improved their reading proficiency.

50can:

A 50-STATE SURVEY OF 23,000 PARENTS

The “State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents” is the second edition of a 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research. The survey report offers an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

The 275-page report is available for download in full and by question or state.

Robert Schmad:

A program designed to assist businesses impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota has been shut down following widespread fraud concerns, according to local news reports.

The board of Hennepin County in Minnesota, home to Minneapolis, approved $2 million in funding for local businesses impacted by Operation Metro Surge — a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota launched in December 2025. The county received roughly 300 applications and ultimately distributed about $500,000 to 82 applicants, while more than 200 applications were flagged for potential fraud, according to local reports.

“The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it’s a problem because clearly there’s no fear out there,” Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde said, according to Kare 11. “Until we get it where people fear things, then they’re gonna keep doing it.”

Robert Ordway

Evan Barker’s tell-all reveals a party in turmoil.

On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.

Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.

Nearly two years later, the full story behind Barker’s split from the Democratic Party is told in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. While she isn’t the first person to write about Kansas, the working class, or the Democrats’ fall, Barker is the first to do it with a true insider’s perspective. The solution she offers reads less like a fix than a final warning to a party that looks to be spiraling out of control.

A 20-Year Diagnosis

In 2004, before Barker had entered politics, Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas?, arguing that Democrats had drifted toward economically conservative policy while wading ever deeper into culture-war territory. His prescription was illustrated by example: the state’s most successful Democrat, Governor Kathleen Sebelius, won by doing the opposite. She focused on issues people like Barker’s family cared about—health care and school funding—while steering clear of hot-button social fights. Diagnosis and prescription were delivered together. That was before social media, algorithms, and Super PACs came along to flatten any bottom-up narrative a candidate might otherwise build.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh–grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.

Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.

I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysisby EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these de schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

more. Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Published 2016)

———

Renu:

But it’s just unfathomable to me that NHJ wasn’t (at least I assume this from the piece) checking her daughter’s homework every night, wasn’t practicing math drills, wasn’t forcing her daughter to read books at higher grade levels, etc. (Also, this isn’t a stay-at-home-parent luxury; my father is a cardiologist who, even amidst brutal on-call schedules, helped me prepare for spelling tests.)

Critics of academic excellence such as NHJ (and the Bo French’s of the Right) demonize Asian families (many of whom are low-income and/or immigrants) for prioritizing education, discipline, strong study habits, delayed gratification. Yet, then they turn around and act shocked when their children aren’t getting into NYC’s specialized high schools or UT, blaming racism or some silly Asian immigrant conspiracy.

———

Daniel Friedman:

But then it turned out her kid really couldn’t do math. And, like her daughter, she didn’t learn anything.

———-

Adam Kushner:

By the time our son was in fourth grade, he was on level with his peers — and well behind where my wife and I had been growing up. We’d just had a third child. We moved to a nearby suburb feeling like we’d betrayed an ideal.

Nikole stuck with it, though — until Najya began wondering, in middle school, why her education was subpar. What happened next is the subject of today’s cover story in The Times Magazine. I spoke to Nikole about it.

———

She thought my support of the Specialized High School Admission Exam, the SHSAT, was racist. I thought her school politics were deeply misguided, and well, quite racist.

Unlike Hannah-Jones I have nothing to walk back.

———

The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones

———

Susan Edelman:

Nicole Hannah-Jones and @nytimes did not disclose that her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, sits on the. 24-member Panel for Educational Policy, and chairs the contracts commitee, which oversees millions of dollars spent by the city Department of Education.

———

Let’s be clear: her project was not limited to subjecting her child to her “political virtues.” It was subjecting every child to it.

———

Her failure was not moral but analytical. She thought the schools were failing from not enough money, parental involvement, or administrative attention—all of which she was in a position to provide.

If her diagnosis had been correct, her decision would have been laudable.

———-

Some truly wild stuff in Nikole Hannah Jones’s quarterly New York Times article, like this understanding description of randomly filling in standardized test answers

———

Everything she documents is a management and accountability failure rather than a resource failure. NYC spends $36k per pupil, the highest of any large district in the country. There haven’t been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades.

———

To purposefully subject your children to this environment distills progressivism to its core, and is the same reason blue cities are full of homelessness and crime. They truly believe antisocial behavior is ok, and to enforce any kind of rules is oppressive

———

I remember a Madison school board member (years ago) making the argument to parents that they should stick with underperforming schools…

———

Agreed. But Hannah-Jones can still be faulted for not doing her homework. The evidence that her analysis was empirically wrong was already widely disseminated, and not just among policy wonks, when she made her decision.

———-

Back in 2021, the NYT Mag did a story about Minneapolis’ desegregation plan, which took the novel step of sending white children to predominantly black schools. There was a striking passage in which a white mother who was gamely participating in the plan and who had joined the PTA, expressed some disappointment that no one from the administration had informed the parents of a recent shooting. The reply: “This is what we live with every day.”

———

Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly

———

The creator of the 1619 Project sent her young daughter to a struggling public school, convinced that upper-middle-class parents could lift it up. A decade later, the results are in.

———

Kat Rosenfield:

Actually, what bothers me about this: the essay makes public what should have been a private apology for Hannah-Jones’s failures as a mother, and in doing so not only elides the apology she should be making for her failures as a journalist but refuses to acknowledge them at all

———-

Why wouldn’t she think she had the power to transform her daughter’s school?

———

In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

———-

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

Michael Strong

Schooling is one function that is almost universally dominated by government managed institutions around the world. The belief that governments should provide “public schools” and that those schools were an “investment in human capital” and that they were “vital” for democratic citizenship are among the most deeply embedded beliefs around the world. Many people would be shocked that anyone would question it. There are mountains of research purporting to show the value of public schools.

But one of the most valuable concepts in economics is that of “opportunity costs.” What might have been if governments had not come to dominate K12 education in the 20th century?

A Skeptical History of “Public Schools”

Thomas Jefferson is often regarded as the father of public schooling because of his 1781 proposal in “Notes on the State of Virginia”,

This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor [i.e., superintendent], who is annually to choose the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools [high schools, in effect] of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of [Virginia], for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.

George H. Smith, summarizes Jefferson’s later views on education,

Throughout most of his life Jefferson favored providing three years of free education to all (free) children, rich and poor alike. By 1820, however, Jefferson had changed his mind. Only pauper children should receive free schooling; those parents able to pay tuition should be required to do so. Jefferson believed that the fees of parents who could afford to pay would cover much of the cost of educating pauper children. The remaining expenses would be minimal: “To a county, this addition would be of about one-​fifth of the taxes we now pay to the State, or about one-​fifth of one per cent.”

He was also against compulsory attendance laws,

“It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”

Jefferson’s model was much more similar to a system of voluntary private schools, with a modest state subsidy for “paupers” (plus scholarships for the super elite) than anything remotely similar to contemporary public schools.

Horace Mann is the real father of public schooling. He was influenced by the statist Prussian system,

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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

Bill Gurley:

This is a topic that has been weighing heavily on my mind for over five years. I hope we can find a way for eveyone to move forward with “inquiry” as the true-north. For the best interest of the globe.

Searching for Feynman — Resource Links

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Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

more.

Natalie L. Marchant, Lise R. Lovland, Rebecca Jones, Alexa Pichet Binette, Julie Gonneaud, Eider M. Arenaza-Urquijo, Gael Chételat, Sylvia Villeneuve:

The Cognitive Debt hypothesis proposes that repetitive negative thinking (RNT), a modifiable process common to many psychological risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may itself increase risk. We sought to empirically examine relationships between RNT and markers of AD, compared with anxiety and depression symptoms.

Methods

Two hundred and ninety-two older adults with longitudinal cognitive assessments, including 113 with amyloid-positron emission tomography (PET) and tau-PET scans, from the PREVENT-AD cohort and 68 adults with amyloid-PET scans from the IMAP+ cohort were included. All participants completed RNT, anxiety, and depression questionnaires.

Matthew Syed:

Really? If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism. It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. We know this because she alluded to many at the time of her (again, widely acclaimed) “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) speech. She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters. She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night.

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More.

Jill Lepore:

This August, an MIT committee of faculty, students, and staff released a remarkably thoughtful report on “AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training.” Its many cautions included the warning that “as a community, what should worry us most is that many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to learn.”

By contrast, Harvard’s administration appears oblivious to such concerns — notoriously so. Harvard College Dean David J. Deming’s recent recommendation that student use of AI in writing-intensive classes should be not only accepted but encouraged, is only the most outrageous instance. This policy was, fittingly, the leading example cited in a Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane.”

Has Harvard indeed lost its mind? The comparison with the MIT report, set against a growing body of empirical research into the effects of generative AI on learning, is a good place to start answering that question.

While of course noting the astounding benefits of AI in many areas of academic research, the MIT report takes careful stock of the ways in which reliance on AI risks the abandonment of crucial educational experiences, including the problem set, the take-home exam, office hours, study groups, and undergraduate research opportunities. In the latter case, the committee found that instructors were considering outsourcing research assistance to AI instead of hiring undergraduates, presumably on the grounds of cost-savings and efficiency. The committee inquired, “But if those criteria come to dominate our decisions, we all have to ask, ‘What is it that we are here together to do?’”

Ian Bogost

Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.

Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of studentsoutside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.

Then COVID-19 revealed that the credentialing process could continue if campus life was reduced or even eliminated entirely. Considerable controversy and confusion accompanied this moment; some students tried to sue expensive universities on the grounds that a closed campus was not worth the full-freight price. But in the end, credentialing proved entirely possible with a compromised or absent version of campus life.

Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut). Suffering through a term paper no longer inherently affords opportunities to take a break to get a late-night coffee with your fellow students, to commiserate with hallmates over a difficult professor, or to reach an unexpected realization while drunk at a house party. Social and academic progress are no longer woven together. No particular quantity of shared time or deliberation is required to carry out one inside the other.

Ivan Johnson:

Still, that doesn’t stop people from trying to sell us the idea that it can. Every time a new technology shows up, the companies who stand to profit from it look at education and see a problem they can solve, because solving it would also make them economically successful, in a market worth a great deal of money. It’s really just Upton Sinclair’s old point. He wrote about efficiency being valued over humanity, looking hard at working conditions in the wake of the industrial revolution. He said it’s hard to get someone to see something clearly when their income depends on not seeing it. So the pitch comes fast, and every time, they tell us this one is different. It never is.

I have two stories from my own career where I chose the sales pitch over the people in the room who actually knew better, buying a company’s promise that a piece of technology would just make things better, and finding out that it didn’t. I think we’re about to make that same mistake with AI too.

Smart boards

If you don’t know what a smart board is, that’s because they were dumb. A smart board was a touchscreen panel mounted over a section of a classroom whiteboard, with a projector bolted above it throwing the image down. It ate up about seventy-five percent of your usable whiteboard space, and it worked maybe a quarter of the time.

At my last school, I went to a conference, got sold, and installed them in every classroom, over the objections of teachers who begged me not to take their whiteboard space away. The bill was over fifty thousand dollars. Within two years, almost every teacher in the building had quietly retreated to the small strip of real whiteboard they had left. I eventually took every one of them down and kept the projectors, which is, of course, what everyone eventually used in classrooms anyway: a whiteboard and a projector.

Much later in my career, I watched one of the most gifted middle school Waldorf science teachers draw by freehand in chalk  a cell in more depth and more beauty than I had ever seen in a textbook or on a slide. It made me question whether I needed a projector in the room at all.