schoolinfosystem.org
By Becky Jacobs More than 20 years ago, Blue Cross and Blue Shield United of Wisconsin gifted more than $300 million to each of Wisconsin’s medical schools to improve public health. In the years since, however, Wisconsin has fallen in national health rankings, and the state continues to struggle with racial disparities in low birth […]
Jensen, A. C., & Jorgensen-Wells, M. A. Decades of research highlight that differential treatment can have negative developmental consequences, particularly for less favored siblings. Despite this robust body of research, less is known about which children in the family tend to be favored or less favored by parents. The present study examined favored treatment as […]
Hanna Schmid: Democratic state lawmakers are making another attack on parents’ rights and educational choice in Illinois. A bill would require homeschooling parents to file annual reports to avoid truancy charges, be credentialed and have their curriculum reviewed. A bill filed by Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly would attack parental rights and educational choice […]
Quinton Klabon: This is 1 of the coolest things I have done. We did an unbiased, deep poll of Black and Latin Milwaukee parents to see how and why they pick the schools they do. 🧵 In short, parents lack the information they need to make the best match for their children. We were shocked […]
Amy Erkenswick for Cusd200 Board of Education via Awake Illinois My intention was to keep this campaign page a landing spot for positivity and to champion efforts toward our community’s shared goals. I had hoped that the ill-intended efforts of last election season would escape me. Unfortunately, today during my Meet & Greet I was […]
Sarah Mueller: Delaware has a resource-based school funding system that was created in 1940. That means there’s a yearly count of students where the number of children in each building are converted into units. Meyer has voiced support for moving to a weighted student funding formula, where the money follows the student based on need. […]
Kaleem Caire: Mississippi is now #1 in reading among Black children while Wisconsin is #41 among all 41 states reporting scores for Black children. We have a lot more money in our state than they do in Mississippi. In Madison, we have even more. What is up with this? Our public school advocates need to […]
Michael Bloomberg: As Democrats examine why Kamala Harris lost and how the party should change course, education policy should be a top issue. But few party leaders are talking about it. Many voters are still unhappy with Democratic support for excessive school closings during the pandemic. Too many elected officials, pandering to teachers unions, kept […]
Wall Street Journal: That’s the bottom line from the 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) report released on Wednesday. Fourth and eighth grade reading scores declined by two points on average since 2022—roughly as much as they did between 2019 and 2022. Some 33% of eighth graders scored below “basic” on the reading exam—a […]
WILL: Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability […]
Holly Ramer: Vermont’s child welfare agency relied on baseless allegations about a pregnant woman’s mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby was born, according to a lawsuit that alleges the state routinely targets and tracks pregnant women deemed unsuitable for parenthood. The ACLU of Vermont and Pregnancy […]
The “Ethical Skeptic”: I share an equal frustration with the lack of genuine curiosity and rigorous investigative effort applied to interpreting the artifacts uncovered at Göbekli Tepe and other archaeological sites. For instance, why was I the first to recognize that the serpent image carved into the wall of Enclosure AA, or Hypogeum Pit, at Karahan Tepe represents Sheshanāgá, […]
WILL: Join the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and 50CAN as we share the results of a new survey of parents on the state of educational opportunity in Wisconsin. Among the key findings are parent perspectives on education and the lack of information parents have access to regarding their local school system, the true […]
Morgan Polikoff and William Hughes It’s been over four years since schools closed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and by now there is no question that the pandemic has a long shadow over Wisconsin education. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam show Wisconsin students’ performance lags far behind historical peaks in the early to mid-2010s, […]
Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Charlie Peters The child victims of rape were denied justice and protection from the state to preserve the image of a successful multicultural society Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs […]
Paul Vallas: Since 2000, over 266,000 African Americans have left Chicago. An overwhelming majority of blacks exiting Chicago are middle-class families with children. Within the black exodus from Chicago, children are overrepresented in the black population’s decline. In comparison to black adults over the same time period, 2000-2020, the number of black children 17 and […]
By Hugh W. Catts, Alan G. Kamhi The idea of differentiating comprehension from the other components of reading was suggested over 15 years ago by Alan Kamhi (the second author).6 He argued that many assessments of reading conflated word reading accuracy and fluency with comprehension, which could lead to misconceptions about why children performed poorly on […]
Paul Vallas: As long as the CTU commands the levers of power over CPS, minority students will suffer most Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates’ latest gambit is to ratify a contract that will induce the complete collapse of CPS finances and thus force the state to intervene and […]
The FP In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated. She documented how devastated parents were […]
Ben Smee A 14-year-old north Queensland boy with a severe intellectual disability was wrongly convicted and sentenced to nine months’ detention by a magistrate who recorded guilty pleas to a series of charges, despite the child being incapable of instructing his lawyers and not verbalising a plea in court. The boy – who has an IQ of […]
Morgan Polikoff and William Hughes It’s been over four years since schools closed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and by now there is no question that the pandemic has a long shadow over Wisconsin education. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam show Wisconsin students’ performance lags far behind historical peaks in the early to mid-2010s, […]
Robert Pondiscio: Does any field have a weaker grasp of its own history than education? Last week, I hosted a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on “Bringing High Expectations Back to Education.” The event, which can be viewed on YouTube, was kicked off by a presentation by Steven Wilson, an ed reform fixture who has a […]
Charles Sykes: America is again facing an educational crisis. Last week, The New York Times reported that American students “turned in grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders have dropped […]
Chun Han Wong: Sightseeing travelers from China have swamped the grounds of Singapore’s two biggest universities, peering into classrooms, snapping selfies and even barging into lectures to get a sampling of the education. From tiger parents and their children to trend-chasing influencers, visitors cite the allure of campus life in a Southeast Asian city-state known […]
Gloria Romero: As part of Donald Trump’s effort to make America great again, I propose that we make America read again. One way to start would be to dismantle the Department of Education and return its responsibilities to the states. The education industrial complex is a quagmire. Nationally, student academic outcomes have plateaued or declined. […]
Jason Riley: The Education Department’s main functions include sending states money to help fund low-income school districts, though that’s something Washington managed before the existence of a stand-alone education department. It also enforces civil-rights laws and manages student loans. There’s no reason, however, that the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights couldn’t be absorbed by […]
Anna Stokke: Letter in today’s Winnipeg Free Press from @umanitoba prof Darja Barr. “The MB govt’s decision to eliminate all subject-area requirements for pre-service teachers is a big miss — from misinterpreted research, to misrepresented contexts, misguided policy and a misled public.” —- A big math mistake Re: Walking in the right direction on math […]
Madeleine Rowley “The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal […]
Maryellen MacDonald & Mark Seidenberg Calkins became a lightning rod because she represented the sheer intransigence of educators in the face of evidence that their methods for teaching reading were ineffective and ill-conceived. Calkins has now conceded that problems with her approach discussed in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story were real. The problems were not small ones. Calkins […]
by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found. In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that […]
Anna Stokke In answer to Martha Koch’s opinion piece, “absolutely,” and I say that as a scientist with 40 years of experience in the biology of behaviour, but the crackpot ideas of self-described “researchers” that have held sway for the last 30 years with respect to influencing educational policy are the least reliable basis for […]
Helen Lewis: But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media […]
Michael J. Petrilli and Devon Nir States across the country have enacted new private-school choice programs in recent years, inevitably raising questions about accountability for participating institutions. Though it is true—as our friends in the school choice movement argue—that choice itself is a form of accountability because of the agency it provides to parents and […]
David de la Croix & Marc Goni: We have constructed a comprehensive database that traces the publications of father–son pairs in the premodern academic realm and examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence. We find that human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children and that nepotism declined when […]
Jonathan Chait: Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here. Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. 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 […]
Simon Sarris: Do children today have useful childhoods? ~ ~ ~ An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia […]
Alec Johnson: Over a year after the Wisconsin Legislature approved Act 20 and Gov. Tony Evers signed it into law, the state Department of Public Instruction is still waiting for the joint finance committee to release nearly $50 million it was promised as part of the new legislation intended to improve reading among state schoolchildren. […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum: Despite a decline from the previous year, rates of chronic absenteeism for Wisconsin’s students – defined as missing more than one in ten school days for any reason – remained at historically high levels in 2023 for children of every race, grade level, and socioeconomic status. District leaders point to many causes, […]
Joanne Jacobs: Hoping to be “innovative,” schools have added digital devices — tablets, Chromebooks, iPads and so on — without a clear idea of how to use them or any reason to believe students will learn more, writes Amy Tyson on After Babel. A former child therapist and the mother of four children, Tyson is […]
Deanna Pan and Emma Platoff On one side are Congressional Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is up for reelection this November and supports Question 2, the teachers union-backed measure to repeal the state mandate requiring students to pass their 10th grade MCAS exams. Democratic Governor Maura Healey sits squarely in opposition — along with Lieutenant Governor […]
Mark Dent: When Kathy Alexander started managing a lunch program at a Vermont school with 200 children in the late 1990s, she was shocked by how much the cafeteria felt like a business. Her staff spent significant amounts of time on paperwork to track students’ incomes and collected money from kids at a cash register. They faced […]
Christopher Rufo: The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declareditself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services […]
Joanne Jacobs: The most satisfied — 70 percent — have a child in a parochial or other religious school, and non-religious private schools and homeschools are close behind at 65 percent. About half of those with kids in public magnets, charters, online schools and microschools are satisfied. Support for school choice — especially parent-controlled Education […]
Matt Beienburg: With literacy rates declining in public schools across the nation, the last thing we need is for families to read fewer books to their children—yet Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is pushing parents to do just that. With the help of a new lawsuit, parents are fighting back. For years, Arizona families have […]
Parents defending education In 2020-21, as many schools across America were shuttered because of COVID-19, parents were sitting at home working virtually, alongside their children learning virtually, and they began to realize that classroom education was no longer focused on math, science, history, English, and other subjects that would prepare youngstudents for success. Now, children […]
By Natalie Yahr Teachers at three Madison Montessori schools have voted to be represented by a union, joining a short list of unionized child care workers in Wisconsin and becoming what may be the state’s first unionized private school teachers. The 12-3 vote included all eligible staff from the three schools operated by Toad Hill […]
Shawn HublerSoumya Karlamangla and Stephanie Saul In a statement, Mr. Newsom said that “merit, skill and hard work” should determine college admissions. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few,” he said, “which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.” Schools with legacy preferences have argued that they […]
Lesley Muldoon: Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the […]
Bezos Washington Post To have children or not to have them? That is the question more and more Americans are asking themselves. Only 26 percent say having children is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life, according to a Pew Research Center survey, whereas 71 percent say the same about “having a job or career they […]
Masterman: The recommendations in the report were developed by the HSA Board and also were informed by conversations with administration in an effort to gain consensus around some of the main recommendations. One primary recommendation (see page 48) is to end the randomized admissions process and restore human judgment to admissions, preferably with a designated […]
Liyan Qi: Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag. At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China […]
Vanessa Fuhrmans, Katherine Bindley and Chip Cutter: It’s hard to overstate how much remote and hybrid work have reshaped the postpandemic labor market. It has enabled moves to lower-cost areas, let working parents better coordinate child care and brought millions of people into the workforce—including those with disabilities. And it made it easier for mothers […]
Emma Jacobs: —— Choose life!
Quinton Klabon Here are four concrete things we can do to change children’s lives by this time next year “Progress is incremental. It is something that we all have to show up for, because…if we don’t care about our kids and our public schools, then we are destined to fail.,” said Milwaukee Public School Board […]
Wall Street Journal: Should parents be held criminally liable if a child goes on a shooting spree with a gun from the home? That question is now in sharp public relief with the indictments this week after 14-year-old Colt Gray murdered two students and two adults at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. The U.S. […]
Clare Ansberry: There are still plenty of grandparents—about 67 million Americans as of 2021. But the percentage of older parents without grandchildren is accelerating, says Krista Westrick-Payne, assistant director at the Bowling Green center. Of American parents between the ages of 50 and 90, some 35% don’t have grandkids. In 2018, that share was 30%. […]
Anna Stokke: Unfortunately, illiteracy remains largely hidden and its impact on our society largely underappreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to support adult education. But we should also ask ourselves how so many adults, who were once children, did not learn to read at elementary or middle school in Manitoba. Without understanding […]
The Economist: nqts’ salaries were raised to £30,000 ($39,400) last year, and will increase by 5.5% this month. But teachers will still be paid less in real terms than in 2010 (see chart) and less than many of their peers in other rich countries. On average teachers work six hours longer each week than other […]
Robert Pondiscio US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week embarked on a five-state bus tour to “fight for public education.” His campaign, amplified on social media, is ostensibly to rally support for traditional public schools. However, this “fight” is built on two flawed assumptions that, when scrutinized, reveal both the limitations of Cardona’s vision and an overtly political agenda. What Cardona […]
David Blaska:
Quinton Klabon: NEW WISCONSIN STATE TEST SCORE STANDARDS“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT. Yes, parents across Wisconsin will hear their children are “Meeting Standards,” only to have multiple UW schools reject them in senior year. Let’s support educators and kids striving for better. Related: “Median number of years of business experience are ZERO” More: […]
Dave Zweifel: I remember writing a column a couple of years after the pool opened chiding a group of Madison alders who, during budget deliberations, were upset that the pool’s admission charges didn’t cover 100% of its annual costs. My column declared that a city that had just been given a first-class swimming pool for […]
Joshua Cowen: Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such […]
Christina Buttons Progressives have labeled Tim Walz a “champion of children,” citing policies he enacted as governor of Minnesota. Those policies, however, have endangered some of the state’s most vulnerable kids. In May, Walz signed into law the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country. Inspired by activists’ […]
YLE: Use of air purifiers at two daycare centres in Helsinki led to a reduction in illnesses and absences among children and staff, according to preliminary findings of a new study led by E3 Pandemic Response. Air purifiers of various sizes and types were placed in two of the city’s daycare centres during cold and […]
Zvi: As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup: Ban Phones in Schools England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me: However, teachers’ […]
Mike Masnick: Dear California Governor Newsom and Attorney General Bonta: you really don’t have to be the opposite end of the extremists in Florida and Texas. You don’t have to lie to your constituents and pretend losses are wins. Really. Trust me. You may recall that the Attorneys General of Texas and Florida have taken to lying […]
Joshua C. Robertson: Black voters have repeatedly expressed support for school choice, with nearly 80% endorsing policies like education savings accounts and vouchers, according to Morning Consult. Polling by RealClear Opinion Research also shows that black voters support school choice more than any other race. Clearly, our communities want our children to have the same […]
Carrie Mckean: Back home in the States, we’re constantly worried about our kids. It’s well-documented and generally accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of childhood independenceand free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: […]
Douglas Belkin: Running a high-profile university during a war in the Middle East where students, faculty and alumni are at odds has turned into one of the toughest jobs in America to keep. The presidents at five Ivy League universities have stepped down since the Israel-Gaza war began last fall. Four of those schools have […]
Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates, Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic […]
Wall Street Journal: Chicago parents have been wondering when Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates was going to address the disastrous reading and math scores in Chicago public schools. Now she has. In an interview in early August with Chicago radio news station WVON 1690, Ms. Gates was asked to respond to the union’s critics who […]
Ted Balaker: Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars so your children can spend four to seven years under the tutelage of the world’s worst therapist. Too often that comes pretty close to describing the modern college experience. Universities routinely toss out wisdom that’s been accumulated over centuries and backed up by modern psychology in […]
Andrea White: Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to cure the long-ailing Houston Independent School District. He is arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial educator in the nation’s second-largest state. He’s 67, and he roams the maze of desks with the agility of an athlete, peering over the […]
Peter May: When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played […]
Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken: We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of […]
Vivek: greater risk to our future than, say, climate change – yet most politicians are too scared to talk about it & now it’s apparently taboo. But here are the facts: our nation’s birth rate is now down to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest in history and well below replacement rate. It’s not even […]
The Economist: A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable […]
Rachel Wolfe: Americans aren’t just waiting longer to have kids and having fewer once they start—they’re less likely to have any at all. The shift means that childlessness may be emerging as the main driver of the country’s record-low birthrate. Women without children, rather than those having fewer, are responsible for most of the decline […]
The Economist: That the pandemic messed up schooling is well known. Between 2018 and 2022 an average teenager in a rich country fell some six months behind their expected progress in reading and nine months behind in maths, according to the oecd. What is less widely understood is that the trouble began long before covid-19 […]
Andy Welch: Of course, free-range parenting does rather fit in with perceptions outsiders often have about Scandinavian people. Look at them all, with their hygge, and their sky-high living standards, low crime rates, enviable maternity and paternity rights and exceptional aesthetics. Norway is indeed seventh on the World Happiness Report. It also has the world’s 10th highest GDP, along with […]
Jessie Van Berkel: Investigators are examining potential Medicaid fraud among Minnesota autism services, and state lawmakers say they will consider licensing the providers, whose numbers have increased dramatically across the state. The Minnesota Department of Human Services has 15 active investigations into organizations or individuals providing certain autism services and has closed 10 other cases, […]
Pamela Paul: “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted. After the […]
Tracy Alloway and Laura Nahmias A total of about 800,000 people moved out of large urban counties last year, or twice the pre-pandemic rate, EIG said. Moves out of the city have combined with lower birth rates to drag down the number of young children in big urban counties. Birth rates there have fallen at twice the […]
matija The net effect of this is that kids have far more extended boundaries set on them (except on their phones!). For example, nowadays, parents expect their children to be free to go and do groceries alone or play outside without adult supervision only at around the age of 10 to 12 (if not even […]
Wall Street Journal: Seven library patrons in Llano County, Texas, population 21,000, are litigating the unshelving of 17 books. Amid public complaints, one county commissioner had urged the librarian to “pick her battles.” This was a no-no, says the lead opinion in Little v. Llano County. “If a government decisionmaker removes a book with the […]
Balajj: Recall that after the Democrat primary ended on June 8, Obama very consciously put Biden on stage, let him stumble and mumble, and then held his hand[10] to usher him off stage. That was the act of a savvy politician: Obama was ostensibly appearing with Biden to help him, but was really there to […]
Mike Masnick Warning: Reading this article may cause you to question the Surgeon General’s reliance on feelings over science. In 1982, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop said video games could be hazardous to children and warned of kids becoming “addicted” to them, causing problems for their “body and soul.” This warning was not based on […]
Daniel Buck: Everyone benefits from exemplars. We all need models to mimic and follow. In the policy realm that means states, legislatures and governors who pass policies and reforms that materially improve the lives of their residents. We also need cautionary tales, clear examples of mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. On education, California has stepped […]
“Mildred & Hands”: He certainly has his work cut out for him. Gothard is being thrust into a likely $600 million referendum campaign this fall that won’t be easy to pass. Inflation and soaring housing costs have soured many voters on tax hikes. Advocates will need to show taxpayers in a clear and specific way […]
Patrick Mcilheran: In Madison, where the possibility of school choice arrived 23 years after Milwaukee, there are six private schools in the choice program that Smith calls “vouchers,” and those six schools enrolled 655 choice students in the school year just ended. The Madison Metropolitan School District, in comparison, has about 25,000 students. Big ask Perhaps Madison […]
Annalise Gilbert: Miranda Stovall’s lawsuit against her local Kentucky school board in June transformed a national debate over parental access to education into a copyright dispute when the district invoked the rights of a Pearson PLCsubsidiary to reject her request for a copy of a mental health survey administered to students. Stovall learned that her child […]
Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum: More American children than ever are qualifying for special education, but schools are struggling to find enough teachers to meet their needs. A record 7.5 million students accessed special-education services in U.S. schools as of 2022-2023, including children with autism, speech impairments and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. That is 15.2% of […]
CBO: 2034, that annual amount is projected to reach $3.5 trillion (or 8.5 percent of gross domestic product). Over the 2025–2034 period, subsidies are projected to total $27.5 trillion—with Medicare accounting for 46 percent; Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), 25 percent; employment-based coverage, 21 percent; subsidies for coverage obtained through the Affordable […]
Jon Haidt & Zach Rausch 1. The adolescent mental health crisis is real From the 1990s through the mid-2000s, there was little sign of any youth mental health problem in the U.S. in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets. But by 2015, adolescent mental health was a 5 alarm fire, with steeply risingrates of loneliness, anxiety, […]
Dave Zweifel Many educators complained at the time that the entire voucher program would serve as a foot in the door to eventually undermine the public school system — a system that had served the country since colonial days and was credited with representing the true melting pot among children from different cultures, races and incomes. […]
Christopher Rufo: The practice made Sivadge recoil. “In the cardiac clinic, we were taking sick kids and making them better,” she says. “In the transgender clinic, it was the opposite. We were harming these kids.” Then, the following year, she breathed a sigh of relief. Under pressure from the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, Texas […]
Kaleem Caire One City Preschool continues to attract far more children than we can enroll, and is ready to grow and expand. Our two public charter schools, One City Elementary School and One City Preparatory Academy, are making notable progress as well: In July 2025, we will host our 10th anniversary celebration and first 8th […]
Timothy Walker Since I first moved to Finland in 2013, I have witnessed an ever-deepening societal problem that has devastated student learning. Childhood has become dominated by digital devices. This is a global trend, but it disproportionately affects Finnish children. Finland’s teenagers, formerly the world’s highest achievers, still perform above average on the Program for International […]
Members of Milwaukee Communities In light of recent revelations concerning MPS’ gross financial mismanagement, irresponsible and unresponsive leadership, and inadequate governance by the elected MPS School Board Directors, the members of Milwaukee communities are taking decisive action and will be holding a press conference tomorrow, Wednesday, June 12th, at 5:30 PM, at Milwaukee City Hall located at 200 […]