schoolinfosystem.org
This presentation discusses the results of the DQC’s sixth annual state analysis Data for Action 2010, a powerful policymaking tool to drive education leaders to use data in decision making.
Margaret V. Soucek and a small group of friends set out in the mid-1960s to help reform the Morton High School District 201 Board.
Their group, The Organization for Better Education, met with so much stonewalling and hostility from local political forces in Berwyn and Cicero that one of their candidates, Mary Karasek, considered dropping out of the race, Karasek recalled Monday. But when Mrs. Soucek heard about her friend’s wish, she wouldn’t have it.
“I thought, ‘It isn’t worth it,'” Karasek said. “But Margaret got so worked up about the fact that I withdrew, that I decided I had to [run].”
Mrs. Soucek, 86, a longtime Berwyn resident, would go on to serve as president of the District 201 Board, frequently squaring off against forces loyal to west suburban figures such as former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese. Mrs. Soucek died Wednesday, May 21, in Adventist La Grange Memorial Hospital after a heart attack.
The U.S. Constitution leaves the responsibility for public K-12 education with the states.
The responsibility for K-12 education rests with the states under the Constitution. There is also a compelling national interest in the quality of the nation’s public schools. Therefore, the federal government, through the legislative process, provides assistance to the states and schools in an effort to supplement, not supplant, state support. The primary source of federal K-12 support began in 1965 with the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
Gregory McNamee: We live in a sea of information, as Britannica’s Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there’s raw sewage floating on it. Sometimes that sea is so choppy that it’s dangerous to enter. In a time of educational crisis, when reading and analysis are fading […]
Will Flanders: Notice the year of comparison is always 2010 for the left. Likely bc ’10 was the height of public school largesse–pre Act-10 & federal money was pouring in. A longer view shows that we’re spending $10K more per kid than 1970 to produce kids who can’t read.
Chris Rickert: “I will say from general experience and observation that most districts interact with the certified and non-certified group independently,” he said, “but approach annual increases for all employees with an eye toward relative fairness and equity — keeping staff at similar standing in the regional market for like employee groups.” Dan Rossmiller, executive […]
via a kind email: In this session, we will: You’re invited to a free webinar on Thursday, June 26 at 1:00 PM(CT) to walk through the WILL Model Policy on Act 20 Reading and Retention and the newly released Companion Guide to Implementing Act 20. Under Wisconsin law (Wis. Stat. § 118.33(6)), all school districts must adopt a promotion and retention […]
Jim Bender and Patrick McIlheran A paper from an insiders’ group offers bad-faith arguments about Wisconsin school choice and the “decoupling” reform that would increase transparency A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed by the Wisconsin Association […]
Jason Epstein: Without question, Jason Riley is one of the most prominent black journalists in the United States, rightly known for his weekly columns in the Wall Street Journal. On a consistent basis, he shrewdly dissects the nostrums of many authors, both black and white, who assert that the road to a successful future in race […]
Chris Rickert: More than seven months after the principal and assistant principal of a Madison elementary school were removed from their positions amid multiple complaints from parents and staff, the two remain on the district’s payroll. Doing what, exactly, district officials won’t say. Candace Terrell and Annabel Torres remain listed in the district’s online employee […]
G David Yaros: First, we get rid of the four regional superintendents, obliterate their individual fiefdoms and ax the lone high school superintendent. So far so good, as these individuals were not exactly delivering sterling outcomes. More. IRG: Instead of operating under its corrective action plan, MPS still isn’t meetingimportant financial deadlines attached to state funding. […]
www link: Following the posting of the preprint paper “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation” on arXiv in November 2024, concerns were raised about the integrity of the research. MIT conducted an internal, confidential review and concluded that the paper should be withdrawn from public discourse. In an effort to correct the research record, MIT […]
Steve Sailer: So, I looked up the top 100 donors in 2024 versus in 2020 and then estimated their ethnicities from online sources. (Note that looking at the top 100 donors will overstate the Jewish share of total contributions, large and small, because Jews are so heavily represented among the very rich: e.g., about one-third of the […]
Karen Mulder: Hillsdale is the only college in Michigan that does not accept federal funding, operating completely independently of government handouts and subsidies. Schools like Michigan State University and the University of Michigan are learning that federal dollars come with strings, and those strings are taught. The two colleges—the biggest in the state—are both members […]
Heather MacDonald: Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the […]
Molly Hennessy-Fiske Several faculty and university senates have approved resolutions asking their leaders to sign a NATO-like agreement that would allow the institutions to share attorneys and pool financial resources in case President Donald Trump’s administration targets one of its members. The Washington Post reached out to all 18 senates and administrations at schools in […]
Michael Zwaagstra Imagine you were to ask a random group of Canadian parents to describe the primary mission of schools. Most parents would say something along the lines of ensuring that all students learn basic academic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics. Fewer parents are likely to say that schools should focus on reducing […]
Tyler Cowen summary: Some extremely telling quotes from former Biden admin officials on the challenges they had trying to advance priorities through their own bureaucracy. more: NGOs operate outside the chain of command. They answer to no electorate, no oversight, no public mandate. They can push any agenda they choose without accountability. So the real […]
Alex Shieh: Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day? Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college […]
Emily Kopp: A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes. The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical […]
WILL: Additional Background: Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, DPI made several changes to Wisconsin’s academic accountability system that have made it less rigorous. These changes were made unilaterally by the Department without any input from the legislature or Governor. These changes included: Earlier this year, WILL endorsed Assembly Bill 1, introduced by Senator John Jagler […]
more. 2007 math forum audio video Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Heritage From 1950 to today, there’s been a 100% increase in the number of students in public schools, a 243% increase in the number of teachers, and a 709% increase in the number of non-teaching staff, which are largely administrative positions. Only 47.5% of people in the public school system are actually teachers. “An emphasis […]
Kevin Sliman: A Penn State engineering student refined a century-old math problem into a simpler, more elegant form, making it easier to use and explore. Divya Tyagi’s work expands research in aerodynamics, unlocking new possibilities in wind turbine design that Hermann Glauert, a British aerodynamicist and the original author, did not consider. Tyagi, a graduate student pursuing […]
Richard Van Noorden Two days before the end of 2021, administrators at Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong, China, issued a highly unusual report. The hospital announced that it had disciplined some 35 researchers who had been linked to fraud in publications, such as fabricating data. These sanctions were part of a countrywide crackdown motivated by […]
Mackinac Center Teachers can be drunk at school five times before they are fired. They can be high three times before losing their job. And they can MAKE AND SELL DRUGS and keep their job. James Hope: Another unique bargaining tactic played out in a school about 100 miles north of Ann Arbor. Bay City […]
Martin Gurri: There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that […]
Dr. Darja Barr, Dr. Jim Clark, Dr. James Currie, Dr. Payman Eskandari, Dr. Shakhawat Hossain, Dr. Narad Rampersad, Dr. Anna Stokke, Dr. Ross Stokke and Dr. Matthew Wiersma: “ai” summary: A review of references cited by Dr. Martha Koch found no credible support for her claims that recent amendments to Manitoba’s Teaching Certificates and Qualifications […]
Paul Vallas: Even if the CTU accepts the school districts contract counter offer, it will cost taxpayers over $3 billion over four years guaranteeing property tax increases each year to their state limit. Barely half the schools $10 billion budget currently finds its way to the schools. The other $5 billion goes to fund the […]
Austin Berg: Jason Lee is one of Johnson’s closest advisors and earns a taxpayer-funded salary of more than $189,000. But Harris County, Texas, records show Lee is an active registered voter in Texas, and cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election there. Records from the Chicago Board of Elections show Jason Lee registered to […]
Rachel Lu: As an adjunct philosophy professor in the early 2010s, I taught excerpts from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. The course, “Introduction to Ethics,” was required for all students, and the only class I taught in my seven years at the University of St. Thomas. Needless to say, Coming Apart is not traditionally listed as a great work of moral […]
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner Here’s one fact Chicagoans should know as the Chicago Teachers Union demands billions more for its massive labor contract: only half of the $10 billion spent at CPS each year makes it to classrooms and instruction. The other $5 billion goes to fund a sprawling bureaucracy of near-empty to half-empty […]
Corrine Hess: The Madison running community is urging the University of Wisconsin-Madison to alter its plans for the new football practice facility on campus that includes a smaller indoor track than the one that stood for nearly 70 years. In August, UW-Madison demolished the aging Camp Randall Memorial Sports Center, commonly known as the “Shell,” to […]
Chicago Tribune: By any measure, Chicago Public Schools teachers are extraordinarily well paid given the norms of their profession. The median salary for a CPS teacher is nearly $95,000. That’s 21% more than teachers make in Cook County’s suburbs, where median pay is $78,000. What’s more, CPS says it pays its teachers more than any […]
Nasser Lubega, Abigail Anderson, Nicole C. Nelson: High rates of irreproducibility and of poor mental health in graduate students have been reported in the biomedical sciences in the past ten years, but to date, little research has investigated whether these two trends interact. In this study, we ask whether the experience of failing to replicate an expected […]
Quinton Klabon: ACT 20 READING UPDATE • 440 schools ignored DPI about reading retraining progress. Below describes those who responded. • The large number may be due to teachers who previously completed a program or who chose a shorter retraining than LETRS. I welcome correction. The October, 2024 Wisconsin DPI Report (PDF): University of Wisconsin […]
Kayla Huynh: “We are spending more revenue than we have to spend,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction moving forward.” “We need to be sustainable. There’s no doubt about this,” he added. “It’s frustrating to have […]
Global China Pulse: Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The […]
Mel Westbrook: I reviewed the upcoming Seattle Schools capital levy (BEX VI) which sits at $1.8B. They aren’t even TRYING to hide using more capital dollars for operations. 90% of the Tech department’s funding now comes from this levy (and that’s up 10%). bit.ly/3BTfYYu
Noah Smith: So anyway, I want to go through a bunch of progressive issues from the 2010s — immigration, DEI, energy and climate, crime and policing, the welfare state, universal health care, unions, and trans rights — and explain why I think they’re all mostly stuck. Immigration In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic […]
Kayla Huynh Madison children and teens are becoming increasingly involved in activities outside of class, according to a recent report on hundreds of clubs and athletics programs run by the public school district. Nearly 60% of middle and high school students participated last school year in at least one co-curricular activity sponsored by the Madison […]
WILL: A calculator with current and future property taxes – notwithstanding other, ongoing assessment and mill rate increases. Much more on Madison’s well funded K-12 $607,000,000 Fall 2024 tax & $pending increase referendums, here. More. A summary.
Chalk & Talk: In this first episode of a two-part series, math professor Anna Stokke sits down with Dr. Brian Poncy, a school psychology professor at Oklahoma State University, who specializes in math interventions. His extensive research on basic fact fluency led to the development of a free math program called M.I.N.D, aimed at improving […]
Paul Vallas: Something’s broken. One year anniversary since the Safe-T Act started and defendants released after their arrest have missed 67,416 court dates. This includes defendants charged with violent felonies in a justice system that is clearly not protecting victims of crime.
Abbey Machtig: But the nationwide search for a new leader that ended with Gothard’s hiring wasn’t an inexpensive endeavor: The district spent more than $100,000 on contracts with consulting groups, catering, hotels and travel during the search, according to records provided to the Wisconsin State Journal via an open records request. This is on top […]
Bradley Busch: Retrieval Practice is one of the most well researched learning strategies. For some, it is often associated with older students preparing for their exams. But can it help young students learn both Maths and spelling? Recent studies suggest that Retrieval Practice can be equally beneficial for younger learners, helping them to grasp foundational subjects. In […]
Danielle DuClos: Urban Triage also provides the county’s housing navigation services, which aim to help residents find housing and fill out rental applications. The nonprofit’s contract with the county for housing navigation and other services is $456,000, according to county records. Last year’s nonprofit tax filings show Urban Triage had 24 employees and $2.8 million in net assets. […]
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: […]
Anna Russell: Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out […]
Austin Berg: Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski started the Chicago office of PFM Financial Advisors in 2010. Under her leadership, that office was the financial advisor or co-financial advisor on $7.6B worth of CPS borrowing across 19 deals from 2011-2019. If those deals stole money from the district, why did Johnson hire […]
Hannah Schmid, Jon Josko Nearly 31% of public school teachers in Chicago send at least one of their children to private school, according to federal data. The leader of the Chicago Teachers Union sends her oldest child to a private school, too. The fact that so many public schools teachers are choosing private schools for […]
Garrett Shanley: Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers. The university said Sasse’s budget expansion […]
Jill Barshay: Inflated grades were more common than depressed grades. In this analysis, over 40 percent of the 33,000 grades analyzed – more than 13,000 transcript grades – were higher than they should have been, while only 16 percent or 5,300 grades were lower than they should have been. In other words, two out of five […]
Larry Kummer Summary: The effects of debt are among the most widely misunderstood factors of macroeconomics. The almost delusional writings of perma-bears and conservatives have demonized debt, while economists often regard high debt levels with complacency. Yet economists have learned much about dynamics of debt. This post looks at this cutting edge of economic theory, […]
April Rubin: The class of 2023 had the worst ACT performance in more than three decades, according to newly released data from the nonprofit that administers the college admissions test. Why it matters: The scores are the latest indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education, with academic performance and test scores declining at all levels. The 2023 cohort was […]
Jean M. Twenge, Heejung Park The social and historical contexts may influence the speed of development. In seven large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents 1976–2016 (N =8.44 million, ages 13–19), fewer adolescents in recent years engaged in adult activities such as having sex, dating, drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without their parents, and driving, suggesting […]
With the arrival of our latest K-12 Superintendent, I thought readers might have interest in recent calendar activity. On 4 June, 2024, I made a public records request of the taxpayer funded Madison School District: “digital copy of Superintendent Joe Gothard’s calendar from his first meetings (April?) through 4 June, 2024. In addition, I write […]
Retraction Watch: Nature has retracted a 2002 paper from the lab of Catherine Verfaillie purporting to show a type of adult stem cell could, under certain circumstances, “contribute to most, if not all, somatic cell types.” The retracted article, “Pluripotency of mesenchymal stem cells derived from adult marrow,” has been controversial since its publication. Still, it has […]
Charles Piller: Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Naturenormal in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been […]
Douglas Carnine: To fill this void, our 84 volunteer experts are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of evidence-based resources. These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional […]
Jill Barshay: Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy. […]
Jeremy Noonan: It is also a major reason why teachers are fleeing public schools. The public school accountability system, by relying solely on quantitative metrics like graduation rates to gauge educational quality and to evaluate administrators, frustrates teachers’ ability to truly teach and care for their students and look out for their long-term well-being. The first […]
Adam Andrzejewski Here is just a sample of our findings: Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite universities are turning out graduates who believe that open antisemitism and the championing of terrorism are forms of “social justice.”
WILL The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe […]
Archie Earle: UnHerd was targeted by the GDI, which said that a place on its “dynamic exclusion list” of publications was merited due to the site having “anti-LGBTQI+ narratives” and being “anti-trans”, equating widely-held views on gender to disinformation. Kathleen Stock, an UnHerd columnist highly commended at last night’s Press Awards, was labelled a “prominent gender-critical feminist” by the […]
Sarah Taddeo: Patrick Moriarty sat expectantly in a plastic chair in his Brighton driveway at 3:20 p.m. on Monday as the sky darkened, the moon slipping in front of the sun behind a blanket of clouds. “How do you guys like this?!” he said to the crowd surrounding him, who weren’t neighbors or coworkers but […]
Stephanie Stamm and Jesse Newman: Prices for hundreds of grocery items have increased more than 50% since 2019 as food companies raised their prices. Executives have said that higher prices were needed to offset their own rising costs for ingredients, transportation and labor. Some U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration have criticized food companies for […]
Jarrett Skorup: Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an article from Dec. 15, 2009, written shortly after Dr. Borlaug passed away. It features a new introduction and is written to honor the man who would have been 110 years old on March 25, 2024. In the winters, I spend my time officiating high school […]
Rob: It’s hard to overstate how important – and strategically brilliant – @jk_rowling’s power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectivelyneutered Scotland’s dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law – on a massive public platform – on its very first day, she has in effect nullified the law by forcing the […]
Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland If the Electoral Count Act unambiguously did not allow for the vice president’s involvement, as some have contended, why did Congress quietly modify the law in an omnibus bill to clarify that the vice president’s role in the certification of elections was merely ministerial — a high-priced letter opener? Finally, the legacy […]
WiSJ: But the odd way Madison elects its School Board is a significant factor that needs fixing. State law requires candidates in cities with populations between 150,000 and 500,000 — meaning only Madison — to run citywide in seven numbered seats for three-year terms. So every spring, candidates must choose which of two or three […]
Austin Berg: The Chicago Teachers Union is planning to take Chicago Public Schools students out of class this Friday to vote for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $100 million real estate transfer tax hike. To do this, the union is partnering with @BringChiHome, a political organization spending millions of dollars pushing a “yes” vote on Johnson’s tax […]
Quinton Klabon: Joint Finance Committee REJECTS the curriculum lists presented to them. ——- Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004- Underly and our long term disastrous reading results…. WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004- “Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, […]
Sarah Shaffer: Coming together around the question “What could we win together?” this broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises. Shortly after we spoke that day, Villanueva and her colleagues felt […]
Ben Raab & Benjamin Hernandez: Over 100 faculty members now have their signatures displayed on a website for a new faculty group, Faculty for Yale, which “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning and research as distinct from advocacy and activism.” Among other measures, the group calls for “a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment” and the promotion […]
Retraction Watch: It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about. A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paperfor issues with the data and images. Gregg Semenza, […]
Selena Simmons-Duffin How did scientists get the idea that the appendix was useless? There had been a lot of discussion about what the appendix might do as a function, whether it served a function, prior to [Charles] Darwin’s time. The [fact] that we can live without it does provide some support for the idea that […]
Greg Lukianoff: ACLU National Legal Director David Cole has a review of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” coming out in the February 8 edition of the New York Review of Books. Overall I thought it was quite positive, but Cole made some arguments — which we actually hear quite often — […]
Douglas Detterman: Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of […]
Sara Randazzo: The effort has been slow to gain traction partly because the loudest opposition comes from teachers themselves. Some Texas teachers complain that the extra pay is doled out unfairly and pits colleagues against one another, even as recipients report life-changing raises that have paid off debts and funded long-awaited vacations. “This merit-based pay […]
Jonathan Zimmerman: It’s about Carole Hooven. Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives. We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American […]
Rob Thomas: But the seeds of Mattes’ crusade to expose wrongdoing in government were planted not in sunny Florida, but in wintry Madison. As the new Bunker Crew/MSW Media podcast“Lawyers Guns and Money” chronicles, the Connecticut-born Mattes attended school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late ‘60s and joined the antiwar movement there. In the […]
Adam Andrzejewski The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal […]
Melissa Korn and Joseph De Avila: A major donor to the University of Pennsylvania has told the school he would rescind a $100 million gift if the school doesn’t replace President Liz Magill, who has faced intensifying criticism for her handling of antisemitism on campus—most recently because of how she defined harassment in a congressional […]
Patrick Mcilheran: Huge taxpayer savings are at risk, but beyond that is the question of who controls government, voters or organizers The unions’ lawsuit to overturn Act 10, Wisconsin’s 2011 labor reform, isn’t primarily about money. Money is involved. When the Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker took away most of the control that public employee […]
Rachel Saslow: The first rule of Portland Public Schools budget cuts: Don’t call them budget cuts. “We refer to it as a ‘gap,’” says Will Howell, a PPS spokesman. So, the school district faces a $130 million gap because of the labor contract it signed last week with the Portland Association of Teachers—an agreement that […]
by Bob Yirka A team of neuroscientists at the University of Padua, in Italy, working with a colleague from CNRS and Université Paris Cité, has found evidence suggesting that neural development of babies still in the womb is impacted by the language they hear spoken by their mothers as they carry them. In their paper published in […]
John Sailer: A search committee seeking a professor of military history rejected one applicant “because his diversity statement demonstrated poor understanding of diversity and inclusion issues.” Another committee noted that an applicant to be a professor of nuclear physics could understand the plight of minorities in academia because he was married to “an immigrant in […]
Andrew Mcmunn: The average Composite score on the ACT test for the class of 2023 has fallen to 19.5 out of 36, according to a report. The decrease in scores marks a decline of 0.3 points from 2022, when the average score was 19.8, data released by ACT in October shows. ACT is the nonprofit organization […]
Abbey Machtig: The Madison School District is in the middle of two referendums approved by voters in 2020. The $317 million capital referendum has gone toward building a new elementary school and funding significant high-school renovations. The smaller operating referendum gave the district an additional $33 million to work with over four years. Despite this […]
Rikki Schlott The academic was fired after almost 20 years of his data — including figures used in an explosive study, which claimed the legacy of lynchings made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives — were found to be in question. College authorities said he was being fired for “incompetence” […]
Thomas Claburn Last week, privacy advocate (and very occasional Reg columnist) Alexander Hanff filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) decrying YouTube’s deployment of JavaScript code to detect the use of ad blocking extensions by website visitors. On October 16, according to the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, Google published a support pagedeclaring that “When you block […]
Thomas Claburn: The law requires tech companies to prevent illegal content from being distributed on their platforms and to remove it when identified. It also seeks to prevent children from being exposed to harmful material, a goal that demands effective online age verification. And it allows for fines of up to £18 million ($21.82 million) […]
Teo Armus and Hadley Green “So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze…. With a flash of bluish white […]
Luke Andrews: Dr Melissa Kearney, an economic professor at the University of Maryland, previously told DailyMail.com: ‘There has been a greater emphasis on spending time building careers. Adults are changing their attitudes towards having kids. ‘They are choosing to spend money and time in different ways… [that] are coming into conflict with parenting.’ There are […]
Hardika Singh: “Now it’s like, ‘forget the orange juice.’ That money will go toward the tip,” said Underwood, a 69-year-old optical wholesaler from Ridgeland, Miss. “Some things you just don’t need like you used to because prices are up.” Orange juice prices have been climbing as citrus groves have faced a spreading greening disease and […]
Hannah Cox: Earlier this year, Florida joined a growing list of states with universal school choice programs—meaning any student in the state can access a portion of the money the state spends on their education and use those tax dollars to homeschool, attend a private school, or do some sort of mixed-learning program. Families have […]
Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity. More.
NPR: High school students’ scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test. Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
Peter Gray, David F. Lancy and David F. Bjorklund: It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the US are at an all- time high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psy- chiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, […]