School Information System

Armin Rosen:

In the meeting with Ellison were Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis, and Ikram Mohamed, a consultant for Feeding Our Future. Both eventually faced federal indictments for their alleged role in the scam. (Said has been convicted on 21 counts of fraud, while Ikram is awaiting trial.) Ellison assured his guests that the money would continue flowing through FOF. It was the state government, which Ellison in theory represented, that would soon be on the defensive, the attorney general told them. “[Governor Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible,” said Ellison. “Let’s go fight these people,” he declared, “these people” being rightfully cautious state officials. Ellison suggested that Salim “send the names of all these people who are hanging on by a thread” — the Somali businesses and nonprofits that existed at the public’s expense, many of them through fraud — so that he could personally needle senior bureaucrats into restoring their funding. 

Ellison might not have extended such generosity out of pure nobility of spirit. Nine days after the meeting, Ellison’s reelection campaign received four donations at the legal maximum of $2,500, one of which came from Ikram’s brother, who also became a Feeding Our Future defendant. Salim Said made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Jeremiah Ellison, Keith Ellison’s son, then a Minneapolis city councilman. In total, Glahn found that Ellison received $15,000 from FOF-linked donors. At the time, the state remained happily oblivious to the Feeding Our Future scam, which only broke open when FBI agents executed scores of simultaneous search warrants in January of 2022.

Ellison’s job is to be the top legal advocate for the government and the people of Minnesota. On the recording, “he’s sitting with people who were suing his clients, the state agencies, and talking about how he’s going to fight his own client,” Republican state representative Walter Hudson, a member of the House of Representatives’ Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, explained when I met him at the Capitol in Saint Paul. Ellison, he said, “was downplaying very clear evidence of massive amounts of fraud in order to gain political patronage from the Somali community, at minimum. Now, from there, you can speculate all sorts of things.” 

Natalie Wexler:

Comparing education systems internationally is a tricky business because contexts vary widely. But England and the U.S., along with some other countries, have long shared a similar problem: Education orthodoxy conflicts with what cognitive science tells us about teaching and learning.

Orthodoxy vs. Science

In both countries, prospective teachers have been told they should serve primarily as facilitators, allowing children to direct their own education as much as possible through inquiry, discovery, and free choice. It’s considered more important for students to acquire skills—for example, in reading comprehension or critical thinking more generally—than to acquire any particular knowledge. Some argue that requiring students to retain factual information is not only unnecessary but harmful.

Cognitive science, on the other hand, indicates that when learners are new to a topic, what works best is explicit instruction that incorporates lots of teacher-directed interaction with students. And studies showthat learners need to acquire knowledge through a content-rich curriculum in order to apply “thinking” skills. The more information you have about a topic stored in long-term memory, the better able you are to understand a text on that topic or to think about it critically.

Susan Pickard:

The keynote speaker, a well-known American anthropologist in his 50s, wearing a tight T-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms, stood on stage in front of a packed ballroom at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, the most elite social-science gathering of its kind in the United States. “To quote the taxi driver who drove me from the airport,” he said, pausing for one theatrical beat, “ ‘fuck ICE!’ ”

The audience — from grey-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster  — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.

We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.” 

Andy Kessler:

A June study from MIT Media Lab suggests that using ChatGPT to write essays results in “cognitive debt,” a fancy way to say that artificial intelligence makes you dumb. Critics of AI and social media regularly throw around terms like “continuous partial attention.” Or “brain rot.” In a Substack article on our “stupidogenic society” (more on that later), one commenter states, “Our society has become so smart we truly are stupid.” Ouch. But are we?

We’ve heard all this before. The Atlantic asked in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—which I found from a Google search. My parents called television the “idiot box,” a term coined in the mid-1950s. Calculators, cars and probably candles and the abacus were considered a menace to society.

Still, the antitechnology backlash grows. We know that intelligence scores from 1932 to 1978 increased about three points every decade, the Flynn Effect. Each generation gets smarter. That’s too short for evolution, so scientists credit better nutrition or reduced exposure to lead. But IQ score growth slowed in teenagers starting in the 1990s and again in the 2000s. Hmmm, must be PCs and that darn internet.

In 2023 Northwestern researcher Elizabeth Dworak discovered a “reverse Flynn effect,” with youth scores dropping from 2006 to 2018 in three out of four “cognitive domains.” Facebook was released to the general public in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It’s obviously their fault, right? Well, IQ scores are notoriously fickle.

Rachel Wolfe:

“People are making really rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent and how the stakes seem higher and higher,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the Carolina Population Center.

Efforts in other countries to subsidize child-rearing and boost fertility have largely fallen flat. In Japan and Hungary, for example, policies like expanded paid family leave and monthly per-child allowances led to only modest increases in the birthrate.

But those types of policies are very different from what the Trump administration is laying out.

“If I have a baby today, I need money today, I don’t need money when my kid turns 18,” said Guzzo.

Terry Schilling, who runs conservative political ads as head of the American Principles Project, says that he sees Trump accounts as a “great starting point at shifting our economy toward the next generation.” Millennials and Gen Z, he says, are the first generations to inherit a worse country and economy than their parents. “We need to fix that, and soon, or else we will lose our country to socialism,” he said, pointing to how Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral election in part by appealing to young people’s economic anxieties.

Kimberly Strassel:

The Minnesota story—in which Somali fraudsters bilked taxpayers out of more than $1 billion—has many ugly story lines to choose from. It’s a parable of failed assimilation and the need for policies that heat the melting pot. It’s another warning of identity politics, of fraudsters using “minority-owned” status to cash in and crying “racism” to evade scrutiny. It’s a scandal of politicians who looked the other way, more eager to win votes than to enforce the law.

President Trump has for his part sought to co-opt the story for his own priority: immigration. He’s raged about ungrateful Somali immigrants, paused immigration applications from 19 countries, and ramped up immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area. This might excite the base, but it’s diverting attention from a far better policy opportunity.

Because at root, this is a story of broken welfare. Of a federal government that shovels more than $1 trillion annually into more than 80 major “antipoverty” programs (and countless minor ones)—a system too complex to ensure even basic integrity. And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.

Open Justice UK:

Working directly with survivors and using community crowdfunding, our organisation has lawfully acquired and redacted these court documents, ensuring that the realities of grooming gangs are documented accurately and responsibly. By providing this material, we help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public understand how these cases unfold in court and why open access to justice records is vital for safeguarding and future prevention.

Jon Marcus:

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared with 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data shows.

“This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom.“

It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars.

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened in 2024 with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit.

Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals.

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply.

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable.

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A long running issue: Credit for non Madison School District Courses. More, recent history

Other school systems allow students to take off campus courses at nearby technical or 4 year colleges. Teacher union issues seek to have been dealt with….

Jordan Adams

In brief, the current state of our schools is the result of a model of education that discounted students actually knowing and understanding things, that cast aspersions on authority figures like students’ teachers and parents and those who have come before them, that viewed students first as social problem-solvers and then as outright political pawns and partisan activists, and that built an apparatus of gatekeeping and grift that repelled not only conservatives but also the most talented and capable individuals from becoming teachers and education leaders. In this vacuous, politically charged environment, woke was injected and thrived, reinforcing this self-sabotage in a vicious cycle.

So tackle the woke and actually enforce transparency and reforms (instead of presuming passing a law or policy will magically fix everything without any oversight). But Republicans must do more. They must reform education to remove the conditions that allow woke to flourish, and that fundamentally means returning education to forming wise, virtuous, and highly capable future citizens. It means focusing on academics and character. It means casting a vision, a return to what school was meant to be.

To deliver on education and save the country, Republicans need look no further than how our Founding Fathers were educated, what they said about education, and what parents are demanding today: Classical Education.

Junyi Hou, Andre Lin Huikai, Nuo Chen, Yiwei Gong, Bingsheng He:

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools. PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI). Early aggregated analytics demonstrate active user engagement and validate the practicality of an editor-native, agentic writing assistant. More details about this demo and video could be found at this https URL.

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Andrew Akbashev:

Basically, this AI writer removes a big part of PhD education.

It takes over your brainwork.

Yes, it saves your time by writing for you.

But you skip the essential thinking & analytical process because you don’t need to write anymore.

In my view, this is a dangerous road.

Retraction Watch

Authors of the first “Matters Arising” commentary published August 6 noted the article projected the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62 percent by 2100, “an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates.” The authors of the critique also pointed out the PIK authors had used a dataset for Uzbekistan with “anomalies.” By removing the Uzbek dataset, the estimate in the original paper “aligns closely with previous literature,” the critique reads.

In a second Matters Arising, published a week later, Christof Schötz, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich in Ottobrunn, Germany, and a researcher at PIK, argued the analysis in the paper “underestimates uncertainty … rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.” 

The PIK press office responded to our request for comment from the authors, including more information regarding the new data and where they plan to submit for publication, with a copy of the embargoed retraction notice, as did Nature’s press team. 

Alessia Degraeve:

Michigan State University (MSU) is training future teachers to see classroom inequity primarily through the lens of race—ignoring the deeper forces that most shape student success: class, family stability, and quality of early education. 

In the school’s elementary and secondary education programs, every student must take “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.” Young America’s Foundation (YAF) obtained the syllabus for this required course. It is built entirely around one textbook.

At the top of this syllabus, in large bold print, is the word “REQUIRED.” What follows is a declaration: “There is one required book for this class. It is We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love.”

Why do teachers need to approach diverse students differently than white students? Why does the course assign only one textbook—without exposing students to competing perspectives?

Abigail Shrirer:

My instinct is to live as lightly as possible so I can be nimble. If I’m honest, this has always been a problem of mine to some extent. Like, when we moved to New York, I didn’t want to have to buy furniture and commit to a new place, so we signed onto a two-year furnished sublet. This all has downstream effects: We have a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old. I know stability is essential for them. And if I’m really, really honest, I grew up in a family with some instability, so I worry that I’m re-creating that by refusing to commit to a long-term home.

But I genuinely, in my bones, think chaos is coming. What do I do? How do I build a stable life when I’m convinced we need to be ready to run? —Love, Your Friend in Need, Nellie

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Ever notice that a peculiar sadness inheres in plastic forks and paper plates?

No one ever settles into a folding chair, no matter how sturdy. Couples who live together for years, telling themselves that they’re as good as married, rarely seem to believe it. The fact is, you don’t really tuck into a meal on squeaky Styrofoam. “My girlfriend” neither carries the ring nor commands the respect of “my wife.

……

Impermanence alienates and unnerves us.

Overinvest, never underinvest, in people around you and in those you love.

Particularly in a world with poor visibility, they are the closest thing any of us has to security. Give the community you inhabit a real shot and make a go of ensuring it succeeds.

Thompson Reuters and West Publishing vs Ross intelligence:

Copying protectable expression to create a competing substitute isn’t innovation: it’s theft. This basic principle is as true in the AI context as it is in any other. ROSS Intelligence Inc. copied copyrighted, editorial content from Westlaw, West Publishing Corporation and Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH’s (together, “TR”) legal research platform, to create its own legal research platform. Given those undisputed facts, Judge Bibas sitting by designation in the District of Delaware correctly held that, under binding Supreme Court precedent, ROSS’s creation of a direct substitute for Westlaw was copyright infringement and not fair use. D.I.770 (“Op.”).

In terms of copying protectable expression, this case is not about who owns “the law.” ROSS did not copy from Westlaw to get access to the law—it already had the law. This case is about ROSS’s copying of legal analysis, including at least 2,243 headnotes from Westlaw that its own expert found were dissimilar from the cases (the “West Headnotes”). For over a hundred years and as recently as 2020, the Supreme Court has upheld “the reporter’s copyright interest in

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more.

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Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO.

Jared Cooney Horvath:

When people think about excessive technology in schools, their minds usually go to phones. But according to a new book from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, we’re overlooking the true culprits: the laptops sitting on students’ desks. In “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning—and How to Help Them Thrive Again,” Horvath explains why consuming information through screens leads to falling performance, fractured attention, and the slow erosion of rigorous thought.

We’re proud to publish an exclusive, adapted excerpt from the book that answers an urgent question: Why, after generations of progress, are today’s children less intellectually capable than their parents? —The Editors

This might be one of the hardest truths today’s parents have to face:

Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.

The daughter who once loved school, but now dreads it. The son who used to devour books, but now scrolls until midnight. Fading memory, slipping focus. Something is wrong, and many of us have felt it.

Matthew Yglesias:

The first time I ever heard a land acknowledgment, I was on a panel at a nonprofit conference in Colorado. A Native woman stood up in the audience and started shouting and demanding the floor. Most people were confused, but a few were cheering her on. When the moderator let her speak, she asked to do a “land acknowledgment.” I didn’t know what that was, but she was granted permission and said something about the land to scattered applause before we moved on. 

As far as activist tactics go, it was pretty good. 

It was much easier for a progressive moderator at a conference with mostly progressive attendees to just say yes than to try to have the woman forcibly removed. It’s a small-bore example of the strategic logic of nonviolent protest, and it succeeded in getting large swathes of progressive America to preemptively start doing land acknowledgments. 

The 2024 Democratic platform, for example, commences with a fairly innocuous land acknowledgment, stating that they were gathering on “lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial.” But the Native Governance Center’s guide to Indigenous land acknowledgments tells us, “Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.” 

I think it’s worthwhile to consider the distinction here

Matt Ridley

According to analysis by the Washington Post, it is not just Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democratic party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president last year. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European Parliament has voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping fight climate change.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier” and generally deemed evil. In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.

Margot Cleveland:

This email may represent the first public evidence that the Biden Administration’s DOJ knew the special counsel’s office planned to subpoena congressional Republicans. But the scandal is even greater because in “concurring” in Smith’s use of subpoenas to target communications of members of Congress, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section expressly acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the proposed course of action.

“As you are aware, there is some litigation risk regarding whether compelled disclosure of toll records of a Member’s legislative calls violates the Speech or Debate Clause in the D.C. Circuit,” Principal Deputy Chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section John Keller wrote in a May 17, 2023 email to two top members of the special counsel’s team. Significantly, that email then cited the controlling precedent of United States v. Rayburn House Office Building, 497 F.3d 654, 662 (D.C. Cir. 2007), citing that appellate court decision’s holding that under the Speech or Debate Clause, “[t]he bar on compelled disclosure is absolute.” That email also cited In re Grand Jury Investigation, 587 F.2d 589, 594 (3d Cir. 1978) as establishing “[t]he caselaw is clear that a legislator asserting the invasion of the Speech or Debate Clause privilege by use of a grand jury subpoena to a third party may intervene and oppose such use.”

Aaron Garth Smith

That teachers’ wages have stagnated over two decades of growth in public school funding highlights deep structural problems in K–12 finance.

large body of research shows that effective teachers are the most important school-related factor in determining student success, making teacher compensation a key policy lever. “We need to pay all teachers more—and effective teachers even more,” said Heather Peske of the National Council on Teacher Quality in a recent SCHOOLED debate on teacher pay.

Peske has a point. The nationwide average teacher salary fell by over 6 percent between 2002 and 2022, going from $75,152 to $70,548 in 2023 dollars, according to new Reason Foundation research. In total, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries fell in 40 of 50 states, as shown in Table 1.

It’s also a fact that teacher salaries are tied to educational attainment and years of experience, meaning that high-performing teachers—and those in shortage areas like math, science, and special education—aren’t paid more for their results or expertise.

To put the right incentives in place, bold teacher pay reforms are needed. But to maximize the long-term impact of these policies, it’s important to address the root causes of stagnant salaries. Examining data both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic reveals structural problems in K–12 finance that keep dollars out of teacher paychecks.

Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard and Clara Ence Morse:

“I have come across what I think is a great way to relieve the suffering of tens of millions of kids,” Yass said in an interview with The Washington Post in the offices of Susquehanna International Group, the behemoth trading firm in the Philadelphia suburbs that he co-founded. “To most people it’s like if you’re a libertarian billionaire, you must be Lex Luthor trying to do something nefarious. If I gave to a hospital, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

To Yass, political spending when it’s on behalf of pro-voucher candidates is akin to charity, benefiting children and families who need a champion to face down teachers unions. “They needed a philanthropist,” he said. “I felt it was my role to be that philanthropist.”

But teachers unions and other critics see vouchers as an assault on public schools, which serve the vast majority of children. They complain that private schools face little accountability for the money they are given or their academic results. They also are allowed to pick and choose their students. In several states, critics note, most of the beneficiaries were already attending private schools when they joined the voucher program; some of those families may have struggled to pay tuition on their own, but for wealthier parents, it was a windfall at taxpayer expense. (Yass, for the record, thinks vouchers should go to all families — even those as wealthy as his.)
Critics say his giving represents an absurd amount of influence for one person, who can press his political agenda simply because he is rich.
“If you picture a man spraying a fire hose at the political system, that’s how he has reshaped how Pennsylvania politics work,” said Arielle Klagsbrun, a liberal activist who helps run a coalition of groups that oppose Yass, and who co-wrote the essay Yass was emailed about in January 2023. “This is the agenda of one billionaire trying to push his beliefs and whims on the rest of the state.”

The Economist:

HRISTMAS STOCKINGS may contain more surprises than usual this year, as children open presents that can talk back. Toymakers in China have declared 2025 the year of artificial intelligence (AI) and are producing robots and teddies that can teach, play and tell stories. Older children, meanwhile, are glued to viral AI videos and AI-enhanced games. At school, many are being taught with materials created with tools like ChatGPT. Some are even learning alongside chatbot-tutors.

In work and play, AI is rewiring childhood. It promises every child the kind of upbringing previously available only to the rich, with private tutors, personalised syllabuses and bespoke entertainment. Children can listen to songs composed about them, read stories in which they star, play video games that adapt to their skill level and have an entourage of chatbot friends cheering them on. A childhood fit for a king could become universal.

It is a future filled with opportunities—and hidden traps. As real kings often discover, a bespoke upbringing can also be a lonely and atomised one. What’s more, as their subjects often find out, it can create adults who are ill-equipped for real life. As AI changes childhood for better and for worse, society must rethink the business of growing up.
Being reared by robots has advantages. Tech firms are already showing how AI can enhance learning, especially where teachers and materials are scarce. Literacy and language-learning have been boosted in early trials. The dream is that, with an AI tutor, children can be saved from classes pitched to the median, in which bright pupils are bored and dim ones are lost. If you want a version of this leader for an eight-year-old Hindi-speaker, AI can rewrite it; if they would prefer it as a cartoon strip or a song, no problem.

White House:

1. How American “Strategy” Went Astray
   To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.
   
2. A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
   
3. A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy. American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.
   
4. After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

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Competence and Merit – American prosperity and security depend on the development and promotion of competence. Competence and merit are among our greatest civilizational advantages: where the best Americans are hired, promoted, and honored, innovation and prosperity follow. Should competence be destroyed or systematically discouraged, complex systems that we take for granted—from infrastructure to national security to education and research—will cease to function. Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense, and innovation will evaporate. The success of radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself. At the same time, we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding “global talent” that undercuts American workers. In our every principle and action, America and Americans must always come first.

Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges

David Lloyd Dusenbury and Philip Pilkington:

With harmony, slight things grow to greatness. With discord, great things shrivel and fail.

—Matteo Ricci, 1596¹

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama caused a stir by publishing an article in the National Interest titled “The End of History?”. A State Department and Rand Corporation analyst at the time, Fukuyama confessed that he was feeling something out of the ordinary. “We may be witnessing,” he said, “not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.” Did this fill him with dread? Not really. Post-history was not brought on by catastrophe but, fortunately, by the apotheosis of what he called “the Western idea.” And apparently, liberal democracy is the Western idea. The “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” had not, therefore, come like a thief in the night, but rather, like a liberal technocrat.²

Not everyone was convinced. In fact, Fukuyama’s 1992 book in the same vein, The End of History and the Last Man, was negatively reviewed; Perry Anderson, a historian of the Left, was struck by “the virtual universality of the rejection” of Fukuyama’s thesis: “For once,” he observed, “most of the Right, Centre, and Left were united in their reaction.”³

It is telling, though, that Fukuyama made his move by channeling a feeling. For whatever his critics said, his idea matched the Western mood circa 1990, which could accurately be called euphoria. What Fukuyama hailed as the preordained triumph of liberal democracy quickly became an axiom. His sense that liberal ideology had not just outlasted Soviet communism but had transcended the whole realm of “ideological struggle” took root in Washington, and then in London and Berlin. His notion that “we have already emerged on the other side of history” spread rapidly in Western policy circles.⁴ Many liberals, especially in the up-and-coming Boomer generation, felt that they had truly won the great game of history.

Richelle Wilson:

Recent test scores show that only about half of Wisconsin students are proficient in reading. Those numbers are even more stark for Native American students. 

In 2022, only 5 percent of Native third graders in Brown County were reading at grade level.

“To find out that 95 percent of our children were struggling — it hurts,” Jennifer Webster, who serves on the tribal council for Oneida Nation, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” 

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

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

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger and Erin McGroarty

State and local officials are focusing efforts to keep children from online spaces that encourage violence, as a Wisconsin agency reports a noted increase in tips about school safety.

This year, tips to the state Office of School Safety jumped by 30%, including nearly 240 tips about concerns of a planned school attack. 

In the Madison school district, officials told the Cap Times the school safety tips they field most on a day-to-day basis originate on digital devices and online platforms.

State officials, including Office of Children’s Mental Health Director Linda Hall, say online activity and social media increase the risk that young people will fall into unsafe spaces on the internet, which can harm emotional health and expose them to violence. 

“We used to always talk about stranger danger. Now we have to have those conversations with kids, but put it in the digital context,” Hall said. “It’s not just watching out for somebody who might be on a street corner, trying to lure them into a car. It’s what’s happening while they’re online.”

Manuel Ansede: 

In the autumn of 2020, with humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.

Nicholas B. Creel:

Samantha Fulnecky, a University of Oklahoma psychology student, received zero points on an essay assignment after citing the Bible in her response to an article about gender roles. The instructor, a transgender graduate student, called the paper “offensive” and said it lacked empirical evidence. The case has since become a national scandal. The instructor has been suspended, and the student has filed both a grade appeal and a religious-discrimination complaint. The student is likely to win on both counts.

Bryan Caplan:

Only a small minority of pregnancies have horrible physical consequences, and people who are contemplating an abortion rarely claim otherwise. But when contemplating an abortion, many if not most prospective parents predict horrible mental consequences for themselves. In the vernacular: “A baby would ruin my life.” If my argument so far is correct, the correct reaction to such claims is not to stonewall with: “Too bad” or “Trust women.” The correct reaction is to ask: “Is it really true that a baby would ruin your life?” 

The strongest known evidence on this question is Diana Foster’s “Turnaway Study,” which uses what economists call a regression discontinuity design to estimate a long list of causal effects of abortion. Foster interviewed women in abortion clinics who were near the legal cutoff. Some turned out to be just below the cutoff — and normally ended up getting an abortion. Some turned out to be just above the cutoff — and normally ended up getting a baby. 

I learned about Foster’s work twelve years ago, but only recently did I read her full book: The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having ― or Being Denied ― an Abortion.* Foster walks readers through the study and the co-authored research that came out of it. The book is careful, thorough, wide-ranging, well-written, and creative. While Foster is obviously deeply pro-choice, her methods are sound and her presentation is transparent. The book’s most notable findings:

1. Women who managed to get abortions had almost exactly the same self-reported well-being as the turnaways: “Shortly after being denied an abortion, women had more symptoms of anxiety and stress and lower levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction than women who received an abortion. Over time, women’s mental health and well-being generally improved, so that by six months to one year, there were no differences between groups across outcomes. To the extent that abortion causes mental health harm, the harm comes from the denial of services, not the provision… Yet once the pregnancy was announced, the baby born, and the unknown fears and expectations realized or overcome, the trajectory of mental health symptoms seems to return to what it would have been if the woman had received an abortion.” To illustrate, here’s the key figure on depression from the book.

———

Choose life.

Leor Sapir:
At their conferences, closed to outsiders and the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. They spoke about the boys who said they wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys, and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient—some of them adolescents—who wanted to be made to look as if they had no sex at all.

In one of the videos, obtained exclusively by The Free Press, from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) spoke about one such case. Penkin told the audience about Sky, who she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who was living on his own for the first time.

Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin.

Brian Blase:

This morning, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a damning report showing that the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges are highly vulnerable to fraud. The report was requested by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith.

As a result of expanded subsidies and porous federal oversight, the federal exchange approved subsidized health insurance for 23 of 24 fictitious applications submitted by GAO. In addition, GAO found that tens of billions of dollars in advanced subsidies to health insurers have not been properly reconciled. Together, these failures show that the ACA exchanges lack even minimal oversight and are rife with fraud and abuse that is hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars.

GAO’s findings are strong confirmation of Paragon research into improper and phantom enrollment. We identified an estimated 6.4 million improper enrollees in fully subsidized plans in 2025. The massive surge, driven by people unaware of their enrollment or with other coverage, has caused a doubling in the percentage of exchange enrollees without any medical claims from 2021 to 2024.

Patrick T Brown:

The fertility crisis in the United States is, in large part, a marriage crisis. Births to married women are only a tick below where they have been since the late 1980s, while births to unmarried women have fallen precipitously, by as much as 30% from a 2007 peak.

Conservatives, who’ve long bemoaned single parenthood, have scant reason to cheer this outcome. It’s not that people are waiting to have kids until after marriage. Rather, they’re increasingly opting out of committing to partnership and parenthood altogether. And as new research shows, progressives, especially, are less likely to find either marriage or parenthood worth pursuing. This, even as Americans on the Right of center remain committed to both.

Alex Tabarrok:

TABARROK: I do agree that it is puzzling that the interest rate on bonds is so low. Hanno Lustig and his co-authors have an interesting paper on this. They point out that not only is it the case that we have all of this debt with no plans to pay it, as far as we can tell right now, but the debt is not a very good asset in the sense that when will the debt be paid? If it is going to be paid, it’s going to be paid when the times are good. That means that you’re being paid when GDP is higher and the marginal utility money is low.

When is the debt not paid? When does it get bigger? It means when the economy is doing poorly. The debt as an asset has the opposite kind of structure than you would want. It’s not like gold, which arguably goes down in good times and goes up in bad times. You get some nice covariance to even out your portfolio. The debt as an asset is positively correlated with good times, and that’s bad. You should expect the interest rates to be much, much higher than they actually are.

Henry Oliver:

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

Budget Document with curious “security” applied:

Madison’s budget website.

Erin Gretzinger:

This year’s budget is 10% higher in both revenue and expenses compared with last year’s, with additional spending focused on priorities like expanding 4K options and boosting staffing, which went up by nearly 60 full-time equivalent positions. About 81% of the district’s budget goes toward staff compensation and benefits.

More:

An annual enrollment tally at the Madison school district declined by more than 100 students this fall, marking the first decrease in two years and falling far below the district’s own estimates that predicted an increase for the 2025-26 school year.

Across Wisconsin, every school tallies its enrollment on the third Friday of September to help determine state funding levels for districts. This year, the Madison Metropolitan School District counted 25,557 full-time equivalent students. That’s down 110 from last fall.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K-12 tax and $pending practices.

——

Michael Torres:

A 62% increase in funding (adjusted for inflation) has resulted in a 2% DROP in reading performance among Illinois 4th graders over 22+ years.

Kelsey Piper:

When there’s a scandalous “false miracle” in the education world, it’s usually one of two things: direct cheating on a test or careful selection of the population that takes the test. So if you see a sizable improvement in education results, it’s worth looking out for both of those.

When I first began looking into the “Mississippi Miracle,” wherein a low-performing southern state shot up in fourth-grade reading scores from 49th place to ninth place, I was worried about being taken in by yet another fraudulent success story in the world of education. So, I tried to figure out: Was I looking at education, or was I looking at selection?

In particular, a major plank of Mississippi’s reading reforms is a test of basic reading fluency administered at the end of third grade. Kids who don’t pass it are held back a year. For at least five years, people have argued that maybe this, rather than any actual teaching skill present in Mississippi, is what’s driving the state’s improvements.1

A provocative new article from Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel H. Robinson in Significanceargued that, in fact, nearly all of Mississippi’s results are driven by the third-grade retention policy, not by the phonics instruction, curriculum changes, or the teacher training that accompanied them. It has gone viral, with lots of glee in certain quarters, where it was sometimes taken as proof that there’s nothing other states need to learn from Mississippi after all.

This is an important debate, but I’ve been dismayed to see their article treated as a significant contribution to it. It’s badly mangled with straightforward factual errors that should undermine anyone’s confidence the authors did their homework — for example, the authors claimed that “the 2024 NAEP fourth-grade mathematics scores rank the state at a tie at 50th!” In fact, Mississippi ranked 16th on the fourth-grade math NAEP assessment.2 Unsurprisingly, the authors’ errors are not limited to these sorts of factual claims but also extend to their core argument, which is wholly unpersuasive.

Karen Vaites:

A word about That Sloppy Paper on Mississippi:

What struck me most was its arrogance.

A smug tone and talk of “facts of arithmetic” accompanied a paper that badly misstated Mississippi’s math outcomes. Accurate outcomes on left, sample of their paper on right.

Really, check the tone in this segment (and the paper generally).

Somewhat related:

Modern education policy (getting rid of phonics, banning middle school algebra, eliminating honors classes, prioritizing equalization instead of education) isn’t happening because that’s what families want.

These policies happen when families and voters aren’t paying attention, and if we want schools to switch their focus back to education and excellence, it will only happen if families and voters demand it.

Quinton Klabon:

Is the Mississippi Miracle in reading real? Yeah!

If anyone ever debunks it, it will not be people who cannot read a ranking chart.

“To their credit, when I reached out to the authors about this mistake, they acknowledged it and reached out to get it fixed before publication.”

Kelsey Piper:

All right, my response on Mississippi is up. I think the strongest argument is simply that steady improvements in every decile for the last twenty years cannot be explained by a one-off change in which students are retained in 2015.

Karen Vaites:

Are you tired of sloppy and straw man-heavy pieces by Mississippi naysayers?

Me, too.

I take up that That Sloppy Paper.

More importantly, I ask you to look into Louisiana, the land of NAEP gains untainted by 3rd grade retention.

It’s arguably the more promising model for state reform, anyway.

My latest:

————

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

——-

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

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Barba:

A Mission District nonprofit that San Francisco paid more than $14 million in recent years to distribute groceries and help kids is at risk of losing city funding over serious concerns about its finances, according to city monitors.

Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth was flagged by the controller’s office in a report released Tuesday as one of two city-funded nonprofits that demonstrated “a pattern of severe fiscal or programmatic concerns” last fiscal year.

The controller found that HOMEY had failed to disclose debts, produced dubious financial reports and had no clear plan for resolving its financial issues, records show. Although it acknowledged its cash-flow issues, HOMEY disputed the other findings.

“What upsets me the most is that they are saying we are bad actors,” said HOMEY Executive Director Roberto Alfaro. “That is totally not the case.”

The findings were one aspect of the 44-page annual report, which detailed how the controller sought to hold nonprofits accountable for the $1.63 billion that San Francisco paid them last fiscal year, largely to address homelessness and other systemic issues.

WTMJ:

Students at Milwaukee High School of the Arts got an unexpected holiday surprise Monday when actor Hugh Jackman walked into their music class with a special message and gifts.

The visit wasn’t just a celebrity appearance. For students like Jasper Davidson, a senior creative writing major, it felt like validation of their artistic dreams.

“It felt validating, it felt like we were appreciated,” Davidson said.

Heather Gillers:

Things aren’t looking good for Harvard’s big bet on bitcoin.

The country’s oldest and richest university supersized its wager on the cryptocurrency last quarter, ramping up its holdings in iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF to nearly half a billion dollars. Even after Tuesday’s rebound, bitcoin has dropped more than 20% this quarter—dragged down in a crypto rout hitting everyone from Wall Street to retail investors to holders of the U.S. president’s meme coin.

Harvard could have gotten out unscathed—or even with a small gain—if the school had sold its holdings in early October, before prices dropped. The average price Harvard paid couldn’t be learned but if the school still holds some or all of the 4.9 million shares it bought last quarter, the best-case scenario would be a 14% loss on those holdings.

Open Justice UK:

Working directly with survivors and using community crowdfunding, our organisation has lawfully acquired and redacted these court documents, ensuring that the realities of grooming gangs are documented accurately and responsibly. By providing this material, we help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public understand how these cases unfold in court and why open access to justice records is vital for safeguarding and future prevention.

Sean Hollister:

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they’re actually worth a click!)

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

Rose Horowitch

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.

Forty years ago, students with disabilities could count on few protections in higher education. Federal law prohibited discrimination against disabled students, but in practice schools did little to address their needs. Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights expert who teaches at Harvard Law, recalled the challenges of attending law school as a student using a wheelchair in the 1980s. “I sat in the back of the classroom, could not enter certain buildings in a normal way, became the first person on the law review with a disability, and dragged myself up the stairs,” he told me.

The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, was meant to make life fairer for people like Stein. The law required public and private institutions to provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

Gregory Lyakhov:

Public school districts have a responsibility to educate students, safeguard taxpayer money, and provide families with opportunities for success. However, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become a national example of how a school system collapses under mismanagement, political patronage, and an absence of accountability.

A report from the Chicago Board of Education’s Office of Inspector General uncovered $23.6 million in misused spending—specifically, spending on lavish and often unapproved travel: $1,000-a-night hotel rooms, airport limos, luxury suites, and “professional development” trips that doubled as vacations. One teacher stretched a four-day seminar into a weeklong Hawaiian resort stay costing $4,700.

Emma Pettit:

Did a student paper arguing for traditional gender roles and identities deserve its failing grade? Or was that mark proof of political bias, and of academe’s hostility to religious conservatives?

That debate is unspooling at the University of Oklahoma. There, Samantha Fulnecky was recently asked in a psychology course on lifespan development to respond to an academic article. In her short reaction paper, Fulnecky wrote that while the article “discussed peers using teasing as a way to enforce gender norms,” she did “not necessarily see this as a problem,” according to screenshots of her paper that were posted on X by the university’s Turning Point USA chapter. That’s because “God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”

Max Tani:

The piece also seemed to divide staff, and reignited years-old internal tensions between some younger, more left-leaning members of staff and management.

“People are really upset,” one Times journalist told Semafor.

In a series of posts on Bluesky, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said, “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.” On Friday, he deleted his posts, saying they violated the Times’ social media guidelines. Bouie also deleted subsequent posts on Sunday that also seemed to express frustration at the Times’ decision to publish the story, and shared a post that said “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”

The paper would not comment on whether it had compelled Bouie to delete the posts.

Times columnist Lydia Polgreen did not comment on whether the story was newsworthy, but wrote that as a biracial person with African parents, she easily understood why Mamdani checked a box on his college admissions form identifying as Black or African American.

Christopher Rufo:

The New York Times beat us on the Zohran scoop, but we beat the New York Times on the Somali fraud scoop. Make no mistake: although we have significantly fewer resources, this is a competition between peer institutions and, more often than not, we’re beating them to the story.

Ted Balaker:

Maybe we shouldn’t shield kids from complex controversies

Imagine if students at one of our nation’s highest-ranking universities couldn’t do grammar school math. Well, administrators at the University of California, San Diego recently discovered that plenty of their students struggle with math they should have learned a long time ago.

Here’s an example: Rounding is a third-grade skill, yet 61% of UCSD students who were placed in a remedial math course couldn’t round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred.

Keep in mind that UCSD placed sixth in US News & World Report’s national rankings of public universities. Also keep in mind that 94% of the students placed in the remedial math course had completed an advanced math class in high school such as pre-calculus, calculus or statistics. And keep one more thing in mind — those students received an average grade of A- in those advanced high school math classes.

College students should be able to round correctly, and what if they could? What would that tell us? Not much. If they could answer a dozen other standardized questions correctly that would tell us more, but maybe not much more.

How would most college students answer a different kind of question, say, one like this: Are WNBA players underpaid?

Maybe it makes me a crazy homeschool parent, but when he was 10, I had my son tackle that question.

Erin Gretzinger:

School officials also told freshman Aurelia Bergstrom — who has been diagnosed with a low incidence neuro genetic condition of unknown origin which leads to global developmental delays — that she had to pass a tryout under the same requirements as other swimmers. Her mom, Krisjon Olson, said the policy change would “functionally disqualify” her daughter. 

The parents pushed back as the swim season began but neither the school nor district budged. After the families went public with their concerns, more than three dozen people submitted written comments or spoke at a School Board meeting, urging the Madison Metropolitan School District to allow the girls to swim and support inclusive athletics more broadly.  

A few days after the meeting, Shukla and Bergstrom were let back on the team in time to compete in three meets before the season ended. 

While the parents said they appreciated the community’s support and the school’s reversal, they told the Cap Times they still have questions about why their daughters were cut in the first place and missed much of the season. Who was involved in the decision to oust their daughters or bring them back also remains unclear to the families. 

The parents, other families and advocates say the debacle raised doubts about the school district ensuring access to athletics for disabled students. Last school year, students with disabilities represented about 16% of the district’s enrollment, or about 4,100 children. 

The response has also struck a chord with some families as federal protections for disabled students are under pressure from the Trump administration. 

By Danielle DuClos

In a recent high-profile case of educator sexual misconduct, the parents of a Kenosha student are suing their school district and their daughter’s former teacher after administrators concluded the teacher groomed the girl when she was 14.

Christian Enwright, 31, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of disorderly conduct in April. Prosecutors accused him of a “sexually charged” social media relationship with the student, according to the criminal complaint.

The plea and the family’s lawsuit have gained widespread attention, including from legislators at the state Capitol. This fall, lawmakers cited the Enwright case while proposing to criminalize grooming a minor for sexual activity.

Educator sexual misconduct and grooming often only become publicly known when an educator is arrested and charged with a crime.

A Cap Times investigation found that more than 200 educators were investigated by the state Department of Public Instruction from 2018 through 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct or grooming, a likely undercount of the true prevalence of these behaviors. In November, the Legislature ordered an audit of the department’s handling of misconduct investigations in response to the Cap Times reporting.

The Enwright case is a rare instance in Wisconsin where educator misconduct resulted in new legislation and changed school policies. It’s also unusual that Enwright’s conduct resulted in criminal charges, despite no criminal penalty for grooming in state law.

Aaron Smith:

States have amassed nearly $400 billion in teacher pension debt, which is about $9,285 per student in public schools.

What governments owe teachers far exceeds how much they’ve saved, a problem that will be exacerbated by declining enrollment.

Chicago Public Schools alone has over $16 billion in net pension liabilities.

Here are the top ten public school districts in total pension debt:

Ronald Purser

In classrooms today, the technopoly is thriving. Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively. We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice. Critical pedagogy is out; productivity hacks are in. What’s sold as innovation is really surrender. As the university trades its teaching mission for “AI-tech integration,” it doesn’t just risk irrelevance—it risks becoming mechanically soulless. Genuine intellectual struggle has become too expensive of a value proposition.

The scandal is not one of ignorance but indifference. University administrators understand exactly what’s happening, and proceed anyway. As long as enrollment numbers hold and tuition checks clear, they turn a blind eye to the learning crisis while faculty are left to manage the educational carnage in their classrooms.

The future of education has already arrived–as a liquidation sale of everything that once made it matter.

Jill Barshay:

In a fragmented system where every district makes its own choices, evidence is one of the few forces capable of offering coherence. And the statistics that track the nation’s schools — achievement, inequality, enrollment, finances — are irreplaceable. As it stands now, there is a lot we won’t know, measure or trust in the future of education. 

The deeper irony is that the cuts did not simply weaken the field of education research, they compromised the country’s ability to see its own school system clearly. Reform may indeed be overdue. But rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.

Hannah Black:

I compulsively read whatever perspectives I could find online by people who regretted having children. No one who didn’t want a child would have read so much about the experience of having children. I was looking for an armature to make conscious a decision that I had already unconsciously made. Regret is a popular topic in contemporary writing on motherhood, sparkling with the static of a broken taboo. The only comparable regret discourse I can think of is the liberal media’s desire to flush out people who regret voting for Trump. I recall very little of what I read, but I remember a comment by a woman who said she did not relate to regret discourse because before her child was born she would spend hours looking mindlessly at her phone, and now her days were full of the meaningful labor of childcare. This comforted me because I too had empty time to fill. Time, like a uterus, expands to fit what’s inside it. Children, little human clocks, youth coming around again like lunchtime, illuminate the stretchy, incomprehensible texture of time. The single most common thing parents of older children say to me is, “Enjoy it, it goes by so fast!” Everyone says it in the same tone, nostalgic and conspiratorial, stunned by the fact of finitude. Becoming a parent is like joining a subculture of the majority. Like queer culture, it is structured around the illegibility of love, but it’s not remotely queer, it’s the least queer love of all: the heavy paste of parenting’s social form completely conceals its destabilizing, romantic heart.

Regret hallucinates a bridge between what does and does not happen, an anchor securing the unlived life to the lived one. The regret I experienced after my earlier abortion stemmed not only from having made what I thought was a wrong decision, but from my refusal to acknowledge the decision’s total reality. The regret allowed me to live two lives, the life of reality, in which I was not a mother, and the life of regret, in which the baby was still at stake, still an open question and, in a way, I was its mother. The non-baby of my regret would now be old enough to vote, and they have left home, but they still visit sometimes, especially now I start to realize that I will most likely only ever have one child. And I regret that. “One is better than none,” a stranger I confided in at a playgroup once told me, as we watched a room full of babies play. I repeat the phrase to myself often, as a talisman of my narrow escape from the annihilating power of my indecisiveness.

Developed by Barb Novak, PhD Director, Office of Literacy:

School and District level data (.xlsx). Act 20 annual reporting.

——

Chris Rickert:

Nearly 44% of Madison School District 4K through third graders scored below the 25th percentile on an early literacy screener required under a 2023 state law, the state Department of Public Instruction reported Monday,

The results were slightly worse than for students in those grades statewide. About 37% of them scored in the bottom quartile

Results varied widely by grade in the Madison and other school districts. More than half of Madison’s kindergartners and first graders, for example, scored in the bottom quartile, while only 13% of students in 4-year-old kindergarten scored in the bottom quartile.

…..

Act 20 was spurred by disappointing state standardized test results in English/language arts. As of last school year, only 51.6% of students were deemed to be meeting or exceeding standards in that area. In the Madison district, it was 47.3%.

——-

As with all school data, it is important to adjust student demographics in assessing school performance as these factors, unfortunately, play a large role in student outcomes.  To account for this reality, I use a regression analysis to measure the impact of these variables on the reading data, then use that data to make predictions about outcomes for each district. Districts that have fewer students below the 25th percentile than predicted are arguably doing a good job in reading education relative to other districts.The results of the regression predicting the share of students below the 25th percentile are depicted in Table 3.  First, it is important to note that the percentage of African American students does not show up as a significant predictor here. This is the first academic outcome data I’ve ever examined in Wisconsin where this is the case. What is not unusual is that student poverty is a key predictor. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have 31.43% more kids below the 25th percentile than a district with no students in poverty. Similarly, the share of students with disabilities matters here. A school with 100% of students with disabilities would be expected to have 72.77% more students below the 25th percentile.

——–

Anna Stokke:

🎯This is probably one of the smartest things I’ve heard a Canadian Minister of Education say. It gets to the heart of why scores never improve. The people who created the problem are always given the job of fixing the problem.

——

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

——-

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

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Dell:

We’re Committing $6.25 Billion to Give 25 Million Children a Financial Head Start

This contribution will fund $250 deposits for children ages 10 and under, expanding early access to investment accounts powered by Invest America.

More.

The Economist

Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most

Springfield, MA might seem an improbable setting for an education miracle. The city with a population of 155,000 along the Connecticut river has a median household income half the state average; violent crime is common. Yet graduation rates at the city’s high schools are surging. Between 2007 and 2022 the share of pupils at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology who earned a diploma in four years jumped from 50% to 94%; at neighbouring Roger Putnam Vocational Technical Academy it nearly doubled to 96%.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

Reducing standards may feel good in the short run, but it does a disservice to our children and undermines our collective well-being in the long run. (2/2)

Neetu Arnold:

A new study shows that public school performance ratings encourage reforms that benefit students and parents.

If you want to shut down the “school-to-prison pipeline,” holding failing schools accountable may be the best place to start. Many education debates focus on relaxing discipline as a way to keep kids out of the justice system. But a new study finds that receiving a failing accountability rating—and the reform pressure that then results—can work to reduce the share of students who get arrested or incarcerated as young adults.

“School Accountability, Long-Run Criminal Activity, and Self-Sufficiency,” published in the Journal of Human Resources in November 2025, followed more than 54,000 South Carolina students who entered ninth grade between 2000 and 2005, tracking them into their thirties to examine arrest and incarceration outcomes. Since 2000, South Carolina has rated public schools from “unsatisfactory” to “excellent” based on graduation rates, merit scholarship eligibility, and test scores.

JK Rowling:

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it’s proved shockingly successful. Trans activists’ shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they’ve been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.

Time and again, I’ve seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. ‘Well, yes, maybe there’s something in what you’re saying, but it’s hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can’t you be nice? Why won’t you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don’t you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?’

As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, ‘it’s not that I couldn’t see your point, but did you have to say it that way?’ We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it ‘gender affirming care.’ We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn’t exist.

Sean Brynda

“We’ve had some firearm recovery in schools where officers have taken away multiple firearms from students ranging in age from 8-years-old to 17-years-old,” said Norberg. “I believe in ensuring safety and that we can be there on-site as schools when incidents like that come up and if there are resources needed after and incident occurs that we can be there on site to provide additional resources to students and faculty outside of the Milwaukee Police Department.”

The 33-officer involved program has 25 full-time SROs assigned to different high schools and 8 other officers that rotate to other schools found within the the school district. Captain Norberg says the purpose of the SROs at school is to de-escalate conflict. 

“They respond to fights and disturbances particularly during lunch and dismissals to ensure that the safety of the students and also that of the school staff,” said Norberg. “Our SROs are trained to spot potential problems and to prevent early escalation into serious incidents. On many times, MPS has contacted us because they hear things and have asked us to be around to help monitor those kind of situations.” 

Jonathan Sine:

Working paper.

Runs ~500k Chinese graduate dissertations through plagiarism-detection software, then links them to 60k successful civil-service recruits (and controls).

By Bill Whitaker, Aliza Chasan, Henry Schuster and Sarah Turcotte:

A team of public high school students in Georgia faced some skepticism when they decided to try to come up with a way to detect Lyme disease earlier. 

But the students at Lambert High School in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, pushed ahead with their idea, using the gene editing technology CRISPR, and took it to the iGEM competition, a sort of science Olympics, in Paris. iGEM stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine and the annual competition has been around for about 20 years. 

Now, scientists say the students’ groundbreaking work could be a major breakthrough if further testing pans out. 

“We’re doing something in our high school lab that could potentially have a huge impact for, like, millions of people. It’s not like we’re just saying, like, ‘Oh. I’m just doing this little thing that might help my grade,'” said high school senior Claire Lee. “This thing could help save lives.”

Soyonbo Borjgin

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Deng Xiaoping reintroduced standardised college entrance examinations, which had been suspended for 12 years. (My maternal grandmother announced: “From now on, being rich is good, and being poor is bad!”) Both my parents got good scores and were admitted into colleges in Hohhot, where they studied the humanities, rather than practical subjects like medicine and engineering. This may be because intellectuals were still respected in the early 1980s, the start of the Reform Era (in my opinion, the best period of socialism in China). All college graduates were guaranteed a state job. That the son of an illiterate shepherd could attend university proved that our nation was advancing.

My father, a Mongolian Studies graduate, was hired to teach at Inner Mongolia University, and my mother, who studied journalism, became a reporter at The Inner Mongolia Daily. Four decades later, they were employed in these same institutions. Say what you will about state socialism, but it provides workplace stability.

In 1989, soon after I was born, my father was arrested. He does not speak about this period – that is the way in our culture – but I understand he got swept up in the Tiananmen Square movement, which had reached even the remotest corners of China. In Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, demonstrators swarmed through the streets and squares, demanding autonomy for their ostensibly autonomous regions. I’m told my father painted a pro-democracy slogan on a public building. He was imprisoned for two years.

One evening, when I returned home from nursery, there were two bald strangers in our living room: my father and his brother, also a protestor, had their heads shaved in jail. My mother made a huge feast, at least 10 dishes, to celebrate their release. To their credit, the university rehired my father, though as a librarian, not as a professor. If you go to prison, it’s natural to lose your job.

When I was a child, my mother would take me along on her reporting trips to remote villages. We travelled by the party Jeep, which was a rare sight in rural Mongolia: people came out of their huts to gawk at the vehicle. On weekend afternoons, she would sit at her desk, draft her articles, and then bike over to the office to hand them in to her editor. If I dwell on this memory, I can convince myself that she liked her line of work. Then I remember she remains a low-level reporter. Only party members are given promotions, and she never joined the party.

Robert George:

The ideological partisanship, dogmatism and bigotry on display in our society today are to some degree the fruit of our educational system. Too many college classrooms have become indoctrination camps. Some students buy into the leftist ideology they’re taught and become its enforcers. Others react by embracing opposing forms of extremism. Either way, radicalism and animus replace knowledge and wisdom. 

So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor and, above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth. 

David Sacks:

Every time we would prove an accusation false, NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months.

Today they evidently just threw up their hands and published this nothing burger. Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don’t support the headline. And of course, that was the whole point.

At no point in their constant goalpost-shifting was NYT willing to update the premise of their story to accept that I have no conflicts of interest to uncover.

As it became clear that NYT wasn’t interested in writing a fair story, I hired the law firm Clare Locke, which specializes in defamation law. I’m attaching Clare Locke’s letter to NYT so readers have full context on our interactions with NYT’s reporters over the past several months.

Once you read the letter, it becomes very clear how NYT willfully mischaracterized or ignored the facts to support their bogus narrative.

Follow-up:

This may be the point: portray anyone with real-world experience as too conflicted to serve in government so only professional bureaucrats/activists/NGO-types (with the same views as NYT reporters) are eligible.

Chamath:

Agreed.

There is a concerted effort by the bureaucratic class to paint success and experience as a sign of corruption.

Instead, it’s the exact opposite.

Success and experience in the free market only comes from repeatedly expressed and easily measured good judgement.

Gavin Baker:

Separately, the @nytimes urgently needs to provide remedial math education for these journalists and their editors. The idea that 500,000 GPUs sold to the UAE could generate anywhere near $200 billion in revenue to Nvidia is ridiculous.

I look forward to the correction that will be assiduously posted to the @NYTimesPR account which has 90k followers vs. the main account with 52.8m followers.

I should note that while I do not know David well, we have many good friends in common and I like him personally. More importantly, I am grateful for his service, which has unquestionably cost him a vast amount of money. And my superstar sister-in-law is a partner at Craft, for which David is lucky.

Dan Gillmor:

I’m hard on the NY Times for its many failings in political coverage, but this piece — about a South African immigrant to the US who is central to the manifestly sleazy, and lucrative, Silicon Valley / Trump world dealings — is simply excellent.

New York Times follow-up:

“Reporting on powerful figures who influence financial and industrial policies that affect millions of Americans is core to the role of The Times and part of being a member of the free and independent press. Our reporters do not have an agenda — they examine leads, verify them in good faith with the subjects involved, and publish what we confirm. That’s exactly what happened here.

We remain confident in our reporting on Mr. Sacks, an important and influential member of the Administration. The Times’s article documents the ethical complexities and intertwined interests of his dual roles as a government advisor and a major investor.”

The New York Times

– A spokesperson for The New York Times

——-

Nic Carter:

NYT article on Sacks is the purest distillation of East Coast v West Coast mindset to date.

East Coast: all financial incentives are conflicts. government should be run by impartial career bureaucrats and academics

West Coast: no conflict no interest. your views are worthless if you have no skin in the game

——-

more.

And.

Rachael Horowitz:

Contrast with: 68 top executive-branch officials in Biden administration had less than 2 ½ years of experience in the private sector. The average business experience of Biden appointees was only 2.4 years and 62 percent had virtually no business experience.

Ben Kamisar:

But what has shifted is the price of college. While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995. Tuition at private, four-year colleges is up 75% over the same period.

Poll respondents who spoke with NBC News all emphasized those rising costs as a major reason why the value of a four-year degree has been undercut.

Jacob Kennedy, a 28-year-old server and bartender living in Detroit, told NBC News that while he believes “an educated populace is the most important thing for a country to have,” if people can’t use those degrees because of the debt they’re carrying, it undercuts the value.

Kennedy, who has a two-year degree, reflected on “the number of people who I’ve met working in the service industry who have four-year degrees and then within a year of graduating immediately quit their ‘grown-up jobs’ to go back to the jobs they had.”

“The cost overwhelms the value,” he continued. “You go to school with all that student debt — the jobs you get out of college don’t pay that debt, so you have to go find something else that can pay that debt.”

The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected across virtually every demographic group. But the shift in sentiment is especially striking among Republicans.

jason Locasale:

NPR frames the reduction of this empire as if it’s some catastrophic blow to biomedical science. In reality, it is the clearest indictment of the system we’ve built – a system where:

• aging PIs retain massive labs long after their most productive years
• Harvard and other nonprofits quietly subsidize them through indirects and internal slush funds
• trainees serve as disposable workers in an oversaturated job market
• cronyism dictates who gets resources
• cancer is wielded as a fundraising weapon

Ashlea Ebeling:

When Carmen Thomas was growing up in Boston, her mom told her that her absent dad’s name was Joe Brown. So when she sent a saliva sample to 23andMe in her 20s and got a match with a Brown, she was excited.

It turned out the man she believed to be her father had died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely half sisters. They went out for boba tea and at a sleepover at their grandmother’s, she looked through family albums and held a pillow with his photo printed on it.

A year later, she was suing the Brown sisters and their mother. Thomas wanted a share of a multimillion-dollar medical-malpractice award they had won after Joe Brown died of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm. After all, she was his daughter too, Thomas said in a court complaint early last year.

Surprise heirs like Thomas are popping up because of DNA test kits, lawyers say, and wreaking havoc for families handling their loved ones’ estates. States are grappling with how to rewrite laws to address the issue, and lawyers are encouraging people to rethink their estate plans.

The lawyer representing the Brown sisters and their mother said his clients were taken aback by Thomas’s claims.

Allysia Finley:

Because so many incoming students were numerically illiterate, the university added a remedial class for middle- and elementary-school math. Remarkably, among students placed into that math course, 94% had completed an advanced math class in high school (e.g., pre-calculus, calculus or statistics) and received an average A- in their math courses.

Is this an indictment of A) the University of California’s admissions; B) public K-12 schools; C) U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings; or D) all of the above? If you chose D, you’re correct.

Start with A. The UC Board of Regents in 2020 scrapped standardized tests as an admissions requirement under the guise of promoting “equity.” The likely real reason: Blacks and Hispanics score lower on average on the SAT. Requiring applicants to submit standardized tests scores could also make it easier for critics to prove the university is providing racial preferences, which were prohibited by a 1996 voter referendum. The math-proficiency analysis suggests it may be doing so on the sly.

Amid a push to boost diversity and overall enrollment—and thus rake in more government student aid—UC San Diego admitted increasing numbers of unqualified applicants from low-income high schools: “In order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding,” the report says.

That’s because the College Board has made the exams easier to pass to encourage more students to take them—and thus rake in more money from testing fees. The share of students passing AP exams has soared over the last two decades, including for calculus AB (6.3 percentage points), English language and composition (17.9), chemistry (21.9) and U.S. history (23.3).

Call it vanity grading: Mediocre students now graduate with top GPAs and AP scores, which makes parents feel better about their kids’ public schools and eases political pressures for education reform.

Principals office:

Yet most parents will overwhelmingly say they like their child’s public schools. I think it’s because of the false narratives most public schools spend millions to keep up via PR departments. Ask your school district how much they budget in their Communications Department. You will not like the answer.

Education Staffing since 1970:

– Students +8%

– Teaching Staff +60%

– Non-Teaching Staff +138%

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Aaron Smith:

Public schools are increasingly taking on debt.

From 2002 to 2023, total debt went from $8,074 per student to $12,592 per student in real terms.

Public school debt now totals $586 billion, which doesn’t include pension liabilities.

With student enrollment falling, legacy costs are a major problem for many districts.

Alan Borsuk:

Let’s do the math: There are more than 500 students in that school. At about $4,000 per student, MPS is receiving about $2 million more for Carmen students than it is actually paying to Carmen. In addition, the school is paying MPS $727,469 this school year to rent the building, which was originally an MPS middle school.

The number of students in the MPS independent charter schools was only about 2,500 in the fall of 2008. That rose to a peak of just under 9,000 in the fall of 2016. Some schools have closed, some have switched to other authorizers, some have lost enrollment. The number in the MPS system this fall is about 6,900.

Current attention has focused primarily on Carmen Northwest, which was up for renewal of its charter contract. The school’s test scores have been low, but its general vitality as a school community has been pretty good (as the large number of Carmen supporters at recent school board meetings demonstrated).

The school board voted Nov. 20 to give the school a one-year renewal, on the condition that it won’t be renewed again and it won’t be allowed to continue to use the building that has been its home for more than a decade.

That means the forecast is for the number of students in this group of charter schools to fall by more than 3,500 by fall 2027. That alone would create a revenue loss to MPS of more than $12 million a year. And the loss of these charter schools, most of them with academic performance above the MPS averages, is very likely to drop the MPS overall achievement picture. Furthermore, one of the remaining MPS-authorized charter schools, the Hmong American Peace Academy with about 2,000 students, would account for two-thirds of the remaining students in this scenario. HAPA, as it is called, has achievement scores well above the MPS average. Will HAPA stay with MPS in the future? I wouldn’t count on that.

Ernesto Londono:

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Scott Johnson summary:

Overlooking the element of political corruption, this cuts closer to the bone:

Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue.

“American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis,” said Dr. Samatar, who is Somali American.

Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.

Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”

For the New York Times, not bad.

Minnesota DHS:

To all whistleblowers who have reached out: Thank you for your courage and for continuing to send critical information. Your willingness to speak up is what allows the public to maintain trust in systems that too often operate in the dark.

Victor Davis Hanson

Males in their teens and 20s are prolonging their adolescence — rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time. 

The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man, who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.

Zoomers rarely date supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.

Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.

All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males — 9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League — are of no interest to college admission officers.

So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Sophia Cope:

EFF filed an amicus brief urging the Arizona District Court to protect public school students’ freedom of speech and privacy by holding that the use of a school-issued laptop or email account does not categorically mean a student is “on campus.” We argued that students need private digital spaces beyond their school’s reach to speak freely, without the specter of constant school surveillance and punishment.  

Surveillance Software Exposed a Bad Joke Made in the Privacy of a Student’s Home 

The case, Merrill v. Marana Unified School District, involves a Marana High School student who, while at home one morning before school started, asked his mother for advice about a bad grade he received on an English assignment. His mother said he should talk to his English teacher, so he opened his school-issued Google Chromebook and started drafting an email. The student then wrote a series of jokes in the draft email that he deleted each time. The last joke stated: “GANG GANG GIMME A BETTER GRADE OR I SHOOT UP DA SKOOL HOMIE,” which he narrated out loud to his mother in a silly voice before deleting the draft and closing his computer.  

The Allen Analysis:

The central question remains the Google Trends spike. There are several plausible explanations. A social media post containing his name may have circulated before mainstream news outlets picked up the shooting. Early reporters or local community members may have speculated or shared details before verification, which then produced search traffic. Search interest could also have come from internal networks tied to immigration lawyers, former colleagues, or individuals who recognized the name before law enforcement publicly identified the suspect. It is also possible that the Trends data is inaccurate for names with extremely low volume, a known phenomenon in low-frequency datasets.

US Navy:

ANNAPOLIS, Md.- United States Naval Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, relieved the Commandant of Midshipmen Capt. Gilbert Clark Jr. today due to a loss of confidence in his ability to effectively lead the Brigade of Midshipmen.

The naval service maintains the highest standards for leaders and holds them accountable when those standards are not met.

Clark assumed the role as Commandant of Midshipmen in June 2025. Capt. Austin Jackson, Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen, has assumed duties as the interim Commandant.

The Naval Academy Commandant is responsible for the day-to-day conduct, military training, and professional development of approximately 4,400 midshipmen.

Caroline Sutton:

What struck the economists was the absence of information. Food banks had no way to express what they valued, no view of what was available, and no means to coordinate across regions. Some were excellent at logistics. Others had deep relationships with donors. Others had neither advantage. Yet all were trying to serve their communities under enormous pressure.

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1.

Rachel Wolfe & Paul Overberg:

The term is from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Many of the women who view their lives in this way say they think of themselves as existing in between the extremes of tradwives (who treat caring for their homes and families as a more permanent, full-time job) and girlbosses (who center their lives around work).

As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points.

Natalie Yahr:

“If people understood how government worked, then surely they would be more interested in public service as a future occupation,” said Galanter, who served on the Madison City Council, ran former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s Madison office and used to open all her public presentations with the same line: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

In 2018, she pitched her idea to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, a membership organization of the state’s papers, figuring their publications could get the word out across the state.

The association agreed, and the Wisconsin Civics Games were born. Soon staff were making plans for regional playoffs and a state final at the Capitol where members of the winning team would each receive $2,000 in scholarships.

Since then, teams from 76 high schools have competed, and interest continues to grow. This year’s regional playoffs, held in April, drew 205 students — twice as many as the first year.

Mike Nichols:

Pick ’n Save stores in Wisconsin are run by Roundy’s, which is a subsidiary of Kroger. A Kroger spokesperson did not return a call for comment, but in 2024 a Roundy’s corporate affairs manager told a local Madison publication, Isthmus, that the company was planning to “continue to provide access to fresh foods at affordable prices” at the South Park Street location.

Meanwhile, Madison city officials — having already doled out millions — now own a nearby space at 815 Cedar St. that, it appears, was not built to easily house a grocery store.

The space, for instance, reportedly had insufficient electrical power and the building had a roof that won’t accommodate necessary equipment. A large bank of windows and the floor plan are also less than ideal.

The building “wasn’t built for a grocer, even though it was supposed to be,” said Kristi Maurer, the grocer who will open Maurer’s Urban Grocery in the city-owned space.

“A lot of the journey has been dealing with the building and the reality of the building,” she said.

The City of Madison bought the “condo space” for $4.6 million in 2021 from the developer of a multi-use development that includes a lot of apartments. But it also approved $3.5 million for improvements in 2023, according to media reports, and then in 2024 approved another $1 million in improvements to make the space work as a grocery store.

As part of the lease agreement with Maurer’s, the city will recoup $3.85 million in tenant improvements and that will remain an asset of the city, according to a city communications manager.

It is unclear, in the meantime, when exactly lease payments might begin.

Chris Rickert:

Folger explained the delay in getting to Elvehjem and Lindbergh by saying that the process last school year to pick a name for the former Southside Elementary — now Lori Mann Carey Elementary — took longer than expected.

“We are now on track to start the process for two schools this year,” he said.

According to emails from district officials to the organizer of the Lindbergh proposal, Betsy Abramson, the district was looking at starting the name-change process for Lindbergh earlier this year but later moved that date to this month.

Abramson said she knows that changing the name of the school isn’t the most important item on the district’s agenda, but the reasons for the delay haven’t been made clear to her.

“At this point, I’m very frustrated at the length of the process,” she said.

Elvehjem staff members submitted the proposal to rename that school after Stephanie A. Bernard, a Black former Madison schools teacher who died in August 2022.

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

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

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

amac.us

What’s going on? Has this explosion of mental health awareness liberated young people to be “who they truly are”? Or has it trapped them in a culture of fragility, convincing them they are broken or otherwise socially unfit before they’ve even reached adulthood?

The Mental Health Industrial Complex

While more money than ever is being poured into therapy, medication, and mental health services, global mental well-being is declining. This recognized trend is known as the Treatment Prevalence Paradox (TPP): the more we treat, the worse the statistics get.

Suicide rates are climbing. Antidepressant use is soaring. Disability claims for mental illness are up across the West. International studies show that young people, especially those in English-speaking nations, report the lowest mental well-being of any demographic. Despite record spending, the mental health crisis keeps deepening.

We wouldn’t accept this in any other branch of medicine. Cancer outcomes are improving. Heart disease and diabetes mortality are falling. But in mental health, treatment seems to correlate with worsening outcomes. The uncomfortable truth is that our current approach may be part of the problem.

The Trouble With Diagnosis

Dr.Kelly Piacek:

As Wisconsin’s seventh-largest school district, we serve more students than 98% of Wisconsin districts, operate 23 separate facilities, and employ close to 1,500 people, making us one of the largest employers in the city of Waukesha. Our top teacher salaries have reached nearly $95,000 per year, and our new teacher salaries have increased by 18% since 2021.

While we have maintained competitive compensation models, our costs to operate facilities, update curriculum, provide pupil transportation, and strengthen safety and security infrastructure continue to outpace enrollment. Several of our elementary and middle schools have been trending toward 50% occupancy, leading to costly inefficiencies that risk sacrificing programs and services by spreading specialists across too many facilities.

We embarked on the “Optimizing Our Future” process last spring with clear goals in mind: Address this excess K-8 capacity by reducing overall building space by 10%-15%. We asked the administration to facilitate an open, community-involved process, and we spent the summer in candid and honest discussion about ongoing enrollment challenges that have led to a persistent structural deficit, impossible trade-offs between facilities and staffing, and the pros and cons of potential solutions.

The Board reached a decision Nov. 12 that met our goal, and the process now shifts from input and deliberation to implementation. The conclusion of this work doesn’t come with celebration or pats on the back. It leaves an empty feeling in the moment — and for some, it concludes with disappointment, sadness, and even anger. Leadership sometimes requires us to sit with that discomfort, to accept the disappointment that accompanies the necessary change, and to work to move forward with clarity and compassion.

Danielle DuClos

Then in January 2020, Kruchten was arrestedafter a school field trip to Minnesota where students discovered hidden cameras in their hotel rooms. 

Kruchten pleaded guilty a year later to federal charges including attempting to produce child sexual abuse material and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The charges stemmed from two previous incidents in Wisconsin. 

The federal judge at Kruchten’s sentencing revealed 137 victims were involved in the case across numerous field trips, court records show.  

Ten of the students later sued Kruchten and the Madison Metropolitan School District, arguing the district had given Kruchten broad authority and discretion, which allowed him to secretly film students and violate their constitutional rights. 

Kruchten admitted in a lawsuit deposition that he filmed students in their hotel rooms dating back to 2016, according to the deposition transcript. 

But while the lawsuit ultimately led to a settlement with Kruchten last year, the school district was dismissed from the case. Three students involved in the lawsuit told the Cap Times they hoped the legal pressure would spur the district to overhaul its policies and training practices to prevent educator sexual misconduct from happening again. 

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More.

and:

Years after David Kruchten’s arrest, MMSD policies and training still fall short of researcher recommendations to prevent educator sexual misconduct

Former students speak out, saying MMSD didn’t do enough to protect them

Dan Goodin:

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

Wendy:

It’s not one student every now and then. It’s daily. And the system is built to cycle students right back in, no matter what happened.

If only legality mattered.

I wish people knew how normalized this is. Students in my building literally designate bathrooms depending on who is vaping, who is dealing, who is using, and who is just trying to pee in peace. As soon as admin cracks down on one location, students shift to another.

Someone once suggested stationing parent volunteers in every bathroom.

Aside from the obvious impracticality, it’s not even allowed. Adults can’t be posted in student bathrooms, for very good legal and safety reasons.

I’m not sharing these things to blame students, point fingers at parents, or criticize administrators. I’m sharing them because we can’t fix a system the public fundamentally misunderstands.

You can’t solve a problem people don’t believe exists.

If the conversations I start on X have shown me anything, it’s that the gap between public perception and classroom reality is enormous.

I’m often told that I assume my school’s issues are universal. Maybe they aren’t. But what if they are?

Jason McGahan:

The head of the L.A. teachers’ union is ambitious, audacious, and uncompromising. But critics blast her as a demagogue whose gamesmanship during the pandemic took a toll on the kids she claims to fight for

Cecily Myart-Cruz rarely sits for interviews. When she wants to communicate with the media, which is infrequently, she usually does so through a press release or, if the situation demands, a prerecorded video. For the most part, the famously contentious head of L.A.’s most powerful union–United Teachers Los Angeles–remains unapproachable, ensconced inside UTLA‘s Wilshire Center headquarters where she controls the levers and dials of the largest, most complicated, and, these days, most divisive educational labor machine in the state–possibly the nation.

Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum–or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

Traditionally, the job of UTLA is to represent the best interests of the L.A. school system’s 33,000 teachers–to ensure that they are paid properly, that they have the resources to do their jobs, and that their work conditions are safe. But under Myart-Cruz’s stewardship, which began when she assumed office in the summer of 2020, that purview has been expanded to include a breathtaking range of far-flung progressive issues: racial justice, Medicare for all, the millionaire tax, financial support for undocumented families, rental and eviction relief–over the last 15 months, UTLA has championed them all. Many of these may be laudable aims, or at least worth debating, but they aren’t the sort of agendas normally pursued by your neighborhood teachers’ union. In what universe, after all, does UTLA’s recent boycott of Israel over the conflict with Hamas benefit the teachers–or students–of Los Angeles?