School Information System

Richard Phelps

In late 2024, the citizens of Massachusetts voted in favor of Question 2, which prohibits the continuation of the MCAS exam graduation requirement. Technically, however, it changes only one paragraph of state law, leaving other sections in apparent contradiction. The Massachusetts legislature must resolve the ambiguity.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) is one product of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA). Other components of the holistic reform included extra funding for public schools, more school choice, and an independent statewide school inspectorate. In the years following, Massachusetts students would rise to the top on national and international assessments.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), in both person power and funding, embodied the main force behind Question 2. It not only opposed the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement, but any other external exam with direct consequences for students or teachers. It also employed some long-debunked research tropes to argue against testing.

The Voices for Academic Equity Coalition organized the most prominent entities opposed to Question 2. Included were some of Massachusetts’ leading political, business, and non-profit organizations.

The governor appointed the K–12 Statewide Graduation Council after Question 2’s passage, which included a wide variety of stakeholders. They met throughout 2025 to devise a plan to replace the MCAS examination as a graduation requirement. They proposed a new program of statewide end-of-course tests, along with locally designed portfolios and capstone projects.

Question 2 prohibits only the retention of the MCAS exam graduation requirement. This may have the beneficial effect of encouraging the Commonwealth to consider quality control over the entirety of the K–12 program, rather than just at its end point. It is recommended that such a quality control framework comprise four elements:

Christine Black:

And yet, recommendations against lockdowns for college students did not curtail mandates and restrictive policies that harmed them. College offers young people a time to question authorities, to explore new ideas, to have adventures with friends while socializing and bonding. Classical liberal arts education embraces the ideals of sharpening students’ critical and creative thinking; provoking them to examine divergent perspectives; and teaching them to strengthen their oral and written arguments. Yet, during the Covid period, colleges and universities all over the country followed government and bureaucratic mandates while discouraging and even punishing students’ critical thinking and questioning.

When Houston returned to school in fall of 2020, it felt like a ghost town to him with students working on classes online from their rooms. Students were forced to wear masks outside, he said, as campus police surveilled them. On the first offense, they were fined, and on the second, they were sent home, “as 19-year-olds,” he said incredulously. He described regularly carrying snacks while walking outside, so he could remove the mandated face mask and breathe freely. Late one night, he visited outside with his cousin whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. They sat about 15 feet apart, talking. A campus police officer approached to force them to apply the mask. They said they were eating. 

“You’re not eating consistently enough,” the guard said. “Put the mask on.”

Police banging on dorm room doors when college friends gathered; secret tip lines college administrators provided for turning in non-compliant fellow students; administrators barring students from leaving campus for months; teacher firings; student expulsions; shaming and bullying the non-compliant – Covid-era college students shared stories like these.

Face Masks While Cross-Country Running; Required Covid Shots

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A deep dive into the implications of Dane County Madison’s Public health lockdown mandates is long overdue

Chris Rickert:

58-year-old Madison school teacher was charged with four felonies Friday for exchanging sexually explicit messages and images with a 15-year-old Texas girl, according to a criminal complaint in Dane County Circuit Court.

David C. Fawcett, of Madison, faces one count of sexual exploitation of a child and three counts of possession of child pornography for the messages he shared over Snapchat between mid-June and late August, the complaint says.

Fawcett, who has no prior criminal record in Wisconsin, was arrested Wednesday at his home on the Near East Side and given a signature bond Friday during an initial court hearing, meaning he is not required to post any money to be released before trial. As a condition of his bail, he is barred from social media and cannot have any unsupervised contact with minors.

Mark Hemingway:

In December, bestselling author and humorist David Sedaris wrote a New Yorker magazine essay about a recent trip to Portland, Oregon. While on a walk to a donut shop, he “lost count of the strung-out addicts I passed on my way” before eventually encountering four homeless people huddled around an empty baby carriage and smoking drugs right on the sidewalk. Moments later, a dog belonging to one of the addicts rushed out and bit him. 

Following the incident, Sedaris, a former methamphetamine addict himself, was struck by the fact that most people in Portland didn’t seem concerned about the state of the city – even the medical worker who treated him appeared more concerned with the dog’s well-being than what had happened to him: 

Brad Weisenstein:

California’s taxes were No. 1 at 89 cents per gallon. Michigan was 66 cents a year ago but increased to 87 cents to claim the No. 2 spot in the January federal survey.

Heading west out of Illinois can save 37 cents in taxes by buying in Missouri or Iowa.

Illinois’ practice of applying sales taxes to gasoline after the motor fuel tax is charged effectively creates a tax-on-tax situation for drivers. This has led some residents, particularly those near state borders, to fill up elsewhere.

Mark Janus:

The employees stayed in four and five-star hotels like the Bellagio and Venetian. Some flew to Sin City costing taxpayers over $1,000 for each person in airfare alone. I recently checked prices and found round trip airfares for less than $500 from Chicago Midway to Las Vegas. The price tag for all this taxpayer funded frivolity was over $26.6 million.

No wonder the Chicago Teachers Union is asking for more money from the Illinois Legislature.

The Office of Inspector General in their report dated November 12, 2025, found the professional development conferences these employees attended were also conducted in Chicago. Yep, right in their own backyard. But alas, in 2023 one of the years the conference was offered, only twenty-three employees elected to attend in Chicago. And, when it was offered virtually only one person attended between 2022 and 2024.

Evidently, it’s more fun to go to Las Vegas on the taxpayer dime than to go across town in Chicago.

Garry Tan:

The California Policy Center’s analysis lays it bare: California’s public sector unions collected $921 million in 2018 alone. That’s not campaign contributions—that’s annual revenue. The prize they’re protecting? According to Govern For California, state and local governments spend $240 billion per year on public employee compensation and benefits.

“There is no special interest in California that wields more influence over state and local politics than public sector unions. At every level of government, from the office of the governor to a school board managing a district with only a few hundred students, public sector unions are omnipresent. With rare exceptions, to defy their agenda is certain political suicide.”— Edward Ring, The Financial Power of California’s Government Unions – California Globe (californiaglobe.com)

The California Teachers Association alone has 325,000 members and $356 million in annual revenue. Unlike private sector unions that negotiate with management controlled by shareholders, public sector unions can elect their own management—the politicians who depend on union endorsements. That’s not collective bargaining. That’s a protection racket.

Robert Pondiscio:

In this respect, those 19th-century statesmen turned out to be fair—if accidental—cognitive scientists. Long before anyone spoke of background knowledge, schema, or cognitive load, they hit upon a foundational truth about literacy: Language proficiency depends on access to a common stock of knowledge that writers assume and readers recognize. Comprehension is not a content-neutral “skill” that can be reduced to decoding symbols on a page and finding the main idea. It’s a sense-making process that rests to an extraordinary degree on references, idioms, allusions, and stories that are common and broadly shared among the literate.

That insight helps explain why Texas, alone among states, has taken the unusual step of proposing a specific, statewide list of literary works—books, plays, poems, speeches, and stories that all students would be expected to encounter over the course of K–12 schooling. The list is not an attempt to freeze culture in place or settle arguments about the canon once and for all. It’s honest about what literacy actually requires: not exposure to print in the abstract, but familiarity with the texts and traditions that enrich, inform, and structure the English language.

An essay on my Substack by my AEI colleague Annika Hernandez anticipates—and answers—many of the objections now being leveled against the Texas list. As she observes, “Many educators have forgotten that, no less than history and science, English class exists to deliver a body of knowledge: specifically, knowledge of the literary canon” [emphasis mine].

Jernesto:

I know what you might be thinking: “If you can ‘vibe code’ your way through it, the problem wasn’t actually hard.”

I think that misses the point. It’s not that AI is good for hard problems, it’s not even that good for easy problems. I’m confident that my third manual rewrite of a module would be much better than anything the AI can output. But I am also a pragmatist.

If I can get a solution that is “close enough” in a fraction of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI route. And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my pragmatism.

At the end of the day, I am a Builder. I like building things. The faster I build, the better. Even if I wanted to reject AI and go back to the days where the Thinker’s needs were met by coding, the Builder in me would struggle with the inefficiency.

Even though the AI almost certainly won’t come up with a 100% satisfying solution, the 70% solution it achieves usually hits the “good enough” mark.

Jimmy Percival:

The Fourth Amendment is an essential safeguard of Americans’ privacy and personal liberty. Its protections must not be eroded. But they also must not be misappropriated by those seeking to subvert legitimate law enforcement. The left has done that for decades, particularly in the area of immigration enforcement.

Multiple media outlets report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been using so-called administrative warrants in Minnesota to arrest illegal aliens with final orders of removal in their homes. The Department of Homeland Security welcomes the opportunity to explain this reasonable and lawful approach to the American people and federal courts.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It also provides that where a warrant is required, it must be supported by probable cause and specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Most Americans are familiar with this process. If a police officer witnesses a crime, the criminal generally may be arrested without a warrant. But if the police come to a home to make an arrest, police generally must obtain a judicial warrant before entering without permission.

Nicholas S. Zeppos

Yet Baumol’s cost disease has its theoretical and practical limits. There is nothing in his work that suggests that rising costs are inevitable across the entire institution. Colleges are large, complex enterprises with significant administrative services that parallel those seen in the for-profit world. Review an organizational chart, particularly at a research university, and you will see a vast number of vice presidents overseeing finance, facilities, human resources, technology, legal affairs, and communications and marketing. Just like Apple or General Motors, colleges run payroll, manage technology, build out the physical plant, and participate in a growing architecture of compliance, reporting, and media scrutiny. Look at these areas across time and you’ll see that any number of breakthroughs, particularly in technology, have streamlined these functions.

Higher education therefore contains two spheres. One is the instruction-and-research core that defines Baumol’s cost disease. The other is an administrative and operational infrastructure that, in principle, should behave more like the increasingly efficient sectors of the economy. Treating these as one undifferentiated “cost problem” produces bad governance and misguided policy: We chase illusory savings in the classroom while resigning ourselves to rising costs in areas that should be getting cheaper per student, faculty member, and staff member.

This is not to exempt the core from scrutiny. At some institutions the use of technology has become a central part of scaling teaching and has allowed for dramatic improvement in access. AI holds great promise for making advising, registration, and career services much more efficient. But for those institutions that remain wedded to the human interactions we find so valuable, technology may only help at the margins, leaving the most educationally valuable activities such as discussion, mentoring, supervision, and individualized assessment, firmly in place. Many of the proposed “productivity” gains at the core of higher education are simply reductions in the quality of the product — larger classes, thinner feedback, fewer contact hours, more contingent labor.

Inquirer:

The city plans to open new schools (in part by using empty space in existing buildings), expand access to criteria-based middle school programs, create additional career and technical education pathways at neighborhood high schools, and update recreational and performance spaces. These investments lean into the district’s relative strengths. Suburban schools may have more resources, but they don’t have options like the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, or Central High School.

The plan, of course, is not perfect. One proposal the district should reconsider, for example, is the relocation of Lankenau High School. The facilities plan recommends relocating Lankenau to Roxborough High School, which would make it difficult to offer many of its nature-oriented programs. The district may be better off keeping Lankenau and closing Roxborough, which has just over 600 students and test scores that are lower than district-wide averages.

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The 46,500-student district, which has grappled with a longer-term enrollment slide over the past decade, projects 3,000 fewer enrollees over the next two years, Skipper said Wednesday. This year, the district said it lost 1,670 students compared to the previous year. Enrollment decline is driving down revenue, while fixed costs like “historically high health care premiums,” out-of-district special education spending and yellow bus transportation are squeezing the district, Skipper said.

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Madison taxpayers , are increasing taxes and funding bricks and mortar amidst declining enrollment.

Alina Snisarenko

It’s not just higher grades that are being given out to more students, according to Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa who teaches about grade inflation. 

Maharaj says grades in high schools tend to cluster at two different ends: around the cutoff grade for a passing mark, which is 50 per cent, and at the higher end, in the A+ range. 

“There’s increased pressure on teachers to get students to pass their classes either by helping them learn more, or by artificially inflating their grades to get them above the cutoff mark so that they achieve the credit,” said Maharaj. 

“All of the incentives in the system are for teachers to do that.”

Scott McKay

But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success.

Another way to say this is that the destruction of wealth — personal, community, and national — has been the chief philosophical pursuit at the Washington Post for quite some time.

Ronald Reagan summed up that philosophy pretty well:

Well, Bezos has been subsidizing it since 2013.

The Washington Post has been losing money hand over fist for more than a dozen years now, and it’s proof of the veracity of another famous saying, this one by Charles Krauthammer, among others: “That which cannot continue, won’t.”

You can’t keep losing money forever. Things don’t exist to diminish. If you don’t produce anything, you will ultimately perish.

And the Washington Post has been losing its owners money for two decades now.

Yes, but money isn’t everything, right?

It’s too bad that sanctimony can’t be monetized. Otherwise this would sustain the Post into the next millennium:

Liam Beran:

Amy Robertson keeps a pretty close eye on the Madison school district. She is part of a group of parents who have raised concerns about the performance of Van Hise principal Rebecca Stein and she tries to keep up with school board meetings.

She rates the board’s performance “fine, but not amazing,” but is a fan of seven-year board member Nicki Vander Meulen, whom she says “makes it a lot easier as a parent to understand what’s going on” by asking questions at board meetings and sharing information on social media. Nevertheless she is okay with the fact that both incumbents on the April 7 ballot — including Vander Meulen — have challengers. “Competition forces people to articulate what they stand for. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to know what’s important to them.”

One of Robertson’s concerns is with the school board’s lack of clarity over how the district is spending the funds raised through the November 2024 referendum — $100 million for operating funds and $507 million for capital projects. Combined, the referendums add $676 in annual property taxes on the average-value Madison home, estimated to be around $481,000. The capital funds are being used to supportrenovations at 10 schools while the operating funds are for staff pay and benefits increases, and to support existing district services.

The resulting property tax increases, says Robertson, are pushing her to the “max” of what she can afford: “Those [referendums] look a lot more real on a property tax bill than a ballot.”

Attendees at a Jan. 13 candidate forum held by the Lapham Marquette Parent-Teacher Group raised other concerns about the board, including whether members ensure that parental complaints are brought to the attention of administrative officials. Parents also wanted to see action to improve student safety and address principal turnover at the district’s middle schools. 

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Deepa Javeri:

Only a handful of students got perfect scores on the AMC 12. Then AI came along.

In the fall of 2025, as students readied for the AMC 12, the first in the series of math contests that lead to the International Mathematical Olympiad, a frightening realization started taking hold in the country’s elite math circles: Cheating had become so entrenched in the competition that it was threatening the very existence of the country’s most prestigious math contests.

The AMC 12, formally known as the American Mathematics Competition, had faced issues in the past with stolen exams. Last year, though, was different. It was not a question of a few leaked copies of tests passed from hand to hand a day before the competition. On Chinese sites like RedNote and WeChat, as well as Discord and even Reddit in the United States, copies of the yet-to-be-administered exams were openly for sale.

Katherine Bowser

Drawing on data from our Teacher Contract Database, we examine master’s degree premiums across four areas:

• State policy landscape: how state mandates influence district implementation of master’s degree premiums.
• Longitudinal trends: changes in the average master’s degree premium through time.
• District policy landscape: how master’s degree premium structures and costs vary across districts.
• Opportunity cost: the financial investment required from districts to pay for master’s degree premiums—and what they’re giving up in exchange.

Chris Freeland: 

Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.

WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.

Laura Meckler, Lydia Sidhom, Eric Lau

John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said that when programs reach their hiring goals, it’s largely because they are “overtly discriminatory.”

“These kinds of programs have certainly discriminated against White candidates,” he said. “They’ve certainly discriminated against men. They’ve certainly discriminated against Asian candidates. To be fair, you have to judge individuals on their individual performance.”

Experts in the field do not consider Asians to be underrepresented. In 2015, they made up about 13.6 percent of all faculty at top research schools compared with 10.5 percent of undergraduate students. That increased to about 17.3 percent by 2024 versus 13.6 percent of students.

Now advocates for greater diversity fear progress toward their goals will stall or reverse.

John Chapman

FREMONT, Neb. (WOWT) – The mother of a Fremont High School student who was struck by an SUV during a student protest said she is angry with school officials and believes they should have prevented the demonstration.

The student was hit by a red SUV while participating in an anti-ICE protest outside the school. She is now recovering at home with bumps and bruises.

“I think it mostly got me in my legs because my knees is what’s really bugging me right now,” the student said. “All I remember is that it was red.”

The girl’s mother said the incident should never have happened and that students were not informed enough to organize such a protest.

“First of all, I don’t feel she’s informed enough to have made a decision like the one that she made by doing a protest,” the mother said. “I don’t feel that any of the young people that were involved know enough about what’s going on to do or set up a protest because I feel they don’t know what they’re protesting.”

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Franklin High School student walkout sparks community debate over timing and purpose.

1,360 Franklin 4k-3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Chad Aldeman:

According to data released in December from the National Center for Education Statistics, public schools added 118,000 employees last year even as they served 135,000 fewer students.

You may have heard this story before. In fact, I wrote a nearly identical sentence around this time last year.

But enrollment keeps falling as staffing levels rise. Since 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic, student enrollment is down 1.4 million (a 2.8% decrease) while employment is up by 479,000 (a gain of 7.3%).

Part of the staffing gains comes as the result of schools adding 90,000 teacher jobs. Combined with declining enrollment numbers, that has allowed most states and districts to effectively lower their teacher-to-student ratios.

Elsa Johnson:

In 2023, one month into my freshman year at Stanford University, an upperclassman was showing me her dorm room — a prized single in one of the nicest buildings on campus. As she took me around her space, which included a private bathroom, a walk-in shower and a great view of Hoover Tower, she casually mentioned that she had lived in a single all four years she had attended Stanford.

I was surprised. Most people don’t get the privilege of a single room until they reach their senior year.

That’s when my friend gave me a tip: Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation”.

She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”.

Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions.

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Stanford students are perfectly schooled to be in government. Good at gaming the system, no shame, horrible values. Defund Stanford and the rest.

Jared Diamond and Louise Radnofsky:

Taken together, the charges in Thursday’s indictment offered the latest reminder of how pervasive game-rigging has become in the era of legal sports gambling in America: No level of basketball is safe.

“This,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said, “was a massive scheme that enveloped the world of college basketball.”

At the center of the indictment are a pair of gamblers named Shane Hennen and Marves Fairley. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania say the pair placed five- and six-figure bets on contests that were fixed. A lawyer for Fairley declined to comment on Thursday. Hennen’s lawyer, Todd Leventhal, said Friday that Hennen’s betting losses were far bigger than his winnings.

“He’s got to be the worst inside gambler ever,” Leventhal said.

Hennen and Fairley are two of the same men who are facing charges in New York for allegedly conspiring with athletes to manipulate their performance and using inside information in half-a-dozen NBA games in 2023 and 2024.

But before the scheme arrived at gyms on the campuses of Coppin State and Abilene Christian, it originated on the other side of the world—in the coastal province of Jiangsu, China.

WMC Foundation:

Since 2000, non-instructional staff positions have increased by over 8,000, with school or district administrator positions increasing by nearly 700. This means that during this period, for every eight students lost, public schools added one non instructional staff member. Meanwhile, for every teacher lost, districts hired three non-instructional staff, including one additional administrator – effectively replacing educators with non-teaching roles at an accelerated pace.

The bloat in Wisconsin’s education system, especially over the last two decades, is undeniable. As a state, our primary concern should be less focused on how much money is allocated to public schools, rather it should be focused on how we are spending the money we are currently investing.

David Blaska:

The chickens have come home to roost. Over half of Wisconsin employers say the state’s K-12 education system does not adequately prepare students for the workforce, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce finds.

Ann Jacobs:

For the 1st time ever, the Wisc. Elections Commission filed a “friend of the court” brief. Why? Because the City of Madison was essentially arguing they didn’t have to count absentee ballots. Which is preposterous.

Emma Petit:

Kristina M. Johnson’s project was personal. Announcing a goal of hiring 100 underrepresented and nonwhite scholars, Johnson, then president of Ohio State University, drew on her background.

She described her experience as a young woman studying engineering in the 1970s. It took her a long time to realize she could become a professor, she said, because it was only men who taught her basic coursework.

John Kass:

Today, I stand before you as something of an oddity worthy of exhibition by PT Barnum, perhaps in a cage:

An old newspaperman, and even worse, a conservative newspaperman.

My good friend Prof. Charles Lipson, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a frequent guest on my podcast, the Chicago Way, offered some advice on this talk.

“You’re not a professor, so don’t act like one at Hillsdale. You’re a reporter. Talk like a reporter on the ground. Not from 30,000 feet.”

So here I am on the sidewalk. A gumshoe reporter without a Camel filter.

As some of you may know, I was a reporter and nationally syndicated lead columnist at the Chicago Tribune for some 40 years, that is until leftist billionaire George Soros showed the Tribune and me that Soros was boss.

The Jacobin, pro-Soros newsroom union at the Tribune defamed me and I had to get out. The Jacobins demanded that I apologize and submit to a struggle session.

I refused.

Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

A longer version of this essay was originally published by the Eternally Radical Idea.

Suppose you’re a democratic socialist who has been invited to speak at a college campus. Who do you think would be more likely to try to silence you, a left-leaning woman or a right-wing man?

It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.

Walt Hunter:

At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year.

I’ve seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?

Rick Esenberg:

Madison is correct in noting that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right in the sense that the legislature has no obligation to permit it at all. BUT if it does and people choose to cast their ballot in the way specified by law, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that Madison has a constitutional obligation to count their legally cast vote.

Quinton Klabon:

Oh, no…

Madison, Wisconsin, picked Illustrative Math for kindergarten through 8th grades.

Shoot. Much discussion occurred about math identities, meaning making instead of memorization, and significant reading to solve problems.

Milwaukee also uses it for 6th through 8th.

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“The commercial math-education sector is flooded with ineffective math programs and T professional development marketed as “research-based.” But that can mean almost anything, from small case studies to opinion framed as research.”

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2014: 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

Maud Maron:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.

The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.

No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.

About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.

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English 10.

Chris Rickert:

The Mount Horeb School District has fired a coach accused of engaging in “inappropriate communications” with underage students, district Superintendent Steve Salerno said Tuesday.

Dave Chancellor had been a Mount Horeb High School track-and-field and girls cross-country coach. On Monday, Salerno and Mount Horeb Police Chief Doug Vierck issued a statement saying police had been made aware Friday of “concerns regarding inappropriate communications between a coach, non-teacher employee, of the Mount Horeb School District, Mr. David Chancellor, and juvenile students.”

“Preventative measures have been put in place to ensure this person is not on or around any school district property,” the two said.

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704 Mount Horeb 4k-3rd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Claire Cain Miller

But while average scores have declined for everyone, boys are doing much worse. On standardized tests, they score lower than girls in reading in nearly every school district in the United States, and at every grade level that tests are given, according to a new analysis from researchers at the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. The reading gap exists around the world too.

Boys’ struggles with reading aren’t new: They have scored lower than girls since standardized tests began a half-century ago (the gaps were largest for students in the 1990s). But in contrast with efforts to encourage girls in math and science, which have helped shrink their achievement gap with boys, little attention or effort has been focused on improving boys’ reading skills.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Helen Andrews:

The purpose of the ban was to ease pressure on students. The Chinese word neijuan, literally “inward rolling,” describes pointless competition that grows ever more demanding without making anyone better off. Authorities believed that education was becoming like that, shackling students to their desks and draining their parents’ resources without actually making anyone smarter. Competition had long since reached the point of diminishing returns and was even doing more harm than good.

“The tutoring industry has proven resilient.”

The ban is still in place, but the tutoring industry has proven resilient. Tutoring has moved underground. Classes are smaller or one-on-one to avoid detection by authorities. Smaller classes are more expensive, with the price of sessions reportedly doubling in some cities. Why do parents pay these higher prices and students continue to submit to this grim slog? Because life outcomes in China are determined by high-stakes testing and by one high-stakes test in particular: the gaokao.

——-

The coauthor of this book on the gaokao says the best balance for his own kids would be to send them to Chinese schools until 7th grade and American schools after, to give them a solid foundation without stunting creativity. “Each system has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Nadya Williams:

In 1963, a book written by a depressed and frustrated stay-at-home wife and mother effectively launched second-wave feminism. For Betty Friedan, a left-leaning, pro-labor journalist before she was a mother, there was nothing good about an intellectual woman staying at home with her children as her main companions. The three Cs—cooking, cleaning, and (worst of all these) child care—were drudgery of the worst kind, she declared. The Feminine Mystique reads today as the sort of things one might tell one’s therapist—and, indeed, Friedan had approached her therapist about coauthoring the book with her. He demurred. 

And yet, the popularity of the book shows that it hit a nerve. To some extent, this nerve is still a sore point even for mothers who have never heard of Friedan. The question Friedan posed is remarkably common, in fact: How might an intellectual woman cultivate a flourishing life of the mind while raising children? And even: Why might a woman cultivate a life of the mind while raising children? What’s the point of it, or what good is it, if it does not contribute to the household income or the ever-important GDP? To be clear, for Friedan these were rhetorical questions: In her view, the life of the mind was incompatible with the homemaker’s life. This view persists in our society, and there are multiple problems with it, but I will mention just two. 

Nadya Williams is the interim director of the MFA program in creative writing at Ashland University and the books editor at Mere Orthodoxy, where she also hosts the Christians Reading Classics podcast. Her next book, Christians Reading Classics, is coming this fall from Zondervan Academic.

Edward Ring:

The vast majority of elected positions, especially at the local level, are bought and paid for by government unions

With a rough top-down analysis, it’s easy enough to estimate how much government unions collect and spend every year in California. They have roughly a million members, paying roughly $1,000 per year in dues. That would be one billion dollars per year. They spend about a third of that on politics. That’s equal to over a half billion dollars, every two year election cycle, that these unions can use to influence if not decide the outcome of every contest from the top to the bottom of the ticket.

If you want to know who is paying for those ubiquitous yard signs promoting some complete unknown to become the next member of the local school board, however, it gets a lot harder. If you think it’s a government union local, buying the office for a compliant candidate, you’re probably right. They’ve got the money, and they’re everywhere. But compiling a detailed assessment of government union spending at the local level in California is nearly impossible.

This matters because public agencies are relatively decentralized in California, with local government expenditures accounting for over 60 percent of total state and local spending. The only organizations that wield sufficient resources to select and support tens of thousands of local candidates every election are government employee unions. For obvious reasons these unions also have a strong incentive to find candidates they know they’ll be able to “negotiate” with for more staff, more pay, and more benefits.

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Eli Stark-Elster:

Am I willing to say that Common Core, rather than social media, was the singular force underlying the heightened destruction of youthful minds? No, I’m not. As Tyler Cowen pointed out in a conversation with Haidt, reducing these mood shifts to one cause or another is a bit like reducing a hurricane to the flapping wings of one particular butterfly.3

Still, it is striking that most discussions of the 2012 mystery tend to ignore what the kids themselves said about it. The children don’t think social media added much stress to their lives; they think the shift has much more to do with the increased rigor of school. Perhaps we should take their opinions seriously. 

Garry Tan:

Helen Andrews says Asian Americans are ruining education with ‘grind culture.’ The data says she’s lying.

My fellow General Partner at Y Combinator, the brilliant founder and investor Ankit Gupta, flagged something disturbing this weekend: a viral thread from a conservative commentator arguing that Asian Americans are ruining American education with their “grind culture” — and that white families are engaging in “educational flight” to escape us.

racist framing of Asians as good at test scores and white kids as “following their passions first and pushing themselves later”. we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race and create spaces where more students can experience that. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. They acted on those passions then and do now too. they just also took academics seriously and did well at it. we don’t need to DEI-code other kids’ inability to keep up.

This is the oldest form of American racism, dressed up in new clothes. And Ankit is right: we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. We don’t need to dress up discomfort with competition in DEI language.

Christina Buttons

In less than a month, two “ICE watchers” have been shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, a federal agent shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. His death follows that of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was killed on January 7.

Both Pretti and Good participated in “ICE watching,” an anti-immigration-enforcement tactic that can involve tracking ICE agents, filming arrests, and alerting other activists of enforcement actions. While participants frame ICE watching as a “community safety” measure, these tactics often place untrained civilians in direct, high-stakes confrontation with armed federal agents.

——-

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom. States Newsroom was fiscally sponsored by the Hopewell Fund, managed by Arabella Advisors—the same progressive dark-money network that fiscally sponsors States at the Core, which helped implement the ICE watch model used in Minneapolis.

——-

Although Brom was given three consecutive life sentences in 1989, he has been paroled after serving only 36 years.

Stefan Schubert:

According to Harvard’s latest data, 37 percent of tenured professors at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are over 65, and 44 percent of retirements occur at 75 or older. Many other universities without mandatory retirement also have high proportions of older faculty.

Should they be forced to retire to help younger researchers get a job? As Nature notes, many think so. Others find this ageist, arguing that older professors have a right to keep working.

I think both sides in this debate have the wrong perspective. Academia doesn’t exist to give jobs to academics, but to provide value for students and wider society. Consequently, older professors should only have to retire if they provide less value than their younger replacements.

Brian Fraley:

UPDATE 6:18pm As a result of Dairyland Sentinel’s reporting, this afternoon the Joint Finance Committee delayed a scheduled vote to release $1 million to the Department of Public Instruction for agency operations. Committee Co-chair Mark Born, R–Beaver Dam, cited this report as the reason for the postponed vote, saying the committee decided to “hit pause” as it raised serious questions about whether the use of taxpayer funds in this manner was proper. 

More than a year after the Dairyland Sentinel first sought public records regarding the overhaul of Wisconsin’s student performance benchmarks, the Department of Public Instruction has finally released another handful of internal documents. The new disclosures were forced only after the Dairyland Sentinel retained legal counsel through the Institute for Reforming Government. 

The records obtained by the Dairyland Sentinel reveal a process defined by high taxpayer costs and a strict, threatening vow of silence.

The documents concern the “standard setting” process used to redefine what it means for a Wisconsin student to be “proficient” in reading and math. Following a formal demand letter from IRG last month, the Department of Public Instruction late Monday released 17 pages of internal recruitment emails, applications, and non-disclosure agreements. Many of these records were withheld during the agency’s original response in February 2025, which at the time only provided a pre-packaged 324 page technical summary.

The newly released records confirm a staggering price tag for the four-day event. In an email to the Dairyland Sentinel, the DPI confirmed the line-item cost for the standard setting workshop was $368,885. The event was held in June 2024 at the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells, a premier destination known for luxury amenities, including massive indoor and outdoor water parks, spa services, and multiple bars.

——-

more.

If this FOIA request had been filled in a timely manner, @KinserforWI would be Superintendent of Public Instruction.

👀 I NEVER want to hear “students are underfunded” again while 88 so called educators blow nearly $400,000 on a taxpayer funded vacation and almost 70% of Wisconsin students aren’t proficient in math or reading.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Teagan King:

Organizers of a proposed East Side charter school will no longer ask the Universities of Wisconsin to sponsor it this year, putting the school’s future in question.

North Star Preparatory Board President Rea Solomon, a Sun Prairie teacher, said in an email that organizers are “discussing next steps soon and plan to continue our efforts to expand educational opportunities for youth in our community.”

She didn’t say why North Star is halting its application process.

Wisconsin charters are public schoolscreated through a contract, or “charter,” between the school’s governing board and a sponsor. The aim is to foster educational innovation by giving charters more freedom, including in management and instruction techniques.

——-

A majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board voted to abort the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter School.

Chris Cerf:

The New Jersey Assembly recently moved to eliminate the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment, joining a troubling national trend of states that now allow students to graduate from high school without any objective evidence that they have mastered the minimal skills necessary for future success.    

Diluting academic standards, reducing cut scores or eliminating test-based performance measures altogether are tried-and-true features of administrations that want to give the appearance of progress without doing the often politically fraught work of actually advancing student learning. 

Proponents frame this as a move to reduce student stress or promote a more holistic education. But let’s call it what it is: a retreat from a commitment to educational equity.  

As a former New Jersey commissioner of education, superintendent of Newark Public Schools and New York City deputy schools chancellor, I have seen firsthand that the most radical, yet necessary, reform states can pursue is an unwavering insistence on equal and high standards for all children regardless of where they live or how much money their families have. Handing out diplomas disconnected from proficiency is a profound error. Students are more than capable of meeting high bars, and policies must reflect that belief.  

———-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Paul Vallas:

…, $2B in property taxes shifted from commercial to residential and damage caused by her ill-equipped protégés Kim Foxx and Brendan Johnson she helped elect, Preckwinkle’s in political trouble.

She will try to point to her fiscal stewardship. Don’t be fooled. It to has been a disaster. Consider:

•Preckwinkle’s budgets have grown from just over $3 billion in 2011 to an astounding $9.9 billion in 2025

•Preckwinkle has balanced her budgets at the expense of public safety underfunding both the County Sheriff’s Office and Cook County States Attorney.

•Over 40% of the budget went to public safety when she took office. Today, a mere 17 percent is appropriated to safety in County budget as she reduced the jail population by half.

Stuart Reges:

Four years after the University of Washington began investigating Stuart Reges for authoring a satirical ‘land acknowledgement,’ his First Amendment rights have been upheld by the Ninth Circuit.

Like others, I decided to strike a blow against such policies through satire—specifically, by including a parody version of a land acknowledgement on my course syllabus in January 2022. Instead of using the university’s version, I wrote:

I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property, the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.

The “labor theory of property” originates with seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government, he argues that when one’s labour is mixed with shared land, the land loses its public character, because people own the products of their work. Or as Locke originally put it: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

For example, the land on which downtown Seattle sits was once an Indigenous village—which gives the tribes in question a claim of ownership according to this theory. But UW’s main campus was carved out of dense forest, and therefore would not qualify.

My land acknowledgement quickly became a hot topic within UW’s reddit community, with many social-justice-minded students expressing outrage. UW officials pronounced themselves “horrified,” censored my syllabus, and offered my students an alternate course section if they wanted a different instructor. The university then began an investigation, which could have led to the termination of my employment.

Benjamin Ryan

Fox Varian had a turbulent childhood. Her parents split when she was 7, triggering a three-year custody battle that ultimately saw her estranged from her father. She suffered from a constellation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism and bounced around various schools. Her first period sent her into a meltdown, and she battled disordered eating and body-image issues. By mid-adolescence, she was completely lost.

At 15, she began questioning her gender during sessions with her psychologist. She changed her birth name, Isabella, to Gabriel, which she saw as androgynous. Over the next two months, she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, switched her name again, to Rowan, and started telling people she was transgender.

In December 2019, 11 months after she started this public social transition, Varian underwent surgery to remove her breasts. She was 16 years old.

Cory Turner:

But, when that reduction-in-force (RIF) was blocked by the courts and the Education Department was forced to retain and continue paying these staff, the department prohibited them from returning to work.

For nearly nine months, from March 21 to mid-December, “there were 247 people on administrative leave from OCR who were being paid while not being allowed to work,” says Jackie Nowicki, lead investigator of K-12 issues at GAO, “and that decision came with a cost.”

A cost of between $28.5 million and $38 million, according to GAO.

Reagan Allen

That sense of imbalance is confirmed when enrollment data across the UNC System are examined more closely. At many universities, women now account for more than 60 percent of the undergraduate population, a proportion that would have been difficult to imagine even a generation ago. Of the 16 institutions in the UNC System, only three are not majority female, and even there the undergraduate populations are roughly evenly split between men and women. That short list of exceptions—Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina State University, and UNC Charlotte—underscores how widespread the imbalance has become across the system. Regardless of geography, mission, or student-body size, most UNC campuses are moving in the same direction. This shift is not the result of a single admissions cycle or a short-term disruption but is part of a longer-term trend that has quietly reshaped campus culture. The more pressing question is not whether the imbalance exists but what has changed in the pathways to college and why those changes appear to be affecting young men so pronouncedly.

Kayla Huynh:

She said all schools received the new materials, which include lesson plans, teacher manuals and other resources, by the end of December. Teachers began using the updated curriculum Jan. 27.

In 2021, before Act 20 was enacted, the school district entered an eight-year, $12 million contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to adopt literacy curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade. But district leaders this fall learned the materials — the second version of a curriculum called Into Reading — were incompatible with the state’s standards for science of reading instruction, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said at a Nov. 13 School Board meeting.

Prior to purchasing new resources, the district had attempted to create its own materials and reconstruct the existing curriculum to more accurately reflect the science of reading. The process frustrated some teachers who said they received frequent changes in guidance throughout the year, with little time to adapt.

Greg Toppo:

In September 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, along with then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to announce an eye-popping gift: $100 million to reform Newark Public Schools.

Local philanthropists and others would match that, doubling the gift to $200 million.

In exchange, the struggling urban system was expected not only to welcome more independently run charter schools but to close low-performing schools, give families an easier way to choose a new school and enact a performance-based pay system for teachers.

In the seven years since Zuckerberg’s announcement, critics have not been shy in pointing out how much turmoil the effort has caused. But they haven’t had a good way to figure out whether Zuckerberg’s millions have been well-spent.

A new study, out Monday, represents the first attempt to answer that question. It finds that the cash made a difference — in a limited way.

The findings, from a team led by Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, look at school achievement data from 2009 through 2016, comparing the growth in Newark students’ achievement relative to that of similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey.

The upshot? Newark students improved sharply in English.

In math? Not so much.

——-

Thirty-one percent of a gift meant for children went to the union as the price of being allowed to measure whether teachers were effective. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system working exactly as it’s designed to work. Protecting itself from accountability is the primary function.

——-

and, Thiel Fellowships.

Nora Gordon:

This is true, and I’m glad they shared this. Many parents whose kids have Chromebooks sitting in their backpacks right now probably didn’t know this, including me, so I looked it up. 

I found the fact-check in a 2025 Inspector General report, where I learned it’s a school-level decision whether to have 1:1 Chromebooks. So when they write “MCPS does not have one-to-one remote devices for every student” they mean “some MCPS schools have one-to-one remote device policies, but some don’t.” MCPS lets principals lead the way on lots of other instructional decisions, and doesn’t talk about how that leads to things being inequitable across schools. MCPS has to write with fewer words than I do (thanks, readers!) and probably didn’t want to get into whether the issue is things being inequitable across schools or within them.

It’s not just about the school-level policies, it’s about who actually has a remote device at home. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that even when schools have a 1:1 policy, they often don’t know where their Chromebooks are–so every student may not have one.

Dissident Teacher:

Most of these people haven’t learned the lessons of property redistribution at the hands of government. Our public schools’ emphasis on feelings over facts has had some seriously deleterious effects on anyone who graduated after 2010 or anyone who has spent their life working in government bureaucracies or for rent-seeking corporations that receive revenue from the state. 

Such people appear to believe there is a magic wand the government has but refuses to use which could prevent any financial hardship and thus any negative emotions. I suspect the 13 years they spent learning that everyone gets an A as long as they comply hard enough is a significant contributor to that mindset. 

This training appears to be very sticky, especially if it comes with well-meaning parents who, after 13 years of public school, send their 18-year-old off to college with a blank check (often courtesy of the state). These college students generally focus their time on recreation; grade inflation in the university means real head-down studying is optional. Students’ utopian leanings are also reinforced by the typical social media feed where beautiful women emote and a rigid set of rules around what “empathy” looks like are enforced by a choir of high-follower count Useful Idiots. 

It’s no wonder so many leave college with a Bachelors degree and the belief that pretty much everything necessary to human life should be provided, free of charge, by the state and that anything less than that is a form of institutional racism.

——-

Remember, Warlord Wanda is teaching your kids in Minneapolis public schools.

John Schindler:

“What I do know is that nobody of significance in the mainstream media ever bothered to investigate whether any part of said “conspiracy theory” might be true. Indeed, the one journalist who bothered to ask, Ben Swann, trashed his media career when he ran a segment at the CBS TV affiliate in Atlanta which considered Pizzagate a topic worthy of discussion.”

Aaron Terr:

The right to protest is strongest in places Americans have long assembled to speak their minds: public parks, streets and sidewalks. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is conducting operations on a public street, you may stand nearby to protest as long as you’re not physically interfering. Importantly, officials may never shut down a protest simply because they dislike its message. Anywhere you can say “I love ICE!” is also a place you can say “I hate ICE!”

The government can impose limited restrictions in public spaces. A permit may be required for large demonstrations that require street closures, for example. But even then, the government can never condition approval on the viewpoints to be expressed.

And you don’t have a First Amendment right to protest on private property without the owner’s permission. That means you can’t occupy a church, as anti-ICE demonstrators recently did, and expect constitutional protection.

St. John Barned-Smith, Jill Tucker

Though any potential walkout would be more than a week away, teachers and the San Francisco Unified School District remain stuck at the negotiating table over high turnover, pay and benefits, and other issues after nearly a year of bargaining, union officials said.

More than 5,200 educators – or 97.6% of the city’s teachers – voted in favor of a potential walkout and strike, mirroring the union’s preliminary vote in December when more than 99% of its members voted in favor of a strike.

The move comes as SFUSD has been buffeted by challenges in recent years, including a budget deficit so bad if forced a state takeover, the disastrous rollout of a $34 million payroll system that resulted in error-filled paychecks, and plunging enrollment. The district only recently pulled out of the worst financial category assigned to public agencies for the first time in four years.

District officials and union negotiators have been bargaining for much of the last year, but dispute issues such as health benefits, contractual pay raises, more resources for special education students, and codifying San Francisco’s sanctuary protections in its contract.

Union negotiators also argue that despite those financial headwinds, district officials recently voted to put $111 million dollars into a rainy-day fund, cash that union members believe should be directed back to classrooms and school sites. 

The last time San Francisco teachers struck was in 1979. Forty-seven years ago, teachers walked out after demanding a raise of 15.7% over two years and that the district rehire more than 1,000 teachers who had been fired after the passage of Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax revolt. 

The strike ended more than a month later when the two sides met at City Hall and signed an agreement giving the teachers a 15.5% raise over two years and rehiring about 700 teachers.

——

Peter Kazanjy:

San Francisco nuked their school district by:

1. Going full nutso during COVID and not returning to the classroom antil August 2021 – 15 months after initial lockdowns.
2. Going full awokening and nuking algebra / merit admissions at Lowell.
3. Focus on the dumbest things possible (school renamings instead of instruction improvements).

All of this is the result of the SF School Board membership being a stepping stone political role towards higher office – which means that union captured junior democrat aspirants strive to grab a seat and then act as a union lapdog.

Anton Cebalo:

On three individuals who had wildly different impressions of the United States with world-changing consequences.

One can draw a line connecting Huning’s observations in America and China’s focus on engineering and technological dominance since the 1990s. The Chinese state has also used technological systems as a tool for discipline, like the “social credit system,” perhaps inspired by Huning’s writings and experience in America.

Becky Jacobs:

A former assistant professor can move forward with a federal lawsuit claiming he was discriminated against when he was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a judge ruled Thursday.

“We are pleased with the court’s decision to allow the case to proceed to trial, and we look forward to a fair and just resolution based on the full presentation of the facts,” Ahmed Mahmoud said in a statement with his attorneys following the decision.

Mahmoud started working at UW-Madison’s Cell and Regenerative Biology department in 2017. He received awards from the universityand its licensing and patenting organization for his research, which focused on developmental, stem cell and regenerative biology.

Then in 2024, Mahmoud filed a federal lawsuit in the Western District of Wisconsin against the UW system’s Board of Regents, which oversees UW-Madison, and Deneen Wellik, who chaired the UW-Madison committee that denied Mahmoud tenure.

Ian Jones, Chris Wheadon, Sara Humphries, Matthew Inglis:

Advanced-level (A-level) mathematics is a high-profile qualification taken by many school leavers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and around the world as preparation for university study. Concern has been expressed in these countries that standards in A-level mathematics have declined over time, and that school leavers enter university or the workplace lacking the required mathematical knowledge and skills. The situation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland reflects more general international concerns about decreasing educational standards. However, evidence to support this concern has been of limited scope, rarely subjected to peer-review and of questionable validity. Our study overcame the limitations of previous research into standards over time by applying a comparative judgement technique that enabled the direct comparison of mathematical performance across different examinations. Furthermore, unlike previous research, all examination questions were re-typeset and candidate responses rewritten to reduce bias arising from surface cues. Using this technique, mathematics experts judged A-level scripts from the 1960s, 1990s and the 2010s. We report that the experts believed current A-level mathematics standards to have declined since the 1960s, although there was no evidence that they believed standards have declined since the 1990s. We contrast our findings with those from previous comparison studies and consider implications for future research into standards over time.

———-

2014: 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

Zijing Wu:

China’s genius classes differ in important ways from talent streams in the west. First, the system dwarfs its international competitors in scale. Second, it is state-driven. China graduates around five million majors in science, technology, engineering and maths every year, according to the state media Xinhua, compared with about half a million in the US. 

Tens of thousands of these graduates are genius-class students, taken out of regular classes for an intense period of study between the ages of 16-18. While others swot for China’s feared college admissions exams, the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school, depending on their results in starry international competitions. The best students continue to more advanced talent schemes at the top Chinese universities, such as the elite computer science programmes at Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities.

When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Taiwanese-American CEO, called Chinese AI researchers “world-class” last year, he was likely thinking of the genius-class grads who are building the country’s tech powerhouses such as DeepSeek and Huawei, as well as AI companies internationally. “You walk up and down the aisles of Anthropic or OpenAI or [Google] DeepMind,” said Huang last May, “there’s a whole bunch of AI researchers there, and they are from China . . . They are extraordinary and so the fact that they do extraordinary work is not surprising to me.”

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more.

Rose Horowitch

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.

Better SOMA:

Bessie Carmichael is an elementary school in San Francisco, south of market. Across the street from my business. The state is the 4th largest economy. Its leaders will boast brag and blame. Who is accountable? These are the reading and arithmetic levels. Let that sink in.

Paul Vallas:

CTU VP Jackson Potter is back calling for remote learning options for parents in fear of ICE. Never mind that ICE never staked out schools. This is part of the CTU’s aim to divert parents’ attention from failing schools.

Though there are a total of 628 school campuses within CPS, the Sun-Times can only cite one incident of ICE on or near a school campus when they arrested a school district employee.

They also cite just one incident of ICE dispatching tear gas near a school, failing to mention federal agents were being harassed by protesters.

Learning loss aside, school age children risk an increase to injury of 500% when not in school. During the 2 school years in which CTU forced the district to keep schools closed 78 straight weeks, there were over 900 students shot and over 100 killed.

Garry Tan:

The Center for Educational Progress lays it out plainly: Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded because the progressive reform movement became laser-focused on equity—specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups—at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence.

The result? Gifted programs get cut. Selective admissions eliminated. Excellence abandoned. Meanwhile, Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear—they just have to outrun Democrats. When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat it, we’re back to zero. Victory claimed, nothing actually accomplished.

—-

We do need a new path. And its WILD academic performance in Mississippi is now exceeding academic performance in California. Gifted programs should NEVER be cut in the name of “equity.”

——

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Emma Gallegos And Lasherica Thornton

Educator Eric Gustafson had sued the San Francisco Unified School District in June after Lowell High School Principal Jan Bautista removed Gustafson from his journalism class, which he had taught since 2017, to teach English courses. The removal followed a student-reported story in which other students alleged verbal harassment by unidentified teachers, prompting student uproar and confrontations with suspected teachers, according to Gustafson.

The ruling “is so clearly a defense of student journalism,” Gustafson told the Chronicle. “That’s the thing that makes me happiest and is the biggest relief.”

Bautista must reinstate the teacher to his journalism role within 30 days of the ruling, according to the Superior Court judge. The ruling stated that the administrator’s action violated California’s Journalism Teacher Protection Act, which prohibits schools from retaliating against educators for defending students’ First Amendment rights. 

“As this is a personnel matter which may take some time to sort out, we are limited in what we can share right now,” said Laura Dudnick, district spokesperson, in a statement to the Chronicle. “We remain fully committed to continuing to provide students with high-quality journalism instruction, and will be sure to keep students informed of any updates.”

——-

more.

Jonathan Turley:

Reports indicated that the visit, part of McMahon’s “History Rocks” tour in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, was cancelled due to a campaign by parents.

The parents rose up after McKinley Principal Christine Booth wrote them saying that the school was

“proud to offer this unique opportunity and… unforgettable experience for our McKinley students. Students will enjoy a dynamic, interactive assembly that brings American history and civic learning to life through fun, game show style activities, hands-on participation, and even prizes. This high energy experience is designed to spark curiosity, celebrate our country’s story, and make learning memorable for our students.”

Fairfield Superintendent of Schools Michael Testanifolded immediately under the political pressure rather than stand firm that the school is a place for different ideas and voices:

“Following this evening’s announcement about the Secretary of Education’s planned visit to McKinley on Friday, we heard from many families who expressed concerns and shared that they were considering keeping their children home. Due to these circumstances, the Secretary of Education’s visit to Fairfield has been canceled.”

Those “circumstances” were the combination of political pressure from parents and a lack of principle by school officials.

Thomas Briggs

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help learning. They do neither.

Kayla Huynh:

A 1976 court order to desegregate Milwaukee Public Schools led to initial progress that has since faded.
Many Milwaukee schools remain racially segregated, with achievement gaps persisting between White and Black students.
Recent efforts to renew desegregation conversations have stalled due to a lack of funding and leadership changes.
Officials say lasting solutions require addressing broader issues and collaborating across sectors.
On Jan. 19, 1976, federal Judge John Reynolds ordered Milwaukee Public Schools to desegregate, in response to a lawsuit filed by lawyer and state Rep. Lloyd Barbee.

The ruling prompted sweeping changes to the city’s educational system. In the initial years under the court-ordered desegregation plan, schools made measurable progress.

But 50 years later, the promise of sustained integration has faded. Many of Milwaukee’s schools remain divided along racial lines, and achievement gaps between White and Black students persist.

Barbee, who died in 2002, was disappointed the mandate didn’t achieve lasting integration, recalled his daughter, Daphne Barbee-Wooten, a civil rights lawyer who edited a book of her father’s writings. Even so, she said, Barbee always held onto hope that his vision of an integrated school system in Milwaukee would one day be realized.

John Cassidy:

The uncomfortable truth is that the Western system can select winners without selecting for upstream process excellence. You can win by licensing the molecule, then outcompeting on reimbursement strategy, access, marketing, and distribution. That is profitable in the short term, but it quietly degrades the one thing that compounds: the industrial capability to discover, test, and make the next generation of drugs.

But systems still run on messy human capability. Biology is not a clean API. The loop only compounds if you own the ugly middle: how experiments actually get done, how failures get debugged, how quality is enforced, how intuition forms.

That’s why outsourcing is more than a margin decision. When you outsource enough of the wet work, you export capability IP. And it’s almost invisible because it shows up as OpEx, not CapEx. It doesn’t trigger alarms. It just compounds, until the industrial base you rented becomes the one that out iterates you.

Charlie McLean

Computer coding captured Neth Dharmasiri’s 11-year-old imagination when his father handed him a beginner’s guide to Python — one of the world’s most popular coding languages.

“Here I am, six years later still coding,” the now-17-year-old said.

“It is difficult … [but] that appeals to me because I have a curiosity within myself to fix problems.”

A year ago Neth took on his biggest challenge yet.

Taking a leaf from Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ playbook, he set himself the task of building his own basic programming language.

“I’ve been developing it for the past year and doing a lot of user interface changes on it but it’s a fully functioning programming language,” Neth said.

Sian Leah Beilock:

Families across the U.S. are questioning whether a four-year degree is worth it. Student debt has soared. Recent graduates are struggling in a rapidly changing job market. Colleges can also be too ideological: On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.

Lee Child:

I want to focus on one: the books our children study at school. As a teenager in the 1960s, I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Inside the classroom, we studied a narrower canon: Shakespeare, the great poets and Victorian novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.

All these authors are of course worthy of study, now as then. But you might expect the English literature curriculum to look somewhat different for the students of the 2020s. It must surely reflect and embrace the sweeping cultural change we’ve lived through: access to education, social attitudes, immigration, diversity of our population and so much more.

Yet if you look at the English curriculum our young people study today, it remains stubbornly similar to the 1960s. The overwhelming majority of authors still look a lot like me (though they don’t write like me, you might be relieved to learn). While access to brilliant, imaginative authors like Malorie Blackman, Meera Syal and Bernardine Evaristo is now possible for GCSE and A-level classes, schools lack the support to actually get these texts into the hands of their students.

There’s nothing new in making the case for change. The national curriculum has failed to meet the needs of a “diverse multicultural and multi-ethnic society”, argued the landmark 1999 Macpherson report after the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence. A quarter of a century later, fewer than one in 50 GCSE students studies a writer of colour. More than one in three such students identifies as Black, Asian or from an ethnic minority background.

My publisher, Penguin Random House, is among those calling for a more representative curriculum. The Lit in Colour campaign has shown that studying texts by writers of colour can increase students’ empathy, engagement in the subject and enjoyment of reading. These benefits apply to all students — not just those of colour. The classics will and should always have a vital role in the curriculum but teaching a more diverse range of texts can ensure all students feel included and visible. New literature is a portal to unfamiliar worlds and people. It makes sense to sample the lives of our fellow citizens and deepen our understanding of those around us.

Aaron Sibarium

The Department of Justice on Wednesday joined a discrimination lawsuit against the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, unveiling new data that shows the extent of the school’s racial preferences. The filing is the latest setback for the elite medical school, which has endured an onslaught of scandals—largely due to the Washington Free Beacon’s reporting—since 2024.

“As the Supreme Court has made clear, admission into our nation’s educational institutions cannot be based on discriminatory racial policies,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a press release. “Today’s intervention is the Department of Justice’s latest effort to hold our universities accountable for unlawful policy — especially in the state of California.”

By Regina Waldroup

An international student studying in Chicago said he may drop out and move back home after he was beaten and robbed on a CTA train early Sunday morning.

Shubham Patil, an international student from India studying cyber security at Roosevelt University’s downtown campus, said he was attacked while taking the Red Line home from a late-night study session with classmates over the weekend.

He said he felt nervous immediately as the man who attacked him stepped onto the train at the Belmont station.

“He comes from first car to second car, and he is standing beside me,” Shubham said. “He is targeting me I believe because I’m just talking with my grandma on the phone in my own language. Then, he just starts punching me over and over with his legs and knees. Somebody presses the help button, and the driver says move to another car. I’m just screaming like I’m mad, ‘help me, help me.’ But nobody tried to help me.”

Shubham said when he got off at the Clybourn stop, the man was still attacking him. 

He said he managed to call 911 and the police showed up a short time later.

Joan Larroemec

He believes that humanity’s future will be defined by who wins between those who prefer freedom and those who prefer the absence of risk.
That the champion of the total state that protects its population at the cost of its freedom is China, and that the whole stakes are whether the West—the only civilization defending individual freedom—prevails.

Claire Honeycut:

While we’re talking history. You MUST get a HUGE timeline 👇map for your wall!

Help kids create a mental model of time… No abstract, disconnected dates in my house.

Matthew X. Wilson:
In the early morning hours of January 10, 2026, a nineteen-year-old tried to burn down Mississippi’s largest synagogue. According to a complaint unsealed in federal court, Spencer Pittman drove to a gas station to purchase containers of gasoline, removed the license plate from his car, and then, upon arriving at Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, broke one of the synagogue’s windows with an axe, spread gasoline around the building, and used a torch to light a fire. After his arrest, Pittman told police that he targeted the congregation because of its “Jewish ties,” describing it as the “synagogue of Satan.”

A graduate of a local Catholic school, Pittman was an academically high-achieving student and a talented baseball player. He was, by all accounts, a normal American teenager. But his social media presence tells the story of someone who had recently navigated obscure parts of the internet; in the weeks before his crime, Pittman posted about adopting a “Christian diet” for “testosterone optimization” and published a cartoon video of a woman “baptizing” a stereotypically-dressed Jewish figure, complete with a large nose and money bags, by pushing him into a pool.

Pittman’s hate-fueled arson attack was a despicable crime for which he will receive the justice that he is due. Still, important questions remain. How did a teenager who had until recently lived an apparently normal life end up trying to burn down a synagogue? Amid increasing worry about the spread of anti-Jewish attitudes in some dark corners of the online right, what can right-wing figures of stature and authority do to prevent such trends from spiraling out of control? How can the right stop more Spencer Pittmans from being created?

We don’t yet know the full story of Pittman’s radicalization. But it seems likely that his descent into an anti-Jewish worldview was in large part fueled by online content. While it would be wrong at this point to blame any one influencer for his radicalization, as a broad matter, there are a number of online anti-Jewish provocateurs who have drawn significant followings among young people, and young men in particular.

Zac Bowden:

Windows 11’s online Microsoft Account requirement means your PC is automatically backing up its data encryption key to the cloud, and Microsoft says it will hand those over to the FBI if requested via legal order.

Microsoft has confirmed in a statement to Forbesthat the company will provide the FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys if a valid legal order is requested. These keys enable the ability to decrypt and access the data on a computer running Windows, giving law enforcement the means to break into a device and access its data.

Corrinne Hess:

But in 2018, district officials started to dig into testing data and found the students who were considered economically disadvantaged were scoring about a half year behind their peers in math and reading. 

Hilts and his team knew they didn’t need to make curriculum changes — most of the students were scoring very high on standardized tests. 

In fact, Grooters said the challenge was to make sure the other students’ scores didn’t drop in the process.

——-

more.

Map.

Erin Gretzinger:

The Madison School Board approved a $165,500 contract for a compensation study at its Monday meeting following months of mounting calls from the teachers union to address salary compression for veteran teachers.

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s board green lit a proposal from Evergreen Solutions, a Florida-based consulting firm, to conduct a study of about 4,500 employees’ compensation. Set to begin in February, the work is scheduled to conclude by the end of June.

The study aims to “ensure the district’s compensation practices are internally equitable, externally competitive and align with modern job market standards,” according to a memo to the School Board.

The study comes after Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, has spent the past few months lobbying for the school district to address salary compression for veteran educators. While the district has raised the starting pay for new teachers in recent years, the union has argued the pay scale doesn’t fairly compensate loyal veteran teachers who stay at the district.

Teachers who leave and come back to the district would make more than those who stayed with Madison schools during the same period, union representatives say.

——

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Aanu Adeoye and Patrick Temple-West:

Investors in western biotechs face the prospect of lower valuations as Chinese start-ups attract growing investment from global drugmakers looking to replenish their pipelines.

China has emerged in recent years as a hub for drug development, particularly early-stage candidates, with faster timelines allowing companies to reach proof of concept ahead of western rivals.

Because the country’s biotechs can run clinical trials more quickly and cheaply, rivals from elsewhere risk being “undercut in licensing or partnering discussions”, said Oliver Kenyon, senior director at life sciences investor RTW.

This was particularly the case for “fairly crowded therapeutic areas”, he added, noting the trend “might compress long-term returns” for investors.

Aaron Schaffer, Will Oremus and Nitasha Tiku:

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

Maggie Switek, PhD, Brock Smith and Abigail Humphreys, PhD:

Our report and interactive online tool break down the components of the BPC index, delivering actionable insights into the factors driving short- and medium-term economic performance in US metropolitan areas. Policymakers, government officials, and business leaders can leverage this analysis to craft targeted strategies for fostering sustainable growth in the metros that drive America’s economy.

Benjamin Yount

The latest conversation about rising property taxes in Wisconsin has nothing to do with Gov. Tony Evers’ 400-year veto.

The Institute for Reforming Government has accused the Wisconsin Association of School Boards of refusing to lower property taxes by voting against the latest decoupling plan at the state capitol.

“School board members from across the state met in Milwaukee this week and officially agreed to advocate against decoupling school choice funding,” IRG said in a statement.

Decoupling would separate state support for choice schools and traditional public schools. In addition to making it easier to track which school gets what, IRG said decoupling could lower property taxes.

“Instead of separating district and choice, the state deducts state funding from your local district for choice students. District students do not lose a single dollar, but your district makes up the difference by raising property taxes,” IRG said. “Proponents say Wisconsin should ‘decouple.’ Districts could lower their property taxes. [And] Families could choose schools that best fit them, supported by the state.”

The WASB didn’t offer any explanation for its opposition to decoupling. The official resolution on the question is locked behind a members-only firewall. But as recently as 2004, there was some support for decoupling among WASB members.

Jolynda Wang:

This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

Many English professors have identified the use of chatbots as harmful to critical thinking and writing. Now, professors who had previously allowed screens in class are tightening technology restrictions.

Professor Kim Shirkhani, who teaches “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” explained that for about a decade prior to this semester, she did not require printed readings. This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options.

“Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they’re more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”

As the course director for “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” Shirkhani leaves the decision of allowing technology in the classroom up to each individual instructor. Yet others have followed her practice.

Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class.

Shanaka Anslem Perera:

In 1994, the United States Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring telecommunications carriers to design their networks with built-in capabilities for government wiretapping. The law emerged from FBI concerns that digital switching technology would render traditional surveillance impossible. CALEA’s solution was elegant in its naivety: force every carrier to build a standardized interface through which law enforcement could access communications pursuant to court order. The interface would be secure because it would be secret, protected by access controls, audited by compliance regimes. No adversary would find it because no adversary would know to look.

Twenty-two years later, the United Kingdom enacted the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, colloquially known as the Snooper’s Charter. It went further than CALEA, mandating that technology companies retain communications data and provide access mechanisms for intelligence agencies. The architecture was the same: centralized access points designed for authorized users, protected by the assumption that authorized users would be the only ones using them.

Salt Typhoon was the adversarial audit that the system failed.

Andrew:

In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process:

For a long time, I [King] resisted the accumulating evidence that our institutions for curating trustworthy science were failing.

I believed our academic gatekeepers–editors, reviewers, and research-integrity officers–were quietly doing their jobs. Overstretched, but nevertheless, curating a trustworthy scientific record and correcting it when problems appeared.

That belief ended when I attempted to replicate an extraordinarily influential article “The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance,” by Robert Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim. The paper has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it.

Uh oh . . . I have a horrible sense that I know what’s coming next:

It contains serious flaws and misrepresentations.

Mike McIntire:

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015. Promotional materials included a cartoon of a Black child saying it felt good knowing that “scientists are taking steps to keep my information safe.”

The scientists did not keep it safe

In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”

In response to the fraudulent access by a Chinese researcher, she said, the N.I.H. “made enhancements that will prevent this type of incident” from happening again.

“N.I.H. has a longstanding commitment to make the results of N.I.H.-funded research available,” she said, noting that it has approved more than 92,000 access requests since 2007. “At the same time, N.I.H. takes the protection of all human data very seriously and has numerous safeguards in place.”

But the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, reported last April that the N.I.H. did not have the resources to properly monitor all the downloads of genetic data and “may be missing violations that go unreported by researchers.”

Ramona Bessinger:

The term “collectivism” is one I know well from my tenure as a Providence school teacher. Back in 2021, teachers at my school, Esek Hopkins in Providence, Rhode Island, were given new DEI pedagogy to use in the classroom. We were told to embrace a concept called the “Whole Child” and to familiarize students with the term “collectivism”.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that “collectivism” had far reaching consequences that meant the abandonment of American values, history, and literature. It was pressed upon teachers and staff that all students “belonged” to the school. Policies usurping parental authority were created, classic literature was thrown out into dumpsters at the back of the school. Absent from my curriculum and classroom library were my books on the Holocaust like Anne Frank and classic American novels like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and many more.

In place of the classics we were mandated to use curriculum platforms that included hundreds of cartoon paperbacks with zero literary merit, instead the books mocked America and reflected racial division, class division and religious division.

The American flag was disappearing from the classroom, while flags from other countries were flown.