School Information System

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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?

Notes on K-12 Licensure Spaghetti

Colleston Morgan, Jr.

Good points in the full piece.

IMO, there’s a throughline from the Des Moines debacle to @DrJillUnderly’s @WisconsinDPI teacher misconduct mess: an overreliance on broken licensure systems, substituting bureaucratic credentials as a proxy for educator quality & effectiveness.

The Des Moines superintendent episode wasn’t an immigration story – it was a story about systemic failures in our industry. @rickhess99 and I discuss for @educationweek

Lessons From a ‘Vetted’ Superintendent’s Fall From Grace.

Imagine trying to turn a hearing on the failure of public schools to deal with sexual abuse into an attack on private schools as Senator Larson does here. Their hatred for families having options knows no limit.

New analysis compares literacy vs. poverty rates for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids. Is your school a Bright Spot?

Chad Aldeman:

So which schools help students get started on the right path?

Last year, we set out to find the school districts that were doing the best job of teaching kids how to read. Now, we are expanding that search to individual schools — and have found 2,158 where third-grade reading scores are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates.

We’re going to be highlighting more of those stories in the months to come. But for now, we’re making our data available for anyone who wants to dig in. Armed with the full dataset of 41,883 schools across 10,414 districts in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, built the interactive tool below. Start by selecting the state you want, or click on an individual school to see how it compares with those in the rest of its district.

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Will Flanders:

We have done similar work including a richer array of control variables in our Apples to Apples reports. Private Choice and charter schools tend to rise to the top when all these variables are accounted for.

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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?

K-12 Tax & $pending Priorityes and Politics

Quinton Klabon:

We are near all-time highs in percentage of publicly funded students. And people can object to vouchers if they want.

But we have the fewest -number- of publicly funded students since 1995. We can afford it!

More.

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

John Thornhill & Caiwei Chen:

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?

Civics: Far-left policies on policing, education, and taxation are pushing Los Angeles, Chicago, and others to the brink.

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps never in recent history have American cities so badly needed strong, pragmatic mayors—and gotten so few. Congressional Republicans, with few urban constituencies, won’t be of much help with mass transitor other city services; big cities will have to “go it alone.” But rather than realigning city budgets and working toward self-sufficiency, many mayors favor far-left policies on policing, rent control, education, and taxation that amount to what the late Fred Siegel described three decades ago as “a suicide of sorts.”

This autumn could well see a neo-socialist, Zohran Mamdani, win the mayor’s office in New York. In Minneapolis, a Mamdani clone, 35-year-old state senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the dominant Democratic Farmer Labor Party (later rescinded, following allegations about voting irregularities at the party’s July convention). Leftists have also scored victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. And Seattle, which suffered some of the most destructive effects from 2020’s “summer of love,” as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to replace the moderates elected in the 2020 aftermath with a new slate of far-left politicians.

Cities cannot afford such choices. Today, major American metropolises constitute a smaller portion of the nation’s population than at any time in the past half century. Employment has steadily shifted away from cities since the 1950s. The production of great office towers, those temples of urban prominence, has fallen to levels a small fraction of those of the 1990s and may soon dip belowthe rate of spending on new data centers. According to the Financial Times, many global firms are planning to reduce their office footprints by between 10 percent and 20 percent. The industries that traditionally drive high-end employment, like finance and professional services, are also those most often receptive to remote or hybrid work.

The “ai” race, notes on constraints

Today, however, China has the means, motive and opportunity to commit the equivalent of technological murder. When it comes to the mobilisation of the whole-of-society resources needed to develop and deploy AI to maximum effect, it may be just as rash to bet against China.

The data highlights the trends. In AI publications and patents, China leads. By 2023, China accounted for 22.6 per cent of all citations, compared with 20.9 per cent from Europe and 13 per cent from the US, according to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025. As of 2023, China also accounted for 69.7 per cent of all AI patents. True, the US maintains a strong lead in the top 100 most cited publications (50 vs 34 in 2023) but its share has been steadily declining.

The US also outdoes China in top AI research talent — but the gap is narrowing. According to a report from the US Council of Economic Advisers, 59 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers worked in the US in 2019, compared with 11 per cent in China. But by 2022 that ratio was 42 per cent to 28 per cent.

…..

long-term advantage often comes down to how widely and deeply technologies spread across society. And China is in a good position to win that race (although murder might be pushing it a bit!).

Education is another tell. Major Chinese universities are implementing AI literacy programmes in their curricula, embedding skills proactively before the labour market demands them. The Ministry of Education has also announced plans to integrate AI training for children of all school ages. I’m not sure “engineering state” fully captures China’s relationship with new technologies, but decades of infrastructure building and top-down co-ordination have made the system unusually effective at pushing large-scale adoption, often with far less social resistance than you would see elsewhere. The use at scale, naturally, allows for faster iterative improvements.

civics: the “autopen”

Greg Collard:

The House Oversight Committee’s report, “The Biden Autopen Presidency,” can be broken down into two basic parts:

Biden’s inner circle — or “politburo,” as the report characterizes it — worked like the two guys in Weekend at Bernie’s, constantly propping up the president to hide his declining cognitive condition from the public.
As a result, Biden was often not in charge, thus the need for the administration to use the autopen multiple times.

The report reaches a conclusion that reads like a judicial ruling: Absent evidence that Biden made executive decisions, “the Committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void.” The report continues:

Barring evidence of executive actions taken during the Biden presidency showing that President Biden indeed took a particular executive action, the Committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void. The validity of the executive actions allegedly approved and signed (largely by autopen) by President Biden must be reviewed to determine whether legal action is necessary to ameliorate consequences of any illegitimate pardons granted, or executive actions implemented, throughout the Biden Autopen Presidency. The Committee finds numerous executive actions—particularly clemency actions—taken during the Biden Administration were illegitimate.

Attorney General Pam Bondi responded the morning the report was released, saying her team was reviewing Biden’s use of the autopen for pardons.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Health Insurance Cost Explosion

Tom Church:

2. What would health insurance that actually functions like insurance look like?

Let’s remind ourselves what insurance is supposed to be for: Large, unexpected, costly events. You pay premiums to cover those costs and pay out of pocket for routine, inexpensive, and predictable costs.

Car insurance is the classic example: You pay insurance for when you get into a major accident. You don’t use your insurance to pay for routine and expected costs like gas, oil changes, and tire rotations.

Let’s also remind ourselves how health insurance differs from normal insurance: It covers routine, inexpensive, and predictable costs. In fact, health insurance is mandated to cover those things (see: the Affordable Care Act). Routine doctor visits, laboratory services, preventative wellness visits, and vaccinations are mandated as Essential Health Benefits (EHBs) that all individual and small group health insurance plans must cover. Various preventative measures have no deductible to enrollees.

The unpopular truth is that health insurance in America covers too many things. Health insurance is largely about pre-payment of care. All health care shouldn’t go through health insurance. Premiums and deductibles are high because everything goes through insurance.

The strange equity crusade against algebra

Kelsey Piper:

In 2014, too many kids were failing eighth-grade algebra, so San Francisco got rid of it.

This was part of a broader movement called “detracking,” an initiative advocated by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) and others in the world of math education. This would lead schools to stop offering advanced or remedial classes in favor of placing all students, regardless of ability, in the same classes. Tracking “too often leads to segregation, dead-end pathways, and low quality experiences, and disproportionately has a negative impact on minority and low-socioeconomic students,” the NCSM warned.

So San Francisco took the plunge. No students would take algebra in eighth grade. The hope was that the step would address the city’s glaring inequities regarding which students were high performers in math.

“We decided to detrack both out of the best academic interests of the students and out of a moral imperative,” San Francisco math teacher Kentaro Iwasaki told me. “Tracking mirrors the segregation in our society, maintains the haves and the have-nots. The segregation within our schools — if we walk down a hallway and we see a high-track class, it’s generally white and Asian students, and low-track classes generally Black and brown students.” Iwasaki had taught math at Mission High School in San Francisco prior to the detracking initiative.

A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset

Maister:

Beginners coming into our little corner of the programming world have it rough. Normal CPU-centric programming tends to start out with a “Hello World” sample, which can be completed in mere minutes. It takes far longer to simply download the toolchains and set them up. If you’re on a developer friendly OS, this can be completed in seconds as well.

However, in the graphics world, young whippersnappers cut their teeth at rendering the elusive “Hello Triangle” to demonstrate that yes, we can indeed do what our forebears accomplished 40 years ago, except with 20x the effort and 100000x the performance.

There’s no shortage of examples of beginners rendering a simple triangle (or a cube), and with the new APIs having completely displaced the oxygen of older APIs, there is a certain expectation of ridiculous complexity and raw grit required to tickle some pixels on the display. 1000 lines of code, two weeks of grinding, debugging black screens etc, etc. Something is obviously wrong here, and it’s not going to get easier.

Genius-producing math program lost to UC Berkeley fingerprinting requirements

Litong Deng:

Hannah Cairo shook the math world when she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a 4o-year-old unsolved math problem, when she was only 17.

Well ahead of her peers in math, Cairo applied to colleges when she was 14 and was accepted into UC Davis.

Seeking advice on what to do, she consulted UC Berkeley professor Zvezdelina Stankova, founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, or BMC. Cairo had been enrolled in a BMC summer program. Stankova encouraged her to enroll in graduate-level math courses at UC Berkeley rather than enroll as a student at UC Davis.

“I ended up following (Stankova’s) advice, which, in retrospect, I think was a much better decision,” Cairo said.

Eventually, Cairo learned about the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, which she would eventually disprove, in a graduate-level math class taught by UC Berkeley assistant professor Ruixiang Zhang.

Cairo is one of many talented mathematicians who have gone through BMC’s programs. Other former BMC students include Oaz Nir, founding partner at Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm with a net trading revenue of nearly $8 billion in 2024, and University of Toronto professor Gabriel Carroll, a four-time top-five scorer in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, widely considered one of the most prestigious undergraduate math competitions in North America.

However, after 27 years, BMC has shut down its flagship program, BMC-Upper, due to “stringent” new campus background check requirements, according to a statement on BMC’s website.

Metahistory

Adam Tooze:

Dr. White taught at a number of universities, including Wayne State, the University of Rochester, Wesleyan, Stanford and several campuses of the University of California system. In 1972, while he was a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, his career acquired an unusual footnote: He sued Edward M. Davis, the Los Angeles police chief, over the department’s practice of enrolling undercover officers as U.C.L.A. students so they could monitor the goings-on in classrooms and student organizations. He argued that the practice violated the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and privacy. The California Supreme Court, in 1975, ruled for Dr. White, reversing a lower court decision. “Given the delicate nature of academic freedom, we visualize a substantial probability that this alleged covert police surveillance will chill the exercise of First Amendment rights,” the court said.

Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes

Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman

College education is a key determinant of political attitudes in the United States and other countries. This paper highlights an important source of variation among college graduates: studying different academic fields has sizable effects on their political attitudes. Using surveys of about 300,000 students across 500 U.S. colleges, we find several results. First, relative to natural sciences, studying social sciences and humanities makes students more left-leaning, whereas studying economics and business makes them more right-leaning. Second, the rightward effects of economics and business are driven by positions on economic issues, whereas the leftward effects of humanities and social sciences are driven by cultural ones. Third, these effects extend to behavior: humanities and social sciences increase activism, while economics and business increase the emphasis on financial success. Fourth, the effects operate through academic content and teaching rather than socialization or earnings expectations. Finally, the implications are substantial. If all students majored in economics or business, the college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by about one-third. A uniform-major scenario, in which everyone studies the same field, would reduce ideological variance and the gender gap. Together, the results show that academic fields shape students’ attitudes and that field specialization contributes to political fragmentation.

We’re in an ‘education depression.’ This solution is a no-brainer.

Arne Duncan & Jorge Elorza:

Democrats can regain the educational (and moral) high ground with this federal program.

The latest Nation’s Report Card should be a national wake-up call.

Students at every grade level are slipping. Fourth graders struggle with basic reading. Eighth-grade science scores have declined. Twelfth graders are performing at generational lows in both reading and math. The cracks in our education system are forming early and widening across K-12.

This isn’t a post-2020 dip. The warning signs have been flashing for more than a decade. Since the early 2010s, student achievement has stagnated and then declined, especially for those furthest from opportunity. It’s what education writer Tim Daly calls an “education depression”: a prolonged, structural failure to prepare young people for what lies ahead.

At the same time, the crisis of lost instructional time is deepening. Students don’t need just better schools. They need more time on task: more learning hours, more individualized tutoring, more chances to catch up. During the pandemic, states used federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act to expand direct student supports. But those dollars have dried up. Unless states find new ways to sustain them, millions of students will be left even further behind.

One solution already exists: The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special education services and learning technology. For both current governors and gubernatorial candidates, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

By opting in, a governor unlocks these resources for students in their state. Some Democratic leaders have hesitated, however, worried that the program could be seen as undermining public schools, since private scholarships are also eligible. But that misses the point.

Opting in doesn’t take a single dollar from state education budgets. It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

That’s why opting in isn’t just defensible, it’s a no-brainer.

Governors won’t control the SGOs directly, but they can shape their impact by promoting transparency and accountability, spotlighting those organizations aligned with their values, and ensuring that the students with the greatest needs are prioritized. The federal program, in essence, can help rebuild the supports that expired with ARPA.

The potential scale is significant. According to a recent analysis by Education Reform Now, even with just 30 percent taxpayer participation, the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois, and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year — funds that could expand tutoring, special services and learning time without reducing state education budgets by a penny.

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Robert Pondisco:

I’m not impressed. @arneduncan is now wringing his hands over our “education depression” and lost instructional time? Where was the concern about “student time on task” when he was pushing parents to boycott schools to “fight for stricter gun laws?”
theatlantic.com/education/arch…

Findings cite lack of evidence-based teaching methods, long wait times for clinical assessments

Maggie Macintosh:

Human rights investigators have found that parents of struggling readers across Manitoba are being forced to take on “a full-time job” of advocacy so their children can become literate in local public schools.

The Manitoba Human Rights Commission released the long-awaited findings of its probe into literacy 101 education on Thursday — the penultimate day of Dyslexia Awareness Month 2025.

The 70-page document reveals that many schools are not using evidence-based methods to teach reading and lengthy wait times for clinical assessments are affecting overall literacy rates

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China

Amy Hawkins:

A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.

In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.

Murphy’s work focuses on Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in China, being co-opted into forced labour programmes. Her research, and that of colleagues at the HKC, has been cited widely by western governments and the UN, and has helped to shape policies designed to root out goods made by forced labour from international supply chains. The Chinese government rejects accusations of forced labour, and says that Uyghur work programmes are for poverty alleviation.

In February, Murphy was told that her work on China, described previously by the university as “groundbreaking”, had to stop. The website for the Forced Labour Lab, Murphy’s small team of researchers at the HKC, was taken down – although several of the reports remain available in other, less visible parts of the university archive.

In October, the university said it was lifting the ban on Murphy’s work on China and forced labour, and apologised.

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Appalling. One of Bridget Phillipson’s first acts was to axe the part of our Free Speech Act which would expose foreign funding in our universities.

Third-Worldism

Zineb Riboua:

I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.

Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.

In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.

Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language

Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It’s Hiring High-School Grads

Angel Au-Yeung:

“College is broken,” one Palantir post said. “Admissions are based on flawed criteria. Meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions,” it said. The fellowship offered a path for high-school students to work full time at the company.

After deciding to apply, Zanini found out he got the fellowship at around the same time he learned of his admission to Brown University. Brown wouldn’t allow him to defer and he had also landed a full-ride scholarship through the Department of Defense.

“No one said to do the fellowship,” said Zanini, who turned 18 in September. “All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor, it was a unanimous no.” His parents left the decision to him, and he decided to go with Palantir.

Zanini is one of more than 500 high-school graduates who applied for Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship”—an experiment launched under Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s thesis that existing American universities are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers.

Some fellows applied because college wasn’t interesting to them. Others applied after getting rejected from target schools.

Palantir is a data-analytics company that has become known lately for its government contracts, including with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Its work with immigration enforcement authorities and in other arenas has drawn criticism, but Karp and other executives have leaned into a pro-America ethos. The company also has many commercial clients.

Ms. Song cannot understand the broad enthusiasm young people have for Mr. Mamdani, who leads the race.

Li Yuan:

In 1976, Song Ying swam for eight hours from Shenzhen, then a small fishing village, to Hong Kong, joining millions of mainland Chinese who risked their lives to escape hunger, indoctrination and repression under Communist rule.

Today, at 72, she is a New Yorker who voted for President Trump three times and voted early for Andrew M. Cuomo in Tuesday’s mayoral election. She views socialism as a curse she barely survived when she fled China and fears that Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the Democratic mayoral nominee, is a threat to her adopted home.

Ms. Song cannot understand the broad enthusiasm young people have for Mr. Mamdani, who leads the race.

He wants to raise taxes on the rich to fund programs like free child care, buses and city-owned grocery stores, which is vastly differentfrom the Marxist socialism that was practiced by China under Chairman Mao Zedong.

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Former President Obama called New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Saturday to praise his campaign and offer to be a “sounding board” in the future, sources confirmed to ABC News.

This ‘reconciliation’ is a disaster for Canada

National Post:

Canada has paid billions upon billions to rectify past wrongs — figures that supersede what we spend on the military, and yet are still not enough.

Here’s a partial list: $23 billion to settle the lawsuit for the government not adequately covering the costs of Indigenous children in care; $1.72 billion to cover the cost of farming equipment that was promised to Saskatchewan First Nations 150 years ago but wasn’t provided; $14.9 billion to resolve special claims since 1973; $1.1 billion to settle a lawsuit by patients of federal Indigenous hospitals; $1 billion to an Alberta First Nation to adjust 19th-century treaty payments to modern dollars and $10 billion to another in Ontario, opening the doors to other nations doing the same.

And there are many more on the way. Some Manitoba First Nations are suing Manitoba Hydro for a share of the energy company’s profits, some Ontario First Nations are seeking $95 billion and the power to halt all development in Treaty 9 land without Indigenous consent. It all adds up to complete economic stagnation.

The Liberal government’s attitude of pulling punches and paying claims out the nose — and appointing judges who are open to the idea of more and more compensation — has swelled this into a problem of scales hard to comprehend. Oh, and when anyone points out the sheer cost of all this, they can expect to be accused of perpetuating the “colonial mindset.”

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Civics: The Rare Earth Elements Trap

Michael McNair:

After using export pressure for political leverage, Beijing lifted the export restrictions and flooded the market, driving prices below what any unsubsidized Western producer could sustain. Despite being America’s only player in this critical industry, Molycorp couldn’t compete against state-backed rivals and went bankrupt, ensuring U.S. dependency on China.

The lesson was that China would weaponize critical supply chains when needed, then use subsidies to prevent Western competition from emerging. We spent years warning policymakers, but the response was always the same: “In America, markets decide.” They couldn’t grasp that subsidized competition makes market-based investment impossible

An Expensive Experiment’: Gates Teacher-Effectiveness Program Shows No Gains for Students

By Madeline Will

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s multi-million-dollar, multi-year effort aimed at making teachers more effective largely fell short of its goal to increase student achievement—including among low-income and minority students, a new study found.

This conclusion to an expensive chapter of teacher-evaluation reform shows the difficulty of making sweeping, lasting changes to teacher performance. The results also demonstrate the challenges of getting schools and teachers to embrace big changes, especially when state and local policies are in flux.

The evaluation of the program, released today, was conducted by the RAND Corporation with the American Institutes for Research and was funded by the Gates Foundation.

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Office of Literacy, Office of the State Superintendent, Barb Novak:

Civics: Federal Government antifa investigations

Gabe Kaminsky:

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that works with prosecutors to pursue drug cartels, war crimes, and money laundering is shifting resources to investigate antifa funding, as federal officials implement directives from President Donald Trump labeling it a “domestic terrorist organization.”

The office, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), has broad legal powers and works closely with Customs and Border Protection, the Justice Department, and intelligence agencies. It is one of many offices launched in the years that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to address national security threats, and it employs more than 7,100 special agents, spread across 220 U.S. cities and 53 countries.

In recent weeks, law enforcement officials at HSI have begun to look into left-wing funding networks, including fundraising platforms that Republicans have said are used by antifa-aligned groups, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials at HSI, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are also looking into how antifa might recruit activists, the people said.

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antifa: grok, claude, openai, gemini, perplexity. Also britannica, grokipedia and wikipedia.

The University of Wisconsin System did not reply to requests for information about progress toward this requirement (early literacy…)

Reporting for Wis. Stat. §§ 115.39(4)(g) Administrators and Educators DPI is required to report (for the 2023 – 24 and 2024 – 25 school years), the number of individuals who completed the mandatory professional development training under 2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2), which requires teachers of 5K through grade 3 and principals and reading specialists serving students in 5K through grade 3 to complete professional development training that meets the requirements of 2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27(2). Teachers must enroll in the professional development training prior to July 1, 2025. Administrators must complete the training prior to July 1, 2025.

An online survey was sent to the superintendent or equivalent of each district or independent charter school that serves students in 5K through grade 3. Recipients received a unique link and had approximately six weeks to reply. Reminders were sent. Seventy-three percent (314 of 430) of districts and charter schools responded.

2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2) also requires professional development training for University of Wisconsin System faculty or academic staff member who teach a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by the DPI to teach a grade from kindergarten to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the professional. The training must be complete by July 1, 2025

Related: MTEL & “Foundations of Reading”

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Massachusetts, a bellweather blue state, is closely watching as landmark literacy legislation advances to the Senate

Karen Vaites:

This week, the Massachusetts House passed legislation that would give its department of education – known as DESE – the right to mandate use of state-approved curriculum.

A similar bill failed last year, yet Massachusetts outcomes have continued to slide:

In October, the Boston Globe proclaimed a “Northern Nosedive” in reading scores, and finally, Massachusetts leaders are willing to touch a third rail with curriculum mandates. Most states – and especially blue states – honor local control norms when it comes to curriculum, enabling districts to use whatever they please.

Massachusetts is on to something. Curriculum reform was the cornerstone of literacy work in Louisiana and Tennessee, two of the three states with the biggesr reading gains since 2019.

States are looking to replicate this Southern Surge, and Massachusetts – a longtime bellwether state for education policy – is already a reform pacesetter.

As an advocate for curriculum improvements in US schools, I’m cautiously cheering this bill. It’s necessary to combat the entrenchment of poor programs.

But I’m sounding some alarms, too.

Balanced Literacy Remains Rooted in Massachusetts

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

Related: MTEL & “Foundations of Reading”

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Teacher reveals the truth of behaviour crisis in Scotland’s classrooms

Catriona Stewart

We can have the best curriculum in the world – spoiler alert, we don’t – but if pupils are disrupting their learning and that of the well-behaved majority, then everything else is pointless.

What’s preventing this from being tackled? I think there are broadly three main reasons.

First, there’s systemic and institutional denial that there’s even a problem in the first place. This permeates governmental, local authority and school leadership level, and is present even amongst some teachers – “they behave for me” – for whom poor behaviour and low standards are just normal.

This is driven by ideology. The system is based on trauma-informed and restorative practices. Not only are these not working, they’re causing immense damage. To challenge those ideological sacred cows is to admit their ineffectiveness and we don’t have brave or visionary leadership prepared to do that, beyond the occasional outlier like [head teacher of Berwickshire High School] Bruce Robertson.

Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, is part of the problem, as they too are committed to this flawed and damaging approach to behaviour that’s wreaking such havoc in our schools.

A French delegation symbolically reconstructed the Joan of Arc chapel’s journey from Chasse-sur-Rhône to Milwaukee

Kelly Meyerhofer:

A group of French people gathered around the heart of the Marquette University campus the morning of Oct. 28. They were there to take in something faithful former residents had flocked to more than 600 years ago and an ocean away.

The group hailed from Chasse-sur-Rhône, the small French city where the Joan of Arc chapel began its life as a place of worship circa 1420. It served the city’s people for hundreds of years before falling into disrepair. The Gothic chapel was eventually reconstructed at Marquette in 1964 and has become a symbol of the campus’ Catholic identity.

The French delegation’s visit was the last stop on a transatlantic tour retracing the chapel’s journey from the 7,000-person city south of Lyon to Milwaukee.

“In a way, it’s a symbolic reconstruction,” said Jennifer Vanderheyden, a Marquette associate professor of French who teaches a course on Joan of Arc and helped lead the delegation on campus. “They want to reconstruct this link (between Chasse-sur-Rhône and Milwaukee).”

……

Marc Rotjman, a former president of Racine’s J.I. Case Co., and his wife, Lillian, bought the chapel in 1962 and later donated it to Marquette. They already had a connection to Marquette: They’d given a $200,000 collection of Old Masters paintings to the university in 1958.

A talk on the urgent need for university reform

Brandon Warmke:

I’m sorry to say, however, that we have defaulted on our contract with the American public. For starters, universities regularly engage in illegal race- and sex-based hiring. You know it, and I know it. Hiring committees often decide from the outset to hire a woman or racial minority. Deans often refuse to make hires if the candidate does not contribute to “diversity.” Some people deny this ever happens; they say that although affirmative action is crucially important, no one has ever been hired because of his or her race or sex. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that is plausible.

And it isn’t just hiring. Recently, it came to light that the Harvard Law Review rejected 85% of submissions using a racial rubric. Remarkably, the student editors often cited demographic reasons to accept or reject papers. “We have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors,” one editor claimed. Another complained that an article cited only “nine women and one non-binary scholar,” while another criticized a paper for only using the word Black seven times.

I ask you: Is this how the Harvard Law Reviewshould be run? How did it come to be run this way in the first place?

Furthermore, universities regularly discriminate, not just on the basis of race and sex, but also ideology.

We know, for example, that academics discriminate against conservatives. How do we know this? You can just ask faculty, and they’ll tell you. According to a survey conducted by Yoel Inbar, 37% of psychology faculty say they would discriminate against a conservative in a hiring decision, a finding replicated in other studies and confirmed by any conservative in academia.

To nobody’s surprise, this ideological discrimination extends to graduate admissions. For example, in 2020–21, the English department at the University of Chicago announced that it was “accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” If you just wanted to get a PhD to study Chaucer or Shakespeare, sorry, you were out of luck.

Academics also engage in a kind of implicit discrimination in the way they construct job ads, which are often written to exclude conservatives, libertarians and centrists. Examples are legion, but consider a recent ad from UC Berkeley seeking a tenure track professor who works on “abolition studies, anti-racism and anti-blackness, social inequality, racial socialization, racial capitalism, trans/queer/feminist theory, structural intersectionality, social justice and structural change, and critical disability studies.”

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Support the Dish for less than $1/week

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Ongoing healthcare cost explosion

Erin McGroarty

For years, the couple chose the high-deductible plans in order to secure a more affordable monthly premium. In recent years it’s cost the two about $300 a month. Without the tax credits, that monthly cost would more than double to around $800.

The expanded tax credits had saved the family enough that LaCasse-Ford and her husband were able to create a comfortable savings account. If health care costs go up for her husband, those higher monthly premium payments will quickly eat through the family’s savings, she said.

“All of the unknowns are very stressful,” she said.

How did we get here?

The Affordable Care Act became law in 2010 under President Obama.

The framework for premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans began in 2014. Since then, the federal government capped how much plan holders pay for their insurance premiums, limiting the cost at a certain percentage of their annual income. The government would pay for the rest by providing a tax credit to make up the difference.

In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress and President Joe Biden expanded the premium tax credits to entice more Americans to be insured. The plan worked: The number of people with health insurance ballooned from around 11 million to over 24 million people.

Without the enhanced tax credits, some plan holders will see their insurance costs double or triple.

The circular, impregnable resilience of Higher Miseducation

Andrew Sullivan:

One of the more maddening aspects of the rise of wokeness in the last decade was how some of the younger advocates for “social justice” responded to criticism. “Read a book,” they’d tell me, and roll their eyes. I was twice their age, had relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard, but I could obviously only believe what I believed because I had never “read a book.” No discussion was possible until I had “educated” myself — a task they refused to expend any “emotional labor” on. A few exasperated huffs, a slight panic in their angry eyes, and they were gone.

The same almost-Pavlovian response would arise during the BLM madness if you challenged for a millisecond the idea — shared by 44 percent of liberals in 2019 — that cops were gunning down over a thousand unarmed black men a year (the empirical answer was 29 — compared to 44 white men). Was I not aware of the fact of white supremacy, the self-evident systems and structures that Jon Stewart was an instant expert in? Or that sex and race were entirely social constructions? Sheesh. What rock had I been hiding under?

It wasn’t the differing opinion that upset me. One of my queerest character traits is that I love differing opinions. It was the assumption that none of this was opinion at all, but merely established empirical fact — of which I was blissfully unaware, probably because I was a bad-faith bigot, or had never picked up a book. This absolute certainty was also generally correlated with higher levels of education — just as “liberals” and “very liberals” were far more likely to have a college degree than those to their right. Over time, my friends began to wither among the educated classes, especially the newly minted and humorless “queers”, as I gravitated to normies, who had some strong views, were open to some others, and enjoyed a good chat and smoke sesh.

A new study tells me little I didn’t suspect already about my educational peers and how this strange correlation emerged between higher education and epistemological certainty. But it does prove something empirically important.

A new college ranking considers such factors as free speech on campus and alumni success

Wall Street Journal:

The definition of an elite education has been undergoing revision of late, as top universities from Harvard to Columbia to Northwestern have too often betrayed their commitment to free inquiry on campus. A new ranking system aims to better capture excellence in key tenets of a college education.

The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal looked at 100 colleges, assessing them on qualities that many students and families are concerned about, including free speech, the school’s approach to politics on campus, and students’ professional success after graduation. Schools that have demonstrated ideological pluralism among the faculty received higher marks. Same for a vibrant and inclusive campus social life. Student tolerance for controversial speakers was another plus.

The rankings also look closely at the strength of the general curriculum and whether the university is providing excellence or coasting on a fancy reputation.

Penn Graduate Ed School Hacked?

Christopher Rufo

It appears that hackers have taken over the University of Pennsylvania computer systems, calling the college a “dogshit elitist institution full of woke retards” and threatening to release evidence of its discriminatory admissions practices.

Understanding China’s Exam-centric Education System

Bill Bishop:

This is a recording of my October 31, 2025 discussion with Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li about their excellent and important new book The Highest Exam – How the Gaokao Shapes China.

From a synopsis of the book:

In The Highest Exam, authors Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau present a sweeping, data-rich account of China’s exam-centered education system — a “centralized, hierarchical tournament” culminating in the Gaokao, a grueling three-day college entrance exam. Drawing on decades of empirical research and lived experience, Jia and Li — both leading economists who took the Gaokao and later taught at top universities in Beijing, Hong Kong, and the U.S. — reveal how this state-managed system shapes education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values.

“a cry of conscience from a parent addressed to Madison’s public schools”

Ray Mendez:

We devote this blog to Mr. Ray Mendez, parent of a Madison public school student to Superintendent Joe Gothard and the school board:

The head-stomping at Madison Westwas not a “fight.” It was a near-fatal attack. Madison Police arrested three teens; two are accused of first-degree reckless injury and battery, and a third faces battery and disorderly-conduct charges. Police said the victim required hospitalization.

This was predictable. I and others warned you for years that your policies, culture, and cowardice would end in blood. Weapons are confiscated every week. Fights and stabbings barely make the news now. And still you hide behind silence and word games while children bleed.

With the resources you control, this failure is not negligence. It is criminal. I should not have to spend my own money (over my taxes) and time on attorneys to make schools safe for my child and yours. You waste time on optics instead of action. Each of you own the escalation of violence in schools that will lead to more bloodshed and worse.

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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?

On Rigor and our Education System

Gina Raimondo

She also added that “a lesson we can learn from China is that they invest in the talent… whereas we don’t have an effective workforce system in this country, we incentivize attendance… we send everyone to college [and] people don’t have skills for jobs. China is incredibly intentional… There is a lot we can learn from China.”

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Civics: Covid Origins, continued

Senator Rand Paul:

The documents I released today reveal U.S. intelligence officials were in contact with Dr. Ralph Baric — a collaborator of WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi – years before the pandemic.

In September 2015, the CIA and ODNI reached out to Baric to discuss a “possible project” on “coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.” Less than two months later, Baric and Shi published “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” research funded through USAID’s PREDICT program and NIH grants, widely acknowledged as gain-of-function.

In 2018, Baric and Shi were again listed as collaborators on EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, which sought to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, the same feature that later appeared in SARS-CoV-2.

In January 2020, Baric was summoned by ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group to brief officials and later shared slides titled “Origins,” discussing a possible accidental lab release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a hypothesis that Fauci’s circle publicly dismissed as a conspiracy.

Bill Gates Rethinks Climate Catastrophe

Wall Street Journal:

As epiphanies go, this is welcome. Mr. Gates, in his advocacy, has been a leading promoter of the view that a warming climate is an existential crisis that demands urgent political action. His 2021 book has the nuanced title, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Without innovation, he wrote, “we cannot keep the earth livable.” The effect on humans “will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”

Now, on the cusp of the latest COP30 climate conclave in Brazil next month, Mr. Gates offers different advice. An essay released on his website promises “three tough truths about climate,” the first of which is that rising temperatures are “a serious problem” but “will not be the end of civilization.”

Wait—this is a hard truth? You mean humanity isn’t doomed? The only people for whom this is a “tough” message are the climate zealots who remain committed to the idea that rising temperatures are a totalizing emergency. They say this to intimidate politicians into giving them billions of dollars in green subsidies, along with other powers to remake the modern economy and society.

Mr. Gates now sounds like Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” whose writing often runs in these pages. Mr. Lomborg has been arguing for years that while warming temperatures are a reality, the world’s poor in particular face far more urgent challenges. He believes, as these columns have also long argued, that the best way to cope with rising temperatures is through innovation, adaptation, and policies that continue to spread economic growth and prosperity.

How a radical experiment to bring a forest into a preschool transformed children’s health

Phoebe Weston:

Aurora Nikula, 5, is having a normal day at her nursery. She is making a cake out of sand and mud, adding in make-believe carrots, potatoes and meat. “It’s overcooked,” she says as she splashes water in, then adds another dollop of sand. “More sugar, it tastes better,” she says. A handful of mud goes in, and the dish evolves into a chocolate cake.

Aki Sinkkonen, a principal scientist with the Natural Resources Institute Finland, is watching. He’s also very interested in Aurora’s cake, but for different reasons. “Perfect,” he says, admiring the way she is mixing soil, sand and leaves and then putting it on her face. “She’s really getting her hands in it.”

To a hygiene-conscious kindergarten, this could be a problem, but at Humpula daycare centre in Lahti, north of Helsinki, children are encouraged to get muddy. Across Finland, 43 daycare centres have been awarded a total of €1m (£830,000) to rewild yards and to increase children’s exposure to the microscopic biodiversity – such as bacteria and fungi – that lives in nature.

We already know that access to the outdoors is important for children and their development. But this study goes one step further. It is part of a growing body of research linking two layers of biodiversity. There is the outer layer – the more familiar vision of biodiversity, made up of soil, water, plants, animals and microbial life, that lives in the forest, playground (or any other environment). And then there is the inner layer: the biodiversity that lives within and upon the human body, including the gut, skin and airways.

Travel sports can dominate a family’s calendar — and its budget. Many parents say the chance for a scholarship or a shot at the pros is well worth it.

Max Rivera

To millions of American families who pour their money, their free time and their hopes into travel baseball, Striker Pence is the ultimate success story.

Standing 6’6”, the 16-year-old Pence’s imposing frame and fire-breathing fastball — which has been clocked at about 100 miles per hour — have drawn comparisons to Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson. He’s seen as a potential top pick in a future Major League Baseball draft.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Per student spending reality…

Daniel Buck:

Public school teachers think we only spend ~$7,500 per student

The real number is ~$15,000. Approaching ~$30K in major cities.

How can we have an honest conversation about American schools when even TEACHERS are this misinformed?!

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending practices. This despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin becomes the 36th state to limit cellphones in schools

Scott Bauer:

Wisconsin became the 36th state to limit cellphones and other electronic devices in school Friday, when its Democratic governor signed a bill requiring districts to prohibit phone use during class time.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, though some Democrats in the Legislature said controlling gun violence should be a higher priority than banning cellphones.

In signing the bill, Gov. Tony Evers said he believes that decisions like this should be made at the local level, but “my promise to the people of Wisconsin is to always do what’s best for our kids, and that obligation weighs heavily on me in considering this bill.”

Evers said he was “deeply concerned” about the impacts of cellphone and social media use on young people. He said cellphones could be “a major distraction from learning, a source of bullying, and a barrier to our kids’ important work of just being a kid.”

Why are Massachusetts’ teachers unions so opposed to the reading bill on Beacon Hill?

Nik DeCosta-Klipa:

Hitting the books: Often, when Beacon Hill lawmakers pass something unanimously, it indicates there’s little pushback against the legislation. But not this week. On Wednesday, the Massachusetts House passed a sweeping early literacy reform bill by a vote of 155-0, despite opposition from the state’s largest teacher’s union. As the legislation moves to the Senate, here’s what to know about the debate:

The backdrop: Beacon Hill leaders said the bill is needed to combat “troubling trends” in reading. While a report earlier this yearfound that Massachusetts schoolchildren lead the nation in reading, scores still lag behind pre-pandemic levels. The latest MCAS results show that nearly 60% of students in grades 3 through 8 are not meeting English language arts expectations.
What’s in the bill: Supporters say about a third of Massachusetts school districts are using outdated reading instruction techniques. The bill would push them to adopt “evidence-based” methods. It’s part of a larger “science of reading” movement that focuses on things like sounding out words (aka phonics), reading comprehension and fluency — as opposed to “three-cueing,” a controversial method many states are moving away from. (NPR has more here on what makes the “science of reading” different.) If passed, the House’s bill would give the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education the power to set K-3 reading curricula based on that framework. It would also require DESE to provide online materials and free training to help teachers adapt to the new methods.
On the other hand: Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, told WBUR’s Cici Yu that his members have big concerns about limiting the tools they can use “to address the needs of a very diverse student body.” Page said some reading specialists say three-cueing — which uses photos and sentence structure to help students identify words they don’t know — can be helpful for certain kinds of learners. And he argued that the “science of reading” movement has yet to shift outcomes in every state (though some have made progress). The state’s second-largest teachers union, AFT Massachusetts, didn’t take a stance on the bill, according to its president, Jessica Tang. But it did push for several small changes, like a successful amendment to loosen a full ban on three-cueing. Page also applauded that change, but added: “We still have a real issue with having a very strict mandate on what kind of curriculum to use.”
What’s next: Page and Tang plan to press for further changes to give individual districts more leeway, as the bill moves to the Senate. A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka said their chamber plans to review the bill and that “members are very much engaged in improving literacy outcomes.”

Neetu Arnold:

Here’s why the Massachusetts Teacher Association is against a major reading reform bill:

1) Teachers would lose autonomy over curriculum

2) Oppose 3-cueing ban

3) Skeptical of Science of Reading until it works everywhere

“after three years of schooling, more than 90 per cent could not identify letter names, letter sounds or read simple words at expected levels”

Andrew Jack:

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, 57 per cent of 10-year-olds in these regions could not read and understand a simple story, and this ‘learning poverty’ worsened afterwards to 70 per cent, according to some studies.

The new analysis highlighted that one-third of children are taught to read in a language they do not speak or understand well. It argued improved literacy required either switching basic education into the home language or spending much more time and intensive support to develop their skills.

It also called for a more systemic focus on the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in the spoken language; understanding phonics, or the relationships between letters and sounds; and reading fluency, comprehension and writing.

Primary school enrolment in lower-income countries has risen sharply, notably during the 1990s, according to World Bank data.

The report did not cover higher-income countries, where literacy rates are much higher.

Mississippi and Louisiana Schools’ Decade-Long Surge Past Virginia

Todd Truitt

But what about the money? Here’s Aldeman:

According to the NEA, New Jersey spent $24,831 per student in 2023-24 while Louisiana spent $17,541 and Mississippi spent just $12,490. In other words, I think Mississippi and Louisiana have a strong case to be made that their schools are performing considerably better than New Jersey’s are at a much lower cost.

Mississippi and Louisiana Are Outperforming Virginia

You find similar results for Virginia in the demographic subgroup data: both
Mississippi and Louisiana are outperforming Virginia on NAEP for the least advantaged subgroups and the most advantaged subgroups. Further, Mississippi spends less money per pupil than Virginia (26% less per pupil) while Louisiana spends a comparable amount per pupil as Virginia.

Virginia also has school districts achieving results like in Mississippi and
Louisiana. Wise County Public Schools (WCPS) spent $11,517 per student (37% less than the state average) and had Virginia’s third-best overall standardized test pass rate in the 2023-24 school year. WCPS hadn’t ranked lower than eighth since 2013. WCPS is in a Southwest Virginia county that has a high poverty rate, suffers from a meth epidemic and has a high incarceration rate. Educational leaders there attribute WCPS’ success in part to its focus on setting high expectations at the local level.

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

notes on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly’s re-election

David Blaska:

All committed under the un-watchful eye of Superintendent Underly, a MAGA-hating progressive bought by the Democrat(ic) party (to the tune of $1,141,632 — 80% of her total campaign funding), supported by the teachers union, and endorsed by The Capital Times itself. As the news outlet reported:

The WI Department of Public Instruction investigated more than 200 Wisconsin teachers, aides, substitutes, and administrators from 2018 to 2023 who were accused of sexual misconduct or groomingbehaviors toward students, but the department never reported those incidents to the public. … Not surprisingly, some legislative Republicans are attempting to use the results of the newspaper’s probe to make political points.

Those darn Republicans!

Make political points, will they?! One would hope so! Because her office IS and ought to be po-lit-i-cal. Supt. Underly holds a constitutional office elected by the people on a statewide ballot. Endorsed by her predecessor at the Dept. of Public Instruction, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. The office may be officially non-partisan (Wink, wink!), but it is certainly political. Now watch The Capital Times dance around the consequences of its own reportage:

Some have used the Cap Times’ revelations to call for Underly to resign. But this is about so much more than plain old politics. It’s a matter of the public having confidence that the officials in charge of our schools are working to keep children safe and share with the public how they’re doing so.

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers

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?

“UChicago: Spending Your Tuition On Its Mistakes.”

The university is an acute example of the financial woes plaguing higher education. Even before President Trump’s federal funding cuts, many schools were already stretched by years of competitive spending. Their budget struggles are in many cases more than a decade in the making, and it’s not just far-flung state universities or D-list private colleges suffering.

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

“Our president kept saying we’ll get ‘sharper,’” said Gabe Winant, an associate history professor at UChicago. “How does something get sharper? You file away at it.”

In the years leading up to the pandemic, low interest rates fueled borrowing binges across higher education to build snazzy academic buildings and dorms. UChicago and other schools also pushed into private equity and other alternative assets, hoping for big returns but tying up money in long-term investments even as cash grew tight.

“I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.”

Jill LePore & David Leonhardt:

Leonhardt: Do you think that what is often described as woke is a real problem, as opposed to merely a problem that the right has managed — to use another word the left likes — weaponize?

Lepore: No, I think — I am in the belly of that beast. I’ve been teaching at Harvard since 2003, and something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff. I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.

Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about.

I think the place I put blame is quite different from the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem, so I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.

Leonhardt: Yeah, and it’s hard to win people over when you’re making them feel that way. I want to get back to the Constitution before we close. While I was reading your book, I made a list in the back pages. I hope you don’t mind that I was writing in a copy of your book about the constitutional amendments that I thought we needed today, and I ——

…..

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another”

——

ROMINA BOCCIA AND TYLER TURMAN

How targeting scholars for speech leaves lasting scars

Nate Honeycutt

When a scholar is targeted for their expression, the story rarely ends when the headlines fade. The formal investigations wrap up and the social media outrage may die down, but for many, the experience marks a permanent shift in how they think, speak, and interact with others in public. Such cases have profound implications for academic freedom and the state of campus free speech in higher education.

According to FIRE’s Sanctioned Scholars report, nearly three-quarters of the scholars we asked said they would not change anything they said or did that led to being targeted. But many also said that, in other ways, they are now altering their speech.

Artificial Writing & Automated Detection

Brian Jabarian:

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used for written deliverables. This has created demand for distinguishing human-generated text from AI-generated text at scale, e.g., ensuring assignments were completed by students, product reviews written by actual customers, etc. A decision-maker aiming to implement a detector in practice must consider two key statistics: the False Negative Rate (FNR), which corresponds to the proportion of AI-generated text that is falsely classified as human, and the False Positive Rate (FPR), which corresponds to the proportion of human-written text that is falsely classified as AI-generated. We evaluate three leading commercial detectors—Pangram, OriginalityAI, GPTZero—and an open-source one —RoBERTa—on their performance in minimizing these statistics using a large corpus spanning genres, lengths, and models. Commercial detectors outperform open-source, with Pangram achieving near-zero FNR and FPR rates that remain robust across models, threshold rules, ultra-short passages, “stubs” ( 50 words) and ’humanizer’ tools. A decision-maker may weight one type of error (Type I vs. Type II) as more important than the other. To account for such a preference, we introduce a framework where the decision-maker sets a policy cap—a detector-independent metric reflecting tolerance for false positives or negatives. We show that Pangram is the only tool to satisfy a strict cap (FPR 0.005) without sacrificing accuracy. This framework is especially relevant given the uncertainty surrounding how AI may be used at different stages of writing, where certain uses may be encouraged (e.g., grammar correction) but may be difficult to separate from other uses.

Why Are Chicago’s Leaders Doing Nothing About Unsafe Drinking Water?

Paul Vallas:

For decades, Chicago has turned a blind eye to a silent epidemic that has harmed generation after generation: Lead contamination in drinking water. The science is settled — no level of lead exposure is safe. Lead damages brain development, stunts growth, and causes serious problems with learning, behavior, hearing, and speech. Studies consistently link lead exposure with lower IQ scores, reduced attention spans, and diminished school performance.

A 2024 analysis by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that 68 percent of Chicago children under age six live in households with tap water containing detectable levels of lead. Their findings, based on 38,000 home water tests conducted between 2016 and 2023, underscore how widespread this crisis truly is.

Researchers have also found compelling connections between lead exposure and violent crime. Economist Rick Nevin’s landmark 2007 study revealed strong correlations between childhood lead exposure and later violent offenses across nine Western countries. A 2012 review in *Environment International* confirmed this trend, showing that declines in airborne lead emissions have consistently aligned with reductions in urban violence. Amherst College economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes credited the U.S. phaseout of leaded gasoline during the 1990s with reducing violent crime by more than 50 percent.

While we cannot attribute all social ills to one toxin, it would be equally irresponsible to ignore overwhelming evidence that environmental remediation directly improves public safety and community well-being. Clean air and clean water are not abstract “costs” of government — they are the foundation of public health and opportunity.‍

Harvard’s New Grade Inflation Report Pulls No Punches

1636 Forum:

“Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded . . . for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work. It’s a farce,” said a faculty member.

“We are terrified of the A-,” one student admitted. Another added, “I think the current grading system is working very well.”

These are among the many tensions (and shocking findings) at the heart of Harvard’s latest step to address grade inflation: a new report titled, “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College: Update on Grading and Workload,” authored by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh on behalf of the Office for Undergraduate Education (OUE). It’s Harvard’s clearest, most unflinching look yet at how grading has gone off the rails, and what it plans to do about it.

We’ve praised Harvard before for its rare honesty on this issue in The Atlantic and The New York Times. This report goes further. It reads as part research paper, part wake-up call — an appeal to bring real rigor and learning back into the classroom.

Drawing on surveys and interviews with students, faculty, and administrators; internal grade and Q score (Harvard’s end-of-course student evaluations) data; and reviews of other universities’ attempts to curb grade inflation, the report has a simple premise: Harvard’s mission is to educate its students — and the current grading system undermines that mission.

For readers of our three-part series on grade inflation, the diagnosis will sound familiar. But this report’s details make it even harder to look away. It is eloquent, data-rich, and often bluntly uncomfortable.

The report concludes with four concrete recommendations for professors, a call for faculty collective action, and encouragement for administrators to “have [faculties’] backs” as they recalibrate grading. It also previews further proposals from a task force of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) and reflects on the failed reform attempts of Yale and Princeton: “Grading is a problem too complex to admit a single solution,” the report notes. “The history of these efforts reveals that exhortations won’t be enough.”

Still, for all its depth, the report mostly stops at diagnosis. The recommendations are relatively narrow, and its single paragraph on collective action feels more like a nudge than a strategy. If Harvard wants faculty to act in coordination and not leave departments to solve a collective action problem alone, it’ll need to offer more than encouragement and a handful of suggestions.

Harvard nonetheless deserves credit for candor. By airing its data and acknowledging the depth of the problem at the College level (though rigor issuesexist at other Harvard schools), it’s doing more than most institutions. Yale, by contrast, just announced: “To woo students, French department makes courses easier.”

With Harvard-Yale around the corner, here’s hoping Harvard keeps this momentum going.

What You Need To Know:

Grades at Harvard are both inflated and compressed at the top. A’s now make up 60.2% of grades (up from 24% in 2005), and the Class of 2025 averaged a 3.8 GPA.

Faculty say they can’t grade honestly. Nearly half say they “simply cannot” give the grades students truly deserve; others say they can do so only “with difficulty” due to systemic pressure.

Graduate schools struggle to tell Harvard students apart. Admissions committees say that with so many A’s, students are harder to distinguish; students respond by piling on more extracurriculars and credentials to stand out.

Incoming students may be less prepared to meet academic expectations. Especially in the humanities, faculty are concerned about students’ comprehension of complex texts, stemming from pandemic-era learning loss and diminished ability to focus.

Harvard sees no silver bullet. Harvard is tackling grade inflation as a collective action problem requiring multiple, simultaneous fixes, rather than the one-off efforts by peer institutions failed.

The report suggests four steps for faculty to take by spring. These include reviewing grading distributions from 2015, reducing reliance on effort-based assignments, clarifying standards for A-level work, and aligning grading across multi-section courses.

Harvard’s promise of coordinated reform remains vague. The report devotes just one paragraph among its 25 pages on its collective action next steps, and offers little guidance beyond encouraging faculty to collaborate.

More recommended reforms are coming (eventually). A new task force is exploring structural grading reforms, but there’s no timeline or formal proposals yet.

1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways

We’ve pored over the new report so you don’t have to. Keep reading for 1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways on:

The scope and stakes of grade inflation

The institutional and cultural pressures fueling grade inflation

How students are adapting (and struggling) in a distorted academic system

How Harvard plans to respond, and what it will take to succeed

Here’s what stood out:

A PROBLEM NO LONGER DENIED: SCOPE AND STAKES OF GRADE INFLATION

The report confirms, and further quantifies, what Harvard has been saying for months: grade inflation is systemic and it’s undermining Harvard’s ability to educate students.

Over the past six months, Harvard has increasingly acknowledged the extent of its grade inflation problem. In The Atlantic and The New York Times, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh conceded that faculty now give A’s “pretty much to everyone.” A January 2025 reportfrom Harvard’s Classroom Social Compact Committee found that students “often don’t attend class,” and prioritize extracurriculars over academics. The Class of 2025 had an average GPA of 3.8, and a Crimson survey of Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) faculty taken in the spring of 2025 showed that nearly 90% of respondents agreed Harvard has a grade inflation problem.

This new report by Harvard College quantifies just how far grade inflation has gone. It describes how the College now faces “considerable compression at the top of the scale.” In 2005, A’s made up just 24% of grades. By 2025, they accounted for 60.2%. Grade inflation rose steadily from the early 2010s to the late 2010s, then accelerated in the late 2010s and ultimately spiked during the pandemic’s remote instruction period, and never receded. The summa cum laude GPA cutoff now sits at 3.989, up nearly a tenth of a point in five years.

As one section bluntly states, “about half of the faculty surveyed reported that they simply cannot award the grades students have actually earned, while the rest reported that they can do so only with difficulty.”

THE INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL PRESSURES FUELING GRADE INFLATION

The report finds that behind many causes of grade inflation lies a single force: misaligned incentives that often require collective action to fix.

The report surfaces a complex mix of institutional, interpersonal, and cultural forces that shape faculty grading behavior. Some pressures act on individual faculty; others can only be countered through collective action (as one professor noted: “This is a classic game theory problem”). Between Part I and Part II of our three-part series on Harvard’s grade inflation problem, we explored nearly all of these factors:

— Administrative pressure to accommodate students: The College “has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others, that some are struggling with difficult family situations or other challenges, that many are struggling with imposter syndrome—and nearly all are suffering from stress.” Absent clear support on how to address these challenges otherwise, faculty have often responded by relaxing standards.

— Student pressure on faculty to assign high marks: With A’s now the norm, students fear anything less could jeopardize their chances at competitive jobs or graduate school. Some students dispute grades directly, while others turn to advisors who, as the report notes, “advocate inappropriately on students’ behalf.”

— Fear of negative course evaluations: In 2008, FAS professors voted to formalize course evaluations, turning the informal course evaluation system into the now-standard Q Guide. The report notes that since then, many instructors (especially non-tenured or non-ladder) increasingly hesitate to grade more stringently. Ironically, the data show grades barely predict Q scores, and workload doesn’t correlate at all.

— Faculty competition for concentrators and high enrollment: In Part Iof our series, we explained the pressure faculty face to keep enrollment numbers high. The report adds another layer: senior faculty “feel responsible for drawing undergraduates into their concentrations,” which can create a “race to the bottom” to compete for students, as one faculty member put it.

Despite faculty concerns that students are doing less, the data suggest students are working more than ever.

The report notes that “many faculty believe that hours worked have gone down, even as grades have gone up” and that 69% of FAS faculty surveyed by The Crimson agreed that Harvard students “do not sufficiently prioritize their coursework.”

The numbers suggest otherwise. In 2025, students reported spending 6.3 hours per course per week outside of class, up from 5.55 hours in 2015. On average, students said they spent 45 hours per week on academics, far more than the 10 to 15 hours they reported spending on extracurriculars.

This discrepancy may partially be explained by national trends pointing to lower incoming academic preparation — or, at the very least, changing academic and media environments.

One explanation may stem from the “shadow system of distinction.” Because “students sense that their grades are insufficient to distinguish them from one another,” the report notes that students increasingly chase additional academic credentials, such as secondary fields, double concentrations, language citations, or concurrent master’s degrees. In 2015-16, 85.6% of students took a four-course load per semester, while by 2024-25 that number had dropped to 69.5%, with more students taking five or more courses instead.

Faculty, especially in the humanities, also point to a shift in students’ academic habits and preparedness that may be shaping their classroom performance. The report highlights growing concern that students are arriving at Harvard less prepared for the demands of reading-intensive courses. Students struggle more with complex reading, prompting some faculty to shorten or simplify assignments. The report attributes this to national trends: fewer complex texts in high school curricula, coupled with a media culture that makes it harder for students to sustain focus. (As The Atlantic details, more Ivy League students are showing up to college without ever having read a full-length book. Some Harvard students say you can also graduate without reading one either.)

Together, these patterns suggest that the challenge may be less about students’ underlying capacity to learn, and more about the set of tools they enter college with, including their ability to focus and engage deeply in an environment increasingly shaped by digital distraction and pandemic-era disruptions.

Past efforts to reform the University may have contributed to today’s challenges.

In 2007, Harvard commissioned a FAS task force to revitalize excellence in teaching, which produced a “Compact to Enhance Teaching and Learning.” Among its recommendations was to encourage more innovation and creativity in pedagogy, with the Bok Center for Teaching and Learningproviding “consultations” to individual instructors and departments looking to do so in line with best practices.

According to the new report, faculty have “more than met this call,” often by redesigning courses to “increase learning.” Many shifted away from high-stakes exams toward lower-stakes assignments, believing this would help students retain material. But as the report notes, these changes may have had side effects: “lower-stakes assignments are more effective at rewarding effort than at evaluating performance, giving students the false sense that they’d mastered material that still eludes them.” The report calls this shift “fundamentally at odds” with a grading system designed to differentiate performance.

The pandemic’s academic effects are far from over.

The report mentions COVID only in reference to the spike in grades during remote instruction, but its impact runs far deeper. Today’s undergraduates experienced formative academic years during the pandemic, disrupting the development of focus, habits, and interpersonal skills.

Though Harvard has rolled back many pandemic-era policies, there’s no true return to a pre-COVID baseline. Students who were in middle school during the pandemic are now entering college. The University should not assume these disruptions will fade on their own.

HOW STUDENTS ARE ADAPTING (AND STRUGGLING) IN A DISTORTED ACADEMIC SYSTEM

At least some of students’ fears about the “shadow system of distinction” are valid.

The report notes, “increasingly, [graduate] admissions committees tell us that it can be difficult to tell Harvard students apart.”

If this is the case, it’s no surprise that students are taking on more courses and extracurriculars to stand out. But it also underscores a key point from Part III of our grade inflation series: Harvard should coordinate with its own graduate schools to ensure admissions officers interpret new grading distributions consistently.

Students may need to learn not to equate effort with excellence.

The report finds that many students misunderstand what grades are meant to evaluate. They often see grades as a reflection of how hard they worked, rather than the quality of what they produced. As the report puts it, students “don’t know what constitutes ‘excellent’ or ‘extraordinary’ work in a discipline,” and may not realize that grades are intended to measure that standard.

Students reported that grades felt “fair” when “they work hard and get an A” and “unfair” when they “work hard and don’t get an A or when another student doesn’t work hard and does.”

While the report paints with a broad brush, there are individual students who are frustrated with the current system and yearn for more rigorous courses and feedback.

While much of the report emphasizes systemic pressures and collective behaviors at play, it also captures a quieter frustration among students who want more rigor. Some describe their coursework as feeling “fake” when high grades are the norm and feedback is minimal. One student “lamented that no instructor had ever told her that she could do better work,” while others felt finals were so easy they could have “aced [them] on the first day of class.” In other words, Harvard’s “gem” courses (the easy A, low-workload courses) that students seek out are, as the report puts it, “counterfeit.”

HOW HARVARD PLANS TO RESPOND, AND WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO SUCCEED

Harvard aims to avoid the missteps of other universities that have tried to curb grade inflation.

The report notes that other institutions like Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, and Wellesley have each tried single fixes. These range from Yale’s “raising awareness” of high grades among faculty to “influence faculty practices, to Cornell and Dartmouth adding median course grade data on student transcripts, to Princeton’s cap on A’s (as we covered in Part II and Part III of our series). None worked because “grading is a problem too complex to admit a single solution.”

In contrast, Harvard says it is attempting to implement multiple of these strategies (and more) at once, and is also treating grade inflation as a collective action problem.

The report offers four targeted requests for faculty to begin reining in grade inflation, and signals more proposals to follow.

The report calls on faculty to take four steps before the spring semester:

1. Consider recalibrating grading distributions to 2015 “when grading was not overly stringent, but we did assign a broader distribution of grades.”

2. Reassess how much weight they place on effort-based assignmentsversus assignments that demonstrate students’ content mastery.

3. Articulate their grading standards so students understand what constitutes excellent, A-worthy work output, not just effort.

4. Standardize grading in multi-section courses taught by multiple Teaching Fellows to ensure consistency.

The Educational Policy Committee has also “charged a faculty committee with exploring possible adjustments to our current system of honors and grading,” which include:

— Allowing a limited number of A+s to distinguish the “very best students.”

— Recording the median grade for each course on transcripts to reduce the incentive to seek the easiest courses.

— Developing alternate internal systems to express grades and distinguish students when determining prizes and honors.

The report didn’t indicate a timeline for these proposals, just that they are still seeking faculty and student input and that “none will be adopted without the vote of the FAS Faculty.”

Without follow-through, Harvard risks repeating its peers’ mistakes.

The report highlights some promising voluntary efforts already underway, such as departments establishing grading standards within concentrations and large gateway course faculty working to align grading expectations. The OUE encourages other groups of faculty to do the same. Rather than outlining any next steps to begin institutional coordination, the report says the OUE “would be very happy to convene these conversations, if that would be useful.”

This light touch may be deliberate. For meaningful culture change to take root, faculty must agree that grade inflation is real and worth tackling. This data-rich, rigorously argued report helps lay that groundwork, while also urging FAS and College leadership to show faculty “every day” that the leaders “have their backs” as they recalibrate standards.

Still, questions remain about what happens next. When Harvard released its Antisemitism and Islamophobia Task Force reports last spring, President Garber asked each school dean to submit an action plan by semester’s end. Here, there’s no comparable request. The OUE is gathering feedback from students, but the path forward remains vague.

Money may complicate things further. With Harvard facing the prospect of no future research funding, a $300+ million annual endowment tax, and cuts to incoming PhD seats by more than half, reforms that rely on better trained instructors, like standardizing grading across multi-section courses, may be harder to pull off. Those PhD students are the ones who do most of the grading, and there will be fewer of them to do it.

We’ll keep you updated in our weekly newsletter on new developments in Harvard’s efforts to curb grade inflation. Please keep sending us your questions in the meantime and we’ll keep trying to answer them!

SNAP’s centralization in Washington leaves millions vulnerable when Congress stalls

The ongoing government shutdown is threatening to stall funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food aid to more than 40 million Americans. According to Politico, at least 25 states have issued notices to beneficiaries that their benefits will cease on November 1.

The fact that a program providing food assistance to millions of Americans can be brought to the edge of a cliff because of partisan gridlock illustrates the perils of allowing the welfare apparatus to become increasingly centralized in Washington. Devolving welfare programs such as SNAP to the states would align spending authority with accountability and insulate food aid from federal dysfunction.

SNAP’s Federal Funding Bottleneck

At its core, SNAP’s problems stem from its flawed financing structure. While technically administered by the states, the federal government has always borne the lion’s share of the program’s costs.

The federal government and the states currently have a 50–50 split in paying for SNAP’s administrative costs. Federal taxpayers, however, still pay 100 percent of the program’s benefits costs, meaning that whether food stamp enrollees across the country receive their benefits depends entirely on congressional appropriations. This particular spending formula has not been amended a single time since the Food Stamp Act of 1964.

“This year’s (Madison) budget is 10% higher in both revenue and expenses compared to last year”

Erin Gretzinger:

… with additional spending focused on the district’s priorities like expanding 4K options and boosting staffing, which went up by nearly 60 full-time equivalent positions. About 81% of the district’s budget goes toward staff compensation and benefits.

The district’s total tax revenue will increase by a little over 20% this year, due in part to two referendums approved by voters in the 2024 election. The Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan research group, found the percent increase is more than double the district’s previous record increase in the last three decades.

For the average home in the Madison school district, valued at $481,300, homeowners will see their property taxes increase by about 16% or $683 this year — lower than initial estimates of $1,000.

———

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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?

Childhood Get access Arrow

Uta Bolt:

This paper documents how cognitive skills develop beyond childhood. Using unique data from a British birth cohort followed since 1958, I link cognitive skills in childhood to cognitive skills at 50. I establish five facts from these data: First, childhood cognitive skills persist strongly into adulthood. Second, wages at 50 are better predicted by cognitive skills at 16 than by cognitive skills at 50. Third, higher education predicts higher cognitive skills and wages. Fourth, occupational choice predicts wages, but not cognitive skills at 50. Fifth, periods out of the labour market depreciate wages, but not cognitive skills at 50.
Information

AI forces us to re-articulate what education is for: not producing polished outputs, but forming capable, discerning minds.

Robert Pondiscio

In the spring of 2000, E.D. Hirsch Jr. published an essay in American Educator titled “You Can Always Look It Up—Or Can You?” It’s one of those pieces that distills a lifetime of insight into a few pages. Hirsch argued that the notion of teaching “learning skills” instead of knowledge was deeply misguided. To look something up, he noted, presupposes that you already know something—enough to recognize what’s relevant, to interpret what you find, to sift sense from nonsense.

The problem wasn’t that children were lazy or that teachers were inept, but that progressive pedagogy had confused knowing what with knowing how. Hirsch saw this long before most of us: the capacity to find information isn’t the same as understanding it. Skills are empty vessels; knowledge is what fills them.

k-12 Tax & $pending climate: Declining Referendum Support

Corrinne Hess:

While most are focusing on the Gov race with the Marquette Law School Poll, this jumps out at me (Education reporter):

For the first time, a majority, 57%, say they would be inclined to vote against a referendum to increase taxes for schools in their community.

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Will Flanders:

The @mulaw poll showed that Wisconsinites are fed up with spending more on schools. This data illustrates why. While inflation-adjusted K12 revenue has increased by thousands in the last decade, NAEP proficiency has plummeted. Money is NOT the problem in WI schools.

——-

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Wyeth Renwick and Nirja J. Trivedi:

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?

‘Soul-Crushing’: Students Slam Harvard’s Grade Inflation Report

Harvard students pushed back forcefully against a new University report condemning grade inflation, arguing that it misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.

The 25-page report, released Monday by the Office of Undergraduate Education, suggested that Harvard’s grading system had become so lenient that it no longer meaningfully distinguished between students. It warned that current practices were “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and were “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

But in interviews with The Crimson, more than 20 students said the report missed the complexity of academic life at Harvard. Many objected to its suggestion that students were not spending enough time on coursework and warned that stricter grading could heighten stress without improving learning.

Sophie Chumburidze ’29 said the report felt dismissive of students’ hard work and academic struggles.

“The whole entire day, I was crying,” she said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”

“It just felt soul-crushing,” she added.

The report called on Harvard affiliates to work with officials to “re-center academics” and devote time towards tougher and more strictly graded courses. But many students said the push felt misguided, warning that tougher grading, without attendant changes in academic quality, would shift their focus from learning to chasing grades.

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Noah Smith:

If grades are meaningless and admissions are meaningless, then a college degree is meaningless.

Economists call that a “pooling equilibrium”.

Mass. House passes reading bill years in the making, rebuffing powerful teachers union

Christopher Huffake

Despite a push from the state’s largest teachers union to defang the bill, the Massachusetts House onWednesday passed a major reading instruction measure aimed at discarding outdated methods and reversing the state’s decade-long slide in teaching children to read.

The bill’s passage marked a rare setback for the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has been riding a near decade-long string of electoral and legislative victories.

The bill, which the House passed 155-0, would require districts to use state-approved reading curriculums that include “five research-based areas,” which include not just phonics but also vocabulary and comprehension, among other focuses.

The House Democrats’ proposal emerged this week after years of advocacy on and off Beacon Hill, and after similar bills passed around the country. States have looked to the rare examples of Louisiana and Mississippi, which have bucked the nationwide decline in achievement over the past decade.

A union-backed amendment to the bill that would have eliminated the role of the state’s education department in determining acceptable curriculums was withdrawn during Wednesday’s session before it could even be debated. The amendment — filed by state Representative Samantha Montaño, a Boston Democrat — would have allowed districts to choose their own curriculums without state approval as long as they report to the state that their choices are high-quality.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found

Maarten Boudry

For the past few years, I have been the holder of a Chair at Ghent University dedicated in honour of Etienne Vermeersch, a Belgian philosopher renowned for many things but perhaps most notably for his early warnings about overpopulation and his advocacy for birth control. A few years before his untimely death in 2019, he expressed his “despair” at his failure to convince our political leaders to take overpopulation seriously.

Etienne was an intellectual hero of mine for whom I have huge respect, but this is the only thing about which he was dead wrong. Because there is no problem of overpopulation. In fact, before long, we will have to start worrying about underpopulation, caused by rapidly falling birth rates. It turns out that this is bad news not only for humanity but also for the planet, because more humans means more available resources and less destructive impact on nature.

Come again? More humans means more available resources? No, that’s not a typo.

Choose life.

Madison’s Whitehorse school staff on leave amid sexual assault investigation

Enjoyiana Nururdin, Erin Gretzinger

Staff members at a Madison middle school were placed on leave pending investigations into allegations that a student was sexually assaulted off school grounds, according to statements from the school, school district and police.

The Madison Metropolitan School District, the state’s Office of School Safety and Madison’s Police Department are investigating whether two male staff members at Annie Greencrow Whitehorse Middle School assaulted a male student with disabilities.

The student’s family members said in a Facebook post last week that two employees at Whitehorse assaulted him at a residence off school grounds, sprayed him with Lysol and threatened to kill him if he told anyone. The social media post was edited and has since been taken down.

A woman who identified herself as the student’s mother spoke Monday night during the public comment period of the Madison School Board meeting. It was the first time the mother directly and publicly spoke about the allegations, which were originally posted to Facebook by her sister-in-law.

K-12 tax & $pending climate: Obamacare costs & usage

Brian Blase:

But despite mandates for preventive services with zero cost-sharing, a large and growing share of ACA exchange enrollees never submit a claim, meaning they apparently use none of the services their policies cover—preventive or otherwise.

Since Obamacare eliminated potential financial cost barriers to preventive services, why would so many covered individuals never obtain any services at all—not even a well-visit or screening?

When someone has coverage with “first-dollar” preventive services but makes no use of the system, some possible explanations arise. They may be healthy and have no need for care in that year. Or they may lack access (such as provider network issues) or awareness that preventive services are free. Finally, we have to consider whether they are improperly enrolled, or a phantom enrollee.

In either of the latter two cases, Obamacare’s assumption—that coverage leads to preventive care uptake, better health, and lower costs—is significantly undermined.

On Fiat Experts: How the Priesthood of Failure cost America $38 Trillion of Administrative Bloat

Erik Prince & Dave Ramaswamy

The COVID pandemic provided a natural experiment in experts’ competence. The results were unambiguous. Every major government recommendation was proven wrong: masks did not work, then they were essential, then two were better than one. The virus did not spread asymptotically; then, asymptomatic spread became the primary driver. Two weeks to flatten the curve became two years of flattening.

The curve remained unimpressed. Models predicted tens of millions of deaths in the immediate near-term, though the natural case fatality rate proved to be a fraction of those initial dire estimates. Much of the death toll ended up as an outcome of the public health establishment’s recommendations: their warnings to stay indoors to avoid getting sick, their war on doctors promoting early self-treatment at home, and their encouragement of the widespread use of ventilators, which caused tremendous harm.

The models were wrong about the baseline, the intervention, and the outcome, despite being ‘peer-reviewed’ (another word for ‘immune to reality’).

When the interventions failed, America’s 80,000 health bureaucrats did not resign in disgrace or apologize. The CDC requested larger budgets. The FDA approved more emergency authorizations. Several officials were promoted, while parents who questioned school closures at board meetings were investigated as potential domestic terrorists. How did Anthony Fauci—whose record on AIDS, swine flu, and COVID was at best uneven—end up the highest-paid federal employee and a media celebrity? Why does failure never disqualify these experts?

The answer lies on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon appeared on television. President Nixon announced a temporary suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, which would then become permanent. This decision removed the last constraint on money creation. Between 1971 and 2024, the Fed’s balance sheet expanded from $80 billion to over $8 trillion—a hundredfold increase —causing not only inflation in goods and services but also in expertise.

Thus, a new species of bureaucrat was born: the fiat expert.

Chicago Teachers Union spent $173K on poolside recording studio, won’t show audit to members

Mailee Smith

The Chicago Teachers Union’s latest federal filing tells you how the union spends members’ money and it calls into question what the union isn’t telling them.

CTU’s filing shows it spent $173,000 on a “recording studio” in New Mexico with no helpful context on its purpose. But it did have a pool.

If CTU released its annual audits to members, as required in its internal rules, spending on a “recording studio” in New Mexico might have an explanation. But since it hasn’t released those audits since September 2020, members can only guess.

CTU’s questionable spending includes a New Mexico recording studio

Notes on Gifted Programs

Troy Closson:

And it prompts questions about ability and opportunity. Is bias shutting bright children out of gifted education? Are schools measuring academic potential or family privilege? Is a separate gifted and talented program even the best answer?

“There is no issue in American education that is more fraught,” said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University, who called the enrollment disparities a troubling example of “the failure of public education to educate all students to their ability.”

Gifted and advanced education is sometimes regarded as a niche concern, especially when schools face daunting challenges, including widening achievement gaps and alarming declines in 12th-grade reading and math skills. The debate is often deeply emotional because some of these programs were formed with an explicit goal of keeping middle-class white families in public schools who might otherwise have fled amid integration.

Still, a growing number of education leaders have cast advanced education as an urgent problem with far-reaching consequences for millions of traditionally underserved children and for the strength of the nation’s economy as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown could depress the arrival of high-skilled immigrants.

Should Schools Teach That America Is Good?

Brian Kisida, Colyn G. Ritter, Hanes Shuls and Gary Ritter:

Polling finds that teachers, more than the general public, believe schools should

The Beliefs of Parents, the General Public, and Teachers

We recently fielded a set of surveys to a representative sample of American parents, the general public, and teachers about education’s role in teaching about America. In general, we find broad agreement among these three groups. Notably, teachers appear to be more optimistic than parents and the general public when it comes to portraying America in a positive light and imparting democratic values (see Figure 1).

For example, 62 percent of teachers express that it is “very” or “extremely” important for schools to teach that the United States is a fundamentally good country, more than the general public (55 percent) and parents (59 percent). It is also encouraging that most people appreciate nuance enough to recognize the difference between blind veneration and enlightened notions of democratic citizenship. A majority of each group believe it is “very” or “extremely” important that schools teach students to be patriotic and loyal to the United States, yet higher shares of all three groups believe it is “very” or “extremely” important to teach that it is good to question the policies and actions of the U.S. government. When it comes to issues of race and education that have received so much attention over the past decade, teachers are less likely to support teaching that the United States is a fundamentally racist nation than are members of the general public or parents. Finally, most Americans believe it is “very” or “extremely” important that students learn about the U.S. Constitution and its core values, with teachers believing this at a higher rate (82 percent) than parents or the general public (75 percent).

How English Departments Became Broken

George Leef:

If you really want to understand the horrors of war, don’t just read accounts written years after a battle, but instead read first-hand accounts by soldiers who were on the front lines. Similarly, to understand what has happened in the hostile takeover of American college English departments, it’s best to read a description by a professor who fought to preserve them as places where students are taught to write well by studying books by great authors. Fought and lost. His story is at once enlightening and depressing.

Cotter’s experiences destroy the notion that zealous left-wing professors are acting in good faith.The book at hand is Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual by Reynolds Cotter, a pen name. It tells the author’s tale of earning his Ph.D. so he could teach students about great literature, obtaining a faculty position and tenure at a prestigious state university, and then losing his lonely fight against “progressives” who were determined to reshape the English department to suit their ideological agenda.

Poison everywhere

John Loeber:

When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story. When he started teaching in Northern England in the late 1970s, he and the other teachers would often talk in the break room about how their students seemed to be getting dumber every year. It was so strange — the kind of thing you might say with a worried laugh but no explanation. Smart primary schoolers turned into middle schoolers that just didn’t get things.

Years later, he connected the dots: the school was at the bottom of a hill, in a little valley, and the playground right by the busy main road. All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.

Nobody knew. There was no pediatric lead testing.2Later pilot studies in Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow would eventually confirm this: children were found to have average blood lead levels of 3-5x the safe maximum. Just imagine what the severe cases looked like.

This story has stuck with me. It features the shocking and tragic loss of healthy lives — condemned to live in functional disability — brought about by many well-intentioned people doing their best, trusting that the status quo is safe and normal. But it often isn’t — what you hope and trust to be fine is secretly killing you.

‘Iryna’s Law’

College Fix:

Key Takeaways

North Carolina Governor Josh Stein signed ‘Iryna’s Law,’ imposing stricter regulations on criminal proceedings and laying groundwork for resuming executions, named after murder victim Iryna Zarutska.
The law passed overwhelmingly in a Republican-majority legislature, but no Senate Democrats voted in favor due to controversial amendments on capital punishment administration.
Duke University law professors expressed concerns over outdated execution methods, the rushed timeline for capital cases leading to potential injustices, and the law’s failure to address systemic issues like mental illness and wrongful convictions.

Earlier this month, Democratic North Carolina Governor Josh Stein signed into law House Bill 307, more commonly known as “Iryna’s Law.” The law, as The Chronicle reports, “imposes harsher regulations for criminal proceedings and lays groundwork to resume executions.”

The legislation is named after Iryna Zarutska, who was murdered on a Charlotte train in late August by a man with a lengthy criminal record and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The law passed both the state House and Senate overwhelmingly, by votes of 82-30 and 28-8 respectively. No Senate Democrats voted for the bill.

This was due, The Chronicle claims, to (Republican) Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger’s “last-minute amendment” regarding the most controversial part of the bill: changes to the administration of capital punishment.

Iryna’s Law as passed states “if a state court ever rules the current method” of capital punishment — in this case lethal injection — to be unconstitutional, “the Secretary of the Department of Adult Correction must approve another method of execution, like firing squad or electric chair.”

Notes on The Taxpayer Funded Madison School District

David Blaska

Everything progressives believe about K-12 education is wrong. It’s minority students who suffer most. So says The Atlantic magazine — hardly a MAGA outlet.

“America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy,” its headline warns. “Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”

Bad enough State schools superintendent Jill Underly cooked the books to paper over Wisconsin’s declining test scores. The Republican legislature forced her to return to the gold standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found a 6% decline in fourth-grade reading proficiency.

Now Supt. Underly is “under fire” over her department’s handling of sexual grooming and teacher misconduct claims.”

For the record: Jill Underly was endorsed for re-election this spring by the teachers unions, the Democratic parties of Wisconsin and of Dane County, and The Capital Times, which once billed itself as “Dane County’s Progressive Voice.”

What did public education get wrong nationally, in Wisconsin, and here in Madison?

——

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jeonghyun Kim and Cory Koedel:

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?

Civics: Google’s ongoing censorship

Steve Guest:

WATCH: Sen. Ted Cruz BLASTS Google’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy for refusing to apologize for Google’s censorship of Americans after the 2020 election.

Cruz to Google: “Hold on a second. You’re taking the position that if anyone argues there’s fraud, if anyone lays out claims, if anyone lays out evidence, the omnipotent Google in the sky will say, ‘No, you stupid citizens, you don’t get to hear this is that.'”

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Ohio Elections

Zach Tuggle:

You should not be paying more in your property taxes than in the principal and interest repayments on your mortgage,” Ramaswamy said. “Elder Ohioans should not have to move out of their houses because somebody said their house happens to be worth more on paper where they can’t afford to live there anymore.”

He labeled his vision and the choices needed to achieve it as being a “moral obligation.”

What do time accommodations do to the predictive value of LSAT scores for legal education?

Derek Muller:

Back in March 2025, I wrote about the LSAT’s predictive value in law school admissions. I argued that while it remains useful, it is less valuable today than it was twenty years ago (even though many admissions practices still treat it as equally predictive).

And in June 2025, I wrote about what we know, and what we don’t, about accommodations in law school exams.

I wanted to dig into one of the empirical literature’s central claims—how time-related accommodations affect the LSAT’s predictive value—and what that might reveal (or obscure) about legal education.

Data from LSAC shows that time accommodated test-takers receive higher scores than non-accommodated test-takers, around four to five points. Most accommodations for test-takers translate into LSAT scores that predict law school success as accurately as for non-accommodated test-takers. For instance, a visually-impaired person receiving large-print materials will receive a score that fairly accurately predicts law school success. There is an exception, however, for time accommodations, and LSAT scores tend to overpredict law school success when there are time accommodations. Requests for additional time have increased dramatically over the years, from around 6000 granted requests in 2018-2019 to around 15,000 granted requests in 2022-2023.

Imagine two entering students, similarly situated in all material respects (e.g., GPA, etc.), and with identical LSAT scores. One received a 165 with a time accommodation; the other received a 165 without one. The time-accommodated score would probably be a 160 or 161 without the time accommodation.

LSAC data suggests that the time accommodated score overpredicts law school GPA. That is, despite receiving what appears to be a 165, it functions as something lower.

Students are learning less, studying less, and skipping class more — yet their grades go up and up

Grades at American universities have been rising for decades, a trend that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what happened after that? Using new data collected through the 2023-24 school year, we can see how grades continue to evolve. The Covid spike in grades corrected in the two years immediately after the pandemic, but the drop in grades was short-lived — the decades-long upward trajectory resumed thereafter.

We looked at average grades in all freshman-level undergraduate courses from 2011-12 to 2023-24 at eight large public universities: Kent State University, Missouri State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (These institutions post their grade distributions online.) While all of these are large universities, they range from not selective to highly selective, meaning grading in this sample likely reflects university grading more broadly.

Below we graph overall grade trends as well as separate trends in the following fields: business and economics, social sciences and humanities, and math-intensive STEM, which excludes biology.

The overall trend shows steady increases through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp spike in 2020. The average freshman-level course grade rose from just above 3.0 in 2012 (a B) to 3.3 by 2020 (a B+). After corrections in 2021 and 2022, the trend turned upward again in 2023, resuming its pre-pandemic trajectory.

The same pattern — a pandemic spike, followed by a post-pandemic correction and then the resumption of grade inflation — is apparent across fields, with the exception of business and economics, which reverted to its 2016-19 flatter trend. (Still, grades rose rapidly in business and economics in the early 2010s.)

More:

Advocating PhD study

Ada Palmer:

Employment is in chaos. Tariffs are battering global supply chains. The tech companies behind large language models (LLMs) say their products will soon automate away huge swaths of jobs, replacing occupations that have existed for decades (like programming) or millennia (writing, child care) with unprecedented new jobs overseeing automated work — jobs whose skill needs no one can predict. If the generative AI geese do lay these golden eggs for investors, we may face unemployment on a scale to rival the industrial revolution. If they don’t, some already fear a tech-stock crash to rival 1929. Either way, the promises of LLMs are already

What really doomed Napoleon’s army? Scientists find new clues in DNA

Becky Ferreira:

Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.

While the epic death toll has been notorious for centuries, the exact pathogens responsible for the losses have remained a matter of debate. Contemporaneous reports from the field suggested that typhus and trench fever commonly afflicted the army. But when scientists sequenced DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers, they did not find the bacteria that causes those diseases.

Instead, the results revealed the presence of “previously unsuspected pathogens” that suggest paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever were major killers during the mad rush from Moscow, according to a new study.

Chicago Teachers Union Missing Audits

Mailee Smith:

The Chicago Teachers Union’s annual reporting with the U.S. Department of Labor shows it has been paying accountants to conduct its audits.

But it hasn’t released those “annual” audits in over five years.

CTU is required by its own internal rules to provide an audit of its finances every year. But it hasn’t done so since Sept. 9, 2020.

The union reported to the U.S. Department of Labor that it did have an outside auditor conduct an audit in 2025 and that the cost totaled nearly $80,000.

Why the Waywardness of Academic Geography Matters

Robert Thornett:

For over 75 years, geography departments have been nearly nonexistent at so-called elite colleges in the United States. Most Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford and the University of Chicago, once had geography departments. Now, the only one with a geography department is Dartmouth. Having taught college geography for over eight years, I can attest that most American college students never take a geography course. They graduate without ever having to demonstrate that they know anything about the physical or cultural landscapes of other countries, let alone their own.

American geographic education took a massive step backward in the wake of World War II, when Harvard shut down its geography department in 1948 and most other U.S. colleges with geography departments followed suit. But while geography went out of style among the elites, since the 1980s it has made a major resurgence, especially in the land-grant universities, where greater emphases on energy, agriculture, and natural-resource management provide a demand for geographic knowledge.

Civics: Hochul Vetoes Public Records Bill, Leaving ‘New Era of Transparency’ Still Pending

New York Focus:

Governor Hochul vetoed a measure to speed up New York’s public records process, which is among the slowest in the nation. We asked our reporters about their most protracted records requests.

When Kathy Hochul took over as governor in 2021, she promised a more transparent, more responsive state government. In her first major speech as chief executive, she vowed to usher in a “new era of transparency,” including by facilitating an “expedited process” to more promptly fulfill public records requests under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

It was a niche topic for a debut speech, but important for government accountability: FOIL, which allows members of the public to request unpublished records from state and local government agencies, is one the main ways that journalists, advocates, and other watchdogs ensure that New York officials don’t evade public scrutiny. Each state has a version of the law, but New York is among the slowest to fulfill requests.

Four years later, Hochul has pursued some transparency initiatives, — but still hasn’t come through on her promise to expedite New York’s notoriously slow FOIL system. This year, the state legislature tried to pick up the slack, passing a bill that would tighten the deadlines that agencies must meet in responding to FOIL requests — but this month, Hochul vetoed it.

Teaching has been replaced by “group activity, worksheets and screen time,”

Joanne Jacob’s summary:

We know what schools need to do to improve learning, writes Mike Schmoker, the author of Results Now 2.0. He lists three practices proven to be effective:

The faithful implementation of a clear, sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum
Daily engagement in liberal amounts of purposeful reading, discussion, and writing across the curriculum
The routine (though not exclusive) use of explicit, step by step instruction — where each lesson has a clear goal and the teacher frequently “checks for understanding” — and re-teaches when students struggle

Schools that do these things get excellent results, Schmoker writes. Yet many teachers have been told in training and professional development sessions that knowledge is unimportant and explicit instruction is outmoded.

“Actual teaching has been overtaken by staggering amounts of group activity, worksheets and screen time,” he writes. The culture of teacher training is dominated by “whims, fads, opportunism, and ideology.”

Litigation on a Wisconsin mom’s ability to criticize her government

WILL:

Additional Background: The initial lawsuit involved a defamation claim for run-of-the-mill social media posts on X and Facebook. The posts in question criticized a school district for having a “social justice coordinator,” and described people who hold such positions as “woke,” “white savior[s]” with a “god complex,” “woke lunatics,” and “bullies.” Statements like these are pervasive on social media; indeed, they were more restrained than a lot of online speech. Nevertheless, the Plaintiff, who previously held the position, chose to respond with a defamation lawsuit, and the trial court allowed the claims to go to trial.

WILL stepped in to file an early appeal to avoid a costly and non-sensical defamation trial for First Amendment protected speech. We argued, and the Court agreed, that for statements to be actionable for defamation, they must be “provably false.” See Milkovich v. Lorain J. Co., 497 U.S. 1, 20 (1990). That is, a comment must directly state or clearly imply an objective, binary truth claim that listeners would reasonably understand to be either true or false. As courts have recognized, firm adherence to this principle is critical to protecting free speech.

Courts have regularly held that nebulous concepts like “woke” and “bully” that are routinely and indiscriminately thrown about in public discourse are not actionable precisely because their meaning depends on one’s opinion and viewpoint. As the court noted in this case, “Johnson’s statements cannot be proven true or false.”

Elon Musk launches Grokipedia, an AI-powered Wikipedia rival

Will Oremus and Faiz Siddiqui:

Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI, only for the site to stop working soon after.

The project, which the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia, was visible to the public for about an hour before it began blocking visitors. Musk and his social media company, X, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

When it first went live Monday afternoon, the site resembled Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appeared significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings — and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.

Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”

Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject. It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasize AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain releases “releases reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship,” citing xAI’s own website to make that point.

Censorship: Earlier today, Spotify pulled my Anita Archer episode! 😱

Anna Stokke:

This is a mistake, but may take time to work out. 🔥Despite that, it’s still outperforming every episode in terms of daily downloads! In the meantime, please follow Chalk & Talk on YouTube 👉

Censorship: Earlier today, Spotify pulled my Anita Archer episode! 😱

Anna Stokke:

This is a mistake, but may take time to work out. 🔥Despite that, it’s still outperforming every episode in terms of daily downloads! In the meantime, please follow Chalk & Talk on YouTube 👉

Did you know that 3rd grade reading scores are highly predictive of later-life outcomes? It’s true.

Chad Aldeman:

My favorite paper on this comes from Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly, who looked at how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting longer-term academic outcomes. In a 2021 paper, they used data from North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State and found, “consistent and very strong relationships between 3rd grade test scores and high school tests, advanced course-taking, and graduation.”

The signals are strong enough by 3rd grade that educators and policymakers should act on them. Goldhaber’s team concluded that, “early student struggles on state tests are a credible warning signal for schools and systems that make the case for additional academic support in the near term, as opposed to assuming that additional years of instruction are likely to change a student’s trajectory. Educators and families should take 3rd grade test results seriously and respond accordingly; while they may not be determinative, they provide a strong indication of the path a student is on.”

Unfortunately, math gaps start to show up almost immediately in state testing data. To help visualize this issue, I created the interactive tool below. Users can click on a state to see its average math proficiency rates in grades 3-8. In states that make the data available, users can also sort by specific student groups. The data come via AssessmentHQ.org, which pulls directly from state websites.

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Anna Stokke:

In the flavour of @ChadAldeman: if your child is behind in math DO. NOT. WAIT. ⚠️Even parents who have strong math backgrounds have told me they trusted the school to do its job, only to find their kid struggling in middle school b/c there was no urgency to teach math well.
Math is cumulative. It’s relentlessly hierarchical. When students get behind it snowballs. ⛄
What to look for?

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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

Harvard College’s Grading System Is ‘Failing,’ Report on Grade Inflation Says

Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava:

More Harvard College students than ever are passing their classes with flying colors, but the College’s evaluation system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading,” according to a report released by the Office of Undergraduate Education on Monday.

The 25- page report, which was sent to faculty and Harvard College students on Monday, found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, compared to only a quarter of grades two decades ago. It concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

In the 25-page report, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh argued that the rising share of A grades necessitates reforms to “restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”

A faculty committee is exploring whether instructors should be able to award a limited number of A+ grades to undergraduates to crack down on grade inflation, according to the report. The highest grade undergraduates can currently receive is an A. The committee is also considering a proposal to include the median grade for every course on a student’s transcript.

Concern over high grades at Harvard is not new. Two years ago, Claybaugh presented a report to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences calling attention to skyrocketing undergraduate marks. A faculty committee concluded in January that undergraduates frequently prioritize other commitments over their classes.

Effective Reading Instruction inLow-and Middle-Income Countries:What the Evidence Shows

Authors (in alphabetical order by last name): Horacio Alvarez-Marinelli, Izzy Boggild-Jones,Michael Crawford, Margaret “Peggy” Dubeck, Dhir Jhingran, Christopher Lack, NompumeleloMohohlwane, Maria Eugenia Oviedo, Benjamin Piper, Jaime Saavedra and Hanada Taha:

One of the primary causes of this literacy crisis is the failure to use instructional methods proven by research. Many education systems continue to use outdated approaches that research has shown to be ineffective or lack clear guidance on how to teach reading effectively. Other factors that contribute to poor reading outcomes include insufficient books, inadequate teacher training and ongoing professional development, high absenteeism, limited class time, instruction in unfamiliar languages, and teaching that doesn’t match children’s learning levels—all compounded by a broader failure to adopt science-based reading practices.

Fortunately, scientific research now provides clear guidance on how children learn to read and how to teach them effectively. Reading is one of the most extensively studied areas of human learning, with over a century of research. While early research focused primarily on English-speaking, high-income countries, the research base has expanded significantly. This report synthesizes the growing
research from LMICs, reviewing more than 120 studies on effective reading instruction conducted across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and covering more than 173 different languages. This expanded evidence confirms that certain fundamental principles of effective reading instruction are universal, though specific aspects of instruction can be adapted to different languages and cultural contexts.

This research shows that reading with comprehension is a complex process that relies on multiple, interconnected skills. These skills can be grouped into two broad domains: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is the ability to recognize written symbols (e.g., letters) and convert them into the sounds they represent to recognize words. Language comprehension involves understanding what those words, sentences, and texts actually mean. Both decoding and language comprehension skills are essential and work together when children read: without decoding skills, children cannot recognize words; without language comprehension, they cannot grasp their meaning (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Effective reading instruction must develop both skill areas simultaneously. These foundations start in the early years, at home or in formal early childhood education, and become the focus of the primary grades.