School Information System

Zach Groshell:

What Has Changed

AI is dramatically better than it was a year ago. New models have emerged that are not just incrementally improved but fundamentally more capable.

That part is clear. What hasn’t changed requires a longer conversation.

What Has Not Changed

• Direct Instruction Remains Critical for Improving Student Outcomes

Direct Instruction in the Engelmann tradition remains the most effective method of teaching we have — not because the evidence is beyond dispute, but because it follows the discipline of engineering: analyze, design, field-test, evaluate, revise — the same cycle that produces reliable software, bridges, and aircraft. Engelmann did not start with ideology and then try to make kids fit it. He started with a logical analysis of the stimuli and the kids’ behavior — their responses, their performance, their errors — and kept iterating until they learned. Cognitive science and the broader science of learning have spent more than 50 years confirming what this process produced, through both direct and indirectresearch. Whether by analog or by digital, by script or by screen, we must teach students effectively and efficiently, using principles of learning science and instructional design.

• Most Schools Lack a Coherent Curriculum

However, most schools don’t even have an articulated, sequenced, cumulative curriculum. What they have is at most a patchwork, or something that lives in the head of individual teachers. It leads to teaching that is built on sand — it is almost irrelevant whether a teacher teaches explicitly or not when what is taught is random slop that was Googled or generated by AI the night before. And it all just keeps moving. A student who failed to master a prerequisite skill three months ago has no mechanism to recover, because the curriculum doesn’t build or circle back. There is also zero transparency — as a parent or a consultant, trying to find out what is being taught in a given grade for a given subject is like going on a scavenger hunt, where at every turn you’re told to just trust the process. This isn’t for kids. This is because the adults can’t get their act together.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Corey McDonald:

A majority of Vermont’s students are “well below” math and English language arts proficiency goals, while the state’s public education system “is not yet consistently delivering strong and sustained outcomes for all students.”

That’s according to the Vermont State Report Card, the Vermont Agency of Education’s annual assessment of student and school performance. Released on Thursday, the report found that a majority of Vermont’s students during the 2024-25 school year were “not yet meeting grade-level academic standards.”

Meanwhile, more than half of Vermont schools fell below performance expectations too, and saw either stagnant or declining student performance, according to the report.

Erin Davis, the Agency of Education’s chief academic officer, said in a press release that the results “are a clear signal that our current student outcomes are not where they need to be.”

“It is our collective responsibility to confront these challenges head-on and ensure every Vermont student receives the high-quality education they deserve,” Davis said.

Carrie McKean

Alarmed by her daughter’s desperation and frustration, Coleman started looking beyond the report cards, which had consistently shown adequate progress. What she found surprised her. In eighth grade, she learned, her daughter couldn’t read an analog clock. She didn’t understand basic fractions or how to turn them into percentages. She didn’t know her multiplication tables. Middle school math was getting more difficult, but she didn’t have the foundational skills necessary to do harder computations. Her struggles would only get worse.

A group of middle school Midland Independent School District (MISD) teachers, who didn’t speak on the record due to district policy, told me they are not surprised: They see the same thing every day. (I reached out to the district for comment but did not receive a statement before publication.)

One teacher said many middle school students arrive in her classroom unable to understand the difference between multiplication and division. Other students don’t understand a number line or positive and negative numbers. Many have no fluency in basic math skills, yet they’ve continually been passed to higher grades. 

Hermes:

Judge John D. Hyland denied 3 motions: vacate, recuse, and set over. He actually stated in his opinion: “The Court finds no grounds to disqualify or recuse itself.”

Here’s the 34 page Report by forensic expert Natalie Schilling, Ph.D., demonstrating the egregious ghostwriting of ex-Judge Frank Remington, passed off as the work of Judge Hyland. Read it and you be the Judge!

Judge John D. Hyland admitted in chambers that he had not even finished reading the briefs when his law clerk, Andrew Remington, delivered a finished draft decision. Andrew’s father, a former Dane County judge, Frank Remington, Jr., is the individual the evidence points to as the author. Father and son live together.

Ashley Lopez:

“Right now, we only rate 18 out of 435 races as toss ups, which means that less than 5% of Americans will truly be deciding who’s in control of the House,” David Wasserman, senior elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, told NPR.

This disparity in the voting power of Americans in congressional races has been a worsening problem for several election cycles.

Unite America Institute, which tracks what it refers to as the “primary problem” and advocates for election reforms, calculated that in 2024, just 7% voters elected 87% of U.S. House races.

Voters have self-sorted themselves geographically, and technology in recent years has allowed lawmakers to more effectively carve up congressional districts that give one party an advantage over another.

Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, said the mid-decade redistricting prompted by Trump last year has further reduced the number of competitive seats. His organization says 32 states currently don’t have a single competitive congressional race.

Wyatt Eichholz

Nearly three-quarters of Wisconsin’s teacher workforce is female, data from the Department of Public Instruction show — a proportion that has increased over time.

The figures count the number of teachers in the DPI’s publicly accessible All Staff Report, labeled by sex. This includes teachers at traditional public schools as well as district and independent charter schools but does not include teachers at private institutions.

In 1994-95, the earliest school year for which data are available, the public teacher workforce was about 67.6 percent female. Over time, that level has increased, stabilizing around three-quarters. In 2025, 74.8 percent of teachers were women.

Claire Lai

It is in the spirit of those shared values — freedom of expression, compassion, and the sanctity of the individual —  that I ask for your help.

My father, Jimmy Lai, has spent his entire life championing those same ideals. 

He did not just admire American values from afar; he understood them as the essential bedrock of a flourishing society.

To him, the American spirit of liberty and the courage to speak truth to power were not just political concepts, but moral imperatives.

He risked everything — his business, his freedom, and now his life — because he believed that the freedoms enjoyed in the West should be a universal right.

John Bickle & Marica Bernstein

One can glean much from these titles and their authors’ backgrounds. First, you don’t find words like those from the MLA titles Hillard highlights—e.g., “goofing,” “radical,” “politics,” or the like. This isn’t due to selection bias on our part. The titles cited here make up about 25 percent of last year’s program, and we invite readers to review this and all archived programs. The academic backgrounds of the presenters are important to the point. The philosophy participants have made a huge time investment in their educations and careers, not only to have (or to soon have) Ph.Ds. in philosophy but, in many cases, especially among our more junior presenters, to have also earned master’s degrees in a brain science. This means that they have not just gotten textbook knowledge but have gained experience in neuroscience research labs. And our neuroscientist presenters have developed a willingness to engage with philosophers, some having done so for many years.

Our participants spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings.In short, our participants have training and interest across two fields, one a humanities discipline and the other a STEM. They did not invest this kind of time and energy to talk about “Transcending Embodied Gender Norms” (one of Hillard’s MLA examples). Instead, they spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings; they’re thinking hard about the brain sciences’ methodologies and technologies; and they’re exploring how philosophy’s rigor can lead to better neuroscience experiments and analyses. And so are the participating neuroscientists, shoulder to shoulder with the philosophers.

Joshua Robertson:

No one would benefit more from school choice than minority communities in Mississippi. While the state has impressively raised educational standards in recent years, black and Hispanic kids are still more likely to attend the lowest-performing schools. More than half of black families in the state backed universal school choice in 2024. But neither Democrats nor Republicans have listened to the will of the people.

Something in the Magnolia state needs to change. Maybe it will happen in the 2027 elections when every member of both houses of the Mississippi Legislature runs for re-election. About three-quarters of GOP primary voters in Mississippi backed the school-choice bill that just failed, according to a recent poll from the American Federation for Children. They may want to rally around new leaders who will actually fight for families and freedom. That’s what Texas voters did in 2024, and now that state has universal school choice, too.

Nothing would help more than attention from Mr. Trump. He should call on Mississippi Republicans to reverse their foolish decision. Even better, he could tell them to get with the program or make room for leaders who will. That message could be the spark that lights a thousand pro-school-choice primary challengers worthy of a presidential endorsement.

Peter Wagner:

David J. Farber, a gregarious professor of computer networks who was sometimes called the “grandfather of the internet” because of the ultimately groundbreaking students he trained, died on Feb. 7 in Tokyo. He was 91.

His son Emanuel said the apparent cause was heart failure. Professor Farber had been teaching at Keio University in Tokyo since 2018.

When Professor Farber started his career in the mid-1950s, at Bell Laboratories, computers were practically islands unto themselves. If they communicated at all, they talked by means of a Teletype or punch card reader down the hall.

Since then, thanks in part to his work, the realms of communication and computation merged into that one powerful glue for society that is the internet; The New York Times once described him as “an early architect” of it.

Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon:

They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.

Democrats have long accepted inefficiencies as the price of support from public sector unions, and this may seem the worst time to demand better. Confronted with the president’s cruelty and lawlessness, the unions have been inspiring: defending wrongly fired workers, fighting federal overreach and organizing against ICE brutality.

But it’s precisely because of increasing authoritarianism that Democratic governors and mayors need to show the public that they can deliver. With the president weaponizing budget cuts against blue states, there is little room for error. Democrats need a new bargain with public sector unions — one that respects their voices and livelihoods but puts public services first.

Begin with the cost of government. Blue-state and blue-city voters pay higher taxes. More than half of city and local government expenditures (and 20 percent of state expenditures) are paid out to employees. These blue states and cities often also pay state and local government workers more than similar jobs pay in red jurisdictions, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

Much of this gap is tied up in pension benefits. Workers generally valuehigherwages today more than retirement guarantees in the future. But pensions are attractive to politicians who pass future costs to future taxpayers. And it is the job of unions to fight for the largest benefits they can.

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“The new [Chicago pension] law will cost the city $60 million next year — more than enough money to cover the city’s summer job program — before ballooning to $11 billion over three decades. Because of Illinois’s Constitution, the commitments cannot be reversed.”

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more.

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Related: Act 10

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Milwaukee County Pension Scandal Primer. More.

Wyatt Eichholz:

Complex system insulates districts that agree to raise taxes the fastest

You might be paying higher school property taxes this year because of a referendum to exceed a school district’s revenue cap — one that you did not get a vote on in a district your kids do not attend.

That’s because of the structure of Wisconsin’s school levy tax credit, under which property owners in some school districts have seen their school levy tax credits shrink to subsidize additional spending in other districts where they have no vote and no representation.

Thomas Haigh

Knuth then enumerated his motivations, as a computer scientist, to read the history of science. First, reading history helped him to understand the process of discovery. Second, understanding the difficulty and false starts experienced by brilliant historical scientists in making discoveries that specialists now find obvious helped him to see what made concepts challenging to students and thus to become a “much better writer and teacher.” Third, appreciating the historical contribution of non-Western scientists helped in “celebrating the contributions of many cultures.” Fourth, history is the craft of telling stories, which is “the best way to teach, to explain something.” Fifth, the biographies of scientists teach tactics for a successful and rewarding career. Sixth, history teaches how human experience has changed over time. As humans we should care about that.

Knuth also identified some special contributions to the history of science that professionally trained historians are uniquely well placed to make. We are good at “smoking out” primary sources and putting historical activities in the context of broader timelines. He also appreciates our ability to translate papers written in languages that he cannot himself read. He finds attempts at historical analysis “probably the least interesting” aspects of our papers but appreciates lengthy quotations from primary sources.

Garry Tan:

Asked point-blank why the US dominates tech while Europe stagnates, the Senator pivoted to healthcare and homelessness. The honest answer would destroy his worldview.

Stanford Economics researcher Sid Gundapaneni (@MacroscopeEcon on X) asked Bernie Sanders a simple question: “What institutional or economic features explain this difference?” between US and European tech innovation. Europe has produced zero of the world’s ten largest frontier tech firms. America dominates.

Bernie’s response was textbook evasion.

He never answered the question. He couldn’t. Because the honest answer would require admitting that European-style redistribution correlates with zero frontier tech companies.

Harriet Ryan:

As high school approached, Cancelleri decided that wasn’t enough. He paid about $20,000 for his son, a straight-A student, to repeat a grade at a private middle school sports academy.

“The draw to it [was] just giving him a little bit of extra time to develop and mature,” said Cancelleri, whose 15-year-old son, Carter, has grown about 3 inches since August and hopes to be a strong competitor next year as a high school freshman.

Sixty other boys are repeating a grade at the same academy, The Togethership, where coursework includes throwing mechanics, game film review and nutrition along with traditional subjects such as Algebra and English.

By Sasha Rogelberg

He said Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one. 

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessmentdata taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath wrote. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Sonya Gugliara

An upstate New York high school teacher was allegedly sidelined after she agreed to advise a Turning Point USA chapter on campus.

Jennifer Fasulo, a Spanish teacher at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, a Syracuse suburb, was placed on a paid leave of absence on Jan. 30, just weeks after she offered to help students establish a Club America, the high school division of the Charlie Kirk co-founded conservative group, her supporters say.

“The district can confirm that a staff member has been placed on paid administrative leave while a matter is under review. We are following established administrative and legal procedures, and we are unable to comment further or share additional details at this time,” the Baldwinsville Central School informed parents in a Feb. 10 letter.

via Stu Smith:

“We need to go in a socialist direction” to build what he praises elsewhere as a socialist “intellectual apparatus” like the ones in Cuba and China, because that’s where he says you get the “real state power necessary to fully educate the people.”

Sonja Anderson:

which occurred in the third century B.C.E. This conflict was part of the series of wars between Rome and Carthage, an ancient city in modern-day Tunisia.

Study co-author Agustín López Jiménez, an expert at the archaeology company Arqueobética, which excavated the site, told El Pais that researchers found the elephant foot bone beneath some collapsed adobe walls dating to around the third century B.C.E. According to the study, the same area revealed 12 three-pound stone balls, which were “unquestionably artillery projectiles for lithoboloi,” a kind of catapult.

The Second Punic War began after Hannibal attacked Saguntum, a city on the Iberian Peninsula that had allied with Rome. When Carthage refused to withdraw, Rome declared war in 218 B.C.E.

Wall Street Journal:

Test your knowledge with this WSJ quiz about books, music, movies and more

Anna Hansen:

The three top spellers advanced to the Badger State Spelling Bee on March 21, so Barnhill will be joined by Joanne Aldoori of Madinah Academy, who placed second, and third-place finisher Ignatius Fassino of St. Ambrose Academy. 

Casey Barnhill found his spelling bee victory cradled between Colombia, Peru and the Pacific Ocean. The Velma B. Hamilton Middle School student took first place after correctly spelling “Ecuador.”

Barnhill was one of 41 students vying for the title of Madison’s star speller Saturday at Madison College’s Mitby Theater.

“I’m feeling good because I got second place last year,” he said. “I got out last year on definition.”

The three top spellers advanced to the Badger State Spelling Bee on March 21, so Barnhill will be joined by Joanne Aldoori of Madinah Academy, who placed second, and third-place finisher Ignatius Fassino of St. Ambrose Academy. 

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Alex Tabarrok

The conclusion of Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in the tariff case:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem
arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers
disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

Jimmy Sengenberger

In early 2024, Jeffco Schools carved out a special “municipal interest” process enabling Lakewood and other municipalities to bypass traditional bidding to acquire shuttered schools.

Eight months earlier, an appraisal had made it clear to the school district that competitive bidding was in fact viable for the closed Emory Elementary, meaning the district could sell the property and turn a tidy profit for taxpayers within a year.

Disregarding that appraisal, the board of Colorado’s second-largest district voted last November to sell the Emory property to the city of Lakewood for $4 million — without going through a bidding process.

Shortly before that, Lakewood’s city council had approved flipping the closed school to The Action Center, a social and homeless-services nonprofit, for just $1 million, while retaining seven acres of the 17-acre property as open space for the city.

Tommaso Giommoni,  Gabriel Loumeau  & Marco Tabellini:

In this paper, we provide systematic evidence in support of the long-standing hypothesis that taxation was an important driver of the French Revolution. We first document that areas with heavier taxes experienced more riots between 1750 and 1789 and voiced more complaints against taxation in the cahiers de doléances of 1789. After showing that these effects are driven by indirect taxes, we exploit sharp spatial differences in the salt tax and the traites—the two principal indirect levies—to implement a regression discontinuity design (RDD).We find that unrest was higher on the high-tax side of the border. These effects intensified over time, peaking in the 1780s, and were stronger where fiscal disparities were larger and Enlightenment ideas more widespread. We further show that adverse weather shocks amplified unrest in high-tax municipalities. We then document that taxation fueled the spread of unrest during the Grande Peur—the wave of revolts that swept France in July 1789 and culminated in the abolition of feudal privileges. Finally, we link taxation to revolutionary politics in Paris, documenting that deputies from heavily taxed constituencies were more likely to frame the tax system as oppressive, support the Revolution, demand the abolition of the monarchy, and vote for the king’s execution.

Arnold Kling:

If change is happening in the market for K-12 education, can higher ed be far behind?

The trends noted above work to the benefit of UATX. The families that have explored alternatives to public schools make up the addressable market. If you have already opted out of the normal path of education, then it is not such a leap to try UATX. 

Accordingly, it is reasonable to expect UATX to achieve its aggressive growth goals for the next couple of years. While legacy universities face a declining college-age population, declining high school test scores, and obstacles to filling their classrooms with foreign students, UATX expects to enroll 125 or more students this fall, as many as in the first two years’ classes put together. This will feel like an invasion, with a large and somewhat unpredictable impact on the atmosphere and culture here.

This influx will arrive in the context of governance issues that are roiling higher education today.  Thomas W. Smith writes,

Will Flanders

Each year, Wisconsin property taxpayers contribute more than $6.5 billion in local school levies. Those dollars are commonly understood to support classrooms, teachers and student services. In reality, a large — and growing — portion is diverted to debt service, a non-negotiable financial obligation before a single classroom dollar is spent.

In fact, the debt-service share of the local levy continues to grow, not because students are receiving more, but because past borrowing decisions increasingly dictate today’s budgets. Fortunately, at least one school district is showing that a debt free future is possible.

Statewide, nearly 18% of all local school levies — about $1.18 billion each year — are used to service debt. In practical terms, almost one out of every five local school tax dollars is unavailable for instruction or student support because it has already been committed elsewhere. Unfortunately, long-term debt has become a routine feature of school finance rather than an exception.

Looking at debt on a per-student basis makes the impact clearer. Across Wisconsin, districts levy an average of $1,483 per student each year simply to service existing debt. In districts that carry any debt at all — roughly 85% of districts statewide —that figure rises to $1,550 per student, before any money is spent in a classroom.

At the same time, Wisconsin is experiencing sustained enrollment decline, and while per-pupil revenue limits may decline with enrollment, existing district debt does not shrink when enrollment falls. The obligation stays fixed, and the burden shifts. Even if no new debt is added, fewer students are left to carry the same costs.

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30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Catherine Herridge:

Straight to the Point: Sexual Abuse Epidemic in Public Schools

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

00:40 “Pass The Trash” Teachers accused of abuse in public schools are quietly moved to other schools

01:23 Sexual Abuse Epidemic in California

02:40 Mandatory Reporting to law enforcement: Compliance is reported to be near zero

03:40 No legal requirement to notify parents of credible allegations of sexual abuse in schools

04:30 Minority and Poor Communities Disproportionately affected

05:30 Elementary School Teacher pleads no contest to lewd acts with children

07:00 No one wants to acknowledge prevalence of abuse in students K-12

07:35 Data estimates 17% of students in K-12 public schools will suffer sexual misconduct by school personnel

09:00 Teachers Unions know there is “widespread non-reporting” of alleged sexual misconduct

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200 Wisconsin teacher sexual misconduct, grooming cases shielded from public.

More.

adafruit:

As we’ve said before on this blog, when we covered Washington and New York, it doesn’t matter if you’re pro or anti-gun. The state should prosecute people who make illegal thing, not add useless surveillance software on every tool in every classroom, library, and garage in the state. And as you can see, these bills spread – that’s how an small group can push legislation into the entire country. First, Washington proposed theirs, then New York, now California. Once those three states pass a law, that’s 20~25% of the country by GDP/population and thus every manufacturer is forced to comply with a bad decision in order to stay in business. If you’re a maker, educator, or manufacturer anywhere in the US, even outside these states, this is a problem-problem now.

Racquel Bazos

A battle over control of the Baltimore County School Board is flaring in Annapolis, where Democratic lawmakers are clashing over how many members voters should elect and how many the governor should appoint. 

Eugene Volokh:

Some excerpts from the long discussion in Parker v. Costco Wholesale Corp., decided in November by Magistrate Judge S. Kate Vaughan (W.D. Wash.), but only recently posted on Westlaw:

The Court identified material misstatements and misrepresentations in those filings, which contained hallucinated case and record citations and legal errors consistent with unverified generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) use and ordered Counsel to show cause as to why sanctions should not issue. The Court outlines its observations before turning to Counsel’s explanations….

Review of Plaintiff’s Response to Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment (“MSJ Response”) indicated the filing relied on inapplicable law, misrepresented and misquoted the law and the record, and included a wide array of idiosyncratic citation errors. For brevity, the Court summarizes the most egregious examples….

[Among other things,] Counsel included hallucinated and inaccurate quotes to the record. This was particularly egregious given that he sought to demonstrate a question of material fact precluded summary judgment and attempted to do so by relying on mischaracterized evidence….

Emmanuel Mauleón

This is not a call for refinement or recalibration of immigration enforcement following months of federal occupation in Minneapolis. It is a call to name failure plainly. When ICE’s ordinary operations require protection from law rather than obedience to it, abolition is not a radical slogan but a natural conclusion. The whistle is being sounded in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or rush to patch over the cracks before more bodies make structural collapse inevitable.

Dylan Kane:

Here’s my core prediction: Alpha School will not be the place where we finally unveil the holy grail of education technology, where 100 percent of students can learn from a computer. Alpha School will not be the place where Engelmann’s ideas scale to reach every student. Developing curriculum is an empirical science. Designing great curriculum requires endless tinkering and testing and revision. If that testing happens at a $40,000-a-year private school, it simply will not scale to everyone. Alpha School might do great things for a slice of students. That’s cool. But let’s make sure the claims are in line with reality.1

If Alpha School is serious about being “the future of education,” the solution is simple. I’m seeing these allusions to Engelmann. Follow in his footsteps. Partner with a struggling school where outcomes are poor. Test the curriculum there. Refine and iterate with the students who are most likely to struggle. If Alpha School isn’t interested in doing that, I’m not going to pay much attention to the big claims. Go be a successful private school. Live and let live. I’ll head back to my classroom to do the best I can with boring traditional whole-class instruction. 

1

I’ll note that there’s a section of the edtech world that is honest and straightforward that their products are designed to help the most academically capable students. I appreciate that! I know public schools struggle to challenge talented students, I see it every day. I’m happy those products exist. I respect them for being honest about who they’re designed for. If Alpha School marketed themselves that way, I wouldn’t be writing long posts about all this.

Kayla Huynh:

• A group of 11 Wisconsin school district superintendents is urging lawmakers to increase school funding.
• The superintendents want the state to use its projected $2.5 billion surplus to boost aid and provide property tax relief.
• Districts have faced budget shortfalls, leading to cost-cutting, potential school closures and a reliance on voter-approved referendums.
• Negotiations between Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislative leaders over a tax relief package remain at a stalemate.

A group of Wisconsin school district leaders is pleading with lawmakers to increase school funding and provide property tax relief before this year’s legislative session ends.

The superintendents, representing 11 school districts, including Wisconsin’s five largest and six rural districts, said lawmakers should use the state’s proposed $2.5 billion surplus to boost aid to schools. They said rising costs and stagnant state support have forced districts to rely on voter-approved property tax referendums to help meet budget shortfalls.

“Wisconsin urgently needs a bipartisan compromise on school funding,” the district leaders said. “The current stalemate leaves public school districts unable to plan responsibly and pushes local communities to shoulder costs that the state should be sharing.”

Superintendents of the state’s largest districts in Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, Racine and Green Bay penned the open letter to lawmakers in late January. District leaders in rural Baraboo, Reedsburg, River Valley, Sauk Prairie, Weston and Wisconsin Dells released the same statement Feb. 17.

——-

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students. A bit more than $26k per student.

Erin Gretzinger

The Dane County district attorney filed misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting an officer against Madison School Board Vice President Maia Pearson Thursday.

The charges stem from a December incident involving Pearson and Brandi Grayson, the CEO of Urban Triage, that led to their arrests. Both Pearson and Grayson have entered not guilty pleas and obtained signature bonds, court records show.

While Grayson had been arrested in December by Madison police on three counts of disorderly conduct and OWI, Grayson was only chargedThursday with disorderly conduct and resisting an officer.

Pearson and her lawyer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Grayson’s attorney.

In a separate pending case, Grayson is facing disorderly conduct and property damage chargesthat followed a report by a man she had previously been in a relationship with. Grayson has pleaded not guilty in that case, as well.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Erin Eritzinger

After screening bids to ensure the materials met mandatory requirements, the school district’s K8 Math Leadership team sent along four proposals for further consideration by a larger selection committee.

That committee included 40 people across 21 schools and the district’s central office, as well as School Board member Ali Muldrow and Lisa Hennessey, a University of Wisconsin-Madison teaching faculty member who serves on the board of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Following hours of meetings and evaluations in January, the committee selected Illustrative from three finalists. The cost estimates for Illustrative or the other finalists weren’t shared in materials provided at the Instruction Working Group meeting this month. District administrators previously told School Board members the price tag of math materials would be less than its most recent purchase of reading curriculum, which cost $5.6 million.

In a presentation to School Board members, district officials highlighted the curriculum’s approach to working with students of different skill levels. Madison high schools already use Illustrative materials, meaning there would be consistency if the curriculum is adopted across all grade levels. 

District officials particularly emphasized Illustrative’s “problem-based” learning approach, which involves students first tackling problems in small groups and then trying it themselves with supervision before the teacher models how to solve the problem.

—-

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

——-

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Chris Rickert:

Jensen then told police that the person who made the original report in October has a stepsister who goes to Thoreau, that the stepsister had seen the photo and told her mother about it, and that the mother had reported the photo’s existence to the school.

Madison police and the Madison School District launched investigations after the staffer at Thoreau Elementary School allegedly took the photo of the then-7-year-old, developmentally disabled boy in late September.

In response to a Feb. 13 Wisconsin State Journal story about the matter, Thoreau Principal Emily Jensen sent a message to Thoreau families Thursday asserting that while the photo’s existence was reported to the school on Oct. 1, police who followed up on the matter did not share the photo with the school.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Ethan Sandweiss

Some of those funds come in the form of utility bills and facilities maintenance but the vast majority – $25 million – came in direct transfers of unrestricted university funds: money that can otherwise be used anywhere at IU.

It’s the second highest year on record, after appropriating $34.3 million in 2024 to close the deficit – more than eight times the average for other Big Ten schools.

But in the 2025 fiscal year, IU athletics reported a $10 million surplus, driven mainly by media rights, ticket sales and contributions. That’s according to IU’s NCAA financial report, obtained Monday by WFIU.

None of IU’s direct support was returned to the university, per the report.

The Economist:

It helps that red states have gone back to basics: legislators in state capitals have enacted new rules that require teaching reading via phonics and holding failing schools accountable. Those decisions matter a great deal for classrooms. But America is made up of more than 13,000 school districts, most of which have the autonomy to set policy, too. That gives cities and towns across the country the opportunity to run small experiments to figure out how to get students to learn—and then to double down on what works.

In Birmingham, Alabama, city leaders are doing just that. This is not a place where fixes come easily. Pupils in the school district are almost all black and nine out of ten qualify for free or cut-price lunches. For years their test scores were a drag on state averages (which were already low). But a few clever policies seem to be turning things around.
In the past two years the city went from having 15 “F”-rated schools to just one. A Stanford and Harvard study found that children in Birmingham are making up for maths learning lost during covid lockdowns about half a grade level faster than students in less poor districts. Kay Ivey, Alabama’s Republican governor, boasted in her state-of-the-state address last February that Alabama is no longer “just a football state” but also an “education state”.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Alec Johnson

Declining enrollment is a big reason behind school closures

Shaw said that while the Policy Forum has not specifically studied school closures, it has closely tracked student enrollment, which has a direct effect on funding.

Enrollment has declined at public school districts every year for more than a decade. That decline has affected a majority of Wisconsin school districts, Shaw said.

Statewide, public school enrollment in the 2014-15 school year was 870,652. By 2024-25, that had dropped to 805,881, according to the Policy Forum, a decline of almost 65,000 students – more than 7% statewide.

The main factor: a decline in the birth rate statewide.

———

Choose life.

———

“Statewide, public school enrollment in the 2014-15 school year was 870,652. By 2024-25, that had dropped to 805,881, according to the Policy Forum, a decline of almost 65,000 students – more than 7% statewide.”

Miriam Merin:

“What if the valedictorians in America’s schools were the cool kids?” This is the question Nicholas Kristof posed in his recent column in The New York Times, imagining a culture in the U.S. where academic excellence carries the same social prestige as it does in some East Asian countries.

But in many of the environments I’ve inhabited—elite universities and professional circles in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.—the valedictorians are already the cool kids. Whether they exhibit genuine academic prowess or have learned to “game the system,” their presumed competence is the ultimate social currency. It grants them not just admiration, but often a kind of anticipatory deference based on the influence they will presumably wield in the future.

Mr. Kristof is not necessarily wrong or alone in feeling envious of the high regard that some prosperous, rapidly developing democracies, particularly in Asia, have for education. Exploring the role cultural values play in shaping national outcomes has preoccupied educators and institutional leaders for decades. And at a time when gifted programs and test-entry schools are falling out of favor in much of the U.S., his point is especially well taken.

But I worry that we have come to conflate intelligence and success with moral authority.

In America’s high-achievement settings, excellence can function as a form of psychological and social insulation: Intelligence is taken as a proxy for virtue; success as evidence of character and wisdom. Over time, this dynamic can make it harder for the most credentialed and celebrated individuals to question their own judgment or remain open to new viewpoints. It can also make it harder for others to question the behavior of those whose accomplishments appear to place them beyond reproach.

Richard Ngo:

A key problem with Caplan’s trinity is that most of it is easily replaceable. Getting good grades at college does signal intelligence and conscientiousness, but these could be signaled far more easily and cheaply. It’s very easy to signal intelligence via test scores: IQ is surprisingly predictive of many other desirable cognitive traits. This need not require literal IQ tests—standardized tests like the SAT or GRE are highly correlated with intelligence. In other cases, companies use IQ-like tests (e.g. tech companies’ coding interviews). These are also significantly harder to cheat on than college courses.

Caplan acknowledges that college grades are far from the best way to signal intelligence; what he doesn’t discuss is that they’re even further from the best way to signal conscientiousness. If you asked people why they don’t just learn college material independently without paying for college, I expect that a common response would simply be “oh, I don’t have the discipline for that”. College provides external frameworks, timetables, local incentives, and social pressure for people who aren’t conscientious enough to learn without that.

Neetu Arnold

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City was a warning of what could lie ahead in American electoral politics—especially the enthusiasm that he inspired among younger voters. Those aged 18–29 had the highest turnout of any group, at 35 percent, almost double its level in 2021. Mamdani’s democratic socialist agenda also draws support beyond New York. An Axios/Generation Lab poll conducted days before the mayoral election found that 67 percent of college students held a positive or neutral view of socialism; only 40 percent said the same about capitalism.

Support for socialism and for figures like Mamdaniprimarily comes from young people who feel priced out of the American dream—owning a home, securing a stable job, and starting a family. Many first confront the gap between expectation and reality when they enter college and take on substantial debt, a stark contrast with the youthful freedom that older Americans often associate with their own college years.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

Sign up for our free newsletter today.

On college affordability, Democrats have built brand trust: voters expect subsidies from them. The issue is salient enough that even local politicians like Mamdani, who have relatively little jurisdiction over higher-education policy, feel compelled to voice broadcommitments to boosting university subsidies.

Matthew Yglesias

There’s a pretty robust body of research on what happens to schools when neighborhoods gentrify, and the general finding is: not much. Or rather, not the thing you’d naively expect.

A Stanford study by F. Chris Pearman found that gentrification was actually associated with declining enrollment at neighborhood schools, with the largest drops occurring when the gentrifiers were white. In Denver, gentrifying neighborhoods saw a 23% enrollment decline between 2006 and 2016 as white families used school choice mechanisms — charters, magnets, out-of-boundary transfers — to avoid their zoned schools. A Chalkbeat analysis found that in gentrifying areas nationally, white parents enrolled their kids in schools with 19% fewer poor students and 14% fewer Black and Hispanic students than their assigned neighborhood school.

The basic dynamic is straightforward and kind of depressing: white families move in, housing prices rise, the neighborhood changes, but the schools don’t. Or they change only in the sense that lower-income families get priced out and enrollment declines.

New York City is the partial exception, where gentrifying schools saw a 40% increase in white enrollment between 2000 and 2014. But even in New York, that was concentrated in specific neighborhoods — it wasn’t a district-wide transformation.

Kim Malcolm & Ruby de Luna:

Things slowed down. Orders weren’t coming in; they still aren’t coming in like they used to. One worker told me she can be logged on for hours without receiving an order. Customers still want the convenience, but many balked at the fees that the apps tacked on after the new law. The companies say the fees are necessary.

That pattern is consistent with a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research —wages were higher in the first few months and then dropped. The study also found that months later, drivers have more unpaid idle time, and drive longer distances between orders.

And how about local businesses, how has the law affected them?

I checked back with Uttam Mukherjee, co-owner of Spice Waala, that serves Indian street food on Capitol Hill, Columbia City, and Ballard. Mukherjee has expressed concerns early on. Those concerns he says have become real — he’s getting fewer orders coming through those apps because of the added fees that customers are now paying.

Caroline Hoxby & Christopher Avery:

We show that the vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college. This is despite the fact that selective institutions typically cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the two-year and nonselective four-year institutions to which they actually apply.

Moreover, low-income high achievers have no reason to believe they will fail at selective institutions since those who do apply are admitted and graduate at high rates. We demonstrate that low-income high achievers’ application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts with similar achievement. The latter generally follow experts’ advice to apply to several “peer,” a few “reach,” and a couple of “safety” colleges. We separate low-income high achievers into those whose application behavior is similar to that of their high-income counterparts (“achievement-typical”) and those who apply to no selective institutions (“income-typical”). We show that income-typical students are not more disadvantaged than the achievement typical students. However, in contrast to the achievement-typical students, income-typical students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, are not in a critical mass of fellow high achievers, and are unlikely to encounter a teacher who attended a selective college.

We demonstrate that widely used policies—college admissions recruiting, campus visits, college mentoring programs—are likely to be ineffective with income-typical students. We suggest that effective policies must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers.

Tej Parikh:

We can see that the drop in vacancies predates the release of OpenAI’s large language model (LLM). Instead, the fall in job postings dovetails with a period in which the Federal Reserve pressed the brakes on the US economy by raising interest rates by 5 percentage points.

What’s more, because of the post-pandemic surge in openings and hiring, the subsequent reduction appears to reflect a normalisation. 

These broad trends in hiring and central bank rate increases hold in many G7 nations during the same period.

There are non-AI drivers of labour market weakness, too. For instance, in Britain the rise in youth unemployment is, in part, linked to the Labour government’s policies, such as payroll tax increases.

Garry Tan:

I sometimes wonder about the fervor education bureaucrats have for making standardized testing optional. Then I hear stories like Aleysha’s and know exactly why they do it. Tests reveal the rot.

San Francisco paid 6-figures to education school bureaurcrats pushing “Grading for Equity” — homework doesn’t count, unlimited test retakes, lateness and absence don’t affect grades. A score of 80 can earn an A. The game is to keep grades up while learning collapses. Rubber stamp F’s into C’s, C’s into B’s, B’s into A’s.

And once you’re through the gate? Harvard doesn’t even offer remedial writing courses. There’s nowhere to catch up. The students who were passed through without learning are stranded.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

WMC:

Since 2000, for every eight students lost, public schools added one non‑instructional staff member.

More adults than ever, yet fewer kids reading and doing math at grade level. That’s not a ‘year of the kid’ – that’s decades of growing a bloated bureaucracy.

———

New York City has an unusually high per capita spending level.

When you have a good point, make it the right way.

Dan O’Donnell, via a kind reader:

Black Hawk Middle School in Madison, Wis. is openly violating the 14th Amendment, Civil Rights Act, and years of Supreme Court precedent by offering free brunch and games today to only black students and staff members.

Danyela Souza Egorov:

In September 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signedS960, a bill limiting the size of classes in New York City public schools. The law phases in class-size limits—20 students for grades K–3; 23 students for grades 4–8; and 25 students for high school—over six years.

Fast forward to today: the implementation of the class-size law is causing predictable disruptions in Gotham. Parents and experts warned from the beginning that the law would be expensive, hard to implement, and generate, rather than reduce, inequality. Three years in, their fears remain valid.

Smaller class sizes mean more classes—and more teachers. New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) estimated that the new law would cost the city between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually to hire the number of additional instructors required to comply with the law. This would make the city’s public schools, already projected to spend more than $42,000 per pupil, even more inefficient.

Michael Torres

At its founding in 1956, the AP program was not intended to be such a behemoth. Its founders viewed it as “an opportunity and a challenge to … the strongest and most ambitious boys and girls.” For the program’s first several decades, its growth reflected that purpose. In 1956, 2,199 AP exams were administered nationwide. That number increased by an average of 10,567 tests per year over the next 30 years. By the pandemic’s aftermath, growth had accelerated to an average of 325,000 additional tests administered per year, reaching 6.25 million in 2025.

Amidst this blitz, the New York Times asked, in a 2023 article, “Why Is the College Board Pushing to Expand Advanced Placement?” The story noted that, “for the past two decades, the College Board has moved aggressively to expand the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses and tests—in part by pitching the program to low-income students and the schools that serve them. It is a matter of equity, they argue.”

That move was so successful that the Times said the AP program had become “something of a de facto national curriculum.” Indeed, the financial success of the AP program is matched only by its power over American classrooms.

Jamie Cavanaugh

Across the country, a quiet but important shift is underway in how courts review administrative agency decisions. Nineteen states have ended judicial deference to administrative agencies (including Kansas just this week), either through legislation or state court decisions. More are poised to follow. Bills are currently pending in states like Alabama, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia, reflecting a growing recognition that judicial deference undermines the rule of law and tilts the scales of justice too far in the government’s favor.

That momentum accelerated in 2024, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. For four decades, Chevron required federal judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the laws it administers whenever statutory language was deemed ambiguous. Rather than weighing competing interpretations and choosing the most persuasive one, Chevron mandated that judges put a thumb on the scale for the government.

The results were predictable. Chevron led to a dramatic win rate for federal agencies—often at the expense of individuals, small businesses, and regulated entities that found themselves in the crosshairs of government enforcement. By overruling Chevron, the Court reaffirmed a basic constitutional principle: it is the judiciary’s job to say what the law is.

ButLoper Brightresolved only half the problem. While federal courts are no longer bound byChevron, many states continue to apply their own versions of judicial deference. In those states, agencies still enjoy a built-in advantage when their interpretations of state law are challenged. As a result, Americans’ rights can vary dramatically depending on whether a dispute arises under federal or state law—and depending on which state they live in.

Oliver Traldi:

The purpose of education is to help us live better lives.

Rebecca and Henry have asked me to write something for this blog about liberal education. What is a liberal education, they ask? Why does the “Great Books” stuff I’ve been doing as a teacher for the past few years, they ask, fit the model? My former Tulsa Honors colleague Dan Walden just came out with an essay about these topics in The Point, too. I largely agree with Dan, but with some differences of emphasis.

I think an appropriate liberal education is one that teaches us to “free solo,” intellectually speaking. The deepest, most difficult questions that arise in our lives stare us down like barren rock walls, unmarked and unscalable, pristine in a precipitous terror of sand. To live thoughtfully, reasonably, and morally is no small task, let alone to do so freely and authentically. Yet this is what our very ability to think and act seems to demand of us – at least to some of us, the way a mountain might demand to a free soloist to be climbed. Through a liberal education, free people grow in their capabilities, their powers, until few things accessible to their reason and will remain foreign to them.

Douglas Berlin & Scott Calvert:

By coordinating negotiations across the state with the threat of strikes, the unions aim to escalate funding battles from local school boards to the state legislature, said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, a union representing more than 300,000 educators. The state contributes a majority of the money in public K-12 school budgets.

Jorge Elorza:

America is in a decade-long education depression. Barely a third of students are proficient in reading or math across most grades in recent testing, achievement gaps are widening fast, and too many college freshmen are arriving on campus unable to read a full book or do middle-school-level math. Chronic absenteeism has surged after the pandemic; students are disengaged. Educators are burning out, and teachers are increasingly hard to recruit and retain. Costs are rising. Trust in public schools is at a record low, and families with the means to leave increasingly do, leaving districts with half-empty buildings.

This is what an institutional breaking point looks like. In these periods of deep political and social change, or interregnums, reforms that were once considered unthinkable become not only possible but also necessary. This moment of crisis in K-12 education is an opportunity to reimagine it from the ground up. We need nothing less than a new educational operating system — one that channels public funding through students and families directly, rather than through centralized district bureaucracies.

For decades, reformers have tried to fix the education system from within, pushing for higher standards, better data, stronger accountability and more equitable funding. Some gains have been made, but efforts to improve the system have repeatedly ground to a halt, blocked by bureaucratic inertia and political gridlock.

At the heart of this resistance is a fundamental misalignment of incentives. Schools are largely funded according to their ZIP code, not their success or failure. They often don’t need to deliver strong outcomes to maintain enrollment or secure their budgets. Without structural incentives to improve, even well-meaning systems stagnate, as bureaucracies optimize for self-preservation rather than delivering results. To transform our education system, we need to change the architecture of the system itself, not just patch the policies and programs that sit on top of it.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Dan Berrett:

Days after alleging years of financial mismanagement in an interview with the student newspaper, the chief financial officer of the University of California at Los Angeles is out of a job.

Stephen Agostini, who started at UCLA in 2024 after serving as the associate vice chancellor for finance and budget at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was fired, according to a university spokesman. Tuesday’s

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Jaweed Kaleem:

The abrupt change came days after Agostini gave an interview to the Daily Bruin student newspaper saying the campus had “financial management flaws and failures” predating his arrival, leading to what he said was a $425-million deficit. In the interview, Agostini blamed financial woes on faculty and staff raises, academic departments’ requests for new positions and expanded programs, and UCLA athletics, which has run in the red for multiple years.

Agostini suggested that UCLA’s annual financial reports going back to 2002 were incorrect, saying he saw “very serious errors” — a charge UCLA officials deny. UCLA’s last posted financial report covers the 2022-23 fiscal year. 

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Financial mismanagement contributed to $425 million annual deficit, UCLA CFO says

Paul Vallas:

Just look at the numbers on this list. It’s staggering.

This is what depression level pricing looks like! Does Mayor Johnson know what this does to residential property taxes to fill the gap in the levy?  

Doubtful he does.

Small wonder there has been a $2B property tax shift from commercial to residential property since 2021.

Does the mayor know what the depopulating of the downtown does to retail and service industries?

How about Chicago’s 9000 restaurants that he has saddled with new costly mandates? 

Trick question. Of course he doesn’t.

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35,364 fewer students.
6,343 more staff.

Still not “fully funded.”

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Real per capita federal spending:

2026: $22,550
2000: $12,915

Even adjusting for inflation and population, federal spending is up 75%.

By Joel Kotkin & Bheki Mahlobo,

The decline of religion remains a fundamental reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where over 50% of those under age 40 do not identify with any faith. Even in more religious America, some estimate that as many as 100,000 churches will close in the near future. Meanwhile, the ranks of “Nones,” those outside religious communities, have grown so large that their numbers rival those of Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

Yet, as we document in a new report for the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, there are signs that religion is enjoying more than a nascent revival. Data emerging from the 2020s suggest that we are witnessing a complex spiritual restructuring that intersects with economic mobility, demographic resilience, and a profound intellectual realignment.

For the first time in decades, Pew Research notes, in the U.S. at least, Christianity has stopped its nosedive as more people begin to see the efficacy, and the rewards, of religious faith and practice.

This fragile development is especially noteworthy as it exposes growing divides and fault lines in American politics and culture. Drawing on a vast array of longitudinal studies, interviews, and other sources, one startling finding in both America and abroad is that, contrary to past assertions, today the faithful are not poor and ignorant but increasingly from the educated upper middle class. 

Margaret-Anne Storey: 

The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time. Technical debt nicely captures that “human understanding” also matters, but the words “technical debt” conjure up the notion that the accrued debt is a property of the code and effort needs to be spent on removing that debt from code.

Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to “go fast” or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot and may not understand what the program is supposed to do, how their intentions were implemented, or how to possibly change it.

Technical debt lives in the code; cognitive debt lives in developers’ minds.

Simon Willison:

I’ve experienced this myself on some of my more ambitious vibe-code-adjacent projects. I’ve been experimenting with prompting entire new features into existence without reviewing their implementations and, while it works surprisingly well, I’ve found myself getting lost in my own projects.

Chuck Ross:

The American people need to have confidence in the people tasked to serve as amici before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) told the Washington Free Beacon about Daskal’s selection.

He highlighted a bill he sponsors, the FISA Accountability Act, which would give Congress a role in selecting amici curiae for the court. Currently, the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review appoint amici. Those roles are held by district court judge Anthony Trenga, a Bush appointee, and Stephen Higginson, an Obama appointee to U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (Mo.), another Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, grilled Daskal about her disinformation board background at a hearing on May 20.

Garry Tan:

Jelani Nelson drove to Sacramento for months, recruited allies, and won: Academic standards at UCs matter

“Show up. Shock them out of their comfort zones. Let them know business as usual is over,” Nelson wrote. “Politics is a repeated game, and we are establishing a new equilibrium.”

Legislative bill season is here again. Nelson reports no new dumbing-down bills yet — knock on wood. That’s not luck. That’s the result of politicians understanding there’s organized opposition watching every move.

This is how you win. Not with one angry tweet. Not with one testimony. You show up again and again until they understand: every vote is being watched. Every bill is being tracked. The education bureaucrats thought they could quietly dismantle standards while no one paid attention. Now they know better.

Helen Andrews:

Meritocracy is like free trade. Countries or classes embrace it when it advantages them and view it more skeptically when they are no longer on top. Like Great Britain before us, America preached free trade when it meant opening up foreign markets to our world-beating products and enriching our allies. When it came to mean losing our industrial base to China, we belatedly started to ask whether the case for free trade was really so axiomatic.

“Meritocracy is like free trade.”

The same pattern is now playing out with meritocracy. It was a useful rallying cry for those who wanted to open up America’s ruling institutions to non-WASPs, starting with the Ivy League in the 1960s and culminating when the new class swept through Washington in the Clinton years. But when it came time for those newly minted elites to send their own children to college, suddenly unfettered dynamism no longer looked so appealing. A wave of books appeared in the 2010s with titles such as The Meritocracy Trap, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy. 

This belated skepticism was doubtless self-serving. But, like the free-trade skeptics, meritocracy’s critics were right. Free trade and meritocracy are both ways of maximizing competition; competition is healthy, but too much can be toxic. 

Austin Berg:

The answers reveal how a hollow office wreaks havoc on the health of Chicago’s finances.

Chicago’s treasurer

The city’s current treasurer has made herself unusually vulnerable to criticism. Melissa Conyears-Ervin has been the subject of multiple ethics investigations and scandals since taking office in 2019.

Here are the toplines:

• Security detail controversy: Conyears-Ervin briefly received a Chicago police security detail upon taking office. After a security assessment concluded neither the treasurer nor the city clerk required ongoing police protection, CPD withdrew that detail. Conyears-Ervin then hired private security guards using public funds. No previous Chicago treasurer is known to have received a CPD security detail. The controversy resurfaced in 2024 when Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson attempted to bankroll the treasurer’s security team using the city’s water fund.
• Asking banks for personal help: While overseeing deposits of city funds with BMO Harris and other banks, Conyears-Ervin acknowledged asking BMO to provide a loan to her husband’s landlord. Two former employees alleged she tried to “force” the bank to issue a mortgage on the building that houses the aldermanic office of Conyears-Ervin’s husband, 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin, who also serves as Johnson’s hand-picked chairman of the Budget Committee.
• Repeated ethics violations: The Chicago Board of Ethics found in April 2024 that Conyears-Ervin committed 12 violations of the city’s Governmental Ethics Ordinance and moved to impose $60,000 in fines. In a separate probe, involving misuse of city resources and the firing of whistleblowers, she agreed to a $30,000 settlement to resolve those charges.

Jasmine Li:

More than 5,000 Stanford students have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 undergraduates. It has spread to 10 other colleges including Columbia, Princeton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 million in venture-capital funding.

The growth, fans say, reflects a reality about many college kids: They’re intimidated by real-life courtship and overwhelmed by the endless scroll of dating apps. Entrepreneurial students have found huge demand for alternate matchmaking tools.

“It helps people take a chance on connection,” said Weng, a computer-science student who coded Date Drop in about three weeks. “You get a reason to meet up with a specific person, take some of that pressure off.”

Rick Sobey

The lawsuit includes children books that depicts gay and lesbian couples with children, including the book “Families, Families, Families!” (Federal filing screenshot) 

Massachusetts father cannot opt his kindergartner out of books about ‘gender stereotypes,’ federal judge rules: ‘It does not violate plaintiff’s religious faith’

Atlanta News First staff and Abby Kousouris

A bill advancing at the state capitol could significantly change high school sports across Georgia.

It would allow student-athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness, or NIL.

House Bill 383, known as the Georgia High School NIL Protection Act, passed unanimously out of the House Education Policy and Innovation Subcommittee on Tuesday. 

Supporters say the legislation would place guardrails around a system that already exists, while critics warn it could expose young athletes to pressure and exploitation.

Christian Smith:

The central problem at Notre Dame is that these fine words are not acted upon in a remotely consistent and thoroughgoing manner. Various programs, centers, and institutes scattered across campus, and a certain number of individual faculty members, do work hard to engage the Catholic intellectual tradition. But at the institutional level, with the university as a whole, Notre Dame’s leaders are equivocal about that Catholic mission and make decisions and pursue practices that ­undermine it.

Compared to most other places, Notre Dame has many good things going on. But compared to what it could and should be—what it says it wants to be—Notre Dame is a disappointment. It’s not just that the university hasn’t reached its potential, it’s that it hasn’t seriously tried. Sustained engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition happens in pockets, but leaders avoid the institutional efforts that would make this engagement consistent and integrated.

What might such efforts look like? To begin with, Notre Dame’s leaders should be consistently clear and vocal about the purposes and entailments of a university with a Catholic mission. Department chairs and deans should understand and support that mission by being intentional and careful in recruiting faculty who understand (or are willing to learn about) the mission of a Catholic university and can in good faith commit to supporting it in their own ways.

More.

Wyatt Eichholz

Per-pupil spending by Wisconsin school districts is at its highest level since 2000 even after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction.

Statewide, school districts spent $17,400 per student in the 2023-2024 school year, more than $1,000 higher than the previous year.

Total education cost per pupil — the red line on the graph — has risen steadily except for a two-year dip following the 2011 Act 10 labor reforms, which permitted districts to reduce employee benefits costs. Growth accelerated in 2021 following the COVID pandemic.

Adjusted for inflation — the blue line — per-pupil spending now exceeds its prior peak in 2010, when per-pupil spending was equivalent to $17,386 per student in today’s dollars.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 $pending, now around $26,000 per student.

Isaac Mansell:

am a senior at Harvard. Last week, a faculty committee released a proposal to combat grade inflation at my school. The proposal would do two things: First, it would cap the number of A grades issued to undergraduates at 20 percent for every class. Second, Harvard would cease using grade point average (GPA) to rank students for academic honors and prizes and instead turn to average percentile rank—a measure of how students perform relative to their classmates. If passed by a full faculty vote later this spring, the proposal would take effect in the 2026–27 academic year.

How do the students feel about this proposal? You will perhaps not be surprised to hear they are up in arms. While faculty, according to the campus paper, lent cautious support to the initiative, an overwhelming 84.9 percent of my peers “definitely” disagree with limiting A grades to 20 percent, according to a Harvard Undergraduate Association survey.

I’m among the minority who support the proposal. Let me explain why.

Cynical Publius

As President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth work to restore the focus of America’s military on lethality and warfighting, one of their major tasks has been to reform the institutions that train our military leaders. In recent news, Secretary Hegseth has decreedthat military officers may no longer attend fellowships or government-sponsored degree programs at Harvard University, and he is apparently looking to expand that ban list beyond Harvard into colleges and universities nationwide that teach the desirability of toxic policies such as Marxism, DEI, and the myth of anthropogenic climate change. The rationale here is simple. America’s military exists to close with and destroy our nation’s enemies, and for no other reason. The toxic brew of politicized beliefs taught at the Ivy League institutions of 2026 detracts from and degrades that military mission, and they cannot be tolerated in uniform.

That’s a great start, but there is much more to do on this front. Perhaps no task is more important in this vein than reforming the military’s Senior Service Colleges (also known as War Colleges). Our War Colleges have lost their way, as they each strive to be a sort of government-run Ivy League university instead of a training ground for lethal strategic warfighters. As a graduate of one of those War Colleges, I cannot emphasize enough just how important reform of these vital institutions is to our nation’s defense.

For the uninitiated, there are six War Colleges. They are: (i) the National War College (Fort McNair, Washington, DC); (ii) the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security & Resource Strategy (Fort McNair, Washington, DC); (iii) the Army War College (Carlisle Barracks, PA); (iv) the Naval War College (Newport, RI); (v) the Air War College (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL); and (vi) the Marine Corps War College (Quantico, VA). These War Colleges serve to train America’s senior military leaders to assume future positions of strategic importance.

The students are generally promotable lieutenant colonels (or promotable Navy and Coast Guard commanders) or full colonels (or Navy and Coast Guard captains). The schools also admit senior civilians from across the federal government. The National War College and the Eisenhower School are both “joint” schools (i.e., students are from all military services), and the other colleges are service-specific, although they too admit a number of students from the other military services. The War Colleges also admit students from allied foreign militaries.

Alicia Nieves:

As I watched the relentless campaign against Thierry unfold, I struggled to understand why the state party failed to defend one of its own from the progressive groups. The newly elevated issue of medical transition treatments for minors was far removed from the traditional positions of Democratic officials, such as civil rights, worker protections, and public education. But in this instance, it was treated as a defining test of loyalty. The party’s decision was made all the more perplexing by who Thierry was. 

Shawn Thierry would seem to embody the modern Democratic Party: an African-American woman, a lawyer, and the daughter of a city maintenance worker and an English teacher. The generations of African-Americans who built her district of Sunnyside, Houston’s first black community, were working-class, Christian, and loyal to the Democratic Party. They helped deliver Texas for Kennedy and Johnson, under whose terms the Democrats passed sweeping civil rights legislation. But African-Americans, particularly older voters who form a significant share of the Democratic base, tend to be more socially conservative. Rather than see Thierry’s vote in favor of the ban as one that reflected the will of voters in her plurality-black district, the state Democratic party determined that allowing the progressive groups to remove Thierry was less costly than defending her. 

Shortly after her loss, Thierry released a statement announcing she was leaving the Democratic Party. “The Democratic Party has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss,” she wrote. “This is not the party I grew up with. I have witnessed firsthand how the so-called ‘liberal’ left now stifles thoughtful debate, silencing dissent with an iron fist—demanding blind allegiance to ideology, where one must comply or be cast out.”

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Meanwhile.

CDR Salamander:

I’m not interested in excuses. The future will be won or lost by those who master emerging technology…or the methods to defend against them.

I also don’t want to hear the, “…but they pay full price…” If that is your argument, then we already know what you and your institution are, we are just haggling over the price.

I know that administrative bloat won’t pay for itself, but I don’t care. Return to 1996 levels and train Americans. Public or private institutions, they all receive government funds. There is leverage.

Ashlea Ebeling & Richard Rubin:

Any child with a Social Security number who is under age 18 at the end of the year the account is established.

Under a pilot program, the Treasury Department would seed the accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028 who have a Social Security number and are U.S. citizens.

When are they available?

The accounts are expected to roll out in 2026, and parents and others will be able to start contributing in July. The Treasury Department will oversee the program, and banks or other financial institutions will administer accounts.

How do people get an account?

People with eligible children can elect to open an account by filling out a new IRS tax form, Form 4547, which you can attach to your tax return. There is a box to check if you want to receive the $1,000 seed money. Alternatively, in mid-2026 there will be an online portal at www.trumpaccounts.gov where parents and guardians can sign up their children for accounts.

Julie Johnson/

“I don’t understand why you’re always out of cash, to be honest with you,” Fine told the board. 

Fine told the Chronicle that Santa Rosa is among eight districts in the state with what’s called a “negative certification,” meaning the district can’t meet its financial obligations without making painful decisions about what services to cut. He said the district had failed to respond to years of razor-thin margins and budget shortfalls.

The depth of Santa Rosa’s spiraling financial crisis was masked by a series of one-time funds to help schools get through wildfire disasters and the pandemic.

“They need to cut back immediately — they need to stop spending money,” Fine said. 

The North Bay district serving about 13,000 students is battling to avoid the fate of the Oakland Unified School District, where a cash crisis put that district under state control for the last 22 years. 

Christopher Rufo:

Harvard Medical School is now teaching doctors “indigenous Maya knowledge” for neonatal care. The Mayans, of course, were famous for decapitating and dismembering young boys to appease the rain god Chaac.

Emmanuel Camarillo and Sarah Karp:

Soon the loudspeaker alerts were coming multiple times a week, making the situation almost “normalized,” Markut said. The school started encouraging students, many of whom like to go out for lunch, to stay inside. It opened classrooms where students who are afraid to leave can find refuge.

But Julia thinks it shouldn’t have to be this way.

“This fear shouldn’t be incorporated into our routines,” she said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to multiple requests to answer specific questions about federal activity around Chicago schools. The agency has said its agents do not target schools.

Brian Fraley:

DPI has a transparency problem that is quickly becoming a legal one. After a year of stonewalling our investigation into what we discovered was a taxpayer-funded Waterpark Workshop, the department has yet to release the vendor contract. Conveniently for them, it is the very document they claim restricts their ability to provide more details about their secret process to change the state’s Forward exam.

The Dairyland Sentinel is again turning to the Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) to compel the DPI to release public records. On Friday, Jake Curtis, general counsel and director of the Center for Investigative Oversight for the IRG, sent another demand letter to the agency, this time following its failure to produce a signed and executed contract with Data Recognition Corporation, the vendor who helped coordinate the workshop and the standards-setting process.

If Superintendent Jill Underly and her staff choose to continue to hide behind the terms of a contract with a vendor, they at least should have to produce the contract. Fulfilling our open records request would take someone 30 seconds to produce, and after waiting more than a year for partial fulfillment of our request from 2025, our patience has worn thin.

We are not alleging any wrongdoing on the part of the vendor, or DPI or their hand-picked conference participants. This is a search for public records and answers to questions that are in the public interest.

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Jill Underly, Tony Evers, Ben Jones and Wisconsin DPI Influence, Open Records, Non Outcomes & Sausage Making.

Jill Underly:

Mark Treinen: (Cap Times Editor!)

I really can’t let this stand @DrJillUnderly @WISCTV_News3. The superintendent’s continued claims of DPI transparency and our reporting’s inaccuracy are problematic. Thread.

Much more on Jill Underly, here.

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Open Records! Wisconsin DPI’s Refusal to Explain $368,885 Secret Waterpark Meeting Risks Invalidation of New Exam Standards

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Tony Evers

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Brian Fraley:

The larger concern is less about election mechanics and more about institutional behavior.

For many Wisconsin families and local officials, DPI increasingly appears less like a responsive public agency and more like a distant authority issuing directives from Madison. Frustrations over guidance, priorities, and regulatory tone are no longer rare complaints. They have become common refrains.

Any large bureaucracy, left largely to itself, tends to turn inward and outside voices carry less weight.

Wisconsin’s constitutional structure has reinforced precisely those conditions. DPI’s separation from the cabinet, coupled with diffuse accountability, has fostered a department culture that many citizens view as insulated from ordinary voters and everyday classroom realities.

Public education is meant to serve families and communities. It cannot afford to feel detached from either.

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Jill Underly, Tony Evers, Ben Jones and Wisconsin DPI Influence, Open Records, Non Outcomes & Sausage Making

Stephen Macedo:

1. He calls it the flu. I am old enough to remember when we were told that is a conspiracy theory.
2. There was decades of pandemic planning before Covid. The consensus was that school and workplace closures, restrictions on gathering sizes, mask mandates, social distancing measures, etc., were NOT effective and that the cost of doing so would be very high.
3. Measures NOT recommended by the WHO in their 2019 pandemic planning documents included contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry/exit screenings, border closings, and school closures.

Johns Hopkins said essentially the same thing just months before Covid started and made the point that the overbearing measures might be used for political reasons. I’ve said it for years that Covid kicked off 2020 e!ection theft season.

4. In 2008, the ACLU said (in relation to Bush-era pandemic preparedness planning) that fear of diseases has justified abuses of state power, that coercion and brute force breeds pubic distrust, strategies that rely on voluntary participation do work as long as public health officials are working to help people not punish them, and that minorities bear the brunt of tough public safety measures.

The ACLU said noting during Covid which tells us something since they have been co-opted by Democracy Inc.

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A deep dive into taxpayer funded Dane County Madison’s public health covid “mandates” is long overdue.

Anthony Lonetree:

Ryan Strack, the district’s senior executive officer, took the lead in presenting its latest budget update last week, and the school system has hired an outside consulting firm — at a cost of up to $830,000 — to provide technical and operational support.

There’s a strong need for a finance division rebound.

Ibrahima Diop, the former public face of the budget process, left Minnesota’s third-largest district on Jan. 30 — months after being reprimanded and then subjected to “escalated disciplinary action” by Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams.

Documents obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune in a public data request also show the district ordered an outside review of the finance division that described it as being at a “crisis point” with significant employee turnover — reportedly more than 50% over the past two years — and poor morale.

“Staggering,” Sayles-Adams wrote of the findings in her correspondence with Diop.

The consultant’s report was issued last August, and on Tuesday, Feb. 10, Strack took center stage for the latest budget update. While the update showed the district’s projected general fund deficit rising from $30.3 million in December to $50.5 million, Strack and the finance team were commended for bringing depth and transparency to the process.

Budget cuts loom. So, too, does a so-called district “transformation process” that could lead to the closing or merging of schools in a system plagued with excess building space.

John Trasviña

Currently, the school district contributes $1,681 per month per employee for family health care.  That amount will increase to $ 3,188 per month in 2027 under the new contract, barring any rate hikes. In July 2026, the school district will pay between $390 and $750 more per month for most teachers. If the school district has underestimated the number of teachers who will opt into fully paid health care in 2027, then the superintendent’s caveat that the agreement takes the district to its limits may be an underestimate and more financial pain to teachers, parents, and students will ensue.    

The contract also includes provisions unique to San Francisco. Teachers get one additional paid day this year and two days next year to perform “duties … chosen solely at [their] discretion. …” at home or at school.  The contract calls on the school district to identify a second school site for emergency overnight housing for students or their families, contingent upon city funding.  And it promises that all newcomer families are provided access to legal, housing, health, employment, food, and other resources; teachers are provided training on how to interact with federal immigration law enforcers; and that the district and teachers “jointly commit to defend the right to a free and safe learning environment to the extent permitted by law.” 

The next steps are for the school district staff to explain how much each of the provisions costs; where the money will come from; whether the funding can be sustained beyond one year; and what happens if paying for the contract forces employee layoffs or student program cuts.  The school district had earlier recommended eliminating preparation periods for teachers of Advanced Placement classes as one way to pay for part of the agreement but the teachers union disagreed so this teacher support remains.  

Barbara Oakley:

I’ve spent the last few years trying to answer that question. The result is a paper I’m polishing with my colleagues Kenzen Chen, Olav Schewe, and Terry Sejnowski. Its core argument is simple: the dominant framework in education—constructivism—is structured so that it can never be shown to be wrong. And a framework that can’t fail can’t improve.

The idea that can’t be wrong

Here’s the basic logic. Constructivism starts with a truism: learners construct knowledge in their own minds rather than having it beamed in through thought transference. Of course they do. No one disagrees with that.

But from this obvious point, a much bigger claim gets smuggled in: because learners construct knowledge, teachers should step back and let students discover things on their own. Less explanation. Less practice. More exploration.

Ashley Belanger:

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) accused Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of coercing tech companies into removing a wide range of content “to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations.”

It’s the second lawsuit alleging that Bondi and DHS officials are using regulatory power to pressure private platforms to suppress speech protected by the First Amendment. It follows a complaint from the developer of an app called ICEBlock, which Apple removed from the App Store in October. Officials aren’t rushing to resolve that case—last month, they requested more time to respond—so it may remain unclear until March what defense they plan to offer for the takedown demands.

That leaves community members who monitor ICE in a precarious situation, as critical resources could disappear at the department’s request with no warning.

Louise Perry:

But here’s my concern: As a citizen of both Britain and Australia, I’m all too aware that these countries don’t have anything like the First Amendment. Free-speech protections in both countries are faltering, not least because both governments feel threatened by the right-wing populist parties that have surged as a response to high levels of immigration in recent years.

We are seeing a censorious instinct bubbling up in politicians alarmed by these developments. One senior Australian politician has been explicit on this point: “We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States,” New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said last year while defending controversial hate-speech laws, “and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”

As I wrote for the Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, the British government has been disregarding free-speech norms, including several cases of British citizens’ being imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment for comments on social media that could plausibly be described as political dissent.

Wall Street Journal:

It’s hard to predict how the flurry of mid-decade political redistricting will affect the House partisan balance this election year. The betting now is that it might yield Republicans a one- or two-seat gain over what they might have won otherwise. The bigger deal is what happens after the next Census in 2030, and on current trend that’s bad news for Democrats.

If recent trends in population growth and migration continue, the Brennan Center projects that Texas would gain four seats, Florida three, and Georgia, Arizona, Utah, North Carolina and Idaho one each in the reapportionment after the 2030 Census. California would lose four, and New York two. Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would give up one apiece.

This would give Southern states 164 House seats, which is 19 more than in the 2000s. The Northeast would have 81 seats, down from 92. Progressives portray the South as backward, but then why are so many people moving there from blue states? Answer: a lower cost of living and taxes, higher-quality schools and abundant jobs, among other reasons.

Domestic migration (not including immigration from other countries) to Florida (22,517) significantly slowed this past year and was lower than to Alabama (23,358), Georgia (27,333), Tennessee (42,389) and South Carolina (66,622). The Brennan Center says Florida may gain only two seats if its slower pace of growth continues. Florida’s rising housing prices combined with higher mortgage rates may be slowing migration there.

Curriculum Insight Project

We recently received a question from an elementary teacher in Ohio. She noticed that her state has an approved reading curriculum list, but no writing curriculum list:

“Our district admin are telling us that the curriculum we use for writing from TpT because it’s explicit, systematic, and provides a gradual release approach is not on the state list, and therefore we will not be able to use it starting next year. When I look up approved writing curriculums on the ODE website, I am finding nothing about an approved list for writing. It seems that only big box curriculums that have a writing component would be allowed, even though ours (HMH Into Reading) has a terrible writing program. Looking for information.”

This question has a lot of layers, and each layer deserves a conversation.

We do, in fact, need to teach writing skills explicitly.

Some like to think that writing skills emerge naturally as reading skills develop, but studies show otherwise.

For example, a Norwegian study set out to test the hypothesis that “writing is caught,” and found (to their surprise) that simply increasing writing time in 1st & 2nd grades, without increasing writing instruction, did not result in improved writing quality, better handwriting fluency, or more positive attitudes toward writing. It turns out writing is indeed taught, not caught.

Joseph Murray

The first volley in the Left’s assault on VMI began with the 1996 Supreme Court case United States v. Virginia. The Clinton Administration had sued VMI, the last all-male public university in the country at the time, to admit women. Justice Scalia, the lone dissenter to the Court’s mandated integration of VMI (Justice Thomas recused himself), noted that the system of governance installed by our country’s forefathers “is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution.” At the end of his withering opinion, he remarked, “Today’s decision does not leave VMI without honor; no court opinion can do that. In an odd sort of way, it is precisely VMI’s attachment to such old-fashioned concepts as manly ‘honor’ that has made it, and the system it represents, the target of those who today succeed in abolishing public single-sex education.”

To supplement the Court’s draconian ruling, Bill Clinton’s Department of Defense warned VMI that if it went private to avoid the consequences of U.S. v. Virginia, all ROTC programs would be revoked from the school, preventing cadets from commissioning upon their graduation. The Institute capitulated.

In 2001, the next wave of the Left’s assault focused on the Institute’s religious observances, deep traditions that defined VMI since its inception in 1839. The entire Corps traditionally prayed grace together before supper every evening. The ACLU sued and won, and another jewel was taken from VMI’s crown.

Neal Morton:

Three years ago, Gale and 15 other math teachers in northern Utah volunteered for a pilot program to introduce data science at their high schools. They split a $20,000 state grant, each designing their own course to teach students how to gather, analyze and interpret massive streams of information that define and govern modern life. State education officials, meanwhile, hoped data science might help more graduates get work in Utah’s booming tech industry. They also wondered whether students who disengaged with traditional math might find relevance and interest in the subject again.

The Beehive State is one of a growing number of states that have expanded access to data science in schools, according to a 2025 report from Data Science 4 Everyone, a nonprofit group. Some 14 states offer pilot courses for students or train teachers in the subject, the report said, while an additional seven have formal standards that guide what students learn about data science and at what grades.

Fans of the field’s expansion into K-12 schools see data science as a stepping stone to good jobs in fields like health care, manufacturing and transportation, which may not require a college degree. Critics, however, worry the emphasis on computers and coding crowds out more traditional forms of math, like algebra and calculus, which often are necessary for admission to selective colleges and provide the building blocks for many high-paying jobs in science, engineering and mathematics fields.

Ah politics. Funny how things “work”.

Ben Jones:

Prior to being appointed to the bench, Judge Jones built an impressive record as an attorney in private practice, and then was legal counsel under three successive Superintendents at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the state’s education agency. 

Ben distinguished himself at DPI as the leader developing legal frameworks for providing education during the COVID crisis. He also oversaw efforts to hold teachers accountable when there was unacceptable behavior. And, Ben was the architect of the legal strategy to protect children’s rights, especially as the Trump Administration has tried to undermine protections secured through generations of advocacy – especially for LGBTQ+ kids.

Most local justices seem to be unopposed after being “appointed”. In this case, Jones [DPI Search] has two opponents on Tuesday’s primary ballot: Huma Ahsan and Nathan Wagner.

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Jill Underly:

Mark Treinen: (Cap Times Editor!)

I really can’t let this stand @DrJillUnderly @WISCTV_News3. The superintendent’s continued claims of DPI transparency and our reporting’s inaccuracy are problematic. Thread.

Much more on Jill Underly, here.

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Open Records! Wisconsin DPI’s Refusal to Explain $368,885 Secret Waterpark Meeting Risks Invalidation of New Exam Standards

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Tony Evers

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Roisin Michaux

Berkeley gender and race studies students were given the task of creating and editing Wikipedia pages and filling them with critical theory/queer propaganda instead of submitting final papers — for over a decade.

Abby Monteil:

Rodríguez’s Wikipedia assignments take place in partnership with Wiki Education, a nonprofit that works with university professors in the United States and Canada. The professors’ students add content to course-related Wikipedia articles, which, according to the organization’s website, helps them gain skills like “media literacy, writing and research development, and critical thinking,” while simultaneously filling Wikipedia “content gaps.”

“Wikipedia is a public-facing project — it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world,” Rodríguez told UC Berkeley News in a December interview. “In a political moment where these histories are actively being erased from public view, having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important.”

According to The Daily Californian, as of January 26, Rodríguez’s students have contributed over 300,000 edits and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. At the time of writing, their work has garnered a whopping 96 million-plus views. Her students’ topics run the gamut, touching upon local history like the resonance of queer life in San Francisco’s Chinatown, as well as more international focus areas (for instance: worldwide sex worker movements).

liemandt:

Across virtually every grade level (K-12) and subject, Alpha District’s average student is scoring better than 99% of individual students nationwide.

Mathematics: The “Crown Jewel”

Alpha’s math scores are the most significant outlier. In typical high-performing schools, growth slows as students reach older grades due to the “ceiling effect” (running out of test material). Alpha students, however, are showing accelerating growth even at the highest levels.

• Kindergarten: Mean RIT 177.2 (99th %ile). For context, the national norm for a 3rd grader in the fall is ~188. Alpha Kindergartners are performing nearly at a 3rd-grade level.
• Grade 5: Mean RIT 229.6 (98th %ile). This score is already higher than the national average for an 11th grader (norm ~226).
• Grade 11: Mean RIT 278.3 (99th %ile). This is an astronomical score. The typical “college readiness” benchmark is ~236. Alpha’s average is 42 points higher than the college-ready standard.

Reading & Language: Consistent Mastery

• Reading: Every single grade level from K-12 posted a mean RIT score at the 99th percentile.
• Grade 11 Reading: Mean RIT 245.8. This projects to a level of verbal complexity found in post-graduate coursework.
• Language Usage: Consistent 99th percentile performance from Grade 2 through Grade 11, indicating mastery of complex grammar and writing mechanics far above grade level.

San Francisco Chronicle:

But San Francisco’s strike did not occur in a vacuum. 

The California Teachers Association, the powerful statewide union representing teachers, has made no secret of the fact that it is coordinating a statewide campaign — dubbed “We Can’t Wait” — to align teacher strikes in more than two dozen districts, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Oakland to Berkeley to Sacramento to San Jose.

These strikes are intended to flex the union’s statewide power as it considers who to endorse in the California governor race and as it lobbies the state for more education funding.

California teachers deserve fair wages and benefits. But it’s worth noting they are already the best paid in the nation — despite the state in many instances having worse educational outcomes than poor states like Mississippi.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Wall Street Journal:

The California Teachers Association launched the operation a year ago with district unions that coordinated the expiration dates of their contracts. The goal is to make “a set of shared demands” at “the same time across the state,” the CTA said in a press release.

This week San Francisco and its 50,000 students paid the price. The United Educators of San Francisco went on strike Monday demanding a 9% pay raise over two years and health coverage fully paid for by the district, among other things. After keeping kids out school all week, on Friday they settled with the district for raises of 5% over two years and the full health benefits they demanded. Other staff will get pay hikes of 8.5%. The tentative agreement costs a reported $183 million.

San Francisco teacher salaries already start at about $80,000, and the average is $100,000. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget this year includes $149 billion for public schools, or about $27,418 per pupil. That’s up from $16,352 in 2019. Per pupil spending has grown about twice as fast as inflation owing to rich non-salary benefits. San Francisco teachers can retire at age 63 with a pension worth 85% of their final pay, plus free health benefits for life.

Jeff Eager:

Repeal of the tax hike in the referendum seems overwhelmingly likely. What remains uncertain is how the revolt will reshape Oregon’s political landscape. A successful repeal could fracture the progressive coalition that has dominated for decades and affect midterm election outcomes.

The horse-drawn delivery of petitions to Salem was more than a quaint photo-op. It symbolized a return to the days when citizens spoke up and held accountable a government too comfortable in its power. Oregon’s tax revolt isn’t only about dollars and cents. It is about reclaiming the state’s political soul from a ruling class that has forgotten who it serves.

Nan Miller

If you saw the 2004 Pixar hit The Incredibles, you might remember that Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob, captures in one line the reason our schools are failing. Resisting his wife’s plea that Bob attend his son’s “graduation” from fourth grade, Bob growls, “We keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!”

Today’s remake of that film would have Bob growl, “We keep creating new ways to celebrate illiteracy!” because the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is pressuring teachers and professors to drop the requirement that students learn to speak and write Standard American English.

Unfortunately, the NCTE is having some success.

That directive is a byproduct of the NCTE’s 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), whose delegates demanded that

Teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!

and that

Teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!

In short, delegates to that conference “DEMAND[ed] Black Linguistic Justice.”

Stanley Goldfarb

President Trump’s crusade against DEI has brought to light another crisis: the dramatic decline of medical education. For years, medical schools have emphasized discrimination and indoctrination at the expense of merit and excellence, to the detriment of patients. While the Trump administration has taken steps to right this wrong, a more far-reaching response is needed. For the sake of every American’s health, the president should reform the accreditation system for medical schools.

The crisis in medical education is directly connected to DEI. For years, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits M.D.-granting programs, required medical schools to establish programs “aimed at achieving diversity.”

Matthew Yglesias

Before the pandemic, KIPP DC was a middle-of-the-pack charter network. Its 11 campuses tested about 2,900 students, making it by far the largest charter operator in the District. Its proficiency rates — 37 percent in ELA, 40 percent in math — were roughly in line with the charter sector average and not far from DCPS. Some individual campuses, like Promise Academy (57 percent ELA, 78 percent math) and KEY Academy (46 percent ELA), were doing well. It was a functioning, if unremarkable, school network.

That network no longer exists, at least not in any recognizable form. KIPP DC’s ELA proficiency has fallen to 18.4 percent. Its math proficiency has fallen to 14.5 percent. Every single one of the ten campuses that can be compared across time declined. The worst-hit campus, Heights Academy, went from 44 percent ELA proficiency to 10 percent, and from 66 percent math proficiency to 11 percent. This isn’t a dip. It’s a collapse — and three years into post-COVID testing, there is essentially no sign of recovery.

The trajectory

The shape of the decline is striking. KIPP DC’s scores didn’t erode gradually. They fell off a cliff between the last pre-COVID testing year (2018-19) and the first post-COVID year (2022-23), dropping roughly 20 points in ELA and 27 points in math. And then they flatlined. From 2022-23 to 2024-25 — three full years of testing — ELA has moved from 17.6 to 18.4 percent. Math has moved from 13.0 to 14.5 percent. At this rate of recovery, KIPP DC would not return to its pre-COVID math proficiency level until the 2060s.

Alysia Finley:

More than half of high-school grads matriculate to college, even though only 35% of 12th graders score proficient in reading and 22% in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This suggests that many college students aren’t academically prepared or even inclined. But colleges ensure they graduate just the same by handing out A’s for no effort.

U.S. colleges awarded 2.2 million bachelor’s degrees last year, about twice as many as in 1990. That’s also double the number of associate’s degrees. Another 860,000 Americans last year received a master’s degree, nearly triple the 1990 figure. Nearly 40% of Americans with a bachelor’s now have an advanced degree.

Colleges have added graduate programs in fields like urban planning, sustainability and fine arts to rake in more federal dollars. Students had been allowed to take out unlimited federal loans for graduate studies until last summer’s GOP tax bill capped borrowing at $200,000 for professional degrees (like medicine or law) and $100,000 for others.

One result: Young college grads enter a labor market that is saturated with heavily credentialed workers. But they have less work experience and are often less productive than their older counterparts. Many skated through college by relying on AI to do their work. Take ChatGPT away, and they struggle to function.

Jill Tucker:

Q: Are they likely to veto the contract?

A: It depends. The district will have to show them they have a plan to pay for it. 

San Francisco schools have been in a fiscal crisis for several years, spending more than they get in revenue. For this school year, the school board cut $114 million in staffing and other spending from the budget, with more than $30 million in additional cuts needed for this next year — before the new teacher contract.

Q: Does the district have a plan?

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A: Yes, and no.

Su provided some idea of how the contract would be paid for, with the district’s $111 million emergency reserve spent significantly down and other one-time monies used to cover costs. Funds from a 2008 parcel tax, Measure A, will help pay for the health care benefits, but that expires in 2028. 

The union also agreed to pause paid sabbaticals, which will save about $5.4 million per year, but declined to give in on extra prep periods for Advanced Placement teachers and department heads, which would have added another $8 million to the district’s side of the equation.

The district and union are expected to sign a separate agreement to work on passing a renewal of the tax for the ongoing coverage. But if it doesn’t pass and without the revenue from the voter-approved measure, it’s unclear how the district would be able to pay the 100% family care, which is expected to cost $42.3 million starting in 2027-2028, and increase by more than 7% annually thereafter.

Wisconsin Assembly Bill 1034:

February 10, 2026 – Introduced by Representatives Dallman, Krug and Tittl, cosponsored by Senator LeMahieu. Referred to Committee on State Affairs.
1An Act to amend 20.285 (1) (gj); to create 20.285 (1) (cj), 20.285 (1) (ck),
220.285 (1) (cL) and 36.11 (12) of the statutes; relating to: name, image, and
3likeness rights for University of Wisconsin System student athletes;
4maintenance costs for University of Wisconsin–Madison intercollegiate
5athletic facilities; and making an appropriation.
Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau
Name, image, and likeness rights for UW student athletes

The bill specifies certain rights and duties related to name, image, and likeness of University of Wisconsin System student athletes and athletic programs.

Under the bill, the Board of Regents of the UW System (board) may enter into agreements providing for the compensation of student athletes for use of their name, image, or likeness. Neither the board nor a UW System institution (institution) may adopt or enforce a policy that prohibits 1) the use of a student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness when the student athlete is not engaged in official team activities; or 2) the student athlete from obtaining professional representation relating to the use of the student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness.

The bill requires a student athlete to disclose each third-party agreement for the use of the student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness before the student athlete enters into the agreement. A student athlete may not enter into an agreement for the use of the student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness if 1) any provision of the agreement conflicts with a provision of an agreement of the board or a board, institution, or intercollegiate athletic program policy; or 2) the compensation for the use of the student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness is provided in exchange for athletic performance or endorsement of certain products or activities, including tobacco products, alcohol beverages, gambling, banned athletic substances, an illegal substance or illegal activity, or an activity proscribed by the board.

Under the bill, the board may enter into an affiliation agreement to facilitate opportunities for student-athletes to be compensated for use of their name, image, or likeness rights and for management of agreements and program revenue for the benefit of student athletes and the board.

The bill specifies that any person’s activity that compensates a student athlete for the use of the student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness may not be considered an act on behalf of the board if the person is a separate legal entity from the board and the board does not own or control the person.

The bill includes an exemption from the open records law for records in the custody of the board, an institution, or other formally constituted subunit of the board relating to 1) any term or detail of an agreement or proposed agreement for the use of a student-athlete’s name, image, or likeness; or 2) generation, deployment, or allocation of revenue generated by an intercollegiate athletic program that are the subject of reasonable efforts under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of the records, when competitive reasons require confidentiality.

Debt service for athletic facilities maintenance costs
Under current law, a portion of program revenues that are appropriated for debt service on certain UW System facilities is allocated for the payment of 40 percent of the principal and interest costs for maintenance of UW–Madison intercollegiate athletic facilities. The bill eliminates that allocation and instead appropriates $14,600,000 annually in general purpose revenues to UW–Madison to finance debt service for such maintenance costs.

Additionally, the bill appropriates $200,000 annually in general purpose revenues to finance debt service for maintenance costs of the UW–Milwaukee Klotsche Center and $200,000 annually in general purpose revenues to finance debt service for maintenance costs of the UW–Green Bay soccer complex.
For further information see the state and local fiscal estimate, which will be printed as an appendix to this bill.
The people of the state of Wisconsin, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows:

Fired Football Coaches….

Winning programs aren’t perfect, but they win because they have people around the program doing things to help make the team as successful as possible before they even step foot on the field.

They solve problems instead of explaining them. They align schedules. They empower leadership. They plan ahead. They protect culture.

Losing programs are not victims of poor coaching. They do however, lack infrastructure. They lack shared expectations. They lack the willingness to make hard decisions early, and with conviction.

If you’ve worked in both environments, you recognize the difference immediately.