School Information System

Josh Centers:

The British cybernetician Stafford Beer (1926-2002) gave us the right lens for all of this. He compressed a lifetime of studying organizations into one blunt dictum: The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it intends, not what its mission statement declares. Beer wrote that there is no point in claiming that a system’s purpose is “to do what it constantly fails to do.”2Judge the system by its output.Subscribe

The stated purpose of American schooling is to teach children to read. Its output, sustained across decades and undisturbed by any reform or budget, is children who have been deliberately dumbed down.

Faced with falling comprehension, the system did not prescribe more books. It prescribed fewer. We need not claim that any committee of villains planned this. Nobody planned the death of Alexandria either. By Beer’s rule, intent does not enter into it: A system that reliably produces non-readers is a system for producing non-readers. That is what it does. That is its purpose.

You may find this bleak, but this cuts both ways.

Your household is also a system, and its purpose is also what it does. Not what you intend for your evenings, not the values written on the refrigerator, but what actually happens between dinner and bed. If the evening reliably produces two hours of screens, that is what your evening is for, whatever anyone meant by it. But if the evening reliably produces twenty minutes of a real book read aloud, you are running a system that produces readers, and no administrator, no curriculum, and no algorithm on earth can reach a child inside it.

Horowitch is proof herself, though she buries it near the end: Her father read aloud to her nearly every night, all the way through middle school. The writer announcing the end of the age of reading is the product of a house that produced a reader.

This is why we say that reading is rebellion. A free man is one who cannot be controlled. A slave is not allowed to read. The school system will go on doing what it does. The question in front of you is smaller than the system and far more powerful: What does your house do?

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Aaron Churchill

This June, the Texas State Board of Education adoptednew social studies standards and a required literature reading list for its public schools. These changes follow Texas’s 2024 release of its “Bluebonnet” curriculum, a package of instructional resources for elementary school, which sparked controversy over the inclusion of Bible stories in the reading materials.

Bible stories, canonical books, and “patriotic” social studies standards have each invited familiar charges of culture-war excess. Perhaps. But look again—and look at these three things together.

Taken together, these initiatives suggest something more consequential than conservative provocation. Texas appears to be developing a coherent theory of education: Knowledge is cumulative, literacy depends on background knowledge, and language proficiency has an unavoidable cultural valence, meaning that it reflects the knowledge a speech community shares and assumes its members possess. Furthermore, Texas’s theory of education assumes that public education is obligated to equip every child with the knowledge, language, habits, and skills needed for full and effective participation in America’s civic, cultural, and economic life.

Texas may not have gotten every curricular choice right. But it appears to know what it thinks education is for. That alone distinguishes it from much of American schooling.

Start with the state’s new social studies standards. Their most striking feature is not their ideological orientation but their specificity and architecture. In the early grades, children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions. Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution. The standards explicitly call for concepts to be embedded in stories and historical content in order to “create schema for understanding.”

This is a significant departure from the way American education often thinks about social studies—and education more broadly. For decades, schools have been encouraged to focus on skills: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, collaboration, and, in literacy, comprehension strategies such as finding the main idea, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose. The tacit assumption is that the particular content used to practice these skills is negotiable and interchangeable.

Montgomery Brea:

I am a lifelong, committed Democrat. I have voted for and donated to this party consistently, including to Gov. Tim Walz. It is precisely because of that loyalty that I am writing this — not out of partisan opportunism, but out of genuine anger.

On June 10, the Minnesota Board of Pardons — Gov. Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — voted to erase the felony sexual assault conviction of Tou Lue Vang, a man who raped a 10-year-old child more than 20 years ago. Vang had admitted to sexually abusing the girl over roughly two years, and at one point tried to justify it by invoking cultural norms in Thailand, where he was born in a refugee camp. The pardon came only after Vang faced imminent deportation, having been detained by ICE during a recent enforcement operation. There is no immigration policy, no political calculation and no procedural justification that makes this acceptable.

What has disgusted me even more than the pardon itself is watching fellow Democrats rush to justify it — not as a hard call, but as an act of compassion, framing it as sparing a family from separation. I understand the emotional pull of that argument. Vang has a wife and six children. But a man does not get to invoke the family he built while free to argue his way out of the consequences of raping a child. That argument should never have carried the day, and it should not be carrying water for Democrats now.

María García-Garrido:

In this preregistered systematic review, we identified 198 studies, of which 114 provided sufficient quantitative data for meta-analysis. Across these studies, the Montessori method was associated with nominally positive and conventionally large, pooled effects on learning outcomes in pretest–posttest and posttest-only designs. However, these estimates were characterized by extreme between-study heterogeneity, substantial small-study effects, and clear indications of publication bias, which substantially limited their robustness and interpretability. Methodological limitations, including inconsistent reporting of implementation fidelity, low transparency, and limited experimental control, further constrained the generalizability of the findings. By combining design-sensitive modeling, multimethod bias diagnostics, and an operational framework for Montessori fidelity, this review advances a metascientific perspective on the credibility of evidence in education research. Overall, the results indicate that the large average effects reported in the literature are largely attributable to structural weaknesses of the evidence base rather than to robust educational impacts, underscoring the need for greater methodological rigor, preregistration, and open data to strengthen cumulative knowledge about Montessori education.

Neetu Arnold:

While criticisms of gifted education are not new, they have grown increasingly absurd. In New York, writer Katie Arnold-Ratliff, for example, recently questioned whether student giftedness was a myth. She originallytried to argue that gifted programs were pointless because “only 12.3 percent” of gifted students in a study “reached a level of eminence” by age 50, meaning “88 percent never” reached extraordinary levels of success such as becoming Fortune 500 executives or award-winning journalists.

Arnold-Ratliff’s article, however, represents the last gasp of a failed experiment. Attempts to replace gifted and talented programs with more “equitable” initiatives have proved damaging to both high-achieving kids and students struggling academically. Thankfully, some school districts are starting to reverse course.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

Jill Barshay:

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them.

This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.

To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.

Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.

After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge. 

Colin Schultz; Updated by Meilan Solly:

Despite its nearly 1,000-year  history, Oxford in many way feels like a product of our time. You can still enroll at the English university. You can still attend Merton College.

The Aztec civilization of central Mexico, on the other hand, feels anchored in the more distant past. Archaeologists dig up Aztec ruins, and  museums stage exhibitions about the Mexica, as the Mesoamerican people are also known. But the dawn of the Aztec civilization, marked by the founding of the city of Tenochtitlán at Lake Texcoco—now Mexico City—didn’t arrive until 1325, 229 years after teaching began at Oxford. A 1428 alliance between Tenochtitlán and its neighboring states of Texcoco and Tlacopan cemented the Mexica’s dominance, giving rise to the Aztec Empire.

Spanish forces and their Indigenous allies captured Tenochtitlán in 1521, bringing the Aztec Empire’s reign to a close after less than a century. The White House, whose cornerstone was laid in 1792, has been standing longer than the Aztecs presided over their capital.

This comparison isn’t intended to pit civilizations against each other. But it offers an interesting way of thinking about just how skewed our understanding of history really is. Most people have timelines in their heads that are distorted and compressed, and they don’t always match up with reality.

Julie’s R Cartwright:

Deeper Dive.

Carolyn Gorman:

The percentage of students with disabilities is inversely related to how elite the higher education setting is.

Obviously something is wrong with what’s happening here.

Tyler Cowen:

How does socialism hurt the young? More than a century of experience should make the answer obvious. The record of capitalist democracies is strong, whereas socialist countries such as Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea have floundered economically and failed to protect individual rights.

Yet a rising generation of Americans has managed to unlearn this lesson, and are backing a spate of candidates who will reinject socialist ideas into the political mainstream. Antipathy toward Israel and so-called “oligarchs” are the animating issues of these campaigns. But once elected, these voters and candidates will push the Democratic Party to enact programs such as Medicare for All, adding a thick layer of centralization and redistribution to the top of the U.S. economy. In the long run, the brunt of this economic damage won’t be borne by the billionaires who are so often the targets of socialist attacks. Instead, it will fall on the young enthusiasts of socialism who are driving the trend.

Nowhere is the risk of socialist harm to the young clearer than in healthcare—the very issue on which so many progressive voters are demanding radical reforms. That’s because we are currently in a boom of medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and when radical innovation is emerging, capitalist economies outperform socialist ones by even more than usual. This was true for the information technology revolutions of the 1980s, when America outpaced the Soviet Union, and it is proving true today as healthcare becomes more about innovation, AI, and information technology.

Marble:

The open map of primary school, built from the US and UK curriculums.

1590 concepts and 3221 prerequisite links, from first words to algebra. Every link says what must come first, and why. Tap any dot to see everything a learner must master before it.

Ford Fischer

A mini-documentary on a month-long argument over what it means to be a “patriot” in Trump’s America

“What is a patriot? As America reached its 250th birthday, celebrated by President Trump’s Freedom 250 events in Washington DC, this question could be answered very differently, depending on who you asked. President Trump kicked off celebrations with a UFC fight at the White House on June 14th, which also happened to be his 80th birthday …

As attendees waited in line for the event on the White House’s South Front, protesters against the administration rallied outside.” — Ford Fischer

Rose Horowitch

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Kristof:

It starts in your teens, not your twenties.
Nobody is coming to give you permission – it was already given the day a good AI model became free – the only question now is whether you use it or wait for a stamp that no longer means anything.

1. Start now, not after graduation. Read widely, argue with people smarter than you, learn how three or four different fields actually work, and build something that runs – all of it, at the same time, starting at fifteen or sixteen. Your portfolio is what you built, what you shipped, and it’s the range of what you understand and who you’ve tested your thinking against.
2. Treat knowledge as something you accumulate through work and dialogue, not attendance. Seek out people who disagree with you, who know things you don’t, who come from a different field or a different country. A real education is built in conversation and contested in argument or against reality – a lecture hall gives you neither.
3. Choose mentors who have skin in the game over teachers who don’t. Find the people who ship — engineers, founders, builders — and apprentice yourself to them, formally or not. A professor who has never had a bridge fall or a company fail has nothing to teach you about consequence.

Pat Garrett:

The News: A new report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the MacIver Institute finds that a longstanding Wisconsin statute conflicts with the Wisconsin Constitution’s “secret ballot” guarantee. As a result, WILL and MacIver are calling for the Wisconsin Legislature to amend the law. 

The Quote: WILL Associate Counsel, Nathalie Burmeister, stated, “We have serious concerns that enforcing this statute at central count locations could violate voters’ right to a ‘secret ballot.’  We are hopeful the Legislature will amend the law, and that WEC will work with local election officials to protect the right of all voters to have the way they voted kept private.”  

CEO of the MacIver Institute, Annette Olson, stated, “Voter confidence in elections is critical in securing and preserving freedom in Wisconsin and America. Protecting the secret ballot should be everyone’s priority.” 

The Issue: Under Wis. Stat. § 7.52(3), election officials in municipalities that use central count must put the poll list number of each voter who casts an absentee ballot on the back of the ballot. The “poll list” is a list maintained by election officials in which each voter is given a unique number, and the voter’s name is recorded on the list when their vote is cast. The poll list is a public record. As a result, someone could easily find out that John Doe was voter #452 on the poll list in the last election. 

Brandon L. Wright:

The newest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long-Term Trend assessmentsoffer sharply different pictures, depending on students’ age and where they fall in the achievement distribution (see Figure 1 below).

Among nine-year-olds, there is some welcome news. Scores rose four points in both reading and math since 2022, with the gains concentrated among lower-performing students. The gap between the top and bottom of the distribution also narrowed for the right reason: Students at the bottom improved, rather than those at the top declining further.

These gains are genuinely encouraging and deserve to be treated as such. There were already signs of deterioration among lower-performing students before the pandemic, and Covid compounded those problems enormously. Four-point increases do not repair all the damage, of course, but they are substantial, statistically significant, and a welcome indication that an academic recovery is underway for some who badly need it.

Less encouraging is what happened to scores for students near the top of the distribution, which showed no statistically significant changes between 2022 and 2025. This after scores for the top students declined only slightly between 2020 and 2022 (which itself was remarkable, given the closures and other disruptions of the pandemic).

The basic story is simpler than the statistics make it sound. Scores for high-performing nine-year-olds fell much less than those for their lower-performing peers during the pandemic, but they have barely rebounded. While students further down the distribution made sizable gains, those at the top remained in roughly the same place.

Jerry Brown

That tension sits at the heart of how California has tried to address school accountability. For decades, the prevailing approach was blunt: reduce school quality to a single standardized test score, rank schools accordingly, then act on the results. The problems with this approach were well-documented. 

To put it plainly, California’s old approach punished schools serving the highest-need communities without accounting for the complexity of the challenges they faced.

We chose a different path when the state launched the California School Dashboard in 2017. The dashboard was designed to give families and educators a more complete picture of how schools are serving students. It incorporates a range of measures, not just academic performance. The explicit design principle was that no single data point can fully capture a school’s impact on students. 

Data matters, but nuance, context and judgment matter, too. The dashboard was never intended to serve as a cudgel for local school districts to kill competition and punish parents and students. That is what makes the situation at Aspire Golden State Preparatory Academy so troubling.

Aspire Golden State Prep, founded in 2008, is a public charter school in East Oakland serving a predominantly low-income community of color, like the two charter schools I founded in Oakland in the early aughts when I was mayor. Golden State Prep’s students enroll in sixth grade performing three years below grade level, but by graduation they are outperforming their peers at other schools.

As a result, it has one of Oakland’s highest high school graduation rates. It is a school that, by most accounts, is doing meaningful work in a community where educational options are scarce and the consequences of getting this wrong fall hardest on the kids who can least afford it.

Rich Witzel:

Chicago Public Schools followed Chicago Teachers Union’s staffing-first approach. Now the district faces cuts.

After years of adding staff and expanding programs while enrollment declined, buildings sat underused andacademic results remained weak, Chicago Public Schools proposes eliminating about 120 assistant principal positions as it faces a projected budget deficitof $732.5 million.

CPS has been pushed in this direction by the Chicago Teachers Union. Recent contracts increasingly go beyond traditional issues such as wages and basic working conditions, with agreements including costly, personnel-heavy initiatives such as sustainable community schools.

Those demands increase costs and reduce flexibility, making it harder for CPS to match spending to enrollment, school use and student outcomes.

Sustainable community schools show the weakness of this approach. The original eight high schools have seen enrollment fall 25% since 2018, compared with an 8% decline among CPS high schools overall. Those eight schools also posted lower academic proficiency rates, higher absenteeism and higher per-student spending than district averages.

In other words, the CTU is pushing CPS toward a model that spends more without delivering better results.

——

Chicago’s pension debt rose by approximately $500 million in 2025, according to the city’s audited annual financial report, with the amount the city owes to its four pension funds hitting $36.4 billion. @wttw

Linda Taaffe

The classroom guards, symbolic armbands and secret salutes carried out by members of an elite student movement at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto may have ended decades ago, but that brief, ominous week in April 1967 when a history lesson took an unexpected turn continues to have worldwide impact on the eve of its 50th anniversary.

The Third Wave began as an experiment in the classroom of first-year history teacher Ron Jones to simulate fascism in World War II and demonstrate to skeptical students how the Nazi Party rose to power. Over five days, the movement took on a life of its own as it spread from the 30 sophomores in Jones’ homeroom class to more than 200 students from all three high schools in the Palo Alto school district eager to pledge allegiance to a social movement that promised acceptance and reward to those who obediently followed its rigid rules.

“It started out as a fun game with the most popular teacher at school,” said Mark Hancock, one of the students in Jones’ Contemporary World History homeroom class. “He told us, ‘If you’re an active participant, I’ll give you an A; if you just go along with it, I’ll give you a C; if you try a revolution, I’ll give you an F, but if your revolution succeeds, I’ll give you an A.’

“I was a mischievous 15-year-old, and I remember right away, I wanted to be one of those revolutionaries who got an A. … But it went well beyond (grades) pretty quickly, and at the end, I was scared to death.”

——-

More.

Greg Fournier:

I have four grandchildren, three of whom have been diagnosed with learning disabilities. At different times, they have had Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), legally binding documents under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or 504 plans, which are rooted in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Both documents specify the accommodations students must be given to help them learn.

I have watched my daughters fight like tiger moms to get their kids the services they deserve by law. I have also watched with dismay as my granddaughter was treated badly by the Wake County, NC, public school system, despite her disabilities. (She is now enrolled in a private school, where she is flourishing.)

Most of us have encountered parents who were fierce advocates for getting their children accommodations in school. But as is the case with my upper-middle-class daughters, success in getting accommodations is often affected by the class and education background of parents who are seeking services, a disparity that is likely exacerbated by differences in who gets IEPs and who gets 504 plans.

The more widely used IEP is an entitlement program that details procedures and processes to provide a “free and appropriate public education.” In contrast, 504 plans are based in anti-discrimination laws and do not have the same complex requirements and safeguards as IEPs, giving schools far more discretion in granting 504 plans compared to IEPs. In turn, 504 plans are the result of often intense negotiations involving school officials, evaluators, and parents, and data consistently show that low-income students are more likely to have IEPs while more advantaged students have 504 plans. Finally, students in colleges and universities can use their high school IEPs or 504 plans to argue for accommodations in college.

Lex:

The degree is done 100% remotely.

It’s hosted on Coursera – that’s where you watch the lectures, and where they host the class resources, such as lab notebooks and quizzes. Coursera also provides forums to chat with teaching staff (which are rarely used), and this is how you upload your assignments.

The program is run by the University of London Worldwide, its distance-learning arm. And Goldsmiths, University of London, marks the assignments and exams.

Nate Anderson:

Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don’t need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can’t be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?

A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.

Record scores

A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the recent situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning. And we know all this because the blind economics professor at the center of it all, Roberto Serrano, is not letting it go.

In just the last week, Serrano—who was born in Spain—has told his story to El Paísand Inside Higher Ed, which have both run significant pieces on the scandal.

The story that Serrano told them begins in December 2025, when a gunman attacked Brown’s campus and killed two people, including one who had recently introduced herself to Serrano.

Chad Aldeman:

If a district has low reading scores and uses instructional practices that are inconsistent with what has been well documented about how children learn to read, the case is clear for switching to an evidence-based science of reading approach.

But Lexington’s young readers are not struggling. They have relatively strong test scores. So, perhaps not surprisingly, the prospect of being forced to change their literacy practices hasn’t sat well with Lexington’s leaders.

Famously, Lexington is the place where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired. Today, it’s a wealthy suburb about 10 miles outside of Boston. Its residentsare extremely well-educated — 84% have a bachelor’s degree or higher — and the median price for purchasing a house is $1.2 million.

As state legislators debated the science of reading bill, Lexington Public Schools attracted attention because it continued to use literacy materials associated with (much-maligned) balanced literacy approaches, including Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study program. (The district uses a supplemental program called Wilson Fundations in an attempt to fill in gaps.) The superintendent has been an outspoken critic of the state legislature’s efforts.

Perhaps in spite of its curricular choice, and thanks in part to the families it serves, Lexington’s students score pretty well on state tests. Last year, 70% of its third graders scored proficient in reading, compared with 42% statewide. Lexington doesn’t have a lot of poor kids, but its low-income third graders outperformed their peers statewide (44% versus 24%). Only 25% of Lexington’s children with disabilities reached the same bar, but even so, that was higher than the statewide average of 14%.

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Carl Hendrick:

In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it “children of the magenta line,” after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem. 

VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the

sea. 

The thing I find really fascinating about this story and why I think it has so much import for learning and AI is that his core diagnosis was that the autopilot was in fact, not the problem. The truth is that automated function in planes saves far more lives than it endangers and I think the same will be true of self-driving cars. (I have no interest in the hackneyed claim that the machines are bad and the humans good. The machines are, on the whole, magnificent I think). The thing I think is so interesting is that when faced with an emergency, the pilots reached instinctively for more automation not less, when the right thing to do was often to drop down a level and fly. So the danger is not automation itself but over-dependency on automation and this is quite obviously what happens when we give novice learners unfettered access to chatbots. 

But actually its worse than that because those pilots had already internalised lots of organised knowledge. What is happening now for many students is worse because they dont even know what they dont know. To understand why this is the case, we need to go back and look at some misguided ideas about learning. 

One of the dominant concepts of learning since the 1970s has been the idea that facts and internalised knowledge is the lowest rung on the ladder of learning, the part we can safely externalise, because you can always look it up (see Bloom’s taxonomy). Teach the transferable skills, ie the critical thinking, the questioning, the analysing, and let the facts take care of themselves; after all, they are only a search away, and half of them will be out of date within five years in any case. It is a seductive picture, and it is almost exactly wrong. In fact, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, it’s not even wrong.

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Ben Somers:

Alpha School made a groundbreaking change to how we teach kids academics that every school should copy

They started A/B testing every piece of learning material to give kids the most effective materials for every topic

To accomplish this, they needed to divorce mastery tracking from curriculum. They needed to build a “routing” layer that has independent diagnostics/assessment in order to be able to run these A/B tests

We’re taking this one step farther at Recess; our product has a recursive/self-improving loop similar to how tiktok works.

Adam Singer

I’ve been writing about the rot in higher education for a while now. In Half of Social Science Falls Apart Under Scrutiny, I covered how a massive seven-year DARPA-funded study found only half of social science papers hold up when tested, a consequence of the ideological monoculture I documented in Academia Is Exactly as Biased as You Think. In We Stopped Teaching the Story of Prosperity, I argued universities have quietly abandoned the intellectual tradition that built the modern world. And in The End of America’s Marxist Era, I traced how postmodern Marxist ideology, dressed up in corporate-approved buzzwords, embedded itself in American institutions. We’ve debated and discussed these previous topics, but taken together there’s a clear story our universities are ideologically captured. And if you still want to debate it’s not a big deal, at the very least you can acknowledge universities have failed to provide a bulwark in the broader culture against things we’re seeing play out now.

In our latest piece of evidence, Stanford goes and votes, nearly unanimously, to expand a mandatory freshman curriculum that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve been describing. Today I want to go into that briefly and hope people will read with an open mind, because I think it’s important we get everyone on the same page with this problem so it can be clarified and discussed.

A courageous Stanford accounting professor, Iván Marinovic, brought actual diversity of thought to his school by voting no to a new curriculum and wrote about it in the Stanford Daily. His piece is worth reading in full, but we’ll go through just a bit of it. The mandatory course Why College? is meant to introduce students to liberal education and the good life. It assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across an entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and “indigenous ways of knowing.” That’s an 11-to-1 ratio of, I would argue, ideas meant to undermine Western values and ideas that you and I would find honorable. 

And it’s not like the canonical 45 pages are a greatest hits collection. Students get 8 pages of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a short Epicurus and Seneca selection, and a single Nietzsche aphorism. As Marinovic puts it: “There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom, none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.”

Kelly Meyerhofer:

It’s the latest in a recent trend of holdover appointees, and was initially used by Republicans to prevent Evers from replacing their picks on state boards.

Democrats blasted the situation then but could now be taking a page from the same playbook, aided by a pair of state Supreme Court decisions that essentially renders board terms meaningless.

It began with Fred Prehn, who was appointed to the Natural Resources Board in 2015 by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Prehn disregarded his term’s 2021 expiration date to prevent a Democratic majority from forming on the board. He served about two years beyond his term, casting the deciding vote to increase the quota for the state’s wolf hunt and to scrap limits of so-called forever chemicals in groundwater.

The state Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote by conservative justices, ruled political appointees can remain in their posts until the Senate confirms their successor because the expiration of a term doesn’t in itself create a vacancy. Two of the board’s four conservative members had ties to Walker.

Prehn paved the way for three Walker appointees on the state Technical College System board to serve for nearly two years beyond their terms. Their decisions to stay were less consequential than Prehn’s because the overwhelming majority of the Technical College System Board’s votes were unanimous.

In 2025, a state Supreme Court controlled by liberal justices ruled the leader of Wisconsin’s elections agency may stay in her role until the bipartisan commission chooses to replace her or she resigns. That’s allowed the leader, Megan Wolfe, to serve indefinitely.

Guru Madhavan

In 1839, J.M.W. Turner painted The Fighting Temeraire. The old warship, once a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, glides like a ghost across the canvas, towed by a small steam tug belching smoke on its final voyage to the ship-breakers. The image shows a clear moment of change: sail giving way to steam, and with it, a major shift in power. The ship relied on timber, rope, canvas, and Britain’s seafaring towns. The tug depended on coal mines and iron foundries that supplied machine shops in the Midlands. Turner showed the tension of this time, when new technology changed who held power.

By Turner’s time, the United States had already defeated Britain’s navy in two wars—one for liberty on land, another for freedom of the seas. The 13 colonies used new technology in creative ways to win their freedom, and by keeping up with innovation, they managed to defend their freedom. Now, as the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, we can ask: What does it really mean for a country to be independent? 

We tend to focus on how nations and individuals defend freedom but rarely turn that focus to the tools and systems that sustain freedom. Declaring independence is only the beginning: Independence must still be engineered.

Forging freedom

Long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775, Britain had drawn the lines of conflict through technology. The Wool Act of 1699 choked colonial textile exports. The Hat Act of 1732 crushed local hat-making. The Iron Act of 1750 forbade finished iron goods. Each statute tightened the knot: Colonial capability existed only at Britain’s discretion. The Boston Tea Party may have been a loud response, but resistance also took subtler, more empowering forms. At a 1769 Virginia ball, more than a hundred women arrived in homespun gowns. Every thread was defiance.

When war came, everyday tradespeople pivoted to the fight. Farmers turned plowshares into gun barrels, while clockmakers turned their precision skills to making firing mechanisms. By 1777, two weapons production models had emerged—centralized sites like the Springfield Armory that could produce high-quality guns in large quantities, and household workshops that were more agile and could meet local needs. In parallel, the new nation developed an equally important source of supplies and support: France sent gunpowder and loans and eventually opened a second naval front in 1781, which proved as decisive as any weapon.

WYSR:

A frontier model is the compression of a massive amount of training data into numerical weights. The combined collection of books, forums, code repositories, manuals, papers, chat logs, transcripts, court cases, essays, comment sections, articles, tutorials, and every errant thought scrapeable by the frontier labs’ army of spiders crawling across the internet and beyond is staggering. 

In a way, its incomprehensibility is almost like psychic armor. It’s too big to understand directly.

Consider a wild river delta. As water runs from highlands to the sea, it erodes the land it travels through and carries the debris downstream as sediment. Silt, sand, clay, and all manner of organic material, scoured from every inch of tributary and riverbank, from plowed fields to rugged hillsides, end up aggregated in the delta. So does the richness of every life the river supports along the way. A continental watershed, swirling, accumulating, and ultimately settling at its terminus. The vast volume of disparate material combines in the delta to form something lush, strange, and alive.

And what is the sum of all human knowledge if not this?

Every cluster of letters scraped from the pages of history (the literal tokens an AI model ingests) is a single grain of silt deposited by the ever-flowing river of man’s exploration. Pile enough grains and you understand the movement of the stars. Stare long enough at the mud and you see the structures of logic itself. The large language model’s transubstantiation of alluvial soil into answers is the grand harvest of the society that grew it.

But subtract the dirt and there is no delta.

Subtract the corpus and there is no harvest. 

There is nothing.

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

deja vu.

I “prompted” grok, gemini and Claude for summaries of this report.

Grok’s intro plug:

(The study) compares traditional sequences with reform programs (such as Core-Plus) using data from over 17,000 students and a real Wisconsin high school that switched curricula. The summary includes clear data tables, placement outcomes, and practical implications for parents and educators.Beautifully designed, fully responsive, and easy to read on any device.

Claude’s intro plug:

“A University of Wisconsin study of over 17,000 incoming students found that students from traditional high school math sequences placed into more advanced college math courses than students from reform curricula like Core-Plus, even after controlling for whether they’d taken calculus. Taking calculus in high school — regardless of curriculum — was linked to the single biggest jump in placement scores. Encouragingly, the placement test itself showed no meaningful bias between curriculum types. Read the full study and a 10-year case study of one district’s curriculum transition: [link]”

Gemini’s intro plug:

How does your high school’s math track affect college success? A UW Center for Placement Testing study shows Traditional tracks outperform Reform tracks by 7-8% on college exams, nearly doubling top calculus placements. Yet, the placement test itself is proven completely unbiased. Read the full math readiness report here: [Insert Your Link]

—–

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

Katy Purviance:

A researcher at Williams College set out to study variations in curiosity across elementary school classrooms. She had to abandon the study. The problem was not funding or methodology. As researcher Susan Engel later noted, there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms she visited that there was nothing to measure. In one classroom, she witnessed a teacher respond to a visibly curious child this way: “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.”

Read that sentence with fresh eyes. A child’s genuine question was treated as an interruption to learning. The institution designed to cultivate the mind had decided, in that moment, that curiosity was a liability.

Before starting school, children ask their parents an average of 100 questions per day (Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question, 2014). In school, the rate drops to fewer than one question every two hours. When a teacher-librarian introduced open questioning exercises across grade levels, kindergartners generated questions so quickly they could not write them all down. By fifth grade, many students could not produce a single question to ask. Susan Engel documented a fifth-grade classroom where two full hours passed without one student asking anything at all.

A mind that arrived overflowing with questions has learned, systematically, to keep them to itself.

Erin Gretzinger:

“Right now going to work feels like suffering,” one staff member wrote in response to a school climate survey. “Staff are walking on eggshells at school every day,” another said. “Check on Van Hise staff,” a third said. “We are not okay.”

The responses pointed to the school’s principal, Rebecca Stein, as the root of their concerns — echoing public complaints from a group of parents over the last school year.

In the 2025-26 school year, the parents submitted a formal complaint to the Madison Metropolitan School District about Stein’s leadership. From the beginning of Stein’s tenure in the 2023-24 school year, parents previously told the Cap Times as well, they’d heard concerns from teachers about micromanaging and bullying under Stein.

However, the district found Stein didn’t violate any policies and concluded the school’s culture challenges predated Stein’s tenure, according to messages sent to families from Deputy Superintendent TJ McCray that were shared with the Cap Times.

“The review illuminated a deeply complex situation, identifying an unsustainable school climate marked by erosion of trust and significant communication breakdowns across the community that existed prior to the current leadership,” McCray wrote in a May email.

———

Van Hise has long been one of the taxpayer funded Madison K-12 System’s least diverse schools (16.7% “economically disadvantaged” – Wisconsin DPI). Curiously, we taxpayers expanded it a few years ago, despite space in other schools…..

27.3% of Van Hise’s 4k to 3rd grade students (71) scored below 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Nicole Pollack:

The school’s football team played just one of its five home games at the field last year, head football coach Jesse Norris said. The team played two games at Breese Stevens Field and two games at other high schools.

Norris said the football team’s successes have come in spite of its ever-changing venue, and he believes upgrading the field will make the team even better. For high school athletes, he said, “having the consistency of a home is key.”

“Athletics are one of the many ways we fulfill our Catholic Dominican mission of educating the whole person,” Edgewood High School president Kevin Rea said in an email. The school, Rea added, seeks to educate students “academically, physically, socially, and spiritually,” and sports bring the community together.

Edgewood wants to build new bleachers that can seat 1,200, with a press box at the top and coaching offices, team and multipurpose rooms and trainer space below. The school’s plans also call for a concession stand, bathrooms, storage sheds, EMS access and a new sound system. Notably, the plans don’t include field lights.

Ann Althouse summary

I’m less interested in the random oysterman than I am in the Democratic Party leadership, what they were up to, and what they are doing now. It’s so much like the story of Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2024. They let the primary process occur, propped the guy up while democracy was in play, let the people expend their power to choose, and then and only then a fatal defect got exposed, and the people’s choice had to withdraw himself. The Party got to insert their candidate, someone who never had to face the test of the primary. I want to hold the Party responsible for what it did. Was it just idiotically searching around for a “masculine” man and infatuated with his oysters? Did it cynically select him and think the people don’t care about sexual misdeeds anymore — the #MeToo era is over and it’s time to go for those “manosphere” votes?

——-

Alex Berenson:

This may get very ugly for @nytimes

A victim of sexual misconduct (at a minimum) by Graham Platner explains in detail how she provided the Times the evidence it could have used to corroborate her story – and how the Times ignored it

This is deep journalistic malfeasance

——-

Mary Katherine Ham:

Former Gov. Ralph Northam was appointed to a college board by Gov. Abigail Spanberger this year after refusing to resign in 2019 in the face of party-wide demands in the wake of a blackface/Klan hood picture scandal and another admitted blackface incident. Everyone just shut up and he served a full term. Now, one of the reasons they didn’t force him out is bc their next two in the line of succession were an AG, who also had a blackface scandal, and a Lt. Gov. named Justin Fairfax who had faced sexual assault allegations and fast-forward, just recently murdered his wife. So, maybe Ds in Maine can find someone besides Platner who doesn’t have a racist pic or tattoo and/or violent history with women, but their record thus far not great, and the Virginia Dems don’t offer a template for that.

——-

“You said: He’s your kind of man.” – Elizabeth Warren

Platner “represented masculinity” for the Democrats:

let them eat cake

——-

David Blaska:

Watch for guilty pleasure the Nurse Ratched of progressive politics singing a political torch song for the burley, tatted-up ex-Marine as Her Kind of Man. Like a 1940s bobbysoxer, Sen. Warren goes all weak in the knees.

———-

Jake Altman:

How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America? In the wake of a series of DSA victories in New York City, Jonathan Chait raised the alarm in The Atlantic, writing that as the group has risen in power, it has also grown “more hostile to the [Democratic] party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.” Long-time DSA members, including former staff member and thought leader David Duhalde and socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson, pushed back, dismissing Chait as someone who doesn’t know or understand the DSA.

Corrinne Hess:

In late 2025, legislative Republicans introduced a bill to strengthen math education for Wisconsin’s youngest students. 

The plan would have required schools to implement consistent math assessments and intervention plans for students who fell behind in math — similar to the sweeping reading legislation known as Act 20 passed in 2023. 

The bill didn’t make it out of committee.

——-

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

Jon Marcus:

Glass doors lead to the light-filled lobby of a redbrick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy quad, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified about their faith.

Original artwork hangs on the walls on the way to the music department, chaplain’s office and recital hall, along with brass “leaves” listing the names of past financial boosters formed into the shape of a tree.

This visit to Trinity Christian College, in Palos Heights, Illinois, isn’t real. It’s virtual, captured just before the college closed in May so students and alumni could remember the campus, which is being sold off to repay more than $26 million worth of debt and other liabilities. 

“Instead of being wiped off the map, this is a way to honor the legacy” of the college, said Shalom Nwaokolo, who, with his wife, Ashley, is creating the permanent digital preservation of it. 

Memorializing colleges and universities in virtual reality is among the more sentimental responses to the accelerating pace at which they’re closing and projected to close. 

So pronounced has this trend become, however, that it’s also resulting in more consequential steps that speak to the intensifying threat of plummeting enrollments, rising debt and other problems.

Tom Tugenhadt

In 2024, for the first time in more than a century, governing parties in every developed country lost vote share. The White House changed residents, as did 10 Downing Street. President Emmanuel Macron’s group took a pounding in France, and Germany’s governing coalition collapsed. Even in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s support ebbed. From country to country, the complaint often was the same: You just don’t deliver.

This failure is visible in the U.S., where Congress spent $42 billion in 2021 to wire rural America for broadband. Four and a half years later, the first two towers—one in Nebraska and one in Louisiana—went live. Last year it was reported that a multibillion-dollar program for electric-vehicle chargers, also started in 2021, had led to only a few hundred being installed. California’s high-speed rail, approved by voters in 2008, has no trains in service and only one remote segment under construction.

Matthew Yglesias:

I did a panel with Adam Gray and Tom Suozzi at WelcomeFest where they outlined their Promise to America, an effort to put some meat on the bones of the general idea of moderation. One of the things they say is “we are capitalist, not socialist,” which is definitely a sentiment that I agree with. 

Suozzi said on the panel, very correctly, that market economies have dramatically outperformed the competition and delivered, while not perfect societies, certainly the greatest levels of material prosperity that we see anywhere on Earth. 

This is all totally correct, but I think that people who know that it’s correct need to think more about why, despite its correctness, it has become so unfashionable for young people to embrace capitalism. 

I think one really important reason is that if you look at what people spend money on, you know housing and health care are the two most important sectors by far. Young people consume far below-average amounts of health care, though, meaning that their consumption is really dominated by housing. A large share of the population consumes housing in the form of renting a home from themselves, so they are somewhat insulated from the ups and downs of the housing market. 

But those people are mostly old. 

If you’re young, your experience of the economy is dominated by the housing situation. And the housing situation in the United States is not very good. So I think for most young people “capitalism” means something like “the status quo system,” and they perceive the status quo system to be pretty bad because they are super exposed to the single most dysfunctional element of the status quo economic system. 

Now, in my capacity as a lawyer for capitalism, I am happy to point out that not only is housing the most dysfunctional element of the status quo economy, butit’s also the element that is run in the least capitalistic way. 

on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan

But if you were to say to me, you know, is the eligibility system that we currently have working? I mean, if everybody would comply with it and stay out of the courts, maybe, but they don’t. There is no agent regular regulation, which is a huge problem. You talk to any student athlete about that, and any school about it, they’ll tell you that. This provides some regulatory structure around agents. It also deals with all the state preemption issues. We, you know, you got 40 different states with 40 different rules around how NIL should work, which makes it virtually impossible to set a national standard. You also have the elements associated with dealing with how we’re going to handle some of the issues around NIL, which you mentioned. And again, you know, for all of this, what we’re really trying to achieve is some sort of national framework so that you can have national championships and national competitions, in which, for all intents and purposes, everybody’s playing by the same set of rules. Now, I understand some of the concerns that the Big 10 and the SEC, in particular, have raised with the bill. We have some concerns with the bill too. But to simply walk away from something that deals with a number of the most significant challenges that face college sports at that point in time, in my view, would be a mistake, and I spent time talking to folks in all of the power conferences, and the rest of Division I, and Division II, and Division III about this, and my message to them has been, look, these folks crafted a bipartisan bill, really hard to do, does everybody love everything about it? No. Is the process associated with crafting it done? Also, no. So, let’s take seriously this opportunity to support the process, support the effort, support the parts of the bill that we believe in. And then continue to try and work with folks in the Senate, and hopefully ultimately folks in the House to create something that we can all get behind.

Will Wang:

The Art Institute of Chicago’s API includes ahas_not_been_viewed_much field on artwork. It’s a boolean that describes whether an art piece hasn’t been visited on their website very much.

More specifically, per the source code , has_not_been_viewed_much means the art piece has been viewed fewer than 200 times on the website since January 1, 2010.

Of course, that still begs the question: what are these artworks? Why aren’t they being viewed? I can’t answer the latter, but, if you have a moment for the former, please take some time to browse.

ny post:

A new Federal Reserve working paper found the record surge in illegal immigration during the Biden administration triggered higher home prices and rents.

The findings arrive as immigration remains a polarizing political issue. Republicans argue former President Joe Biden’s border policies strained housing and public resources, while Democrats say immigration helped ease labor shortages and supported economic growth.

The paper, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, combines immigration court records with government administrative data to measure how the unprecedented wave of illegal immigration between 2021 and 2024 affected local labor and housing markets.

The authors caution the study is a preliminary draft circulated for professional comment and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

Researchers found the influx of illegal immigrants boosted employment with little measurable effect on wages but significantly increased housing demand.

NY Times Editorial Commentary:

In 1970, only 7 percent of college freshmen nationwide had a high-school grade average of A or higher; today, the share is roughly 40 percent.

————

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Corinne Hess:

“If nothing else changed in our world, we wouldn’t even be able to cover our health insurance increases,” Hamdan said. 

Meanwhile, expenses such as curriculum and instructional materials, utilities, health insurance, transportation and employee salaries continue to increase.

———

Last month, the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) published an analysis of the cost reductions which would occur if policymakers banned three abusive and common contracting terms used by hospitals to inflate their revenue. For elected leaders who profess to want to make healthcare more affordable, taking up this cause would be a good place to start.

———

Will Flanders:

This is just money moving around based on enrollment and property value changes. Districts w/ declining enrollment and/or rising property values get less, districts in the opposite situation get more.

———

Notice: It doesn’t affect schools’ funding, only how much is paid by property taxes vs. income taxes.

Under it all: The cost spiral enabled by @GovEvers unilaterally jacking how much schools can spend by an unprecedented sum for the next 4 centuries.

———

Healthcare cost are putting an extreme pressure on school districts’ finances ($94,500,000 in Madison!). “Application bloat” as well, along with curious curriculum and related costs.

Teagan King:

Roughly six months into the Monona Grove School District’s efforts to sell two properties, the district is still searching for a buyer for one and has ditched plans to sell the other.

At a June meeting, the Monona Grove School Board approved plans to request a letter of intent from the city of Monona, giving the city until Aug. 31 to say whether it’s interested in buying the Maywood School building at 902 Nichols Road.

The school district had not heard from the city as of late June, but “we remain in close contact with city officials,” Superintendent Tanya Fredrich said.

Monona Mayor Nancy Moore said the city is evaluating the site’s condition and possible uses before making any decisions.

Kelly Meyerhofer

• Newly released records show a growing divide between former UW system president Jay Rothman and the Board of Regents.
• Regents expressed concerns ranging from the system’s strategy on artificial intelligence to feeling their role was reduced to a rubber stamp.
• The board asked Rothman to resign, but he refused and challenged them to fire him, which they later did.
• After news of his potential ouster broke, Rothman received an outpouring of support, while board members did not.

Many University of Wisconsin Board of Regents members privately complained to each other in text messages about UW system president Jay Rothman in the months leading up to his ouster, according to newly released records.

Board President Amy Bogost and board member Timothy Nixon described some of the problems the board had with Rothman during a legislative hearing in April, but the nearly 500 pages of records recently obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveal a much deeper divide between Rothman and the board than was previously known.

The board’s grievances ran the gamut, from large concerns, like whether universities were prepared to lead in the era of artificial intelligence, to more petty beefs, like whether Rothman gave the board enough credit for a particular initiative.

Anna Hansen:

Aspiring chess champion Lincoln Olson, 11, was challenging community members to play him in chess on the Capitol Square during the Dane County Farmers’ Market. Olson has been playing at the market for the last two weeks trying to raise money for upcoming travels to national tournaments.

Eleven-year-old Lincoln Olson played 12 games of chess against competitors twice his age at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. His only losses were one game and a tooth.

Olson is a proud member of the Edgewood Campus School’s chess team, playing since last fall. He also played in a national competition in May, ranking 40th in his division, or in the top 24%.

Matthew Yglesias:

I was at a couple of education events in the spring that all featured very smart, very achievement-oriented people talking about how to address the national crisis in basic reading and math attainment. A common lament was that politicians and pundits are simply not focused enough on the question of whether kids are learning the basics, preferring to fire off hot takes about culture war topics. 

This is a view that I very much sympathize with and have articulated over the years. 

That said, I’ve also been in a bunch of conversations about things like Noah Smith’s essay on the need for a revival of American liberal nationalism or Jerusalem Demsas’s take about how you have to love America in order to save it. 

I broadly agree with these takes. But I also find that they’re a little bit lacking in specificity. 

I know that Rob Sand, who’s running for governor in Iowa, does things like open town halls by having everyone sing “America the Beautiful.” A friend described Sand as the Daniel Day-Lewis of politics: He understood quite some time ago that trends in Democratic Party politics were going one way and political trends in Iowa were going another, and he fully committed to a hyper-distinctive post-partisan Iowa-as-fuck persona. He never breaks character, and he not only performs the patriotic ritual, he makes it seem natural. 

Bill Glahn:

The number of habeas corpus cases filed in Minnesota is ramping back up again, reflecting both renewed ICE enforcement activity and increasingly lenient judges.

Since March 25, when the federal 8th Circuit court of appeals ruled that “shall be detained” meant exactly that in relation to illegal aliens, some 222 new habeascases have been filed in the federal district of Minnesota. These habeas corpus petitions seek the release of illegal aliens held in ICE detention.

The 222 newest cases represent just a part of the more than 1,300 habeas cases filed in Minnesota so far in 2026. January and February saw an explosion of filings tracking Operation Metro Surge. Filings dropped off in March as the Surge wound down.

The Associated Press (AP) reported last week,

ICE arrests 10,000 in 5 days, a sharp late-June surge in Trump’s deportation push

Those are national numbers, but the late-June surge can be seen in Minnesota habeas filings, fueled in part by a big workplace raid in Bemidji, which I wrote about here.

That raid, on a residential roofing jobsite, generated eleven (11) habeas filings last month. Since the 11 cases were scattered among six federal judges, I think it will prove a good case study in the habeas phenomenon. So far, three aliens have been released with the other 8 cases still pending. One judge appears to have declared the concept of workplace raids to be illegal.

Since the March 25 8th Circuit ruling, here are the statistics on habeas rulings in the Minnesota district,

Tyler Cowen summary

Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.

Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.

Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.

Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.

Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.

Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.

Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.

Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.

Katherine Bindley:

Alternative schooling is having a moment among high-income parents. Families who can afford to send their kids to the best K-8 institutions are seeking new options. They’re exploring schools that prioritize life skills and call teachers “guides” or “coaches.” Some use AI-based tutors that tailor the curriculum to the child’s individual needs.

Parents considering less traditional options say AI is poised to have significant effects on the economy, so old ways of learning may no longer make sense. (Forge Prep’s marketing materials refer to it as “built for 2040. Not 1940.”) They also say AI tutors and hands-on learning in smaller groups offer opportunities for a more individualized curriculum.

Unlike public schools, these institutions aren’t required to report metrics to the state and their relative effectiveness can be difficult to evaluate.

Hamed Aleaziz, Ernesto Londoño and Amy Qin:

A three-person Minnesota panel including Gov. Tim Walz granted a pardon to an immigrant convicted of sexually abusing a child, drawing accusations that he and other Democrats are impeding federal efforts to expel dangerous foreign criminals eligible for deportation.

The Minnesota Board of Pardons granted the reprieve on June 10 to Tou Lue Vang, 42, who came to the United States as a child and was set to be deported to Laos imminently. Mr. Vang had submitted a letter to the board expressing regret for the actions that led to his 2005 conviction, and said a pardon could help him stay in the country with his wife and six children.

Mr. Vang’s victim, who was 10 when the abuse began, also submitted a letter supporting the pardon. Mr. Vang pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct in a plea deal that spared him from serving time in prison.

The pardon effectively wiped clean Mr. Vang’s criminal record, providing him an avenue to fight deportation.
Trump administration officials criticized the pardon, denouncing Mr. Walz and other Democratic leaders in the state. The other two members of the pardon board are Attorney General Keith Ellison and the state’s chief Supreme Court justice, Natalie Hudson.

“These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting,” Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, said of Mr. Walz in a statement.

“Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl,” Ms. Bis said, confirming that the pardon would remove the criminal sexual conduct conviction underlying Mr. Vang’s removal order.

In response to a request for comment, Mr. Walz’s office pointed to the letter the victim provided the board, and said such pleas for clemency carry significant weight. Mr. Walz was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024 and has been a frequent target of the Trump White House, especially over immigration.

——-

More.

Child rape is not a private, civil matter to be settled like the outcome of a car crash. It’s a serious felony criminal offense against public order. All citizens have an interest in such acts being punished. Despite Mr. Vang’s twisted logic, child victims cannot consent to, or be complicit in, their own abuse.

The Economist:

Perhaps the black stuff is our bête noire. Yet these howlers, and others, have given rise to the charge that, far from being all-knowing, The Economist is so reliably wrong that the smart move is to bet against it. There is no better time to double down on a stock-market rally than when we start fretting about a bubble. Last year the then chairman of Reform UK, a populist-right party, called The Economist the “ultimate contrarian indicator”, while complaining about our criticism of his party’s fantasyland fiscal numbers. (A few months later, the party reversed course and ditched those policies.)Is the accusation fair? Or can The Economistlay claim to a creditable forecasting record? Predictive perfection is not our goal and we aim mainly to inform and stretch minds. But ideally we would be right more often than wrong. To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.

Isabel Garcia:

Suffolk University and Merrimack College in Massachusetts became the latest universities to gain approval for three-year bachelor’s degree programs after the Board of Higher Education gave the green light Friday. 

The colleges join more than 60 other institutions that have approved three-year degree pathways in recent years, according to The College Investor.

California State University, the largest public school system in the U.S., likewise voted in May to approve three-year degree programs, including a Bachelor of Professional Studies, Bachelor of Applied Studies, and Bachelor of Education. Its 22 campuses will decide whether to implement the programs.

The University of North Carolina also recently approved a pilot program for expedited degrees designed by its campuses. Seven of the university’s 16 institutions drafted proposals, which could be launched as early as fall 2027, according to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Philip Greenspun:

Let’s celebrate America at 250. What have we accomplished as a people, working together, that is great? Let’s leave out our military heroics because those are regularly celebrated in statuary, political speeches, etc. Let’s leave our literature because books are usually written by one person. Same deal with software, much of which is substantially created by small teams. In the comments, please leave what you think we’ve done that has done the most good for humanity overall outside of military.

I’ll go first: integrated circuit fabrication. While the transistor was developed by a small team, including Nobel laureate William Shockley, who later set up Silicon Valley, and the IC itself was invented by Jack Kilby, it literally takes a village to fabricate ICs in significant quantities.

What are some resources that we can use to teach tweens and teens about the miracle of birth (of their smartphones)? Here are some with promise…

From our brothers and sisters in Korea (indirect shout-out to the U.S. military since the South Koreans probably wouldn’t be fabbing chips today if not for our willingless to cooperate and sacrifice as a society in the military domain):

Prager;

PragerU, in partnership with the White House, is bringing America’s founding to life through cinematic storytelling—spotlighting the men and women who risked everything for liberty.

Mike Solana

khanna’s ‘billionaire wealth tax,’ which is not a tax but an asset seizure in which he tallies everything you own, then demands a percentage on top of what you’re taxed — every single year — is already targeting anyone worth $50 million or more. this ends with your 401k.

———

Blue States’ Wealth Tax Trap Would Crush American’s Prosperity

More.

——

Ro Khanna is already saying the billionaire tax should apply to people with $50 million or more

Soon it will be lowered to $1 million. Then $100,000. Then $10,000.

——-

Sebastian Caliri:

Mamdani sounds good and is profoundly wrong. America is not exceptional because it believes nothing in particular.

In Democracy in America (which, surely, he has read) De Tocqueville points to the importance of a set of religious mores that constrain possibilities enshrined in the Constitution:
“.. at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything… [if religion] does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it.”

There is a reason for America’s prosperity and it resides in freedom mixed with restraint that limits e.g. majoritarianism (the majority can be wrong about something), social engineering, and cruelty.

———

Houman David Hammati:

Mr. Mamdani,

If America is truly “an arena of supremacy” that persecutes its people, why did you come here from Uganda instead of staying in India or building your vision where you were born?

America is like our child.

As parents and citizens who chose her, we have a sacred duty to criticize her quietly when she falls short—so we can help her grow stronger and wiser. But we also have a duty to publicly praise her, celebrate her, defend her, and stand with her—especially on her 250th birthday.

You don’t trash your own kid to the whole world on her big day. That’s not love. That’s not leadership. That’s ingratitude.

I was rescued by this country as a small child. She gave my family freedom, opportunity, and a chance to thrive when we had nothing. I owe her everything. And with that gratitude comes the obligation to serve her, protect her, and make her better every single day—not tear her down in public on the day we celebrate everything she has given the world.

Happy 250th Birthday, America.

I will always choose to lift you up.

God bless the United States of America. 🇺🇸

———-

Brivael Le Pogam:

In France, the State captures and redistributes 57% of everything the nation produces. Fifty-seven percent. Stop and dwell on that figure. For every unit of value created by an engineer, a worker, a founder who risked it all, more than half passes through hands that built nothing. This isn’t a budget line. It’s a permanent mortgage on people’s existence.

And here’s what no one will admit to you: it never happens through revolution. No one votes for decline. We vote for compassion, for security, for justice, for the planet. At every step, we trade a piece of freedom for a promise. And the promises are always beautiful. That’s the trap.

Today’s collectivism no longer waves the red flag; it has understood that it doesn’t sell anymore. It has learned to speak the language of care. ESG, governance, compliance, “responsibility”: these are the new words for a very old idea. The idea that an enlightened elite knows better than you what’s good for you, and that power must therefore be transferred to it, line by line, to decide in your place. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse: it’s a consensus. No one is hiding. Everything is done openly, applauded, subsidized.

——-

Spencer Pratt:

The communist doesn’t think to increase the quality of the grid. The communist demands that you decrease the quality of your life.

They make you ration the things that every other American gets to enjoy. Every single time.

——-

Elon Musk:

Mamdani has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker.

——-

Calvin Coolidge:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

———

Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July.  

——-

John Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism of the Revolution.” It gave many colonists a biblical framework for understanding resistance to tyranny.

Then came prayer. In September 1774, delegates gathered in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Before beginning their work, they agreed to open in prayer and invited Jacob Duché, an Anglican pastor, to lead them. The previous evening, a frightening rumor had spread that British forces were shelling Boston. As Washington, Adams, Hancock, Henry, and others gathered in Carpenter’s Hall, Duché read the appointed Scripture reading for the day—Psalm 35: “Plead my cause, O LORD, with those who strive with me; fight against those who fight against me.”

———-

A socialist mayor lecturing America on the evils of capitalism…

His father makes $350k/year teaching African History and Colonialism. No other country on earth pays academics that kind of money for that subject.

Thanks capitalism.

His mother came to Harvard at 19 on a scholarship and became a millionaire making documentaries. You dont become a millionaire documentarian under socialism.

Thanks capitalism.

America is NOT exceptional BECAUSE “we are richer, stronger, more powerful” than everyone else.

No.

Erick-Woods Erickson

So on this 250th birthday, let me tell you what to do if you fret about this country. Stop being a victim. Reject the voices — foreign-funded, many of them — who want you angry, isolated, and at war with your neighbor. Get off the screen. Go outside. Go to church even if you don’t believe, because you need a community that isn’t a tribe of political partisans. Volunteer at the food pantry. Sit on your front porch and wave at the people walking by. Love your neighbor, whether or not he loves you back — you don’t get a carve-out on that one. Make your community better, and your town gets better, and your state, and then the whole country heals from the bottom up. That’s how it works. Not through revolution. Through you and me.

Mitch Zacks:

As readers celebrate the July 4 holiday with family, we’re reminded that for nearly 250 years, the United States has been an engine of invention, innovation, and growth. Over time, new industries have formed, productivity has improved, living standards have risen, and companies have been created, scaled, merged, disrupted, replaced, and reinvented.

One of the remarkable features of U.S. innovation is that it rarely comes from a single invention or a single company. History shows that progress builds in layers, with one breakthrough creating the infrastructure for the next. The integrated circuit, for instance, started as a practical solution to a physical problem, which was that computers could not keep growing if every connection had to be soldered by hand. By shrinking electronics onto microchips, it helped make possible everything from space exploration to factory automation to smartphones and artificial intelligence.¹

The automobile offers another example. Henry Ford did not invent the car, but the Model T and the moving assembly line changed the economics of transportation. By reducing assembly time from more than 12 hours to roughly 90 minutes, Ford helped turn the automobile from a luxury product into something much closer to a mass-market good.

Throughout history, the U.S. economy has been remarkably good at taking ideas and building systems around them. These systems take the form of factories, supply chains, financing mechanisms, distribution networks, public markets, consumer ecosystems, etc. The result is that inventions become industries, and industries become sources of earnings, employment, productivity, and wealth creation.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of it all is that everyday investors can ‘own’ a slice of the U.S. economy and all the innovation and growth it creates. I’m referring, of course, to our ability to buy stocks.

What’s more, investors do not need to identify every breakthrough company in advance to participate in American innovation over time. It is not necessary to correctly predict which single stock will dominate the next decade. A diversified equity portfolio, which is accessible for anyone who wants to invest, provides exposure to the evolving American growth engine while reducing the risk that any one company, product, or theme fails to live up to expectations. How great is that?

As we look ahead, artificial intelligence may be the next major chapter in this long American innovation story. There will be disruption, and some jobs and business models will undoubtedly change. But investors should be careful with the idea that every task or industry touched by AI will simply disappear. That has not been the pattern with major technologies before, and though much remains unknown about AI’s ultimate impact on the economy, I doubt the ‘AI jobs apocalypse’ is nigh. Computers did not eliminate work as many believed they would. There are over 250,000 data scientists in the U.S., for instance, a job that did not exist prior to the computer’s invention.

For investors, the long-term thesis for equity ownership can boil down to a single question: whether the U.S. economy still has the capacity to turn innovation into long-term growth. History suggests it does, and I would not bet against this history.

Bottom Line for Investors

American innovation and economic growth have been powerful forces at work since our country’s founding. But 250 years of spectacular growth does not mean the path has always been smooth.

The country has also endured recessions, depressions, wars, inflation shocks, banking crises, political uncertainty, market crashes, speculative bubbles, and countless periods when investors had good reasons to feel uncertain about the future. Many would argue we’re living in one of those periods now, with artificial intelligence raising big questions about jobs, productivity, and the economy.

The investor’s job is not to predict every breakthrough or identify every future market leader in advance. The investor’s job is to stay positioned to participate in the broader system that turns innovation into growth, which in my view, means investing in stocks. The stock market is not a perfect reflection of American innovation, but it has historically been one of the most accessible ways for investors to participate in it. Owning equities means owning a claim on businesses that are adapting, competing, investing, and creating value in an economy built on reinvention.

Matthew Harwood:

By the time of his death, there was little gratitude for Paine’s contributions to the United States outside of workingmen’s associations because of his blistering attacks on revealed religion, particularly Christianity. But as America barrels toward its semiquincentennial, Thomas Paine emerges as the Founding Father Americans can celebrate without regret. Unlike his contemporaries, Paine’s radical liberalism feels strikingly modern—pro-democracy, pro-market, anti-poverty, and antislavery—and worth defending as the forces of reaction mount here at home and abroad. Without the pen of Paine, in fact, there might not be a United States to celebrate today.

In January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense hit the streets of Philadelphia like a cannonball. The 47-page pamphlet was an immediate sensation. Not only did Paine reject reconciliation with Great Britain and call for independence, he attacked hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as millstones around humanity’s neck. What made the text dangerous was that Paine didn’t write it for polite society. With wit and verve, he wrote it for the masses in language any farmer or artisan could understand. But Paine went further. He had the temerity to tell common people that they weren’t mules to be driven into the mud by their so-called betters. Instead, they had the right and ability to rule themselves with dignity, the divine right of kings be damned.

Paine’s democratic beliefs terrified the more elitist and conservative Founding Fathers, most notably his decades-long nemesis, John Adams. While Adams conceded that without Paine “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain,” he feared Paine’s egalitarian ethos would unleash anarchy into the nascent republic. Paine’s forceful argument for universal male suffrage without a property qualification petrified Adams. (Though he had a friendship with the founding feminist Mary Wollstonecraft during his time in England and revolutionary France, Paine doesn’t seem to have commented on women’s voting rights.)

Glenn Reynolds:

Just last week, Congressman Keith Self introduced a resolution to repeal the Seventeenth. And this time the idea doesn’t seem quite as crazy.

Background: When the Constitution was drafted, and for well over a century afterward, the Senate wasn’t popularly elected. The Constitution provided for the choice of Senators by state legislatures. One did not really campaign for a Senate seat, one lobbied. This was consistent with the Constitutional plan, in which the House of Representatives represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.

The Progressive movement didn’t much like this (a cynic might suggest that they thought it would be easier to demagogue the public than state legislatures made up of cynical politicians.) The 17th was also very much in keeping with the more democracy mood of the era. The franchise had been expanded from a minority of white men with property, to all white men, to all men, and was well on the way (just two amendments later!) to being extended to women. 

Voters were impatient, and there was less appreciation of the careful structural compromises that had been made when the Constitution was drafted. By having a house of Congress that was responsive to the concerns of the states as states, the original design of the Senate served as a counterweight to federal ambition. Once the Senate was just a smaller version of the House with bigger districts, that changed. Public passions mattered more (vitiated only somewhat by the Senate’s longer terms) and Senators now had to campaign.

Tyler Cowen:

Each individual will be seen as something special by the other humans. Public spaces will be emptier, so anyone out in public will attract more notice. If you are waiting in line at the movie theater, you will be more likely to start talking to the person next to you. After all, you already have had the option of talking to the AIs all day long.

It has long been the norm in American small towns that you say hi to the people you pass on the sidewalk, or perhaps start chatting with customers in your store who appear to be outsiders. Those kinds of practices will spread to the large cities of today, which will become like smaller towns due to lower population density.

Many of these humans will invest heavily in their appearances, in their charisma, and in their “vibes.” After all, the AIs will, and already do, perform so many useful informational functions. If you, as a human, wish to draw attention to yourself and be seen as noteworthy, you will have to specialize in the remaining human functions. That may include “touching grass,” giving warm and appropriate hugs, looking good or at least looking interesting, and having some kind of unique identity that either is visible upon meeting or which AI smart glasses will communicate during social interactions. (“This guy has sailed around the world three times and punched a shark on the nose.”)

——-

Choose life.

Alex Tabarrok summary:

The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

———

Richard Hanania:

-The NHS backlog is six million patients, 10% of the population

-Dental care is so out of reach that 10% of Britons report “do it yourself” dental care like extracting teeth

-Junior doctors went on strike, their starting salaries are $44,000 a year. The average civil servant makes $41K a year

-Keir Starmer faced a scandal for going to a “luxury” hotel, which was $230 a night.

——-

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Will Briggs:

Another resident expressed concern about the level of debt service — money to pay back borrowed funds for infrastructure projects — in the city’s roughly $450 million annual budget. In the current budget, debt service amounted to the second-highest operating expense at $72 million, behind public safety spending at $186 million.

The city is under a third of the maximum allowable debt under state law and maintains a AAA bond rating, the highest possible rating for bonds and a sign the city has capacity to meet its obligations, Schmiedicke said. State and federal contributions have not kept up with local government’s needs, prompting more borrowing to cover local infrastructure costs, he added.

Joel Achenbach: 

In April 1976, three months before the American bicentennial, two guys no one had ever heard of formed a little company called Apple.

They were building what were called “microcomputers.” The traditional tech companies of the time built large mainframe computers. Small computers were of interest to hobbyists. They were a bit like toys. But the two nobodies, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were working out of a house in suburban California, believed they could make microcomputers that nontechnical people would find useful in everyday life.

“We didn’t get the flying cars that ‘The Jetsons’ promised us,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington whose book “The Code” describes the history of Silicon Valley. “But we walk around with supercomputers in our pocket, and these supercomputers were invented by two long-haired, vegetarian college dropouts who didn’t bathe very often and worked out of a garage.”

Chris Rickert:

A former school custodian from Mount Horeb was found guilty late Wednesday of sexually assaulting a child his former girlfriend had cared for at an in-home daycare more than a decade ago.

A jury took a little more than an hour to find James A.A. Myers, 41, guilty of the repeated sexual assault of the same child. The child, who is now 16, had reported to police in 2024 that she remembered being assaulted by Myers several times between Sept. 30, 2012, and Sept. 30, 2015, while at the daycare in a rented house in Mount Horeb where Myers and his then-girlfriend lived.

A book she was reading in school at the time had sparked her memories of the alleged assault, she told police.

Myers was charged in the case on March 7, 2025, when he was still working as a custodian in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District. A spokesperson for the district said on Tuesday that he resigned from that position effective Aug. 6, 2025.

Ashley Belanger: 

The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.

Tim Harford:

How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way.

In February 1912, on a cold Sunday morning, Reichelt persuaded journalists, a camera crew and a small crowd to watch him demonstrate his new wearable parachute. The official story was that Reichelt would throw a dummy from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, more than 50 metres up. Reichelt, however, had tipped off journalists that he would make the jump himself. Otherwise, one suspects, there would have been fewer spectators.

The parachute is, as it happens, something of a running joke in evidence-based policymaking. In the Christmas 2003 edition of the British Medical Journal, obstetrician Gordon CS Smith and public health researcher Jill Pell published a systematic review of “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge”. They noted, with mock sorrow, that “we were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention” and called for “the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine” to organise and participate in a rigorous randomised trial of the parachute. 

In case the joke has passed you by, the argument being lampooned is a complaint by advocates of evidence-based policymaking. Many well-established medical practices — along with ideas in policing, criminal justice, education, economics and beyond — have never been seriously tested by the gold standard for evidence: a double-blind, randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCT advocates suggest that this is a scandal. Is it?

The Ceiling Trap:

The most tempting idea in economics

Rents are crushing. A law could just… stop them. What could go wrong?

In every expensive city on Earth, the same conversation repeats. Rents rise faster than paychecks. A family gets a renewal notice with a number that makes their stomach drop. And someone proposes the obvious remedy: make it illegal. Cap the rent. Freeze it. If housing is a human right, why should a landlord be allowed to price a person out of their own neighborhood?

The appeal is real, and so is the problem it responds to. In big, productive cities, a third or more of renter households spend over 30 percent of their income on housing — the standard threshold for being “rent burdened.” Rent control promises relief, and it delivers something voters can feel immediately: my rent stops rising, starting now. 11 “Rent control” is a family of policies. First-generationcontrols (1940s-style) freeze nominal rents outright.Second-generation controls, common today, cap annual increases, often with exemptions for new buildings and rent resets between tenants. The economist Richard Arnott introduced this taxonomy in 1995. The distinction matters — and, as we’ll see, so does everything a ceiling doesn’t change.

Yet among economists, rent control has achieved something remarkable: near-consensus in a field famous for disagreement. In a 1992 survey of American economists, 93 percent agreed that rent ceilings reduce the quantity and quality of housing available. When the IGM panel of elite economists — left, right, and center — was asked in 2012 whether rent control had improved affordable housing in New York and San Francisco over the prior three decades, 2 percent agreed.22 Alston, Kearl & Vaughan, “Is There a Consensus Among Economists in the 1990’s?” American Economic Review(1992); IGM Economic Experts Panel, “Rent Control,” February 2012. The IGM panel includes Nobel laureates from across the political spectrum.

NCES:

In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).

This indicator uses information from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to compare countries’ expenditures on education using two measures: expenditures on public and private education institutions per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student and total government and private expenditures on education institutions as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The OECD is an organization of 38 countries (as of 2021) that collects and publishes an array of data on its member countries. Education expenditures are from public revenue sources (governments) and private revenue sources, and they include current and capital expenditures. Private sources include payments from households for school-based expenses such as tuition, transportation fees, book rentals, and food services, as well as public funding via subsidies to households, private fees for education services, and other private spending that goes through educational institutions. The total government and private expenditures on education institutions as a percentage of GDP measure allows for a comparison of countries’ expenditures relative to their ability to finance education. Purchasing power parity (PPP) indexes are used to convert other currencies into U.S. dollars. Monetary amounts are in constant 2021 dollars based on national GDP deflators and PPP indexes.¹

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Jasper Smith:

In the spring of 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion essay by John D. Sailer, who was then a fellow at the National Association of Scholars. Based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Sailer detailed how a search committee from the Texas Tech University biology department had vetted candidates for a faculty position. One was dinged for advocating a race-neutral approach to teaching; another was praised for reciting a “land acknowledgement” before their job interview. What Sailer found confirmed what he and other critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts had long suspected, Sailer wrote: Diversity statements function as ideological litmus tests.

“DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views,” wrote Sailer. “Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.”

The next day, Texas Tech announced that it would stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring. A short time later the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, sent a letter to the state’s public colleges condemning any hiring practices that consider candidates for reasons other than merit.

For Sailer, the Texas Tech investigation was a turning point in his career. “Moving on to Manhattan Institute was kind of a logical next step,” he said.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank founded in the late ’70s to improve “great American cities,” has emerged in recent years as a formidable influence on higher education. The think tank has crafted model legislation to remake colleges and universities as race-blind institutions, fueled the campaign to oust Claudine Gay as president of Harvard, and turned City Journal, its quarterly magazine, into a platform for attacking diversity programs, grade inflation, and university presidents’ capitulation to the demands of left-leaning students and faculty. It has found in Trump administration officials and red-state lawmakers a battalion of allies who share the view that higher education has strayed from its truth-focused mission.

In the months leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, met with members of the administration to plan how the government could rein in DEI by threatening federal funding. On his second day in office, Trump signed two executive orders banning DEI-related contracts and spending across the government.

Oyin Adedoyin:

Chris and Carolyn McAuliffe are in their 60s but don’t expect to retire anytime soon. They’re still paying off their student-loan debt, which has ballooned to a half-million dollars.

“I regret going to college,” said Chris, an engineer for a health insurance company.

When they earned their graduate degrees decades ago, the couple owed a combined $114,000 in student loans. With stable careers—Carolyn in nursing—they stayed on top of their monthly payments. Then they bought a house and had two children and money got tight, so they consolidated their loans and opted for a payment plan that lowered their monthly bill.

That extended the life of their loan, and compounding interest charges kept pushing up their balance.

Student loans are increasingly following Americans into their 60s and rewriting what they believed would be their retirement years. More than three million people 62 and older owe federal student loans, up from 1.8 million in 2018, according to Education Department data. Delinquency rates among older borrowers have skyrocketed too, in some cases because they are on fixed incomes or have medical expenses.

Lewina O. Lee , Peter James, Emily Zevon and Laura D. Kubzansky:

Optimism is a psychological attribute characterized as the general expectation that good things will happen, or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes. Previous studies reported that more optimistic individuals are less likely to suffer from chronic diseases and die prematurely. Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15% longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond. These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

Alfred Lin:

You have to teach it young. From Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

“If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented, and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge…the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.”

Peter Landers:

Compared with the glacial pace of American universities, the Chinese decision was practically a summary execution. 

On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei alleged that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced a probe the same day. A month later, it said it confirmed misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and ousted the dean of the university’s Institute of Translational Medicine.

A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China and perhaps the nation’s most powerful person in medical science. With a single five-minute video, the 33-year-old graduate-school dropout can stop an academic star’s career in its tracks.

“The main reason they moved so fast is the sheer scale of the public outcry I can generate,” Geng said in an interview. “The universities simply couldn’t afford to wait.”

Isabel Berwick:

Confidence in the financial returns of a university education has fallen in the UK, as the rapid development of AI threatens to transform the job market.

A British Social Attitudes survey found that a third of people in England consider university education to be a waste of time. The proportion of people expressing this sentiment doubled over the past eight years.

Confidence in higher education’s ability to generate a return on investment reached a record low of 36 per cent, a decline of 10 percentage points from 2018.

Kevin Bass:

This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn’t understood what I had been judging.

I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn’t human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent “unprofessional behavior”, which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school’s own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment.

But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, “Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood.” I wasn’t. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn’t imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind.

Joaquin Sapien:

It took less than a day for the detective to give up on the case. A patrol officer had reported a harrowing, violent midnight rape in a Syracuse, New York, park. Hospital records recounted that the victim, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was “crying uncontrollably.” Her face was bruised, and she had scratches on her neck. Her hymen had been lacerated in two places. Her urine was “grossly bloody,” according to the hospital report, and there was semen inside her.

At 8 on the morning after the assault, after the victim looked fruitlessly through books of mug shots in hopes of identifying her assailant, Syracuse detective George Lorenz interviewed her. She had been awake most of the night for a first police interview, followed by forensic and medical exams: everything from gathering physical evidence of the rape to X-rays of her skull because the attacker had pounded her head on a brick walkway. To alleviate the pain from her injuries, she had been given Demerol, a powerful opioid.

Lorenz, a burly 17-year veteran of the department who had worked as a meat cutter and truck driver before becoming a police officer, seemed annoyed that she had trouble staying awake, according to her subsequent account. “That’s inconsequential, just the facts,” he barked when he thought she was providing extraneous detail.

The detective was dubious that a rape had occurred, according to his preliminary report. “It is this writer’s opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual,” he wrote. After speaking to the male student whom the victim had been visiting before she was attacked, the detective checked the crime scene for anything his colleagues, who had recovered a knife and the victim’s glasses, might have missed.

That was the totality of Lorenz’s investigation. Five hours after receiving the case, in a report marked 13:00 on May 8, 1981, he placed it in the “inactive file pending further info.” The consequences of that decision are still playing out nearly a half-century later.

Sanya Mansoor

Law enforcement’s use of warrants sweeping smartphone location data requires privacy protections, court rules.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information – even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote.

The judges ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v US, against the government, in a case that has been widely viewed as a test of how privacy rights translate into a new digital era.

The use of geofence warrants is widespread, and gives law enforcement agencies the power to compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone data from people at or near crime scenes. The warrants allow police and the FBI to collect this information from individuals within the radius of a virtual “fence” during a particular timeframe. But they are not restricted to requesting data for precise targets.

Nick Danforth:

Following its defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Empire came to an end on Nov. 1, 1922. After six centuries of splendor, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna, the once-great sultanate stumbled spent into the 20th century and finally collapsed.

But what if it hadn’t?

The fall of the Ottomans was once seen as an inevitable end for “the sick man of Europe,” especially during a historical moment that left empires from the Qing to the Hapsburgs in tatters. But a growing number of works by historians such as Donald Quataert and Hasan Kayaliargue that the Ottomans’ decline was overstated and its collapse was not predestined. In fact, had its leadership stayed out of World War I, or had its German and Austrian allies proved victorious, the empire might well have survived.

Mustafa Aksakal’s The War That Made the Middle Eastoffers the latest and most compelling take on this argument. Aksakal, a historian at Georgetown University, argues that on the eve of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire was not a sick man, doomed to decline by sectarian and national separatist movements. Rather, it was a viable political entity that was destroyed by catastrophic decisions, external invasions, and the profound strain of an existential conflict. As Aksakal writes, “A different future for the empire was also on the table, one that kept alive and extended the empire’s history of a multiethnic and multireligious society.”

What would this hypothetical, post-war Ottoman state have looked like? Perhaps wisely, most historians are hesitant to delve too far into the speculative realm of alternate history. But their scholarship nonetheless provides clues for anyone foolhardy enough to try.

Ares Luna:

One keyboard bug three decades in the making

A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium:

“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

Kayla Huynh:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty alleges the DPI is “effectively hiding public records behind an illegal” $34,014 fee. In a statement, WILL said the law firm in August 2025 requested from the DPI records of applicants since 2018 who were denied educator licenses for failing to complete an approved program, a DPI-approved educator preparation program that meets specific criteria.

WILL said the DPI acknowledged it had located 1,381 denied applications but charged more than $17,000 to review the files by hand, at $49.26 per hour. The DPI later increased the cost of the records to over $34,000 after WILL attempted to narrow its request, the law firm said.

“An informed electorate is essential to representative government, which is why Wisconsin law strongly favors public access to government records,” said WILL associate counsel Lauren Greuel. “After months of delay, DPI is attempting to price the public out of that access by imposing tens of thousands of dollars in unlawful fees. Government transparency cannot depend on whether citizens can afford to pay for it.”

——-

Corrinne Hess:

After months of no contact, DPI responded, saying the agency had located 1,381 denied applications but said they would have to review the applications by hand, costing $49.26 per hour at a cost of $34,014, said WILL attorney Lauren Greuel.

“An informed electorate is essential to representative government, which is why Wisconsin law strongly favors public access to government records,” Greuel said. “After months of delay, DPI is attempting to price the public out of that access by imposing tens of thousands of dollars in unlawful fees. Government transparency cannot depend on whether citizens can afford to pay for it.”

DPI spokesperson Alison Parkins said in an email to WPR that the agency could not respond in detail due to pending litigation. 

“However, the estimate reflects the time and resources required to produce the requested records, in accordance with Wisconsin’s open records laws,” Parkins said in a statement. “Defending lawsuits from special interest groups such as this requires taxpayer-funded resources that are diverted from our core mission of supporting Wisconsin schools, educators, and students.”

Kathryn Palmer:

Two years after Educational Testing Services lost its contract to administer the SAT, ETS has acquired ACT from a private equity firm. 

“Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job,” Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, said Tuesday in a news release announcing the acquisition of ACT, which administers a standardized college admissions test that rivals the SAT. “Together with ACT, we’re determined to serve students and parents along with educators and states by expanding access to education and job opportunities across America.”

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is demanding that the Arrowhead Union High School District remedy unconstitutional religious discrimination after school officials prohibited graduating senior Sarianne Beronja from displaying a Bible verse on her commencement slideshow.

Students were asked by the District to submit personal messages to appear alongside their names during graduation. While the District approved a wide range of personal expressions—including humor, song lyrics, words of gratitude, and even Venmo requests—it rejected Sarianne’s submission solely because it was religious.

A video explaining what happened is available here.

Among other remedies, we are asking the District to rescind any policy, directive, practice, or interpretation that prohibits student religious expression solely because it is religious in nature.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “‘Separation of Church and State’ is not an excuse to erase the viewpoints of students of faith. Arrowhead invited students to express themselves and approved countless secular messages, but when Sarianne shared a Bible verse that reflected her faith, school officials censored it. That’s unconstitutional. We are calling on the school board to immediately correct this violation and ensure no future student is subject to similar discrimination. If the District refuses to do so, our clients are prepared to pursue legal action.”

Nicola Mastrorocco & Edoardo Teso

We investigate how technologies that reduce the costs of monitoring by central authorities have shaped the historical transition from small patrimonial states to large bureaucratic organizations. Our analysis is based on a novel dataset that traces changes in the organizational structure and geographic presence of the U.S. federal government over the nineteenth century. To identify causal effects, we develop a new identification strategy that exploits the expansion of the railroad network as a source of variation in the travel time—and thus monitoring costs—between Washington D.C. and other locations. We present three main findings. First, reductions in travel time to Washington D.C. significantly increased the likelihood of federal government presence in a location. Second, this effect is stronger for occupations and tasks characterized by more severe agency problems. Third, decreases in travel time to Washington D.C. are associated with a decline in patrimonial features of the federal government in the location, in line with enhanced monitoring capacity reducing dependence on personal trust and connections.

——-

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Betsy Hammond:

Two West Linn parents were furious that their children’s elementary schools held onto a once widely used reading curriculum years after it fell out of favor — and wondered why the state allowed it.

As it turns out, the Oregon Department of Education simply took the West Linn-Wilsonville School District at its word that it was in compliance with state curriculum rules. Top administrators asserted the district had gone through all steps required to use materials not on the state-approved list. Pressed by the parents, though, it could provide no records to back up its claim.

Now those parents, Rebecca Puskas and Ashley Bohanan, have filed a legal challenge to the state’s longstanding practice of allowing school districts to assert that they’ve met basic state requirements without providing any proof.

Under the current system, Oregon’s 197 school districts self-certify that they have met minimum requirements for instructional hours, dyslexia screenings, curriculum adoptions and 54 other topics. Puskas, a lawyer, said if their drive to get a judge to reverse the Oregon Department of Education’s decision succeeds, she believes it would prompt a reckoning for that system, known colloquially as Division 22 assurances.

This month, state schools chief Charlene Williams acknowledged many people who interact with the Oregon Department of Education criticize it for accepting districts’ self attestations without requiring evidence.

Hala Gorani:

When I told my (much younger) cousin Asad that I had sent several messages to people I had worked with, suggesting we collaborate, but hadn’t heard back, he didn’t seem surprised.

“That’s totally normal nowadays,” he said casually. “If you don’t get a response,” he explained, “it usually just means it’s not happening.”

“But why not just tell me there’s no budget, or that they’ll get back to me when they have an answer?” I asked him. “Anything but silence?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But I can tell you I’m left hanging all the time when I approach someone who isn’t interested. That’s just the norm.”

It made me wonder whether, as job security has eroded and lifelong relationships with companies have disappeared, it has become easier to ignore people. When there is no expectation of a lasting relationship, and no real personal or emotional consequence, a message, a call, or an email can simply go unanswered.

Is ghosting, I wondered, the new “no?”

Now, I’m no saint in this department. People I don’t know sometimes approach me asking for favours, introductions, or the kind of “quick question” that somehow requires 45 minutes of my life, and I will admit that I have occasionally allowed those messages to drift into the digital wilderness.

Mary Julia Koch:

When William Pallan arrived at the University of Pennsylvania his freshman year, he was set on studying the humanities. He wanted to engage with the great thinkers of the Western canon, from Plato and Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. But as he searched through Penn’s online course catalog and sat in on classes, he felt that the options on offer focused less on the great texts themselves and more on postmodernist interpretations of them. He recalls leaving the first lecture in an English course on Shakespeare midway through when the professor said they’d be approaching the bard’s work through a queer lens.

Glenn Reynolds:

But more importantly, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: We’ve run America with and without a “professional, independent civil service,” and there was more trust in government — and better execution of policy — before the creation of the civil service than after, and particularly before the now-overturned case of Humphrey’s Executor, which protected “independent agencies” from presidential supervision.

But the ramifications of this new decision suggest that the Pendleton Act itself might be at risk, and it should be.

Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system,” which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive. When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially. This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.

Maddie Stone, Amy Westervelt, and Katie Worth:

What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change. 

In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook. 

While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture. 

The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined. 

CBC Radio:

The core of Humboldt’s thinking on education is ‘Bildung,’ a word that first appeared around the late 13th century, when the Bible was translated from Latin into German. It comes from the idea that a person carries in their soul the image of God, and use it to build those ideals within themselves. 

Bildung’s meaning was static for the next 500 years, but by the late 18th century, German poets and philosophers began to reshape it. Humboldt joined the debate. For him, Bildung was non-secular. He saw it as the ability to see and manifest one’s own, individual potential.

In an essay called Theory of Bildung in 1793, he writes: “What do we demand of a nation?  Of an Age?  Of entire mankind, if it is to occasion respect and admiration? We demand that Bildung, wisdom, and virtue, as powerfully and universally propagated as possible…that it augment its inner worth to such an extent that the concept of humanity, if taken from its example alone, would be of a rich and worthy substance.”

It’s a very powerful concept, says Philipp von Turk, who points to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a seminal influence on Humboldt’s concept of Bildung.

Corri Hess:

Throughout high school, Amanda Watzka and David Heisel would go on long drives across Oconto County.

Heisel would stroke Watzka’s hand and talk about his family’s wealth. He would let her know he could protect her once they were finally together. 

But Watzka and Heisel were not teenage sweethearts — Watzka was a 15-year-old technical education student at Oconto Falls High School, and Heisel was her teacher.

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More.

Yaxue Cao:

Patriotism is gauche, “the enlightened people” — to borrow a phrase from George Orwell — would say, implying that patriotism is for simpletons.

Simpleton or not, my love for America is simple, straightforward, and unadulterated. It’s where I call my home, my sweet home.

God bless America.

AFT:

Before 2018, many public-sector employees were forced to pay union fees just to remain employed, even if they disagreed with the union. That changed with a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Today, public-sector employees—including teachers, first responders, and state and local government workers—have the right to decline union membership and stop paying dues.

Paul Vallas:

Her Majesty CTU Pres. Stacy Davis Gates has decreed CPS’ budget “dead on arrival,” although it hasn’t even been presented yet. Let’s be clear: Davis Gates’ warning is don’t make any cuts that impact her members as CPS tries to close a $732 million budget hole. 
 
CTU leaders and Mayor Johnson claim the state is shorting the schools by $2 billion. This means the almost $33,000 per pupil the district currently spends is not enough. They’re demanding $39,000 per pupil to keep current CTU member staffing levels and to pay for salary increases. 
 
Per-pupil funding has grown 44% since 2019, as CPS added 9,000 full-time positions despite losing 12% of its students and received record salary increases. Last year alone, CPS had 1 full time employee for every 7 students and more non-teaching employees (23,074) than teachers. 
 
What has Chicago gained from this? No additional class time, an abandonment of academic standards, an all-out assault on school choice, and the politicization of classrooms.

Camilla Long:

I wasn’t going to write about the horrific findings of the Ockenden report, the many devastating errors at maternity units in Nottingham hospitals. The woman, for example, who went in to have a caesarean, only to discover she’d been given an “inadvertent cystectomy”: they’d cut her bladder out by mistake. Or the dead baby stuffed in a bin as “clinical waste”; or the woman who was told to terminate a healthy pregnancy.

Or the heavily pregnant mother in labour who telephoned the hospital nine times, crying and begging to come in, only to discover, when she was finally allowed in to give birth — having been sent home once — that her baby had died. “I’m sorry, your baby’s dead,” said a staff member. Only minutes earlier, they had been offering “aromatherapy”, fussing over the birthing pool, asking what kind of music she’d like.

The vanity of it.

What happens when a society gets so carried away with itself — with an ideology, an aromatherapeutic way of being — that it abandons all empathy, all reason?

Manuel Pascual:

The renowned economist Roberto Serrano has ‘overwhelming evidence’ that his students cheated. He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”

Michael Lydick:

Alas, most Americans will never be able to buy one. Current US regulations effectively place these cars behind a 25-year “wait wall,” an import restriction enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It prevents foreign-market vehicles from being legally driven here until they are at least 25 years old, unless manufacturers spend heavily to certify them for US safety and emissions standards.

At the same time, satellite imagery revealed enormous European parking lots filled with surplus vehicles from another Chinese EV manufacturer, BYD—a potent visual reminder of the imbalance shaping the modern EV economy.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), citing “unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of US persons,” in December implemented a ban on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), including drones, manufactured outside the US. In March, the FCC banned the sale of new foreign-made routers in the US, pointing to cybersecurity threats posed by vulnerable networking gear.