schoolinfosystem.org
Richard Van Noorden & Miryam Naddaf In January, a review paper1 about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been […]
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider: To understand why Democrats have been so reluctant to run teachers requires a trip back into the party’s history. In the 1970s, Democrats were in the throes of an identity crisis over what they stood for—and whom to blame for their electoral setbacks. For the better part of four decades, […]
Miguel Cardona: This vision matters because students enrolled in well-funded public schools get a better shot at quality instruction and additional support—including tutoring and after-school programming. They get better access to nutrition assistance, mental health services, and learning environments that embrace who they are. It is this vision, when fully realized, that will allow every […]
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 […]
Mark Movsesian: Last month, at the end of a three-year saga, the U.S. Department of Education ruled on a complaint that New Jersey parents had filed against the Cedar Grove School District. The conflict is interesting for what it suggests about overreaching school administrators and about the capacity of persistent parents who believe their kids’ […]
Stuart Loren: Some context: The average Chicago teacher salary is $94.3k compared to $63.8k for the average American (or 47.8% higher). As of 2019, the average Chicago teacher pension benefit was $6,376/month (eligible at age 55) vs $1,783/month for Social Security in 2024 (eligible at age 62). I realize there is variation between individuals and […]
David Blaska summary: Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Matt Barnum: The share of teachers who say the stress and disappointment of the job are “worth it” has fallen to 42%, which is 21 points lower than other college-educated workers, according to a poll by Rand, a nonprofit think tank. As recently as 2018, over 70% of teachers said the stress was worth it. […]
George Leef: In the good old days of American education, professors could speak their minds freely. Disagreements would often result, with others disputing the case that the speaker had made. The solid consensus, however, was that academic freedom must never be curtailed, since intellectual progress depends on the exchange of ideas, just as John Stuart […]
Brook Silva-Braga Only about one-third of elementary school students in the U.S. are reading at grade level, according to the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. In response, many schools are rethinking how they teach kids to read. In one New York City first grade classroom, Melissa Jones-Diaz goes letter by letter, teaching the specific […]
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’ […]
Will Flanders & Nic Kelly: Recently, the Wisconsin Policy Forum released a comprehensive overview of the education landscape in Milwaukee. The report is likely eye-opening for many—and shows just how far behind Milwaukee’s students are in comparison to the rest of the state and the nation. But, much of the media coverage of this report seems to […]
Skylar Croy: Unprecedented is an understatement. No. 2024AP1643-OA Strange v. Wisconsin Elections Comm’n A petition for leave to commence an original action under Wis. Stat. § (Rule) 809.70 has been filed on behalf of petitioner, David Strange, individually and as Deputy Operations Director-Wisconsin for the Democratic National Committee. The petition names as respondents: (1) Wisconsin […]
Susan Edelman: Scores on Algebra 1 Regents exam plummeted by 14 percentage points at south Queens schools that used a controversial new curriculum teachers have blasted as “a complete disaster,” a superintendent revealed this week Josephine Van Ess, superintendent of Queens South High Schools, told parent leaders Wednesday that the 29 high schools under her watch, all […]
Susan Edelman: Scores on Algebra 1 Regents exam plummeted by 14 percentage points at south Queens schools that used a controversial new curriculum teachers have blasted as “a complete disaster,” a superintendent revealed this week Josephine Van Ess, superintendent of Queens South High Schools, told parent leaders Wednesday that the 29 high schools under her watch, all […]
Paul Vallas: In either intent or outcome, racism is the defining feature of Stacy Davis Gates and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s education policies and minorities are hurt most Let’s be clear, the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) blocks any changes to improve schools that impact its members, their numbers, work load or job security. So CTU President […]
Austin Berg: Yesterday, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates accused Martinez of being “insubordinate” after his team presented numbers showing the union’s demands would effectively bankrupt the school district. “Every other mayor in this city has told them what to do and they’ve done it,” Davis Gates said of past CPS leaders appointed by […]
Paris Schutz The Chicago Teachers Union Foundation is seeking to significantly reduce the property tax bill for its West Loop headquarters, according to documents from the Cook County Assessor’s Office obtained by FOX 32 Chicago. The Assessor recently reappraised the value of the CTU’s building, estimating its fair market value at $19 million. However, the CTU is […]
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 […]
Bryce Hill: Population loss in Chicago – and Illinois in general – can be attributed to one cause: people moving out. More people are moving out of the city than are moving in. While international migration continues to be a boon to population counts and births still outpace deaths, Chicago’s population decline is because Chicagoans […]
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 […]
University of Tennessee news: The Institute of American Civics, housed in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, conducted a statewide survey this spring examining civic knowledge and participation by Tennesseans. The survey report says its results lead to two obvious conclusions: “It is crucial that Tennesseans develop a higher level of civic […]
Anthony Watts Why the difference? Apparently the WaPo reporter can’t convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit correctly, due to an attempt to “Americanize” the story, she wanted to display the temperature in Fahrenheit, used in the United States. If you don’t know the formula, you can use Google to do it, which is what she likely […]
Tyler Cowen Summary: “how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration. The cosmopolitan liberals are on a […]
The district is asking voters for the money as funding from federal pandemic aid and a 2020 referendum are set to expire. If voters also approve of the district’s other referendum on the November ballot — a $100 million request to help fund day-to-day expenses — district officials estimate the owner of an average-value home in Madison […]
David Blaska: Like hobo stew, the cost of living has many ingredients. Pumping increasingly worthless dollars into the economy is one of them. Democrats in Washington injected billions into America’s economic bloodstream in the name of Covid relief. Yet another casualty of the pandemic panic, along with closing schools and wearing masks on the bike […]
City Forward Collective: Key finding #1: Milwaukee residents remain deeply dissatisfied with the state of affairs at MPS, and believe more must be done to address the district’s academic and financial shortcomings (2/6) Key finding #2: Milwaukee residents believe MPS School Board members should be held accountable for the district’s issues. 2 out of 3 […]
Lucas Robinson: At a crossroads in the struggle to balance Madison’s budget, the city will either rely on $22 million from a property tax referendum or $6 million in cuts to city services, according to two versions of a five-year budget unveiled by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. Rhodes-Conway is touting the referendum plan as a long-term […]
Lucas Robinson: At a crossroads in the struggle to balance Madison’s budget, the city will either rely on $22 million from a property tax referendum or $6 million in cuts to city services, according to two versions of a five-year budget unveiled by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. Rhodes-Conway is touting the referendum plan as a long-term […]
Georgia Howe Since I began covering the spread of critical race theory into public school curriculum, I’ve received one question more than any other: what concrete actions should we be taking to get this stuff out of kids’ classrooms? This morning, I spoke to Vicki Manning, school board member with the Virginia Beach City Public […]
Dave Seminara: When I was a desk officer in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, I hated coup attempts. My phone never stopped ringing, round-the-clock task forces were organized, and bosses demanded endless reports because important people in Washington, D.C. had become interested in countries they otherwise ignore. Sometimes, I rooted for the aging […]
Gary Saul Morton: Uncompromising atheism was the fundamental principle of Soviet ideology. It’s thus remarkable that three of the greatest Soviet literary masterpieces—Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”—were avowedly Christian. Woven into Solzhenitsyn’s account of torture, starvation and hard labor in the gulag—evil that many […]
Rory Linnane: The final candidates for the interim superintendent position are: In compiling the finalists, the school board reviewed lists of potential candidates from the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards and the Council of Great City Schools.
Brian Riedl: Annual budget deficits doubled to $2 trillion over 2022–23 and are headed toward $3 trillion a decade from now. Social Security and Medicare face a combined $124 trillion cash deficit over the next 30 years. The national debt is projected to soar past 165% of gross domestic product (GDP) within three decades—or as […]
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 […]
Madeleine Rowley According to a letter written by Haim’s lawyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari admitted that she hadn’t reviewed the purported evidence against Haim and was instead relying on what FBI agents told her. In the same discussion, Ansari insisted that the documents Haim sent to Rufo included children’s names, but nothing in the documents Rufo saw identified any […]
WILL The News: In an agenda posted last week, the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) Board indicated that they will delay their plans to evict two Carmen Charter Schools campuses from their buildings until October 2024. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and other education advocates have previously stated that evicting the charter school would be […]
Abbey Machtig Administrators are recommending Sennett Middle School and Cherokee Heights Middle School be replaced with new buildings. The same goes for several combined schools that share the same location: Shabazz City High and Sherman Middle; Black Hawk Middle and Gompers Elementary; Toki Middle and Orchard Ridge Elementary. The district would also renovate Anana and […]
David Blaska: but probably won’t because — Forget it, Jake, it’s Madison WI! School employees harassed police as they arrested an 18-year-old student criminal for carrying a loaded weapon inside La Follette high school, according to the most excellent report from Chris Rickert of the WI State Journal, made after an open records request. One Kyshawn M. Bankston had […]
Liz Bowie and Kristen Griffith City school administrators began seeing teachers submitting 60 course credits — the equivalent of two master’s degrees — from Idaho State University this year to get an increase in pay. To the human resources department, this looked fishy. How could a full-time teacher have enough time in one year to do the […]
Michael Petrilli: So now many places have too few students for the schools, thousands of which will have to be permanently closed in coming years. Postponing the inevitable only makes the process more expensive by wasting scarce tax dollars on half-empty buildings and unneeded principals, gym teachers and attendance clerks. Whereas leaders on the left […]
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 […]
Allison Garfield: ….demolishing the two single-family homes and one two-family home currently on the property. The development will include 138 units, plus parking for 143 cars underground and 25 outdoor spots. The building will stand about 36 feet high with a combination of light brown-colored brick and gray fiber cement siding. Patios and balconies are […]
Kayla Huynh One question on the ballot would ask voters for $100 million over the next four school years to increase spending on staff salaries and education programs. The second would ask for $507 million to renovate or replace seven aging elementary and middle schools. The two referendums would be “unprecedented in size and scope […]
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 […]
Brian Harvey In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP,and this is what I sent them: SICP was revolutionary in many different ways. Most importantly, it dramatically raised the bar for the intellectual content of […]
John Schlifske: The recent news that Milwaukee Public Schools failed to file a required financial report to the state Department of Public Instruction, that its past reports were missing data or inaccurate, and that it might have to payback millions in funds to the state is just another proof point underscoring the need for substantial governance reform. This lays open two […]
Philip Howard: Today, in a runoff election for mayor, Chicago voters will choose either former teacher Brandon Johnson or former schools CEO Paul Vallas. What’s raising eyebrows is the funding of Johnson’s campaign: Over 90 percent has come from teachers unions and other public employee unions. Vallas has the endorsement of the police union, but his funding […]
Luther Ray Abel: once you’re auto-graduated from one of the area’s failed schools. But if you’re a Marquette-educated city planner who grew up in Whitefish Bay and now has a place, a goldendoodle, and a job in the Third Ward, Milwaukee is everything a man could ever want. Ride the white-collar novelty streetcar that cost tens […]
Paul Fanlund: That blowback has been the most pronounced and personally directed as on any topic in all those years of writing. I am cast as a selfish, out-of-touch elitist, even as a racist. Whatever I have written or done before, the critics see themselves as the true progressives, and malcontents like me deserve scorn. […]
Dairyland Sentinel The problems with MPS reporting their financial data go back far longer than anyone has previously reported. Yesterday we ran a perspectives piece that included this nugget of information regarding the connections between MPS and Milwaukee City Government Commentary Oh and the data that DPI says MPS has failed to properly submit since September? […]
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 […]
Abbey Machtig: Past spending decisions combined with current revenue estimates leave the district with an estimated $40 million shortfall, Assistant Superintendent of Financial Services Bob Soldner told the Wisconsin State Journal. District could renovate, build new schools The district appears to be leaning toward building several new schools with potential referendum dollars rather than renovating […]
Christopher Rufo: On the morning in June 2023 that Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital’s residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential “leaker,” presumably through forensic examination of the hospital’s computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution. Now, […]
Kaushikee Nayudu, Emma Talley and Jessica Zhu Two members of The Daily were arrested early this morning in connection with an attempted pro-Palestine occupation of the president and provost’s office in Main Quad. One was present to report on the protest for The Daily and was detained in violation of his First Amendment and Fourth […]
Allison Garfield: If the property tax increase covered the projected $27 million deficit, it would cost the average household an additional $284 annually, or roughly $24 a month. If approved by voters, the increase would add to a revenue stream Madison already relies heavily upon to fund its services, with over 70% of the city’s […]
Brian Fraley: “How bad are things that MPS? Only 40% of MPS sophomores are proficient at reading and less than 30% are proficient at math. And the graduation rate and MPS is abysmal. Obviously what MPS has been doing is not working. So why has DPI ignored the problems of MPS? Why can’t the Superintendent and her deputies take […]
Judge Glock: An ever-mounting debt burden is the greatest threat to the city’s survival. As that problem worsens, more residents will question whether they want to stay in a windswept city paying down someone else’s pension—or decamp for places that don’t place such a millstone around their citizens’ necks. According to the group Truth in […]
Nate Hochman: A once great American city has become something short of a dystopia, where shop owners sleep with shotguns and citizens must act as police. For seven months, Dylan Carrico Rogers slept in his bike shop with a shotgun. TriTech Bikes, located in the Montavilla neighborhood of northeast Portland, Ore., where Rogers grew up, had […]
John Kang: This Article explores the religious origins of the right to alter or abolish government. I show in Part I that the right was widely accepted among the American colonies as expressed through their constitutions and, later, the federal constitution. In Part II, I usher the reader back in time and across the continent […]
Jon Kamp and Alicia A. Caldwell: Adding the 90 shelter students has cost Stoughton, which teaches a total of 3,740 students, at least $500,000 for increased staff and busing costs. The state said it has reimbursed nearly all of that money. But the lag time and uncertainty about how much would be paid back has […]
Change.org What if I told you that Congressmen settled over 250 sexual harassment lawsuits using taxpayer money, and there was no way to find out who these Congressmen were? Would you believe me? The truth is that the situation is as described in the question. For decades members of Congress would use your taxpayer dollars to buy their […]
Alyssa Lukpat: New graduates need to earn at least $50,000 a year, on average, in their first decade off campus for the degree to pay off, according to new research from Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit that analyzed federal education and earnings data. If they can land that salary, or make $500,000 before taxes over […]
by Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private […]
Christopher Rufo: The images of the recent protests at Columbia University have grabbed the attention of the American public: students chanting for a Palestinian state, “from the river to the sea”; activists setting up a mass tent encampment on the campus lawn; masked occupiers seizing control of Hamilton Hall. For some, it was a sign […]
Gillian Tett: Back in 2020, when then US president Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok because of alleged Chinese influence, Microsoft tried and failed to buy the app’s US operation — a move that chief executive Satya Nadella later dubbed “the strangest thing” he had ever done. Now events are becoming even stranger. Last month […]
ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY AND GONZALO RIVERO This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that: To see how digital decay plays out on […]
Wall Street Journal: Payday lenders challenged the CFPB’s power under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to draw its funds from the Federal Reserve up to $734 million, adjusted for inflation. They argued this self-funding scheme violates the Constitution’s command that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” […]
Ramon Marull: The Berlin Conference (1884 – 1885) recognised the sovereignty of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Free State of the Congo. The king governed the territory until 1908, when it passed into the hands of the Belgian state. Leopold II ruled the Congo as his personal dominion from 1885 to 1908. During this […]
Heather MacDonald The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks […]
Christopher Rufo Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open […]
Daniel Nuccio: A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according […]
Eugene Yan: Why does complexity sell better? Complexity signals effort. Papers with difficult ideas and technical details suggest blood, sweat, and tears. Systems with more components and features hint at more effort than systems with less. Because complex artifacts are viewed as requiring more effort, they’re also deemed as more challenging to create and thus more […]
Kevin Fagan: Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage. The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner […]
Edward White A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her […]
By Becky Jacobs Miscommunication and “a technology error” led to a polling place issue earlier this month that created a brief controversy over extending voting hours at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a campus spokesperson said. Neither the university nor city officials expect such a problem to occur in future elections, they said. “This was a […]
Luke Rosiak and Christopher F. Rufo: Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising […]
Stephen Foley and Simon Foy: “We somehow stopped the meritocracy,” said one former McKinsey partner who remains close to the firm. “We stopped pushing people to leave and had an enormous overhang of people. When that happens the numbers just get staggeringly bad. Don’t we advise companies on this?” The sharp decline in attrition is […]
by Alex Tabarrok The real explanation for rising prices amid greater homes per capita is actually quite simple, fewer kids. Kevin Erdmann has an excellent post on this going through the numbers in detail. I will illustrate with a stylized example. Suppose we have 100 homes and 100 families, each with 2 parents and 2 kids. Thus, there […]
Scott Calvert: The bumper-to-bumper jockeying at school drop-off and pickup is lurching past annoyance en route to true-crime drama. “DO NOT cut the line. DO NOT drive on the gravel path near the water tower,” Principal Michael Girouard told Red Oak Middle School parents in Battleboro, N.C., in a scolding missive. “If you find yourself […]
By James Vaznis A group of white and Asian-American parents in Boston are taking their fight over admission to the city’s exam schools to the US Supreme Court, arguing that efforts to diversify enrollment is resulting in discrimination against Asian-American and white applicants. “Wherever competitive admission K-12 schools exist, it seems that policymakers have targeted them […]
By Kayla Huynh For decades, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras rehearsed in what Artistic Director Kyle Knox called “the bowels” of the UW-Madison humanities building. After the organization moved out four years ago, WYSO became scattered, with members practicing in schools, churches and even parking lots throughout Dane County. Now, for the first time in the nonprofit’s […]
Brian Spegele: Qin Huangsheng once imagined a better life in the city when she left her home village to become a factory worker at age 16. Now, in her early 40s, she has $40,000 in personal debt and a base salary of $400 a month. Debt collectors are hounding her. She is blocked from buying […]
Konrad Putzier: The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant. Today, the building […]
Dave Cieslewicz And even if power won’t listen, those of us who hear what Berliner hears appreciate his courage for saying it out loud. As a service to YSDA readers who might not take the time to read the entire lengthy piece, here are some of our favorite excerpts. It’s true NPR has always had […]
Julie Wernau: Every kid wants a pencil—especially a carefully carved stub of a pencil called a mini. Sasha Portnoy, a 9-year-old from Hamden, Conn., is among those playing the market. “One or two mini-pencils for a box of Nerds. Or maybe two or three for an Airhead,” said Sasha, explaining the pencil-to-candy conversion rate. She […]
Robert Pondisco: A simple fact about education in the United States trumps all others, yet has been largely overlooked in the education reform era and contributed to its disappointing underperformance: it takes nearly four million women and men to staff America’s K–12 classrooms. A number that large, by definition, means that teachers will be people […]
Jessica Winter: In truth, the crisis was a collision of multiple issues: racial tension, union power, the respectful treatment of queer and trans kids, and the place of religion in schools—not to mention the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and what it has done to the fabric of civic life in the U.S. The public schools […]
Christopher Rufo: I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing? Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes. In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We […]
Aaron Sibarium: In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class […]
Joanne Jacobs: Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.” Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize […]
Jessica Gould: But since announcing an overhaul of readinginstruction and implementing new curricula in half of all elementary schools last September, the city education department has declined to release data from seasonal assessments, called “screeners,” saying it would be premature. Gothamist has now obtained preliminary screener data shared with some public school educators that shows stubbornly […]
Rory Linnane: When Milwaukee Public Schools turned to city voters for more funding in 2020, it was smooth sailing. The dynamics are different this year as the district asks voters for more funding April 2. The 2020 referendum passed with 78% of the vote, providing the district with up to $87 million in annual funds as […]
Theo Baker “We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has. I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in […]
Gaius Mucius Scaevola Superintendent Nyah Hamlett of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, not immune from controversy after allegedly plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation, has now opened herself up to charges of conflicts of interest after strong patterns in her hiring practices have been revealed. This October the Superintendent approved the hiring of her husband, Breon Hamlett, to work at […]
The Economist: As election-night parties go, the mood was bleak. On March 19th primary-election voters in Chicago were asked to vote on a ballot measure that would have raised the transfer tax on properties worth over $1m so as to generate money to pay for homelessness relief. The measure was backed by the city’s entire […]
Paul Fanlund: When Shon Barnes became Madison police chief in 2021, the School Board had already removed police officers who had been stationed in each of the city’s four mainstream public high schools. The year before, raucous protests against the school resource officers — SROs — had been visceral in the racial upheaval that followed […]
Karl Widerquist: The modern definition of UBI stipulates the grant must be in cash, and because small-scale hunter-gatherer or agrarian communities do not have cash economies, they do not have UBIs. But these practices show how the values that motivate much of the modern UBI movement are not new to politics but have been recognized […]
Nick Pinto: The NYPD sent a sweeping subpoena seeking information from the social media account of the president of a New York City police accountability organization in February, records reviewed by Hell Gate show, only to withdraw its subpoena when told they would need to justify the subpoena in court. Michael Clancy, better known to […]
Martin Kulldorff: I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic. On March […]