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Search Results for: We have the children

Why has Wisconsin public health declined despite millions in funding?

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 […]

Parents favor daughters: A meta-analysis of gender and other predictors of parental differential treatment.

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 […]

Legislation and Homeschooling

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 […]

How do parents choose Milwaukee schools?

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 […]

k-12 governance notes: Wheaton, IL school board candidate

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 […]

Delaware considers k-12 taxpayer funding update

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. […]

Mississippi, Louisiana and Madison Reading Result Commentary

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 […]

Voters see them tolerating failure, capitulating to the teachers unions, and blocking charter schools

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 […]

America’s Schools Keep Flunking

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 […]

“obscuring performance data and hindering informed decision-making”

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 […]

Lawsuit alleges Vermont tracks pregnant women deemed unsuitable for parenthood

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 […]

An Interpretation of Göbekli Tepe Pillar 4

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, […]

Event: A Survey of Educational Opportunity in Wisconsin

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 […]

Wisconsin makes it hard for parents to access data and understand report cards

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, […]

How the UK grooming gangs scandal was covered up

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 […]

Illinois, the nation’s self-proclaimed most progressive state, is first in tax burden and last in equity and has residents of all demographics leaving in record numbers

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 […]

Differentiating Comprehension from the Components of Reading

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 […]

It Is the CTU, Not Funding, Which Is the Major Obstacle to Quality Education in Chicago

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 author uncovered the truth about the dangers of transitioning minors—and stood up to bans, boycotts, and smears

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 […]

When asked to plead, teenager with mental age of an eight-year-old responded ‘yeah’,

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 […]

Wisconsin makes it hard for parents to access data and understand report cards

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, […]

After a “lost decade,” let’s restore high expectations for students

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 […]

“America’s education system is in trouble, but neither Republicans nor Democrats are up for the challenge of enforcing change”

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 […]

Universities draw gawking travelers, annoying scholars; ‘like observing zoo exhibits’

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 […]

Department of Education: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Gone

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. […]

Notes on the Taxpayer Funded Department of Education

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 […]

notes on declining math rigor

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 […]

Civics: “Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis”

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 […]

The Calkins Legacy

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 […]

politics and vouchers in North Carolina

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 […]

“in which she insisted teachers shouldn’t take math”

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 […]

literacy crisis backstory and perhaps more on Caulkins

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 […]

K-12 Accountability Notes

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 […]

Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800)

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 […]

Democrats Used to Run on Education. What Happened?

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 […]

Learning is a consequence of doing

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 […]

Wisconsin Administrative Literacy Coaching Budget Rhetoric

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. […]

Chronic Absenteeism Persists in All Corners of Wisconsin

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, […]

Notes on “edtech”

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 […]

Notes on politics and the Massachusetts’ graduation exam

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 […]

American schools spend ~$900B a year on education. Should the federal government pay more for meals?

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 […]

Civics: the “grant industrial complex” and immigration

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 […]

39% of public-school parents are satisfied with their child’s school

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 […]

No More Pencils, No More Books in Arizona

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 […]

War on Parents

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 […]

Madison Montessori teachers’ new union might be a Wisconsin first

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 […]

California Bans Legacy Preferences at Private Universities

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 […]

It’s finally time to put pandemic excuses behind us and hold students to higher standards

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 […]

Notes on the Birthrate

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 […]

In 2021-2022, Philadelphia switched all schools to a unified lottery system, and the school’s focus on excellence was systematically dismantled.

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 […]

The Missing Girls: How China’s One-Child Policy Tore Families Apart

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 […]

The Work From Home Free-for-All Is Coming to an End

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 […]

Childless Cities

Emma Jacobs: —— Choose life!

Notes on City leadership and the taxpayer funded Milwaukee k-12 system

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 […]

Georgia has charged the father of 14-year-old Colt Gray. Is that fair?

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. […]

A falling U.S. birthrate means some lament missing a key chapter in life

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%. […]

“There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights Inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.”

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 […]

Notes on United Kimgdom’s teacher climate

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 […]

Notes on the taxpayer funded bus tour

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 […]

Restore Madison School Resource Officers

David Blaska:

“Proficient” is now…a -19- on the ACT” – taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

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: […]

Madison tax & $pending growth and November 2024 referendum rhetoric

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 […]

Commentary on school choice

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 […]

Endangering Vulnerable Kids

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’ […]

Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids’ sick days by a third

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 […]

Parenting

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’ […]

“Age appropriate design”

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 […]

Black Voters Demand School Choice

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 […]

An Anxious Generation—of Parents

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: […]

How University Leaders Are Holding On

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 […]

The global fertility crisis is worse than you think

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 […]

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates says black students can’t succeed on tests.

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 […]

Maybe Homeschooling is Easier Than You Think

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 […]

“When state leaders took over Houston Independent School District, they wanted a superintendent who could withstand criticism”

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 […]

The play deficit

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 […]

“Milwaukee ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally” – Madison is higher, yet

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 […]

America’s declining birthrate is a far greater

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 […]

Class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty in America

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 […]

Why Americans Aren’t Having Babies

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 […]

Faddish thinking is hobbling education in the rich world

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 […]

Notes on free range parenting

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 […]

Minnesota autism providers under investigation, lawmakers consider adding ‘guardrails’

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, […]

In U.S. Gender Medicine, Ideology Eclipses Science. It Hurts Kids.

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 […]

‘Urban Family Exodus’ Continues With Number of Young Kids in NYC Down 18%

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 […]

How Safetyism and Social Media are damaging the kids

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 […]

The Fifth Circuit’s Public Library Police

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 […]

Civics: On The Democrat Party, the legacy media and Biden/Rice/Obama/Harris

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 […]

The Surgeon General Is Wrong. Social Media Doesn’t Need Warning Labels

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 […]

California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read

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 […]

Commentary on Madison’s Latest K-12 Superintendent

“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 […]

Tiny and terrifying: Why some feel threatened by Wisconsin’s parental choice programs

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 […]

Board repeatedly denied records on copyright basis, suit says

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 […]

A Record Number of Kids Are in Special Education—and It’s Getting Harder to Help Them All

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 […]

Civics: “net federal subsidies in 2024 for insured people are $2.0 trillion”

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 […]

Advocating Social Media limits

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, […]

Notes on “voucher” schools; accountability?

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. […]

The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine

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 […]

An update on One City Schools (Monona, WI)

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 […]

Notes on Finland achievement

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 […]

Milwaukee School Board Recall Effort Underway

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 […]