School Information System

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.

——-

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.

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.”

——-

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.

Oversight project:

Governments have pushed propaganda on their citizens since the days of Ancient Greece.

It is not a new concept. Whether dictatorship or democracy, governments have imposed propaganda on their own citizens in peacetime for purposes of reinforcing or changing national identity and behavior, and in times of war to promote noble causes of patriotism, national pride, and unity to defeat a common enemy. That propaganda is often assisted by ideologically aligned institutions.

The first half of the 20th century saw the maturing of the study of psychology, and the industrialization of psychology through journalism, entertainment, education, and advertising to condition people’s thoughts and influence their behavior.

President Woodrow Wilson utilized domestic propaganda after winning his second term to generate enthusiasm for U.S. entry into World War I, and to change America’s traditional values as part of his progressive agenda to transform America. Most of this propaganda was open. The Department of War became the first federal agency, during World War I, to institutionalize relations with Hollywood for the purpose of producing domestic propaganda.

At about this time, industrial-scale scientific manipulation of the mind became a political and business tool. Pioneers on this scale included Edward Bernays (“Bernays”), the nephew of Sigmund Freud (“Freud”) known as the “father of public relations.” Bernays’ 1928 book, Propaganda, laid out a philosophy for democratic governments to manipulate the public.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society,” he wrote as the opening words of Chapter 1, titled “Organizing Chaos.” To Bernays, “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”1Bernays mainstreamed the idea of what he called “Engineering of Consent.”2

——-

more.

Pavel Durov:

You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its “encryption”, we found multiple attack vectors.

Jukka Savolainen:

Academic sociology has been stifled by ideological capture. To restore its credibility, I advocate for the kind of external intervention once undertaken in Denmark. In 1986, the Danish government closed the University of Copenhagen’s sociology departments after finding them irreparably compromised by neo-Marxist activism. Rebuilt in the 1990s, Danish sociology now enjoys international distinction. This precedent suggests that academic freedom can be legitimately curtailed when its abuse undermines a discipline’s scientific integrity. Drawing analogies to other institutions that enjoy wide autonomy but face intervention when trust is violated, I argue that higher education should not be exempt. In American sociology, critics have long observed that the discipline operates less as an impartial science than as an instrument of progressive activism. Examples include the treatment of politically inconvenient findings, such as Mark Regnerus’s contested study of same-sex parenting, contrasted with leniency toward outright misconduct when it supports fashionable narratives. Research agendas on crime, gender, and race display systematic blind spots, privileging ideologically charged explanations while marginalizing alternative perspectives. As enrollments decline and sociology ranks among the “most regretted” majors, the discipline risks further irrelevance. Drawing inspiration from the Danish model, I call for reforms grounded not in partisan retaliation but in the principles of open science, intellectual pluralism, and Mertonian norms. Competitive grants, heterodox research centers, and independent advisory boards can help realign sociology with its mission: the rigorous and impartial study of social life. 

——-

more.

Dave Cieslewicz:

There’s a fundamental dishonesty to all this. If you get a “D” you’re not “emerging.” Emerging implies improvement. But there’s a good chance you’re treading water at best. In any event, you’re falling behind, not meeting standards. You need to be told so. Honestly. In clear language. You need to hear that you need to shape up. Because when a kid emerges from the warm embrace of MMSD, he’ll find himself in a world that does evaluate him, does pass judgement on his performance and sometimes does so in harsh terms that don’t spare his feelings. 

How we deal with failure is probably the best test we can have. Do we allow it to ruin us? Do we accept the evaluation, figure out how we need to improve and get going? Or do we blame the system? 

My real concern about all this is that at MMSD it’s about that last point. Nobody fails, but those whose work is incomplete are the victims of a system, not subject to their own shortcomings. 

Failure can be a valuable thing. God knows I’ve had enough of it in my life — including in my early years in elementary school. Avoiding that experience — feeling bad about yourself, about how you’ve performed, but taking responsibility for your own shortcomings and resolving to do better — is robbing kids of something valuable. It looks to me like MMSD’s understanding of that material isn’t even developing.

———

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?

Dario Amodei:

In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress. Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next. This loop has already started, and will accelerate rapidly in the coming months and years. Watching the last 5 years of progress from within Anthropic, and looking at how even the next few months of models are shaping up, I can feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.

In this essay, I’ll assume that this intuition is at least somewhat correct—not that powerful AI is definitely coming in 1–2 years,⁷ but that there’s a decent chance it does, and a very strong chance it comes in the next few. As with Machines of Loving Grace, taking this premise seriously can lead to some surprising and eerie conclusions. While in Machines of Loving Grace I focused on the positive implications of this premise, here the things I talk about will be disquieting. They are conclusions that we may not want to confront, but that does not make them any less real. I can only say that I am focused day and night on how to steer us away from these negative outcomes and towards the positive ones, and in this essay I talk in great detail about how best to do so.

Jim VandeHei:

All of you must figure out how to master AI for any specific job or internship you hold or take. You’d be jeopardizing your future careers by not figuring out how to use AI to amplify and improve your work. You’d be wise to replace social media scrolling with LLM testing.

• Be the very best at using AI for your gig.

Plead with your friends to do the same. I’m certain that ordinary workers without savvy AI skills will be left behind. Few leaders are being blunt about this. But you can. I am. That would be a great gift to your friends.

• I don’t want to frighten you, but substantial societal change is coming this year. You can’t have a new technology with superhuman potential without real consequence. You already see the angst with friends struggling to find entry-level jobs. Just wait until those jobs go away. It’ll ripple fast through companies, culture and business.

Martin Preib:

A sign of this transformation is Northwestern University giving a tenure track job to Bernardine Dohrn, founding member of the terrorist group Weather Underground. A few people protested when a former terrorist bomber was hired at a prestigious university to “educate” American youth, but not very many.

Crepeau is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, a department within Northwestern University that became a hotbed of radicalism. She was hardly the only one. A large swath of zombie journalists cranking out the same ideological rants in the name of journalism throughout Chicago also graduated from Medill. They roam the city like a band of hyenas, carefully barking the same story and turning on any of their own kind who should stray from the party line.

One of the most appalling chapters in Crepeau’s decade-long stint at the Tribune powerfully revealed how much this movement influenced her reporting. It was the case of a man once convicted for his role in the 1982 murder of two police officers on the South Side of Chicago.

Jackie Wilson’s saga of receiving a life sentence into garnering his freedom, then becoming a millionaire, could not have taken shape without the media, including Crepeau, kowtowing to the forces of the radical left that worked so hard to free Wilson from prison, claiming he was tortured into confessing.

The most chilling example of the refusal by the media to inform the public about what was truly taking place in the release of Wilson was their refusal to address the Soviet-style commission called TIRC that paved the way for Wilson to get out of prison. Created by the state legislature, TIRC was granted, incredibly, the authority to overturn convictions by a collection of unelected members appointed by the governor. One of the most blatant attacks on constitutional government, TIRC has freed scores of convicted murderers on often trumped-up claims of innocence and abuse, claims that were rejected throughout the entire judicial process, only to have the TIRC tribunal suddenly endorse them. Many of the TIRC commissioners stood to benefit from the release of maniacs like Wilson.

Kathleen Delaski:

We keep hearing about this potentially crippling shortage of high skilled workers needed to keep America at the forefront of innovation and world leadership. Meanwhile, our graduating college students can’t find jobs in the broader or entry level versions of these fields. What gives?

I am not an expert in AI, quantum computing, robotics or cybersecurity, some the fields where we need these high skilled workers. For example, there are apparently three AI job openings worldwide right now for every skilled AI worker.

But I am tracking the two debates which demonstrate the supply and the demand side of this picture and if you put them together you can see: “Houston, we have a problem,” (to harken back to the glory days of an earlier moonshot). 

The first debate. Importing talent

Since the space moonshot, we have come to rely on significant foreign expertise to fuel America’s innovation. How do we switch horses now when we are running at such speed, with trillions invested and an international race to world dominance in manufacturing and new technologies? 

We don’t, for now.

We’ve watched the President wrestle out loud with this conundrum all year. His base, and many others, argue we should be saving the highly paid roles for Americans, like the 1.6 million open AI jobs in the US. In fact, exactly a year ago, the first intra-MAGA fight boiled to the surface, before Trump even took office, when Elon Musk tried to convince the President-elect that he couldn’t run his rocket company or his electric car company without importing foreign expertise. We just didn’t have the talent stateside.

Naglaa Abu-Mandil Hassan, Keri A. Brown, Jill Eyers, Terence A. Brown and Simon Mays:

As noted above, infanticide was identified at the Roman Ashkelon brothel site where remains of nearly 100 perinatal infants were found (Smith and Kahila, 1992). There, aDNA analyses identified an excess of male infants, the suggestion being that prostitutes selectively reared girls to join the trade, with the mostly male remainder being discarded (Faerman et al., 1998). A finding of an excess of males among the Yewden infant burials would be contrary to a general preference for male offspring in the Roman World, but would potentially be consistent with the brothel theory.

Joshua Hochschild

1. Berry and Lewis critique modernity’s displacement of traditional relationships through technological and bureaucratic systems.
2. Catholic social teaching arises as a response to new social realities rather than presenting new moral principles.
3. The principle of subsidiarity emphasizes local governance and the importance of scale in human organization.
4. Berry’s vision integrates ecological ethics with a theological understanding of human dignity and community.
5. Literary imagination enriches socio-political discourse, as seen in Berry’s and Lewis’s works addressing modern challenges.

——-

“What happens when a cabal of secular progressive technocrats takes over an historic, traditional liberal arts college?”

Arnold Kling:

Austin Scholar writes,

When you think about a stereotypical teenager, these things probably come to mind:

• Sleeps until noon
• Fights about everything
• Glued to their phone
• Hates school…

But Matt points out that these “typical” teenage behaviors are actually symptoms of developmental dysfunction. Here’s how Matt explains what a developmentally healthy teenager looks like:

She wakes up with things she wants to accomplish. Not because someone’s making her, but because she’s genuinely excited about her projects.

She links to a presentation by Matt Bateman. 

Matt explains that teenagers who do real things now become adults who thrive. Teenagers who do fake things become adults who… need therapy to figure out what they actually want.

Barton Swaim:

The unfolding debacle in Minneapolis captures an underappreciated fact about the Democratic Party: It is configured to react in unreasoning rage to everything President Trump does. The challenge of “messaging”—how to condemn roundups of illegal migrants without defending protesters’ lawlessness—is only a symptom of the problem. The problem itself arises from the Byzantine network of activist nonprofits created and fostered over the past decade and a half by liberal foundations and progressive billionaires.

The Democrats’ nonprofit problem began more or less in 2010, when a cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate. Wealthy foundations and donor-class ideologues, animated by fears of global catastrophe, decided they couldn’t achieve their goals by democratic persuasion and had to create an army of nonprofit groups to wage legal and political war on the imagined enablers of climate change.

———

MADISON (WKOW) — Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett is responding to accusations made by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surrounding an undocumented woman accused of the deaths of two Minnesota teenagers.

Noelia Martinez is in the Dane County Jail after reportedly driving the wrong way on the interstate near Deforest, hitting a car with 18-year-old Hallie Helgelson and 19-year-old Brady Heiling.

Martinez is charged with nine crimes, including homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle, operating while intoxicated, and operating a motor vehicle while revoked causing death.

Navroop Singh:

This pattern war debts, reserve loss, deficits, devaluation, creditor dependence, and asset liquidation is not uniquely British. It is imperial mathematics. Rome followed it over centuries; Britain compressed it into decades. The United States now shows early but unmistakable signs of the same trajectory.

America was consciously founded as a New Rome. The Founders studied Roman history obsessively, borrowing its republican ideals, symbols, architecture, and warnings. The Capitol, the eagle, Latin mottos, and the Senate were not aesthetic choices but ideological ones. America saw itself as Rome reborn wiser, restrained, immune to imperial decay. Yet Rome itself believed the same thing.

Like Rome and Britain before it, America’s strength rested on a broad middle class, a credible currency, and global financial privilege. Today, all three are under strain. Federal debt stands around $38.4–38.5 trillion, with debt-to-GDP near 124 percent. Interest payments approach $1 trillion annually, rivalling defence spending. Since abandoning gold peg in 1971, the dollar has lost roughly 86 percent of its purchasing power. The dollar’s reserve share, while still dominant, has declined to around 57–58 percent as alternatives slowly emerge.

Mark Atwood:

If you want to learn how machines actually work, go watch a mid-century industrial film. The ones shot in black and white, with the clipped narration and the cutaway diagrams. The ones that assume you can pay attention for twenty minutes, remember a sequence, and behave like an adult around rotating mass and stored energy.

Then compare that to most “training” made today. It is either infantilized entertainment, compliance theater, or vendor marketing in a lab coat. It tells you what to click, not what to understand. It teaches substitution, not diagnosis. It gives you a vibe, not a skill. It is worse than useless because it produces the confident incompetent.

This is not because people got dumber or because cameras got better. It is not because “the culture changed.” It is not because we forgot how to teach.

It is because the legal system made truthful instruction radioactive.

The moment you treat instruction as a liability surface, you stop teaching and start lawyering. That is the whole story. Everything else is downstream.

JD Busch:

Latin isn’t the first NAIS school to face antisemitism scandals while maintaining sprawling DEI bureaucracies. The Shipley School (another NAIS member) previously relieved its headmaster and DEI director following antisemitic controversies, according to published reports. Both schools share a common thread: Carney Sandoe & Associates, the executive search firm that’s become prominent in DEI recruiting for elite independent schools.

At Latin, the crisis has reached critical mass.

Nazi music, take two

In early January 2026, a teacher overheard two Latin middle school students discussing their practice of “Erika” — a 1938 German marching song that was the Wehrmacht’s most popular tune during World War II, according to historian Major General Michael Tillotson. The lyrics describe a soldier missing his sweetheart (innocuous enough), but the song’s inextricable association with Nazi Germany is hardly subtle.

This marked the second time in fourteen months that “Erika” appeared at Latin, according to school communications and media reports. A New York Post article reported that some middle school band members allegedly played the anthem in November 2024. Parents and documents reviewed by the New York Post claim that the school disregarded the incident.

Dr. Thomas Hagerman announced his resignation on Wednesday, January 14, less than two weeks after the second “Erika” incident surfaced. His departure letter cited “health concerns” and the need to “attend more intentionally to my health and overall sustainability.” Translation: He makes for a convenient scapegoat, though the school remains under severe pressure.

David Phillips

The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge. The issue isn’t merely that the present arrangement allows ideologues and recalcitrant administrators to use research projects as human shields, howling miserably when failures to comply with federal regulations and their underlying values result in the withholding of federal funds. It is that the current arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy.

An issue brief published this past summer by the Manhattan Institute describes “the frustrating reality that,” as authors Frederick Hess and Richard Keck write, “at far too many of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a secondary concern.” Per Hess and Keck, “University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman notes that faculty tend to characterize ‘research as their “work” and teaching as their “load,”’ a habit that, as Zimmerman dryly observes, says ‘volumes about academic priorities.’” What it says, of course, is that college and university administrators are far more concerned with maintaining a stable of widely published, grant-winning faculty celebrated for their research and writing than they are with the quality of teaching on campus. And this can come only at the expense of student learning and real education.

Chris Rickert:

After testing a new grading system at East High School that downplays traditional letter grades, the Madison School District plans to extend the system to its three other traditional high schools.

The district’s communications office, however, wouldn’t reveal a timeline for when “standards-based” grading will make its way to West, La Follette and Memorial high schools.

“We are reviewing the implementation at East and working with leaders and staff across the other high schools in the district to finalize the plan for when we will expand this to the other schools,” district spokesperson Ian Folger said.

The district’s two alternative high schools, Shabazz and Capital High, will not be affected by the shift to standards-based grading, he said.

…….

After the ninth and 13th week of a semester and at semester’s end, students’ ratings are converted to traditional letter grades A, B, C, D and I, for incomplete, and those are used to calculate students’ grade point averages.

——-

Top Bay Area schools embrace controversial grading system

——

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?

Meer:

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables AI applications to connect with external tools and data sources in a standardized way.

Think of it as a universal language that lets AI models talk to the outside world.

Before MCP if you wanted Claude or another AI to access your Google Drive you’d need custom code.

Want it to also read from Slack?

More custom code.

Each integration required its own unique solution.

MCP changes this by providing a single consistent protocol.

Build once. Connect to everything.

Pasha Kamyshev:

To understand America you MUST understand the perspective and incentives of the most important people in America: the people to whom the state gives all of the taxpayers’ money.

You see, when the state is $40 trillion in debt, this money didn’t just magically disappear into a black hole. Rather, it was spent on projects the government was somehow convinced were useful or necessary at the time. Some people got that money, and it flowed into their bank accounts. Some of these people who get money from the government are quite rich. I am going to call them “state oligarchs,” who are different from “market oligarchs.” Not every person paid by the state is an oligarch. There are some people who simply collect an upper-middle-class paycheck inside an agency that doesn’t do anything.

“Market oligarchs” are usually well-known founders of new firms who stay in the spotlight. “State oligarchs” are less well known. However, they exist and their incentives and actions are the key to shaping the past, present, and future of America.

The key insight you need to grasp is that as a collective, the “state oligarchs” benefit from higher taxes, even if those taxes predominantly fall on the “rich.” While it may sound counter-intuitive at first why some rich people would advocate for “higher taxes,” consider this: if you are a defense contractor or a healthcare provider who gets 100% of their revenue from the government, then raising taxes gives the government MORE money to pay you, even after you take into account your own tax bill.

Roberta Schaefer:

Massachusetts undertook sweeping education reforms in 1993 that linked funding increases to comprehensive reforms, ranging from curriculum and accountability changes to a new three-part teacher licensure test whose pass rate was initially just 41 percent.

Massachusetts has put greater emphasis than New York on high-quality curriculum. In fact, the standards and curriculum frameworks developed by Massachusetts in the late 1990s and early 2000s have been praised as the nation’s best. When those standards go unmet, Massachusetts officials appear to intervene more aggressively in underperforming school districts than their New York counterparts do. The Commonwealth follows a specific set of interventions and monitoring protocols.

Teacher education programs in Massachusetts are accredited directly by BESE, while New York’s Regents rely on outside accrediting agencies.

Policymakers in Albany might better meet their obligations, both to students and to taxpayers, by closely studying the reasons why Massachusetts consistently produces better outcomes than New York at a significantly lower cost. This report recommends several key changes:

——-

Ken Girardin:

Massachusetts owes much of its high student performance today to its 1990s ed reforms which included an overhaul of the teacher pipeline (accreditation and licensure). Roberta Schaefer (fmr MA school board member) did a good analysis a few years ago.

Related:

MTEL

Foundations of Reading, Wisconsin’s one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements – often waived by Tony Evers and others.

Susan Shelley:

Behested payments have funded the California State Protocol Foundation. In 2025, Newsom “behested” a payment of $220,000 from the University of California Berkeley for the “charitable” purpose of paying the costs of attending the Vatican climate summit. He “behested” the U.S. Energy Foundation out of $150,000 to pay for his “delegation” to the COP30 climate change conference in Brazil, also described as a “charitable” purpose.

Newsom hit up Zoox, Inc., an autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Amazon, and Centene Management Company, LLC, of St. Louis, “a leading provider of government-sponsored healthcare,” for $25,000 each “in support of general operations” of the Protocol Foundation.

Hope Karnopp:

The report found net property taxes — which accounts for credits to help taxpayers — grew by 4.6% in 2025 to nearly $12 billion, the highest rate since 2008. The forum previously forecasted another increase in property taxes in 2026.

“Limiting property tax growth has lowered the state’s tax burden, but it has also stressed local budgets and services. That in turn has led to a number of referenda to exceed state revenue and levy limits, helping push property tax growth higher in 2025 than previous years,” the report said.

——

Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Mel:

The same Democrat politicians who have been calling the Trump admin & ICE a bunch of fascist jackboot thugs just voted to give the federal government even MORE power to surveil and control our movements.

Why would they vote to give “fascists” more power?

——

Madison’s Marc Pocan voted for more federal power.

——-

Meanwhile:

VIRAL PROPAGANDA: This video of a girl weeping as she watched ICE detain a man in her neighborhood went viral

REALITY: ICE was detaining a man who lived at the same address as two convicted child rapists and he refused to comply with officers

——

Paul Vallas:

More striking is the fact that there has been a four-fold increase in the number of times the police have been shot at on average this decade compared to the last.

Ryan Walters

The CTU continues to prioritize left-wing politics over learning, acquiring knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Chicago parents expect Chicago Public Schools educators to teach reading, writing, and critical thinking skills — not to use classrooms as staging grounds for foreign and domestic political activism.

Yet, that’s exactly what happened when union-backed activists used taxpayer-funded schools to promote protests tied to Venezuela, all while displaying a poster that misspelled the word “governor” as “governer.” This gaffe would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. 

This wasn’t a typographical error scribbled by a student in a rush. It was part of a professionally organized political display, endorsed by the same education establishment — the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — that insists it knows what’s best for America’s children.

Reagan Allen:

This gap in knowledge is reinforced by the limited emphasis on financial literacy in American high schools. Students are carefully guided through college applications, essays, and standardized testing yet often receive little instruction on how loans work, how interest accrues, or how to evaluate debt relative to income. As a result, student borrowing is often treated as routine and manageable at the outset, even though its consequences can prove inescapable later.

When young people are asked to make one of the largest financial decisions of their lives without the tools to assess it, confusion is almost inevitable. Until families, schools, and policymakers are willing to discuss higher education in concrete financial terms, including its costs, risks, and realistic returns, student borrowing will continue to be driven more by faith than by calculation. Reintroducing basic financial reasoning into the college decision would not diminish the value of education, but it would force more honest decisionmaking around a choice long insulated from scrutiny.

——-

more.

Greg Lukianoff

The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that isprotected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three otherDemocratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

Tim Harford: 

»

there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market.

The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.

Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.

A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.

Channel3000 Obituary:

Marcia Lynn Rainwater beloved wife, mother, grandmother, teacher and friend passed away on January 18, 2026 surrounded by her loving family. She was born August 15,1945 to Olan and Marguerite Nincehelser in Topeka Kansas.

Marcia held a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the University of Central Arkansas and a Master’s Degree in Education from Mid-American Nazarene College. A dedicated career elementary school teacher she loved teaching and enriched the lives of hundreds of young people.

A square dance class at the University of Central Arkansas in 1964 changed the direction of two lives. Marcia met Art Rainwater and they began a lifelong partnership. After marriage in 1966 they began a journey that included 5 states, world-wide travel and finally ended in Madison WI in 1994. Marcia loved everything about Madison and after her retirement from the Verona Area School District in 2008 she enjoyed an active and fulfilling retirement. Marcia made friends everywhere she went. Of all her many retirement activities she was particularly attached to her Mahjong friends and the Zentangles ladies at Oakwood Village.

Molly Beck

Gov. Tony Evers is pushing back against arguments Madison city officials made in a recent lawsuit contending they can’t be sued for failing to count nearly 200 mail-in ballots in 2024 because absentee voting is not a right but a privilege.

A group of Madison voters represented by the liberal law firm Law Forward sued city and county election officials in March over the city’s failure to count 193 absentee ballots cast during the 2024 presidential election.

Mitchell Schmidt:

Attorneys for Witzel-Behl and the city have argued in court filings seeking to dismiss the case that, by voting absentee, the affected voters “exercised a privilege, rather than a constitutional right,” and there is no “legal basis upon which they could be entitled to monetary damages for the failure of defendants to properly count their absentee ballots.”

Evers, who does not take a position on any other dispute within the case, pushed back at that argument, writing in a statement that “Wisconsinites should have the opportunity to cast their ballot, and if they follow all of the rules, then their vote should count just like everyone else’s.”

Theodore Dalrymple:

But for many years now, the name “Rotherham” has meant only one thing to the rest of the country: the sexual abuse scandal of the first decade and a half of this century, in which gangs of men of Pakistani origin—descendants of immigrants to the town—sexually abused white girls in an organized and systematic fashion. This activity was ongoing, unbeknown to me, though not to the authorities, during my brief residence in Rotherham.

I cannot do better to describe the scandal than to quote the first five paragraphs of the executive summary of the independent report into it, published in 2014. Written by a professor of social work, Alexis Jay, it has the power to shock, as few official documents have:

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day. In May 2014, the caseload of the specialist child sexual exploitation team was 51. More CSE cases were held by other children’s social care teams. There were 16 looked after children who were identified by children’s social care as being at serious risk of sexual exploitation or having been sexually exploited. In 2013, the Police received 157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation in the Borough.

Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. This came from those working in residential care and from youth workers who knew the young people well.

Maggie Appleton

When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko  pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Many people have talked about what large-scale, automated agent orchestration systems could look like in a few years, and no one else attempted to sincerely build it.

Mike Solana:

The ballot proposition was constructed in such a way as it can technically not solve any of the stated problems it was ostensibly written to address — chief among them, filling a massive budget hole in Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) following California legislation that guaranteed permanent funding for illegal immigrant healthcare. That promise was never tenable, but following federal Medicaid cuts it has dragged California into crisis. The futility of the ballot proposition has left most men impacted with a sense that the ballot proposition’s true purpose is to humiliate them, disrupt their personal lives, and hurt their companies. Given especially the proposition’s dangerous language surrounding control, which I detailed extensively last week, founders of private companies in particular, with their armies of lawyers investigating this thing, believe the proposition, as written, could actually bankrupt them. Obviously, there is now real danger in appearing successful in the state of California, as the far left, imbued with a great deal of power, and benefiting now from several years of wealth scapegoating throughout the mainstream press, attempts to liquidate its perceived enemies in business.

But first, are these guys staying and fighting, or are they leaving? And how many have already left? While there’s been a great deal of reporting on the matter, nobody seems to agree on the number.

Three men I spoke with in the largest billionaire Signal chat said they ran an informal poll, and seventy percent of the chat (around sixty people, not all of whom were billionaires) indicated they would leave the state if the ballot proposition passes. According to that same poll, around 15% have already left the state.

I’ve spoken with around ten percent of billionaires in the state myself. Of the 21 men I interviewed, 20 would have been impacted by the ballot measure. All 20 of them, including the Democrats, as well as several of the most committed diehard proponents of revitalizing San Francisco, are now developing an exit plan. (Three have already left.) Almost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now; almost all of them have engaged lawyers to help them navigate what they see as a potentially years-long legal battle; and, among the men I spoke with who are presently running companies, almost all have deployed business ops leaders to focus on opening offices out of California.

While, without exception, every founder of a private company I interviewed mentioned the ballot proposition’s confusing and confounding “control” language, their focus is generally directed to the overall uncertainty surrounding legislation in the state. Concern has much less to do with this single ballot proposition than the question of how companies will be targeted in the future, and everyone believes they will be targeted again. There is also nobody who believes the introduction of architecture for a legalized asset seizure, something we’ve never before seen in this country, will conclude with an exclusive targeting of billionaires over the years to come. Once the concept is normalized, everyone assumes wealth taxes of this kind will ultimately target every “wealthy” person in the state, with the term “wealthy” redefined in whatever manner leftists find useful from election cycle to election cycle.

———

Balaji:

Because after the dollar ends, DC is out of money.
So: Carney, Newsom, Walz, Mamdani turn to Xi.
And MAGA, Elon, Texas, Miami turn to Satoshi.

Dave Hewitt:

There is little doubt these days that social media has had a hugely toxic effect on political discourse. Cancel culture, dehumanisation and bullying, purity spirals and echo chambers: some of our most tribal behaviour has been supercharged and now plays out on an unprecedented scale. What is less clear is how much of this is driven by human dynamics playing out over a new communication medium, and how much is down to the ubiquitous algorithmic feed of recommendations and suggestions employed by the social media giants. 

At their most simple, machine learning recommenders are optimising for some specific goal. The classic and most easily understandable example is monetisation, ie how to get people to spend as much as possible. 

For example it is common to target the conversion rate – what percentage of users turn from non-spender to spender – and treat increasing this figure as one primary goal for system optimisation. The approach then is to run experiments, using everything from changes to user interface, to the variety of recommendations presented, to user-specific high-value deals, to the timing and rate at which these are presented to the user, all of which will produce different rates of conversion. When an experiment produces a higher conversion rate, then that is deemed a success and becomes the default, and further experiments are run against that, in a relentless, automated drive to optimise the target metric: converting non-spenders into spenders.

Kat Rosenfield:

the “5 year-old detained by ICE story” really highlighting how much the information landscape has fractured into multiple disparate narrative ecosystems, with impermeable borders, that do not overlap at all

“truthiness”

and:

ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED.

Imani Cruzen:

More than 6,000 St. Paul public school students have registered to learn online in the past week as the federal government’s immigration enforcement operation continues.

St. Paul Public Schools’ temporary online learning option takes effect Thursday and the deadline for families to register was Sunday. All 69 district schools have been closed through this Wednesday to give teachers time to prepare an online curriculum. Students registering late for the virtual option may have a delayed start time. The district has 33,000 students in total.

The district introduced the temporary online learning option last week which allows students to register without transferring out of their school. Prior to that, students could request enrollment in the district’s online school if they felt unsafe attending class, which required transferring into SPPS Online School.

The percentage of students who have enrolled in virtual learning ranges from a low of under 10% at some schools to up to 75% at others, said district superintendent Stacie Stanley. A school likely would need for 80% to 90% of its students to enroll in the option before moving to a fully-online option would be considered, Stanley said.

by Ploum:

What I like most about teaching “Open Source Strategies” at École Polytechnique de Louvain is how much I learn from my students, especially during the exam.

I dislike exams. I still have nightmares about exams. That’s why I try to subvert this stressful moment and make it a learning opportunity. I know that adrenaline increases memorization dramatically. I make sure to explain to each student what I was expecting and to be helpful.

Here are the rules:

1. You can have all the resources you want (including a laptop connected to the Internet)
2. There’s no formal time limit (but if you stay too long, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem)
3. I allow students to discuss among themselves if it is on topic. (in reality, they never do it spontanously until I force two students with a similar problem to discuss together)
4. You can prepare and bring your own exam question if you want (something done by fewer than 10% of the students)
5. Come dressed for the exam you dream of taking!