The Decline and Fall of Rigor in Advanced Placement

Notes and links on Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.

Adam Echelman, Mohamed Al Elew:

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Reducing Federal Debt

Paul Fanlund:

It should be a cause célèbre among young people, she says, because they will suffer the long-term consequences if the deficit remains unchecked. Bourdeaux became director of Concord last year. She said she and others have been “rebooting” her coalition and are appealing to young people for support.

The debt issue “is getting much more salient, politically salient, and I think the key thing for young people is they need to understand the implications for their future,” she said.

“We talk about things like the Social Security shortfalls that are coming up, that are imminent, and the deficit in general, and really try to impress on young people, this is their problem,” Bourdeaux said. (The Social Security trust fund is projected to deplete reserves by late 2032, forcing benefit reductions or increased taxation or both.)

“Who do they think is going to be paying for this? And if they are not engaged, my generation, older generations, we will make them pay for it. They need to recognize that they need to be at the table as we’re having these discussions. There’s a term, ‘intergenerational theft,’ that we’re increasingly hearing and we’re increasingly talking about.”

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k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Mayor Brandon Johnson’s CFO resigns, citing refusal to ‘compromise my integrity’

Alice Yin, A.D. Quig:

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s chief financial officer resigned Friday after just three months on the job, saying she is unable to fulfill her obligation to provide “complete and accurate” statements about the city’s finances.

Ashlee Gabrysch exits her post as Johnson’s election-year budget is stalled thanks to an ongoing stalemate with aldermen. In her resignation letter obtained by the Tribune, Gabrysch signaled she was leaving due to concerns over how the city was representing financial information.

“The Chief Financial Officer’s statements about the City’s finances are relied upon by investors, rating agencies, City Council, and taxpayers, and they must be complete and accurate,” Gabrysch, who was most recently a senior director at Fitch Ratings, wrote to Johnson. “I am not able to fulfill those obligations under the conditions in which I have been asked to serve.”

Johnson spokesperson Allison Novelo did not immediately have comment.

In a Friday statement to the Tribune, Gabrysch added, “The Chief Financial Officer’s statements about city finances are not idle chatter. … The CFO must act scrupulously to ensure they are always accurate and complete.”

“Throughout my career, I have remained committed to upholding the highest standards of financial integrity and transparency, and in my short time as Chief Financial Officer, I have faithfully discharged this duty,” Gabrysch said. “It has become apparent, however, that to continue in this role would be to compromise my integrity and professional obligations. I therefore have concluded that I must step down from my role, and hereby tender my resignation.”

AI has made it ‘close to impossible’ to assess university coursework, regulator says

Richard Adams:

Universities should go back to traditional exams and in-person presentations to grade students after lecturers complained that AI has made it “close to impossible” to assess coursework, according to an investigation by England’s higher education regulator.

The Office for Students (OfS) said the credibility of degrees from England’s universities was under threat from the prolific use of AI in essays, dissertations and “open book” exams, with students reporting that their peers boasted of using AI undetected by staff.

The regulator warned universities and other higher education institutions that failing to design “valid and reliable measures of students’ knowledge and skills” to combat AI could breach their conditions of registration and lead to sanctions being imposed.

The Bailey: Belonging = “Preferential Treatment”

Lisa Logan:

A network that American taxpayers have never heard of and a theory they never voted on is quietly redesigning how their local governments, chambers of commerce, and schools think about and act regarding immigration policy – and it’s already operating in 22 states. It deceptively goes by words like “belonging,” “welcoming,” and “inclusion” and comes with a measurement framework that proves America is failing along with a blueprint that tells states how to fix it. A network of NGOs, and unelected coalitions combining state agencies and corporate chambers of commerce make sure the blueprint is adhered to – whether voters know about it and have approved – or not.

The man behind the theory and framework is John Powell – Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) at UC Berkeley. He’s the architect of a policy theory called “targeted universalism,” and the author of a 2017 Guardian article titled “Us vs. Them; the sinister techniques of ‘Othering; – and how to avoid them.” This piece is a response to that article and an attempt to expose how it’s actually Powell’s answer to “othering” – “belonging” – that’s being used to subversively usher in federal and state policies that overwhelmingly prioritize immigrants and people of color when it comes to funding and resources. In this way, unfettered immigration can be used intentionally as a Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm and break the social systems of America to completely change the country and the Constitution.

The Motte: Belonging = “An Inclusive Society”

In his article, Powell claimed that conservative media and political leaders like Donald Trump were using verbal and psychological techniques to stoke fear and collective anxiety about certain groups in America such as illegal immigrants. He proclaims they were causing what he terms “othering”: narrowly defining whoqualifies as a full member of society by excluding and dehumanizing them based on their citizen status. Powell dismisses the genuine concerns raised in the immigration debate – about the rise in crime and the strain on the economy – by labeling these arguments as “socially and culturally constructed,” brought about purely by narratives pushed by demagogues. He concluded his article by saying the antidote to “othering” is building true societies of belonging. That sounds like a lovely sentiment until you find out what “belonging” actually means in practice.

Tutoring around the World

Economist:

The sums are significant. More than half of American children take part in a sport after school or at weekends. In 2024 this cost the average family $1,016, just for one child’s main sport. That was a 46% jump from 2019, twice the cumulative rate of inflation. Between the logistics of chauffeuring children to several practices each week and conferring with coaches, American parents are dedicating more than 15 hours a week to their children’s sports—a commitment on a par with a part-time job.

As with young bodies, so with young minds. Private tutoring has long been an obsession in richer parts of Asia. Three in four school-age South Koreans took paid lessons in 2025, according to national surveys, including 57% in the lowest income quintile. So did four in five five-year-olds. The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, estimates that average tutoring spending per pupil has reached roughly a tenth of average household disposable income.

“We pretend to learn, and they pretend to teach us.”

In summary

There are no rules governing how many classes community college professors can teach. Some are cashing in.

As online classes proliferate, community college professors have found a hack — repackaging similar courses for hundreds of students at a time and teaching more than a dozen classes in a single semester.

Professor Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal has at least two tenured, full-time community college jobs, plus recurring part-time gigs over the past 12 months at UC Berkeley, Cal State Sacramento, and seven other community colleges. This fall, she’s teaching 30 sociology, ethnic studies and business classes to about 1,100 students.

In 2024, with roughly the same courseload, she made nearly $800,000, according to public payroll records. CalMatters reached out to her three times for comment, but she never responded.

Community college professors are expected to evaluate student progress and provide direct support without the help of teaching assistants, though that’s nearly impossible at such a scale, said Sarah Thompson, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. “Obviously no one has enough time in a week to teach 30 classes and do a good job, so that’s very problematic.”

However Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor at the office overseeing California’s community colleges, said having multiple teaching jobs is not, by itself, evidence of poor instruction. In an emailed statement to CalMatters, Ferguson, who leads finance and strategic initiatives for the office, said multiple jobs would be a problem if the “faculty member’s workload is preventing the required level of engagement, feedback, assessment, or student support.” In that case, he said the college district — not the statewide college system — should be accountable.

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more.

These part-time professors make big money teaching dozens of classes online. Are their students learning?

Adam Echelman, Mohamed Al Elew:

In summary

There are no rules governing how many classes community college professors can teach. Some are cashing in.

As online classes proliferate, community college professors have found a hack — repackaging similar courses for hundreds of students at a time and teaching more than a dozen classes in a single semester.

Professor Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal has at least two tenured, full-time community college jobs, plus recurring part-time gigs over the past 12 months at UC Berkeley, Cal State Sacramento, and seven other community colleges. This fall, she’s teaching 30 sociology, ethnic studies and business classes to about 1,100 students.

In 2024, with roughly the same courseload, she made nearly $800,000, according to public payroll records. CalMatters reached out to her three times for comment, but she never responded.

Community college professors are expected to evaluate student progress and provide direct support without the help of teaching assistants, though that’s nearly impossible at such a scale, said Sarah Thompson, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. “Obviously no one has enough time in a week to teach 30 classes and do a good job, so that’s very problematic.”

Sun Prairie superintendent reapplies for administrator license

Teagan King:

Sun Prairie School District Superintendent Antoine Reed has reapplied for a Wisconsin administrator license following an application denial and scrutiny for leading the district without the proper license.

Reed submitted a new application for an administrator license Monday, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s license database. Reed previously applied for a license in July but was denied Oct. 7, according to DPI’s denial letter to Reed.

Reed failed to include an employment verification form documenting at least one year of principal experience in Illinois under a valid Illinois principal license, where Reed previously worked, DPI’s letter said, causing the denial.

Looking forward, not back

Did people actually have it better in the 1950s?

In my latest for @WSJFreeEx, I debunk some common nostalgic myths.
https://t.co/Vz647L5IBG

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) November 12, 2026

Civics: That 2015 check from George Soros to one Scott Colom

Teddy Schleifer:

Al Jazeera:

Colom, 43, is a lawyer who has served as a Mississippi prosecutor since 2016 until this year. He is married to Nadia Colom and has two children. His identical twin brother, Andrew, played a major role in his campaign.

The politician was born in Columbus and comes from a family of lawyers. Despite having one of the largest populations of Black Americans in the country, there has not been a statewide elected Black official in more than 140 years in Mississippi.

In interviews, Colom has said he decided to run to “look out for the people”, especially on the issue of affordability. He accused incumbent Hyde-Smith of neglecting the state and “selling out” Mississippians.

In 2015, Colom became the first Black American to be elected as district attorney for the 16th Judicial District, which includes the white-majority counties of Clay, Lowndes, Noxubee and Oktibbeha.

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Glenn Greenwald:

They all seem like they were manufactured in a secret AI factory built by some sinister joint venture between Alex Sores and Reid Hoffman to create armies of blind partisan loyalists. Watch this for as long as you can bear it and you’ll see what i mean. And it seems like there are hundreds of them: a few new one introduced every month.

Direct Instruction is good for students. Schools rarely stick with it

Carmela Guaglianone:

Donna Dwiggins drove around Guam in a pickup truck, stopping at schools all over the island. She was retrieving books from a discarded curriculum, something the school district had mandated just a handful of years earlier. Dwiggins had moved to the island to support the rollout of the program. Then it all fell apart.

Guam’s Department of Education had received a federal grant to bring Direct Instruction, an effective but controversial method of teaching, to nearly all its elementary schools. The process was contentious from the start, Dwiggins recalled.

“Most of the time you’re going into politically hot situations, because they have failed,” Dwiggins said. “The people from the district holding on by their fingernails to their jobs are really offended because you’ve been brought in to fix the problem that they created.”

For decades, Dwiggins worked with Direct Instruction in classrooms across the United States and its territories. She says she has worked with it in hundreds of schools, but few of them are still using it. Despite a mountain of research on its effectiveness, many schools eventually give up on Direct Instruction. APM Reports wanted to understand why.

We contacted more than a hundred schools and districts that have used Direct Instruction at some point since its inception in the 1960s. We talked to people who used it in small, rural schools and large, urban districts. People told us about why they started the program and why they stopped.

Some patterns emerged:

The Inmates Run the Asylum at the Psychological Association

Colin Wright, Andrew Hartz:

The American Psychological Association may soon lose its accreditation authority. Last month, a bipartisan advisory board to the Education Department voted 7-4 to recommend suspending recognition of the APA’s Commission on Accreditation. The vote followed testimony alleging the group tolerated a “pervasive culture of antisemitism” in psychology programs and professional settings.

The reports are alarming and deserve serious attention. But focusing solely on the APA’s hostility toward Israel and Jewish members risks obscuring a larger problem. A substantial part of organized psychology has ceased behaving like scientific and professional bodies and has become a vehicle for left-wing political activism.

The importance of keeping Act 10 and right-to-work, and how to create additional opportunity for workers

James Bohn

Government policies can improve the functioning of labor markets, but they can also protect established interests at the expense of workers seeking employment and advancement. This chapter examines four areas of labor market regulation in Wisconsin in which policies can favor established “insiders” over “outsiders,” limiting economic opportunity, reducing labor market efficiency, and undermining economic growth. It offers six recommendations to increase the freedom of employers and workers to enter into mutually beneficial employment arrangements.

Key findings:

Occupational licensing creates substantial barriers to employment in Wisconsin. Barriers that limit entry into a profession can enable existing practitioners to exercise market power. Roughly 20 percent of Wisconsin workers are in licensed occupations. A national study ranked Wisconsin seventh among states in the number of licensed occupations, with 135.
Wisconsin lacks important mechanisms for reducing unnecessary occupational licensing requirements. The state has no formal sunrise or sunset review process for occupational licensing and has not adopted a comprehensive universal licensing recognition law, despite 28 other states having enacted such legislation.
Act 10 increased accountability in public-sector union representation and shifted opportunities toward newer workers. Consistent with insider-outsider theory, following Act 10’s enactment, salaries of newer teachers increased both in absolute terms and relative to senior teachers and that entry into the teaching profession became more attractive in Wisconsin relative to comparable states, as reflected in an approximately 20 percent increase in the number of teaching degrees awarded relative to those states.
Wisconsin’s right-to-work law strengthened workers’ freedom to choose whether to support a union. Private-sector union membership fell from roughly 8 percent before the law’s enactment in 2015 to around 6 percent afterward, a decline of approximately 30,000 members. Research suggests that right-to-work laws create incentives for unions to provide better services and can encourage greater business investment.

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Notes and links on Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.

What the Cornell 7 Texts Reveal

Kat Rosenfield

It was only then, weeks after the fact, that Jane Doe began describing herself as a victim, culminating in her report to the campus police. In a now–heavily criticized decision, the district attorney found insufficient evidence at the time for a criminal prosecution, while an independent investigation by Cornell resulted in expulsions for two of the accused, a ban from campus for another, and various lesser punishments for the remaining four. It’s unclear what prompted Jane Doe’s choice to renew these same allegations two years later, in the form of a civil suit—and the more evidence, like these text messages, that emerges as a result, the more difficult the truth becomes to discern. Instead, we have multiple competing versions of the same story, many of them told by the same person, at different times and for different reasons.

The Public Has a Right to See UNC’s Syllabi

David Phillips:

UNC’s new syllabus transparency policy is a step in the right direction, but the public deserves more than the bare minimum.

This semester, as WUNC News’ Brianna Atkinson would have you know, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Seth Kotch replaced a once-detailed, color-coded, seven-page, Trivial Pursuit-themed course syllabus with something “more closely representing a business one-pager.”

The reason?

The UNC System recently “mandated that all university faculty publicly post course syllabi in searchable databases” that, as UNC’s Office of Faculty Governance notes, “will be considered public records and will be publicly visible through a central platform.” This mandate, Atkinson ominously declares, is a “response to…a syllabus fishing expedition” launched by an unnamed “conservative watchdog group…to see how professors [of whom Kotch is one] were, in their words, teaching ‘DEI’ in classrooms.” Conservative activists, Atkinson implies, are why we can’t have nice things.

Of course, “fishing expedition” is an uncharitable term for what might be characterized as a legitimate effort at democratic oversight and accountability. But this particular effort was made by the Heritage Foundation-affiliated Oversight Project—one of the groups that, Atkinson writes, “ha[s] made it clear their goal is to prevent instruction associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion or related topics.”

Civics: War by other Means

Lee Fang Summary:

According to Tripp Mickle, one of the NYT journalists who broke the story about Huang (youtube.com/watch?v=raFEJo…), they didn’t have the idea to look into Megaspeed on their own but were told to look into the company by “a tech industry contact”.

Hunter Weiss:

Forced Claude to tell me why they want Jensen gone

What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children

Sarah Zhang:

No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.

Our day care did not have a livestream—see? restraint⁠—but that is indeed a service some now offer. Preschool required its own app, though, as did summer camp. Soon my phone began pinging with messages about playground spats and injuries as minor as paper cuts. As I write this, I’ve learned that my daughter woke from her nap at 2:17 p.m.

The panopticon doesn’t end with babies and toddlers. Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz. They watch their kids via the camera on their Ring doorbell; they monitor text messages. They scrutinize daily photos from sleepaway camp—once a time of complete disconnection—for evidence of sunburns or social ostracism. Why is he standing apart from everyone else? Why isn’t he smiling?

But most of all, parents track their kids everywhere they go. Location tracking might start, for younger kids, with an AirTag slipped into a backpack, jacket, or shoe. (Skechers now makes shoes with a dedicated compartment in the sole.) For kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in—and so parents keep tracking them into adolescence and even beyond. Three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study.

“It’s all about Power”

Joshua Nelson:

“It’s all about power,” said Michael Greer, a special education teacher who spent 26 years as a CTA and NEA member. “In California, the California Teachers Association is the most powerful lobbying group in the state, which also transfers into the national union.”

Greer — a retired educator with two decades of classroom experience who previously served as a local CTA chapter president and as a member of the Del Norte County Unified School District Board of Trustees — said the unions’ core priorities have fundamentally shifted since he entered public education.

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Notes and links on Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.

Tom Ritter¹, Fatih Kilic², Frederik Braun¹, Elisa Luo³, Geoffrey M. Voelker³, Stefan Savage³, Christoph Kerschbaumer¹

Marian University in Fond du Lac will be acquired by a Catholic college in Pennsylvania

joe.schulz:

Marian University, a private Catholic college in Fond du Lac, will be acquired by another private Catholic school based in Pennsylvania.

Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, anticipates completing its acquisition after a two-year transition process. The deal, announced by the schools Monday, is still subject to additional reviews and approvals from the U.S. Department of Education and the Catholic Church in Rome, according to Alvernia President Glynis Fitzgerald.

Under their agreement, the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, who owns Marian, would “gift” the university to the Bernardine Franciscan Sisters, who founded Alvernia, said Fitzgerald and Marian President Aaron Sadoff.

God and Man

Toby Shorin:

Already there have been philosophies of form that have sought to harmonize the inner and outer worlds. The scientific methods of Goethe, the educational practices of Rudolf Steiner, and the building techniques of Christopher Alexander are just three that place emphasis on all forms as living order, as experiential expressions of the universe’s creative drive. It seems to me very possible that a new science of form might give us the wherewithal to create forms of life that are beautiful, enriching, and alive. This is a vocation most suitable to humanity.

Large-Scale Measurement and Real-World Mitigation of Web Browser Fingerprinting in the Wild

This is the companion site to a study Mozilla ran on browser fingerprinting. With the help of almost 25 million Firefox release users, we measured how identifiable browsers really are, found which characteristics make them unique, and used that to design the fingerprinting protections that shipped in Firefox 143. Here you can read the paper and its key findings, browse the full appendix data the PDF had no room for, download the privacy-preserving aggregate data and analysis code, learn how the data was collected, and run an interactive test that compares your own browser against the measured population. If you have a question the data could answer, there is also a discussion board for proposing follow-up research.

Browser fingerprinting is a known tracking mechanism on the modern web, but its real-world effectiveness toward users has been hard to measure. To build robust protections, we measured uniqueness across a large, unbiased population, to determined what individual metrics cause users to be unique. These measurements used multiple privacy preserving technologies, like OHTTP, to ensure that no individual users can be identified or tracked across the web. The protections we built into Firefox avoid web compatibility problems while dropping the percentage of uniquely identifiable users from 75% to 46%.

Research taste in history: the importance of learning Sumerian math

Benjamin Breen:

What I learned from a truly eccentric historian

“Variety, not uniformity, is more likely to be the key to progress. The genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent. Our strata show broken bones of histories all forgotten.” — Benjamin Blood, as quoted by William James, 1911

I’m sometimes asked how I think history education and research will change in an era being reshaped by AI. I don’t trust anyone who claims certainty on the topic, because “AI” is such a moving target (and its impacts on the humanities so poorly understood) that any views are provisional.

But, it seems to me that we are entering an era in which traits like eccentricity and creativity are going to matter much more than before. Language models excel at pedagogies involving memorization, spaced repetition, and customized feedback. They are also getting good at “brute force” archival research. Yet they remain stuck in a median perspective, a sort of averaged-out, clichéd intellectual blandness that helps explain why frontier models still lack “research taste” in humanistic disciplines. (I think this is also why different frontier models converge on an oddly similar tone and subject matter when it comes to creative writing).

This got me thinking about which of my own teachers were most unexpected, most “out of distribution,” relative to the intellectual paths that AI systems converge on. The first person I thought of was a man I knew for only about nine months, when I was a visiting student at Oxford as a twenty-year-old. But the time I spent with Dr. Allan Chapman, who passed away earlier this year, was genuinely life-altering for me.

And the reason was because he was so immersed in the foreign country of past minds that he was almost like a time travel

How Universities Teach Students to Hate the West

Nora Clinton:

Colleges are teaching generations of students to distrust America’s history and institutions without first understanding what made them worth defending.

Great nations have always told their children great stories. From Homer and Virgil to the Bible, inherited narratives teach courage, duty, sacrifice, faith, and belonging. But this inheritance is predicated on an understanding of the world rooted in truth. History, in particular, must educate with facts—not reduce America and the West to caricatures of corruption and oppression. When subverted by corrosive indoctrination, history education becomes a tool of civilizational suicide.

That, unfortunately, is what we often now see in our universities.

Let’s begin with Harvard, where historical studyhas given way to activist indoctrination. The Harvard Guide to American History (1954) was an excellent work of traditional scholarship. It was broad, learned, and serious about evidence. It treated American history as a complex field. Students had to understand political institutions, diplomacy, economics, religion, war, biography, ideas, and social change.

Harvard course offerings over the past decade show how far the center has moved. Rather than survey American history in its institutional and civilizational breadth, many courses adopt axiomatic anti-Western assumptions as their governing framework.

One example is the recent course Harvard and Native Lands, cross-listed by the English and History departments. Its description declares that “Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion” and presents the course as an inquiry into “Indigenous dispossession and resistance.” That framing is not academic but accusatory: before students have weighed evidence or historical context, the institution is condemned through the vocabulary of criminal appropriation and colonial oppression.

What is a computer science degree for now?

Sam Madden of MIT spent an hour and a quarter at UW–Madison this month with Mike Swift, and it’s worth the time for anyone who teaches, hires, or is about to graduate.

His premise: the machine can now do essentially any assignment a CS department sets. So the question isn’t whether students will use it — it’s what is left to teach.

His answer is the part of the degree long relegated to capstone classes many students never reach. Specify what software must do. Verify it does. Read code you didn’t write. Reason about architecture and efficiency. Understand why a solution is the right one, not just that it runs.

He is equally direct about the social cost — quiet office hours, thinner study groups — and about what MIT is spending to respond.

Full transcript and audio: [link] // AI & Education Report.

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “The party has promised to expand the welfare state, cut taxes for everyone but the rich, and bring down inflation and interest rates, but those goals will likely prove incompatible”

Eric Levitz:

Taxing the rich alone probably can’t fund a massive new safety net, yet even this year’s unusually Democratic electorate rejected broader tax hikes.
To ease the tension between their priorities, Democrats should embrace policies that boost the economy’s productive capacity.

Two years from now, however, the blue tsunami’s size could matter enormously. Democrats are unlikely to do quite as well in the 2028 election as they did this year, when the Republican base largely abstained. But Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s party now has plenty of seats to spare. For this reason, if Democrats win the presidency in 2028, they are now extremely likely to also secure full control of Congress — and by comfortable margins.

This is no small thing. Under President Joe Biden, Democrats held only a bare Senate majority, enabling any individual senator to dictate the terms of their policymaking. A Democratic president has not had the chance to govern with robust congressional support since 2010.

Democrats are therefore within striking distance of a rare opportunity — a chance to enact their economic agenda without asking Republicans or their party’s most unreliable centrists for permission.

To seize this historic opening, Democrats will need to formulate a platform that effectively advances their core goals. Unfortunately, this will be harder than it sounds — because the party’s current economic priorities appear incompatible with each other.

During the midterm campaign, Democrats promised to:

Democrats have good reason for embracing all of these objectives. In the last three federal elections, voters punished incumbents for presiding over a rising cost of living. So any governing party would be eager to reduce inflation and borrowing costs, both of which continue to trend in the wrong direction.

Will Democrats quickly repeal Act 10? Answers among the party’s leaders vary

A.J. Bayatpour

On the campaign trail, Wisconsin Democrats broadly voiced support for repealing Act 10, the 2011 law that largely stripped public workers of collective bargaining rights. Now that they’re about to actually take control of state government, the soon-to-be top elected officials have offered different answers in recent days when asked about erasing the controversial labor law.

At the state Capitol Tuesday, incoming Assembly Speaker Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) offered clear support for moving ahead with a repeal of Act 10.

…..

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a right-wing think tank, published a study in 2025 estimatingschool districts and local governments would be paying $2 billion more statewide if Act 10 were never implemented.

The estimates are based off salaries, retirement pay and additional benefits that were in place prior to the law’s adoption. Will Flanders, WILL’s research director, said repealing Act 10 would gradually drive up costs for school districts and local governments.

“That wouldn’t come into play immediately,” Flanders told CBS 58 Tuesday. “It would require these new negotiation processes with re-empowered unions to take place, but we think, over time, that’s likely where we’d end up.”

WILL’s estimates find that if Act 10 never happened, property taxes in Milwaukee would be $1,310 more for a home valued at $300,000. For Waukesha, there’s be an $865 increase, and it’d be $650 more in Racine. However, those numbers don’t tell the entire story.

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Notes and links on Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.

Dwarkesh Patel, Jerry Han:

MPS now enrolls fewer than half of Milwaukee students. What’s next?

Alan J. Borsuk

The Milwaukee education landscape has become a 50-50 proposition.

That is to say, half of the children who live in the city of Milwaukee and who receive publicly funded education are enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools system. And half are enrolled in schools that are not part of MPS.

It’s a reality with major implications.

Since the 1990s, when the private school voucher program was launched and the first charter schools joined the scene, the percentage of Milwaukee’s children who are enrolled in MPS has fallen almost every year, generally by one to two percentage points.

This fall, it hit a new low, just below the 50% mark.

At the same time, a second trend is becoming an increasingly important fact for Milwaukee education: The shrinking number of students who live in the city and who are getting publicly funded education in all the streams of local schools. By my unofficial count (for the record, I’ve been keeping tallies on this for a couple decades), this fall the total is 104,363 students. That compares to 117,565 a decade ago – a drop of 13,202 children.

One big cause (and it’s showing up across Wisconsin and nationwide): Declining birth rates. My colleague, Marquette Law School researcher John D. Johnson, has documented the shrinking number of births in Milwaukee. For example, birth records show a 15% decline in babies born to Milwaukee mothers from 2020 to 2025. That will impact school enrollment for many years to come.

The overall decline in the number of children getting publicly funded education in Milwaukee is close to the decline number in MPS alone. Enrollment in the traditional MPS system a decade ago was 66,300, including about 1,500 suburban students enrolled in MPS schools. That is more than 12,000 higher than the comparable figure for MPS enrollment this fall. The brunt of the impact of Milwaukee’s changing population is falling on MPS.

Enrollment, broadly speaking, is tied to the vitality of schools – and it is certainly tied to the financial picture of schools. In a system as large as MPS, there are schools that are packed with students. But there are others where enrollment is far below a building’s capacity – and the number of such schools is increasing. This speaks to the difficult money picture of MPS and to the health of the system overall.

Here’s one way to think about the enrollment decline in MPS: Think of losing 12,000 students as the equivalent of emptying out three high schools of 1,500 students each and 15 elementary and K-8 schools of 500 students each. That gives some context to the current deliberations that could lead to closing a handful of MPS schools.

(By the way, over the last 10 years, MPS has closed almost no schools.)

The strength in numbers for non-MPS schools shows two important things:

———-

For some comparison: when my Dad was MPS superintendent in 1970, 130,000 kids attended district schools. Today, about 54,000 students are enrolled in MPS.

———-

Where have all the students gone?

States and public school funding systems must adapt to declining student enrollment

Aaron Garth Smith:

Public education is changing rapidly, and K-12 finance systems must adapt to a new era with fewer students and more competition. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, public schools have lost 1.4 millionstudents and are projected to lose another 2.7 million by the 2031-32 school year. And with the rise of school choice policies such as education savings accounts, charter schooling, and open enrollment, a family’s education options are no longer determined solely by where they can afford to live.

States’ school finance systems, many of which date back decades, must be modernized. Central to this is how they count students for funding calculations, a key policy detail that in many states, including those with school choice programs such as Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia, strains state budgets and provides the wrong incentives.

Three best practices can guide policymakers in designing a sound approach to counting students. The following analysis details these three best practices, offers models for policymakers to consider, and compares how 15 states count students.

Best Practice #1: Use Current-Year Enrollment Counts

The most important policy feature in funding calculations is the timeframe used to count students. The three approaches used by states, along with their tradeoffs, are described below.

Current-Year Enrollment: States such as Arizona, Indiana, and Texas use current-year enrollment counts to calculate funding. This approach, which counts students attending public schools in the current year, is most responsive to enrollment changes but provides the least budget predictability for school district administrators because districts’ actual funding isn’t known before the school year.
Prior-Year Enrollment: States such as Alabama, Iowa, and New Hampshire use prior-year enrollment counts to calculate funding. This approach, which gives school districts funding for the number of students they served the year prior, provides greater budget stability but is less responsive to enrollment changes than using current-year counts. Districts that lose students from one year to the next receive funding for “ghost” students (i.e., students who are no longer enrolled, but for whom districts still collect funding), while districts that gain students don’t get funding for these additional students they’re serving until the following year.
Declining Enrollment: States such as Kansas, Missouri, and Montana use the highest enrollment counts of two or more school years, usually including the current school year. This hold-harmless approach gives school districts the longest off-ramp for adjusting budgets to enrollment changes, but it usually results in the most ghost students, making it more expensive than using current-year or prior-year enrollment counts.

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

A salute on Veterans Day

Scott Johnson

Today is Veterans Day. I’m thinking about the late Leo Thorsness. Leo was the native Minnesotan who served in Vietnam and was awarded the Medal of Honor for one helluva mission he flew in 1967, a few days before he was shot down and captured. Every ounce of the courage he displayed on his Medal of Honor Mission was required to endure his six years of confinement in the Hanoi Hilton and its Heartbreak Hotel section, which the Communists reserved for hard cases like Leo. Leo told the story in Surviving Hell: A POW’s Journey, a book in which he sought to turn his ordeal in captivity to helping others survive their own hard times.

I wrote about Leo many times. I took a look, for example, at Leo bringing the lessons he drew from his life to middle school students in “The lesson for today.” When Leo died on May 3, 2017, I wrote this remembrance of him. Meeting Leo may be the highest of the many highlights I’ve had writing for Power Line.

Pretraining progress is mostly coming from data

How much of the rapid progress in AI that we’ve seen over the last few years1 has come from data versus model improvements? The answer has big implications for the economics of frontier labs and the pace of future progress.

We investigate this question at a relatively small scale, and for pretraining specifically, from 2019 to 2025. During each of those years, a new open model recipe was published which codified that year’s publicly known algorithmic tweaks (for example, improvements in architecture, optimizer, initializations, learning rate schedule, hyperparams, etc). And during each of those years, there was also a new public data corpus (produced by broader scrapes and new curation/extraction/filtering techniques).

We train combinations of these year-representative model recipes and data corpuses across different scales of training compute (up to 1e19 FLOPs)2.

Obviously, we can’t compare these different models by their cross-entropy loss against a fixed dataset, since we’re varying the datasets they’re trained on. So instead we evaluate these models on end capabilities as measured by the OLMES eval (which aggregates 10 different relatively easy benchmarks, mostly multiple choice QA). Unfortunately, evaluating end capability rather than pretraining loss adds some noise to our results, as you’ll see in the graphs below, though we try to get cleaner bounds by running multiple seeds.

We find that from 2019 to 2025, 3.24x more compute efficiency gains have come from data improvements rather than model improvements (12.0x for data and 3.7x for models), at the 1e19 FLOPs compute budget3.

Comms Talk: Inside the ideal strategies

Richard Deitsch:

From crisis management to promotional campaigns to navigating content creators in an ever-evolving media corps, a career in sports public relations has never been more exciting or complicated. Multiple stakeholders are part of their orbit — and few off days to enjoy.

“I don’t know that I have ‘hours,’” says Jeff Anderson, the executive vice president and chief communications officer for the Minnesota Vikings. “When you’re in these jobs, you accept that it can feel like 24/7. The NFL calendar certainly dictates the rhythm, and every year when training camp rolls around, I have some anxiety knowing we’re basically going seven days a week for at least the next five months.”

In an attempt to understand what modern sports public relations is like in 2026, we assembled a six-person panel featuring some of the best practitioners in the space. They include:

Why do Americans gravitate to young-adult literature—stories of heroes vanquishing the shadowy forces governing their dystopian worlds?

Tanner Greer:

Cultural historian Robert Darnton famously argued that “world views cannot be chronicled in the manner of political events, but they are no less ‘real.’ Politics could not take place without the preliminary mental ordering that goes into the common-sense notion of the real world.” To discover the “preliminary mental ordering” of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, Darnton turned to an unusual source: the French fairy tale, as told by French peasants to ethnographers and folklorists of the nineteenth century. These stories of repulsive ogres, fearsome fairies, talking animals, and enchanted objects communicated, in Darnton’s eyes, important truths as the French peasantry understood them—truths about “how the world is made and how one can cope with it.” As unconscious illustrations of common beliefs about authority, fate, and morality, these stories offered a rare window into the ancien regime as the common man experienced it. The fairy realm of the French peasant mirrored his lived reality. His was a vicious and empty moral order, where personal destiny depended on the arbitrary whims of the powerful, and survival meant internalizing as fact that “the world is made of fools and knaves: better to be a knave than a fool.”

Future social historians will not be able to consult an oral tradition of fairy tales in an investigation of the twenty-first century’s “mental ordering,” but they will have an equally vast catalog of fictional narratives at their disposal. For the most popular stories of our own day also tend toward the fantastic. Speculative fiction—fantasy, science fiction, and dystopian prophecies—has captured the imagination of twenty-first-century man. These flights of fancy are the cornerstone of our popular culture; their protagonists are our cultural heroes. They testify to the power of escapism.

Why the Baby Bust Is Making the World More Unequal

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde:

The world’s fertility crisis is more severe than is commonly understood. Last year, humanity’s total fertility level dropped below what demographers call the replacement rate—that is, the average number of children that a woman must have to keep a population constant over the long run. This has never happened before. There have been periods when the human population declined because of wars or epidemics, such as the Black Death, in the fourteenth century, or the diseases brought by Europeans to the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But now, simply as a function of their choices, humans will see the world population peak around 2055 and then begin to fall.

The story of the coming decades is not simply one of dwindling and aging. There is a great deal of variation in the baby bust. The most surprising trend may be one that has overturned basic assumptions about fertility rates. Where once it was thought that people—and, by extension, countries—with higher levels of income and education would have lower fertility rates than those who were poorer and less educated, the inverse is increasingly true. Many wealthier people and countries boast higher fertility rates than many poor people and countries.

The inversion is revealing of why governments have had a hard time coming to grips with the fertility crash. The best explanation for why people are no longer having babies is that child-rearing at the scale necessary to maintain populations is fundamentally at odds with the structures of modern life and modern societies. Once an economic necessity, children are now an economic luxury. That portends a world in which economic inequality is accentuated by demographic inequality, with widening fissures within countries and among them. The whole world is grappling with a decline in fertility, but in many different ways. And those differences will stoke further divisions, tensions, and even conflict.

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

School choice and rich curricula are good, even if conservatives like them

Kelsey Piper:

Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of frequently putting ideology above results for children: Democrats by opposing any way to check whether kids are learning, and Republicans by mixing their good ideas (such as knowledge-rich curricula) with illiberal ones (such as insisting on putting the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms and finding reasons for all Islamic schools to be ineligible for the voucher program).1

Hinojosa and the (likely) new Democratic majority on the Texas State Board of Education have the opportunity to do this right. They should build a pluralistic and liberal school system, rather than just rolling back the ways that Republicans built an illiberal one. And while the voucher program itself might be too expensive and unpopular to maintain, they should keep in mind that it’s a real injustice if rich families have educational options and poor families don’t.

The hottest topic in Texas education for the last year has been vouchers. In 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott got a $1 billion state voucher program passed by the state Legislature; it gives low- and moderate-income Texas families around $10,000 per child to spend on private school.

Critics have pointed out that most of the families that took it were already sending their children to private schools, and only 17% had transferred from public schools; Hinojosa campaigned on ending the voucher program and said she would block its proposed expansion. She could also veto voucher funding in the next state budget.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about vouchers. Private schools are not, on average, better than public schools at educating kids.2 Some liberals treat that as a knockdown argument against school choice, but I’m less convinced — after all, parents don’t care about averageeducational outcomes; they care about the outcomes of nearby schools they could plausibly send their kids to. If they have the choice of several schools, they will want to choose the best one available to them.

City Journal’s 2026 College Rankings

Kevin Wallsten:

Are America’s colleges and universities delivering the education that students and the country need? Unfortunately, most are not. For City Journal’s 2026 College Rankings, we scored 115 of the country’s most prominent schools on 95 variables measuring campus governance, educational experience, student life, and career outcomes. On our 100-point scale, not one of these 115 schools scored above 80. Only seven earned a 70 or higher. Eighty-seven received scores below 60. The average score of an American school of higher education this year was an abysmal 50/100.

This assessment might sound harsh, but most Americans now seem to share it. A 2025 Pew survey, for example, found that 70 percent believe higher education is heading in the “wrong direction.” According to polling from Gallup, confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent in 2015 to only 38 percent today. More strikingly, only 31 percent say that a college education is “very important,” the lowest portion since Gallup first asked the question in 1978. The American public, in other words, is increasingly unsure whether college is “worth it.”

But whether college is a worthwhile investment ultimately depends on which college a student chooses to attend. Higher education’s failures are widespread, but our evaluation reveals that they are not uniformly distributed across campuses. The highest- and lowest-scoring schools are separated by more than 60 points on our 100-point scale, and our tracking over the last year shows that there’s an increasingly stark divide between colleges and universities working to solve their problems and those trying to ignore them. Some schools, for instance, have reinstated standardized testing for admissions, removed diversity statements from the faculty hiring process, eliminated DEI offices, and formally endorsed institutional neutrality. Many other schools, by contrast, have made no attempt to correct course, apparently convinced that public disillusionment with higher education is the result of “bad faith” critics and not their own practices.

The uneven performance of the country’s top colleges and universities raises difficult questions for prospective students. Where can they find a rigorous curriculum that exposes them to competing ideas? Which campuses have leaders who consistently defend academic standards, meritocracy, and open inquiry? Are some schools better than others in preparing graduates for responsible citizenship and productive careers?

Unfortunately, the best-known college rankings adopt too narrow a view about the purpose of higher education to provide much help in answering these questions. For better or worse, higher education does far more than simply confer a credential. Colleges and universities shape the minds, characters, and futures of their students. As former Barnard College president Judith Shapiro once said, the job of higher education is to develop an inner life rich enough that “the inside of your head is an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

The Parents Suing Schools Because Their Kids Got Bad Grades

Zusha Elinson:

When Weiwei Luo saw the report card saying her son needed to work on “cooperating with others,” the Silicon Valley mom demanded it be changed. When the school district declined, she called her lawyer.

What began last fall as a playground spat between third-graders has now escalated into a courtroom brawl: In a lawsuit filed in October, Luo calls the teacher’s comments “inaccurate and unsubstantiated,” and is asking a judge to order the district to rehear her case.

Time was when parents disciplined children for bringing home bad marks. Today, they often take a more adversarial approach, educators say, leaning on teachers and administrators to change grades in disputes that can even spill into court.

Ever since remote learning brought classrooms into living rooms during the pandemic, U.S. parents have grown more involved in and less enchanted with schools, according to numerous surveys. That includes scrutinizing how teachers evaluate their children.

Raises without gains: Teachers’ salaries increased, but many don’t make a living wage

Katherine Bowser:

A lot can change over the course of a decade, including the financial goals you’re working toward. As you progress in your career, you expect your salary to help bring those goals within reach. For a teacher who entered the classroom just out of college, that might mean affording a down payment on a home or starting a family; for a veteran teacher, it might mean paying off a mortgage or putting enough away to retire comfortably.

But while teachers’ salaries grew over the last decade, their buying power shrank as pandemic-era inflation drove up the cost of living—making such milestones harder to afford. The median sale price for a new home, for example, rose from $280,400 to $429,000 between the 2014–15 and 2024–25 academic years.¹

In this District Trendline, using data drawn from NCTQ’s District Policy Pathfinder, we examine teacher salaries in 133 of the largest districts²in the United States. We find that teacher salary growth over the past 10 years looks a lot different after accounting for inflation, and that in some large districts, salaries fall short of what teachers need to meet basic living expenses.

The average starting salary of a new teacher rose by 33%

HGSU Picketed My Course. Undergrads Shouldn’t Be a Bargaining Chip. | The Harvard Crimson

David S. Jones:

As the professor of General Education 1116: “Medical Ethics and History,” I would like to clarify the events that led to the disruption of my class on October 29.

On October 27, the Harvard Graduate Students Union emailed me to warn about a picket planned for October 29: “Based on the information we have, we expect that the picket line will interfere with your class. We are extending this communication in the hopes that you will choose to honor the picket line and cancel or relocate your class.” Despite some misgivings, I asked the Registrar if other spaces were available. None were — Harvard has few spaces that can hold 280 students.

My class had an in-person exam scheduled for October 29. Students had been working hard to prepare, and rescheduling the exam was not a good option. Changing an exam date is disruptive in any well-designed course. Moreover, the strike is open-ended: I had no idea when it might end, and I had no guarantee that any future date would be picket-free. Converting the exam to a take-home is pointless in our age of generative artificial intelligence. As a result, I concluded that it was not appropriate to cancel or reschedule the exam.

Parents scrambled to save The Croft School in Boston, Providence

John Hilliard:

Croft promised the environment of a diverse urban school, with the perks of a private institution for $35,000 a year — an affordable price, compared with other private schools. Families with financial need were offered steep discounts and aid at the for-profit school.

Teachers were beloved, offering not just rigorous instruction but robust social and emotional support.

All of that was ripped away on a Friday morning in mid-March, when an email from Croft’s board alerted Ullman and hundreds of other parents to the worst: Croft faced collapse. Within a few days, the board would accuse Scott Given, Croft’s now 46-year-old founder, of hiding $13 million in debt and fabricating financial records.

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“It’s not just a school, it’s a community,” Ullman told the Globe a few days after receiving the email, fighting tears. “It’s an absolutely incredible place.”

The school had one name, but it was really separate campuses in three locations: Jamaica Plain, the South End, and Providence.

Families at all three campuses launched desperate quests to raise enough money to stay open through June. But saving The Croft School took each in a different direction. Providence’s campus followed its own course through Rhode Island’s court system before it closed earlier this year.

UW Promised to Cut Remedial Math by a Third. Eleven Years Later, It Barely Moved

Brooke Smith:

In 2014, the UW System set a goal to cut the share of new freshmen who need remedial math by one-third, from 21% to 14%. It said Wisconsin needed this to “reach its full economic potential.”i More than a decade later, 17% of new UW freshmen from Wisconsin high schools start college in a math […]

In 2014, the UW System set a goal to cut the share of new freshmen who need remedial math by one-third, from 21% to 14%. It said Wisconsin needed this to “reach its full economic potential.”ⁱ More than a decade later, 17% of new UW freshmen from Wisconsin high schools start college in a math class that does not count toward their degree.

Employers see the same gap. In a winter 2026 survey by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, 64% of employers said they have employees who struggle to read or do math.ⁱⁱ The 2025 UW Remedial Course Report shows where that problem starts: in Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.ⁱⁱⁱ In fall 2025, freshmen from Wisconsin’s high schools filled 6,532 seats in remedial math and English courses at UW campuses.

Under Wisconsin law, the Universities of Wisconsin must report each year on how many new freshmen are required to take remedial math and English. The report breaks the numbers down by high school, showing which schools send the most students to college unprepared. Students are placed in remedial courses based on their placement test scores. It is worth noting that three universities (UW-Green Bay, UW-La Crosse, and UW-Parkside) are missing data altogether, so it is possible that the numbers are even higher than reported. Table 1 shows the percentage of fall 2025 new freshmen required to take a remedial course at each UW campus.Table 1.

Percentage of Fall 2025 New Freshmen Required to Take Remedial Courses by UW Campus

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Seventy years of unlearnable mathematics.

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

“governing for every family, every school, and every student, not just the ones your coalition finds convenient”

Colleston Morgan:

Last Tuesday, Wisconsin elected David Crowley as its next governor. He will be the first millennial and the first Black governor in our state’s history, and the first Governor from the city of Milwaukee proper in over 40 years.

That history is personal for many of us – myself included. David grew up in 53206, about 30 blocks down Burleigh from me. Days before the election, my mother asked incredulously, “Can David really win this?” For many of us, Wisconsin electing a Black man from our community to lead the state seemed unfathomable.

Representation matters, and as a son of the North Side and the parent of two Black girls, there is real power in seeing myself – in seeing them see themselves – in our political leadership. Tens of thousands of Milwaukee students who share our lived experiences just watched one of our own win the state’s highest office.

As Dr. Howard Fuller aptly put it, “Like any Black person with even a modicum of understanding…this is clearly a historic moment in Wisconsin.” In that light, I extend CFC’s congratulations to David, and to every candidate who earned the chance to serve this week.

A call to govern for every family, and every school

Governor-elect Crowley said it himself after his primary win: “My job is not to become the first, and if I do become the first, my job is to make sure I’m not the last.” We make sure he isn’t the last by ensuring the kids behind him – including nearly 50,000 publicly funded students on Milwaukee’s North Side – get the education they deserve.

Right now, far too many don’t.

In March, I laid out how Wisconsin Democrats have lost the electorate’s trust on K12 schools. And over the spring, I outlined CFC’s common-sense, cross-partisan agenda for addressing our state’s educational malaise:

Civics: Our Three Branches

Jonathan Turley:

“Democrats also have to deal with prior president such as Obama asserting the right to kill even Americans when they present a threat to our national security…”

I Am a Silicon Valley Veteran. We Are Sabotaging Ourselves.

Jaron Lanier:

Mr. Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality.

Silicon Valley has a special talent for offering amazing products and then screwing them up with ridiculous ideas about how those products should be used.

Few appreciate virtual reality more than I do. I came up with the term. There are simple pleasures in occasionally visiting alternate sensory worlds. It was only when virtual reality went mainstream around 2013 that I realized Americans would not embrace the technology for a generation. The reason: the awful ways key tech leaders talked about it. Recall the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg proclaiming that we would primarily live our lives through virtual reality headsets. Or the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen suggesting that most people were doomed to live virtually, with only elites retaining the privilege of living in the physical world. Predictably, the public did not embrace this vision.

We in Silicon Valley are doing it again with artificial intelligence, except worse — and at a larger scale. In its filing for its upcoming trillion-plus-dollar initial public offering, the leading A.I. lab Anthropic warned that its models could present “catastrophic or existential risks.”

I work on A.I. and use it and like it. The latest large models are genuinely useful. But rather than focusing on how these tools could improve lives, many leaders at the biggest A.I. companies are instead asking Americans to embrace the belief that this technology may kill us and our children, or at the very least drain us of all potential for livelihood and meaning. It should not be surprising then that based on the results of this last election, many Americans have come to disapprove of A.I. more than almost anything.

Notes on Redistributed Taxpayer Funds and k-12 Systems

Will Flanders:

One of the key myths about “underfunding” of public schools is that we need to get back to 2/3rds funding. In reality, the deal Evers and the legislature made got us to 2/3rds funding in 2022. This data from the non-partisan LFB.

docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lfb/infor…

The Death Knell of Digital Search

Kyle Chayka:

Lately, I’ve been having trouble finding stuff in my Gmail inbox. The Search function has become overzealous, jumping to summarize my conversations using artificial intelligence and skipping the actual addresses I’m attempting to search. It’s not just e-mail accounts, though; search is in crisis everywhere. Google Maps guesses where I want to go at a given time of day instead of simply listing places I’ve just searched for. When I try to use Google Search, the A.I.-overview function sometimes occupies my entire browser window, generating its own, not always correct, answers rather than directing me to relevant websites. Full-on A.I. mode skips the old blue links entirely.

Search has gotten so annoying, in fact, that it has become a problem for Google’s very business model. Companies pay Google to splash ads into search results that are relevant to their businesses—advertising stoves, say, to someone searching for kitchen-renovation tips. More than half of Google’s revenue comes from those ads. But, if users aren’t clicking through to external sites, because they’re relying on A.I. to answer their queries, then the ads that Google hosts are suddenly much less valuable. In a recent earnings call, Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, admitted that the company has been seeing “lower monetization” on A.I. searches. After the call, the stock of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell by nearly a quarter, down five hundred billion dollars, the largest single-day drop in its history. Even Google may not be too big to fail, as pessimism mounts about the possibility of Search ever again working the way it used to.

AdChoices

Just as Google has faltered in Search, use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surged. OpenAI’s consumer-product lead, Adam Fry, recently told the tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz that ChatGPT is siphoning users away from the older company: over the past year and a half, it has grown to handle one-fifth the volume of “search-like queries” that Google does. This acceleration only makes sense: a growing number of people now rely on A.I. chatbots as their primary windows to the internet, and they’re less likely to click out of those apps to ask the kinds of simple questions that they might once have turned to Google to answer. It doesn’t help that bots have lately grown much better at browsing the internet in real time, using virtual browsers and plug-ins, rather than simply generating answers from preëxisting data. Google has its own suite of A.I. products, Gemini, but they’ve lagged in popularity behind Anthropic’s Claudeand ChatGPT. The investment firm Menlo Ventures found that Gemini accounts for only nine per cent of A.I. spending for businesses in 2026, down from twenty-one per cent last year.

Misplaced Priorities

Dave Cieslewicz:

It has long been the case that there are three groups the Madison public school system’s board and administration don’t care about: well-behaved kids who just want to learn, teachers who just want classrooms they can control and taxpayers who just want their money to provide kids with a good education in an orderly and safe environment.

That point has been made abundantly clear over and over again, but it was driven home again today with a report on the use of “seclusion and restraint” at MMSD. The report showed that use of these measures is up significantly over the last year.

But here’s what struck me about it. The commentary in the news story focussed exclusively on the misbehaving kids as if they were the victims. One disapproving school board member suggested that the district should move to a “trauma-informed” protocol. It’s not clear what that would be, but she went on to say that a child’s poverty status should be taken into account somehow.

That’s just ludicrous. In the moment, when the kid is acting out, disrupting the class and possibly destroying the entire hour’s lesson for the whole class, the teacher is somehow supposed to first take into account the family’s annual net income?

I certainly understand that most of the behavioral problems in our schools originate with kids from families where the parents aren’t models of positive behavior, if they’re present at all. But that’s not something a teacher can fix. They can only deal with the behavior in real time. What this board member seems to be suggesting is that teachers should be even further restrained from keeping good order in their classrooms.

The Passing of an Exemplary Era

Andrew M. Manshel

The passing of former New York City Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis has led me to reflect on the changing nature of civic leadership.(1) Gordon was a remarkable person. He was born into a barrier breaking academic, African American family in Chicago. He was educated at Williams and Harvard. As Parks Commissioner (and one the city’s first Black’s to be appointed Commissioner) Gordon was the city official who green-lighted both the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (now the Bryant Park Corporation). He was a board member of BPRC (and the New York Public Library) during my entire tenure with BPRC. He also founded Jazz at Lincoln Center and was a long-time board member of the Public Theater.

It is possible that if the current City Hall were presented with a proposal to establish a not-for-profit to administer either Bryant Park or Central Park, or both, the proposals would meet with at least some skepticism. This City Hall if focused on parks in low-income communities. They would analyze the proposal through the lens of suspicion of the public sector. The promotion of possible gentrification of the areas around improved parks would likely engender a good deal of internal discussion.

There are two issues here. One is the passing of a cadre of wise, powerful, public spirited civic leaders. The other is a perception by those born after about 1980 that cities are safe places, and that, if anything, economic activity in downtowns needs to be regulated rather than promoted. No doubt young, progressive elected officials like Chi Ossé, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Tiffany Caban assume that midtown Manhattan has always been safe, busy and clean and can’t imagine otherwise.

Classical Music’s Misguided Quest for “Relevance”

Heather Mac Donald:

On February 2, 2026, the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra voted to terminate its contract with conductor Andris Nelsons. Nelsons had served as the BSO’s music director since 2014, following the retirement of James Levine. The decision had nothing to do with financial matters, according to the orchestra’s president and CEO, Chad Smith; ticket sales had risen under Nelsons. Rather, the board had concluded that “Andris was not the right leader for the entirety of our institution and our community,” Smith told Nelsons’s agents.

The termination was publicly announced on March 6, to widespread disbelief. As recently as January 2024, the board had rewritten Nelsons’s contract to renew automatically, citing its “deep confidence” in his “artistic leadership.” Now, just two years later, it had decided that the BSO and Nelsons were “not aligned on future vision,” as the March 6 press release put it.

Orchestra members were not consulted on the decision to oust their beloved maestro. They were as surprised as Nelsons and the public were. A protest movement sprang up within days. BSO musicians started wearing red boutonnieres on stage, in honor of the red-and-white flag of Nelsons’s homeland, Latvia. Patrons distributed the flowers before BSO concerts.

The situation apparently grew intolerable to management. In late July at Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, the orchestra announced that the #RedFlowerCampaign violated its rules against the unauthorized distribution of materials. Local businesses in Stockbridge and Lenox took up the slack, handing out the flowers on their own premises.

BSO leadership had hoped to deflect responsibility for the prospective firing. “We want . . . this to be his decision and message,” Smith wrote to Nelsons’s representatives. Nelsons wouldn’t play along. This “was not the decision I anticipated or wanted,” he said in a statement after the March press release.

“Enrollment decreases district-wide (Madison) may be part of why more elementary school classes are falling below the policy’s levels”

Erin Gretzinger:

Madison schools are down about 300 students from last year despite the district’s estimates that enrollment would remain flat.

Bob Soldner, assistant superintendent of financial services, said in an interview prior to the report that smaller class sizes would be one impact of decreased enrollment because teachers had already signed their employment contracts for the school year. He said the district wouldn’t want to “disrupt our educational programming” by reducing teaching staff following the enrollment drop.

Across the district, Soldner said, classrooms are more often closer to the class size policy’s minimum number of students rather than the maximum number of students. “That comes with a cost,” he added.

Cindy Green, the district’s assistant superintendent for strategy and innovation, said in a statement that some smaller class sizes are due to students changing schools and unique complexities with determining classes at individual schools. Other smaller classes are the result of intentional choices by the district, she said.

A majority of elementary class sections below district goals are at schools participating in the state’s Achievement Gap Reduction program. The program aims to improve academic performance at schools serving more low-income families, in part through the help of smaller class sizes. Out of 32 elementary schools in the district, 20 are eligible for the program, according to state data.

“We know that smaller class sizes allow for more personalized instruction and attention, which nurture and promote student success,” Green said.

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

“Overfunded”

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

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

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices 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?

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

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

Seclusion and restraint incidents increase in Madison schools

Taegan King:

Incidents of seclusion and restraint in Madison School District schools increased last school year, and most students impacted have disabilities, according to new data from the District.

During the 2025-26 school year, the District recorded 774 incidents of seclusion, restraint or both, up from 506 incidents during 2024-25, according to data shared in an Oct. 1 Madison School Board update. Elementary school incidents increased the most, at 673 compared to 430 the year before.

During the 2025-26 school year, the district recorded 63 incidents of seclusion and restraint in middle schools, up from 53 during 2024-25. In high schools, 38 incidents took place, compared with 23 the year before.

Seclusion and restraint, a controversial practice, are used in Madison schools when “a student’s behavior presents a clear, present, and imminent risk to the physical safety of the student or others, and it is the least restrictive intervention feasible,” according to the District’s seclusion and restraint policy.

Seclusion is the “involuntary confinement of a student” separate from the rest of the class in another room or area that the student can’t leave, the policy says, but the room cannot be locked.

Restraint “immobilizes or reduces the ability of a student to freely move” and does not include briefly touching a student’s hand, shoulder, arm or back to calm them.

Socratic Tutor

JaneStreet

Jane Street just put an AI skill on GitHub. It’s not a trading bot.

It’s a strict Socratic tutor:
→ Starts with a diagnostic of what you already know
→ Builds a skill map with levels from 0 to 5
→ Asks one question at a time instead of handing you answers
→ Brings old material back with spaced review
→ Ends with a final assessment

Copy it into your agent’s skills folder and say “teach me [anything]”. Works in a normal chatbot too: paste the SKILL.md.

Explore Minnesota school districts, compare neighboring communities, and follow changes over time.

Closed Loop

Includes attendance, enrollment, finances, test results, educators, discipline and graduation, with selected comparison exports.

The School

Donald Barthelme:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that … that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems … and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that … you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably … you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe … well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander … well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

HGSU Picketed My Course. Undergrads Shouldn’t Be a Bargaining Chip

David Jones:

David S. Jones ’93 is the Chair of the Harvard History of Science Department, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, and a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

As the professor of General Education 1116: “Medical Ethics and History,” I would like to clarify the events that led to the disruption of my class on October 29.

On October 27, the Harvard Graduate Students Union emailed me to warn about a picket planned for October 29: “Based on the information we have, we expect that the picket line will interfere with your class. We are extending this communication in the hopes that you will choose to honor the picket line and cancel or relocate your class.” Despite some misgivings, I asked the Registrar if other spaces were available. None were — Harvard has few spaces that can hold 280 students.

My class had an in-person exam scheduled for October 29. Students had been working hard to prepare, and rescheduling the exam was not a good option. Changing an exam date is disruptive in any well-designed course. Moreover, the strike is open-ended: I had no idea when it might end, and I had no guarantee that any future date would be picket-free. Converting the exam to a take-home is pointless in our age of generative artificial intelligence. As a result, I concluded that it was not appropriate to cancel or reschedule the exam.

I believe that the union knew the Thursday session would be an exam. The planned interference proceeded, nonetheless. There was a picket outside Emerson Hall before the class began, but students were able to access the lecture hall. The exam started as scheduled at 10:30 a.m. The noise quickly escalated and continued, more or less, for 75 minutes.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Trifecta Tax Increases & “blue ribbon commission”

Will Flanders Notes

The blue ribbon commission won’t find $2 billion a year to pay for this in the couch cushions.

Wisconsin Governor-Elect David Crowley confirms he will repeal Act 10 and Right to Work legislation. When told that will raise taxes by $2 billion every year, Crowley responds with "We’re gonna couple all of this with a blue ribbon commission." https://t.co/9uJSj6Un84

— Dan O’Donnell (@DanODonnellShow) November 8, 2026

——-

David Blaska

Just last winter, Milwaukee schools over-spent its budget by $46 million. Two summers ago, Milwaukee’s school district superintendent quit after missing financial reporting deadlines. When he did get around to it, he submitted bad numbers. The state penalized the district by withholding $42 million in state aid.

——-

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

“Overfunded”

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

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 courageous choices 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?

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

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

NYC ‘principal’ — who’s also a rapper — being paid nearly $200K to run a school that doesn’t exist

David Spector

The promotion came with a $50,000 raise to principal-level compensation. A project director of a planned school usually becomes the new school’s principal.

But Haraguchi-Combs’ new school — a proposed FiDi institution focusing on artificial intelligence and computer tech — was never approved or opened.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels torpedoed the proposal in April after woke backlash over its merit-based admissions model and general fear of AI in schools.

Yet the windfall continued for Haraguchi-Combs, 33.

In his previous role as assistant principal at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem, he made $141,960 a year, according to public records.

A Manhattan Center official confirmed that Haraguchi-Combs is no longer at the school.

When The Post confronted the educator this week outside his shimmering Downtown Brooklyn high-rise, Haraguchi-Combs refused to say where he worked.

“You came to my house? Outrageous,” he barked at a reporter.

Is it time for Wisconsin to teach students about the dangers of communism?

Scott Niederjohn, PhD

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

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

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

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

“it is rare to watch an elected official willingly walk the plank”

Alicia Nieves:

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

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

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

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

——-

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

There’s No Such Thing as a Stock-Market Bubble

Jeff Yass

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

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

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

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

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

Civics: This is The Chud Veto

“It’s Not Real”

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

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

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

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

——-

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

——-

Messaging, media, and communication count, so note:

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

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

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

Daniel Buck

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

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

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

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

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

Why school bond and tax increase elections failed across Texas

Elizabeth Sander

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Competition doesn’t weaken public schools. Complacency does”

Superintendent Maine:

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

They shouldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

That means:

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

“A K–12 finance agenda aimed at transparency, sustainability, and productivity can help state policymakers navigate the decade ahead”

Aaron Garth Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

———

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

“Overfunded”

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

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 courageous choices 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?

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

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jill Tucker, Hanna Zakharenko:

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

On “Weaponizing History”

Jack Henneman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

State officials ask WV Supreme Court for more time on school funding lawsuit, cite upcoming session

Amelia Ferrell Knisely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

SFUSD data shows how families ranked schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signaling and Employer Learning with Instruments

Gaurab Aryal, Manudeep Bhuller and Fabian Lange:

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

———-

More.

Louisiana Aerospace Education Opportunities

Tricia

Louisiana isn’t starting from zero on aerospace.

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

Gates Foundation is spending $400 million on AI in schools

Sydney Lake:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civics: A study finds that data centers have had only a marginal impact on residential electricity prices.

Shannon Osaka

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colleges Struggle to Stop ‘Melt’: Students Who Commit, Then Don’t Show Up

Roshan Fernandez:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Record-breaking retraction: scholarly publisher pulls 1,400 conference papers on one day

Miryam Naddaf:

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

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

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

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

Joint Statement Regarding State Criminal Charges and Irregularities in the Supreme Court of Arkansas’s Office of Professional Programs and the Arkansas Bar Examination

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, November 5, 2026 –

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

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

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

“Secular increases in college completion owe largely to increases among individuals with low levels of GCA”

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

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

Abstract

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

Time to think about the kids, parents, taxpayers, workers, mobile retirees

Mike Nichols

— and who — matters most:

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

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

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

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

Why public schools nationwide are facing a massive drop in student enrollment

Brian Mann

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

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

——

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

Texas Dems vowed seismic education change. Here’s how schools could change for millions of students.

Megan Menchaca:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Google’s AI training for teachers

Tyler Kingkade:

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

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

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

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

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

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: One Party Control

Ann Althouse summary:

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

———

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

———-

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

———

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

“Overfunded”

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

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 courageous choices 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?

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

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Sultan Mehmood & Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

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

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “The Government That Can’t Balance a Budget Wants to Run the Company That Lands Rockets Backward”

Don Surber:

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

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

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

Twitter may be the real target of their disaffection.

Universities as Incubators of Mass Uprising

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

From Moscow to Manhattan: The Soviet Logic Ruining NYC Schools

Emmanuel Peralta Castro; Antoine Peralta Castro

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

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

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

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

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

Madison School Board member gets deferred prosecution deal

Chris Rickert:

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

“Overfunded”

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

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

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices 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?

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

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]