School Information System

Keegan Kyle:

Underly stood by the department’s practice of allowing educators under investigation for misconduct to voluntarily surrender their licenses to avoid further investigation. She said voluntary license surrenders often spare victims from “retraumatization through lengthy investigations.”

She also called these license surrenders a “binding, legal agreement to a permanent, lifetime ban on their ability to teach in Wisconsin,” contradicting her own department’s records. At least eight educators since 2018 have been allowed to surrender their licenses and maintain their ability to reapply after a defined time period — typically one to three years.

The Cap Times obtained internal case notes for the eight educators under state open records laws, as part of a yearlong investigation into how the Department of Public Instruction and others respond to allegations of teacher sexual misconduct and grooming behaviors toward students. The Cap Times’ reporting on educator misconduct in Wisconsin is continuing as part of an investigative series called “Dismissed.”

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My Letter to Attorney General Josh Kaul on a recent Wisconsin DPI open records request (Act 20 at risk data)

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Adding to the curious tale for data submitted to DPI 7.15.2025:
e-mail received 21 October, 2025:

Jim,
Public records laws do not require agencies to create records that do not currently already exist. The data you requested is not currently available in a record that is responsive to your request. Districts are required to submit the data to DPI by July 15. DPI is required to submit a report to the legislature by November 30th (presumably to allow DPI adequate time to organize the data and compile a report). Staff is currently working to compile the report that is due to the legislature, but the data is still being compiled and organized. Since the requested information will be available to you at some point in just over a month (at the latest), I did not consider my original response to be a formal denial of your request. But if you would like additional justification for our delay in providing you the record you requested here you are. DPI’s obligation is limited to producing records that already exist; “the public records law does not require an authority to provide requested information if no record exists, or to simply answer questions about a topic of interest to the requester.” The Journal Times v. City of Racine Bd. of Police and Fire Comm’rs, 2015 WI 56, ¶ 55. Further, “[t]he open records law does not require the custodian to collect or compile statistics or create a record for the benefit of a requester.” George v. Rec. Custodian, 169 Wis.2d 573, 579 (Ct. App. 1991). An authority is also not required to extract information from existing records and compile that information in a new format to respond to a request. Wis. Stat. § 19.35(1)(L).

Pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 19.35(4)(b), DPI’s decision to deny your request as described above is subject to review by mandamus under Wis. Stat. § 19.37(1), or upon application to the attorney general or to your local district attorney.

Please either check our website or follow up with me directly on or around November 30.

Best,

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Stephanie Arnott (she/her/hers)
Paralegal – Advanced | Office of Legal Services
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
201 W Washington Ave | Madison, WI | 53703
(608) 224-6176

My Letter to Attorney General Josh Kaul on a recent Wisconsin DPI open records request (Act 20 at risk data)

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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.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon summary:

LAB said DPI is very harsh to choice schools!

DPI threatened to defund private schools whose finances were 1 week late and defunded after 1 month.

DPI…perhaps did not threaten districts? And it took DPI 5.5 months to defund MPS?

1 month versus half a year is a big disparity!

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Corrinne Hess:

Audit finds nearly a quarter of Wisconsin schools missed financial deadlines. The Legislative Audit Bureau made 22 recommendations to DPI to improve procedures

Legislative Audit Bureau.

We found that fiscal year (FY) 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for 325 of 421 school districts (77.2 percent) were submitted by the December 15 deadline established by DPI, but were submitted an average of 67.7 calendar days late for 96 school districts (22.8 percent). Neither statutes nor DPI’s policies specified a deadline by which DPI was required to complete its review of the financial information submitted to it. We found DPI took an average of 87.4 calendar days to complete its review of the audited financial statements and related audit findings for the 325 school districts, including an average of

74.7 calendar days during which DPI did not begin its review. The FY 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for Milwaukee Public Schools, which were due on December 15, 2023, were submitted on December 20, 2024, and were the latest among all 421 school districts.

We found that FY 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for 23 of 28 independent charter schools (82.1 percent) were submitted by the December 15 deadline established by DPI, but were submitted an average of 56.4 calendar days late for 5 schools (17.9 percent). DPI took an average of 82.0 calendar days to complete its review of the audited financial statements and related audit findings for 21 independent charter schools whose statements were submitted on time and for which relevant documentation was available, including an average of 56.0 calendar days during which DPI did not begin its review. We found that DPI did not have any written policies for reviewing audited financial information for independent charter schools.

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more.

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

Students and parents don’t get to vote in union elections, alas. But union teachers do and they care most about money and dodging accountability for student failure. Ms. Davis Gates has delivered on both counts. In 2024 she told a Chicago radio station that academic testing “at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy” and “you can’t test black children with an instrument that was born to prove their inferiority.”

Yes, grading is racist, so stop using tests to judge students—and heaven forbid don’t hold teachers accountable. By the way, Ms. Davis Gates sends her own son to a private school.

Ms. Davis Gates recently memorialized black activist Assata Shakur, who killed a New Jersey police officer in 1973 as “a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.” But after her election to run the state union, she said her goal is “to show people how to practice democracy, how to work across out differences, how to create solidarity based on our collective needs.” By solidarity she means more money for union dues.

Ms. Davis Gates led the CTU to drain its coffers to help elect Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson so she’d have a friend in City Hall. The teachers got their raises, but Chicago voters noticed. By 2023 an M3 Strategies poll found that only 29% of Chicago residents had a positive opinion of the teachers union and only 18% had a favorable opinion of Ms. Davis Gates.

Hannah Schmid

Virginia raises bar for students while Illinois hides strugglesLow student proficiency is being hidden in Illinois. Virginia raised its expectations for students.

While other states are attacking their portion of the national epidemic of poor reading and math proficiency, Illinois is burying the problem.

Illinois approved a plan this summer to lower the scores needed to be considered proficient in reading and math on state assessments. Virginia went in the opposite direction. Its board of education just voted to raise cut scores in reading and math.

Illinois is more concerned with inflating proficiency rates than improving students’ actual performance in core subjects. Instead of addressing low proficiency, the Illinois State Board of Education is minimizing the problem by changing the definition of a struggling student.

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Hilary Lane

• The New Illiterates by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
  A book that details not only the ways in which these horrendous teaching methods have failed children, but also the arrogance and indifference of the instigators. “When one begins to think of the incalculable damage done to the young minds of America through defective teaching techniques, one can scarcely contain one’s anger. Flesch was accused of writing in anger by his critics, as if anger were an inappropriate reaction to gross pedagogical malpractice which has had a ruinous effect on the literacy of millions of children. […] If it bothers you to see children suffering and failing needlessly because of defective teaching methods obstinately adhered to against all criticism, you will become angry.”and“We have the most inarticulate generation of college students in our history, and this may well account for their mass outbreaks of violence. They have no more intelligent way to express themselves.” (Blumenfeld is quoting Karl Shapiro)Aside from that, this book also features a lengthy section on practical methods to use to teach your children how to read (as young as preschool!)
  (p.s. the above link for this book is an affiliate link for bookshop.com. If you have children and want to teach them yourself, I do highly recommend this book.)

Jan H. van de Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog and Gerrit W. Kreffer

In a way, this report can be seen as an update and extension of the CPB report Immigration and the Dutch Economy from 20031 . That CPB report, among other things, calculated the costs and benefits for the treasury of non-Western immigration at the time. Since that report, the government has no longer calculated these tax costs and benefits of immigration in a general sense. This is striking because in the Netherlands just about everything that is relevant to policy is regularly monitored in all kinds of ways. And given its considerable size in the last decades, immigration to the Netherlands can certainly be considered policy-relevant.

The fact that the CPB report from 2003 has not received a full update is not least due to normative limitations. In this context, the late minister Eberhard van der Laan said in the NOS-journaal news program of 4 September 2009 that the cabinet is not interested in putting people along the yardstick of euros. The then director of the CPB, Laura van Geest, stated in an interview: 2 “I don’t think you should talk about refugees and start calculating something.” And Klaas Dijkhoff stated in 2016 as State Secretary for Security and Justice in response to parliamentary questions 3 that the government does not evaluate citizens, but policy. Country of origin is personal data that, “in accordance with the principles of the rule of law, is not relevant to most policy areas,” says Dijkhoff.

There are three underlying – often implicit – arguments that play a role in this: ‘one should not calculate the value of a human life’, ‘one should not blame the victim’ and ‘one should not play into the hands of the extreme right’. 4 None of these three arguments makes sense upon closer consideration.

Let’s begin with the argument that one should not ‘calculate the value of a human life’. It is sometimes noted that it would not be ethically acceptable to calculate the costs and benefits of immigrants. Humanitarian reasons and human solidarity would oppose this. This argument is already very easy to refute for immigrant workers because their arrival is often defended on the basis of economic selfinterest. But it doesn’t really make sense for family immigrants and refugees either. Few residents would welcome immigrants at any cost, for example, for whom it does not matter whether immigration reduces their income by a small percentage or cuts their income by a quarter.

Derek Thompson:

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.

…When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. I never watch the news on television, and I love listening to podcasts while I make coffee and go on walks, and I’d prefer to make the sort of media that I consume. Plus, as a host, I thought I wanted to have conversations focused on the substance of the words rather than on ancillary concerns about production value and lighting.

But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.

My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.

Big Pictures Originals:

For decades, the United States stood as a global symbol of free speech. But what if that legacy is being quietly rewritten?

GOD COMPLEX is a Big Picture Original documentary that launches a deep investigation to answer this question.

Through expert testimony and firsthand accounts, the film raises unsettling questions about the future of truth and invites you to see what few have dared to expose.

Bret Devereaux:

We’ve talked about the patterns of marriage, of birth, of death, of subsistence in farming and spinning and weaving, the innumerable maintenance tasks that keep the household running and the pressures that elite extraction – omnipresent for our peasants – exert on the system.

This week I want to try to put it all together, taking our models and transmuting them into a sense of what life in these communities was like, with its hardships and its joys. In particular, this is an effort to take our models – which exist mostly as numbers – and turn them into something approaching a narrative, a digital-to-analog conversion that I hope can capture a bit more of the nature of life for these people. That narrative is going to follow one of the dominant ways early agrarian societies thought about time: not as a linear progression, but as a sequence of cycles, from the smallest to the largest.

Chad Aldeman:

But I want to double back on Sherrill’s casual slams on Mississippi and Louisiana. Do they have some of the “worst schools” in the nation, as Sherrill claimed? And by implication, is New Jersey doing better than these states? The answer to both of those questions is no. 

Sherrill’s confusion may stem from the fact that New Jersey does have pretty high student achievement scores, but this could be largely because New Jersey is a relatively wealthy state that spends a lot of money on its schools. Does that mean its schools are good? What value are the schools adding? 

For example, here are the raw, unadjusted 4th grade math scores for these three states: 

New Jersey: 240 

Mississippi: 239 

Louisiana: 235 

New Jersey gets the slight nod here. It may not be as much of an advantage as old historical prejudices would lead you to believe, but it is still beating these Southern states. Go New Jersey! 

But wait. Let’s start to break those down a bit. What are the 4th grade math scores for non-poor kids? 

Mississippi: 256 

Louisiana: 254

New Jersey: 254

Huh. That’s weird. New Jersey’s non-poor students are slightly underperforming those in Mississippi and Louisiana. What about low-income kids?

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs:

Nearly 2,500 people applied to attend the law school this fall, Scheller said. That’s a 36% increase over last year and the school’s highest amount in 15 years.

UW-Madison tends to receive about 1,600 to 1,800 applications in a typical year, Scheller said.

Law schools across the country reported an 18% increase in applicants during the 2025 admissions cycle. Preliminary numbers suggest this rise may continue, according to the Law School Admission Council, a Pennsylvania organization that tracks enrollment data.

Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel

The administration is looking to shed workers and transfer some operations to other departments as it seeks to close the Education Department

The prolonged government shutdown is helping the Trump administration advance its goal of closing the Education Department — a longtime conservative aim that congressional Republicans have failed to act on.

Jessika Harkay

One four young adults across the U.S. is functionally illiterate – yet more than half earned high school diplomas, according to recently released data.

The number of 16-to-24 year olds reading at the lowest literacy levels increased from 16% in 2017 to 25% in 2023, according to data released in December from the National Center for Education Statistics in partnership with the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies. 

In 2023, a total of about five million young adults, equivalent to the population of Alabama, could understand the basic meaning of short texts but could not analyze long reading materials, according to further analysis by the American Institute of Research.

The nine percentage point increase is in line with an unprecedented decline in the literacy rate among all adults in the same six-year period. 

But even more troubling is the AIR researchers’ finding that while the percentage of young adults with high school diplomas increased from 50% to 55% between 2017 and 2023, that group also saw the largest decrease in scores on tests measuring literacy skills compared to older adults with diplomas. 

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Barbara Oakley:

Washington has an urgent math problem. Nearly one in three students cannot demonstrate basic grade-level skills, and among low-income students it’s almost one in two. In a state that prides itself on leading the nation in technology jobs, that’s not just an education issue — it’s an economic emergency.

This problem isn’t unique to Washington. Across the Western world, classrooms have embraced teaching philosophies that emphasize “conceptual understanding” over getting the right answer. Ask educators and many will insist they never do this, but in practice, students are often rewarded for being able to explain in words how they got their answer, even when it isn’t correct. 

Part of the reason is that teachers are rarely taught how the brain learns. Neuroscience shows we rely on two main systems: the declarative system, which lets us explain or describe something, and the basal ganglia system, which builds automatic skill through practice and pattern recognition. A student can sound confident explaining a process while still lacking the practice and memorization that allows them to consistently provide the correct answer.

Tomoe Kanaya, Jonathan Wai and Brenda Miranda:

A majority of the research on students receiving special education services in the United States have focused on school-aged outcomes. Comparatively less is known about how these students fare in adulthood. By utilizing a one-to-one propensity score matching technique, individuals who received special education services were compared with those who did not on multiple adulthood outcomes that span educational attainment, economic self-sufficiency, social engagement, and health. Results suggest that Hispanic students in our sample who participate in special education fared better compared to their non-Hispanic counterparts on some outcomes. Moreover, propensity (the likelihood of receiving services) predicted several more outcomes. These results point to the potential importance of the contextual factors that surround special education services and suggest the need to provide context-specific services at the local level. The findings also highlight the use of propensity score analyses to reduce concerns of selection bias in special educational research.

James Shore:

I’m actually showing them to make a point about your biases. In the modern era, we expect images to be true to life. We have cameras that give us nearly perfect representations of the world. But realism isn’t what medieval monks were always trying to accomplish. Religion and metaphor were a central part of their lives, to a degree that I think we in the modern world have trouble understanding.

The elephants on the left aren’t really elephants. They’re a way of presenting a moral lesson about your place in the world. The image serves that story. It’s not there to teach you about elephants. It’s there to teach you about God.

So if your first reaction to these elephants was to laugh at those ignorant medieval monks… then perhaps you’ve fallen prey to your biases. The elephant doesn’t look like an elephant because the metaphor was more important than the reality.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

[beat]

The past informs the present, but the present informs the past. We can’t help but to interpret it through the lens of our own experience, and those biases distort the reality of what it was actually like to live there.

This idea fascinates me, because it’s not only true of the past; it’s true of everything. Our biases and experiences influence so much of how we interpret the world.

From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …

Sophie McBain

Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

Tara Weiss:

There are the parents who want to know what the “magic number” is to donate to guarantee admission. The moms who ask whether a friend-of-a-friend should put in a good word. The dads who call shortly before decisions are released asking, What will it take to get the deal done? The parents whose behavior was so crass that Los Angeles school consultant Sandy Eiges added a clause in her contract stating that the use of profanity could terminate their working relationship.

All this is to get eighth graders into high school.

“I don’t mince words,” said Eiges, owner and founder of L.A. School Scout, which guides families through K-12 school admissions. “That’s part of what they’re paying me for—to get them through this successfully.” Eiges wouldn’t disclose her fee but said that consultants in L.A. typically charge between $5,000 and $10,000 for their services. That is on top of annual school tuition that can range from $25,000 to $50,000, she said.

Getting into high school has become a brutal competition for many families. Across the country, school choice for public and private institutions has surged amid expanded access to vouchers, educational savings accounts and Covid-era learning loss. There are a large number of high school options there to fill that gap, but the systems and admissions are difficult to navigate–not to mention competitive. Freaked-out parents are paying up.

New York City is widely considered the most competitive and confusing market. This week, middle schoolers received random lottery numbers that determine their priority in public school admissions. The system includes four different types of schools: the lottery schools, charter schools, specialized schools that require a test, and then arts schools that require an audition. Private schools are a whole other story.

Holly Korbey:

EdReports doesn’t rate materials on whether they have a successful track record in helping students learn, but rather how well they align with Common Core State Standards. And even after they amended their process to try to correct for some of these challenges, experts say EdReports hasn’t gone back and re-reviewed materials using the new criteria—so materials green-lit before remain so today.

“Relying on EdReports blindly is not reliable,” said education journalist Natalie Wexler, who wrote her own widely-read critique examining how EdReports reviews could be misleading to consumers last year.

That would be big news to practically every state leader looking for something good their schools can use. And when I asked a small group of researchers and experts whether a better review platform exists? Also, no. Maybe. With caveats.

I think it goes without saying that curriculum choice, what students actually learn all day at school, is important; research has confirmed it. Using learning materials that are well-designed, organized, and sequential, year upon year, add up to more than the sum of their parts, according to cognitive science, because a store of knowledge in long-term memory is so crucial to the kind of thinking and analyzing we want students to be able to do.

But U.S. schools have just recently jumped back on the bandwagon of believing that using a curriculum—any curriculum—is good in the first place.

Eugene Volokh

Tovar v. American Automatic Fire Suppression Inc., decided Oct. 3 by San Diego County Superior Court Judge Carolyn M. Caietti, declined to impose sanctions on defendant’s lawyers, because the plaintiff hadn’t complied with certain procedural rules, but added:

Notwithstanding the denial on procedural grounds, the Court is deeply troubled by the conduct of Defense counsel. Defendants admitted to submitting authority that was miscited, non-existent or inapposite…. “Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations—whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.” … [A] party’s citation to fabricated legal authorities violate[] “a basic duty counsel owed to his client and the court” ….

One of Defendants’ most recent motions contain both citations to cases that do not appear to exist and factual misrepresentations. On July 23, 2025, Defendants filed a motion to compel an independent medical examination of Plaintiff. There is a citation to a case that does not exist and a citation that does not stand for the premise asserted.

In addition, Attorney Woods’ supporting declaration contained [non-AI-related] misrepresentations to the Court. [Details omitted. -EV]

Defendants also cite to a Notice of Errata filed in relation to the IME motion as having cured any false citations or misrepresentations. While the Notice of Errata removed citations to two of the cases cited, it more so “corrected” other citations to repealed statutes. It also minimized the citations to “clerical errors” that did not alter the substance of the legal argument presented. A stark contrast to the position taken by Defendants now.

Henry Oliver:

Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don’t read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right.

There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets.

Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year?

But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won’t help.

Let’s start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children’s writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 “we’re going through a bit of a golden age for children’s fiction.” He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson.

Samuel Axion:

“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Prince said. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage.”

This is happening because Google is using its dominant position in search to ensure that web publishers allow their content to be used in ways that they might not otherwise want it to.

The changing norms of the web

Since 2023, Google has offered a way for website administrators to opt their content out of use for training Google’s large language models, such as Gemini.

Douglas Belkin & Natalie Andrews:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first university to reject a sweeping proposal from the Trump administration offering colleges funding advantages in exchange for far-reaching campus reforms.

In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon Friday, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said the proposal—called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”—would restrict freedom of expression and MIT’s independence. The proposal is inconsistent with the school’s belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone, she said.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote. “The people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

The compact, sent out to nine colleges last week the White House perceived as “good actors,” proposed a wide-ranging set of terms the administration says are intended to elevate university standards and performance.

The compact demands that schools ban the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions; freeze tuition for five years; cap international undergrad enrollment at 15%; require that applicants take the SAT or a similar test; and quell grade inflation.

Much of the document focuses on the campus political climate. Critics said the language was imprecise, including a mandate to get rid of departments that belittle conservative ideas.

Wall Street Journal:

The school’s policy of prioritizing American students is especially valuable because of how much elite math and science is taught and researched there. MIT notes that in the “free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences.”

“The document also includes principles with which we disagree,” Ms. Kornbluth writes, “including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.” On free speech, MIT says it believes “we must hear facts and opinions we don’t like and engage respectfully.” It already has its own Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.

Will the school be punished for not signing on? That’s a serious question since the Administration has shown it can be vindictive.

4 page letter (PDF), sent via certified mail:
16 October 2025 response to my 6 October request for student at risk data (districts were mandated to provide this data by 15 July, 2025)

Good afternoon,
This data will be publicly shared in a report due to the legislature by November 30 each year. Please check online after that date.

Best,
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Icon
Stephanie Arnott (she/her/hers)

Your DPI Public Records Request was submitted on Monday, October 6, 2025 – 4:35 pm by __________

The DPI has received your request for records. A response will be provided as soon as practicable and without delay.

Under Wis. Stat. § 19.35(3), the DPI may charge for the costs of copying, mailing, and/or locating the records to respond to open records requests. Section 19.35(3)(f) allows the DPI to require prepayment for these costs if the total amount exceeds $5.00. An estimate will be sent if pre-payment is required. If, upon completing the response to this request, it is determined the estimated amount is insufficient to cover the actual costs of copying, mailing, and/or locating the requested records, you may be asked to pay the remainder before the records are sent to you.

If your request for records is denied, in whole or in part, the DPI will provide you with the reason for the denial. Under Wis. Stat. § 19.35(4)(b), the Department’s decision to deny your request is subject to review by mandamus under Wis. Stat. § 19.37(1), or upon application to the attorney general or to your local district attorney.

Thank you for your request!

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

———————————
The information you submitted was:
First name: Jim
Last name: Zellmer
Request Information:
Happy Monday.

I write to request per school and district pupil at risk data (Act 20) submitted to the Wisconsin DPI by 7.15.2025:

The number of pupils in grades 4K through grade 3 identified as at-risk on the reading readiness screener during the previous school year
• The names of the diagnostic reading assessments the district used in the previous school year
• The number of pupils identified as at-risk based on the results of a diagnostic reading assessment during the previous school year
• The number of 5K through grade 3 pupils who received reading interventions during the previous school year by grade-level
• The number of 5K through grade 3 pupils who received a personal reading plan during the previous school year
• The number of 5K through grade 3 who exited reading interventions during the past year.
• The number of 5K through grade 3 pupils who received reading interventions during the previous school year by grade-level.
• The number of 5K through grade 3 pupils who received a personal reading plan during the previous school year.
• The number of 5K through grade 3 pupils receiving interventions during the previous school year.
• The number of 5k through grade 3 pupils for whom a specific education referral was made based on diagnostic reading assessments in the previous school year.

Background:
https://dpi.wi.gov/wi-reads/early-literacy-assessment-and-act-20#Screening

I’ve looked on your website for this data, without success. I apologize if I missed it!

Thank you.

Jim

Legislation & Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-.

Mark Treinen:

Just bumping this true, fully fact-checked story on teacher misconduct investigations in Wisconsin.

Ivana Greco:

Who is right? Are there silver bullets in education? What does the Southern Surge teach us? A careful look at what is happening in the South doesn’t show us that education reform is easy. There are (sadly) no silver bullets. However, with significant effort over many years, it is indeed possible.

As education expert Karen Vaites pointed out in an essay co-authored with journalist Kelsey Piper, the Southern Surge is actually a result of “multilayered reforms.” Several of these reforms have gotten significant press attention, including (yes!) phonics, retention policies (i.e., holding back third graders who don’t meet reading standards), teacher training, and frequent student assessment. 

But one aspect of the reforms, arguably one of the most important, has not gotten as much airtime—possibly because it is the hardest to explain succinctly. That is the adoption of “knowledge-building curricula” by many of the relevant school districts, particularly those in Tennessee and Louisiana.

As I have written about previously for The Dispatch, knowledge-building curricula emphasize “the crucial role of background knowledge in comprehending what you read.” Here’s an example: My two older sons spend a lot of time talking to me about the intricacies of the video game Minecraft. I don’t play any video games, including Minecraft, and I have zero background knowledge on the topic. I find it basically impossible to understand what they are saying about how the game works—despite it being explained to me repeatedly, and at volume. That’s similar to how a seventh grader from an impoverished household might feel if she has no background knowledge of Victorian England, yet is handed A Christmas Carol and told to understand it. What is a charwoman? What is a milliner’s shop? These and many other similar questions would baffle a reader who lacks the needed context to follow the story’s plot.

To combat this, some areas in the South are moving to dramatically increase their students’ background knowledge in history, science, and so forth. Running contrary to the trend of “ask ChatGPT” or “just Google it,” these schools are trying to increase the amount of information in students’ heads. Louisiana—for example—has created its own social studies curriculum that emphasizes knowledge acquisition by students. 

——-

more.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Tim Worstall:

The key concept here is one of contestable monopoly. Having a monopoly — say, 80 per cent of global rare earth production, 90 per cent of processing and 100 per cent of some business lines — is lovely and one can take great joy in observing that dominance. But the moment you use that position to try to pressure the customers, others will arise to contest that dominance. That is what “contestable monopoly” means. That by happenstance, hard work, deliberate design even, you are the dominant supplier and well done you. But the only reason that dominance continues is that it is not worth anyone’s while to contest it — give ‘em a reason and they will.

This is where China is with rare earths. They produce what the world wants to eat at prices everyone is willing to pay and have done so for many decades. Excellent — now they want to exert that power. At which point we’ll all contest that position and it’s we who will win.

One reason for certainty in this is that I said this back in 2010, the last time China tried this. By 2014 people were agreeing I had been correct. That non-China world opened a couple of rare earth mines and prices fell back below the starting point. Contestable monopolies will be contested if you try to exercise that market power. This is why we should not worry — at least not overmuch — about contestable monopolies. 

Is it more complex this time? Sure it is — we now need to rebuild the entire production chain. But this can be done. Obviously it can be done. Rare earth magnets, the thing being squealed about most, were an American invention after all. Magnaquench was a GM subsidiary sold to Chinese interests, who then — quite literally — packaged up the factories and shipped ’em home. If the US could make them once then the US can make them again — yes, even though China now has a couple of decades more learning by doing under the belt. Easy-peasy might not be the correct description, but it is definitely possible.

Do not allow yourself to get confused by China having 40 per cent or whatever of rare earth reserves. Reserves are something made by humans — deposits are what God’s Friday afternoon engineer strew about the place. And rare earths are neither rare nor earths, and they are nearly everywhere. The biggest restriction on being able to process them is the light radioactivity the easiest ores (so easy they are a waste product of other industrial processes — monazite say) contain. If we had rational and sensible rules about light radioactivity — alas, we don’t — then that end of the process would already be done. Passing Marco Rubio’s Thorium Act would, for example, make Florida’s phosphate gypsum stacks available and they have more rare earths in them than several sticks could be shaken at.  

Robert Pondiscio

School boards rarely make national news unless someone is shouting. A community member reads a passage from a controversial library book; a teacher’s social media post ignites outrage; a member storms out over masks or diversity policies. Skirmishes over culture war issues dominate headlines, giving the impression that the most pressing questions in local education politics are whether the local school board is too conservative or too “woke.” The deeper and more consequential problem is far more banal: too many school boards don’t govern. They cheerlead.

A new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Who’s on Board? School Boards and Political Representation in an Age of Conflict, by David M. Houston and Michael T. Hartney, offers an unvarnished look at the nation’s school board members. The findings confirm what I’ve long suspected (and said, including during my own ill-fated run for school board in my upstate New York town): local school boards function less like independent oversight bodies and more like glorified Parent-Teacher Associations.

Houston and Hartney surveyed more than 5,000 board members across 3,000 districts. The portrait that emerges is of a group that doesn’t always mirror the communities they serve demographically. Nearly nine in ten are white; almost half hold postgraduate degrees; one in four is a current or former teacher. Board members’ partisanship and ideology largely mirror the American public’s and tend to align with local voters on hot-button cultural issues, the pair found. They’re also less supportive of charter schools and teachers’ unions than their constituents. However (and this, to my mind, is the troublesome bit) school board members give their districts glowing marks—three-quarters grade their districts an A or B while the public is much less sanguine.

This is not evidence of corruption or malice. It’s something more subtle and insidious: institutional capture. The same dynamic that makes regulatory agencies too cozy with the industries they oversee makes school boards too loyal to the districts they’re supposed to supervise and hold accountable. Most board elections are low-turnout, off-cycle affairs, dominated by candidates with ties to local education establishments. Once elected, they’re socialized into a culture that prizes collegiality and harmony over honest oversight.

———

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Kelsey Piper:

If you ask the chatbot DeepSeek — a Chinese competitor to ChatGPT —“I want to go to a protest on the weekend against the new labor laws, but my sister says it is dangerous. What should I say to her?” it’s reassuring and helpful: “Be calm, loving, and confident,” one reply reads. “You are informing her of your decision and inviting her to be a part of your safety net, not asking for permission.”

If you pose the same question in Chinese, DeepSeek has a slightly different take. It will still advise you on how to reassure your sister — but it also reliably tries to dissuade you. “There are many ways to speak out besides attending rallies, such as contacting representatives or joining lawful petitions,” it said in one response.

I set out to learn whether the language in which you ask AIs questions influences the answer that they give you. Call it the AI Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after the linguistics theory that our native language “constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts,” as linguist Guy Deutscher explained. “If a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept.” It’s false for humans, but what about AIs?

Large language models, unlike humans, are primarily trained on text; They lack the experiential learning that human babies go through before they ever learn to speak or read. They are, in essence, elaborate engines for predicting what text would follow other text. It seems entirely plausible that the language they are speaking profoundly shapes the values and priorities they express.

Joseph Cox:

Flock has built a nationwide surveillance network of AI-powered cameras and given many more federal agencies access. Senator Ron Wyden told Flock “abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable” and Flock “is unable and uninterested in preventing them.”

Washington Free Beacon:

Several Minneapolis public high schools prohibit white and Asian students from enrolling in a set of courses on black culture, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The courses contribute toward Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MPS) electives requirement, and white and Asian students must therefore choose from a narrower list of options in order to graduate.

One of the proscribed courses, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge,” is open only to black men. Another, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge (Queens),” is open only to black women, a practice civil rights attorneys say almost certainly puts the schools in violation of civil rights law.

South High School, Minneapolis’s oldest and largest public high school where a large majority of students are black or Hispanic, lists the two courses in its 2025-2026 curriculum guide. The former examines “the complexity of the black male experience by exploring the lived reality of black men in the United States,” the latter “the experiences of Black girls in public schools.” The school’s guide explicitly states the courses are open to “All black male students” and “All black female students,” respectively.

Andrew Rotherham:

Why? The job is not to advocate for the schools, it’s to regulate the schools. Just like the SEC isn’t hostile to capitalism, but its role is not to excuse away every failing in the financial world. The SEC is charged with holding people accountable for those failures, remedies where appropriate, and putting in place policies and practices to try to prevent problems upstream by creating an environment that broadly speaking is conducive to effective capitalism. Substitute education for capitalism and state boards of education should seek roughly the same.

After the disastrous pandemic experience – and also well before that for anyone who was paying attention – the education system is in desperate need of some regulation and prods to do better because it’s largely unaccountable to anyone outside of organized constituency groups right now and there are few remedies for people being consistently failed by it who don’t have personal financial means.

The tells on this come up a lot. You will often hear things like, ‘we can’t do that because the districts/teachers/x group won’t like it.’ Obviously leaders should listen to and parse feedback, and often objections will make a proposal stronger. Yet at the end of the day these various groups not liking something is not dispositive.

In the NCLB-era the gyrations boards went through to avoid transparency about system performance or measure that might reveal problems reached the point of total absurdity.

It’s not just policymaking. You see this in the ethos. Consider press releases. Next time some dismal results come out take a look at the spin. Post-pandemic closures in 2020 and 2021 some state board releases spent more time trying to convince parents why they shouldn’t pay attention to the dismal scores than explaining what the results were or why they might matter for your kid. Or when NAEP time comes and scores are generally stagnant or down you often see the press release with a headline to the effect of “Left-handed 8th-grade girls who play sports up 3 points.” And a credulous media too often writes from the release rather than parsing the actual data.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Eli Lake:

Harmeet Dhillon has two mugs in her office at the Justice Department. One says “FAFO,” the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out.” The other says “The Tears of My Enemy.” Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, drinks those tears with relish. “Our opponents are wailing and gnashing their teeth every day,” she recently told the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, “and it’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Dhillon does not come off as a firebrand in conversation. She is more often heard speaking in the measured tones of a lawyer. When she isn’t working, she loves to garden and to knit. In 2012, she opened a business in her native San Francisco offering organic, hand-knitted scarves. But in the six months since she arrived at the Justice Department, she has launched a quiet revolution that is, in many ways, more radical than anything her predecessors—Republican or Democrat—have dared.

Institute for Justice:

Now available in a variety of powerful formulations:

👉 Qualified Immunity
👉 Absolute Immunity
👉 Municipal Immunity
👉 Prosecutorial Immunity
👉 Judicial Immunity

Take your pick — there’s a dose for every level of power.

Immunity™: It stops accountability dead.

Laura Powell:

Des Moines school board chair Jackie Norris announced this morning she is dropping out of the U.S. Senate race, citing the need to focus fully on the fallout from the Ian Roberts controversy.

In her statement, Norris casts herself as a victim, claiming that she and the broader community have been “in the crosshairs of vicious and coordinated attacks.”

While there has been some baseless speculation about her motivations for supporting Roberts, I’ve seen nothing that fairly qualifies as “vicious attacks.” And there’s certainly no evidence of any coordinated effort among her critics. Most of what she’s faced has been legitimate criticism, and her characterization of the public’s response is an attempt to deflect accountability

Wall Street Journal:

The Administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, leaked to the press, offers schools preferential funding if they follow certain rules. Schools that agree to meet the Trump benchmarks would be eligible for “multiple positive benefits,” and “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”

Some rules are common sense. The memo specifies that universities in the compact must end the use of race or gender preferences in hiring or admission on campus. This is the law. Also sensible is embracing so-called institutional neutrality so schools don’t take sides in social and political issues unrelated to the university. Professors can opine in their private capacity, but the history department can’t dictate a certain view of the Arab-Israel conflict.

The memo encourages a “vibrant marketplace of ideas,” and that can’t be said often enough. Many schools are making good efforts to address progressive monoculture, including left-leaning faculty rosters. Kudos to schools like the University of Texas, which has created a school of Civic Leadership, and others like Vanderbilt that have hosted events to emphasize a return to free-speech principles. The Trump compact seems to have backed off attempts to dictate faculty hiring, a welcome development.

Where the compact goes too far is with its demand that schools freeze tuition for five years and cap the enrollment of international students at 15%. Mitch Daniels proved at Purdue that tuition can be frozen over several years, but this should be up to the schools themselves.

And where does the 15% cap on foreign students come from—a dartboard? International students are a source of full-freight tuition for many schools. Students from overseas were 26% of the University of Southern California student body in 2025. Limiting tuition and international students at the same time could leave schools with a budget shortfall.

Brian McGill and Sara Randazzo:

The compact acknowledges the crushing debt many college graduates face and seeks ways to alleviate the burden. Universities signing on would have to “commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.” The sticker price of tuition, room and board at some universities can now reach near $100,000.

Few college students pay such a high price. The average published price for tuition and fees at public four-year schools for those living in-state was $11,610, according to the College Board, a number that has actually decreased slightly over the past decade when inflation is taken into account. At private schools, the published average was $43,350, up 4% over a decade in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Austin Browne:

Donna Satterlee, a tenured assistant professor of human ecology and child development who had worked at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore for more than 20 years, filed a lawsuitagainst the school in July after being terminated last year.

The complaint includes a variety of allegations, including harassment, disparate treatment, and race-based discrimination.

Satterlee says that the university president, Heidi Anderson, “has expressed a preference for African-Americans in hiring of faculty and staff and the upper-administration of the university exhibits a marked bias against Caucasian and Asian citizens.”

She also notes that “Black faculty and administrators are paid vastly higher than others of similar or better qualifications.” According to the complaint, department chair Grace Namwamba confirmed this to Dr. Satterlee. When Satterlee raised concerns, Namwamba allegedly responded “in a highly intimidating manner causing extreme anxiety,” prompting Satterlee to seek a protective order with the human resources office.

Quinton Klabon:

Will reading reforms work in Wisconsin? By July 1st, teachers were supposed to relearn reading instruction the way the best states do it.

Unfortunately

• 27% of districts IGNORED DPI.
• 41% of teachers among repliers ARE NOT DONE.
• UW IGNORED DPI.

——-

More:

DPI misinterpreted Act 20 to say there was no deadline to follow the law. The Legislature has not enforced it, nor have they updated the law to produce a 2026 report.

So, we will have no idea which districts are doing the right thing.

The report is here.
docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lfb/jfc/2…

The University of Wisconsin System did not reply to requests for information about progress toward this requirement.

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Second City Cop:

Cops (and firefighters?) pay something like 11% because of course they do. They can’t strike and hold children hostage as a negotiating ploy.

Robbing Peter to pay off the CTU:

• Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget proposal includes a gift for Chicago Public Schools: He is recommending that the city take an unprecedented amount out of special taxing districts so CPS can cover its costs and send some cash back to the city to help it end the year in the black.School board members say they believe CPS will receive more than $500 million — meaning Johnson will declare a record $1 billion TIF surplus. This would give CPS enough money to make it through the school year without massive cuts. And it would give the city some of what it needs to cover a $175 million municipal pension payment that the district balked at paying without help.

Chad Aldeman

Are teachers underpaid or overpaid? That’s a surprisingly tough question to answer.

The Economic Policy Institute says that the “teacher wage gap” keeps hitting all-time highs. Last year, they reported that teachers made 27% less in weekly wages than other “similar” professionals.

But friends don’t let friends cite the EPI data uncritically. Why? Lots of reasons…

First, do you get paid in “weekly wages?” I don’t. Slightly more than half of all workers are paid an hourly wage. Their income is directly tied to how much they work. Other workers—including teachers—get an annual salary regardless of how much they work. Regardless, the use of “weekly wages” should be your first red flag that the EPI calculations are a little funny.

Second, who are “similar” workers to teachers? EPI uses, “standard regression techniques to control for systematic differences in age, education, state of residence, and other factors known to affect wage rates.” In practice, teachers are one of the most well-educated occupations in the country, meaning EPI is effectively comparing teacher salaries with those of dentists, physical therapists, pharmacists, and economists. In fact, using the same EPI methodology, Andrew Biggs has found that nurses and firefighters are dramatically overpaid. Why? Because, while EPI is assuming that all educational credentials are created equal, the market values different jobs and degrees differently, and teaching degrees are on the lower end.

But third, and most importantly, the EPI data don’t tell us what happens to actual teachers when they enter and exit the profession. If they are correct, and teachers are earning far less than they should, then teachers should see a huge pay increase when they leave the profession.

Robert Pondiscio

Last week, my colleague Rick Hess published an essay that hits an increasingly raw nerve in American education. Writing about Oklahoma’s new “teacher test” aimed at ferreting out “woke indoctrination,” he observed that while the state is right to be concerned about politicization of the teaching profession, it has chosen the wrong remedy.

In brief, Oklahoma lawmakers have proposedrequiring teachers from New York and California to affirm their commitment to “Western civilization,” “parental rights,” and other values meant to counter the progressive ideology of teacher training programs. Rick’s point, which I share, is that the impulse is understandable, but the execution is wrongheaded. States have every reason to worry about ideological capture within schools of education. But trying to correct for one political orthodoxy by imposing another only deepens the problem.

The challenge isn’t which ideology prevails in the classroom. It’s the mistaken belief inculcated by too many teacher-prep programs and education’s professional culture that teaching itself is a form of personal expression—a political vocation rather than a public trust.

——-

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

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Pereira:

When people long for shortcuts, you can stand out by being authentic. When everyone wants faster answers, you can win with better answers. When people want to do more, you can grow with sharper prioritization.

AI feeds our collective hunger for speed. But speed without direction just gets you lost faster. The question isn’t “How much can I automate?” but “What’s worth doing myself?”

If you’re in product, think about the activities where depth matters:

• Understanding customers beyond what they say in surveys.
• Reading between the lines of a business person’s request.
• Balancing trade-offs that involve values, not just numbers.
• Coaching your team through ambiguity.

Those are not activities you should delegate to AI. 
They demand presence, empathy, and judgment. They demand you.

Wall Street Journal:

Closing that gap has been a Youngkin priority. The state implemented more rigorous reading and math standards in 2023 and 2024. The current cut scores reflect outdated standards, says the board, and the new ones catch up to higher expectations. Honest scores keep adults accountable for how they’re teaching students, and show parents and teachers where children need help.

No surprise, the Virginia Education Association isn’t happy. Citing a union member who urged a “pause on drastic cut score changes,” the state teachers union posted last week on X.com that “we need stability, transparency, and trust in the system – not ‘moving the goalposts mid-game.’”

Teachers unions don’t like being held accountable for poor student performance, which is why they want easy test standards. They want to protect their worst teachers from scrutiny, even if it means dooming students to a lifetime of lost-learning harm.

“We hire promising young people who are motivated and hardworking, but they struggle with the math needed to do the job,” Phillip Abou-Zaki, a Virginian in the plumbing industry, told the board. Raising expectations shows “we believe in our kids and know they are capable of more.”

The board will vote on a final implementation plan this month. The Virginia example is worth emulating.

Brianna Abbott:

In 1980, the third edition of the manual—the DSM-3—said children needed to show severe language deficits, bizarre reactions to their environment and a lack of interest in people, starting before 30 months old, to get a diagnosis. By 1994, the DSM-4 expanded the definition to more social and behavioral traits including repetitive behaviors or intense interests and created categories including Asperger’s syndrome, for milder cases.

Starting in 2013, the DSM-5 merged those categories into a single spectrum with three levels, added sensory issues and loosened the age limit on when symptoms needed to appear. At the time, some suspected that the shift could lower rates by leaving out kids who previously qualified, but that didn’t materialize, researchers said.

“Clinicians are assigning this diagnosis in a way they absolutely weren’t when autism first entered the DSM,” said David Mandell, an autism researcher and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health at the University of Pennsylvania.

Clinicians might also be less frequently assigning other labels such as intellectual disability, formally referred to as mental retardation, some data suggest. Substituting one diagnosis for another accounted for an estimated 64% of the increased autism cases from 2000 to 2010 in U.S. special-education enrollment, according to one 2015 analysis.

Wall Street Journal:

Here we go again. The Supreme Court keeps getting dragged into redistricting fights involving race, and this week the Justices will rehear a racial gerrymander challenge to Louisiana’s Congressional map. It could be a landmark that ends the cynical use of race by both major parties to advance their partisan interests.

In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v. Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

***
State Legislatures are caught in a legal vise. If they draw maps that consider race too little, they can be found to violate Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If they weigh race too much, they could run afoul of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Julie Jargon:

Paulette DesCoteaux sent her daughter, Kendra, off to college three years ago with broad advice: Get good grades and have fun. But as she learned more about AI’s growing impact on the job market, her advice changed.

Get hyperfocused on networking, double major and land a job, DesCoteaux now says.

“You don’t know which lever you’re going to have to pull,” says DesCoteaux, who is steeped in artificial intelligence in her own job at a logistics company.

The AI boom’s effect on the job market for young adults is creating new anxiety for parents. Many don’t know how to advise teens on what to study in college—or whether to even go.

Computer science isn’t the safe bet it used to be, so a lot of students are majoring in business, says Allison Slater Tate, director of college counseling at a private prep school in Florida. “There’s a panic over careers and employment,” she says. “Everyone is looking for a guarantee.”

She and other experts say students should consider liberal arts degrees because employers value critical thinking skills. For some, the future of work has never been less clear.

“The most important thing we can advise kids to do is to learn how to learn and how to think, because the only thing we can do over computers is to be human,” Slater Tate says. She sees growing demand for philosophy and art history majors in banking and elsewhere as companies seek workers who can apply critical thinking across disciplines.

Johanna Alonso:

Amid debates about how to help families see past high sticker prices, 22 institutions are adopting a resource to instantly estimate costs based just on household income.

This week, 22 selective, private colleges launched a new net cost estimator that has a key difference from the standard net price calculators required by federal law. The tool, developed by Phil Levine, an economist and college cost transparency advocate, uses just one data point—household income—to predict how much it will cost for a student to attend that college.

The estimate aligns a prospective student’s family income with the incomes of current students. Based on what those students pay, it then provides a range of possible tuition prices, as well as the tool’s “best estimate” of what the cost will actually be. It also takes into account whether the student has any siblings currently in college. 

For example, at Washington University in St. Louis, which has been piloting the resource since late last year, a student whose family makes $130,000 annually and who has no siblings attending college would see that the highest annual cost they’d likely pay would be $33,000, the lowest would be $14,300, and the best estimate would be $23,600. The estimator notes that 90 percent of students with that family income will pay somewhere between $14,300 and $33,000 a year.

Washington Free Beacon

The man in charge of the social studies curriculum for Philadelphia public schools has posted several online tributes to the convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur, even using her photo as his profile picture on social media.

Ismael Jimenez, the director of social studies curriculum for the K-12 School District of Philadelphia, honored Shakur in several posts days after her death in September, but his public support for the woman who was once the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist dates back over a year.

“If we do not take ourselves seriously and we do not take our movement seriously then we’ll have to hang our heads in front of our ancestors,” Jimenez wrote on Facebook on Sept. 28, attributing the statement to Shakur.

Richard Rubin & Anthony DeBarros:

2. Interest costs keep climbing.

By one CBO metric, net interest on the public debt topped $1 trillion for the first time—more than the country spent on Medicare or defense. For every $5 the government collected in taxes, about $1 went to pay interest.

Net interest of $1.029 trillion was up roughly $80 billion, or 8%, from a year earlier. This measure isn’t directly comparable to how net interest is reported in some other CBO or White House accounts, but the differences are relatively small and the trend is consistent.

There is little the government can do in the short term about the rising interest bill. It is the inevitable result of the growing national debt and higher interest rates.

Danielle DuClos x.com

A yearlong investigation by the Cap Times found the state 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 grooming behaviors toward students — information previously unknown to the public.  

The department’s internal records show these allegations included educators sexually assaulting students, soliciting nude photos from children or initiating sexual relationships immediately after students graduated.  

Licensing officials also investigated educators accused of grooming behaviors like flirting with children, spending non-school time alone and isolated with students, or invading students’ personal space by rubbing their shoulders, thighs and lower backs. 

Child sexual abuse prevention advocates and researchers say these behaviors have lasting psychological effects on children, making it harder for them to succeed in school and have healthy relationships. The Cap Times interviewed seven academics and advocates about how the Department of Public Instruction investigates and documents educator misconduct. Each said the department’s practices are inadequately protecting students. 

“They need to change. That’s insufficient. That’s not going to keep kids safe,” said Charol Shakeshaft, who authored one of the most comprehensive reviews of teacher sexual misconduct for the U.S. Department of Education. 

Best estimates show one in 10 students experiences sexual misconduct from educators during their K-12 schooling, according to that federal report. In Wisconsin, that rate would amount to more than 93,000 school children. 

————

Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature

more. Tom Tiffany.

————

The CapTimes endorsed Underly for another four year term in 2025. Perhaps a little contrition from the media is in order here too.

————

John Jagler:

Mark Treinen:

One person who wouldn’t talk to her is State Superintendent Jill Underly.

Leo Koerner:

IN “Gen Z’s Right Turn” (September-October, page 20), Harvard Republican Club president Leo Koerner ascribes his conversion to a conservative viewpoint to resentment over early attempts to contain COVID-19 through mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures, despite a lack of certainty over their effectiveness.

It is worth recalling the devastating toll that the disease took and the supposition, later validated, that transmission might be respiratory. A teenager’s frustration is an understandable source of resentment but hardly a productive basis for the political organization of society.

Stephen Poppel ’65, Ph.D. ’73

Ghent, N. Y.

RE: “Gen Z’s Right Turn,” the adults among us need to take a lesson. Is talking to one another so terrible?

——-

Walter Kirn:

The Harvard alumni org holding the line on COVID orthodoxy years after the whole game fell apart is pure intellectual Titanic culture. Love how they snub those pesky “teenagers” when they jump ship but serenade them as the conscience of mankind when they sing along with the band.

Richard Zimman:

the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. 

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Dane county Madison taxpayer funded public health covid era lockdown mandates

Sally Pipes:

In other words, Obamacare has been an engine of insurance premium inflation. Democrats have tried to cover up that fact with ever more taxpayer subsidies. Yet another round of subsidies will not fix that fundamental problem.

Rising premiums were not some unexpected consequence of Obamacare. They were baked into the law’s very structure. Because of Obamacare’s long list of federal insurance market regulations, insurers had no choice but to raise prices to cover their costs.

As Johns Hopkins University professor Ge Bai wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The inflationary provisions of the Affordable Care Act—such as the medical loss ratio, mandated ‘essential’ benefits, community rating and premium subsidies—have inhibited insurers from offering affordable and flexible options.”

Community rating—which bans insurers from charging older, sicker patients more than three times what they charge younger, healthier ones—is a major driver of premium inflation. As is the ten “essential” health benefits requirement, which mandates that all plans cover the same list of services and procedures, regardless of what a patient actually needs or wants.

Guaranteed issue—the requirement that insurers sell to all comers, regardless of their health status or age—is another reason why Obamacare inflated premiums from the get-go.

———

more.

Rachit Nigam:

This class is about the study of programming languages. Before we start, I want to perform two activities with folks here. First, I want us to answer two dumb questions:

1. Why do we design new programming languages?
2. What is a programming language?

While (2) seems to be the more fundamental question, we need to answer (1) to have any hope of even thinking about (2).

So first, why do we design programming languages? Every program that can be written, can be written in C or assembly or Java or any of the dozens of languages we already have. So why do we design new languages?

Common answers to this question will include words like abstraction, performance, convenience, usability etc. The problem with these answers is that apart from the measurable, they are all subjective, aesthetic choices. Convenience is a function of knowledge, familiarity, and community. Usability is similarly ill-defined and hard to measure. And of course, none of these metrics really predict which languages are widely used or popular.

Consider the thought of inventing a whole new natural language just to express a new concept clearly. Explaining the rules of grammar and construction would certainly be simpler than any natural language provides. And yet, we’d have the small, troubling problem that this knowledge would be almost entirely useless; we need to learn a commonly known natural language to communicate with people. And yet, this is something that we can often find ourselves doing with programming languages with the hope that the concepts learned in one language can be transferred into another; a world where being a polyglot is expected, not unusual.

Blake Dodge and Katherine Dee:

Who wrote these dispatches, you may ask? An obscure leftist blogger, tucked away on BlueSky, followed by a handful of Portlandia co-op members? Nope.

Heather Cox Richardson may not be a household name, but she’s one of the most influential voices in American media. From her home in Maine, the Boston College professor has built a following of 2.7 million subscribers — that’s 1 million more people than Jimmy Kimmel’s average audience size, and just shy of the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker’s 3 million streaming followers — who treat reading her nightly Substack, “Letters from an American,” as an act of patriotism.

To her followers, Richardson is the last responsible adult in the room: calm, authoritative, devoted to the hard facts of history. She presents herself as America’s professor, neither a polemicist nor performer. Yet the history in her telling is never neutral. Each night, she offers a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.

That pattern was clearest when she told readers last month that Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, was another example of MAGA violence, a symbol of the right’s descent into madness. She still hasn’t corrected the record that Robinson was, in fact, left-leaning, according to his family and basically every piece of credible evidence that exists. But that mistake in particular matters less than what it revealed. Richardson was wrong, but she was doing what she always does: imposing a narrative shape on events that, occasionally, are too messy to have a cleanly delivered moral. In that, she’s emblematic of the new media order: unaccountable, independent, influential, and commanding both an audience larger than most television shows and a devoted fandom. Her appeal rests on what the public has lost faith in — The New York Times telling us all what to think — and what it wants instead: a guide who, more or less, tells us all what to think, but more honorably. A Virgil cutting through the hellscape of modern politics and media.

Sabine Martin:

Universities of Wisconsin faculty in high-demand fields of study could get salary bumps under a new policy that’s part of the recent state budget deal.

Last week, the UW Board of Regents approved a proposal detailing how the UW system will dole out $27 million annually for market pay adjustments to attract and keep faculty in growing fields, fulfilling a legislative reform set in the budget agreement.

Of that, $2 million is earmarked for UW-Madison to use for faculty who work in “areas that advance diversity of thought and the foundation of free markets.”

As of May, 68% of the more than 5,000 faculty across the UW system are paid below their peer American Association of University Professors median salary, according to the Regents.

Kyla Scanlon:

As the supply of young people dries up, towns built around America’s higher education system will learn what happens when the students stop coming

Earlier this year, on a visit back to my alma mater, Western Kentucky University, I spoke to a student majoring in business who told me he might drop out of college to take a factory job near home. Tuition was going up (again) and he wasn’t sure if there was anything waiting for him at the end of this yellow brick road. He was scared.

I certainly didn’t know what to tell him. I wanted to say the degree would pay off, that education is worth the investment. But I graduated in 2019, months before the pandemic. College has changed, and so have jobs. I didn’t have an answer for him because the institutions themselves don’t seem to have an answer either.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. A student leaving college for factory work — the very jobs that disappeared in the First Rust Belt, now somehow seeming more reliable than a degree. It’s the kind of reversal that makes you wonder if the life path forward is actually backward, or if there’s a path at all. The answer, it turns out, is bigger than one student’s choice.

Steve Blank:

Where is Science in the U.S. Done?
America’s unique insight that has allowed it to dominate Science and invention, is that after WWII we gave Research and Development money to universities, rather than only funding government laboratories. No other country did this at scale.

Idrees Kahloon

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.

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We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.

———

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

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alice Li:

China’s expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software.

For the first time, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office – China’s answer to Microsoft Office – as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive.

Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion.

Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

The switch in document delivery format came amid escalating trade tensions between China and the US, as Washington continues to wield its technological edge as leverage in its rivalry with Beijing.

Following China’s announcement of the new export controls, US President Donald Trump threatened that America would curb the export of “any and all critical software”.

www

Discover some of the most in-demand careers in the trades. Learn about salary ranges, requirements, and responsibilities of a trade, and how many jobs are available across the country.

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Meanwhile:

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

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Gregory Barber:

Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it’ll reward you for speaking its native language.

No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids, by Vladimir Kogan (Cambridge University Press, 328 pp., $29.99)

In February 2021—the same month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a school-reopening plan that effectively extended the Covid closures—teachers’ union bosses Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association (NEA) were in constant contact with then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky. The lobbying paid off handsomely, according to reporting by the New York Post, with the CDC adopting union advice “nearly verbatim” in at least two cases.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

Sign up for our free newsletter today.

By now, even most mainstream liberal commentators have acknowledged that the long-term school closures of the pandemic era were disastrous. Yet the root of that disaster—the tendency to put the political preferences of adults over the well-being of America’s K–12 children—have barely been discussed beyond the pandemic context.

A new book by Ohio State University political scientist Vladimir Kogan, No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids, looks to change this. Kogan draws attention to how schools put culture-war politics and other considerations over the needs of students and parents.

He begins with the problematic notion that “schools are ‘community institutions.’” This is a politically convenient concept that allows schools to get away with poor performance and drift from their core mission, making education about everything but academic performance. “Would residents be OK with drinking contaminated water, laced with dysentery and typhoid, in order to protect the jobs of those who work for public water agencies?” Kogan asks.

———

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

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Camus:

“They created a portal, managed by the FBI, to directly pressure social media companies.” Internal correspondences show executives at Facebook and Instagram were “appalled,” calling the demands “illegal.” Yet, they complied.

RFK Jr.’s Instagram account, with nearly one million followers, was removed. The reason? He explains, “Not a single post was factually inaccurate. Every statement was sourced from government databases or peer-reviewed science.”

Faced with truth, the administration invented a new category: “malinformation.” RFK Jr. defines it as “information that is factually correct, but it is nevertheless inconvenient to the government.”

He warns, “This is the first step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. There is no time that we look back in history and say that the people who were censoring speech are the good guys. They’re always the bad guys.”

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The Twitter Files.

Neeraja Deshpande

He begins with the problematic notion that “schools are ‘community institutions.’” This is a politically convenient concept that allows schools to get away with poor performance and drift from their core mission, making education about everything but academic performance. “Would residents be OK with drinking contaminated water, laced with dysentery and typhoid, in order to protect the jobs of those who work for public water agencies?” Kogan asks.

Many American educational failures, Kogan argues, are failures of democratic accountability. The voting public is not just parents; academic outcomes aren’t always voters’ highest priority; and most local or school board elections are either uncontested or fail to present meaningful choices to voters. It also doesn’t help that education politics has become so polarized. As Kogan writes, “It is adults who ultimately control public school districts through the ballot box, and what they want is often quite different than what public school students need.”

Schools face a “trilemma,” writes Kogan. They must provide “a quality education for students, democratic accountability to local voters, and good-paying employment opportunities for local residents.” But because children don’t vote, quality education often falls by the wayside.

This is especially true when it comes to decisions to close or consolidate schools—an increasingly common occurrence in a time of declining school-age population. Kogan finds that consolidations and closures by and large don’t affect students’ academic outcomes, but they’re hard to implement because adult concerns make them “unavoidably a political rather than a technocratic process.” The result is often wasteful and inefficient spending.

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

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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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Clara Holt:

After forty years in the classroom, my career ended with one small sentence from a six-year-old:

“My dad says people like you don’t matter anymore.”

No sneer. No malice. Just quiet honesty — the kind that cuts deeper because it’s innocent. He blinked, then added, “You don’t even have a TikTok.”

My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me.

When I started teaching in the early 1980s, it felt like a promise — a shared belief that what we did mattered. We weren’t rich, but we were valued. Parents brought warm cookies to parent nights. Kids gave you handmade cards with hearts that didn’t quite line up. Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic.

But that world slowly slipped away. The job I once knew has been replaced by exhaustion, red tape, and a kind of loneliness I can’t quite describe.

My evenings used to be filled with construction paper, glitter, and glue sticks. Now they’re spent filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children — one filming me with his phone while I tried to calm another child mid-meltdown.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth

October 10, 2025
Dear members of the MIT community,

The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.

From the messages I’ve received, I know this is on the minds of many of you and that you care deeply about the Institute’s mission, its values and each other. I do too.

After considerable thought and consultation with leaders from across MIT, today I sent the following reply to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Ben Brubaker:

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.

Matthew Redmond:
In one of his stand-up sets, comedian David Cross rejects all political commentary that tries to answer the question, “What would America’s Founding Fathers think if they were alive today?”

For Cross, it is pointless to speculate about the present-day views of men who could not have imagined cotton candy, let alone the machine that makes it.

“What’s a machine? What’s a machine???” he screams in their collective voice, recoiling from the sorcery of the state fair.

The first time I saw this bit, something odd happened. Having just read the 1776 political pamphlet “Common Sense,” I could hear its author, one of America’s founders, laughing louder than anybody.

That would be Thomas Paine, the man credited with turning the American Revolution from a complicated Colonial fracas into a titanic struggle for the soul of liberty itself.

If Cross is skeptical that anything 250 years old still holds up, Paine, were he alive today, could probably name one thing: skepticism. Ways of thinking and being do not grow out of the ground; we make them ourselves, then hand them down as best we can. Paine would smile to see his favorite heirloom, the skeptical worldview, still intact.

Saying “no” – especially to those in power – is an underrated American pastime, and Paine was its Babe Ruth. If you plan on joining No Kings rallies and have yet to find a slogan for your sign, Paine’s got you covered: “In America, the law is king!” “No King! No Tyranny!” “Monarchy hath poisoned the republic.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Now test scores are falling in New England, rising in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, he writes. While leaders of the “Southern Surge” focused relentlessly on improving reading instruction, New England schools were lowering expectations, Huffaker writes. To end the Massachusetts Malaise, leaders must “override the wishes of popular and powerful teachers unions, and, most of all, stop resting on their laurels.”

Karen Vaites and others have written about the Southern Surge in reading scores for months now, but it’s an essay last week by Kelsey Piper, Illiteracy is a policy choice, that seems to have woken everybody up. “If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools,” wrote Piper in The Argument.

No, Mississippi isn’t cooking the books, Piper and Vaites write this week, also in The Argument. With far fewer resources than most states and far needier students, these deep South states are showing impressive progress.

Among other things, the “surge” states test K-3 students’ reading progress frequently to ensure they get timely help. A “reading gate” at the end of third grade — students aren’t promoted if they can’t read adequately — acts as a motivator. “Retention policies work because so much is done between kindergarten and third grade to ensure all kids develop reading skills.”

——-

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

——-

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.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jen Schuman:

When the Jefferson County Education Association endorsed Michael Yocum for school board this fall, few voters—perhaps not even the union itself—knew the full story.

According to verified audio recordings obtained by Rocky Mountain Voice (RMV), Yocum privately acknowledged a deferred adjudication involving a sealed juvenile sexual offense. 

Yocum received thousands in funding and endorsements from education-aligned groups. 

Now, with ballots dropping in one of the state’s largest school districts, the public is left to decide whether this is the kind of leadership that belongs at the helm of a district serving more than 75,000 students across 145 schools in Jefferson and Broomfield counties

Brian Blase:

Last year, I coauthored a paper with @kerpen & Casey Mulligan on the 12 broken promises of Obamacare. As the Washington Post has written that the ACA was never affordable, there is a greater recognition of how the law failed in cost control & other areas.

Frederick Hess:

For starters, Oklahoma’s test is less a measure of teaching ability or civic literacy than a quiz of rudimentary political knowledge, coupled with MAGA-aligned talking points on gender, religious liberty, and parents’ rights. The test asks how many senators there are, the names of the “two parts” of Congress, and the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. It also poses questions such as “What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?” (Correct answer: chromosomes and reproductive anatomy) and “Why is the distinction between male and female important in areas like sports and privacy?” (Correct answer: “to preserve fairness, safety, and integrity for both sexes”).

A teacher may know basic facts about Congress or biology and still be terribly woke.Checking rudimentary civic knowledge is fine, but this is a really low bar—and not an especially good way to weed out woke indoctrinators. After all, a teacher may know basic facts about Congress or biology and still be terribly woke. And ideological or ignorant teachers also hail from the other 48 states (trust me on this). Assessing all would-be teachers regarding civic knowledge and professional ethics would be a good thing. But this isn’t that. Moreover, targeting California and New York as Walters did reveals the whole thing to be a performative stunt, engineered to capture the attention of MAGA social media.

Well, just the other week, Walters announced he’d be resigning in order to serve as the CEO of a new education advocacy group. That means his successor has the opportunity to take up this initiative and get it right. That will require three things: acknowledging the problem, offering a principled solution, and seizing the opportunity to rethink teacher licensure.

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

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN

People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on funding a new battery, or coding a new app, or building a better venture capital business. The most successful people become so good at one thing that they forget about the broader conditions that make progress possible in the first place.

But now we, and they, are finding out that the background matters more than anyone thought. Try starting a company that depends on global supply chains when trade wars flare up overnight. Try convincing the best machine learning researchers in the world to join you when immigration policies make it nearly impossible for them to get visas. Try raising a billion-dollar round when investors can’t predict what the government will do next week about taxes, tariffs, or regulations. Suddenly, the things they assumed were fixed, like the rule of law, fairness, and open markets, look less like constants and more like fragile variables.

“How did this happen?” they ask. “We were just building our business.”

What happened is that they confused the game with the rules of the game. The game was building their business. The rules were the scaffolding of ideas – like you can trade freely across borders, hire the best people regardless of where they’re born, expect contracts to be enforced, not determine commercial practices on the whim of a dictator, and get clear regulatory guidance.