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One City Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email: Tonight, One City Early Learning Centers, a high quality preschool located in the heart of South Madison, is hosting its first graduation ceremony and community barbecue, in honor of its first cohort of children to transition from its preschool to local kindergartens in the city. Nine […]
Over the last 20 years, I have been a guests on several dozen local and national radio and television talk shows across the U.S., and abroad. Tom Joyner, Joe Madison, George Curry, Laura Ingraham, Tavis Smiley, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Juan Williams, Armstrong Williams, Sean Hannity & Alan Colmes, Jean Feraca, Vicki McKenna, Carol Koby, […]
One City Institute for Early Learning: A Professional Development Seminar for Parents, Teachers and Community Educators Presented by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings Kellner Distinguished Professor of Urban Education Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Wisconsin-Madison Thursday, December 1, 2016 5:45pm to 7:30pm Lincoln Elementary School 909 Sequoia Trail, Madison
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: On Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm CST, more than 130 local Black men will participate in Madison’s Premiere Black Male Photo Shoot on the steps of Wisconsin’s State Capitol, City Hall and the Monona Terrace. The photo shoot has been organized One City Early Learning Centers […]
Kaleem Caire, South Madison Child Development: We are embracing the future and the need to change to ensure that more of Greater Madison’s children are ready to read, compute and succeed educationally by the time they begin first grade. Please join us on Monday, June 23, 2014 at 5:30pm at South Madison Child Development Incorporated […]
OnPoint: Parents in Milwaukee want school vouchers and the governor’s signing up. Hear about one city’s big experiment with vouchers.
Tyler Cowen: Why are so many young people today turning to socialism? By socialism I mean an economic system where the government nationalizes the means of production—if not in all industries, at least in some critical ones. But as we shall see, many of those attracted to socialism these days may be more attached to negative vibes […]
Anna Hansen: Children under 16 years old no longer will be allowed at Goodman pool without a parent or adult guardian under new rules implemented by the city. The previous age of children who require an adult chaperone was 10, but Madison Parks officials voted Wednesday night to raise that to 15 years old. The […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum The number of Wisconsin high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs continued its decade-long growth in the 2023-24 academic year, hitting a new record. A combined 78,703 students participated in the dual enrollment programs offered by the University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Technical College systems, through which they could earn […]
Dwarkesh Patel interviews George Church: Mirror life, if it can be weaponized, that would take it to a whole other level of concern. The concern was that if we got it to a certain point, then it would be easy to weaponize it. Again, there’s practical considerations that maybe that most people who consider weaponizing […]
Andrey Mir: “The media is melting down, and neither billionaires nor journalists can seem to stop it,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Journalism may never again make money,” states the Washington Post. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asks The Atlantic. Indeed, an obituary for the American press is overdue. And it turns out that the death […]
Janen Ganesh: And then there is the US, God’s own debtor. It could once at least count on the Democrats to show some token interest in fiscal rigour. Now both parties have a tacit agreement to ignore the debt — call it the Washington Consensus — even at risk to dollar supremacy. Elon Musk, having […]
Jason Riley: The Ford Foundation has spent billions of dollars on poverty initiatives, human-rights advocacy and other selected causes, yet Henry Ford’s most significant achievement was developing the moving assembly line in the 1910s, which transformed manufacturing. Ford made automobiles accessible to America’s burgeoning middle class, expanded job opportunities, and accelerated the expansion of related […]
Gillian Bowditch: Far from dispelling violence, it positively encourages it. By the time you have waded through the document, your gorge will have risen to the point where you could cheerfully strangle the authors with the same ferocity with which they mangle the English language. “Support schools to implement a spectrum of relationships and behaviour […]
Chris Gomez-Schmidt (former Madison School Board member) A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report projects a 20% increase in school property taxes this December, a $883 increase on the average home, driven by the two 2024 referendums and declining state aid. For a city that prides itself on deliberate work to address affordability, this tax increase […]
Aaron Sibarium: When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context. The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.” “The […]
Kayla Huynh: Even with additional funding from the referendum, the Madison school district will also rely on $22.4 million in one-time funds this year to balance its budget. Undernext year’s proposed budget, the school district would spend $9.5 million more than it receives in revenue, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan, indendent research group […]
IN.gov Attorney General Todd Rokita has sent letters to Butler and DePauw universities concerning their respective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, which may violate federal and state civil rights laws and the terms of the universities’ nonprofit statuses. The letters follow a similar inquiry sent by Attorney General Rokita to Notre Dame […]
Sasha von Oldershausen: At the turn of the twenty-first century, measles, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was declared eliminated from the United States, thanks to herd immunity achieved through a critical mass of vaccination. Yet at the beginning of this year, Katherine Wells, the public health director for the city and county of Lubbock, found […]
Ilya Shapiro American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has […]
John Villasenor: While people who have spent years cultivating their writing skills might bemoan the arrival of AI-assisted writing, there is also a much more optimistic way to view these changes. Until now, the ability to write well was inherently elitist. People fortunate enough to have the time and financial capacity to pursue higher education […]
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 […]
Jill Tucker: San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it. An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were […]
John Sailer: The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no […]
Fisher Derderian: The link between funding and the public has frayed. Federal programs have mirrored that drift. The NEA’s grant language in recent years emphasized “capacity building,” “access strategies,” and “administrative equity plans.” ArtsHERE, launched in 2023, directed over $12 million toward “equity-centered frameworks,” focused more on internal processes than public-facing work. The long-term cultural impact of these […]
Packy McCormack: My hypothesis is that technology compounds more quickly than the government ossifies, and that entrepreneurship in a broad sense has overtaken institutions as the prime mover of American exceptionalism. One (very oversimplified) way to think of progress is as a vector sum of government and entrepreneurial forces. A vector is a quantity that has both a […]
Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe interview: City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard. Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical […]
Frederick Hess: That’s not exactly a cross-section of America’s college students. After all, while college faculty may be overwhelmingly left-leaning, the same isn’t true of the broader student population. In fact, Truman’s leadership has doubled down on its intransigence by scrubbing the bios of past winners from its website, ensuring that no one can replicate the AEI study. […]
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 […]
Kayla Huynh Lighthouse is now home to the largest number of voucher students in Madison. A majority of the school’s students identify as Hispanic or Black, and nearly all are from low-income households. The school’s website says, “We are facing unprecedented demand with 150 children on our waitlist as of fall 2024.” Lighthouse and other private voucher schools have […]
Patrick Dent: It was 2019 when Jesse Sharkey won reelection to lead the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). A political activist who masquerades as a classroom educator, Sharkey overcame Members First’s slate at the close of the polls. Sharkey’s return to lead the CTU extended the iron grip of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) over […]
Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe: We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded. Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs. Some 8,500 veteran soldiers were drummed out of the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccinations. Yet 10 […]
Paul Craig Roberts: I think we are going to find out also that the organizations benefitting from what the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concludes is $521,000,000,000 worth of larceny annually in the federal budget have squatters’ rights in the larceny. The theft has gone on for so long and is so institutionalized that the beneficiaries […]
Matt Barnum: A principal-turned-consultant has built a movement—and a business—on overturning how teachers have graded for generations. His alternative: “grading for equity.” Joe Feldman preaches that students should be able to retake tests and redo assignments. There should be no penalties for late work and no grades for homework. No points for good behavior, classroom […]
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 […]
Michael Walsh: But as the demand for degrees (not learning) grew and higher education became monetized, American universities became more akin to Renaissance Italian city-states than socially philanthropic organizations, metastasizing, gobbling up real estate and taking it off the tax rolls, thus helping to destroy the nearby neighborhoods — hello, Columbia, hello University of Chicago, […]
Alexander Nazaryan You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book? I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because […]
Giselle Redmond: Both Ithaca College and the Ithaca City School District are currently being federally investigated in response to complaints filed by the Equal Protection Project, an organization founded by Prof. William Jacobson, a Cornell Law professor. Jacobson created the EPP in 2023. In a statement to The Sun, Jacobson wrote that he founded the organization in response to “discrimination done in […]
James Pierson The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into […]
Stefanie Waldek, Katherine McLaughlin, Elizabeth Stamp, Maya Chawla Though all of these schools are beautiful, for a college campus to be considered the coolest, we think it has to transcend aesthetics alone. Perhaps the award should go to Mount Holyoke with its strong focus on sustainability. All new constructions on campus are built to meet LEED silver […]
Heather Peske It’s nearly universal: Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. The presumption is that the master’s degree signals a greater level of knowledge and skill. But what if I told you that aspiring elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go […]
Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised […]
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 […]
Limited background amidst Wisconsin (and Madison’s) long term, disastrous reading results: Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story). Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading (FORT). Perhaps this forensic thread offers a […]
Tim Daly —— Meanwhile Madison is adding bricks and mortar (and raising property taxes) amidst declining enrollment..
Erin McGroarty With the two-year, $180,000 grant, the nonprofit had expanded its citizenship test study program and had hoped to soon provide study sessions in other areas of the city, including on Madison’s east side. “We hit a record number of students in 2023 and then in 2024 we had another record number of students. […]
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner Chicago’s pension plans – and the city of Chicago by extension – avoided a reckoning in 2020 after billions in federal covid aid helped the city avoid a fiscal collapse. Some of those billions were given as direct aid to the city, while billions more filtered through the economy, eventually boosting city tax revenues. The […]
Renu Mukherjee On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcedthat the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump […]
Summary The report highlights sobering 2024 statistics: only 5.8% of Black 11th-graders in Madison—22 out of 310 students—were prepared for college-level reading and writing, compared to 27% of Black students nationally and 10.3% statewide. In math, just 7.1% of Madison’s Black 11th-graders were college-ready, lagging behind 8% nationally and 6.4% across Wisconsin. Wisconsin ranks last […]
Ann Althouse Summary: “Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel…”“… not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so […]
Rick Hess: All of this anguished activity has been accompanied by the plaintive cry of, “How could this happen?!” The answer is simple: Over the past decade, schools and colleges carelessly embraced an agenda that was out of step with mainstream American values. Education leaders blithely went along for the ride as ideologues, grifters, and […]
Karen Pilarski: Declining enrollment is nothing new to many school districts, including the School District of Waukesha. Due to this, the district is considering what the future will look like and making decisions accordingly. During the Finance and Facilities meeting on Monday, Superintendent Jim Sebert made a presentation called “Optimizing Our Future.” Sebert said due […]
John Sailer: It contributes to universities’ left-wing bent. At Columbia University, the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy Project created a curriculumto help college students imagine a “society without jails and prisons.” At Morgan State University, the Black Queer Everything initiative developed “transformative pedagogies” about “racism, inequality, and injustice.” And at UCLA, the Race in the Global Past through Native Lensesprogram promoted […]
Denis Campbell: Cashless societies may be a sad fact of modern life for those with a nostalgic attachment to the pound in their pocket, but doctors have discovered one unexpected benefit of the decline of coins. Far fewer children are having surgery after swallowing small items that could choke or kill them, and the scarcity […]
Dave Cieslewicz: Some of my liberal friends have expressed their unhappiness over my endorsement of Brittany Kinser for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. So, let me expand on my reasons. When I was at the city of Madison and there was a managerial opening I always first thought about how that department was functioning. If […]
AJ Manaseer Teachers in Chicago are the best paid in the nation while delivering some of the worst results in the nation. Any responsible pushback on their extravagant demands is met with hysterical shrieks of racism or “dismantling public education.” They share no sense of responsibility for Chicago’s dire financial condition and would happily tip […]
Danielle DuClos: Ratzlaff: Property tax relief. With the median home value in Dane County at $304,700, the typical annual property tax bill reaches $7,324 — far exceeding the national median of $2,690. There is no way that this can or will sustain itself. Plus, you add in the two referendums that the city of Madison has passed and […]
David Blaska: Here is where Blaska gets a bit snarky. One would think some burden should accrue to the city clerk’s office. Count every ballot (as Democrats once insisted) and maybe get up to speed on election law, since elections is what they do for a living. Not like we’re seeking Maribeth’s regimen on avian flu.
Lucas Robinson: At last Monday’s School Board meeting, Madison Teachers Inc. President Michael Jones called the referendums a “bait and switch.” “I should have known better than to trust a district that spent the equivalent of multiple educators’ annual salary on school logos and rebranding that no one asked for,” Jones told the board, referring […]
Chicago Maroon: In 1890, the newly chartered University of Chicago aimed to“remove the mind of the student from the busy mercantile conditions of Chicago.” Architect Henry Ives Cobb envisioned a campus with one central quadrangle surrounded by six others, spanning 22 acres of land.
Joshua Dunn For several decades, the high priestess of the balanced literacy movement has been Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, who directed the now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins once estimated that her Units of Study reading curriculum had been adopted by as many as one in four U.S. elementary schools. Irene Fountas […]
Frederick Hess: By summer 2020, it was increasingly clear that kids weren’t at risk and weren’t major sources of spread. And yet, when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called to reopen schools, she was lambasted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “messing with the health of our children.” When Missouri Governor Mike Parson called in July for […]
Joanne Jacobs summary: New York City’s Catholic schools are closing their doors, writes Ray Domanico in City Journal. Families with children are leaving the city, and parents who might have turned to Catholic school in the past are choosing tuition-free charter schools. A small group of Catholic high schools has learned how to survive in […]
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner: Yes, Emanuel inherited a city in bad shape, but he ended up making Chicagoans’ situation even worse. We covered Mayor Emanuel extensively during his time in office. He showed initial promise when he tried to push for 401k retirement plans for city workers and when he first took on the teachers unions. Unfortunately, Emanuel […]
Andrew Mir: The media also have contributed to their own decline. How? “Some of the wounds are self-inflicted,” writes Rosen. In particular, he refers to the struggle of the newsrooms to increase diversity while maintaining the “view from nowhere.” “See the contradiction?” asks Rosen. “Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress […]
Dan Shafer: In the upcoming Spring Election, the highest-profile race is the one for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the latest in Wisconsin’s seemingly endless number of everything-on-the-line elections. The undercard, then, is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Elections for this ostensibly nonpartisan office have not always attracted much attention, but this year’s race might buck […]
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 […]
John Ronnie Short: Cities also spend a lot of money on employees, and many large cities are struggling to fund pensions and health benefits for their workforces. As municipal retirees live longer and require more health care, the costs are mounting. For example, Chicago currently faces a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion, which stems partly […]
Kate Martin, Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford Education journalist Karin Chenoweth visited one of Steubenville’s elementary schools back in 2008 and marveled at the results, which she wrote about in her book “How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools.” “It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” Chenoweth said in an interview. “They […]
Andy Pierotti: – A pending lawsuit claims a publishing giant sold defective instructional material to school districts for decades, allegedly hurting children’s ability to read. An Atlanta News First investigation uncovered the same publisher sold its curriculum in metro Atlanta, including Gwinnett County, the state’s largest school district. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two Massachusetts parents whose […]
grok 3 You’re right to push for thoroughness—my previous response might not have captured every possible city visited by Brittany Kinser, Jill Underly, and Jeff Wright in their 2025 Wisconsin DPI campaigns based on all available X posts and media links up to February 18, 2025. The challenge is that campaign travel isn’t always exhaustively […]
Nash Weerasekera: Together, Krapivin (now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge), Farach-Colton (now at New York University) and Kuszmaul demonstrated in a January 2025 paper(opens a new tab) that this new hash table can indeed find elements faster than was considered possible. ln so doing, they had disproved a conjecture long held to be true. […]
Kristina Armitage: Ironically, LLMs have only themselves to blame for this discovery of one of their limits. “The reason why we all got curious about whether they do real reasoning is because of their amazing capabilities,” Dziri said. They dazzled on tasks involving natural language, despite the seeming simplicity of their training. During the training […]
Associated Press: In ordering U.S. schools to stop “indoctrinating” students in areas of race and sexuality or risk losing federal money, President Donald Trump singled out the Madison School District as promoting the type of policy his executive order seeks to stamp out. The order, signed Wednesday, declares that federal money cannot be used on […]
Joshua Korber Hoffman, CNN When Innocent James completed his chores after school, he would light a kerosene lamp and lay down to read his books. There was no electricity in James’ part of Arusha, a region in northern Tanzania, and so his family was forced to burn expensive oil for him to learn after dark. […]
JD Busch: A few years back, I did what any reasonable parent would do after their kids came home from Chicago schools quoting Che Guevara and rattling off gender theory jargon that would give Judith Butler a headache: I pulled the plug after realizing the K-12 curriculum was infected with a mind virus embedded in […]
Matt Taibbi: It seems possible the advertised “braintrust” had leeway to make policy choices, up to a point. Klain for instance seems significantly responsible for the too-online-wokester quotient in the Biden presidency, trying to name pestilent Internet creature Neera Tanden to head the OMB. Having been “Ebola Czar” under Obama, he also seems to have […]
Austin Berg S&P cites 2025 budget, little willingness to cut spending and uncertainty about the ability to raise taxes. And: A downgrade isn’t only a reputational hit; it could also increase the city’s cost to borrow money for long-term projects like Johnson’s $1.25 billion housing and development bond, which is slated to go to market early […]
MARTÍN E. DE SIMONEFEDERICO TIBERTIWURAOLA MOSUROFEDERICO MANOLIOMARIA BARRONELIOT DIKORU: “AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write,” says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as “Uyi” by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, […]
transcript (machine generated)meta/Facebook blog post: More speech and fewer mistakes. John Robb: There’s a reason people don’t trust Mark. He doesn’t have a highly evolved digital ledger on X. People learn to trust the digital ledger before they trust the person. more: It won’t work. There’s not enough flow/dynamism on the platform anymore (since they […]
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 […]
Marguerite Roza As enrollments drop, city after city is facing pressure to close half-empty schools. Fewer kids means fewer dollars. Consolidating two schools saves money because it means paying for one less principal, librarian, nurse, PE teacher, counselor, reading coach, clerk, custodian… you get the idea. Low-enrollment schools end up on the chopping block because […]
Wall Street Journal: The city is in revolt over the move. Chicago City Council members and school principals oppose the mayor’s putsch. Alderman Andre Vasquez called the mayor’s leadership “dysfunctional.” Alderman Silvana Tabares told the school board “there is still a difference between right and wrong, and you know this is wrong.” By following the […]
Standard & Poors: S&P Global Ratings placed its ‘A+’ long-term ratings on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) Wis.’s outstanding series 2016A and 2017A redevelopment lease revenue bonds; series 2015A, 2016B, and 2016C taxable redevelopment lease revenue bonds; and ‘A’ long-term and underlying ratings (SPUR) on the district’s series 2003C and 2003D taxable pension funding bonds, all […]
Daisy Christiodoulou There are no solutions, only trade-offs One of the arguments I make is that there are quite a few overlaps between the kind of decision-making needed in education and assessment, and that required by football referees. One important concept that’s relevant to both is the idea of trade-offs. For years, before VAR was […]
Michael Lind: Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share […]
kendall Keys: Palmer’s property taxes rose 30.5% from last year’s $3,600 bill. “Right now, it’s just here’s this gap, you know, deal with it,” Palmer said. He owes the city more than $1,100 to make up for what his escrow didn’t cover. “I’m lucky in that I have the money I can cover this with. […]
Wisconsin public policy, forum: The rise in gross levies this year is driven primarily by increases to K-12 property taxes — the largest local property tax most residents will pay. The $325 increase to per pupil revenue limits in the current state budget is one factor, but so was the willingness of many referendum voters […]
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner It’s been the go-to tax in Illinois for decades. Property tax bills have been rising far faster than incomes for at least three decades, as we recently testified to a House Revenue and Finance Committee, and that’s left Illinoisans trapped paying the highest property tax rates in the nation. Those high taxes are a […]
David Blaska summary: Madison will elect three of the seven school board members, seats currently held by Laura Simkin (seat 3), Ali Muldrow (seat 4), and Nichelle Nichols (seat 5). Uniquely in the entire state, candidates run district wide but must specify which seat. Three-year terms, also an oddity. If April 1, 2025 seems a leap […]
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 […]
Bryce Hill: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is currently set to receive a pension worth an estimated $3.8 million through the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund and the Municipal Employees Annuity and Benefit Fund. He qualifies for these benefits thanks to multiple loopholes in the state’s pension code. His pension payout could ultimately be worth far more […]
Adam Andrzejewski “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” Thomas Jefferson wrotein founding the University of Virginia. Two centuries later, however, UVA has pledged to spend seemingly illimitable funds—up to $1 billion—on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, all while trying to downplay these efforts. OpenTheBooks.com, an organization I founded and […]
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 […]
Paul Vallas: The push to oust Pedro Martinez is a sideshow. CTU Pres. Stacy Davis Gates needs a scapegoat on her failure to deliver the $10 billion contract promised to her supporters and the Mayor is doing her bidding. Martinez’s counter offer would cost the district over $3 billion. City Council may block a city property […]
David Blaska: You are not a Dane County judgei n good standing if you have not ruled against Act 10, the statutory limitations on government employee collective bargaining. Bonus points if you supported the recall of Act 10’s author, Gov. Scott Walker. The latest judge to make his progressive bones here in Madison WI is […]
Kids and money: All parents want their children to understand money so that when they become adults they can make good decisions. But it can be hard to know where to start. In a special Money Box Live episode looking at how to teach children about money, Felicity Hannah heard from parents, experts and children […]
Christopher Rufo: The process of ideological capture has taken decades. But the counterrevolution can, and must, quickly retake those institutions in the name of the people and reorient them toward the enduring principles of liberty and equality. Bureaucrats abusing the public trust to advance their own ideologies should be put on notice: they will be […]
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 […]