School Information System

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

“The Illusion of Thinking”

“How to ai”

It argues that AI models, no matter how brilliant they may seem, do not understand what they are doing.

They do not solve problems. They do not reason. They merely generate text word by word, trying to sound coherent.

Apple tested the most advanced reasoning models in the world on controlled puzzle environments. They tore open the internal “thinking” traces.

What they found shatters the narrative that we are getting closer to AGI.

Current models don’t scale with complexity. They have a hard mathematical cliff. And they do not degrade gracefully. They collapse.

But here is the most unsettling part.

When a problem gets too complex, the AI doesn’t use its remaining compute to try harder.

——

The Paper.

My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon

Will Oremus:

»

One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.

China Is Throwing Christians in Jail, but This Pastor Refuses to Back Down

Brian Spegele:

Pastor Ezra Jin was just finishing dinner with his elderly mother-in-law in the Chinese city of Beihai last October when more than a dozen police appeared at the door.

They stormed the apartment, confiscated his phones and computer, and hauled him off to jail.

Since then, he’s been confined to a dank cell at Beihai’s No. 2 Detention Center, cut off from his flock and his family, 8,000 miles away in the U.S. His sin: leading a church that Xi Jinping couldn’t bring to heel.

For years, Jin built a thriving Protestant congregation in the heart of Beijing, known as Zion Church, that operated outside the government’s system of tightly controlled official churches. Authorities once tolerated Jin and others like him, back when China’s economy was thriving and the country was gradually opening up to the world.

Then Xi took power and began tightening the screws. Officials interrogated churchgoers, threatened they could lose their jobs and pressured landlords who rented space to churches. Authorities demanded surveillance cameras be installed at Zion. Some of Jin’s assets were frozen, and he was barred from leaving China.

How to Reform the Universities

By Abigail Anthony:

American universities were once destinations for intellectual enrichment but have devolved into activist factories. Yet those with endowments surpassing the GDPs of small countries will survive the negative press, students will continue enrolling to obtain a snazzy résumé line, and academics will still publish nonsensical ideas that are eventually embraced by mainstream outlets. Since the universities seem destined to endure, how do we fix them?

Recourse to the law is one approach. Nonprofits like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression fight against free-speech violations, while firms such as the Alliance Defending Freedom have sued schools over interpretations of Title IX that enabled males to participate in women’s sports. The Department of Justice is dragging universities to court, particularly for violating antidiscrimination laws.

But coercing an institution to abandon its firm commitments to the progressive agenda will require more than a judge’s order. The Supreme Court ruled unambiguously in 2023 that affirmative action is illegal, yet the demographic composition of incoming classes at colleges across the country has not drastically changed since, which suggests that admissions offices still racially discriminate. More troubling, legal pressure risks further entrenching illiberalism on campus rather than eradicating it. Instead of paring back bias trainings and restrictions on speech, it could merely extend them in ways the militant activist left generally opposes — applying them, for example, to combat antisemitism.

The Great Zombification

Owen Yingling:

During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.

I was disturbed but not surprised when I began to see intrusions into the humanities. Typically, each fraternity deals with one or two plagiarism cases a year in the mandatory humanities courses, but after sophomore year and the release of GPT 5, the cases (allegedly) went down and the grades went up.

Parallel growth marked the next stage. I was asleep in my Cairo hotel bed, studying abroad, when Sidechat, UChicago’s anonymous social media platform, made a tremendous discovery: The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: “Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,” and “And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.”

It should have been clear then that AI use was not simply a matter of academic misconduct. It could not be dealt with solely through reforming the baffling university disciplinary system, which is consistently content to grab twenty or so kids a year and suspend them for a year or two for cheating on an assignment or exam.

Teens Helped Bring Malls Back to Life. Now They’re Getting Banned.

Kate King:

At the Bronx mall, the owner temporarily banned younger shoppers who weren’t with someone 21 or older. These chaperone policies—sometimes called youth-escort or parental-guidance policies—started decades ago and have increased alongside the rise in mall disruptions over the years.

In some cases, mall takeovers have devolved into physical fights, robberies and gunfire. Landlords view banning unaccompanied minors as the most direct way to address the problem. Chaperone policies are also used to respond to gang violence, food-court brawls and shoplifting.

Owners say the bans have reduced violence and disorderly gatherings—to the relief of most shoppers—without having a noticeable impact on sales.

But some teens feel betrayed by these moves. Houston resident Zane Miller, who frequented the Willowbrook Mall in Houston as a teenager and now serves as president of the nonprofit organization National Youth Rights Association, said it was unfair to penalize all teenagers for the poor behavior of a few.

The Light at the End of the Weld

Anna-Sofia Lesiv:

When Rex ran the laser welder on the nose cone, the weld it produced was actually smaller than what a TIG welder would have laid down at roughly half the size. And yet it was significantly stronger, with a tenth of the distortion, and done five to six times faster. The intuition most people have is that a bigger weld means a stronger joint. The laser broke that assumption completely. Because it deposited energy so precisely and quickly, it fused the metal more completely, with less heat spreading into the surrounding structure to weaken and warp it. So you literally got more with less.

SpaceX put the laser into production immediately, and within a month, had over a hundred handheld laser welding machines running throughout the Starship facility. What started as Rex’s pet project became a production standard in thirty days.

Youth Mental Health and School Smartphone Bans: Early Evidence

Henry Saffer:

To provide causal evidence of the effects of these bans, I rely on synthetic difference-in-difference models and the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) from 2016 to 2024. Currently, there are data for only one state with two post-ban periods and two states with one post-ban period, which makes the results preliminary evidence only. The outcome variables are screentime and measures of psychological wellbeing. Overall, these early results provide no clear evidence that the school ban policy reduced screentime or improved psychological wellbeing.

———

Mary Spicuzza & John Diedrich:

Sleep Deprivation

Amanda Ruggeri:

In ancient times, parents probably didn’t suffer as much from feeling sleep deprived, leading some scientists to reconsider guidelines for today’s new parents to get some shut-eye.

How exhausting is it to be a parent? When one brave soul posed this to a Reddit parenting forum, more than 400 answers flooded in. “Extremely. It’s extremely exhausting and it is literally CONSTANT,” wrote one respondent, the sentiment echoed by hundreds of others.

There are many reasons why parents feel so bone-crushingly tired today – and not all of them have to do with sleep. For instance, many families raise their children without community support, while parents often have to juggle work with child-rearing.

At the same time, many caregivers’ sleep certainly changes after having children, whether that’s due to an infant’s middle-of-the-night feeds or a preschooler’s penchant for a 05:00 start.

Given that we’ve been parenting for as long as humans have existed, it may seem natural to assume parents have been sleep-deprived for millennia, too. But the evidence that we have indicates this likely isn’t true. So what did our ancestors do differently – and is there anything we could learn from them?

Behind the curtain, Evers administration diverts taxpayer money to fund environmental bureaucracies

Mark Lisheron:

“This looks like an attempt to skirt the normal budget process by moving positions around instead of being transparent about staffing levels,” Born said. “The reality is, this agency (DOA) already has a large number of positions and, before shifting more we need a clear justification and accountability to taxpayers.”

When the Badger Institute first contacted Rosenberg directly, she said she believed she could provide answers to some of our questions. She then failed to respond to follow-up calls trying to get those answers in the weeks after the Badger Institute obtained the LFB analysis.

The DOA did not respond to emails asking about the office and Rosenberg.

The DOA defended its decisions to an analyst for the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau investigating the behind-the-scenes funding of state offices. Officials took the route they did “due to constraints on expenditure authority” during the regular and public budget process, according to a memo from the LFB analyst shared with the Finance Committee.

——-

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

Civics: “Just 111 contributors – or 17% – were from Wisconsin, records show”

It’s likely most of the donors gave to the legal defense fund Dugan created to help her pay the high-powered team she hired to fight federal charges that she helped an undocumented immigrant escape arrest, but the state records did not say what the money was for.

The list of donors, which Dugan filed in February with the state Ethics Commission, does not include the dollar amounts or the dates that the donations were made, as neither is required to be disclosed, a spokesman with the commission said.

If You Love Reading, Skip Grad School

Eric Jager:

You told me if I loved literature, I shouldn’t go to grad school,” wrote a former student. The biochemistry-turned-English major, who went on to medical school and is now a thoracic oncologist, was thanking me for a conversation we had over fifteen years ago, which I had entirely forgotten. “I’m grateful,” she added, “that literature can remain a personal love rather than an obligation.”

When I received this note recently, I was relieved to find out that a talented student had been spared five to ten years in academic servitude, with job prospects ranging from infinitesimal to none. I was also reminded of a simple truth too often ignored in all the soul-searching about the fate of the humanities in a time of budget cuts, declining enrollments, and AI. There’s no easy solution to the crisis, but there is something we can do about it. Instead of perpetuating our narrow interests, faculty should focus on inspiring students to read and write, regardless of what they end up doing for work.

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

Parents Are Fuming About Other Peoples’ Kids Getting Extra Time on the SAT

Tara Weiss:

Adarsh Vijay Mudgil thought his children had every advantage for college admissions: a top high school in Long Island that offers plenty of AP courses, test-prep tutors and a private adviser to guide them on applications.

Then his daughter told him at least 60 peers received extra time to finish the ACT during their junior year at Jericho High School.

Mudgil said he doubts they all had legitimate reasons for the special accommodation. More likely, they had parents who found a loophole.

“It’s cheating,” said Mudgil, 50, whose daughter is now at the University of Virginia. “It puts our kids at a disadvantage.”

Test time has emerged as a fierce battleground among parents of high-schoolers. Students with diagnosed disabilities or medical issues for years have been given longer to finish college-entrance exams. But the ranks of the extra timers have surged, with a concentration in wealthy areas. And many parents are crying foul.

They’re training their anger on families who are going to extremes for an edge, from spending $10,000 for a diagnosis from a neuropsychologist to finding a gastroenterologist to support requests for unlimited bathroom breaks.

Boy’s brain tumor tied to gene therapy

Jocelyn Kaiser

A gene therapy given to a 13-month-old boy has, years later, led to a tumor in his brain after the virus carrying the gene inserted part of it directly into his DNA, researchers reported today at a meeting and in a paper. The mass was safely removed, but his case appears to be the first time a gene therapy delivered directly into the body has been linked to cancer.

Researchers involved with the case and others stress that the rare case does not mean the adeno-associated virus (AAV) the boy received, which has been given to thousands of people as part of gene therapies, should not be used. “We have to be really cautious in extrapolating this” to other AAV trials, says Lindsey George, who co-led the trial and presented the work at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy.

The boy was born with Hurler syndrome, also known as MPS I, a condition in which certain sugars build up in the brain and damage it. It stems from a mutation in the gene encoding an enzyme called IDUA, which cells need to break down the sugars.

St. John Elementary School Teacher accused of having sex with student

Garrett Cabeza:

A first-grade teacher at St. John Elementary School in Whitman County has admitted to having sex with a 16-year-old student attending the neighboring high school, according to court documents.

Mackenzie Naught, 25, was arrested Sunday at her St. John home on suspicion of first-degree sexual misconduct of a minor, a felony, for the alleged crime that happened a week prior.

“At this time, St. John School District is aware of allegations involving a district employee that are currently being reviewed by law enforcement,” St. John School District Superintendent Tina Strong wrote in a statement. “The employee has been placed on leave and will not be on campus during this process. The District is cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities and will also be conducting its own investigation into the allegations.”

Naught’s husband reported late Saturday night that his wife admitted to him that she had sex with the teen and the husband had screenshots to prove it, court records show. The husband told deputies he knew the teen for years and is friends with his family.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Duplex boom is attracting middle-income earners to Wichita

Rebecca Picciotto:

Wichita is that rare American city betting its future on the middle class.

While Sunbelt boomtowns from Miami to Austin, Texas, expand their tax bases by courting wealthy finance executives and tech workers, Wichita businesses and politicians are reaching out to middle-income earners in fields such as healthcare services, energy and manufacturing.

On the housing front, rows of affordable duplexes are sprouting up for young families, retirees and empty-nesters next to single-family homes and farmland.

Wichita is marketing itself as a rare mecca of affordability for the new middle class in an era of perpetually rising costs, especially the soaring cost of housing. The median household income there is around $66,000, while the average monthly rent for all apartments is $950. That is about 45% cheaper than the national average of $1,750, according to figures from RentCafe.

“City leaders and business leaders have tried to capitalize on that inexpensive housing to try to lure new people to come here,” says Chase Billingham, a sociologist at Wichita State University and author of a book about Wichita’s economic development. “That idea of your dollar going further in this region.”

New York Governor Hochul Opts In to Choice Scholarships

Wall Street Journal:

Starting next year, the program will provide a federal income tax credit up to $1,700 per person for donations to scholarship-granting organizations. The money can be spent on tuition and school fees as well as textbooks, special needs, tutoring, test prep and after-school programs that benefit private- or public-school students.

There’s no good reason for a state not to join since it amounts to free money from the feds and has no impact on state budgets. Students from households earning up to 300% of the regional median income can qualify.

Twenty-nine states so far have opted in, according to Ballotpedia, and most are GOP-leaning states. (Virginia opted in under former Gov. Glenn Youngkin.) Many of those states have already enacted or expanded their school-choice programs. But the federal scholarships are a way for Democratic states dominated by teachers unions to get in on the action and help students languishing in union-run schools.

In Illinois, March primary voters in 30 counties supported a nonbinding ballot question in favor of the state opting into the program. Sixty-four percent said Gov. JB Pritzker should opt in, though he hasn’t so far as he eyes a presidential run and wants union support.

The New York State United Teachers issued a statement Friday that “public dollars belong in public schools. Vouchers—by any name—take money away from neighborhood schools.” The opposite is true. If New York doesn’t opt in, New York donors can still take advantage of the tax credit—but only for donations to outfits in states that have opted in. In other words, New York money would leave the state.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Taxes on Second Homes Are Springing Up Across America

Nichols Miller:

State and local governments across the U.S. are seizing on a juicy new target for plugging budget holes and easing housing shortages: second homeowners.

New York City is planning to tax pieds-à-terre worth $5 million or more. Rhode Island’s “Taylor Swift tax” will hit homes valued at over $1 million that are uninhabited for at least 183 days of the year. Nicknamed after the pop star who owns a waterfront mansion in Westerly, R.I., the measure is set to take effect in July.

Meanwhile, courts are weighing proposals in Montana and San Francisco for extra levies on vacant homes.

These taxes are generating furious debate. Supporters say they would help improve housing affordability by encouraging owners of second homes to turn them into long-term rentals rather than let them sit vacant.

“Homes should be for people to live in, not to sit empty, especially during a crisis,” said Sean Elo-Rivera, a city council member in San Diego, where residents will vote on whether to tax second homes.

Elo-Rivera introduced the city’s proposal, subject to a June ballot measure, to place a levy of $8,000 on vacant properties next year. The tax would rise to $10,000 in 2028.

Wisconsin DPI Literacy Administrative Update

Quinton Klabon:

Early Literacy Curriculum Council interviewed a candidate for state Literacy Director guiding part of Act 20.

The candidate is Kaylee Jackson.

DPI said “is our person” and this is ongoing consultation to keep going. ELCC said they get input beforehand.

——

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

UK has the highest property taxes of any major economy

Mehreen Khan

Property taxes make up 3.7 per cent of the total economy — the highest level in the group of advanced economies, according to comparisons compiled by Ryan, a tax firm.

France and Canada have the second-highest property tax burdens at 3.4 per cent, followed by Belgium and Luxembourg at 3.3 per cent, according to Ryan’s annual business rates review.

The Renegade Academy – Claremont Review of Books

by Spencer A. Klavan

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

***

“Few students or teachers have retained a sense that they are inheritors of a great legacy handed down via the classical and Christian traditions,” wrote Hankins last December in Compact magazine, in an article titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard.” “When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.” Maybe the simplest way of explaining what this means is to point out that civilization, among other things, is a kind of belonging. A civis, in Latin, is a citizen. To become civilized is to become a member of a society and a participant in a shared history. People who become uncivilized, then, become enemies. They are set in opposition to each other and to their ancestors. As Guelzo and Hankins put it in their introduction to Volume II of The Golden Thread, “Voices from outside and inside the Western tradition have condemned Westerners as oppressors, imperialists, colonizers, and appropriators.”

Notes on Success Academy

Chalkbeat podcast

Dickerson, himself a former Success Academy student, interviews another former student about what it was like to attend the school. They touch on everything from uniforms, “mouth bubbles,” and clip charts to extremely rigorous academics and the lingering emotional price tag of attending Success Academy.

University Credentials and Only Fans

Jay Caspian Kang:

There’s a growing idea I’ve seen in some circles that college could be replaced by conversations between an A.I. tutor and a student. When I think about your model, I wonder why college even needs to exist. If I can just seek out a tutor, somebody that I like, and they just charge me a little bit, and we go through these edge-knowledge cases together, what’s the degree for? Couldn’t you, as Hollis Robbins—not only a specialist in African American sonnet traditions but also an idiosyncratic thinker on the subject of A.I. and the future of the academy—just set up your own shop?

I was in Austin, Texas, a couple of times in March with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old billionaires. This is what they’re looking at. Instead of having the credential from the institution, why not have the credential from the professor? If you have a Hollis Robbins education, what would that signal? What would that credential mean as opposed to a degree from a university? There was some conversation about what that would look like, and one guy at the end of the dinner said, “Instead of OnlyFans, it’s like OnlyProfessors.”

——-

Louis Anslow, Pessimists Archive:

Reading First Impact Study Final Report

NCEE:

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 created the Reading First program to help ensure that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The law required an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program. The Reading First Impact Study Final Report provides an update of previously released impact findings on student reading comprehension and classroom reading instruction using an additional year of data (2006-07). In addition, the report includes information on the impact of the program on first grade students’ decoding skill in 2006-07 as well as an examination of the relationship between classroom instruction and student reading comprehension.

The results indicate that Reading First produced statistically significant positive impacts on multiple reading practices promoted by the program, such as the amount of instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction and professional development in scientifically based reading instruction. Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three. However, there was a positive and statistically significant impact on first grade students’ decoding skills in spring 2007.

How American Education Lost Its Senses

Luke Burgis:

The child was the organism. Society was the environment. School was the bridge.

This breaks with everything that came before it. Athens, Jerusalem, the medieval Schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Newman in the 19th century — all of them assumed the world had a given shape, that reality was real, and that human beings were made to perceive it and respond. Plato called it paideia: the slow turning of the soul toward what is. Aquinas distinguished ratio, our calculative reason, from intellectus, the receptive power by which we behold the truth of a thing. A serious education was meant to form both, with intellectus as the higher.

Josef Pieper, in 1948, called this older tradition the antidote to what he named “the world of total work.” Jacques Maritain, writing in 1943, was answering Dewey directly when he insisted that the first task of the educator is to form a person, and only then a citizen. In that order. Never reversed.

Dewey reversed it.

Do we absorb information better on paper, rather than screens? It depends on the screen

Erik Reichle & Lili Yu

The Swedish government recently announced it was moving from the classroom use of digital devices back to physical books. It cited concerns over declining test scores and increasing screen time.

Are these concerns well founded? And what does the science of reading say about the possible consequences of reading on digital devices versus books?

To address these questions, it’s worth remembering that, although reading might appear to be an easy task, this impression is false. Reading is arguably the most difficult task one must learn – one that requires years of formal education and practice to master. In contrast to spoken language, it is a skill we are not biologically predisposed to learn.

The Perverse Tyranny of a Perfect Transcript

Joshua Greene

Each year, the undergraduate college at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Prize to the graduating senior with the highest GPA. For decades, the prize went to one student, sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. The top students all had a perfect GPA. Hundreds more were nearly perfect. Last year, flat A’s accounted for 66 percent of grades. A’s and A–’s accounted for 84 percent.

In Harvard’s Student Handbook, an A represents “extraordinary distinction”—an assessment that makes no sense if it applies to two-thirds of students. To restore meaning to student transcripts, Harvard’s grading committee, of which I am a member, has proposed capping all flat A grades to around 33 percent across undergraduate courses. Our recommendation follows a three-year investigation by Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education at Harvard, that found that the school’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

Grade inflation is about more than numbers. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road? If educators want to revive academic risk-taking, engagement, and inquisitiveness on college campuses, then we should liberate our students from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript.

We find evidence of LLMs enabling people to file lawsuits without lawyers (filing “pro se”) at historically unprecedented rates in federal courts.👇

Anand Shah:

2/
For decades, the pro se share of civil cases has been “remarkably unremarkable” (~11%, +/- 2pp). This is stable through the dotcom era, the 2008 financial crisis, the first Trump term, and COVID-19.

By 2025, the increase in pro se cases accounted for 59% of the growth in federal civil suits over the pre-AI-era mean.

This is likely still early days, the trend shows no signs of stopping.

The Strange Alliance Trying to Remake American Psychiatry

Daniel Bergner:

On May 4, something happened that might, just maybe, mark the start of a transformation in the way mental health is framed and treated in this country.

At the culmination of a daylong Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the ever-polarizing secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged to put the power of his agency, which has one of the largest budgets in the federal government, behind fundamental psychiatric reform.

When he took the podium as the event’s closing speaker, Kennedy couldn’t resist mocking the “orthodoxy” of Covid policy before he transitioned to challenging psychiatric convention. Nor could he restrain himself from a loose, at best, comparison of withdrawal from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressants, to going cold turkey off heroin, which he said he’d done around 100 times. S.S.R.I. withdrawal, he insisted, based on a family member’s experience, is frequently far rougher.

But about his commitment “to confronting overprescribing,” he was sharp. He acknowledged that “psychiatric medications have a role in care,” but added that “we will treat them as one option.” He declared that “too many patients begin treatment without a clear understanding of the risks,” that we must expand “nonpharmacologic treatments” and that psychotropic drugs should no longer be seen as “the default.”

Peoria school board wisely returning to basics in reading

Hannah Schmid:

Peoria Public Schools is adopting evidence-based practices.

Peoria Public Schools is adopting a new reading curriculum to align instruction in kindergarten through fifth grade with evidence-based practices called the “science of reading.”

The science of reading is made up of five best practices in instruction, as first outlined by the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary development and reading comprehension.

The move is good news for students Peoria Public Schools, where 71% of third through eighth graders couldn’t read at grade level in the most recent state data.

They aren’t the only ones in the state who are struggling: Half of Illinois students couldn’t read at grade level in 2025.

Students need evidence-based reforms to ensure they get the instruction and support they need. States such as Mississippi, Florida and Colorado offer models for Illinois to ensure its students are well equipped for success through high school and beyond.

Sosc and Civ Professors’ Names Will No Longer Be Visible During Pre-Registration

Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon:

Professors’ names will no longer be visible to students pre-registering for social science and civilization studies Core courses, several professors in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division told the Maroon.

This change will take effect beginning with pre-registration for autumn quarter 2026 and “reflects the need to schedule instructors and distribute seats across offerings in general education in the Social Sciences,” according to Katelyn Yoshimoto, a spokesperson for the College.

“Removing instructor names during pre-registration gives the College greater flexibility to balance enrollments across all sections and instructors, and to accommodate scheduling adjustments for both students and instructors… while maintaining appropriately sized discussion-based seminars,” Yoshimoto said.

Others with whom the Maroon spoke attributed the change to several factors, including concerns about students selecting professors with reputations for less rigorous grading policies. According to one professor, the civilization studies program in particular has expressed concerns about grade inflation, echoing concerns raisedat other elite universities.

According to Yoshimoto, the new policy was produced following a “deliberative process” between the chairs and masters of the affected programs and Dean of the College Melina Hale. Yoshimoto did not address questions about grade-based motivations for the new policy.

From the Community | Students deserve better than COLLEGE

Ava Chan:

The Stanford Faculty Senate voted last week to extend COLLEGE, a program of three general-education courses — Why College?, Citizenship in the 21st Century, and a Global Perspectives menu — that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no.

I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students.

My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them.

My objection to COLLEGE is, first and foremost, about rigor and quality and, second, about balance. These are not the courses one expects from one of the world’s best universities. If these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.

Take Why College?, the course meant to introduce students to the idea of liberal education and the good life. The syllabus assigns six required books — by Du Bois, Paulo Freire, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tara Westover, Brian Lowery, Robert Sapolsky and Mary Shelley — and roughly two dozen shorter readings. With the partial exception of “Frankenstein,” none of the books is a classic of the Western tradition of liberal education. The list is mostly contemporary and largely progressive.

Civics: Free Speech News

Greg Lukianoff

And, the court continued, “DEI is, of course, a viewpoint,” because it “inherently conveys … that the exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups is undesirable.” Here, the record “establishes that the termination decisions were driven by an expressly ideological method of classification. There can be no genuine dispute about this point. Indeed, the Government has all but admitted as much.” That was especially apparent where the government in part used a ChatGPT prompt to examine whether grants “relate[d] at all to DEI,” which, the court noted, “reflects a purely ideological filter that has no other purpose than to identify disfavored viewpoints the Government wants to suppress.”

The court also held the terminations “likewise violated the First Amendment” to the extent they were “based on their perceived association with the Biden Administration.” Here, too, the government “may not leverage its power to award or deny subsidies on the basis of subjective criteria into a penalty on disfavored viewpoints,” including any “basis that infringes … constitutionally protected interests—especially … freedom of speech,” and ”[p]olitical association is one of those protected interests.” Insofar as “grants were treated as suspect because they were associated with the prior administration” and thus “presumed to not align with the Trump Administration,” the court held, that “is not a permissible funding criterion. It is discrimination based on perceived political association.”

Ultimately, the court held the terminations “reflect the same fundamental constitutional error” in that some “penalized grants because they were perceived to express or reflect disfavored viewpoints” while others did so “because they were perceived to be associated with a disfavored administration,” and “the First Amendment forbids both.” For those reasons, and those involving equal protection violations and/or DOGE action without statutory authority, the court declared the terminations unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect, and permanently enjoined them.

The Trouble With Narrative History

Alex Rosenberg:

In 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published the first of his three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag that also served as an autobiography of his life as an inmate. Solzhenitsyn’s aim in “The Gulag Archipelago” was not only to indict Joseph Stalin, his henchmen, and, before them, Vladimir Lenin for the crime of creating and administering a system that killed one and three-quarters million people. His aim was also to show that the Gulag was an inevitable outcome of the mindset the October Revolution gave rise to.

Naturally, Solzhenitsyn was unable to publish the book in the Soviet Union. In fact, he had to keep the entire project secret for years. (One of those who copied the manuscript hanged herself after revealing its location to the KGB.) Once published in the West, however, “The Gulag Archipelago” was translated into more than 30 languages and became an international bestseller. The worldwide acclaim he received after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature three years earlier — together with the international attention drawn by novels such as “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” — meant he couldn’t be jailed again without serious repercussions. Instead, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was expelled to the West, where he would live for the next 20 years.

That “The Gulag Archipelago” had a major effect on the Soviet Union’s subsequent lifespan is hard to deny. It was evident that the KGB, the Politburo, and Communist Party hierarchy in Moscow thought so. They did everything they could to suppress the circulation of smuggled-in and samizdat (clandestinely copied and circulated) copies of the banned work and to counter its effects, even at great cost to themselves.

MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool

Jennifer Ouellette

Computational model lets users tweak parameters to hear effect on the sound in early design process.

Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument’s final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It’s a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string, according to a paper published in the journal npj Acoustics.

Unlike more common software programs and plugins that simulate violin sounds via sampling, averaging the final sound from thousands of notes, the MIT model is based on the fundamental physics of the instrument. “We’re not saying that we can reproduce the artisan’s magic,” said co-author Nicholas Makris. “We’re just trying to understand the physics of violin sound, and perhaps help luthiers in the design process.”

Violin acoustics has long been a hot topic of research among acousticians, particularly when it comes to unlocking the secret to the superior sounds of violins crafted during the so-called “Golden Age”—notably the instruments of famed Cremona luthier Antonio Stradivari, as well as those of the Amati family and Giuseppe Guarneri. There are plenty of variables to consider, given a violin’s acoustic complexity.

Learning by Mail: The Impact of Correspondence Schools in Early 20th Century America

Daniela Vidart

This paper examines correspondence education as an alternative educational pathway in early 20th-century America. Using newly digitized records from the International Correspondence Schools—the largest such institution, with over 4 million students by 1940—linked to census data, I show that enrollment increased the likelihood of skilled employment by 6-10pp within 3-10 years, particularly among younger students who used it as a substitute for high school. I develop a general equilibrium Roy-style model where individuals sort into educational options by ability. Consistent with the model, correspondence education facilitated skill acquisition for lower-ability individuals and improved selection into high school, amplifying its returns.

A Master’s Degree Isn’t the Job Guarantee It Used to Be

Ray Smith:

The unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a master’s degree has rarely been higher in the past 20 years, according to the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-market think tank focused on the future of work, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics going back to 2003.

At the same time, the unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a Ph.D., law degree or medical degree has rarely been lower.

“For most of the past two decades, these lines moved together—not anymore,” said Gad Levanon, chief economist of Burning Glass.

Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years

The rise of horseless carriages, mass production and other new forms of automation in the first two decades of the 20th century created anxieties about the future of work and employment. A short and sharp depression in the first year of the new decade helped create unease too.

As in the past, the debate isn’t about wether technology will take jobs, it is about how fast it will take them and how many it will create. It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new technology, than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

Waukesha School Board member Voit faces criticism over ‘enemies list’

Karen Pilarski:

Waukesha School Board member Diane Voit was criticized at Wednesday’s board meeting over an “enemies list” that included other board members and community members. While some expressed concern about being included on the list, Voit said it was part of her prayers for peace and reconciliation.

During public comment, parent Paul Reese addressed remarks made by Voit.

Reese referenced Voit’s previous effort to revise the public comment policy to limit speaking from the podium. He said Voit claimed he was attacking her and that she felt targeted.

Voit shared an April 7 email with The Freeman sent to Superintendent Jim Sebert and members of the school board. In the email, she referenced Reese, who previously filed an ethics complaint against her during the election.

“I have prayed daily for years for reconciliation with ‘my enemies.’ Paul was the first on the list seven years ago. The list of ‘enemies’ has grown significantly during the past three years on the Board and with the many hateful comments on my social media during the campaign. I never imagined serving on the Board with the focus on what is best for students could result in so much hate,” Voit said in the email.

“I found that very troubling, that as a parent, that there is an enemies list with my name on it. I don’t think anyone else here would like that,” Reese said.

Reese said others named on the list included Board President Kelly Piacsek, Treasurer Karrie Kozlowski, board members Bette Koenig and Eric Brooks, former board member David Wadd, and three community members.

K-12 tax & $pending climate: enrollment via adult employment

Quinton Klabon

Friendly correction: a lot of people think this, but it is not true!

The most adults ever employed by Wisconsin public schools was in 2025. I do not mean “per student!” We had the fewest students since 1992. That is wild.

“which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism”

Briveal Le Pogam:

These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

Families and Achievement

Brad Wilcox, Grant Bailey, Sophie Anderson, Peter Gentala and Bob Trent:

The state motto, “Ditat Deus” (Latin for “God Enriches”), has been part of Arizona’s history since Abraham Lincoln recognized the Arizona Territory in 1863. The motto reflects the belief that the desert territory and the faithfulness of its inhabitants would yield remarkable prosperity. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the state attracted waves of pioneers drawn by promising opportunities: agriculture, ranching, mining, tourism, and more recently, a business-friendly and attractive retirement ethos. Throughout its history as a territory and state, Arizona has been a destination for Americans and immigrants seeking a new and prosperous life in the beautiful Southwest.

Today, the realization of the Arizona Dream depends, in no small part, on strong families. Children from healthy, thriving families and adults who head up such families are more likely to flourish socially, emotionally, and financially in the Grand Canyon State.

This new, ground-breaking report explains how strong families matter to the fortunes of those seeking the Arizona Dream and what public policy can do to strengthen marriage and family life across the state.

Section I: Thriving Children

Getting off to a strong educational start is essential to realizing the Arizona Dream. This report shows that Arizona kids are more likely to get a good education when they come from strong and stable families. Teachers and school administrators will attest to this because they see its truth demonstrated every year in the students who pass through their classrooms. Children coming from intact families where the mother and father are both involved in their children’s lives are, on average, more likely to have the social, emotional, and financial resources they need to flourish in Arizona.

This is consistent with what leading think tanks and scholars have found in the research on child well-being over the years. The Annie E. Casey Foundation notes, for instance, that children:

growing up in single-parent families typically do not have the same economic or human resources available as those growing up in two-parent families. Single parents also are more likely to experience high stress and depression–especially single moms–as well as limited social support. These factors can affect kids, with those growing up in single-parent families facing greater risks of academic, emotional and behavioral problems.

Likewise, family scholars find that marriage boosts the welfare of children in a range of ways. In the words of economist Melissa Kearney:

… [S]tudy after study suggests that a married-parent family tends to confer benefits to children in the form of greater resources during childhood, and that these increased resources then translate into better opportunities and greater educational attainment, among other outcomes.

Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through Research-Based Reading Instruction

Michael Bruner:

ABSTRACT

Reviews of the research literature provide ample evidence of the link between academic failure and delinquency.

It can also be shown this link is welded to reading failure. It is proposed that research-based reading instruction can be used to reduce recidivism and increase employment opportunity for incarcerated juvenile offenders.

A re-examination of the research literature and interviews with reading instructors teaching juvenile offenders in correctional institutions in five states, was undertaken to determine:

1) in fact, it is sustained frustration, rather than academic prevent all educationally at-risk students from learning to read accurately and fluently and write legibly and grammatically what they can talk about and aurally understand; and 4) what steps must be taken to supplant current instructional practices with methods that can be validated by experimental research in order to prevent reading failure as well as help disabled readers become competent readers.

The research revealed: 1) reading failure is most likely a cause, not just a correlate, for the frustration that can and does result in delinquent behavior; 2) an inordinately high percentage of wards are unable to decipher accurately and fluently and write legibly and grammatically what they can talk about and aurally comprehend; 3) a high percentage of wards are diagnosed learning disabled with no evidence to indicate any neurological abnormali-ties; 4) handicapped readers are not receiving the type of instruction recommended by experimental research; 5) reading teachers, as a result of preservice reading methods courses, have been denied a working knowledge-of the reading programs and methods of instruction that are most successful in preventing reading failure as well as meeting the needs of handicapped readers.

In order to remove the barriers to improved reading instruction so as to allow handicapped readers to become proficient readers in the shortest time possible, it will be necessary to provide reading teachers with opportunity to acquire a knowledge of the alphabetic principles governing English spelling as well as becoming confident in using instructional programs that incorporate intensive, systematic phonics methods.

For this to be accomplished, this inservice training most likely will have to come from private sector literacy providers because departments, schools and colleges of education have a poor track record in providing this type of instruction.

Student Loans: A Multi-Generational Financial Trap

Jeffrey Degner:

In North Carolina as elsewhere, federal largesse has made things worse.

When the United States began its experiment with federally backed student loans in the 1960s, no one predicted that, by the early 21st century, students would have run up over $1.8 trillion in debt and that many of them would be unable to repay what they owe. We were told over and over that college debt was good debt because of the huge increase in lifetime earnings that a degree was supposed to guarantee.

The Tar Heel State has its own set of unique problems when it comes to student debt loads. North Carolina ranks among the top 10 states in debt per borrower, approaching $39k per student-debt holder. One unique feature is the state’s Research Triangle (UNC, NC State, and Duke), which both creates and attracts high-debt graduate and professional students. These individuals carry the largest debt loads of all, often reaching six figures. Nationally, a government-supported increase in individual educational demand enables tuition hikes. This is a well-known relationship: Every $1 in new student debt offered drives a $0.60 increase in tuition. North Carolina ranks among the top 10 states in debt per borrower.

During a bitter strike, an education reporter confronts his replacement

Alexander Russo

For the past three years, I had been the Post-Gazette’s K-12 education beat reporter. This is a story that I unquestionably would have covered for the Post-Gazette.

But not that day.

That day, I was reporting for the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the publication of striking Post-Gazette workers.

I had been on strike since October alongside many of my colleagues from the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, the union that represents newsroom employees at the Post-Gazette, as well as workers in four other unions.

And it incensed me that the Post-Gazette was hiring replacement workers rather than negotiating a deal.

I had seen some of the new hires at picket lines outside of the Post-Gazette newsroom, but this was the first time I had seen one at an assignment.

“Are you with the Post-Gazette?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “are you Andrew Goldstein?”

“I am,” I said, and then added “you know, you’re welcome to come out on strike with us.” She said that she understood. We stood around awkwardly for a few minutes until the governor arrived. I covered the press conference, but in the back of my mind, I knew I needed to say more.

When the press conference ended, the reporter quickly made for the exit. I caught up with her just before she got to the door.

“Hey,” I said. “One more thing.”

I had been anticipating a moment like this for months, waiting to give someone a piece of my mind.

I remember the day I signed my Newspaper Guild union card.

It was early March 2015, and I was pulled into a side office just off the Post-Gazette newsroom to write my name on a small manila-colored piece of paper. I didn’t really know what to think about it.

Fabricated references: a new threat to editorial integrity

Topaz, M ∙ Roguin, N ∙ Gupta, P ∙ et

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

Report the first systematic evaluation of the authenticity of references. The authors initially identified 125 615 773 references from 2 471 758 papers drawn from PubMed Central’s Open Access platform published from Jan 1, 2023, to Feb 18, 2026. Of these references, only 77% (97·1 million) carried a PubMed ID and were further evaluated. References, after passing through several filters to account for spelling errors in names or incorrect titles, were then verified against PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar. References not found in any of these four databases were considered fabricated. Of the 97·1 million references evaluated, 4046 from 2810 papers were considered fake. This number was shown to have increased with time, from one in 2828 papers in 2023, to one in 458 papers at the end of 2025.

What Voters and Parents Want From Schools Is Less Ideological Than We May Think

Charlie Barone:

The loudest fights over K-12 education can make it seem as if American voters in general, and parents in particular,1 are split into warring camps: back to basics v. SEL; school choice v. neighborhood schools; college v. career. But polling tells a less polarizing and more complicated and instructive story. Parents do not primarily want schools to serve as ideological battlegrounds. They want schools to work across a number of different areas.

Start with the basics. In Pew’s 2023 survey, 51% of U.S. adults said public K-12 education was headed in the wrong direction; among those respondents, the most common major reason was that schools were not spending enough time on core academic subjects, cited by 69%. National Parents Union 2024 polling points in the same direction: only 48% of public school parents said their child was definitely prepared academically for the next school year, and that figure dropped to 43% among middle school parents. ExcelinEd’s 2025 national survey found that 86% of respondents rated students being on grade level in reading, math, and writing as veryimportant, higher than for any other single aspect of schooling.

The reading data are especially clear. NPU’s poll found that 81% of public school parents supported setting a national goal for all public school students to read at grade level by third grade. The highest-supported reading-related policies were: free tutoring for students not reading at grade level (91%); research-backed reading curriculum and methods and teacher training and coaching (both at 89%); and, guidance for families on supporting reading skills (88%).

The red-blue flip on local control and what it tells us about education today

Chad Aldeman

For much of the past three decades, education reform rested on a surprisingly durable bipartisan foundation, from the standards and accountability movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s through No Child Left Behind and into the Obama-era push for more rigorous teacher evaluations. That consensus was never without tension, but it held long enough to engender significant progress. Over time, however, it began to wear down, arguably reaching its last gasp in Washington with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. What followed was a mix of reform fatigue, rising polarization, and declining confidence in testing and accountability mechanisms, alongside a broader shift away from technocratic problem-solving. As that consensus frayed, so too did the assumptions that had long governed who should control what in public education.

The erosion of that confidence is visible in public opinion data. In the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of Americans, across party lines, reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. Fast forward to today, that figure has fallen to less than one-third overall, with confidence declining sharply in both parties, especially among Republicans. What has followed is not a clean ideological reversal, but something more fragmented and harder to categorize—one that is increasingly visible in debates over local control. The familiar lines that once structured education policy—between state and local authority—have blurred, and the red-blue divide on local control has begun to shift in a couple of unexpected ways.

First, the traditional red-blue roles around local control no longer map neatly onto today’s reality. Historically, red states prioritized local autonomy, framing it as a defense against state and federal overreach. That commitment has become far more selective. Several red states have taken a more prescriptive approach to schooling, from requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms to using funding incentives and state-vetted lists to steer districts toward preferred instructional materials. At the same time, many blue states now default to a posture of deferencetoward schools and districts, often reinforcing the influence of teachers unions.

DOJ says Yale medical school discriminated against Asian, White applicants

Susan Svrluga

The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale School of Medicine of discriminating based on race in its admissions, by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones.

The department’s allegations are based on a year-long investigation that sought to determine whether Yale’s admissions practices were in compliance with federal civil rights law. The agency determined that the medical school “continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race,” despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.

Wisconsin spending on special education surges – Badger Institute

Wyatt Eichholz:

By the numbers

Wisconsin’s state spending to help school districts pay for special education has been surging in recent years. Under the tax-and-schools deal between Gov. Tony Evers and legislative leaders, rejected in the Senate Wednesday, those appropriations would rise even further.

From 1975 to the mid-1990s, Wisconsin’s state appropriations to help districts cover special education costs were characterized by a gradual increase, with one period, 1995 to 2019, when increases slowed, with several periods when spending was held virtually constant.

Over the same time, the number of pupils served by the special education program increased dramatically, from 58,021 in 1976-77 to 128,290 in 2005-06, a 121 percent increase, before receding to 120,602 in 2018-19. The state defines such students as those who are disabled because of cognitive disabilities, hearing impairments, speech or language impairments, visual impairments, emotional disturbance, orthopedic impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, learning disabilities, or significant developmental delay.

MIT: “funding and the talent pipeline”

Sally Kornbluth:

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.

Why kids don’t go anywhere anymore

Matthew Yglesias:

I do not think of myself as an especially permissive or relaxed parent — I only seem low-key and non-anxious compared to Kate. But I was shocked by this Institute for Family Studies survey of what contemporary American children are and are not allowed to do unsupervised at various ages.

The fact that a quarter of 11-year-olds are not allowed to leave the house unsupervised doesn’t seem all that shocking, until you realize that this means they’re not allowed to play in their yard unsupervised.1 Leaving the yard is a whole separate category.

I’ve also been surprised to see so much skepticism about the idea that nine- and 10-year-olds can be left home alone. We are a family with two parents who both have flexible schedules and just one child, so it’s not like our kid is left home alone all that frequently. But sometimes it’s the logistically reasonable course of action and what’s the problem?

The thing that really makes us outliers, though, is that our child is allowed to “leave the street” in the parlance of this poll and walk to places in the neighborhood.

Yet even though that’s the answer I would give to a pollster (because it’s accurate), I have to confess that in practice, he doesn’t often walk places in the neighborhood without an adult.

Swarthmore scrubs professor’s name from hall due to ‘Indigenous grave excavation’

Micaiah Bilger

The college’s president created the taskforce in December after conducting an investigation into Professor Trotter’s actions around the turn of the 20th century, according to an announcement on the college website. Trotter taught at the private, Pennsylvania college for more than 30 years.

“No matter the educational intentions or that these practices may have been commonplace at the time they occurred, these remains should have been treated with dignity and respect and should never have been removed from their burial site,” President Smith stated.

“Considering these actions today, with our values, convictions, and compassion, the act of collecting any Native American remains is unethical and inexcusable. I deeply regret these actions, and on behalf of Swarthmore College, I apologize for the harm they have caused,” she stated.

The Inquirer characterized Trotter’s work as legal but likely unethical:

The Only Thing Harder Than Getting Into College Is Getting Off the Wait List

Roshan Fernandez:

The University of California, Berkeley had almost 6,500 students on its wait list last year. It ended up admitting none of them.

The only thing harder than getting into college, it seems, is getting off the wait list. At some schools, the wait list is far more selective than the college’s overall acceptance rate. That’s a tough reality for thousands of wait-listed students across the country now, still holding out hope of getting into their dream schools after the May 1 commitment deadline passed.

For colleges, it’s harder than ever to predict who will enroll because students are applying to more schools. Colleges have always used wait lists to manage enrollment, but the lists have ballooned in recent years. It’s part of many colleges’ elaborate cat-and-mouse game to manage yield, or the share of admitted students who enroll. And wait lists have turned increasingly unruly, with fewer standard protocols than traditional admissions.

Four High Schools in Four Years: The Wild World of Athlete Transfers in Florida

Harrie Ryan:

Ah’Mari Stevens, a 16-year-old football player from South Florida, boarded a helicopter with a videographer one day last spring. As the chopper circled Miami, the cameraman explained the purpose of the shoot: “Everybody and their mama wants to know where he’s going to play ball next year.”

Ah’Mari, a whip-fast sophomore wide receiver with two state championships under his belt, peered out the window as various high-school campuses passed below. He listed their attributes—NFL alums, college stars, state titles—and then pointed out Edison High, an inner-city public school whose coach at the time boasted of negotiating multimillion-dollar deals, where he planned to enroll.

“Sometimes a man gotta create their own path,” he said in the video, made by social-media company Footballville. Edison would be Ah’Mari’s third high school, but not his last. After a few games, he switched to a rival Catholic powerhouse known for star receivers.

Suiting up for four different high schools would be impossible in most of the country, thanks to state interscholastic rules that can require transfer students to sit out a year of competition.

Florida is different. School-choice laws mean athletes transfer easily, often without losing a moment on the playing field. In the age of Name, Image and Likeness compensation, the result is a first-of-its-kind high-school transfer portal that some insiders warn may be the future of scholastic sports in America.

How to Access Court Records, by State

A crowdsourced field guide to finding state court records.

Free Will Is Still Undefeated

Rob Henderson

A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

More Colleges Are Closing. It’s About Time

Roland Fryer:

Hampshire College, alma mater of filmmaker Ken Burns, announced in April that it will close after the fall semester. Sterling College, a 130-acre working farm in northeastern Vermont, will graduate its final class in May. The Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 private nonprofit colleges enrolling roughly 670,000 students are at risk of closing or merging within a decade. The instinctive response is elegiac: lament the shuttered campus, mourn the futures it might have made, hope for rescue. Mr. Burns called Hampshire’s closing “an extraordinary loss.”

Is it just me, or is this good news for America? Closing these institutions means students are slowly ceasing to overpay for scant added value. If more market correction is to come, that tells us something important—about higher education and about other education sectors we have built to avoid correction altogether. The question isn’t how to save these institutions. It is how to accelerate market forces.

The private-college sector didn’t rise in a laissez-faire market. It was built by federal loan programs, the postwar college wage premium and decades of expanding demand. In that environment, “more college seats” and “more social value” came to mean the same thing. They weren’t.

Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong

Paul Schofield:

Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical wisdom that comes with years spent in their specific disciplines, educating students.

Chinese spy agency warns nation’s young people against dropping out

William Langley:

Chinese spies have blamed “anti-China forces abroad” for the rising number of disaffected young people turning their backs on the long hours required to build their careers and spur economic growth.

The Ministry of State Security, the country’s spy agency, this week said foreign forces were seeking to “erode the minds of Chinese youths” by disseminating anti-work propaganda online, encouraging them to drop out or, in Chinese internet parlance, “lie flat”.

“They want only for our youth to ‘lie flat’, handing over our development dividends, strategic opportunities, and the future of our nation,” the MSS said in a statement and an accompanying promotional video on WeChat.

“May every young person uphold their original aspirations, stand firm on their principles, remain undisturbed by noise and unclouded by confusion, and thrive in the prime of their lives.”

The warning underscores the anxiety felt in Beijing over high youth unemployment and the growing ranks of alienated workers. China this year set its lowest growth target outside of the coronavirus pandemic in decades, aiming for a rate of 4.5 to 5 per cent.

New Sun Prairie superintendent vows transparency after scandals

Chris Rickert:

Following a series of scandals involving Sun Prairie School District employees, the district’s incoming superintendent is pledging to improve communication and ensure a clear chain of command when bad situations arise.

Antoine Reed was formally hired on May 7 and officially takes over July 1. He currently serves as chief of culture and student engagement for Rockford Public Schools and has been a principal in Milwaukee; South Bend, Indiana; and Chicago. He will make $230,000 a year in his role with the 8,518-student Sun Prairie district.

Reed’s hire comes as criminal cases against two former West High School staffers continue to wind their way through state courts.

People are also reading…

Former Dean of Students Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier faces child pornography and exploitation charges for allegedly victimizing two students at West and downloading images of a third girl whose nude photos he found on the internet. He also was sentenced last month in federal court to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of creating child pornography in connection with the same allegations.

San Francisco school district under fire over mandatory ‘ethnic studies’ identity course for freshmen

By Annie Gaus:

San Francisco parent advocates are furious over what they call an “unvetted and illegal” ethnic studies course that was rammed through without meaningful input — citing divisive lesson plans like a “privilege wheel” that sorts student into an “oppressor/oppressed framework,” according to a legal warning sent to city leaders.

The Friends of Lowell Foundation, which advocates for academic merit at San Francisco’s premier public magnet school Lowell High, blasted a year-long ethnic studies course just permanently adopted by San Francisco Unified School District — making it a requirement for ninth graders.

The scathing letter accuses the San Francisco Board of Education and district leaders of quietly pushing a $7 million, required course for ninth graders called “Voices”that has largely been concealed from concerned parents.

An illustration of a "Wheel of Power/Privilege" with categories such as wealth, gender, sexuality, and ability, divided into "marginalized" and "power" segments.

‘A’ Grades Are Suddenly Everywhere Since the Arrival of ChatGPT

Lindsay Ellis:

AI is making “A” grades easier to come by, a new study shows—and making them less useful to employers trying to size up college graduates.

The share of A’s in college classes heavy on writing and coding—in other words, work more prone to artificial-intelligence use—has grown more significantly than in other classes since ChatGPT’s debut, according to a paper from the University of California, Berkeley, released Wednesday. Professors teaching AI-exposed classes gave out about 30% more A’s and fewer A-minus and B-plus grades.

The results suggest that students have relied on generative AI to do better in their studies, not that these classes of students are learning more, says

Doing Justice While Making Catholic Schools Affordable

George Weigel:

Before joining what once imagined itself the world’s greatest deliberative body, U.S. senator Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) was a decorated naval aviator, test pilot, and NASA astronaut with four space shuttle missions to his credit. Now, like approximately 80 percent of his senatorial colleagues, Sen. Kelly looks in the mirror in the morning and sees a future president. Before he takes the plunge, however, I hope Sen. Kelly finds the political courage to match the physical courage that won him two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

Recently, Sen. Kelly got twenty-nine fellow senators to support his bill to repeal the federal tax credit scholarship program that was created in 2025 and will come into effect next year. A Wall Street Journal editorial quoted Sen. Kelly’s claim that scholarships funded by this program will take “money out of public schools and giv[e] to private ones.” That is false. It was also a rather blatant pander to the teachers’ unions—arguably America’s most reactionary social force, but organizations whose ground game and financial help Kelly surely wants if he makes a run for the White House in the 2028 election cycle.

So, what does this new federal tax credit scholarship program actually do?

Details may be found at the website of the Invest in Education Foundation, but here’s the gist of the program.

k-12 tax & $pending Climate: Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made

Howard Schultz

Washington state has been my home for more than four decades. I arrived in Seattle with dreams and ambition and ended up building Starbucks into a company known around the world. Many Pacific Northwesterners joined me in shaping the culture, benefits and brand of Starbucks—contributing not only to a business, but also the civic and entrepreneurial life of the area.

I am no longer a resident of Washington. My decision to leave had much to do with family choices and my stage of life. Still, I feel a responsibility to speak up about the business and job climate in a city and state that gave me so many opportunities.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: How did the budget get balanced in the late 1990s?

Jessica Riedl:

After the federal deficit reached a post-World War II peak of 6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1983, deficit reduction became a leading issue in American politics. Several deficit-reduction laws were passed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Billionaire and 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot earned a surprising 19% of the popular vote thanks to a quirky campaign that focused heavily on fiscal responsibility.

The winner of that 1992 race, Bill Clinton, subsequently made deficit reduction a centerpiece of his first budget submission and tax increase enactment. The following year, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years on a promise to balance the budget within seven years.

The resulting clash between the GOP’s aggressive timetable and President Clinton’s more gradual approach produced contentious government shutdownsin 1995 and 1996. And yet by 1998 the budget had achieved balance for the first time since 1969—and remained balanced through 2001. A dominant political narrative emerged: High-profile belt-tightening budget deals negotiated by Clinton and Gingrich reduced the deficit and balanced the budget just a few years later.

But budget deals contributed relatively little to balanced budgets

The surprising reality: The elimination of the deficit was largely a temporary historical accident, driven by forces mostly beyond the control of the politicians who claimed credit for it.

Chart 110 (Figure 1 below) maps the path from 1992’s deficit of 4.5% of GDP to the peak surplus of 2.3% of GDP in 2000—a swing of 6.8 percentage points. Nearly the entire improvement in the federal government’s fiscal position resulted from two events: the end of the Cold War and a temporary stock market and tax revenue bubble.

Indiana Charter School Performance During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ron Zimmer, Joseph J. Ferrare, Stephen M. Ponisciak, Adam Kho, Mark Berends, Shelby Smith, Julie W. Dallavis and R. Joseph Waddington:

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schooling nationwide and contributed to substantial declines in student achievement. At the same time, enrollment patterns shifted and charter school sectors expanded in several states, raising questions about whether charter schools were better positioned to support student learning during and after the pandemic. This study estimates the effect of attending a charter school on student achievement growth in Indiana during and after the pandemic using statewide longitudinal administrative data from 2017-18 through 2023–24. We compare charter school students with observationally similar traditional public school students using regression models with inverse probability weighting based on propensity scores and controls for prior achievement and student characteristics. During the 2020–21 school year, charter school students performed similarly to traditional public school peers in mathematics and modestly outperformed them in English/language arts. In post-pandemic years, charter school students experienced greater achievement growth in both subjects, with moderate effect sizes. These gains were concentrated among Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, and lower-performing students. Differences in chronic absenteeism or instructional modality do not explain these patterns. The results are similar in magnitude to a companion study in Tennessee, suggesting charter schools may have contributed to stronger post-pandemic academic recovery.

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Commentary.

Notes on Career Guidance

Lauren Weber:

For much of high school, Savannah Gannaway figured she would work after graduation at the gas station five doors down from her house in Fair Play, a town of 600 in southwest Missouri.

There was no money for college, and no expectation of it either. Gannaway lived with her father, who had dropped out of school and worked as a garbage collector before an injury landed him on disability. None of her siblings went to college.

This month, though, the 20-year-old will receive an associate degree in early childhood education, a credential that will bump her from hourly to salaried employee, at higher pay, at the preschool where she works. She’s considering a bachelor’s degree next.

A big reason she’s on a sturdier path is her career adviser, who was installed at Fair Play High School through a program started by billionaire investment banker Byron Trott. Gannaway’s adviser, Unity Seay, helped her find jobs, tap a state program that pays community college tuition and weather rough patches—such as when juggling a full-time job with school almost pushed her to drop out.

A New Study Spells Bad News for Cellphone Bans

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

The latest study of cellphone bans caused shockwaves as it appeared to be really bad news for advocates of the bans. This study basically compared a specific type of ban, lockable pouches (such as Yondr pouches) with schools that did not use them. Across the board this was basically a null study…no benefits to standardized testing scores, classroom attention, bullying, and the mental health outcomes were “statistically significant”, though wobbling in both directions, and so close to zero in effect size to be more likely due to methodological noise than “real” effects (which would also explain the wobble)1.

Notes on Trust and Facts

“Skeptic Research Center”:

Americans with the highest trust in educators are twice as likely to (falsely) believe that Europeans introduced the concept of war and conflict to Native Americans. (see graph below)

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Sorry, No Deal

Dave cieslewicz:

What an interesting mess this has become.

My guess is that if the surplus spending deal, cobbled together by Gov. Tony Evers, Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, had been introduced a year ago it would have easily passed. But last night it went down in the Senate and is, at least for now, dead.

Essentially, the Democrats killed it. All the Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee voted against it, most of the Dems in the Assembly did the same and then all the Democratic Senators voted ‘no.’ When three Republican Senators joined them, it was over.

It’s hard to see how this can be rearranged in a way that could clear the Senate now. Evers, Vos and LeMahieu are all lame ducks and so have no real political leverage. That’s why I think, had they advanced the very same compromise before they announced their retirements, this would have passed.

———

David Blaska:

The check is NOT in the mail

Could Republicans be so lucky?

Poor Tony Evers. Democrats kicked their own governor one last time on his way out the door. The lame duck governor cobbled together a bi-partisan deal for $600 million more dollars for schools! Big fat check in the mail for taxpayers — $600 for joint filers. No tax on tips and overtime! No way, said Democrats who stood together in that familiar, righteous pose: solidarity! Against their own governor!

Manfully, to the extent that Tony Evers can muster testosterone, the governor attempted to blame Republican governor candidate U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany for “blowing up a bipartisan plan.” But Tiffany left the state legislature for the U.S. Congress years ago.

Let the record show: Republican state legislators overwhelmingly voted YES. Every one the Assembly Republicans who answered the roll call supported the deal — $1.8 billion in property tax relief! Only 10 of the 45 Democrats in the Assembly sided with their own governor — and taxpayers! None of them represent the Madison area, dooming the measure to a 61 to 32 defeat.

——

“still more dollars going into public schools with no requirement for better results”

Continuing New schools amidst declining enrollment

Erin Gretzinger:

The district “had identified early on, for the thousands of people who now live there, that there would be a school in that area. Here we are, 25 years later, with nothing there,” Gothard said at a November School Board meeting. “Part of our impetus for doing this work is to avoid ever having that happen again in MMSD.”

In survey comments obtained by the Cap Times, dozens of respondents called on the district to make boundary changes to reduce overcrowding at Kennedy Elementary, while others asked for a new east side school following development in the area.

“We have seen the population at Kennedy Elementary grow and change. It looks like there will be more housing developments starting up past Sprecher Road, which means there could be even more students coming to the area,” one respondent wrote. “Please consider balancing populations evenly if there is foreseeable growth in the future. Consider the possibility of needing a new elementary school.”

The idea of a new school at Sprecher Road received a cool reception this week from some participants at a district-hosted listening session at Kennedy Elementary. Parents, teachers and staff at the school have advocated in recent years for more support to help its student population, which includes many students of color and economically disadvantaged students.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Mississippi’s educational turnaround was a marathon, not a miracle, experts say – The Lion

JMann:

The “Mississippi Miracle” – the transformation of one of the country’s worst school systems into one of the best – was more of a marathon than a sprint, insiders say.

Three people involved in education in Mississippi discussed how the state changed its policies and practices over time to dramatically improve results.

“The story of Mississippi is often misunderstood,” said Robert Pondiscio, who hosted the American Enterprise Institute webinar. “It’s been called the Mississippi miracle, a phrase that’s catchy, flattering and, in my view, deeply misleading.”

Pondiscio explained that miracles “suggest sudden transformation, mysterious causes or outcomes too extraordinary to be replicated,” but Mississippi’s gains were the product of “years of policy coherence, sustained leadership, literacy reform, accountability, implementation, support and persistence over time.

“That matters, because if Mississippi’s success is a miracle, there’s little to learn from it except amazement. But if it’s a marathon, then there may be lessons here for every state willing to undertake difficult, sustained work.”

The reforms took the Magnolia State from 42nd in the nation in reading to ninth in a little more than a decade. When adjusted for poverty, “Mississippi rises even higher,” Pondiscio said.

————

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Hannah Waight, Eddie Yang, …Joshua A. Tucker

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?

Censorship and Large Language Models

State media control shapes LLM behaviour by influencing training data

State control of the media is shown to alter the training data of large language models (LLMs) through its impact on the information environment. This has a substantial effect on the output of LLMs, with states rated more favourably in their own language when they have tighter media control.

Kids’ test scores began declining way before COVID. These schools are making gains

Cory Turner

The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest Education Scorecard, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.

The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.

Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.

Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the Nation’s Report Card. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.

Counselors Sue Evers Admin Over Christian Counseling Ban

Pat Garrett:

The News: WILL has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Terri Koschnick and Joy Buchman, Wisconsin-licensed counselors, challenging a Wisconsin rule banning consensual, client-driven Christian counseling. The challenge follows an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling that Colorado’s identical law was unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” the “most blatant” kind of First Amendment violation.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Rebecca Furdek, stated, “Wisconsin’s rule is materially indistinguishable from Colorado’s statute held to be viewpoint discrimination by SCOTUS. When we notified the Evers administration of this fact, we were met with a blatant refusal to follow the Supreme Court holding, along with inflammatory, baseless rhetoric accusing WILL of ‘bullying’ children and Wisconsinites. However, Wisconsin counselors have every right to provide Christ-centered talk therapy to the clients who seek them out for that type of counseling.”

WILL Client, Terri Koschnick, stated, “Government officials should not be allowed to police the private conversations I have with my clients who voluntarily seek out my advice as a Christian counselor. They have no right to punish me for saying something they disagree with. That was again confirmed by our nation’s highest court.”

Legacy Media: The New York Times view of the States

Ted Alcorn:

With data from @nytimes API, I analyzed all national+local coverage since 2000—224K articles— to see which topics in each state get covered out of proportion to the rest of the country. A portrait of how the paper of record sees America, one state per tweet, alphabetical. 👇

The degree dilemma: School districts spend millions on ineffective master’s degree premiums

Katherine Bowser:

In this District Trendline, we focus on one of education’s most persistent examples of ineffective and inefficient spending—automatic salary increases for teachers who hold a master’s degree (i.e., master’s degree premiums). Drawing on data from our Teacher Contract Database, we examine master’s degree premiums across four areas:

State policy landscape: how state mandates influence district implementation of master’s degree premiums.
Longitudinal trends: changes in the average master’s degree premium through time.
District policy landscape: how master’s degree premium structures and costs vary across districts.
Opportunity cost: the financial investment required from districts to pay for master’s degree premiums—and what they’re giving up in exchange.

Education leaders must think strategically and spend district funds efficiently and effectively—maximizing outcomes per dollar invested, not spending the least amount possible. Savvy district leaders can use financial pressure as a catalyst to eliminate inefficient practices that have gone unchecked, like investing in a compensation structure that has no clear goals or return on investment.¹

This isn’t to suggest that investing in teachers is unimportant—quite the opposite. Teacher compensation is the largest educational expense,²and rightfully so as they are the most critical within-school factor affecting student achievement.³ Yet many districts allocate these substantial resources without any systematic approach to ensure that students benefit. We find that 90% of large school districts pay teachers more for master’s degrees, and nearly a third of states require districts to, despite the evidence that master’s degree premiums are bad policy for almost everyone:

Five Things I Learned from Bibi Groot about What Happens When You Actually Test Whether AI Tutoring Works

Craig Barton:

Bibi Groot started her career at the Behavioural Insights Team – the government unit that became famous for getting people to pay their taxes on time by changing a single line in a letter. She ran randomised control trials in further education colleges, earned a PhD in Behavioural Public Policy at UCL, had twins in 2022, and then joined Eedi as our first behavioural scientist because, as she put it, education is where her heart is.

I have wanted to get Bibi on the podcast for a while, partly because she is one of the smartest people I work with, but mainly because listeners have been asking me to go deeper into the Google DeepMind study that we published earlier this year. The one that made the news. The one that Daisy Christodoulou, Carl Hendrick, and others all held up as the gold standard of AI tutoring research. Most importantly, the one that was the subject of our first-ever (no doubt AI-generated) hype Tweet.

Best prospects for many 20-somethings are in fast-growing Southern cities, new analysis shows

Ray A. Smith, Jason French and Stephanie Stamm:

A string of cities across America’s Sunbelt are emerging as graduate-hiring hot spots in an otherwise challenging job market for young professionals, an exclusive analysis shows.

Birmingham, Ala., tops the list of the places where newly minted graduates are landing jobs with a college-level career track, followed by Tampa, Fla., according to the new study by payroll processor ADP. In fact, six of the list’s top 10—including Raleigh, N.C.; Tulsa, Okla.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte, N.C.—are in the South.

Other pockets of the country also punch above their weight as early-career launchpads for their mix of 20-something hiring, pay and affordability. Columbus, Ohio, and California’s San Jose area unexpectedly got top scores this year—evidence that even places with so-so earning potential or high costs of living can be prime locations for landing that first job postgraduation.

Altogether, the ADP analysis—which measured 53 of the country’s biggest metro areas—shows that what looks like a nascent recovery in graduate hiring is happening unevenly. Recent data shows companies are boosting entry-level hiring this spring after holding back for several seasons, but their appetite hinges a lot on the kind of role, sector and location.

Wisconsin lags behind in post-pandemic learning recovery. Here’s why

Blaise Mesa:

Wisconsin students have struggled to recover since the pandemic, leaving the state ranked toward the bottom for academic growth in math and reading, a new report says.

The state ranks 33rd out of 38 states in math and 30th out of 35 states in reading, according to the Education Scorecard. The report, released annually, is a collaboration between the Harvard University, Stanford University and Dartmouth College.

There are no findings for Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Vermont due to data limitations, the report says.

The report describes a “learning recession” in the United States that began years before the pandemic in 2013, when math and reading scores stalled and then began to decline.

What does the report say about Wisconsin schools?

The report included mixed news for Wisconsin schools.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10% of classes, dropped from 22% in 2022 to 17% in 2025, but remains higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Wisconsin students are performing better at math than in 2022, but are 0.35 grade levels behind their peers from 2019. Students are reading 0.24 grade levels below 2022 levels and are about half a grade level behind 2019 numbers.

The Sun Prairie Area, Oshkosh Area and West Allis-West Milwaukee school districts are a full grade level behind 2019 math scores, the report says. Meanwhile, Kenosha, Green Bay Area and Sheboygan Area districts are a full grade level behind 2019 reading scores.

But Fond du Lac, Cedarburg, and Waukesha are above average in math and reading, and Racine is emerging as a leader in reading. Hamilton, Elmbrook and Verona Area students are excelling in math.

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⬇️Public-school kids in Milwaukee are 3.6 (!) grade levels behind in reading.

💰This year they spent over $25k per student.

——

Your School District Is Probably Scoring Worse Than 10 Years Ago

“That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines…. [No Child Left Behind] set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Your School District Is Probably Scoring Worse Than 10 Years Ago

Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris, Sarah Mervosh:

The drops in U.S. scores go beyond the pandemic and cut across income, geographic and racial divides, new data shows.

Something troubling is happening in U.S. education.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesdayby the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.

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“That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines…. [No Child Left Behind] set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties.

——-

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Nicholas Bagley, Robert Gordon:

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

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

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

Civics: Democrats should fire bad teachers and bad cops

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill enhancing public sector pension benefits last year, which influenced two bond agencies’ decision to downgrade Chicago’s credit. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can savegovernments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

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Commentary.

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“pressed state Superintendent Jill Underly on how she planned to address educator sexual misconduct and grooming in Wisconsin”

Related: Act 10.

More on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and educator sexual misconduct.

Tufts lawsuit highlights how tenure is not what it once was

Boston Globe:

To Yee, the “precedent-setting” ruling is a win for tenure and an affirmation of what universities owe their highest-ranking faculty. But it also reveals the fragility of an academic ideal that has become onerous for more and more schools struggling with financial pressures. While the battle plays out nationwide, the Tufts case stands out for its size and scope.

Colleges concerned with political scrutiny and their own bottom lines today are unwinding protections for experienced faculty. And though it’s still uncommon for universities to strip tenure from professors entirely, fewer tenured faculty can rely on the financial stability the status once ensured in uncertain times.

In April, after seven years in court, a Middlesex Superior Court judge ultimately ruled in the professors’ favor,finding that Tufts had breached their tenure contracts and wrongly cut their salaries and full-time faculty status based on the amount of external grant funding they were awarded.

But as the suit dragged on, roughly a dozen tenured Tufts faculty left the university or elected to take untenured contract positions to avoid salary cuts, plaintiffs told the Globe. One professor in the lawsuit, unable to afford his mortgage here, took another job in Florida. And Yee saw her salary cut by more than half, from $140,000 in 2017 to $66,000 in 2026, court documents show.

Princeton Mandates Exam Proctors After Fears of ‘Widespread’ AI-Fueled Cheating

Douglas Belkin:

Princeton University faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams, reversing an 1893 policy.

The change came after “significant numbers” of students and faculty requested it, citing fears of widespread cheating made easier by AI.

A student newspaper survey found 30% of Princeton seniors cheated, with less than 1% reporting violations.

For more than a century, Princeton University prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. Students’ pledge not to cheat was enough.

Those days are over—largely because of AI.

On Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing a policy set in place in 1893 when Princeton introduced its honor code. The change came after “significant numbers” of undergrads and faculty requested it, “given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread,” according to a letter from Michael Gordin, Princeton’s dean of the college.

Mounting Resistance to the Teacher Union Leviathan

Larry Sand:

States are starting to push back against the extensive perks granted to the teachers’ unions.

A May 4 Wall Street Journal editorial argues that the single biggest problem in state governance is the “political dominance of public-sector unions.” These include the SEIU, AFSCME, and, notably, the teachers’ unions. But now, several red states are pursuing reforms to curb their influence and give taxpayers a much-needed break.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little recently signed a bill that will end public support for teachers’ unions. The new law will prohibit school districts from deducting dues directly from teachers’ paychecks and will limit unions’ ability to recruit members during school hours. It will also end the practice of granting teachers paid time off for a range of union activities, including supporting candidates for office, soliciting membership, and participating in protests or advocacy.

This procedure is officially labeled “release time,” but more accurately, it’s “union time on the taxpayer’s dime,” a common practice across the country at all levels of government. This racket allows public employees to conduct various types of union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill.

Arizona is developing guardrails for public-sector unions through a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit school districts from collecting union dues through payroll deductions. The bill, which must be adopted by the legislature to appear on the November ballot, would also ban teacher strikes and require unions to distribute communications off school property.

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