School Information System

Mass Daily News:

Graduation rates up 22% while test scores drop — BPS banned failing grades and spent $120K on ‘equitable grading’ consultants

Mayor Michelle Wu took a victory lap over Boston Public Schools’ highest graduation rate in district history. A new analysis says the numbers are a mirage.

BPS posted an 81.3 percent four-year graduation rate for 2025, up from 59.1 percent in 2006, according to recently released data. Wu insisted the district isn’t “lowering any expectations” or “moving the goalposts and making it easier for people to get by.”

But a detailed analysis published by City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, lays out a case that the graduation rate surge has come not from students learning more — but from the district making it easier to pass.

The test scores tell a different story

While graduation rates have climbed, SAT scores for BPS students have remained flat. The average BPS student hovers around the College Board’s college-readiness benchmarks, with many falling below.

The gap is worse for the students the district claims to be helping most.

Low-income students saw their graduation rate rise by 12 percent between 2017 and 2025. Their math scores dropped by 5 percent over the same period.

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A handful of rich folks are basically bankrolling MA.

@MassGovernor & @MassDems crushing the rest of us.

Top 1% (32,800 people) → 38.2% of all MA income taxes
Top 5% (164K people) → 58.8%
Top 10% (328K people) → 69.8%
Bottom 50% (1.64M people) → 3.9% — avg income $32,188

Quinton Klabon:

🚨NEW 2023 NATIONAL SCHOOL SPENDING DATA🚨
🎉🥳🎉

523 districts over 15,000 students
Wisconsin rank/percentile:

Racine: 25th/95th
Milwaukee: 56th/89th
Madison: 58th/89th
Green Bay: 62nd/88th
Kenosha: 154th/70th
Appleton: 178th/66th

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3931 (!) 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. 

T Greer:

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”2The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.3

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Nicholas Carr

Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, the time has come to update my previously published survey of the history of hype and wishful thinking that has for more than a century surrounded technologies for automating education by replacing teachers and classrooms with machines and media. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be the last addition.

Mail: Around 1885, Yale professor William Rainey Harper, a pioneer of teaching-by-post, said, “The student who has prepared a certain number of lessons in the correspondence school knows more of the subject treated in those lessons, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom.” Soon, he predicted, “the work done by correspondence will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our academies and colleges.”

Phonograph: In an 1878 article on “practical uses of the phonograph,” the New York Times predicted that the phonograph would be used “in the school-room in training children to read properly without the personal attention of the teacher; in teaching them to spell correctly, and in conveying any lesson to be acquired by study and memory. In short, a school may almost be conducted by machinery.”

Movies: “It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,” proclaimed Thomas Edison in 1913. “Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.”

Radio: In 1927, the University of Iowa declared that “it is no imaginary dream to picture the school of tomorrow as an entirely different institution from that of today, because of the use of radio in teaching.”

Colin Redemer:

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The Federalist Papers.

That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.

The Unassailable Fortress

To understand why reforming higher education is so difficult, you must first understand what the American university used to be. It was once a place where the Puritan Cotton Mather could write lovingly about Harvard’s mission to train ministers for the Reformed churches of New England. Now Harvard is dead, as the departure of James Hankins clarifies. What we have now is something else entirely.

Jeff Hamilton

With its soft lighting and cosy couches, the classroom hangout at the River East-Transcona School Division high school is supposed to be a safe space for students to decompress.

But that changed one Monday in January.

That day, after the supervising teacher had left the room, a teenage girl says she was sitting on the floor with her back against a love seat when a much larger male student sat down on the cushion directly behind her, boxing her in between his knees.

She said he reached over and forced his hands beneath her shirt, grabbing her breasts for several minutes while she froze and did not speak or move.

“I was too scared to say anything.”

A month later, sitting in her living room surrounded by family members, the girl recounts what happened.

The alleged assault was traumatic enough, the girl and her family say, but the response from school administrators and senior division staff felt like betrayal.

CD Howe

Strong math skills are essential for careers that drive Canada’s economy, including technology, artificial intelligence, finance, and data science. To remain globally competitive and address long-term income gaps, improving math achievement among Canadian students must be a national priority.

The link between early math skills and later academic success is well established (Duncan et al. 2011; Siegler et al. 2012). Early math achievement also correlates positively with future career earnings. According to Werner et al. (2024), math achievement in childhood is a better predictor of adult earnings at age 30 than reading, health, or social-emotional skills. These effects were observed across all demographic groups.

Canada ranked in the top 10 in math on the 2022 PISA survey, an international OECD assessment of 15-year-olds. However, ranking near the top of a falling curve does not imply that all is well. Math achievement has been falling for well over a decade, beginning well before the COVID-19 pandemic. More Canadian students now struggle in math, fewer excel, and in several provinces, the decline is roughly equivalent to two or more years of schooling.

The OECD estimates that a 20-point drop on PISA roughly equates to about one year of learning (OECD 2023). Math scores in all provinces declined more than 20 points since 2003. Seven provinces experienced declines of over 40 points,¹ representing approximately two years of lost learning, while the 58-point drop in Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador is close to three years.

Dashboard link:

Hi Kid:

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And in case you hear something about traditional district schools being underfunded, ask yourself: Is record-high per-pupil spending not enough? If $18,592 per child isn’t enough, what dollar figure would be?

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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. 

Jay Rogers:

“When the address you give the Secretary of State is a law office, and the address you give your mortgage lender is Washington, and the address you give Beijing-linked donors is wherever the money flows—your relationship with California is transactional.”

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Somewhat related: DPI lawyer Ben Jones who oversaw sexual harassment issues appointed to judicial seat.

Danielle DuClos:

He oversaw the department’s legal strategy and educator misconduct investigations. Jones has also worked in private practice representing school districts and municipalities.

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Governor Evers appointed Jones to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2025. Happily, we have a competitive election: Huma Ahsan.

I’m glad reporter DuClos is covering former DPI lawyer Jones’ activities.

Ben Henry:

Fewer workers mean a drop in income tax, which is the state’s main revenue source.

“It’s very serious. They’re all very important things,” said Tyler Schipper, an economics professor at the University of St. Thomas emphasized about the impacts of fewer workers on the tax base.

“How do you get people to come here, how do you get corporations to open up here and hire people,” he added about the challenges to reverse this trend.

Schipper also said states typically have a couple of options to address this issue — adjust the budget, which could lead to job and program cuts, and increase taxes. 

Republican Sen. Eric Pratt from Prior Lake expressed concern about the burden on taxpayers. 

“They absolutely should [be worried]. Because not only might we see a drop in income tax, but we could potentially see a drop in business tax collections too,” Sen. Pratt said.

Chris Rickert:

Judges and judicial candidates, for example, are barred from publicly endorsing or speaking on behalf of a party’s candidates or platforms. They are also not supposed to “participate in the affairs, caucuses, promotions, platforms, endorsements, conventions, or activities of a political party or of a candidate for partisan office.”

Marta Jewson:

Update: After publication, Lamplighter confirmed KIPP’s board voted on the 3-page resolution at its March 12 meeting. The certificated copy submitted to the Orleans Parish School Board indicates the resolution was prepared before the meeting.

Frederick Douglass High School students, parents and staff could not have known KIPP New Orleans Schools would vote to shutter the historic St. Claude Avenue building at what appeared to be a routine monthly board meeting last week. 

The main agenda item for the 9-school charter network’s public meeting stated simply: “CEO Report.” The only vote listed was a monotonous meeting minute approval.

But KIPP New Orleans voted to shutter a 600-student school that day. 

That’s problematic, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press attorney Virginia Harnick said in an interview.

“It’s jammed into a CEO report. It’s so opaque — and just for ‘information’ the public has no idea what’s going on,” Harnick said. “They have no idea that a vote is going to be heard about a school closure and that the vote is going to move students.”

In what was scheduled as a 5-minute report, CEO Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, must have delivered seismic news to prompt the charter board to take up a school closure vote. 

Martha Gimbel

As the debate about our AI future continues to rage, I find myself wondering if we’re all going to become like the main character in my favorite 19th century novel, North and South. The heroine is a young woman during the Industrial Revolution who has to adjust to a whole new way of thinking and living and a host of new societal norms. Sound familiar?

Every day we read about the potentially huge effects AI will have on the labor market, the economy and society. Although many people speak about the future with certainty, we don’t really know what’s to come. People thought the invention of the cotton gin would finally help end slavery. In fact, it massively increased it. On the other hand, weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution were right that their livelihood would be decimated by the introduction of “the new machinery.”

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what effect AI will have on the labor market (or the economy or society). Many people claim it’s already leading to job losses, but the best evidence we have suggests that hasn’t started yet. That doesn’t mean we should ignore it or look away — but it does suggest we might be better served examining lessons from the past than merely speculating about the future. As Winston Churchill once said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

If you want to feel what living through a massive technological shock and its aftermath looked like, it’s time to take a step back from the large language models and read some of the great novels of the Industrial Revolution.

The White-Collar Weavers

Today’s conversation about the labor markets and AI often proceeds as if we’ve never seen this sort of shiftbefore. In particular, people focus on the effect the AI boom may have on higher-wage workers, rather than the lower- or middle-wage jobs that were most affected by the earlier disruptions of computers and automation. However, that dynamic isn’t new. Technological change has altered “high-quality” jobs before.

Jerry Neumann:

around 1500, the Swiss physician Paracelsus noticed that Galenic [medical] treatments did not actually make patients better, and that some treatments—like mercury for syphilis—worked even though they made no sense within humoral theory. Paracelsus began to advocate listening to evidence rather than deferring to the authority of the long dead: “The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.” In 1527, he even staged a public burning of Galen’s work. His vision took centuries to take hold—nearly 300 years later, George Washington died after an aggressive bloodletting—because people are more inclined to believe neat and simple stories like Galen’s than to confront messy and complex reality.

Paracelsus started with what worked and followed that to why. First-principles thinkers start with a hypothesized “why” and then insist it works, regardless of the results. Are our modern entrepreneurship thinkers more like Paracelsus, driven by evidence? Or more like Galen, sustained by the elegance of their own story? In the name of science, let’s look at the evidence.

Buckley Institute:

The DEI-related staff to student ratios are also significant. Across all of Yale, there are 13.4 per 1,000 students, with the DEI student to staff ratio reaching peaks of 53.6 per 1,000 students in the School of Medicine and 23.6 in the School of Public Health.

In a telling example, the School of Public Health launched an Activist in Residence Program in 2022. The most recently appointed activist in residence is now referred to as “Community Scholar” and remains on the School of Public Health staff.

Brian T. Fitzpatrick:

I have been a member of the law faculty at Vanderbilt University for nearly twenty years. Even though my faculty has grown over that time, there are fewer conservatives now than when I joined. We are down to four—a mere ten percent or so of the tenure-track faculty—and two of the four are nearly 80. Remarkably, that probably makes us the most ideologically diverse department in the entire University.

Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.

The Supply Problem

The supply problem is that very few conservatives want to go into academia. I don’t blame them. Conservatives are discriminated against at every level. At the bottom, I have seen my colleagues refuse to interview an amazing legal scholar for a job because he went to a very conservative undergraduate institution when he was 18 years old. In the middle, a conservative member of my tenure-track faculty has not led any of our dozen or so academic programs—and that’s where the money is—in over fifteen years. At the top, how many university academic leaders are conservative? To my knowledge, there are none at my university and very, very few anywhere else: a former law clerk to Justice Scalia was made the provost at Harvard—after he left the Republican Party.

John Hindraker:

Again, no surprises. High-tax states are collapsing before our eyes, and, of course, it is the states with the most population that lose the most net income.

However, I would point out one anomaly: the awful performance of Minnesota. Minnesota lost $1.5 billion of income in 2023, almost the same as Ohio. But Ohio has more than twice Minnesota’s population. Likewise, Minnesota lost one and one half times the net income of Michigan, but Michigan’s population, too, is close to double that of Minnesota. So on a per capita basis, only Maryland shares the basement with Minnesota. Per capita, even the disaster that is Gavin Newsom’s California rates only slightly worse than Minnesota.

Maybe someone will tell Minnesota voters about this between now and the Fall.

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🔴 Red states gained $37.2 billion in income and 492k filers.
🔵 Blue states lost ~$40.8B and 520k filers.

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But now, looking at the deficits caused by absurd spending, and tax policies accelerating revenue erosion, I can say avoid all General Obligation muni’s in California, Illinois & New York.

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I got this email yesterday from CA State Board of Equalization, the new California sales tax rates effective April 1st.

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Here is the satellite view of JB Pritzker’s home away from home, away from Illinois, indeed away from the US, but near his billions in an offshore tax haven

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Voting with your feet.

And.

Paul Runko:

So it’s time for K-12 public education to have a “Moneyball” moment. Here’s the “stats” that should matter when schools construct their teacher rosters:

1. Classroom Management

Students can’t learn if they are constantly distracted by their peers or chaos in the classroom. Principals, administrators, and school board members can easily observe a teacher’s classroom management skills by spending just 10 minutes looking through the classroom door window. Teachers trained well in classroom management and who maintain control of their classrooms will produce better student outcomes and stronger academic results.

2. Literacy Background

All teachers should have experience incorporating reading instruction into their classrooms. Yes, even the physical education teachers. The literary crisis in America is so severe that every subject must reinforce students’ reading ability. When hiring teachers in any subject, hiring managers should prioritize candidates with literacy instruction training who have demonstrated their ability to apply those principles. 

3. Direct Instruction

Students learn best by direct instruction of a knowledge-rich curriculum. While this point is still debated, it’s unclear why. Proponents of education fads like “inquiry-based learning” make interesting arguments against direct instruction but fail to provide evidence for abandoning it. Teachers joining schools should be trained in direct instruction and committed to using it for all students.

4. Subject Area Expertise

All teachers should know the subject that they are teaching. It may sound obvious, but the truth is that some do not. Teacher shortages and other factors can result in educators being hired to teach an unfamiliar subject and teacher education programs that emphasize pedagogy over content, combined with lack of rigor in university course content, often leave many new teachers unprepared for public school classrooms.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Greg Lukianoff:

Afroman reminds the world that you should be able to mock power without fear in this country, because we are a free people. @TheFIREorg exists because that’s not always true in practice, but I’d like to thank @ogafroman for reminding Americans that he wasn’t just standing up for his own rights. The right to dissent belongs to us all.

Matt Mahan:

We spend 55% more per student than Mississippi — and get worse outcomes. 85% of Mississippi’s third graders read at grade level. In California, it’s just 49%. Clearly, the question shouldn’t be how we spend more — the question should be how we spend better so that our kids can succeed.

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Wisconsin early literacy map.

Leigh Searcy:

Goodman has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing. She is accused of abusing her office in a way that breaks the public’s trust. Six cases are cited in the articles of impeachment, including one that involves a fatal hit-and-run.

Before the vote, some house Democrats spoke up and said there has been no showing of a high misdemeanor or crime in office. House Minority Leader Pamela Stevenson questioned the articles of impeachment.

“The standard has not been met here – where is the crime?” Stevenson said.

Republican Jason Nemes, who chaired the impeachment committee, said Goodman has not followed the law.

“If you say the law says this but I’m going to do that instead then you do not deserve the black robe that you have been entrusted with,” Nemes said.

On Monday, Goodman defended her decisions and said some are seeking impeachment because they disagree with her rulings. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Thursday that impeaching a judge would set a dangerous precedent.

The resolution outlines five Articles of Impeachment against Goodman. The articles charge her with:

• Abusing the powers of her office;
• Defying binding precedents established by the highest courts of the Commonwealth;
• Defying statutes enacted by the General Assembly and rules of the Kentucky Court of Justice; and
• Interfering with the rights and powers of the grand jury, trial court jurors, and attorneys to perform their roles.

Following the adoption of the resolution, the Speaker of the House will appoint a committee and staff to prosecute the articles. The chair of that committee is required to lay the Articles of Impeachment before the Kentucky Senate within five days.

Jonathan Turley:

As a Chicago native, I have watched my home city unravel under the policies of Mayor Brandon Johnson and the ultra-left city council. Controlled by groups like the teachers’ union, the city has continued to spend lavishly on progressive causes and bloated pension funds while destroying its own economy. The city has a more than $1 billion budget gap, with a roughly $150 million deficit. Roughly, two-fifths of the budget is now going toward debt service and pension costs. The city council is following a familiar death spiral. It is turning to higher taxes against the very industries that it needs to drive the economy. That now includes a roughly 20 percent tourist tax on hotels. These politicians are doing what the Chicago fire failed to achieve: kill a major city.

Johnson has been pushing for irresponsible measures to grab cash now and pay later schemes. Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) lost a fight to secure a $200 million loan to avoid having to reduce the budget or staff. Johnson and the union pushed for a corporate “head tax.” Barely able to convince many companies to stay in the state, Chicago would actually make it more costly to hire Chicagoans with an additional $ 21-per-employee tax.

The city council just approved an $830 million borrowing plan to finance infrastructure projects by selling bonds. Notably, the council had to bar Johnson from giving the money to the teachers’ union, given his history of dependency on the union. However, the bond will now make the debt crisis even more acute. The bond agreement allows someone else to pay the massive accrued debt after 20 years.

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Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker has $pent million$ on Wisconsin Candidates.

Patrick Denice, and Shahar Dangur-Levy

Using student-level transcript data and information about instructional mode among public high school students in Massachusetts, this study examines the impact of disruptions to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ math coursetaking trajectories. We find that rates of advancement (that is, of taking a higher-level math course in one year compared to the prior year) decreased during the 2020-21 school year—especially among students who spent a greater share of the year in remote instruction. Findings also reveal widening race-based and socioeconomic gaps in math advancement at higher levels of remote instruction. These disruptions contribute to stratification in two ways: students who do not advance in one grade level are less likely to attain higher levels of math in high school generally, and the variation in disruption by race and socioeconomic status means some students fell even further behind in subsequent grades.

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more.

Wendy:

You’re sitting in class. The lesson makes no sense. You’re behind and everyone around you seems to get it. So what do you do?

You have three options:

• Try and fail publicly.

• Check out quietly.

• Act out, and take back some sense of control.

Most choose option three.

After the outburst, they get a

cool-down room

or a restorative discipline conference. Then they go back to the same classroom, with the same gaps, listening to the same lesson. It’s almost like we believe exposure to instruction is the same as learning. You cannot learn fractions if you have never mastered multiplication. The gaps don’t disappear because a student sat through class.

So what happens next? They fail?

Of course not. Because if they fail, they might drop out. And if they drop out, the school loses funding. So the student shows up to tutorials, checks some boxes, and gets a 70. Or they are enrolled in a multiple choice digital course recovery option where they can guess their way through for full credit. Then they advance to the next grade, where the next teacher is expected to catch them up. Spoiler alert: they never catch up. This is how you graduate someone who cannot read.

Is it the students’ fault?

WHR

In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis?

Donna Vatnick: 

In the 1960s, David Chambers, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, instructed teachers to give children a blank sheet of paper and ask them to draw a scientist. Chambers repeated this experiment many times over eleven years, collecting more than 4,800 drawings. The results were surprisingly consistent: white lab coat, glasses, beakers, mysterious machinery, someone saying “eureka!” The study has since been repeated dozens of times. While some details have changed, with beakers replaced by rockets, microscopes by vaccines, or men by women (sometimes), the scientist always wears a white lab coat.

The white lab coat, however, only came to symbolize scientists in the 20th century. Before that, cartoonists satirized chemists by portraying their craft as sorcery whose practitioners wore long dark robes, and painters drew naturalists in waistcoats and breeches against backdrops of plants and landscapes. It was really surgery, more than any other scientific discipline, that gave us the white laboratory coat. Today, scientists don a variety of multicolored, specialized protective equipment to suit the needs of their field, but the fact that children still inextricably link white lab coats to “scientists” says everything about how a simple garment came to exemplify a profession’s public image.

Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty and Anna Wilde Mathews:

Autism diagnoses among 8-year-olds climbed to one in 31 by 2022, from one in 150 in 2000, driving rapid growth in the therapy industry. In 2023, state Medicaid programs paid an average of $61 an hour for therapy services, according to the Journal’s analysis. Those services are often provided by high-school-educated workers earning less than $20 an hour, employees say.

While individual treatment varies, the therapy can include teaching young children to follow directions, practicing chores like folding laundry or learning communication skills, and is mostly administered by registered behavior technicians, the lower-wage workers. More highly trained behavior analysts, typically with master’s degrees, oversee the therapy.

The Journal’s analysis examined providers’ payments per patient as well as the overall number of hours billed per patient. Many providers nationwide billed a high number of hours of therapy for nearly every patient, the Journal found. Experts say that therapy plans should be tailored to individual children’s needs, and thus the number of hours should vary.

Mendy Minjarez, a University of Washington psychologist who oversees an autism treatment program for Medicaid patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said she never recommends 40-hour weeks, the most many states will cover. “It’s a very, very rare situation” where a child needs full-time therapy in a clinic, she said.

Will Flanders

Public scjools apparently have realized the(y) can no longer lie about their failures, and have now decided to blame taxpayers. $18,592 per kid is more than enough. Private and charter schools get better results for $1000s less per student.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Neetu Arnold

Boston Public Schools has posted its highest graduation rates in district history. 81.3 percent of seniors graduated in 2025, according to recently released data, compared with 59.1 percent in 2006.

Despite this surprising jump, Mayor Michelle Wu insistedthat BPS isn’t “lowering any expectations” or “moving the goalposts and making it easier for people to get by.” A closer look at Boston’s standardized test scores and policies, however, challenges this assertion.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

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Graduation rates used to be a reasonable proxy for students’ academic standards. But they are slowly losing their meaning as schools across the country inflate grades, making students appear more academically prepared than they really are.

Standardized test scores offer a more objective picture. BPS’s scores on the reading and math portions of the SAT, for example, have remained flat as graduation rates have soared. The average BPS student’s SAT scores hover around the College Board’s college and career readiness benchmarks. Many students score below these thresholds.

Chad Aldeman

And that’s exactly what we do see from 2005 to 2009, when the average score rose by three points, and scores rose across the performance distribution. That is, there were slightly fewer kids scoring at the lowest levels and slightly more kids scoring at higher levels.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr:

A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded.

These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But we should factor in another cause of receding economic equality: the decline of educational opportunity. There’s a well-established correlation between a college degree and economic benefit. And for guidance on what helps students finish college and earn more income, we should consider the SAT, whose power to predict graduation rates is well documented. The way to score well on the SAT—at least on the verbal SAT—is to have a large vocabulary. As the eminent psychologist John Carroll once observed, the verbal SAT is essentially a vocabulary test.

So there’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.

Flopping Aces:

The overnight destruction of Cesar Chavez’s public standing is all New Media’s doing. A few years back, New Media forced the left to erase its long history with racist, eugenicist Margaret Sanger. This week, the erasure of legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez has begun.

Why do I credit New media?

Simple. Before New Media, the sins of Sanger and Chavez could be ignored or glossed over or dismissed with the flick of a cable news anchor’s wrist.

No more.

New Media forced Planned Parenthood to reckon with the fact that Sanger had a lot more in common with Adolf Hitler than a mustache. For decades, the organized left, Democrats, and their allies in the legacy media covered this fact up as they celebrated Sanger. Finally, after years of New Media relentlessly exposing the truth, Planned Parenthood was forced to abort its connection to Sanger.

Gandhi won’t hold on forever.

Most disheartening is the likelihood that Martin Luther King Jr. will lose his secular sainthood status next year.

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more.

Cesar Chavez accused of abusing ‘young women or minors,’ UFW says; Madison School Name in the mix

Eleanor Hildebrandt

“Leave a Future” is the University of Minnesota’s first new tagline in 20 years. People aren’t quite sure what it means, or what to think of it.

The University of Minnesota’s new tagline — “Leave a Future” — is leaving people scratching their heads.

On Reddit, users cracked jokes about whether the U was encouraging students to leave campus or drop out of school. On X, one user said the slogan sounded like “AI slop and highly paid consultant group-think.” And on the Twin Cities campus, students interviewed Thursday, March 19, weren’t quite sure what to think. 

“Well, future’s in the future, so if you’re leaving it, I don’t know … it’s almost mental gymnastics a little bit,” said Laynie Rickie, a freshman. She liked that it included the word “future” but that’s about it. “Maybe I like the last one a little more.”

The U’s current slogan, which won’t be phased out until August, is “Driven to Discover,” which has been used in marketing materials for two decades.

Keri Ingraham:

Reading and math scores have barely budged, achievement gaps remain, and too many families are trapped in a system that fails their children.

A year later, the results are striking. The department has overhauled operations—cutting nearly half its staff, reducing administrative layers, and consolidating offices. Grants have been streamlined, programs merged, reporting reduced, and oversight of the $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio shifted to a more capable agency.

Eric Hoover:

The news set off alarms. Last summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would add a new component to its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), a system of surveys all colleges must complete each year. The new survey, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS, would require selective four-year institutions to hand over a ton of data — on race, gender, high-school grades, standardized-test scores, and family income — for all applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students over the previous seven completed admissions cycles.

The unprecedented demand was born of suspicion. An executive memorandumPresident Trump signed last August describes “concerns” that institutions were still considering applicants’ race in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively outlawed race-conscious admissions. “Greater transparency,” the memorandum said, “is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” The department described the ACTS as a means of ensuring that colleges weren’t using race-based preferences.

Several higher-education associations and policy wonks criticized the ACTS mandate. Though the data the administration requested “can offer insights into inequities in college admissions,” the Institute for Higher Education Policy wrote, “they cannot prove whether race was a determining factor in an admissions decision.” Which is true; ask anyone who’s ever worked in admissions. But in the end, would that caveat prevent an administration hostile to higher education from claiming that a given institution had broken the law?

Our members are doing their absolute best, but the human toll of this is high. People are exhausted.

A more immediate question has loomed over colleges all winter: How would they submit all the requested data on time?

Club For Growth:

In basic economics, a monopoly occurs when a single provider dominates a market, reducing competition, limiting choices, and often raising prices. A familiar example is your local utility company, which may be the only option for electricity or water in your area. Because there is no competition, customers cannot “shop around” for better service or prices. Similarly, a monopsony is when a single buyer dominates a labor market: Think of a coal town in which one mining company employs nearly everyone. Workers have few alternative employers, which limits their bargaining power and suppresses wages. In education, government-run school districts often function as both monopolies (for students) and monopsonies (for teachers), distorting the market and shielding the system from accountability.

The Problem with the Education Monopoly

US public education operates as a monopoly. Government-run schools dominate the market, leaving families with limited choices, as more than 90 percent of kids in school attend a public school. Most students are assigned schools based on their addresses, with access to better options restricted. As Friedman warned, monopolies stifle innovation and progress, leading to worse academic outcomes.

Three problems arise from education monopolies:

1. Limited Choices: Families often have no alternatives to underperforming schools.
2. Inefficiency: Excessive administrative costs divert funds from classrooms.
3. Lack of Accountability: Without competition, schools have little incentive to improve.

Natalie Eilbert:

• Experts suggest incarceration is less effective than comprehensive treatment for at-risk youth.
• Wisconsin has seen a sharp increase in tips about planned school attacks and police calls to schools.
• Schools and mental health services lack the funding and trained staff to address the growing problem.

On the morning of Nov. 7, 2024, a 13-year-old boy carrying a suspicious bag tried to access several locked entrances to Roosevelt Elementary School in Kenosha, then ran away when a school official questioned him.

After police watched video of the incident, they went to the boy’s home with a search warrant, where they found airsoft rifles, a stockpile of replica handguns, maps of the school, information on other school shooters, and a constellation of websites associated with extreme violence in his internet search history.

Arrested and charged with one count of making terrorist threats, the boy was sentenced on Jan. 27, 2025, to one-year in juvenile detention, with 82 days deducted for time served.

Siya Kumar:

Amid weeks of unrest in Iran, Emory University School of Medicine Dean Sandra Wong announced in an email to medical school faculty on Jan. 24 that a doctor who is also the daughter of a senior Iranian government official is no longer a University employee.  

The announcement follows a Jan. 19 protest where Iranian-American demonstrators gathered outside Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute to oppose the employment of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani by the University. 

Ardeshir-Larijani is the daughter of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security Secretary Ali Larijani. The Supreme Council for National Security is the group responsible for Iran’s defense. In August 2025, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved Larijiani to serve as the council’s secretary and represent Khamenei on the council.

Before her departure from Emory, Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani was an assistant professor in the department of hematology and medical oncology at the medical school. Her Emory faculty page and Emory Healthcare pages are no longer visible as of Jan. 24. 

Steven F. Hayward:

News just out that the number of academic job openings in history has collapsed over the last few years, as there are fewer and fewer students interested in majoring in the subject. The data from the H-Net jobs database look like this for all history fields, and U.S. history

Those are the trend lines of shrinking departments.

Why has this happened? Maybe there is a clue to be found in the fact that biographies of major American figures are extremely popular with the reading public. Biographies especially of presidents and figures from the American Founding, but also generals and major business leaders, have not only rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, but even spawned Broadway musicals. 

But very few of them are written by academic historians. Instead, they tend to be written by journalists or professional non-academic writers like Ron Chernow (Washington, Hamilton, Grant, and J.P. Morgan), James Grant (Bernard Baruch), Doris Kearns Goodwin (FDR and Lincoln), or David McCulloch (John Adams, Harry Truman). 

There are a few current exceptions such as Yale’s David Blight, author of recent biography of Frederick Douglass, or Beverly Gage, author of a recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover (with Ronald Reagan next on her project board) but these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. The few academic historians like Blight and Gage who have written popular biographies tend to older, and withdrawn from the mainstream of academic history (or out of the academic world entirely), like Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, Andrew Roberts, and Joseph Ellis. This is likely related to the fact that undergraduate majors in history have been dropping through the floorover the last 20 years.

Olivia Feldman,  Joshua M. Hyman  & Matthew L. McGann:

The feeling or impression that students get about enrolling in a particular college may be an important determinant of their college application decision. Combining institutional records on college campus tour participants over the last decade with hourly weather information, we leverage tour weather as a plausibly exogenous shock to students’ “feel” for attending the toured college. We find that poor tour weather reduces participants’ likelihood of applying. Tour participants, for example, are 10 percent less likely to apply when their tour is hot and 8 percent less likely when precipitation occurs during their tour. Using administrative data documenting where all tour participants enroll in college, we find that tour weather has little to no impact on the quality or type of college that participants ultimately attend. Nevertheless, our results suggest that students’ “feel” for attending a college can play an important role in the college application decision.

Tim Daly:

Teen cinema has always laughed at the try-hard.

There’s Tracy Flick (Election), wallpapering the halls with homemade campaign posters. Max Fischer (Rushmore), fencing in his school blazer.1 Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), hand frozen in the raised position. Cady Heron (Mean Girls) proudly joining the Mathletes before learning they are social kryptonite.2

Trying hard was uncool. In the teen code, status should accrue effortlessly to rebels who barely want it. Better to be Ferris Bueller (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Cher Horowitz (Clueless), Jeff Spicoli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) or Ren McCormack (Footloose) — boatloads of charisma, no strain.

The humor landed because the try-hards accepted the standard hopes of adults and then dialed them up so energetically that even the adults found them annoying. 

There are fewer try-hards today. Over time, American schools have reduced friction in the name of worthy aims like equity, wellness, and belonging. By friction, I’m talking about the conditions – and reasonable pressures – that make effort necessary, not optional. Some changes were sensible. But collectively, we’ve watered down the notion that it takes effort to succeed – that trying is a key part of a student’s job

Sophie Winkleman and David James:

Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning of this year Australia responded with a ban on social media for under-16s. Now even Britain is finally recognising the scale of the problem. Despite this week’s decision by MPs to consult rather than enforce, the fight will rage on. Deliberation doesn’t work in the arena of addictive substances.

However, the war on classroom screentime has yet to be properly waged, let alone won. Schools have embraced online learning with an almost evangelical fervour, urged on by billion-dollar businesses and bedazzled education secretaries.

Daisy Roser:

The U.S. Department of Education has not been responding to questions about a backlog of complaints, including nearly 400 from civil rights activist Mark Perry alleging race and sex-related discrimination in higher education.

Some disability rights organizations have also expressed frustration with the office, agreeing its response time is slow. 

Perry flags programs that are open only to female students, or only to students of color, in violation of federal civil rights laws. 

Perry (pictured) has contacted the Office for Civil Rights more than 70 times over the past several years to ask for updates on 375 outstanding investigations or requests for evaluation he has filed, according to a January email he shared with The Fix that he sent to more than a half-dozen OCR officials. 

“I am sure you’ll agree that a certain amount of frustration with these delays is understandable, especially given that 44 colleges and universities continue to violate Title IX despite being under a federal civil rights investigation for an average of 5 years,” Perry’s email to officials stated.

Rachel Louise Ensign and Alexandra Wexler:

Before the digital era, executives, lawmakers and other important people often communicated via secretaries and press releases. Now they fire off messages from their phones and computers day and night. Voice-to-text and autocorrect functions can make things worse.

Disregarding spelling and grammar in a written conversation can be a power move or a sign of friendliness, or perhaps both at the same time, said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University.

It conveys: “I’m important, you’re not so I don’t have to bother,” or “We’re so friendly, I don’t have to worry, we don’t stand on ceremony,” she said.

There was a time when a certain level of written formality was expected of people in power. In the 1950s, a CEO sending a letter would most likely speak into a Dictaphone, and the recording would be painstakingly transcribed by a secretary, said Thomas Farley, an etiquette and communications expert who goes by Mister Manners.

“If she made a mistake, she yanked the page out of the typewriter and she started over,” he said.

Tommy Jaime:

The University of Wisconsin–Madison hosted free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff yesterday for a timely conversation with Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin about free expression on college campuses and how UW–Madison can continue its efforts to build a culture that encourages vigorous discourse.

With nearly 200 in attendance at the DeLuca Forum in the Discovery Building, Chancellor Mnookin kicked off the discussion with Lukianoff, president and CEO of the, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) with a question about his background and what steered him toward a career as a champion of free speech. 

Lukianoff shared an evocative story of being the child of a Russian immigrant who left the Soviet Union (and who, as chance may have it, attended UW–Madison). Growing up in New York, Lukianoff was surrounded by other immigrants who also loved America and its foundational First Amendment that stood in contrast to the authoritarian governments many of them had fled. 

Those experiences informed Lukianoff’s beliefs in free speech as the bedrock principle in pursuit of human knowledge. “Dissent is essential for understanding the world as it is,” Lukianoff said.

Becky Jacobs and Olivia Herken:

The legislation would also outline rules around student-athlete NIL agreements and make details — such as the terms of the deal and revenue it generates — exempt from the state’s open records laws. Advocates for government transparency said the exemption could create a “subjective and potentially expansive loophole.”

“There’s been some controversy around that (exemption) language, but the goal has been to codify what we are already doing. We already do not share NIL details … both for privacy reasons and competitive reasons,” Mnookin said.

Asked about the proposed exemption, Hesselbein said they were looking ahead to next year, when Democrats hope to gain a majority in the Senate following this fall’s elections.

“We’ve talked about that as a caucus, and we think that there can be things moving forward that we might want to make amendments in January of the next calendar year,” she said.

Chris Rickert:

In October 2023, the former chair of Madison’s police oversight board threatened officers with investigations during the arrest of her daughter. 

Madison police are disputing an assertion made by the city’s independent police monitor that Black youth in Madison are 25 times more likely than white youth to be cited for a disorderly conduct ordinance violation.

The monitor’s office made the statement in its most recent annual report, posted online Tuesday, as part of a section that also claims police in Madison are far more likely than police in Milwaukee and around the country to arrest people for disorderly conduct.

In a statement released just after 9 p.m. Tuesday, Police Chief John Patterson said that “for years,” including the time period the monitor’s office studied, police have declined to issue citations to juveniles for any municipal offense, and have instead sent them for restorative justice services.

“Officers only issue restorative justice referral forms to youth for municipal offenses — they do not issue tickets/citations,” he said in an email Wednesday. “We do this for all municipal offenses, including disorderly conduct.”

Youth are currently sent to a restorative justice program run by the YWCA of Dane County and funded through the Dane County Department of Human Services, according to police spokesperson Stephanie Fryer. Such programs are aimed at giving participants the chance to take responsibility and repair the harm they’ve caused, while avoiding involvement in the criminal justice system. Restorative justice options have been a key plank in Madison’s work to reduce longstanding racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Grok Summary

• The post highlights JWST’s discovery of about 1,000 compact red “Little Red Dots” from the universe’s first billion years, sparking debate with three theories—dust-shrouded supermassive black holes, collapsing ancient stars, or direct-collapse black holes—all facing data inconsistencies.
• Accompanying animation visualizes these enigmatic specks amid deep-field galaxies, emphasizing their brightness and prevalence, while upcoming radio telescope observations aim to pierce the dust for clarity.
• Recent February 2026 studies favor direct-collapse black holes, suggesting these objects formed without stellar precursors, potentially upending early cosmic evolution models and fueling dozens of queued JWST proposals.

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Genesis.

Stevie Bonifield: 

On Friday, Encyclopedia Britannica and dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that it used their copyrighted content to train its AI, then generated responses that were “substantially similar” to their content, as previously reported by Reuters.

According to Britannica, OpenAI repeatedly copied its content without permission, stating, “GPT-4 itself has ‘memorized’ much of Britannica’s copyrighted content and will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions on demand. The memorized examples are unauthorized copies that [OpenAI] used to train their models, including GPT-4.”

Gema Zamarro, Andrew M. Camp, Josh McGee, Taylor Wilson, Miranda Vernon

Attracting and retaining a high-quality teacher workforce is a central challenge for education policy, and higher teacher salaries are often proposed as a solution. The LEARNS Act increased Arkansas’s minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of $2,000, and provided school districts with the flexibility to deviate from traditional, seniority-based salary schedules. We collected districts’ teacher salary schedules one year before and after implementation and integrated these data with administrative records to study districts’ adjustment to the law and teacher retention during the first three years of the reform. We find that districts made the minimum adjustments necessary to meet the new requirements. These changes increased the competitiveness of starting salaries across districts and reduced salary variation statewide. The Act also substantially increased salaries in rural and high-poverty districts, weakening the negative relationship between starting salaries, student poverty, and rurality. Using a triple-difference design, we find that teachers who received raises exceeding the $2,000 minimum were more likely to remain in their districts, with the strongest retention effects among those receiving the largest increases. We also find evidence that these effects may fade as inflation erodes the real value of the initial salary gains. 

Paul E. Peterson

Massachusetts politicians are celebrating the highest scores any state has ever received on Advanced Placement (AP) examinations, tests used for college admissions and substitutes for college courses. Seemingly, students are better prepared for college than ever before.

Were it only so. Unfortunately, the higher scores are likely due to easier AP tests, not more learned students. Though Massachusetts students continue to outperform those in other states on the exams, there is no evidence that the performance of the state’s own students exceeds those of students in prior years.

The College Board, the agency in charge of the AP program, admits its questions are easier and passing scores have been lowered on key tests like the English Language exam. They justify the easier tests as an adjustment to a less demanding curriculum in high school and lowered expectations by colleges and universities. In other words, AP is simply adapting to a broad decline in educational standards.

A three-university team of economists has taken a careful look at the detrimental effects of grade inflation for high school students. The trends they show suggest that grade point averages (GPAs) in high school nationally climbed over a half a letter grade from about a “B” to over a “B+” between 1985 and 2020, according to information supplied by the National Center for Education Statistics.

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Michael Torres excerpt:

“The College Board, the agency in charge of the AP program, admits its questions are easier and passing scores have been lowered on key tests like the English Language exam.”

Steven Yoder:

Susan Gilkerson, a math teacher and school bus driver, stood before a South Dakota education board and issued a warning. 

The proposed math standards the board was considering — just 36 pages, less than half the length of standards adopted in 2018 — were so scant that teachers won’t know how to use them, Gilkerson said. The existing standards detail not just which math concepts should be taught but also the specific skills students need to demonstrate to show they understand them, said Gilkerson, who teaches in the rural Oldham-Ramona-Rutland district. 

“When I talk to my students, I want them to understand it,” she said of a concept like the Pythagorean theorem. But the new standards contain little guidance on how students can demonstrate they grasp that math concept or countless others, she said.  

Joseph Graves, South Dakota’s education secretary, countered: Teachers and parents don’t understand the current standards because they’re so complicated. “Our whole goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Graves said. 

That exchange this past October marked the opening salvo in an escalating battle over South Dakota’s math standards. One source the department consulted in creating its new draft — part of a review that happens every seven years — was a brand-new set of model math standards produced by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group on the front lines of the education culture wars. The group’s document, named the Archimedes Standards for the ancient Greek mathematician, urges states to do what South Dakota is trying with its standards rewrite: eliminate Common Core math.  

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2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Jorge Elorza, Ben Austin

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have offered little on education policy beyond calls for more funding — even as evidence of failure mounted. Reading and math scores have fallen sharply. Achievement gaps have widened, and chronic absenteeism has surged. Yet the party has defaulted to defending an increasingly indefensible status quo.
Democrats talk about equity while protecting a system that produces profound inequality. They tout empowerment yet resist giving families meaningful choices. They invoke justice but rarely hold schools accountable. And they claim to want innovation while outsourcing their agenda to special interests that have no incentive to change.

They assume institutions are mostly working and just need to be defended more vigorously. But the public is no longer buying it.

Responding to this reality requires a rethink, not a rebrand — not just of the party’s policies, but of the worldview that has produced them. It starts with a simple question: Do we trust the people we serve?

www:

The foundation’s lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to stop the $3 million sale. Even if the county returned the foundation’s money, the lawsuit says the negative effects of the sale are difficult to measure and “cannot be repaired by money alone.”

“Closing on the sale of the Campus to a private school will make it impossible to fulfill the purpose of the Foundation’s gift — an irreparable harm,” according to the lawsuit that the Wisconsin State Journal obtained.

Armando Garcia:

Cesar Chavez, the late farmworker organizer who became a national civil rights icon and co-founded the United Farm Workers, is accused of abusing “young women or minors,” the union said in a statement Tuesday.

“The UFW has learned of deeply troubling allegations that one of the union’s co-founders, Cesar Chavez, behaved in ways that are incompatible with our organization’s values,” the union said. “Some of the reports are family issues, and not our story to tell or our place to comment on. Far more troubling are allegations involving abuse of young women or minors. Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing.”

UFW says it does not have “firsthand knowledge” of any of the allegations and has not directly received reports of what they may be.

“However, the allegations are serious enough that we feel compelled to take urgent steps to learn more and provide space for people who may have been victimized to find support and to share their stories if that is what they choose,” the union said.

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In recent years, the Madison school district has renamed multiple schools. Some were renamed following concerns associated with former namesakes, such as James Madison Memorial High School and Thomas Jefferson Middle School, which are now Vel Phillips Memorial High School and Ezekiel Gillespie Middle School. Other schools have been renamed following new construction, such as Lori Mann Carey Elementary School, formerly Southside Elementary School.

The school district’s policy says it will consider only two renamings per school year. The School Board announced at its Monday meeting that it has begun the process of renaming Lindbergh and Elvehjem Elementary Schools. 

Both schools’ renaming proposals were prompted by controversies surrounding their current namesakes.

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Erin Gretzinger:

More.

Madison’s Cesar Chavez Elementary.

US Drops Case Against Vang Pao; Madison Elementary School Was, At One Time Name for the Exiled Hmong Leader

James Neff

Jim Green says one solution for Oregon’s worst-in-the-nation reading scores is a governor’s executive order away.

Green should know. For 25 years, he worked the halls of the Capitol, first as a lobbyist and then as executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, which represents 1,400 elected members across the state’s 197 school districts. A lawyer, Green also served two terms on the Salem-Keizer School Board.

Now retired, Green has regrets. In particular, he rues some of the victories his group (alongside the teachers union and the Council of School Administrators) achieved over the past two decades. Among them: undercutting state reading assessments by helping pass perhaps the nation’s strongest testing opt-out law and beating back efforts to require phonics-based reading instruction in elementary schools.

“We went too far in saying, ‘Don’t mandate anything,’” Green says.

Today, only 40.3% of Oregon third graders are proficient in reading, as measured by state tests. Green says his group’s success contributed to what he concedes is a statewide disgrace.

The governor could spark a turnaround, Green insists, if she did one thing: issue an executive order that every new Oregon elementary teacher must pass a standalone exam in the science of reading. Nearly 20 states require such a test for teachers, including Colorado, Louisiana, California, and Mississippi—and all of them have higher reading scores than Oregon.

Elizabeth Messenger:

For example, a union member who wants to look at officer and employee compensation over the past five years would start by visiting UnionReports.gov to find their union. On the union’s report filing page, they would click the “View” button in the “Visualization” column to launch the interactive tool. From there, they can navigate using the tabs on the left to explore different categories. The “Officer and Employee Compensation” tab provides a detailed, searchable list of payments to all officers and employees for a specific year. They could also select the “Multi-Year Comparison” tab, which offers charts and graphs displaying compensation data and other financial information across several years, and gives a clearer picture of the union’s financial activities over time.

This new tool is the result of a multi-agency collaboration with our colleagues in the Office of the Chief Information Officer with a process that can be replicated by other department agencies. Developed in-house in just 78 business days — with software costs of less than $600 — it’s an example of government efficiency at its best. And this is the first step in a larger project: We plan to add similar visualization tools for other reports, including those filed by employers and their labor relations consultants (Forms LM-10, LM-20, and LM-21).

An important part of our mission is advancing labor union and labor-management transparency through reporting and disclosure requirements. Our new tool puts American workers first by helping union members engage in the governance of their unions and helping employees make informed choices about union representation. We invite everyone to explore the tool at UnionReports.gov.

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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

Jack Salmon

One obvious reason why the 7% capital gains tax didn’t solve Washington’s budget problem is because state policymakers remain profligate in their spending habits—Washington’s biennial budget has effectively doubled over the past decade.

Another reason why the tax didn’t solve their budget woes is because the additional tax burden encouraged high-earning Washingtonians to leave the state and take their incomes with them.

The chart below shows the net migration of earners making more than $200,000 between 2015 and 2022.[1]Over 2,300 high earners left the state on net in 2021, the year the 7% tax was enacted, and almost 6,400 more left in 2022 when the tax came into effect.

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As it turns out, “tax the rich” is a great slogan until “the rich” move somewhere else.

“The problem with socialism is you run out of other people’s money” — Margaret Thatcher

Scott Carlson:

As the president of a small college in the Rust Belt, Jill Murray feels the crush of enrollment pressures. Her institution, Lackawanna College, has a plan to ease them: It’s starting the pipeline earlier by tapping into Pennsylvania’s 502 school districts.

Lackawanna’s dual-enrollment system is a recruitment tool. It offers college-level courses at $100 per credit — an 80-percent discount — to about 3,000 high-school students, giving them some sense of what majors and career tracks they might pursue at the college.

“So many students have no idea what’s out there,” Murray says. “We have partnerships with over 80 school districts and growing, and we’re going after all 502 if we can figure that out.”

In Pennsylvania, parents pay tuition for dual-enrollment courses, and Lackawanna’s lower price point offers a lure. Credits earned in high school transfer into a Lackawanna undergraduate program, which eases the transfer process and further enhances the program’s appeal.

Dual enrollment — sometimes called concurrent enrollment, among other names — is traditionally associated with community colleges, which can draw half or more of their enrollment from high schools. But four-year institutions — including flagships — are entering those spaces, too, seeking to reach underserved students and help meet enrollment goals. These programs vary, shaped by each state’s competitive landscape and structures for dual enrollment, and the outcomes for students can depend on the guardrails set up by local policymakers. Sometimes students are drawn to brand-name institutions and away from community colleges, where courses are often more transferable.

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Notes and links on dual enrollment.

Credit for non Madison School District Courses

Jessica Harkay:

The “And Stay Out!” report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off UCLA segregation research from 2014.The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls. 

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as March 6. 

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a family’s opportunity to take advantage of open enrollment— a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Jill Barshay:

A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion. 

In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way. Fuchs said the paper is slated to be published this spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities and he expects it to be made public online sooner.  (Update: The paper was posted online in February.)

“We’re not saying that the evidence indicates full inclusion cannot work,” said Fuchs. “We’re saying that the evidence in terms of where to place these children is extremely weak, is fundamentally flawed, and no conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.”

Fuchs also notes that there is a growing body of high-quality research on how to teach children with disabilities or those at risk of being diagnosed with a disability. These studies are randomized controlled trials of interventions that require hours of intense, specialized instruction. For many, if not most, students with disabilities, Fuchs argues, a separate setting, such as a separate classroom or even a separate school, might be the best way to get the instruction they need. 

by Joseph E. Davis, Michael Toscano and Ken Burchfiel

These general trends have been well documented. In our new survey of young men—conducted by YouGov between April 7 and 15, 2025, with a representative sample of 2,000 men ages 18 to 29 living in the U.S.—we found them, too. But what do these trends mean? That’s the crucial question, and to offer an interpretation, we asked both how young men are doing at this time of their lives and why so many are facing the challenges they do. Of course, a lot of ink has already been spilled on this topic. The extensive commentary on the crisis has produced a variety of explanations. Here is a rough summary of three of the most common ones:

• Structural Changes. A sizable literature highlights the role of “structural” changes as the most important contributing factors. The struggles of young men are symptoms of wider economic and educational alterations, such as the off shoring of manufacturing and unfavorable school policies that have weakened the opportunity structure for men.
• Idle Young Men. Some accounts, making little reference to political economy, focus their explanations on deficiencies in young men themselves. Caught up in self-indulgence, a substantial number of young men have become resigned to idleness—addicted to screens and filling their hours with virtual distractions. Their failings reflect passivity, lack of ambition, poor work ethic, and a “purpose void.”
• Failed Socialization. Another school of interpretation centers on failed socialization. Brought up under the old, rigid masculinity norms, young men have not learned emotional openness or to express vulnerability. Now lonely and isolated, they have withdrawn into a kind of antagonistic reclusion and increasingly come under the sway of the “toxic masculinity” promoted in the online manosphere. From this poisoned well, many are imbibing resentment, nihilism, and misogynistic attitudes toward women.

While these arguments are not exhaustive, they represent some of the principal theories. When we designed our survey, these were some of the claims we sought to investigate.

Mike Bird:

1. “Absolutely astounding figures from the NY state comptroller: spending on services for the NYC street homeless population ran to $81,705 per person last year, up from $28,428 pp 6yrs ago. Figures do not include all kinds of other spending, supportive housing, policing costs etc.” Link here.

Nick Shirley

Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger… We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP.

Hollis Robbins:

The most volatile demographic and technological clashes on campus this fall will not be on the streets but in the classroom. Incoming young men, increasingly conservative and highly optimistic about generative AI, will be placed in classrooms with non-tenure-track, overwhelmingly female, politically progressive first-year writing faculty fiercely hostile to AI.

Why? Because accreditors and state legislatures demand first-year writing, which no study has ever found effective, and now seems nonsensical in the AI era. (The last respectable study was in Arum and Roksa’s 2011 Academically Adrift, which found that students showed almost no measurable improvement in writing in their first two years of college.) The argumentsfor ending it are mounting. Does anyone think setting up the incoming AI-savvy 2026 cohort for a first semester classroom battle is worth it?

The Common App’s March 2026 report shows 9.4 million applications, up five percent over last year, 2.1 million more than four years ago. I’ve been following enrollment patterns for two decades. I look at those numbers and see young men who might not have applied to college in past years feeling more confident than before, with an AI at their fingertips.

According to a February 2026 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly two-thirds of teenagers currently use LLMs, with male students significantly more likely to view these tools as fundamentally useful and beneficial for their own lives and society. An ACT survey found that male students were more optimistic about AI and more likely to see it as relevant to college and careers. A Berkeley-Stanford-Harvard analysis of 143,000 people across eighteen studies found that women were about twenty percent less likely to use generative AI overall than men, who view these models as legitimate productivity engines.

Even without taking gender differences into account, the reality for universities is that eighty-four percent of high school students used generative AI tools for schoolwork in 2025, according to the College Board, with sixty-nine percent using ChatGPT specifically. Pew found that teen use of ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled between 2023 and 2024. Boys and girls use it at the same rate. The difference is in attitude. Boys are more enthusiastic. The LLM has likely helped many of them write their papers and lab reports for the past three years. These young men applied to college confident they can pull together a solid essay on any subject.

David Zincavage:

Now terribly long ago, in my high school, the better students, in the two Academic class sections, received instruction in Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.

The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2” thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.

Maleeha Lodhi

From the fall of Troy, selected in her book as the symbolic prototype of a freely chosen calamity, to America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam, she analysed a phenomenon that recurs throughout history. “Mankind,” she wrote, “makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity.” Her book examined what she called the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the state or constituency involved. Tuchman defined self-interest as “whatever conduces to the welfare and advantage of the body being governed”. From that follows her conception of folly: a policy that is counterproductive in these terms.

To be considered folly, the policy or a course of action must meet three criteria. It must be seen as counterproductive at that time, and not by hindsight. Two, a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. And three, to distinguish folly in government from the capricious whims of a single person, “the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler”.

Richard Rubin & Jeanne Whalen:

Republican-led states are racing each other to flatten, cut and eliminate individual income taxes, with 23 states lowering their top income-tax rates since 2021. Mississippi and Oklahoma, among others, put themselves on paths to eliminate personal income taxes. South Carolina is setting a course this year to drop its top income-tax rate to 1.99%, and Missouri residents may vote this November on a plan to phase out income taxes and allow lawmakers to expand sales taxes.

Democratic-controlled states are moving the opposite way, pushing to increase taxes on top earners to combat inequality and plug budget holes expected from Republicans’ cuts to federal health and nutrition assistance programs. Washington state’s legislature last week sent Gov. Bob Ferguson a bill that would create a 9.9% income tax on earnings over $1 million. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pushing state lawmakers to raise income taxes on high-income households. Hikes on top earners are a priority for some Democrats and progressive groups as they head to elections this fall in Rhode Island and Colorado.

The middle ground is quickly disappearing. In 2006, 15 states had top income-tax rates on wage income below 5% and just one exceeded 10%, according to the Tax Foundation, a group that favors lower rates and fewer breaks. Now, more than half of the states have gone below 5% and five others plus the District of Columbia are in double digits.

AB 1034

John Steppe and Jessie Opoien:

With a one-vote margin, the state Senate on March 17 approved a bill to provide taxpayer funding for athletic facility debt service and formalize rules around name, image and likeness. Eleven Republicans and six Democrats voted in favor of the bill, while seven Republicans and nine Democrats voted against it.

——-

Jim Polzin

UW Statement.

Meanwhile:

“I’m hopeful that we can get something done, but I also am very concerned about the fact apparently not all the tribal nations are with us.”

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

For whatever reason she promised him she’d deliver the necessary votes. That could be because, for some reason I can’t comprehend, Hesselbein actually supports this awful piece of legislation. Or it could be that she made a deal with LeMahieu to get some other bill that Democrats liked to the floor. If that’s the case I’m not sure what that bill would have been.

More:

BREAKING: JPMorgan taps Tom Brady, Dwyane Wade, & others for a new athlete wealth management push. The stars will meet with JPMorgan execs to help the bank craft programs designed to serve athletes from college to retirement and prevent players from going broke

Anna Merod:

California’s Fresno Unified School District is one such district experimenting with outcomes-based contracts. During the 2024-25 school year, Fresno USD entered into an agreement with Curriculum Associates for the district’s use of the company’s i-Ready tool, said Ann Loorz, the district’s executive director of procurement.

A multi-department district committee, which includes experts in data research and curriculum, meets weekly with the ed tech vendor to discuss what’s working and what isn’t with the tool’s use in Fresno USD’s classrooms. Loorz said that the district has been able to adjust according to the research regularly provided by Curriculum Associates.

“Instead of just waiting until the very end, when it’s like ‘Oh, that’s all we got and we owe you how much money?’ It’s like a partnership from the very beginning,” Loorz said.

Because of the conditions of the Curriculum Associates contract, Fresno USD did not pay for 100% of the negotiated services since some of the district’s expected student outcomes were not entirely met, Loorz said. 

Elizabeth Statmore:

SFUSD’s justification for suppressing advancement is based on an ideological argument, such as the claim that allowing students to accelerate is inequitable, but the new eighth-grade math policy is a bait-and switch.

There’s a difference between a constraint policy — one that sets a ceiling based on practical or developmental concerns and a suppression policy — one that slows students down or prevents them from reaching the ceiling. In SFUSD’s case, the justification for suppressing advancement is always based on an ideological argument, such as, say, the claim that allowing students to accelerate is inequitable.

That’s why SFUSD parents feel like the new eighth-grade math policy is playing a bait-and-switch — because that’s exactly what it’s doing.

Honest policy is transparent

It is reasonable and realistic in public education policy to set a ceiling  as long as this is done in a manner that is consistent and transparent.

An honest ceiling is set based on real operational or developmental limits. Within that ceiling, students should be allowed to progress without additional hindrances or obstacles. A district that is being transparent with families about its constraints is directing the community’s institutional energies toward getting all over the finish line.

But what SFUSD keeps doing is neither honest nor transparent.

——-

Related: English 10.

Becky Jacobs:

During his campus presentation, Zumbrunnen outlined a handful of ongoing challenges at UW-Madison, including:

• Federal uncertainty, like around research funding. “We know that the federal research landscape has shifted. … Maybe it hasn’t shifted quite as direly as we thought it might have, but we’re still operating … in that space of uncertainty.”
• State action. Zumbrunnen pointed to new requirements from state lawmakers around teaching workloads and how general education course credits transfer.
• Demographic shifts. “We know that there are fewer high school graduates than there once were in the United States, and we know that’s going to have an impact on recruitment and admissions for higher education.”
• Americans’ declining trust in institutions. However, he said, “we’ve got at least some data that says that picture might … have been improving for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially if we tell certain parts of our story really well.”
• General questions about the value of higher education and whether a college degree is worth it.

David Bittinger:

Most American schools once provided students classes in the subject of “civics,” which included the country’s foundational documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; patriotic citizen’s rights and responsibilities, such as voting and jury duty; and American values and heroes, including pioneers and inventors.

Do civics classes sound antique, maybe relevant as a big old phone book (assuming you recall big old phone books)? Since civics classes are virtually gone now, could you guess in which decade they quickly disappeared?

OK, too easy. Everyone guessed the 1960s, right?

The public chaos and criminality so popular now might seem general, but it has two major sources.

Chris Rickert:

On Monday, he referred questions to his attorney, Jonas Bednarek, who released a statement saying that Chancellor is “exploring potential legal remedies related to his arrest and termination.”

“David is relieved that the District Attorney reviewed the facts carefully and found that there was no evidence of a crime. Unfortunately, the police’s investigation, and its decision to arrest him, was not so thoughtful,” Bednarek said. “He was arrested and jailed for two days when the facts clearly did not support those actions.”

Santi Ruiz

Before FAFSA was redesigned in the last couple years, there was good research that there were literally millions of students who would be eligible for federal and potentially state and institutional aid, but never completed the FAFSA. It was too complex, they didn’t know about it — there’s a lot of reasons.

This had been an issue for a long time. [Former senator] Lamar Alexander deserves a lot of credit. He had a lot of desire to simplify this process so it’d be easier and more accessible — many more families would be able to complete it, and it would open up college to more low-income students. When he was on his way to retire, in 2019, there were two congressional bills about FAFSA simplification. The question was, “Can we take this cumbersome, 100-plus question form process” — a lot of it was taking data from your tax returns and figuring out field 38 needs to go here, and a family inputting it and potentially making mistakes — “and make it easier?”

There would be logic built into it. Think of TurboTax— when they find some information on you, they say, “These six questions are no longer relevant, so you no longer need to ask them.” The single biggest breakthrough was this was going to pull data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Santi, you did a tax return hopefully?

Sebastian Raschka:

This page collects architecture figures and fact sheets from The Big LLM Architecture Comparison and A Dream of Spring for Open-Weight LLMs. It focuses on the architecture panels only. Click a figure to enlarge it and use the model title to jump to the corresponding article section.

If you spot an inaccurate fact sheet, mislabeled architecture, or broken link, please file an issue here:Architecture Gallery issue tracker.

Upon popular request, you can now also get this as a physical poster via Zazzle. The preview there may look a bit low-resolution, but the upload is based on a fresh high-resolution export at 14570 x 12490 pixels (a 56 MB PNG file with 182 megapixels). I just ordered one myself but please be aware that I haven’t been able to verify the quality, yet.

Dana Stangel-Plowe:

Five years ago, I blew the whistle on a school I loved. Did it make a difference? 

I taught high school English at an independent school in New Jersey for seven years. I loved the school’s focus on resilience and growth. I loved my colleagues, who challenged and nurtured our students, including my own children, who attended the school. And I felt lucky to be part of such a vibrant learning community. That all changed in 2014. 

A young dean, fresh from an education conference hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools, led the faculty in what we now recognize as a “privilege walk,” in which participants were forced to take a step forward or back based on their identities.

Tim Harford:

The Golden Goose awards do not exist in a political vacuum: they are explicitly designed to showcase the unexpected benefits of federally funded research in the US, and were meant as a rebuke to the earlier Golden Fleece awards, in which US senator William Proxmire would mock what he considered wasteful government spending — often on strange-sounding scientific projects.

Proxmire was not wholly wrong: some government projects are a waste of money, and some academics produce research of little value. But the lack of value is generally not because the research is “useless” but because the research is sloppily or even fraudulently done. Superficially interesting claims congeal on the surface of a steaming vat of confusion.

Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to be tainted. Incestuous as it might seem, the people best placed to hand out funding for basic scientific research are other scientists.

Elizabeth Sander

Texas’ growing microschool movement has attracted hundreds of students and families since the COVID-19 pandemic — but it’s also luring teachers with the promise of increased freedom in the classroom and greater flexibility in how they teach. 

After state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles installed his New Education System at many Houston ISD campuses, two teachers at Baker Montessori Elementary felt constrained. They didn’t have as much autonomy as they wanted when implementing Montessori, which prioritizes independence from a young age.

James Propp

Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. — Tom Lehrer, “New Math”

I ask too many questions. A case in point is the time I lost out on a place I wanted to rent when I asked my potential future landlord one question too many (“Does the pond have mosquitos in the summer?”). Another example is the time I ticked off a car salesman by asking him, after a long string of similar requests that he had gamely complied with, whether I could try changing the tires of a car I was considering buying from his dealership before I bought it. (I mean, shouldn’t every responsible consumer go through the entire owner’s manual when contemplating such a major purchase?) As a member of a local singing group, I developed such a reputation for asking the music director questions that when we went on a tour, one of my fellow singers got a laugh by interrupting the tour-guide with my signature line: “I have a question!”

But my topic today isn’t questions in general. I want to focus on the species of question that I often tell students doesn’t exist: the Stupid Question. And I want to talk about how one stupid question led me to an interesting and new (albeit a bit stupid) way to estimate the mathematical constant pi.

John Stossel:

“My child can’t read!”

That’s become a common complaint from parents.

Why? It might be because kids are distracted by social media and video games.

But I think it’s also because reading instruction became lazy and political.

“Progressives” at teachers’ colleges pushed a reading technique called “Balanced Literacy.” 

Instead of memorizing sounds and letters, teachers push what they call “cueing,” guessing words based on their context, or pictures.

Balanced Literacy downplays “structured phonics,” the older technique where kids memorize letters’ sounds and learn to sound out words.

Balanced Literacy does sound more fun than boring phonics drills. Progressives said it would make kids wantto read.

It mostly didn’t. Yet it was largely accepted until about two years ago, when podcaster Emily Hanford released a series called “Sold a Story.” It resonated with parents who were upset that their children couldn’t read.

“It didn’t seem like they were really teaching them to read,” one complained. “It seemed like they were teaching them to sound like they could read.”

A teacher contacted the podcast to say: “I trained other people in balanced literacy using that cueing system. I’m mad. I’m saddened for the kids that I’ve taught.”

———

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Chad Aldeman:

Besides, thanks largely to the state’s investments in free community college for everyone and tuition- and fee-free public four-year college for students from low-income families, the number of students attending public colleges and universities has jumped by about 24,000 since 2022. That’s a gain of 16 percent in three years, reversing years of declines and far outpacing national rates.

Unfortunately, these high-level attainment measures are hiding some pernicious trends. First, there’s the stark fact that about 26,000 Massachusetts high school sophomores only “partially” met state expectations in math as measured by MCAS tests, and another 11,000 fell into the lowest “not meeting” expectations performance category. Similar numbers of students were behind in English and science.

Second, public college enrollment gains don’t look as good once you realize that they seem largely driven by adults going to college rather than students coming directly from high school. As evidence, the matriculation rate for recent high school graduates entering state colleges and universities is down from about 50 percent in 2015 to 44 percent in 2024.

Third, Massachusetts’ community college enrollment surge means more students entering a system with some of the lowest graduation rates in the country. According to the latest data, barely more than one in three students who enter a Massachusetts community college leaves with any sort of degree or certificate within six years. That places Massachusetts fifth-worst in the country in terms of community college completion rates. Black and Hispanic students have even worserates.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Wendy:

Anyone wondering why the special education population is growing so fast in Texas and across the U.S.? Many people have figured out that being labeled as “sped” is actually very beneficial.

A student reaches 4th grade and still cannot read fluently. The school has two choices:

1. Admit the student has fallen through academic cracks due to poor instruction, or
2. Classify the student with a Specific Learning Disability in Reading and move forward with an IEP.

Guess which route is taken almost every time?

The “SLD in reading comprehension” label becomes a justification as to why the student can’t read at grade level. I’m not dismissing legitimate learning disabilities. Those do exist. However, I have personally witnessed these disabilities vanish when gaps in learning are filled in.

Academic gaps have grown so rapidly since COVID that Texas was forced to remove its 8.5% cap on SPED enrollment. Why? Because it’s easier to label them as “special education” students than to admit we have an instructional problem.

Brian Fraley:

DPI has yet to provide all the public documents I requested 14 months ago.

I enlisted the help of the Institute for Reforming Government. It shouldn’t take threats of legal action to get government agencies to release public data, but here we are.

Eventually, DPI did release SOME of the information we requested a year ago, and that led to our reporting of the $368,885 waterpark workshop.

We are still awaiting more public documents, including the contract DPI signed with Data Recognition Corporation, the vendor who facilitated the standards-reset process.

Now, IRG is calling for state lawmakers to establish a “Special Committee on Oversight of the Department of Public Instruction” because the reliance on waterpark workshops (Yes, there have been more than the one that was convened to reset the standards) raise troubling questions of how taxpayer dollars are being spent by the Department.

There are many layers to this scandal.

Dairyland Sentinel, and the public, deserve access to all public records, including the Department’s contract with Data Recognition Corporation.

Taxpayers deserve a full accounting.

Wisconsin citizens deserve the truth.

———

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

More.

DPI standards.

Billy Binion:

Whenever Paul Ehrlich comes up, this letter comes to mind.

I don’t like celebrating anyone’s death. But Ehrlich’s legacy should be remembered for what it is: apocalyptic environmental predictions that helped legitimize coercive sterilization and ruin countless lives. Horrific.

More. And.

When talking about Ehrlich today, spare a moment to note that he set the template that the modern environmentalist movement still uses: apocalyptic forecasts that don’t bear out, but which lead countless people to make disastrously bad personal & public-policy decisions.

Video.

This explains a lot.

Paul Ehrlich has died. He was 93. He is survived by 8,300,678,394 people (134% increase from 1968), with a daily worldwide average calorie intake of 2,800 kcal (a 22% increase).

It’s cold comfort, but Emde was hardly alone in deferring to Ehrlich’s supposed expertise. The longtime professor of biology at Stanford University and advocate of an apocalyptic theory of human overpopulation, who passed away on Friday at the age of …

Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope, Merrill Warnick:

Average grades continue to rise in the United States, raising the question of how grade inflation impacts students. We provide comprehensive evidence on how teacher grading practices affect students’ long-run success. Using administrative high school data from Los Angeles and from Maryland that is linked to postsecondary and earnings records, we develop and validate two teacher-level measures of grade inflation: one measuring average grade inflation and another measuring a teacher’s propensity to give a passing grade. These measures of grade inflation are distinct from teacher value-added, with grade inflating teachers having moderately lower cognitive value-added and slightly higher noncognitive value-added. These two measures also differentially impact students’ long-term outcomes. Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student’s future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. In contrast, passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back and increases high school graduation, with limited long-run effects. The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year.

——

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

Matt Brown:

The data you’ll see referenced here, and in all future newsletters in this series, comes from the Total Operational Expenses line item from that report. That number includes all the money a school spends on coaching salaries, administrative salaries, scholarships, travel, software, recruiting, and all sorts of other operational expenses. It does not include athlete revenue share payments. The numbers we are talking about here are not the “salary cap” for each team.

I’d love to publish that information! But almost every school refuses to share it, even at an anonymized level. So this is the next best thing I can get.

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025. That means this data is not from this basketball season. It is from last basketball season, when Florida won the national title.

Corrinne Hess:

From 2002 through 2023, student enrollment declined 7.3 percent in Wisconsin, from 875,592 students to 811,661. That was compared to a 1.3 percent decline nationally during the same period, according to the Policy Forum. 

Reasons for the decline are multi-faceted, said Mike Johnson, superintendent of the Eau Claire Area School District. 

“I think the factors include lower birth rates and more choices for students,” Johnson said. 

In the last two years, two independent charter schools opened in the Eau Claire area. Johnson said that has resulted in 60 elementary school students leaving the district. 

DPI released its public school enrollment numbers last week. The state is expected to release enrollment numbers for private and charter schools in the coming weeks. 

This year, the Eau Claire school district has 10,533 students, down almost 9 percent from 2019 when there were 12,523 students enrolled. Those declines have budget implications, as state aid to schools is calculated based on enrollment. 

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Abortion.

Wall Street Journal

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is supposed to be the great moderate hope for Democrats in 2028, but on Friday he revealed himself as a captive of the left’s most destructive interest group. He vetoed a bill to opt his state into the federal tax-credit scholarship program, taking dictation from the teachers union. 

“The answer is not diverting students and dollars from public education, but providing sufficient resources to fix public education,” the Governor wrote in his veto message. That was the last day before the bill would have quietly become law without his signature, after nearly two weeks on his desk.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Robert Stacy Mcain:

Crystal Mangum walked out of a North Carolina prison last month, 15 years after she fatally stabbed her boyfriend, Reginald Daye. Five years before her murder conviction, however, Mangum made national headlines when she accused members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of raping her. The accusation was false, but the furor surrounding that 2006 case provoked a firestorm that had a radicalizing effect on many students at Duke, including President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller. Twenty years later, we live in a world shaped to a remarkable degree by a lie told by a stripper.

David Evans, a 23-year-old economics major from Bethesda, Maryland, was one of four captains of the Duke lacrosse team. Because of the team’s competition schedule, the players had been forced to skip spring break and stay on campus. So the team captains came up with the idea of having a party and inviting strippers to entertain the players. As events would prove, this was a very bad idea, and college boys everywhere ought to be taught this lesson. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but when the team captains called up an escort service to send over a couple of strippers to their off-campus house, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

March 13, 2006, was a Monday night, and one might suppose that the Allure Escort Service in Durham, North Carolina, would have had many adult entertainers available for the occasion. For some reason that was never adequately explained, however, while the lacrosse team captains had reportedly requested white strippers, the two performers sent to 610 North Buchanan Boulevard were a 31-year-old mixed-race woman, Kim Roberts (half-black, half-Korean), and Ms. Mangum, a black woman who was then 27. This contributed a racial aspect to the subsequent controversy that had a magnetic effect in attracting national media attention.

Here it must be pointed out that, although Duke University sits amid the thriving urban Research Triangle region of North Carolina, it is nevertheless still in the South, and there is nothing that the national media loves so much as to cover a “racial incident” in the South. As I wrote in 2020:

Henry Mance:

The number of boarding pupils in Britain fell 4 per cent last year, faster than the decline in private schools as a whole, according to the annual survey by the Independent Schools Council. Since Covid, boarders have fallen from 14 per cent of private school pupils to less than 12 per cent.

The boarding experience has loomed large in English culture, from the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days to the 1968 film If…. and the recent TV sequel to John le Carré’s The Night Manager. It will not be universally mourned. Charles Spencer, brother of Princess Diana, described his prep school, Maidwell Hall, in Northamptonshire, as “without love”. In a recent memoir, he detailed the abuse he suffered there in the 1970s. Maidwell closed last year.

But Rendcomb prided itself on being different. Its founder Noel Wills wanted boarding schools to be places where children from different classes could meet in “absolute equality”. He founded Rendcomb “in the belief that the true aristocracy among men is in reality simply an aristocracy of brains and character”. The school drew heavily from Gloucestershire farming families and council funding. Richer, fee-paying students were almost looked down upon.

Washington Post:

If politicians won’t fix bloated pensions amid credit downgrades, the bond market will force their hand.

It takes a long time to kill a city, and the bigger the city, the longer it takes. But Chicago’s “public servants” have done a fine job speeding up the process.

The Windy City was forced this week to put off a planned sale of $292 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, part of an $800 million debt-service package. Authorities blamed volatility caused by the Iran war, but other bonds were priced without incident.

Scott Jensen:

What Minneapolis homeowners need to realize is this: decreasing valuation of taxable commercial properties combined with increased spending creates a budget gap that must be bridged by increasing taxes “somewhere.” That “somewhere” is YOU.

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And:

Nikita Stange:

That number is staggering, but not unusual. Chronic absenteeism — missing 10% or more of the school year — is a defining challenge in public education. While often attributed to illness or disengagement, transportation is the hidden driver. What this mother lacks is not motivation, but a safe, reliable way to get her kids to school. Yet, absenteeism is sometimes treated as educational neglect, triggering child welfare involvement and lasting consequences. 

When we overlook transportation, we miss a simple truth: Showing up is half the battle. No curriculum matters if students can’t get through the doors. 

Across Cleveland, bus systems are stretched thin, routes are cut, and schedules are unreliable. This strain will worsen; the Cleveland school district’s recent announcement of a massive consolidation plan to close 23 buildings will inevitably place even greater demands on its already fragile transportation network. Families without cars are left to cobble together solutions — walking miles in unsafe conditions or waiting in the dark at isolated stops. The toll shows up in attendance data. 

Two hundred missed days are not just numbers; they are lost reading groups, math lessons, forgotten field trips, and gaps that compound every week away from school. Chronically absent students are less likely to read proficiently by third grade or graduate. For children already facing poverty or disability, the consequences are sharper.

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Journey through classic short stories fille with adventure, horror, tragedyand fantasy.

Jennifer Kabbany:

A bill introduced Thursday by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik seeks to reform the federally funded Truman Scholarship Foundation, whose leaders have doled out the prestigious scholarships overwhelmingly to left-wing students for the last decade.

Each year, the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation provides $30,000 to about 50 students for graduate school in exchange for pledging three years of work in public service.

The “Truman Scholarship Clean House Act” comes after annual research conducted by The College Fix found that of the 653 winners from 2015 to 2025, only 29 conservative recipients were identified compared to 397 liberals, based on their public bios, LinkedIn profiles, and social media accounts. 

The Fix’s research also showed how the program is a left-wing talent pipeline, as it spawns Democratic and progressive careers over Republican and conservative ones by a margin of 35 to 1.

Amine Raji:

The paper demonstrated 90% success against knowledge bases containing millions of documents, using gradient-optimized payloads. What I tested is a vocabulary-engineering approach — no optimization against the embedding model — against a 5-document corpus. The corpus is obviously smaller than what the paper evaluated, so the success rate isn’t directly comparable. The value of a small local lab is reproducibility and clarity of mechanism, not scale. In a real production knowledge base with hundreds of documents on the same topic, the attacker needs more poisoned documents to reliably dominate the top-k — but the attack remains viable. The PoisonedRAG authors showed that even at millions-of-documents scale, five crafted documents are sufficient when using their optimization approach.