School Information System

Love:

𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆

The district spends $𝟮𝟱𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿 on pensions and retiree health benefits. Every dollar goes to retired employees. Zero reaches a working teacher or a classroom. This spending spiral stems from a miscalculation the state was warned about two decades ago.

𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀

Stanford lecturer David Crane sat on the State Teachers Retirement System board in 2006. He warned them their assumed 8% investment return was fantasy and said 6.2% was realistic. The state Senate kicked him off the board.

Why? Lower return assumptions mean higher pension contributions. Higher contributions mean less money for salary negotiations today. The teachers union had every incentive to keep the fantasy alive, and unions own the California legislature.

He was right. STRS and CalPERS have earned 6.45% and 7.2% since 1999. The gap between promised and actual returns forced taxpayers to cover $𝟱𝟵𝟯 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 in shortfalls. Half a trillion dollars that could have funded salaries and classrooms instead went to covering a bet the pension board was warned it would lose.

more:

Take the contract. The district offered 𝟴𝟬% 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲 coverage Tuesday. The union rejected it and demanded 100%. Many SFUSD teachers already earn six-figures in total compensation. The district is insolvent. And every politician in the city showed up to chant instead of telling anyone the math doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, 50,000 kids missed school for a second straight day. Parents scrambled for childcare. The union’s own negotiator called Monday night’s session “finally productive.” Then they rejected Tuesday’s offer anyway.

Which SF politician has asked why families keep leaving or why half the kids can’t read? Name one.

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No one mentioned the real reason SFUSD doesn’t pay its teachers more. District spending on pensions and other retirement costs has grown at nearly five times the rate of school revenues, squeezing out funds needed for teachers’ salaries. 

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Related:

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Jessie Opoien, Molly Beck:

The Republicans’ decision to leave the revenue limit increases intact comes at a time when GOP candidate for governor Tom Tiffany has made repealing them the centerpiece of his campaign.

Tiffany without a repeal, “one-time relief is only a temporary band-aid as property taxes will still rise every year for the next 399 years because of Evers’ veto.”

Evers’ veto was put in place in 2023 and Republicans who control the state Legislature have heavily criticized the measure.

In the most recent state budget, which was passed into law in 2025, GOP lawmakers decided not to include any new funding for a revenue stream for school districts known as general school aids. As a result, the veto’s revenue increases for schools have been funded entirely by property taxes, contributing to a spike in taxpayers’ bills this year.

According to a summary of a recent meeting between the GOP leaders and Evers sent Feb. 5 from an Evers aide to aides of Vos and LeMahieu, Evers said he would discuss repealing the veto if Republican lawmakers approved heavy funding increases for schools, but Vos and LeMahieu said they did not want to discuss the veto.

Wisconsin Now:

All of the Democrats on the state Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities just voted against giving 5,000 instructional academic staff a vote in how the UW is governed, even though they generally teach the most, have the most industry experience and are the most connected to industry and student needs. Currently, only PhDs with tenure, who tend to be theorists who don’t teach as much, have the power to distribute budgets, choose curriculum, and hire and fire people.

That means the Democrats on the committee are choosing to keep an unbreakable ceiling for these workers, including hundreds of instructors of color and women, reinforcing an example of actual structural racism.

Adam Omary:

For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist.

Gabe Kaminsky:

Like many other nonprofits, Bright Future Fund submitted its annual tax return for 2024 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) last November. Just two days later, it quietly went out of business. Bright Future Fund seemed likely to be remembered as nothing more than a small cog in the vast dark money machine that tried to elect Harris and failed.

But Bright Future Fund is now attracting attention among some tax experts and conservatives because of where almost all its money came from during 2024.

The nonprofit received $37.5 million from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds are tailored to people who wish to donate anonymously and receive tax breaks for their philanthropic giving. In its own tax return, Fidelity said that it gives money only to nonprofits “where the funds distributed will be used exclusively for charitable purposes.”

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Fidelity, a huge donor-advised fund, wired $37.5M to a dark money org that backed Kamala Harris in ‘24. But the donation is now turning heads among tax experts, who say Fidelity failed to disclose giving to a non-charity—raising q’s about tax law and voter turnout efforts

Rory Linnane

Milwaukee Public Schools administrators are exploring immediate budget cuts as they say auditors recently concluded the district overspent its budget for the 2024-25 school year, running its main operations fund into the red by about $46 million as of the end of the last school year.

MPS officials weren’t expecting to run a deficit in the last school year, they told the Journal Sentinel, but were surprised by high costs primarily for school meals and transportation services.

It wasn’t until auditors started reviewing spending for the 2024-25 school year this fall when they “started to see these gaps,” Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said. District officials didn’t have a confident picture of the fund balance from the auditors until mid-January, Cassellius said. The numbers are still awaiting final certification and could change slightly, officials said.

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Corri Hess:

Story updated after MPS school board meeting:
Milwaukee Public Schools officials say the district’s budget deficit is a symptom of inflation and inadequate state funding, but also too much spending.

Will Flanders:

State taxpayers send Milwaukee more than $11,700 per student. Total per pupil revenue is more than $24,600 per student. There is NO credible way for the the district to hide behind the inadequate funding excuse.

Sam Corbin:

“… general interest articles on the subject abound, and the political landscape inspires regular pleas on social media to restore potent pejoratives such as ‘lummox,’ ‘bloviate,’ ‘bumptious’ and ‘hoodwink.’ Some requests are whimsical, too, like that of a user on Bluesky who suggested, ‘We should bring back the word “spake,” e.g. “Thus spake my friend Jeff.”‘… Whether these campaigns are sincere or silly, we may be closer to a wordy renaissance than we think…. Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century coinage, ‘brain-rot,’ is now the ruin of modern minds. Calling someone a ‘goon’ is no longer just a 1920s habit. We’re saying ‘sheesh’ again, apparently, and even the president has spoken of skedaddling. Is there a science to this kind of resurgence?”

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more.

Greg Easterbrook

Soon-to-be-former Disney CEO Bob Iger: “Nothing in this deal in any way changes the ESPN approach when it comes to journalism.” Sadly true!

With this stroke 345 Park (NFL headquarters) has contractual business partnerships with Bueno Vista (Disney headquarters, representing ABC, ESPN and Hulu), Paramount (CBS and Paramount Plus), Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet (YouTube), X (Twitter), Fox and the New York Times. There is hardly any major communications enterprise remaining that is not in bed with NFL subsidies and antitrust exemptions.

Over the summer Roger Goodell appeared on SportsCenter and spoke warmly to Hannah Storm about the NFL’s love of ESPN. That was rich, considering NFL Network was created for the purpose of destroying ESPN. Now the two have kissed and made up. There are billions to be made.

Gerard Baker:

Is there a class of people with more vaulting self-belief or more stunted self-awareness than America’s journalists?

“Democracy dies in darkness,” they tell us, the implication being that it is only the torch held aloft by the nation’s brave media folk that keeps the light of freedom glowing in the gathering dusk of an authoritarian age. It’s true that in the absence of independent, trusted sources of information, power accrues without accountability. But there’s no hint in this declaration of their own indispensability or the role journalists themselves have played in undermining the public trust.

The nearly 175 years young Madison Literary Club hosted a talk by Paul Fanlund and John Nichols on “The Business of Journalism”.

mp3 audio // Machine generated transcript

Overton Window, explained.

A few personal notes on the newspaper era:

I was blessed to grow up with parents who prized literacy and lifelong learning. Local, regional and national publications were delivered on the regular and our local library was well stocked with everything else.

A snow storm “baptized” my first day delivering the morning Milwaukee Sentinel to subscribers’ doorsteps.

“Circulation” people mastered the art of heavy and relentless sales tactics.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment in much of the legacy media across the decades are twofold:

1. Rapid decline of inquisitiveness. Stenography has prevailed for most of the journalism world.

2. Brain boxing. Simply accepting a declining Overton Window when we live in a time of unprecedented data/information flow.

There are some exceptions. When asked, “what do you read”, I reply as follows (a sublist):

Local/Regional
Chris Rickert, Danielle DuClos, Erin Gretzinger, Marc Eisen, Rory Linnane, Corri Hess, Allen Borsuk and Laura Scandurra.

captimes.com Madison.com https://www.illinoispolicy.org (Pritzer drops millions in the Wisconsin Democrat Party, worth keeping an eye on Illinois spending, debt and regulation practices), ditto for the https://www.chicagocontrarian.com, jsonline, Wispolitics.com (curiously owned by the cap times for a number of years)

National/Global
Seymour Hersh, Matt Taibbi, Eric S. Raymond, Balaji, John Robb, Gregg Easterbrook, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Arnade, Kevin Kelly, Dave Winer and Katja Hoyer.

ft.com wsj.com nytimes.com economist.com

Finally, a few questions that I did not have time to ask last night.

It’s been 19 years since the Cap Times transitioned from a daily newspaper to being primarily an online news source with a weekly print edition. How has it gone? What have you learned? Problems and successes? Talk about the staff. How many reporters, news producers and editors does the CT have today compared to 19 years ago?

Why did the Cap Times buy WisPolitics.com in 2011? It doesn’t seem like the purchase was ever positioned to strengthen the cap times editorial product. Am I wrong in saying that? You then subsequently sold WisPolitics in 2023 to the State Affairs news chain. Why did you sell it?

As you know, The cap times has always had a tremendous strength in that it shares advertising profits 50-50 with Lee Enterprises, owner of the Wisconsin State Journal. Is that agreement, which dates to the late 1940s, still in effect?

Erin Gretzinger

Members of the Wisconsin Literacy Justice Coalition have talked with school district administrators about their ideas. FitzGerald described the district’s response to their proposals as “lukewarm,” while Wagner said the conversations so far have been “cordial” and the coalition is open to either taking a leading role or supporting the district’s plans.

“We need to build sustainability so that we can eventually get to every elementary school, every middle school, even every comprehensive high school, because we know that there are students struggling in every single level,” Wagner said. “In order to do that, you need infrastructure.”

Coalition members aren’t deterred or slowing down, though. At the recent Goodman Community Center presentation, dozens signed up to receive training and start tutoring.

“We invite those of you who know MMSD teachers and administrators to reach out to them and share your experiences, especially as you begin tutoring,” said Shel Gross, one of the coalition’s leaders. “This sends a strong message to our schools and the school district that this community is ready to show up to address the literacy crisis.”

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Holly Korbey, Luke Morin:

What I would come to learn over time is that the qualities schools are quickest to reward aren’t always the ones most closely tied to student learning. Early in my career, I was celebrated for effort, visibility, and good intentions. Years later, after deliberately studying great classrooms and becoming a far more effective teacher by the system’s own measures, that recognition disappeared.

Up to that point in my teaching career, I had put in my share of late nights and early mornings. I battled the copier, authored hundreds of worksheets, endured unpleasant parent phone calls. If exhaustion was any measure of effectiveness, I was hitting the ball out of the park.

My school was enduring a difficult stretch—high teacher turnover, rapid enrollment growth, and a new administration trying to find its footing. In that context I could almost see how I became a Teacher of the Year candidate—I was a happy warrior: eager, visible, and genuinely committed.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

AD Quig:

Echoing problems first publicly raised by suburban school district leaders, a subset of public library directors reported they have had to go into “ongoing financial triage” because property tax receipts that typically land in their bank accounts in the summer were months late.

Libraries received the bulk of their expected dollars last week and are expected to be made entirely whole this week. But in a memo shared with the Tribune, a group of library leaders said in recent months they’ve had to put off payments to vendors, paused new hires and canceled or scaled back public programs.

The impact on libraries is another wrinkle in the long-delayed upgrade of the county’s internal property tax systems with contractor Tyler Technologies. Though taxpayers settled their bills between mid-November and December, it has taken extra time to get those dollars into the bank accounts of cities, park districts, schools and libraries.

Nadim Hossain:

his email from staff representative at my kid’s elementary school is messed up. Strike if you must but it’s diabolical to say “don’t do independent study while we shut down the school for a few days”.

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Garry Tan:

California labor law says unions can only strike after completing the impasse process. UESF skipped the steps and called a strike anyway.

Balaji:

The most successful tech founders of all time have now exited the failed state of California.

Mike Netter:

With Phillips 66 also exiting, nearly 10% of California’s in-state refining capacity is coming offline in a short window.

Akash:

The real story is $10 billion in tax avoidance.
Zuckerberg is buying a $150-200M estate on Indian Creek Island from the founder of Jersey Mike’s Subs. That’s a 4-5x return for Cancro, who bought the lot for $37M in 2021 and built the mansion from scratch. Good trade.

But zoom out. California just filed the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative imposing a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of anyone worth over $1 billion who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. On Zuckerberg’s ~$212 billion fortune, that’s roughly $10.6 billion in state taxes.

———-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Neetu Arnold:

I appreciate @NickKristof visiting AL/MS to learn from their educational gains. But I reject the growing “both sides” frame for why good reforms haven’t scaled

It downplays how unions & ideology resist sound policies. Even if blue states now support reading & math reforms, that doesn’t mean the political instincts behind bad choices have disappeared

Lowering the temperature shouldn’t mean lowering accountability

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Any time southern states are beating Massachusetts you have to pay attention. This is good stuff.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Publius

The theory basically claimed that racial preferences in admissions to elite schools actually HARMED those minority students who were admitted with objectively lesser qualifications. His theory held that because those students did not have high enough test scores and grades as others admitted to those elite universities, they would therefore lag behind in their school work, receive lesser grades and lesser job opportunities post-graduation, and possibly not graduate at all.

His theory further held that those minority students would be far more successful in life going to schools where their credentials were good enough for admission without racial preferences. He suggested that going to a state school, for example, would lead to higher grades, higher rates of graduation and better life opportunities.

For this theory he had his life ruined. He was metaphorically crucified in the public square as a “racist.”

Notes & Links on Richard Sander.

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Stephanie Saul:

Overall, freshman enrollment of underrepresented minority groups increased by 8 percent at public flagship universities. The analysis, by a nonprofit organization, Class Action, concludes that those schools were among institutions that benefited as a result of higher rejection rates for Black and Hispanic students at the nation’s 50 most selective schools.

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UCLA Law students lead protest against professor who opposes affirmative action

Paulina Rowinska:

The trajectory of a storm, the evolution of stock prices, the spread of disease — mathematicians can describe any phenomenon that changes in time or space using what are known as partial differential equations. But there’s a problem: These “PDEs” are often so complicated that it’s impossible to solve them directly.

Mathematicians instead rely on a clever workaround. They might not know how to compute the exact solution to a given equation, but they can try to show that this solution must be “regular,” or well-behaved in a certain sense — that its values won’t suddenly jump in a physically impossible way, for instance. If a solution is regular, mathematicians can use a variety of tools to approximate it, gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon they want to study.

But many of the PDEs that describe realistic situations have remained out of reach. Mathematicians haven’t been able to show that their solutions are regular. In particular, some of these out-of-reach equations belong to a special class of PDEs that researchers spent a century developing a theory of — a theory that no one could get to work for this one subclass. They’d hit a wall.

Now, two Italian mathematicians have finally broken through, extending the theoryto cover those messier PDEs. Their paper, published last summer, marks the culmination of an ambitious project that, for the first time, will allow scientists to describe real-life phenomena that have long defied mathematical analysis.

Dave Cieslewicz:

I’m referring to the liberal law firm Law Forward’s civil suit against the city and its former clerks over the mishandling of 193 ballots in the November, 2024 election. These were absentee ballots that were misplaced and not counted. They would not have made a difference in any race.

What was really bad about that was the fact that City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl failed to bring it to the attention of the mayor or the city attorney until weeks after she discovered the problem. For that, she and her deputy were forced to resign. The city apologized. There were two separate investigations by the city and the state elections board. New people and new procedures are in place.

This was a bad mistake, but what else do you want the city to do?

Well, Law Forward wants city taxpayers to pay unspecified monetary damages. How much might that be? According to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal, a claim filed in March seeks to value these votes at $175,000 apiece. If they got all of that, it would be just under $34 million. If Law Forward took the customary 30%, that’d be around $11 million. While it seems unlikely that the payout would be nearly as high as that, a cynical person (and I am not a cynical person) might suggest that Law Forward is doing this for two reasons: the money and the exposure for their nonprofit.

John Sailer:

Through public-records requests, I’ve acquired dozens of proposals and progress reports for Mellon-funded projects. The records show how the foundation has lavishly promoted progressive scholar-activism. At the University of Utah, the Transformative Intersectional Collective created workshops on “transgender and queer of color critique” and “environmental anti-racism,” supported by a half-million-dollar Mellon grant. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the “Visualizing Abolition” project promotes research and art that calls for the elimination of prisons with the support of $8 million from Mellon.

For much of its existence, the Mellon Foundation narrowly supported the arts and humanities. One signature project was the creation of JSTOR, the widely used online database of academic research. The foundation avoided controversy

Massimo Mazzotti:

In this essay, I’ll use the case of revolutionary Naples to argue that the rise of a new and allegedly neutral mathematics—characterized by rigor and voluntary restriction—was a mathematical response to pressing political problems. Specifically, it was a response to the question of how to stabilize social order after the turbulence of the French Revolution. Mathematics, I argue, provided the logical infrastructure for the return to order. This episode, then, shows how and why mathematical concepts and methods are anything but timeless or neutral; they define what “reason” is, and what it is not, and thus the concrete possibilities of political action. The technical and political are two sides of the same coin—and changes in notions like mathematical rigor, provability, and necessity simultaneously constitute changes in our political imagination.

¤

Mary Katherine Ham: more.

In a video I stumbled on recently, a man in a hoodie reads to the camera, somewhat haltingly telling the story of Aslan and the Pevensie children. He’s been working his way, one chapter a day, through The Chronicles of Narnia. The text over the video reads, “37 years old, fifth-grade reading level, no one taught me but I’m not giving up.”

Oliver James had behavioral and learning-disability problems in school. He said adults just tried to keep him under control, sometimes literally restrained, and never worried whether he learned. In his early 30s, unable to hold a job, he could …

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It’s astonishing to witness the improvement in public education–reading, math, attendance, grad rates–in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. But we’re busy fighting culture wars rather than scaling up what these three states have done. Please do read: nytimes.com/2026/02/09/opi…

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

James Rosen:

Near the end of Nixon’s second and final day on the stand, the examination strayed into a subject that wasn’t listed on the agenda. This prompted Nixon to admonish his interrogator, “I would strongly urge the special prosecutor: Don’t open that can of worms.” More extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed.

In the avalanche of official disclosure that defined the 1970s, what remained so sensitive that even the special prosecutors wouldn’t touch it?

The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the “deep state.”

Seated in a small Coast Guard station in June 1975, Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but that he himself, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.

The Moored-Radford affair, as the episode became known, constituted a unique constitutional crisis. Over 13 months, in wartime, an enlisted man had stolen an estimated 5,000 documents, most of them classified, from the N.S.C. and delivered them to the nation’s top uniformed commanders. It was time to brief the president.

In the summer of 1973, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, learned of the Radford project and considered it vital to Nixon’s defense. The White House, now run by, of all people, General Haig, enjoined Baker from disclosing the critical work that the Plumbers had done in Moorer-Radford. Nixon and General Haig each harbored good reasons to let the matter rest.

As the president pointedly reminded General Haig in a recorded meeting on May 11, 1973: “Admiral Moorer, I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing, and you know it. Why didn’t I do it? Because I thought more of the services.”

“but the espionage by the Joint Chiefs went unmentioned.”

When excluded from their spheres of interest, entrenched bureaucratic forces will, almost as a biological reflex, respond aggressively.

The Joint Chiefs’ spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times. Declassified documents and scholarship published since 1974 have established that the F.B.I., under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Mitchell, the attorney general, and that the C.I.A. detailed its personnel to various units associated with Nixon, including the Watergate burglary team and “components intimately associated with the office of the president,” as the agency admitted in 1975.

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Senator Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on the Senate.

J-S opinion:

Class debates should be encouraged, but allowing students to lose a day of useful learning on protesting is disgraceful.

Incredible. What is wrong with local school administers and teachers? We have a huge percentage of students not proficient in either reading or math or basic economics, yet we encourage and allow them to walk out to protest social issues (“Hundreds more students walk out against ICE despite threat of discipline,” Jan. 30).

While civics class debates should be encouraged, allowing students to lose a day of useful learning is disgraceful.

Gile Tojek, Brown Deer

Corey DeAngelis

One initiative would restore parental rights by ensuring that moms and dads are notified and involved in key decisions about their children’s education and well-being, including access to school records and opt-outs from certain curricula. The other would protect girls’ sports by requiring athletes to compete on teams matching their biological sex, safeguarding opportunities and safety for female competitors.

Globe & Mail:

The decline in mathematical ability isn’t just a temporary blip caused by COVID – it’s a systemic problem that’s been happening for decades. The trend is deeply concerning because just like literacy, numeracy opens a path to building knowledge and is the foundation for an important part of adult life. 

A lack of math knowledge or fear of numbers hinders individuals doing basic tasks such as shopping, cooking, managing money and doing renovations. Knowing math keeps the doors open to high paying jobs in finance, business, engineering, tech and AI, which are key to growing the economy. Researchers have found that student math scores are strong predictors of future academic outcomes and earnings. 

Canada has been dropping in the international assessment Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). On the chart below showing the latest Grade 4 assessment, you need to look way down the list to find Canada, which lands in the middle of the pack, below Albania, Armenia and the United States.

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More.

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Alma T. Barak, Wyeth Renwick, and Claire L. Simon,

Harvard students slammed a proposal to cap A grades and use raw percentage scores for internal awards, warning that the changes would intensify academic competition, misrepresent students’ mastery of course material, and harm postgraduate prospects.

If approved by faculty, the 19-page plan — released Friday by the Office of Undergraduate Education — would limit the number of A grades to 20 percent of each course, with room for up to four extra As per course. The proposal also included a new “average percentile rank” system, which uses students’ raw numeric scores to determine internal awards rather than grade point averages.

A faculty subcommittee argued that the recommendations “take critical steps towards the College’s goal to re-center academics, restoring confidence in the College’s grading system, and better aligning incentives with pedagogical goals.”

But in more than two dozen interviews with The Crimson, students overwhelmingly urged faculty to reject the proposal.

“You accept a bunch of top 3 percent students in the country and then get surprised that we’re getting all As,” Harlow W. Tong ’28 said. “I don’t understand the point of ranking against each other.”

Tong added that lowering average GPAs would reduce the value of a Harvard education.

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In my 23 years at Harvard I’ve had to increase the proportion of A & A- grades from 25% to 65% of my large intro class (still tougher than the average Harvard class)

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more.

Brian Fraley:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has many problems. They’re self righteous, secretive and indignant. Their communications efforts do not offer clarity, they obfuscate. 

This was on full display in their spokesperson’s response to Dairyland Sentinel’s reporting.

The statement was emailed out to many media outlets. Here’s a link to the full statement as it appeared on WKBT in La Crosse.

Instead of providing the transparency taxpayers deserve, DPI Communications sent a jargon-heavy statement that reads more like a desperate attempt to dodge accountability than a factual rebuttal. Since the agency chose to treat the public’s concerns like a nuisance rather than a priority, we decided to treat their response like a late-term homework assignment for a high school persuasive writing class. We pulled out the metaphorical red pen, identified the logical fallacies, and gave DPI the grade their response deserves.

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Mark Treinen:

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

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Much more on Jill Underly, here.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Danielle DuClos:

The bill would require the department to publish on its website if an educator surrendered their license amid an investigation into misconduct.

It would also remove ways to justify denying access to case records under state open records laws and mandate the department fulfill requests for case records within 14 days, if an educator lost or surrendered their license. Wisconsin’s open records laws currently don’t specify a precise time requirement for fulfilling requests.

“This bill provides basic, easily accessible transparency that helps protect children and inform parents and future employers,” Nedweski said during an Assembly Committee on Education hearing this week.

Voluntary surrender is the most common way educators lose their state-issued licenses, according to a Cap Times analysis of misconduct investigations from 2018 to 2023. Department of Public Instruction investigators have offered educators the ability to surrender their credentials at the start of an investigation and throughout the process.

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Mark Treinen:

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

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Much more on Jill Underly, here.

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———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

AJ Bayatpour

Holy smokes: A Kenosha County judge yesterday dismissed a 45-count burglary/property damage case because the DA Xavier Solis used AI to submit paperwork and didn’t disclose it. The filings in question included “hallucinated and false citations”

Tunku Varadajan:

A persistent theme of his writing is the “squalor produced by the welfare state” and by the “widespread abdication of personal responsibility” that characterizes “Life at the Bottom” (2001), his first collection of City Journal essays. In his introduction to the book, Dr. Daniels wrote, “A specter is haunting the Western world: the underclass.” He observed that “the mental, cultural, emotional, and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have encountered anywhere”—including the poorest countries of Africa, where he did volunteer work as a young doctor. Observing his patients in a Birmingham hospital, he wrote: “Each day my faith in the ability of human beings comprehensively to ruin their lives is renewed.”

ABIGAIL S. GERSTEIN AND AMANN S. MAHAJAN:

A faculty committee proposed a sweeping overhaul of Harvard College grading that would sharply limit A grades and introduce a new internal ranking system — changes that could roughly halve the percentage of As currently awarded to undergraduates.

In a 19-page proposal released Friday, the committee recommended capping A grades at 20 percent for every class, with flexibility for up to four additional As per class. The plan would also introduce an internal “average percentile rank” metric to determine honors and awards — a shift aimed at countering what the committee described as a grading system that no longer meaningfully distinguishes student performance.

If approved, the reforms would take effect in the 2026-27 academic year.

The proposal — which has yet to come to a full faculty vote — follows an October report by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, which found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates were As and concluded that the system was “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

That report argued that grades had become so compressed at the top that they no longer performed their basic functions of signaling mastery and guiding internal or external evaluation.

Faculty have already taken steps to curb grade inflation, slashing the number of As awarded from 60.2 percent to 53.4 percent last fall. But the committee argued that voluntary reductions were insufficient to preserve the A as a mark of “extraordinary distinction.”

Rob Henderson:

“Many educated elites have long excused rule-breaking among people in more disadvantaged communities, arguing that the system is stacked against them…Now, bizarrely, they are extending that same moral leniency to themselves.”

John Rosenthal

HateAid is not just a private organization that lobbies online platforms to censor. Rather, it is a formally private organization that has been invested with what is, in effect, a public function by a foreign government (Germany) under a foreign law (the DSA). It is funded by the German government and served that government in an advisory capacity even before it was appointed as a trusted flagger.

Under the DSA, trusted flaggers discharge the quasi-public function of identifying online content that is illegal under the laws of the country whose government appointed them. In the case of HateAide this includes Germany’s myriad “hate speech” laws that have criminalized all sorts of speech that is perfectly legal in the United States. Even mere insults are a crime under German law. Much of HateAid’s would-be public advocacy work in Germany is devoted to defending public officials—in particular Green Party politicians—against content that on closer inspection bears a remarkable resemblance to what Americans would call criticism or satire, not hate.

Their expertise having been certified by the government that appointed them, the DSA demands that trusted flaggers be given priority treatment by the platforms on which the allegedly problematic content has been posted. This means that content should, as a rule, be removed or otherwise suppressed, for instance, by having its visibility restricted. (Visibility suppression should normally be reserved for legal but harmful content. But the flagging prerogatives of trusted flaggers de facto extend to the latter.)

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Make Speech Free Again: How the U.S. can defeat E.U. censorship.

Kayseh Magan:

The Reformer was the first to report in the summer of 2023 that nearly half of the 60 defendants charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud at the time had billed the state for other services, including child care. Since then, federal prosecutors have charged 18 additional defendants in the federal meals program fraud and more than a dozen for defrauding programs intended to provide autism services to children and housing assistance to the homeless. 

This means that once again, the administration of Gov. Tim Walz failed to do the most basic due diligence by continuing to pay providers who had ties to Feeding Our Future. 

Which raises the question: Why weren’t they more aggressive about stopping this sooner?

Because of politics and race. In July 2024, I explained how fraudsters leveraged the burgeoning political power of the Somali community by weaponizing race and religion to escape accountability. 

Early last year, a recorded conversation between Attorney General Keith Ellision with several Somali individuals, two of whom would be charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud, was released. The audio, recorded in December 2021, was surreptitiously recorded by one of the charged individuals, and was listed in a trial exhibit. 

In the 54-minute recording, Ellison agrees with the individuals lobbying him that state agencies are discriminating against East African providers. Ellison states that Walz agrees with him that too much focus on compliance is hurting small businesses. 

Bruce Schneier:

Lots of people write about the difference between living in a high-trust and a low-trust society. How reliability and predictability make everything easier. And what is lost when society doesn’t have those characteristics. Also, how societies move from high-trust to low-trust and vice versa. This is all about social trust.

That literature is important, but for this talk the critical point is that social trust scales better. You used to need a personal relationship with a banker to get a loan. Now it’s all done algorithmically, and you have many more options to choose from.

Social trust scales better, but embeds all sorts of bias and prejudice. That’s because, in order to scale, social trust has to be structured, system- and rule-oriented, and that’s where the bias gets embedded. And the system has to be mostly blinded to context, which removes flexibility.

But that scale is vital. In today’s society we regularly trust—or not—governments, corporations, brands, organizations, groups. It’s not so much that I trusted the particular pilot that flew my airplane, but instead the airline that puts well-trained and well-rested pilots in cockpits on schedule. I don’t trust the cooks and waitstaff at a restaurant, but the system of health codes they work under. I can’t even describe the banking system I trusted when I used an ATM this morning. Again, this confidence is no more than reliability and predictability.

Think of that restaurant again. Imagine that it’s a fast food restaurant, employing teenagers. The food is almost certainly safe—probably safer than in high-end restaurants—because of the corporate systems or reliability and predictability that is guiding their every behavior.

Rachel Louise Ensign:

Many of those facing the most substantial dollar increases are middle-income Americans who buy health insurance through the marketplaces set up by the government’s Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

Expanded subsidies for those insured under the ACA expired on Dec. 31—the central battle in last year’s record-long government shutdown. That shutdown ended with no resolution on the subsidies, and lawmakers haven’t passed legislation to revive them.

Now, the newly calculated insurance bills are coming due, and Americans are having to figure out how to pay up, or go without.

Lenny and Mandee Wilson, who are 47 years old and live in Charleston, W.Va., paid $255 a month last year for a low-end ACA plan. Late last year, they learned their bill would be going up to $2,155 a month, a sum nearly triple their monthly mortgage payment of about $760.

Richard Phelps

In late 2024, the citizens of Massachusetts voted in favor of Question 2, which prohibits the continuation of the MCAS exam graduation requirement. Technically, however, it changes only one paragraph of state law, leaving other sections in apparent contradiction. The Massachusetts legislature must resolve the ambiguity.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) is one product of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA). Other components of the holistic reform included extra funding for public schools, more school choice, and an independent statewide school inspectorate. In the years following, Massachusetts students would rise to the top on national and international assessments.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), in both person power and funding, embodied the main force behind Question 2. It not only opposed the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement, but any other external exam with direct consequences for students or teachers. It also employed some long-debunked research tropes to argue against testing.

The Voices for Academic Equity Coalition organized the most prominent entities opposed to Question 2. Included were some of Massachusetts’ leading political, business, and non-profit organizations.

The governor appointed the K–12 Statewide Graduation Council after Question 2’s passage, which included a wide variety of stakeholders. They met throughout 2025 to devise a plan to replace the MCAS examination as a graduation requirement. They proposed a new program of statewide end-of-course tests, along with locally designed portfolios and capstone projects.

Question 2 prohibits only the retention of the MCAS exam graduation requirement. This may have the beneficial effect of encouraging the Commonwealth to consider quality control over the entirety of the K–12 program, rather than just at its end point. It is recommended that such a quality control framework comprise four elements:

Christine Black:

And yet, recommendations against lockdowns for college students did not curtail mandates and restrictive policies that harmed them. College offers young people a time to question authorities, to explore new ideas, to have adventures with friends while socializing and bonding. Classical liberal arts education embraces the ideals of sharpening students’ critical and creative thinking; provoking them to examine divergent perspectives; and teaching them to strengthen their oral and written arguments. Yet, during the Covid period, colleges and universities all over the country followed government and bureaucratic mandates while discouraging and even punishing students’ critical thinking and questioning.

When Houston returned to school in fall of 2020, it felt like a ghost town to him with students working on classes online from their rooms. Students were forced to wear masks outside, he said, as campus police surveilled them. On the first offense, they were fined, and on the second, they were sent home, “as 19-year-olds,” he said incredulously. He described regularly carrying snacks while walking outside, so he could remove the mandated face mask and breathe freely. Late one night, he visited outside with his cousin whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. They sat about 15 feet apart, talking. A campus police officer approached to force them to apply the mask. They said they were eating. 

“You’re not eating consistently enough,” the guard said. “Put the mask on.”

Police banging on dorm room doors when college friends gathered; secret tip lines college administrators provided for turning in non-compliant fellow students; administrators barring students from leaving campus for months; teacher firings; student expulsions; shaming and bullying the non-compliant – Covid-era college students shared stories like these.

Face Masks While Cross-Country Running; Required Covid Shots

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A deep dive into the implications of Dane County Madison’s Public health lockdown mandates is long overdue

Chris Rickert:

58-year-old Madison school teacher was charged with four felonies Friday for exchanging sexually explicit messages and images with a 15-year-old Texas girl, according to a criminal complaint in Dane County Circuit Court.

David C. Fawcett, of Madison, faces one count of sexual exploitation of a child and three counts of possession of child pornography for the messages he shared over Snapchat between mid-June and late August, the complaint says.

Fawcett, who has no prior criminal record in Wisconsin, was arrested Wednesday at his home on the Near East Side and given a signature bond Friday during an initial court hearing, meaning he is not required to post any money to be released before trial. As a condition of his bail, he is barred from social media and cannot have any unsupervised contact with minors.

Mark Hemingway:

In December, bestselling author and humorist David Sedaris wrote a New Yorker magazine essay about a recent trip to Portland, Oregon. While on a walk to a donut shop, he “lost count of the strung-out addicts I passed on my way” before eventually encountering four homeless people huddled around an empty baby carriage and smoking drugs right on the sidewalk. Moments later, a dog belonging to one of the addicts rushed out and bit him. 

Following the incident, Sedaris, a former methamphetamine addict himself, was struck by the fact that most people in Portland didn’t seem concerned about the state of the city – even the medical worker who treated him appeared more concerned with the dog’s well-being than what had happened to him: 

Brad Weisenstein:

California’s taxes were No. 1 at 89 cents per gallon. Michigan was 66 cents a year ago but increased to 87 cents to claim the No. 2 spot in the January federal survey.

Heading west out of Illinois can save 37 cents in taxes by buying in Missouri or Iowa.

Illinois’ practice of applying sales taxes to gasoline after the motor fuel tax is charged effectively creates a tax-on-tax situation for drivers. This has led some residents, particularly those near state borders, to fill up elsewhere.

Mark Janus:

The employees stayed in four and five-star hotels like the Bellagio and Venetian. Some flew to Sin City costing taxpayers over $1,000 for each person in airfare alone. I recently checked prices and found round trip airfares for less than $500 from Chicago Midway to Las Vegas. The price tag for all this taxpayer funded frivolity was over $26.6 million.

No wonder the Chicago Teachers Union is asking for more money from the Illinois Legislature.

The Office of Inspector General in their report dated November 12, 2025, found the professional development conferences these employees attended were also conducted in Chicago. Yep, right in their own backyard. But alas, in 2023 one of the years the conference was offered, only twenty-three employees elected to attend in Chicago. And, when it was offered virtually only one person attended between 2022 and 2024.

Evidently, it’s more fun to go to Las Vegas on the taxpayer dime than to go across town in Chicago.

Garry Tan:

The California Policy Center’s analysis lays it bare: California’s public sector unions collected $921 million in 2018 alone. That’s not campaign contributions—that’s annual revenue. The prize they’re protecting? According to Govern For California, state and local governments spend $240 billion per year on public employee compensation and benefits.

“There is no special interest in California that wields more influence over state and local politics than public sector unions. At every level of government, from the office of the governor to a school board managing a district with only a few hundred students, public sector unions are omnipresent. With rare exceptions, to defy their agenda is certain political suicide.”— Edward Ring, The Financial Power of California’s Government Unions – California Globe (californiaglobe.com)

The California Teachers Association alone has 325,000 members and $356 million in annual revenue. Unlike private sector unions that negotiate with management controlled by shareholders, public sector unions can elect their own management—the politicians who depend on union endorsements. That’s not collective bargaining. That’s a protection racket.

Robert Pondiscio:

In this respect, those 19th-century statesmen turned out to be fair—if accidental—cognitive scientists. Long before anyone spoke of background knowledge, schema, or cognitive load, they hit upon a foundational truth about literacy: Language proficiency depends on access to a common stock of knowledge that writers assume and readers recognize. Comprehension is not a content-neutral “skill” that can be reduced to decoding symbols on a page and finding the main idea. It’s a sense-making process that rests to an extraordinary degree on references, idioms, allusions, and stories that are common and broadly shared among the literate.

That insight helps explain why Texas, alone among states, has taken the unusual step of proposing a specific, statewide list of literary works—books, plays, poems, speeches, and stories that all students would be expected to encounter over the course of K–12 schooling. The list is not an attempt to freeze culture in place or settle arguments about the canon once and for all. It’s honest about what literacy actually requires: not exposure to print in the abstract, but familiarity with the texts and traditions that enrich, inform, and structure the English language.

An essay on my Substack by my AEI colleague Annika Hernandez anticipates—and answers—many of the objections now being leveled against the Texas list. As she observes, “Many educators have forgotten that, no less than history and science, English class exists to deliver a body of knowledge: specifically, knowledge of the literary canon” [emphasis mine].

Jernesto:

I know what you might be thinking: “If you can ‘vibe code’ your way through it, the problem wasn’t actually hard.”

I think that misses the point. It’s not that AI is good for hard problems, it’s not even that good for easy problems. I’m confident that my third manual rewrite of a module would be much better than anything the AI can output. But I am also a pragmatist.

If I can get a solution that is “close enough” in a fraction of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI route. And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my pragmatism.

At the end of the day, I am a Builder. I like building things. The faster I build, the better. Even if I wanted to reject AI and go back to the days where the Thinker’s needs were met by coding, the Builder in me would struggle with the inefficiency.

Even though the AI almost certainly won’t come up with a 100% satisfying solution, the 70% solution it achieves usually hits the “good enough” mark.

Jimmy Percival:

The Fourth Amendment is an essential safeguard of Americans’ privacy and personal liberty. Its protections must not be eroded. But they also must not be misappropriated by those seeking to subvert legitimate law enforcement. The left has done that for decades, particularly in the area of immigration enforcement.

Multiple media outlets report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been using so-called administrative warrants in Minnesota to arrest illegal aliens with final orders of removal in their homes. The Department of Homeland Security welcomes the opportunity to explain this reasonable and lawful approach to the American people and federal courts.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It also provides that where a warrant is required, it must be supported by probable cause and specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Most Americans are familiar with this process. If a police officer witnesses a crime, the criminal generally may be arrested without a warrant. But if the police come to a home to make an arrest, police generally must obtain a judicial warrant before entering without permission.

Nicholas S. Zeppos

Yet Baumol’s cost disease has its theoretical and practical limits. There is nothing in his work that suggests that rising costs are inevitable across the entire institution. Colleges are large, complex enterprises with significant administrative services that parallel those seen in the for-profit world. Review an organizational chart, particularly at a research university, and you will see a vast number of vice presidents overseeing finance, facilities, human resources, technology, legal affairs, and communications and marketing. Just like Apple or General Motors, colleges run payroll, manage technology, build out the physical plant, and participate in a growing architecture of compliance, reporting, and media scrutiny. Look at these areas across time and you’ll see that any number of breakthroughs, particularly in technology, have streamlined these functions.

Higher education therefore contains two spheres. One is the instruction-and-research core that defines Baumol’s cost disease. The other is an administrative and operational infrastructure that, in principle, should behave more like the increasingly efficient sectors of the economy. Treating these as one undifferentiated “cost problem” produces bad governance and misguided policy: We chase illusory savings in the classroom while resigning ourselves to rising costs in areas that should be getting cheaper per student, faculty member, and staff member.

This is not to exempt the core from scrutiny. At some institutions the use of technology has become a central part of scaling teaching and has allowed for dramatic improvement in access. AI holds great promise for making advising, registration, and career services much more efficient. But for those institutions that remain wedded to the human interactions we find so valuable, technology may only help at the margins, leaving the most educationally valuable activities such as discussion, mentoring, supervision, and individualized assessment, firmly in place. Many of the proposed “productivity” gains at the core of higher education are simply reductions in the quality of the product — larger classes, thinner feedback, fewer contact hours, more contingent labor.

Inquirer:

The city plans to open new schools (in part by using empty space in existing buildings), expand access to criteria-based middle school programs, create additional career and technical education pathways at neighborhood high schools, and update recreational and performance spaces. These investments lean into the district’s relative strengths. Suburban schools may have more resources, but they don’t have options like the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, or Central High School.

The plan, of course, is not perfect. One proposal the district should reconsider, for example, is the relocation of Lankenau High School. The facilities plan recommends relocating Lankenau to Roxborough High School, which would make it difficult to offer many of its nature-oriented programs. The district may be better off keeping Lankenau and closing Roxborough, which has just over 600 students and test scores that are lower than district-wide averages.

———

The 46,500-student district, which has grappled with a longer-term enrollment slide over the past decade, projects 3,000 fewer enrollees over the next two years, Skipper said Wednesday. This year, the district said it lost 1,670 students compared to the previous year. Enrollment decline is driving down revenue, while fixed costs like “historically high health care premiums,” out-of-district special education spending and yellow bus transportation are squeezing the district, Skipper said.

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Madison taxpayers , are increasing taxes and funding bricks and mortar amidst declining enrollment.

Alina Snisarenko

It’s not just higher grades that are being given out to more students, according to Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa who teaches about grade inflation. 

Maharaj says grades in high schools tend to cluster at two different ends: around the cutoff grade for a passing mark, which is 50 per cent, and at the higher end, in the A+ range. 

“There’s increased pressure on teachers to get students to pass their classes either by helping them learn more, or by artificially inflating their grades to get them above the cutoff mark so that they achieve the credit,” said Maharaj. 

“All of the incentives in the system are for teachers to do that.”

Scott McKay

But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success.

Another way to say this is that the destruction of wealth — personal, community, and national — has been the chief philosophical pursuit at the Washington Post for quite some time.

Ronald Reagan summed up that philosophy pretty well:

Well, Bezos has been subsidizing it since 2013.

The Washington Post has been losing money hand over fist for more than a dozen years now, and it’s proof of the veracity of another famous saying, this one by Charles Krauthammer, among others: “That which cannot continue, won’t.”

You can’t keep losing money forever. Things don’t exist to diminish. If you don’t produce anything, you will ultimately perish.

And the Washington Post has been losing its owners money for two decades now.

Yes, but money isn’t everything, right?

It’s too bad that sanctimony can’t be monetized. Otherwise this would sustain the Post into the next millennium:

Liam Beran:

Amy Robertson keeps a pretty close eye on the Madison school district. She is part of a group of parents who have raised concerns about the performance of Van Hise principal Rebecca Stein and she tries to keep up with school board meetings.

She rates the board’s performance “fine, but not amazing,” but is a fan of seven-year board member Nicki Vander Meulen, whom she says “makes it a lot easier as a parent to understand what’s going on” by asking questions at board meetings and sharing information on social media. Nevertheless she is okay with the fact that both incumbents on the April 7 ballot — including Vander Meulen — have challengers. “Competition forces people to articulate what they stand for. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to know what’s important to them.”

One of Robertson’s concerns is with the school board’s lack of clarity over how the district is spending the funds raised through the November 2024 referendum — $100 million for operating funds and $507 million for capital projects. Combined, the referendums add $676 in annual property taxes on the average-value Madison home, estimated to be around $481,000. The capital funds are being used to supportrenovations at 10 schools while the operating funds are for staff pay and benefits increases, and to support existing district services.

The resulting property tax increases, says Robertson, are pushing her to the “max” of what she can afford: “Those [referendums] look a lot more real on a property tax bill than a ballot.”

Attendees at a Jan. 13 candidate forum held by the Lapham Marquette Parent-Teacher Group raised other concerns about the board, including whether members ensure that parental complaints are brought to the attention of administrative officials. Parents also wanted to see action to improve student safety and address principal turnover at the district’s middle schools. 

———-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Deepa Javeri:

Only a handful of students got perfect scores on the AMC 12. Then AI came along.

In the fall of 2025, as students readied for the AMC 12, the first in the series of math contests that lead to the International Mathematical Olympiad, a frightening realization started taking hold in the country’s elite math circles: Cheating had become so entrenched in the competition that it was threatening the very existence of the country’s most prestigious math contests.

The AMC 12, formally known as the American Mathematics Competition, had faced issues in the past with stolen exams. Last year, though, was different. It was not a question of a few leaked copies of tests passed from hand to hand a day before the competition. On Chinese sites like RedNote and WeChat, as well as Discord and even Reddit in the United States, copies of the yet-to-be-administered exams were openly for sale.

Katherine Bowser

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.

Chris Freeland: 

Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.

WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.

Laura Meckler, Lydia Sidhom, Eric Lau

John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said that when programs reach their hiring goals, it’s largely because they are “overtly discriminatory.”

“These kinds of programs have certainly discriminated against White candidates,” he said. “They’ve certainly discriminated against men. They’ve certainly discriminated against Asian candidates. To be fair, you have to judge individuals on their individual performance.”

Experts in the field do not consider Asians to be underrepresented. In 2015, they made up about 13.6 percent of all faculty at top research schools compared with 10.5 percent of undergraduate students. That increased to about 17.3 percent by 2024 versus 13.6 percent of students.

Now advocates for greater diversity fear progress toward their goals will stall or reverse.

John Chapman

FREMONT, Neb. (WOWT) – The mother of a Fremont High School student who was struck by an SUV during a student protest said she is angry with school officials and believes they should have prevented the demonstration.

The student was hit by a red SUV while participating in an anti-ICE protest outside the school. She is now recovering at home with bumps and bruises.

“I think it mostly got me in my legs because my knees is what’s really bugging me right now,” the student said. “All I remember is that it was red.”

The girl’s mother said the incident should never have happened and that students were not informed enough to organize such a protest.

“First of all, I don’t feel she’s informed enough to have made a decision like the one that she made by doing a protest,” the mother said. “I don’t feel that any of the young people that were involved know enough about what’s going on to do or set up a protest because I feel they don’t know what they’re protesting.”

——-

Franklin High School student walkout sparks community debate over timing and purpose.

1,360 Franklin 4k-3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Chad Aldeman:

According to data released in December from the National Center for Education Statistics, public schools added 118,000 employees last year even as they served 135,000 fewer students.

You may have heard this story before. In fact, I wrote a nearly identical sentence around this time last year.

But enrollment keeps falling as staffing levels rise. Since 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic, student enrollment is down 1.4 million (a 2.8% decrease) while employment is up by 479,000 (a gain of 7.3%).

Part of the staffing gains comes as the result of schools adding 90,000 teacher jobs. Combined with declining enrollment numbers, that has allowed most states and districts to effectively lower their teacher-to-student ratios.

Elsa Johnson:

In 2023, one month into my freshman year at Stanford University, an upperclassman was showing me her dorm room — a prized single in one of the nicest buildings on campus. As she took me around her space, which included a private bathroom, a walk-in shower and a great view of Hoover Tower, she casually mentioned that she had lived in a single all four years she had attended Stanford.

I was surprised. Most people don’t get the privilege of a single room until they reach their senior year.

That’s when my friend gave me a tip: Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation”.

She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”.

Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions.

——

Stanford students are perfectly schooled to be in government. Good at gaming the system, no shame, horrible values. Defund Stanford and the rest.

Jared Diamond and Louise Radnofsky:

Taken together, the charges in Thursday’s indictment offered the latest reminder of how pervasive game-rigging has become in the era of legal sports gambling in America: No level of basketball is safe.

“This,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said, “was a massive scheme that enveloped the world of college basketball.”

At the center of the indictment are a pair of gamblers named Shane Hennen and Marves Fairley. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania say the pair placed five- and six-figure bets on contests that were fixed. A lawyer for Fairley declined to comment on Thursday. Hennen’s lawyer, Todd Leventhal, said Friday that Hennen’s betting losses were far bigger than his winnings.

“He’s got to be the worst inside gambler ever,” Leventhal said.

Hennen and Fairley are two of the same men who are facing charges in New York for allegedly conspiring with athletes to manipulate their performance and using inside information in half-a-dozen NBA games in 2023 and 2024.

But before the scheme arrived at gyms on the campuses of Coppin State and Abilene Christian, it originated on the other side of the world—in the coastal province of Jiangsu, China.

WMC Foundation:

Since 2000, non-instructional staff positions have increased by over 8,000, with school or district administrator positions increasing by nearly 700. This means that during this period, for every eight students lost, public schools added one non instructional staff member. Meanwhile, for every teacher lost, districts hired three non-instructional staff, including one additional administrator – effectively replacing educators with non-teaching roles at an accelerated pace.

The bloat in Wisconsin’s education system, especially over the last two decades, is undeniable. As a state, our primary concern should be less focused on how much money is allocated to public schools, rather it should be focused on how we are spending the money we are currently investing.

David Blaska:

The chickens have come home to roost. Over half of Wisconsin employers say the state’s K-12 education system does not adequately prepare students for the workforce, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce finds.

Ann Jacobs:

For the 1st time ever, the Wisc. Elections Commission filed a “friend of the court” brief. Why? Because the City of Madison was essentially arguing they didn’t have to count absentee ballots. Which is preposterous.

Emma Petit:

Kristina M. Johnson’s project was personal. Announcing a goal of hiring 100 underrepresented and nonwhite scholars, Johnson, then president of Ohio State University, drew on her background.

She described her experience as a young woman studying engineering in the 1970s. It took her a long time to realize she could become a professor, she said, because it was only men who taught her basic coursework.

John Kass:

Today, I stand before you as something of an oddity worthy of exhibition by PT Barnum, perhaps in a cage:

An old newspaperman, and even worse, a conservative newspaperman.

My good friend Prof. Charles Lipson, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a frequent guest on my podcast, the Chicago Way, offered some advice on this talk.

“You’re not a professor, so don’t act like one at Hillsdale. You’re a reporter. Talk like a reporter on the ground. Not from 30,000 feet.”

So here I am on the sidewalk. A gumshoe reporter without a Camel filter.

As some of you may know, I was a reporter and nationally syndicated lead columnist at the Chicago Tribune for some 40 years, that is until leftist billionaire George Soros showed the Tribune and me that Soros was boss.

The Jacobin, pro-Soros newsroom union at the Tribune defamed me and I had to get out. The Jacobins demanded that I apologize and submit to a struggle session.

I refused.

Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

A longer version of this essay was originally published by the Eternally Radical Idea.

Suppose you’re a democratic socialist who has been invited to speak at a college campus. Who do you think would be more likely to try to silence you, a left-leaning woman or a right-wing man?

It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.

Walt Hunter:

At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year.

I’ve seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?

Rick Esenberg:

Madison is correct in noting that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right in the sense that the legislature has no obligation to permit it at all. BUT if it does and people choose to cast their ballot in the way specified by law, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that Madison has a constitutional obligation to count their legally cast vote.

Quinton Klabon:

Oh, no…

Madison, Wisconsin, picked Illustrative Math for kindergarten through 8th grades.

Shoot. Much discussion occurred about math identities, meaning making instead of memorization, and significant reading to solve problems.

Milwaukee also uses it for 6th through 8th.

——

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

——-

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Maud Maron:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.

The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.

No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.

About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.

——-

English 10.

Chris Rickert:

The Mount Horeb School District has fired a coach accused of engaging in “inappropriate communications” with underage students, district Superintendent Steve Salerno said Tuesday.

Dave Chancellor had been a Mount Horeb High School track-and-field and girls cross-country coach. On Monday, Salerno and Mount Horeb Police Chief Doug Vierck issued a statement saying police had been made aware Friday of “concerns regarding inappropriate communications between a coach, non-teacher employee, of the Mount Horeb School District, Mr. David Chancellor, and juvenile students.”

“Preventative measures have been put in place to ensure this person is not on or around any school district property,” the two said.

——

704 Mount Horeb 4k-3rd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Claire Cain Miller

But while average scores have declined for everyone, boys are doing much worse. On standardized tests, they score lower than girls in reading in nearly every school district in the United States, and at every grade level that tests are given, according to a new analysis from researchers at the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. The reading gap exists around the world too.

Boys’ struggles with reading aren’t new: They have scored lower than girls since standardized tests began a half-century ago (the gaps were largest for students in the 1990s). But in contrast with efforts to encourage girls in math and science, which have helped shrink their achievement gap with boys, little attention or effort has been focused on improving boys’ reading skills.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Helen Andrews:

The purpose of the ban was to ease pressure on students. The Chinese word neijuan, literally “inward rolling,” describes pointless competition that grows ever more demanding without making anyone better off. Authorities believed that education was becoming like that, shackling students to their desks and draining their parents’ resources without actually making anyone smarter. Competition had long since reached the point of diminishing returns and was even doing more harm than good.

“The tutoring industry has proven resilient.”

The ban is still in place, but the tutoring industry has proven resilient. Tutoring has moved underground. Classes are smaller or one-on-one to avoid detection by authorities. Smaller classes are more expensive, with the price of sessions reportedly doubling in some cities. Why do parents pay these higher prices and students continue to submit to this grim slog? Because life outcomes in China are determined by high-stakes testing and by one high-stakes test in particular: the gaokao.

——-

The coauthor of this book on the gaokao says the best balance for his own kids would be to send them to Chinese schools until 7th grade and American schools after, to give them a solid foundation without stunting creativity. “Each system has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Nadya Williams:

In 1963, a book written by a depressed and frustrated stay-at-home wife and mother effectively launched second-wave feminism. For Betty Friedan, a left-leaning, pro-labor journalist before she was a mother, there was nothing good about an intellectual woman staying at home with her children as her main companions. The three Cs—cooking, cleaning, and (worst of all these) child care—were drudgery of the worst kind, she declared. The Feminine Mystique reads today as the sort of things one might tell one’s therapist—and, indeed, Friedan had approached her therapist about coauthoring the book with her. He demurred. 

And yet, the popularity of the book shows that it hit a nerve. To some extent, this nerve is still a sore point even for mothers who have never heard of Friedan. The question Friedan posed is remarkably common, in fact: How might an intellectual woman cultivate a flourishing life of the mind while raising children? And even: Why might a woman cultivate a life of the mind while raising children? What’s the point of it, or what good is it, if it does not contribute to the household income or the ever-important GDP? To be clear, for Friedan these were rhetorical questions: In her view, the life of the mind was incompatible with the homemaker’s life. This view persists in our society, and there are multiple problems with it, but I will mention just two. 

Nadya Williams is the interim director of the MFA program in creative writing at Ashland University and the books editor at Mere Orthodoxy, where she also hosts the Christians Reading Classics podcast. Her next book, Christians Reading Classics, is coming this fall from Zondervan Academic.

Edward Ring:

The vast majority of elected positions, especially at the local level, are bought and paid for by government unions

With a rough top-down analysis, it’s easy enough to estimate how much government unions collect and spend every year in California. They have roughly a million members, paying roughly $1,000 per year in dues. That would be one billion dollars per year. They spend about a third of that on politics. That’s equal to over a half billion dollars, every two year election cycle, that these unions can use to influence if not decide the outcome of every contest from the top to the bottom of the ticket.

If you want to know who is paying for those ubiquitous yard signs promoting some complete unknown to become the next member of the local school board, however, it gets a lot harder. If you think it’s a government union local, buying the office for a compliant candidate, you’re probably right. They’ve got the money, and they’re everywhere. But compiling a detailed assessment of government union spending at the local level in California is nearly impossible.

This matters because public agencies are relatively decentralized in California, with local government expenditures accounting for over 60 percent of total state and local spending. The only organizations that wield sufficient resources to select and support tens of thousands of local candidates every election are government employee unions. For obvious reasons these unions also have a strong incentive to find candidates they know they’ll be able to “negotiate” with for more staff, more pay, and more benefits.

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Eli Stark-Elster:

Am I willing to say that Common Core, rather than social media, was the singular force underlying the heightened destruction of youthful minds? No, I’m not. As Tyler Cowen pointed out in a conversation with Haidt, reducing these mood shifts to one cause or another is a bit like reducing a hurricane to the flapping wings of one particular butterfly.3

Still, it is striking that most discussions of the 2012 mystery tend to ignore what the kids themselves said about it. The children don’t think social media added much stress to their lives; they think the shift has much more to do with the increased rigor of school. Perhaps we should take their opinions seriously. 

Garry Tan:

Helen Andrews says Asian Americans are ruining education with ‘grind culture.’ The data says she’s lying.

My fellow General Partner at Y Combinator, the brilliant founder and investor Ankit Gupta, flagged something disturbing this weekend: a viral thread from a conservative commentator arguing that Asian Americans are ruining American education with their “grind culture” — and that white families are engaging in “educational flight” to escape us.

racist framing of Asians as good at test scores and white kids as “following their passions first and pushing themselves later”. we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race and create spaces where more students can experience that. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. They acted on those passions then and do now too. they just also took academics seriously and did well at it. we don’t need to DEI-code other kids’ inability to keep up.

This is the oldest form of American racism, dressed up in new clothes. And Ankit is right: we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. We don’t need to dress up discomfort with competition in DEI language.

Christina Buttons

In less than a month, two “ICE watchers” have been shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, a federal agent shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. His death follows that of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was killed on January 7.

Both Pretti and Good participated in “ICE watching,” an anti-immigration-enforcement tactic that can involve tracking ICE agents, filming arrests, and alerting other activists of enforcement actions. While participants frame ICE watching as a “community safety” measure, these tactics often place untrained civilians in direct, high-stakes confrontation with armed federal agents.

——-

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom. States Newsroom was fiscally sponsored by the Hopewell Fund, managed by Arabella Advisors—the same progressive dark-money network that fiscally sponsors States at the Core, which helped implement the ICE watch model used in Minneapolis.

——-

Although Brom was given three consecutive life sentences in 1989, he has been paroled after serving only 36 years.

Stefan Schubert:

According to Harvard’s latest data, 37 percent of tenured professors at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are over 65, and 44 percent of retirements occur at 75 or older. Many other universities without mandatory retirement also have high proportions of older faculty.

Should they be forced to retire to help younger researchers get a job? As Nature notes, many think so. Others find this ageist, arguing that older professors have a right to keep working.

I think both sides in this debate have the wrong perspective. Academia doesn’t exist to give jobs to academics, but to provide value for students and wider society. Consequently, older professors should only have to retire if they provide less value than their younger replacements.

Brian Fraley:

UPDATE 6:18pm As a result of Dairyland Sentinel’s reporting, this afternoon the Joint Finance Committee delayed a scheduled vote to release $1 million to the Department of Public Instruction for agency operations. Committee Co-chair Mark Born, R–Beaver Dam, cited this report as the reason for the postponed vote, saying the committee decided to “hit pause” as it raised serious questions about whether the use of taxpayer funds in this manner was proper. 

More than a year after the Dairyland Sentinel first sought public records regarding the overhaul of Wisconsin’s student performance benchmarks, the Department of Public Instruction has finally released another handful of internal documents. The new disclosures were forced only after the Dairyland Sentinel retained legal counsel through the Institute for Reforming Government. 

The records obtained by the Dairyland Sentinel reveal a process defined by high taxpayer costs and a strict, threatening vow of silence.

The documents concern the “standard setting” process used to redefine what it means for a Wisconsin student to be “proficient” in reading and math. Following a formal demand letter from IRG last month, the Department of Public Instruction late Monday released 17 pages of internal recruitment emails, applications, and non-disclosure agreements. Many of these records were withheld during the agency’s original response in February 2025, which at the time only provided a pre-packaged 324 page technical summary.

The newly released records confirm a staggering price tag for the four-day event. In an email to the Dairyland Sentinel, the DPI confirmed the line-item cost for the standard setting workshop was $368,885. The event was held in June 2024 at the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells, a premier destination known for luxury amenities, including massive indoor and outdoor water parks, spa services, and multiple bars.

——-

more.

If this FOIA request had been filled in a timely manner, @KinserforWI would be Superintendent of Public Instruction.

👀 I NEVER want to hear “students are underfunded” again while 88 so called educators blow nearly $400,000 on a taxpayer funded vacation and almost 70% of Wisconsin students aren’t proficient in math or reading.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Teagan King:

Organizers of a proposed East Side charter school will no longer ask the Universities of Wisconsin to sponsor it this year, putting the school’s future in question.

North Star Preparatory Board President Rea Solomon, a Sun Prairie teacher, said in an email that organizers are “discussing next steps soon and plan to continue our efforts to expand educational opportunities for youth in our community.”

She didn’t say why North Star is halting its application process.

Wisconsin charters are public schoolscreated through a contract, or “charter,” between the school’s governing board and a sponsor. The aim is to foster educational innovation by giving charters more freedom, including in management and instruction techniques.

——-

A majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board voted to abort the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter School.

Chris Cerf:

The New Jersey Assembly recently moved to eliminate the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment, joining a troubling national trend of states that now allow students to graduate from high school without any objective evidence that they have mastered the minimal skills necessary for future success.    

Diluting academic standards, reducing cut scores or eliminating test-based performance measures altogether are tried-and-true features of administrations that want to give the appearance of progress without doing the often politically fraught work of actually advancing student learning. 

Proponents frame this as a move to reduce student stress or promote a more holistic education. But let’s call it what it is: a retreat from a commitment to educational equity.  

As a former New Jersey commissioner of education, superintendent of Newark Public Schools and New York City deputy schools chancellor, I have seen firsthand that the most radical, yet necessary, reform states can pursue is an unwavering insistence on equal and high standards for all children regardless of where they live or how much money their families have. Handing out diplomas disconnected from proficiency is a profound error. Students are more than capable of meeting high bars, and policies must reflect that belief.  

———-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Paul Vallas:

…, $2B in property taxes shifted from commercial to residential and damage caused by her ill-equipped protégés Kim Foxx and Brendan Johnson she helped elect, Preckwinkle’s in political trouble.

She will try to point to her fiscal stewardship. Don’t be fooled. It to has been a disaster. Consider:

•Preckwinkle’s budgets have grown from just over $3 billion in 2011 to an astounding $9.9 billion in 2025

•Preckwinkle has balanced her budgets at the expense of public safety underfunding both the County Sheriff’s Office and Cook County States Attorney.

•Over 40% of the budget went to public safety when she took office. Today, a mere 17 percent is appropriated to safety in County budget as she reduced the jail population by half.

Stuart Reges:

Four years after the University of Washington began investigating Stuart Reges for authoring a satirical ‘land acknowledgement,’ his First Amendment rights have been upheld by the Ninth Circuit.

Like others, I decided to strike a blow against such policies through satire—specifically, by including a parody version of a land acknowledgement on my course syllabus in January 2022. Instead of using the university’s version, I wrote:

I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property, the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.

The “labor theory of property” originates with seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government, he argues that when one’s labour is mixed with shared land, the land loses its public character, because people own the products of their work. Or as Locke originally put it: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

For example, the land on which downtown Seattle sits was once an Indigenous village—which gives the tribes in question a claim of ownership according to this theory. But UW’s main campus was carved out of dense forest, and therefore would not qualify.

My land acknowledgement quickly became a hot topic within UW’s reddit community, with many social-justice-minded students expressing outrage. UW officials pronounced themselves “horrified,” censored my syllabus, and offered my students an alternate course section if they wanted a different instructor. The university then began an investigation, which could have led to the termination of my employment.

Benjamin Ryan

Fox Varian had a turbulent childhood. Her parents split when she was 7, triggering a three-year custody battle that ultimately saw her estranged from her father. She suffered from a constellation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism and bounced around various schools. Her first period sent her into a meltdown, and she battled disordered eating and body-image issues. By mid-adolescence, she was completely lost.

At 15, she began questioning her gender during sessions with her psychologist. She changed her birth name, Isabella, to Gabriel, which she saw as androgynous. Over the next two months, she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, switched her name again, to Rowan, and started telling people she was transgender.

In December 2019, 11 months after she started this public social transition, Varian underwent surgery to remove her breasts. She was 16 years old.

Cory Turner:

But, when that reduction-in-force (RIF) was blocked by the courts and the Education Department was forced to retain and continue paying these staff, the department prohibited them from returning to work.

For nearly nine months, from March 21 to mid-December, “there were 247 people on administrative leave from OCR who were being paid while not being allowed to work,” says Jackie Nowicki, lead investigator of K-12 issues at GAO, “and that decision came with a cost.”

A cost of between $28.5 million and $38 million, according to GAO.

Reagan Allen

That sense of imbalance is confirmed when enrollment data across the UNC System are examined more closely. At many universities, women now account for more than 60 percent of the undergraduate population, a proportion that would have been difficult to imagine even a generation ago. Of the 16 institutions in the UNC System, only three are not majority female, and even there the undergraduate populations are roughly evenly split between men and women. That short list of exceptions—Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina State University, and UNC Charlotte—underscores how widespread the imbalance has become across the system. Regardless of geography, mission, or student-body size, most UNC campuses are moving in the same direction. This shift is not the result of a single admissions cycle or a short-term disruption but is part of a longer-term trend that has quietly reshaped campus culture. The more pressing question is not whether the imbalance exists but what has changed in the pathways to college and why those changes appear to be affecting young men so pronouncedly.

Kayla Huynh:

She said all schools received the new materials, which include lesson plans, teacher manuals and other resources, by the end of December. Teachers began using the updated curriculum Jan. 27.

In 2021, before Act 20 was enacted, the school district entered an eight-year, $12 million contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to adopt literacy curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade. But district leaders this fall learned the materials — the second version of a curriculum called Into Reading — were incompatible with the state’s standards for science of reading instruction, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said at a Nov. 13 School Board meeting.

Prior to purchasing new resources, the district had attempted to create its own materials and reconstruct the existing curriculum to more accurately reflect the science of reading. The process frustrated some teachers who said they received frequent changes in guidance throughout the year, with little time to adapt.

Greg Toppo:

In September 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, along with then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to announce an eye-popping gift: $100 million to reform Newark Public Schools.

Local philanthropists and others would match that, doubling the gift to $200 million.

In exchange, the struggling urban system was expected not only to welcome more independently run charter schools but to close low-performing schools, give families an easier way to choose a new school and enact a performance-based pay system for teachers.

In the seven years since Zuckerberg’s announcement, critics have not been shy in pointing out how much turmoil the effort has caused. But they haven’t had a good way to figure out whether Zuckerberg’s millions have been well-spent.

A new study, out Monday, represents the first attempt to answer that question. It finds that the cash made a difference — in a limited way.

The findings, from a team led by Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, look at school achievement data from 2009 through 2016, comparing the growth in Newark students’ achievement relative to that of similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey.

The upshot? Newark students improved sharply in English.

In math? Not so much.

——-

Thirty-one percent of a gift meant for children went to the union as the price of being allowed to measure whether teachers were effective. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system working exactly as it’s designed to work. Protecting itself from accountability is the primary function.

——-

and, Thiel Fellowships.

Nora Gordon:

This is true, and I’m glad they shared this. Many parents whose kids have Chromebooks sitting in their backpacks right now probably didn’t know this, including me, so I looked it up. 

I found the fact-check in a 2025 Inspector General report, where I learned it’s a school-level decision whether to have 1:1 Chromebooks. So when they write “MCPS does not have one-to-one remote devices for every student” they mean “some MCPS schools have one-to-one remote device policies, but some don’t.” MCPS lets principals lead the way on lots of other instructional decisions, and doesn’t talk about how that leads to things being inequitable across schools. MCPS has to write with fewer words than I do (thanks, readers!) and probably didn’t want to get into whether the issue is things being inequitable across schools or within them.

It’s not just about the school-level policies, it’s about who actually has a remote device at home. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that even when schools have a 1:1 policy, they often don’t know where their Chromebooks are–so every student may not have one.

Dissident Teacher:

Most of these people haven’t learned the lessons of property redistribution at the hands of government. Our public schools’ emphasis on feelings over facts has had some seriously deleterious effects on anyone who graduated after 2010 or anyone who has spent their life working in government bureaucracies or for rent-seeking corporations that receive revenue from the state. 

Such people appear to believe there is a magic wand the government has but refuses to use which could prevent any financial hardship and thus any negative emotions. I suspect the 13 years they spent learning that everyone gets an A as long as they comply hard enough is a significant contributor to that mindset. 

This training appears to be very sticky, especially if it comes with well-meaning parents who, after 13 years of public school, send their 18-year-old off to college with a blank check (often courtesy of the state). These college students generally focus their time on recreation; grade inflation in the university means real head-down studying is optional. Students’ utopian leanings are also reinforced by the typical social media feed where beautiful women emote and a rigid set of rules around what “empathy” looks like are enforced by a choir of high-follower count Useful Idiots. 

It’s no wonder so many leave college with a Bachelors degree and the belief that pretty much everything necessary to human life should be provided, free of charge, by the state and that anything less than that is a form of institutional racism.

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Remember, Warlord Wanda is teaching your kids in Minneapolis public schools.

John Schindler:

“What I do know is that nobody of significance in the mainstream media ever bothered to investigate whether any part of said “conspiracy theory” might be true. Indeed, the one journalist who bothered to ask, Ben Swann, trashed his media career when he ran a segment at the CBS TV affiliate in Atlanta which considered Pizzagate a topic worthy of discussion.”

Aaron Terr:

The right to protest is strongest in places Americans have long assembled to speak their minds: public parks, streets and sidewalks. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is conducting operations on a public street, you may stand nearby to protest as long as you’re not physically interfering. Importantly, officials may never shut down a protest simply because they dislike its message. Anywhere you can say “I love ICE!” is also a place you can say “I hate ICE!”

The government can impose limited restrictions in public spaces. A permit may be required for large demonstrations that require street closures, for example. But even then, the government can never condition approval on the viewpoints to be expressed.

And you don’t have a First Amendment right to protest on private property without the owner’s permission. That means you can’t occupy a church, as anti-ICE demonstrators recently did, and expect constitutional protection.

St. John Barned-Smith, Jill Tucker

Though any potential walkout would be more than a week away, teachers and the San Francisco Unified School District remain stuck at the negotiating table over high turnover, pay and benefits, and other issues after nearly a year of bargaining, union officials said.

More than 5,200 educators – or 97.6% of the city’s teachers – voted in favor of a potential walkout and strike, mirroring the union’s preliminary vote in December when more than 99% of its members voted in favor of a strike.

The move comes as SFUSD has been buffeted by challenges in recent years, including a budget deficit so bad if forced a state takeover, the disastrous rollout of a $34 million payroll system that resulted in error-filled paychecks, and plunging enrollment. The district only recently pulled out of the worst financial category assigned to public agencies for the first time in four years.

District officials and union negotiators have been bargaining for much of the last year, but dispute issues such as health benefits, contractual pay raises, more resources for special education students, and codifying San Francisco’s sanctuary protections in its contract.

Union negotiators also argue that despite those financial headwinds, district officials recently voted to put $111 million dollars into a rainy-day fund, cash that union members believe should be directed back to classrooms and school sites. 

The last time San Francisco teachers struck was in 1979. Forty-seven years ago, teachers walked out after demanding a raise of 15.7% over two years and that the district rehire more than 1,000 teachers who had been fired after the passage of Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax revolt. 

The strike ended more than a month later when the two sides met at City Hall and signed an agreement giving the teachers a 15.5% raise over two years and rehiring about 700 teachers.

——

Peter Kazanjy:

San Francisco nuked their school district by:

1. Going full nutso during COVID and not returning to the classroom antil August 2021 – 15 months after initial lockdowns.
2. Going full awokening and nuking algebra / merit admissions at Lowell.
3. Focus on the dumbest things possible (school renamings instead of instruction improvements).

All of this is the result of the SF School Board membership being a stepping stone political role towards higher office – which means that union captured junior democrat aspirants strive to grab a seat and then act as a union lapdog.

Anton Cebalo:

On three individuals who had wildly different impressions of the United States with world-changing consequences.

One can draw a line connecting Huning’s observations in America and China’s focus on engineering and technological dominance since the 1990s. The Chinese state has also used technological systems as a tool for discipline, like the “social credit system,” perhaps inspired by Huning’s writings and experience in America.

Becky Jacobs:

A former assistant professor can move forward with a federal lawsuit claiming he was discriminated against when he was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a judge ruled Thursday.

“We are pleased with the court’s decision to allow the case to proceed to trial, and we look forward to a fair and just resolution based on the full presentation of the facts,” Ahmed Mahmoud said in a statement with his attorneys following the decision.

Mahmoud started working at UW-Madison’s Cell and Regenerative Biology department in 2017. He received awards from the universityand its licensing and patenting organization for his research, which focused on developmental, stem cell and regenerative biology.

Then in 2024, Mahmoud filed a federal lawsuit in the Western District of Wisconsin against the UW system’s Board of Regents, which oversees UW-Madison, and Deneen Wellik, who chaired the UW-Madison committee that denied Mahmoud tenure.

Ian Jones, Chris Wheadon, Sara Humphries, Matthew Inglis:

Advanced-level (A-level) mathematics is a high-profile qualification taken by many school leavers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and around the world as preparation for university study. Concern has been expressed in these countries that standards in A-level mathematics have declined over time, and that school leavers enter university or the workplace lacking the required mathematical knowledge and skills. The situation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland reflects more general international concerns about decreasing educational standards. However, evidence to support this concern has been of limited scope, rarely subjected to peer-review and of questionable validity. Our study overcame the limitations of previous research into standards over time by applying a comparative judgement technique that enabled the direct comparison of mathematical performance across different examinations. Furthermore, unlike previous research, all examination questions were re-typeset and candidate responses rewritten to reduce bias arising from surface cues. Using this technique, mathematics experts judged A-level scripts from the 1960s, 1990s and the 2010s. We report that the experts believed current A-level mathematics standards to have declined since the 1960s, although there was no evidence that they believed standards have declined since the 1990s. We contrast our findings with those from previous comparison studies and consider implications for future research into standards over time.

———-

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Zijing Wu:

China’s genius classes differ in important ways from talent streams in the west. First, the system dwarfs its international competitors in scale. Second, it is state-driven. China graduates around five million majors in science, technology, engineering and maths every year, according to the state media Xinhua, compared with about half a million in the US. 

Tens of thousands of these graduates are genius-class students, taken out of regular classes for an intense period of study between the ages of 16-18. While others swot for China’s feared college admissions exams, the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school, depending on their results in starry international competitions. The best students continue to more advanced talent schemes at the top Chinese universities, such as the elite computer science programmes at Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities.

When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Taiwanese-American CEO, called Chinese AI researchers “world-class” last year, he was likely thinking of the genius-class grads who are building the country’s tech powerhouses such as DeepSeek and Huawei, as well as AI companies internationally. “You walk up and down the aisles of Anthropic or OpenAI or [Google] DeepMind,” said Huang last May, “there’s a whole bunch of AI researchers there, and they are from China . . . They are extraordinary and so the fact that they do extraordinary work is not surprising to me.”

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more.

Rose Horowitch

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.