Nearly 200 absentee ballots were not processed correctly in Madison during the 2024 General Election, but the uncounted ballots would not have affected the election results. The Madison Clerk’s Office is investigating the issue and taking steps to prevent similar problems in future elections.
A group of Wisconsin parents say the Department of Public Instruction is dragging its feet on implementing new curriculum that aims to improve children’s reading skills.
In 2023, lawmakers passed legislation known as Act 20. It required schools to shift away from “balanced literacy” curriculum to a phonics-based model known as “the science of reading” beginning this school year.
The law also prohibits the use of curriculum in kindergarten through third grade that uses three-cueing instruction, which means encouraging children to use clues like pictures to guess unfamiliar words.
The letter ought to be included in this piece, so here it is.
The law has jankiness DPI has to navigate, true.
But to me, the division is whether Wisconsin maximizes students’ gains at each step or just does phonics-flavored things and calls it a day. @DDWI13 @ReadingLeagueWI
Dane County had the second highest effective rate of 1.57%. Dane County households paid the largest median property tax bill, at about $6,170, but the median Dane County home value was 69% higher than that of Milwaukee County, at $393,500. As a result, the effective tax rate was smaller than in Milwaukee County.
In Winnebago County, the median home value was $222,400 and the median property tax was $3,362, for an effective tax rate of 1.51%.
The #s are clear. Over the past generation, we’ve increased spending on public schools and have seen no improvement whatsoever. The dollars may be misspent, but public education is not “underfunded.”
“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the deterioration is partly explained by an ageing population and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully account for the trend. His own hypothesis would come as no surprise to Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex pieces of writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to short social media posts and video clips.
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
As the state’s chief fiscal officer — and as the proud parent of a Chicago Public Schools student — I, like most Chicagoans, am outraged at the reckless fiscal course Mayor Brandon Johnson is charting at Chicago Public Schools.
Chicago voters had their say Nov. 5, electing 10 new school board members. But before the voters’ choices have taken office, Johnson pulled a midnight coup with his current …
This isn’t some glib gotcha. It gets to the fundamental issue, which is that (ironically) Republicans are bad at visualizing borders. Because this is the true border of the American world:
The more elite the college, the less they will suffer from a drop in overall U.S. enrollment. Harvard alone, for example, rejected more than 50,000 students last year—enough to populate several less-prestigious colleges’ freshman classes. A drop in stocks, or a reckoning that reveals their opaque private-equity funds aren’t as valuable as they look on paper, would leave a mark, though.
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 they’re the ones that typically cost more per pupil.
But there is another way to cut costs without closing underenrolled schools.
First, it’s worth noting that small schoolsneedn’t cost more per pupil. Our school spending and outcomes data include examples of small schools all across the country that operate on per-pupil costs comparable to their larger peers—some even delivering solid student outcomes.
But here’s the catch: These financially viable small schools are staffed very differently than larger schools.
There’s a fifty-five-student school near Yosemite that spends about $13,000 a student—well under the state average. How do they make it work? One teacher teaches grades two, three, and four. There’s no designated nurse, counselor, or PE teacher, and rather than offer traditional athletics, students learn to ski and hike.
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Madison is expanding bricks and mortar via tax and $pending increases despite enrollment declines…
Someone’s lying. That’s what I’ve discovered after trying to free my state’s higher-education system from “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Instead of complying with a DEI ban we passed into law earlier this year, the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine says it’s forced to maintain these programs or it will lose its accreditation, essentially killing the institution. Yet accreditors say that isn’t the case, even as they give quiet cover to universities. If federal reforms don’t stop these shenanigans, virtually every part of higher education may soon wriggle free of state DEI bans.
I co-sponsored Iowa’s ban on DEI, which Gov. Kim Reynolds signed in May. As an Asian-American, I’m well aware that activists have used this ideology to discriminate against people like me, especially in higher education. Our legislation aimed to right this wrong and provide equal treatment to everyone by banning public institutions, including Iowa’s three public universities, from having DEI offices, programs and staff. I thought that our law would soon drive DEI from our college campuses and state government.
I was wrong. In early November, the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public universities, issued a report on compliance with the law. It laid out, in detail, how DEI initiatives have been shut down statewide. But in the fine print on page 78, I learned that Carver College is keeping its Office of Health Parity open. The office proudly declares on its home page that it “strives to achieve excellence through the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The Board of Regents says its hand was forced by accreditors. These are private institutions that decide whether universities and graduate schools can grant degrees. Iowa’s DEI ban exempts programs that accreditors deem necessary, and accreditors have significant leverage over state lawmakers. If they withdrew their approval from one of our state universities, the political blowback would be severe. No lawmaker wants to be accused of killing a beloved state institution. In other states, including Missouri and Tennessee, the threat of losing accreditation has delayed and even prevented the passage of DEI bans.
Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice differences, and cognitive load. Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional designmodels that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.
Higher education in the U.S. faces a crisis: Its credibility is under attack. The public is increasingly skeptical of university-trained experts and the test-score-based meritocracy that dominates America’s upper middle class.
In a mass democracy, the public accepts elite privilege only when it benefits average citizens. But the 21st century has brought a litany of elite failures: inaccurate intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, regulatory failures that permitted the Great Recession, mismanagement of the pandemic leading to unnecessary deaths and devastating losses for small businesses and students, and the worst inflation since the early 1980s. It’s no wonder much of the public rejects elitism. In retrospect, the populist revolt was inevitable.
Education level has become the great divider in contemporary American politics, eclipsing race and sex. Those with four-year college degrees tend to vote differently than those without.
This new politics of education-based division has transformed the political parties. In the 1960 presidential election, Democrats dominated the non-college-educated vote, while Republicans prevailed among voters with college degrees. The reverse was true in the 2024 election. Working-class voters, including Hispanics and blacks, have been shifting toward the GOP.
Alongside these shifts in voting patterns, American attitudes toward higher education have also changed. In 2015, majorities of Democrats and Republicans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities. While confidence has since declined modestly among Democrats, it has collapsed among Republicans. A decade ago, 56% of Republicans expressed high confidence in higher education, and only 11% expressed little or no confidence. Today, a mere 20% have high confidence and 50% have little or no confidence.
Kennedy, the president-elect’s nominee to run the Health and Human Services Department, aims to remove soda and processed foods from federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. The move could have big repercussions for the beverage industry.
Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks. And it uses Penn’s double standard to make a creative legal argument: By punishing speech that offended racial minorities—but not speech that offended Jews—the university engaged in unlawful race discrimination when it singled Wax out for punishment, the letter says.
“The University’s speech policies … transparently discriminate on the basis of race, including most notably the race of the subject of the speech at issue,” the letter reads. “As such, they violate federal law’s various prohibitions against race-based discrimination.”
Wax’s lawyer, Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, said the case could mark the first time a university has been sued for having racially discriminatory speech policies.
Education consultant Brittany Kinser, who told WisPolitics last week she had decided against a run for state superintendent, reversed course and has filed to run for the office this spring.
Kinser, who describes herself as a “Blue Dog Democrat,” declined to comment further to WisPolitics yesterday in light of a school shooting in Madison.
Kinser, of Wauwatosa, has launched Wisconsin Reads, a nonprofit that backs evidence-based literacy practices and the science of reading.
She joins state Superintendent Jill Underly and Sauk Prairie Superintendent Jeff Wright in the race to be the state’s top education official.
Kinser is critical of DPI’s recent decision to lower the “cut” scores for the state’s annual Forward exam, saying the move lowers standards. Underly said the new scores more accurately describe student performance.
“I want to restore high academic standards and make sure students have the skills for good jobs after graduation,” Kinser wrote in a text message to the Journal Sentinel. “We must prioritize reading, writing, math and science to provide the foundation for meaningful careers and a bright future. The kids should be the number one priority.
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 orders of the mayor who will “personally benefit from a costly union contract,” she continued, “you’re intentionally clearing a way to saddle taxpayers with billions of costs.” All true.
Mr. Johnson has been desperate to oust Mr. Martinez because the schools chief has blocked the mayor’s desire to pay off his benefactors at the CTU. The union wants big raises and more benefits, but the district, with a budget gap of more than $500 million for the current fiscal year, can’t afford it.
Mr. Johnson proposed the district take a $300 million short-term loan to help cover the gap. Mr. Martinez and the original school board refused on grounds it would add to the city’s already unsustainable debt. (Standard & Poor’s has warned the city it could face a credit downgrade.) When the mayor pressured the board to fire Mr. Martinez, they resigned en masse.
Nearly 700 Chicago school principals and assistant principals also supported Mr. Martinez in a letter to the Board of Education. Twenty-one Chicago aldermen signed a letter to the school board saying they “ardently” believed Mr. Martinez is the “logical choice to guide CPS through these troubled times.”
Mr. Martinez was fired without cause so his contract ensures he will stay in his job for another six months, but CTU President Stacy Davis Gates wants a contract before the new board members take office on Jan. 15. Mr. Johnson is now proposing to appoint a “co-CEO” who would serve alongside Mr. Martinez to end-run the chief and approve the CTU contract.
Measuring the relationship between out-of-school time and outcomes like test scores can be difficult. Researchers are primarily confounded by an inability to determine what compels students to choose homework during their time off over other activities. Are those who spend more time on homework just extra motivated? Or are they struggling students who need to work harder to keep up? What role do social expectations from parents or peers play? Previous studies have examined the impact of this outside time use on educational outcomes for students. A 2007 study using data from Berea College in Kentucky identified a causal relationship between hours spent studying and a student’s academic performance through an interesting measure. The researchers took advantage of randomly assigned college roommates, paying attention to those who came to campus with a video game console in tow. They hypothesized students randomly assigned to a roommate without a video game console would study more, since all other factors remained equal. That hypothesis held up, and that group also received significantly higher grades, demonstrating the causal relationship.
The % of 12th graders who say educational institutions do a “good” or “very good” job for the country has steadily declined since 2002, falling ~15% for “public schools” & ~40% for “colleges & universities.”
For nearly 250 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bookshelf-busting series of gilt-lettered tomes, often purchased to show that its owners cared about knowledge.
It was the sort of physical media expected to die in the internet era, and indeed, the encyclopedia’s publisher announced that it was ending the print edition in 2012. Skeptics wondered how Britannica the company could survive in the age of Wikipedia.
The answer was to adapt to the times.
Britannica Group, as the company is now known, runs websites, including Britannica.com and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, and sells educational software to schools and libraries. It also sells artificial intelligence agent software that underpins applications like customer service chatbots and data retrieval.
Britannica has figured out not only how to survive, but also how to do well financially. Jorge Cauz, its chief executive, said in an interview that the publisher enjoyed pro forma profit margins of about 45 percent.
The company is weighing an initial public offering, in which it could seek a valuation of about $1 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Several parents of female students have contacted KCE with a very serious concern. According to allegations shared with KCE by multiple sources:
A boy has been using the girls’ locker room to change at Westosha Central High School. He stares at the young girls while they change and that makes them feel very uncomfortable. Some of the girls began to use the stalls to change. When they would exit, the boy would be exposing his penis and rubbing himself with lotion. He claimed to the girls that the lotion was to “prevent chafing.”
Rankings are ubiquitous: every week, lists of best-selling records, movies, and books are released, and in sports like tennis, athletes are ranked based on their performance in major tournaments. While we know there is more to a song, book, or movie than its sales figures, we are drawn to rankings because they simplify complexity. They reduce a multidimensional concept like success into simple ordered lists.
In academia, citation-based metrics have come to serve a similar function. With platforms like Clarivate and Google Scholar, measuring an author’s performance through citations has become a common practice, whether we like it or not. In some countries, these bibliometric indicators have even started to dictate career progression, making citations an informal currency of success.
There are two Reddit posts in r/AskAcademia and a more detailed and updated vroniplag page (this specific page contains all of the 52 segments found in Andreas Theodorou’s thesis) about the case of academic plagiarism of Theodorou which is shown below:
Andreas Theodorou obtained his Phd thesis from the University of Bath. He is currently a visiting associate professor at UPC , previously a researcher at the University of Umea. He also was a CEO of a company related to AI ethics which he had with his mentor Virginia Dignum.
His thesis contains several plagiarized sentences, most of which are not detectable by plagiarism detection software. It appears that Andreas has taken steps to avoid being discovered. He appears to have methodically inspected each of his plagiarized sentences with a content similarity detector and made minor changes to them in order to avoid being caught. Many of these phrases can still be found via a manual google search.
1. Please provide the number of students by school and total across the district that took the FAST (Formative Assessment System for Teachers) from 1 September, 2024 to 1 December 2024.
The Data Team would assume this to mean the counts of students by school and total across the MMSD for each of the FastBridge universal screeners in use by MMSD for 2024-2025 for the fall administration only. That would then be:
Grades K-1:FastBridge earlyReading (English: all instructional programs; Spanish for DLI/DBE), earlyMath
Grades 2-5: FastBridge CBMReading (English: all instructional programs; Spanish for DLI/DBE), CBMMath Automaticity, aMath
The attached report contains the majority of the requested information and is used by MMSD staff. It does not, however, allow for the calculation of students taking these assessments at a total district level, because students take multiple FastBridge assessments. Even the school totals are not necessarily counts of students who have taken the assessments, but rather, total counts of assessments taken. At a school and grade and assessment level, however, we can be fairly certain that each total at that level is a count of students.
2. Please provide the number of students by school and total across the district that took AIMSweb screening from 1 September, 2024 to 1 December 2024.
MMSD did not administer any aimswebPlus assessments during the Fall window. The requirement to administer aimswebPlus literacy screeners in grades K-3 begins in winter and for 4K begins in the spring. Since the assessment will not be administered until the winter administration, MMSD does not currently have participation data in these assessments for your specified timeframe.
With the delivery of this material, MMSD considers your request closed.
Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a survey finding a decline over 12 years in adult-population functional intelligence in most of its 31 surveyed members, including in the U.S.
You can always question such comparisons. But the 12-year period coincided with the rise of social media. It coincided with the turn of traditional media toward the immature, polarized and neurotic emotional response known to psychologists as splitting, or black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking.
How does a citizen go about honing his grasp of the world’s complexities, ambiguities and contradictions except through consumption of media? It seems entirely plausible, then, if our journalism is stupider, it will soon be evident in the public also becoming stupider.
When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.
To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.
Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?
What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.
The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.
Can anyone name a school or school district that post any data on student outcomes on their web site? It should be a federal or state requirement that they do so.
The University of Michigan has fired a DEI administrator. That’s a start. One Rachel Dawson, we read, directed the prestigious public university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives. Yeah, the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion is cluttered with that kind of high-toned jabberwocky.
Ms. Dawson stands in the shaming dock for uttering various and sundry anti-semitic utterances, among them saying Jews are “wealthy and privileged.” But then, don’t DEI scolds say that about every white person?
Elite universities have been so thoroughly captured by the left that they are no longer capable of reforming themselves to offer an ideologically balanced and intellectually diverse education.
Declaring that institutions are beyond repair should not be done lightly. The Bible offers an instructive lesson on this. Before judging the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham bargains with God so that the cities would be spared if even 10 righteous people could be found there. If there are fewer than 10, the cities lack the critical mass required for making improvements.
Let’s apply the Sodom and Gomorrah test to the Ivy League. If we can find even 10 openly conservative professors at these universities, it might be possible for them to form a critical mass and make progress in getting their institutions to hire other conservative scholars to achieve meaningful ideological balance. Without even 10, these universities would not only lack the motivation to seek greater ideological diversity, but they would have great difficulty identifying quality conservative scholars and convincing them to join an organization without any like-minded colleagues. The point here is not that conservative faculty are the righteous ones, but that a critical mass of conservative professors is necessary to achieve internal reform.
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KEY FINDINGS: 1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
Andy Remus, Vergara’s uncle, spoke at the funeral saying the family holds “no bitterness or unforgiveness” toward 15-year-old Rupnow, noting her family lost a daughter, too.
“Somehow, this precious child of God lost her way,” he said.
Vergara’s funeral was held Saturday at City Church, located next to Abundant Life on East Buckeye Road in Madison. Opening with slow guitar and just over 100 people watching on Facebook Live, the first song concluded with the words “you are God with us.”
Remus said the family is leaning into God to cope with the tragedy — along with being OK with laughter when remembering happy or funny moments.
City Church Lead Pastor Tom Flaherty opened with prayer, asking for God’s help to receive comfort so that healing can begin.
“You save those who are crushed in spirit; well we are crushed,” he prayed. “Please save us.”
From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.
The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.
American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writerdescribes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.
The problems in FrontierMath demand theoretical understanding, creative insight, and specialized expertise, often requiring multiple hours of effort from expert mathematicians to solve. Here, we provide a set of representative example problems and their solutions selected from each quintile of difficulty.
Homework time for U.S. 8th and 10th graders decreased significantly from 2021 to 2023, with 10th graders experiencing a 24% decline and 8th graders a 17% decline.
Florida administrators are revising general education in universities and colleges. Perverse incentives have diluted and politicized general-education courses at the expense of foundational knowledge. Since universities will not fix themselves, state administrators must safeguard educational vision where faculty and university administrators will not.
How did we get here? Most college curriculum was prescribed in the 1800s. Harvard under legendary president Charles William Eliot swung the pendulum toward a totally elective college experience in the late 1800s. Under a strict elective system, students could make their way through Harvard guided only by their own choices. Schools stampeded to the elective system. The quality of education suffered, however, because a grasp of the Western heritage simply fell by the wayside, and students were ill prepared for higher-level classes.
Perverse incentives have diluted and politicized general-education courses at the expense of foundational knowledge.Today’s system of major concentration, general-education distribution, and electives was born from these swings of the pendulum. Yale adopted it in 1901. Cornell in 1905. Even Harvard abandoned its elective system for the major/general-education approach in 1910.
It’s rare to see such overt ideological censorship in print. Most academics know enough to couch their partisanship in comments about the quality of citations or the need for more data. But Click is just a symptom of the wider problem. She has grown up in a department and in an American history profession where outright ideological fixations are considered good form. That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious.
The snub was also ironic because The Footnote was launched as part of a 2021 initiative at Georgetown that “celebrates the intellectual spectrum of higher education” and “collects diverse historical perspectives … believing that everyone has something to say about the past.”
Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide.
The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics.
Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handpicked board of education has added the termination of Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to their Friday meeting agenda.
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates and Vice President Jackson Potter have been lobbying Johnson for months to pressure the board to fire Martinez, who has refused to support the issuance of a $300M high-interest payday loan to fund CTU’s contract demands.
This pressure led to the ousting of the entire seven-member school board in October. Johnson then appointed an entirely new board, with no oversight. The new board president then resigned when 40 aldermen called for him to step down after social media posts came to light wherein he supported 9/11 conspiracy theories and anti-semitism.
Johnson and the CTU are hoping for all of this to rushed through before newly elected members of the school board take office on Jan. 15.
Among the voices who had been critical of the data science courses was Stuart Russell, distinguished professor of computer science at Berkeley. “All the evidence shows that these courses were deliberately designed not to build on or deepen students’ understanding of mathematics,” he wrote in a letter supporting the BOARS decision. “Such a student could certainly not progress in the data science major at Berkeley. The University is therefore in danger of shutting a vast body of students out of careers in science and engineering by authorizing a misleading path to nowhere.”
Russell was not alone in his opinion. Since 2022, hundreds of faculty across California, including many from Berkeley, had signed a letter and a petition saying that the data science courses currently offered in the state were not rigorous enough to qualify as advanced math. Yet, much to their dismay, for years, UC had been quietly allowing students to satisfy their Algebra II admission requirements with these alternative courses.
But the BOARS decision also sparked renewed confusion about long-standing and fundamental disagreements over how to balance equity-focused initiatives and academic rigor when teaching math to high schoolers. Today, many still believe that data science and statistics courses offer more practical and inclusive options for students who may be less mathematically inclined.
Harvard magazine has an excellent interview with three scientists, Michael Mina, Douglas Melton and Stuart Schreiber, all highly regarded in their fields of life sciences, who have recently left Harvard for the private sector.
Why did they leave? Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic. In my talk on US Pandemic Policy I discuss the similar failure of the Yale School of Public Health and how miraculously and absurdly Tyler stepped in to save the day. The rot is deep
For decades Illinois lawmakers have made a mess of the state’s public pension plans. Now they’re about to do so again.
Several proposals to increase the pension benefits of Tier 2 workers – government workers hired after 2010 – are being floated in Illinois, some already in bill form. The purported reason for the increases is that some worker benefits may not be compliant with a federal requirement that requires a worker’s pension benefits be “at least equal” to what he or she would have received under Social Security.
The total cost to taxpayers for those potential changes – ranging from a few billion dollars to as much as $80 billion through 2045 – would make Illinois’ already untenable pension debts even more untenable. A recent Fitch report shows Illinoisans are already burdened with $172 billion in state-level pension debts – the largest in the country (see Appendix).
Unsurprisingly, these “solutions” are being promoted and pushed despite no formal evidence presented that anyone is out of compliance with the IRS’ “safe harbor” test – a test (Revenue Procedure 91-40) that determines if benefits meet the Social Security minimums. There’s been nothing from the IRS nor the state’s actuaries nor any of the various government employers that quantifies which workers – if any – are not in compliance, and what the costs of that noncompliance might be. Until lawmakers know the facts, they should do nothing to enhance the benefits of Tier 2.
As Table 1 indicates, 13 states plus D.C. impose statewide sanctuary rules. These states harbor 45 percent of the nation’s illegal immigrants, accounting for the vast majority of those in sanctuary jurisdictions. California stands out with three million illegal immigrants, or 21.8 percent of the nationwide total.
A further three states do not have state-level rules but have so many local sanctuary jurisdictions that they are treated as full sanctuary states in this analysis. About 751,000 (or 5.4 percent) of the nation’s illegal immigrants find sanctuary in those states.
Another 822,000 (5.9 percent) live in sanctuary localities within non-sanctuary states. There are dozens of these localities ranging in size from major metropolitan centers (such as Atlanta) to small counties in rural areas.
Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?
MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
In a study appearing this week in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.
Eric Martinez PhD ’24 is the lead author of the study. Francis Mollica, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is also an author of the paper.
Interactive data displays allow users to explore resource equity, how dollars are allocated to schools, and which schools are most able to leverage their money to maximize student outcomes. Click any state to explore and filter by specific districts, school characteristics, and student demographics.
Spending data per student for each school is shown on the horizontal axis. The vertical axis displays outcomes; the source is noted in the axis label. Note at what value the axis starts (this is often>zero).
The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with identifying reductions in federal bureaucracy and wasteful government spending in coordination with the president and the Office of Management and Budget, comes at a time when the federal government and all Americans must confront three uncomfortable truths:
The federal government often fails to deliver on its objectives, even those few constitutionally enumerated legitimate functions, while weighing down the economy with regulations that prevent market and nongovernmental actors from addressing major social and economic problems.
US economic growth, while stronger than much of the rest of the developed world, has been significantly lower in the past 25 years than the quarter-century beforehand, reducing American living standards below what they could have been.
Government debt, already historically high, is set to explode to unprecedented levels on policy autopilot over the next three decades, risking some combination of high inflation, slower growth, and federal default.
These three challenges were either worsened or created by the growth and metastasis of an unwieldy federal government and its associated administrative state. The government tries to do too much, so it overspends and overregulates the private sector. The federal government tries to be all things to all Americans—regulator, taxman, protector of individual rights, and Santa Claus—and ends up fulfilling very few of its roles, at a catastrophic cost to the life, liberty, private property, and prosperity of Americans.
DOGE’s focus on reversing a decades-long power grab by regulatory agencies that has strangled American businesses, shackled consumers, raised the costs of innovation, and imposed an intolerable bureaucratic burden on all Americans is welcome.
President Biden’s speech on the economy was followed by disappointing inflation news. Strategas’ Common Man CPI, which tracks essential goods and services, rose 3% annually in November, outpacing headline CPI and wages, potentially signaling a second wave of inflation.
the conflict is more than accruing multiple pensions simultaneously, it impacts the negotiations on steps and lanes
because he’s retained his years of service to CPS via being on loan to CTU, if he goes back to the classroom, it would directly impact his pay and pension accruals
It had been a long week in a chaotic year on the education beat.
Chicago Public Schools officials had released a new five-year strategic plan. And the Board of Education had voted to approve it. Sarah Karp, my WBEZ colleague covering education, and I had produced two in-depth stories on that plan that week.
“Scientific data indicate that playing a team sport like soccer improves executive function skills, which are among the most key life skills of all,” Dr. Alison Brooks wrote in a journal commentary accompanying the new study. She’s professor of orthopedics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
The new study was published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. It was conducted in The Netherlands and led by Lu Yang, a graduate medical student at the University Medical Center Groningen.
Yang’s team looked at data on almost 900 schoolchildren tracked from 2006 through 2017. The kids were assessed at two age periods: Ages 5 to 6 and then again at 10 to 11.
The public is increasingly skeptical of university-trained experts and the test-score-based meritocracy that dominates America’s upper middle class.
In a mass democracy, the public accepts elite privilege only when it benefits average citizens. But the 21st century has brought a litany of elite failures: inaccurate intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, regulatory failures that permitted the Great Recession, mismanagement of the pandemic leading to unnecessary deaths and devastating losses for small businesses and students, and the worst inflation since the early 1980s. It’s no wonder much of the public rejects elitism. In retrospect, the populist revolt was inevitable.
Colleges and universities even have a formalized response. When the two-body problem arises, departments may engage in a practice known as partner hiring: They ask their deans or the heads of other departments to find or create a job for the partner of a person they’d like to hire. Sometimes those extra jobs are tenure-track (the kind that scholars want most), but other times they are something less: lectureships, research positions, or even staff positions such as project managers. Some schools allocate part of their budget for partner hires every year, considering it a recruitment expense. Others turn to regional contacts, hoping to place scholars at nearby institutions for mutual benefit.
The practice of accommodating academic spouses is now second nature in higher education. It’s part of the furniture of academic life, casting its shadow across every school and each department. Partner hiring is widely understood to be beneficial and even necessary when it comes to faculty recruitment. But its effects on the academic labor market, and on the research and educational practice of colleges and universities, is still poorly understood. Hiring—or refusing to hire—academic partners can have a dramatic impact on morale; and faculty are hardly of one mind about its virtue.
In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated.
She documented how devastated parents were lied to and coerced. A favorite tactic of gender clinicians was to tell parents that if they didn’t consent to life-altering treatments with a long list of side effects, including sterility, their girls were likely to commit suicide. Parents were routinely asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”
This kind of rhetoric was not limited to fringe activists pushing an extremist agenda. Over the past decade, it became the standard trope—from human rights organizations, to the legacy press, to the Democratic Party. President Biden himself declared: “Affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things a parent, teacher, or doctor can do to help keep children from harm.” Numerous federal documents encouraged medical intervention.
Nasdaq’s diversity quotas for listed companies, approved by the SEC, are deemed anti-competitive by the Fifth Circuit. The court argues the quotas, while intended to promote diversity, do not align with the SEC’s mandate to protect investors and the economy.
The bill could have easily been under 20 pages. Instead, there are dozens of unrelated policy items crammed into the 1,547 pages of this bill. There’s no legitimate reason for them to be voted on as a package deal by a lame-duck Congress. 72 pages worth of “Pandemic Preparedness and Response” policy; renewal of the much-criticized “Global Engagement Center,” a key player in the federal censorship state; 17 different pieces of Commerce legislation; paving the way for a new football stadium in D.C.; a pay raise for Congressmen & Senators and making them eligible for Federal Employee Health Benefits. It’s indefensible to ram these measures through at the last second without debate.
We’re grateful for DOGE’s warm reception on Capitol Hill. Nearly everyone agrees we need a smaller & more streamlined federal government, but actions speak louder than words. This is an early test. The bill should fail.
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 of which were issued by the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee (RACM), on CreditWatch with negative implications.
S&P Global Ratings sought the final third-party financial audit from MPS for the 2022-2023 fiscal year ending June 30, 2023 to assess the district’s financial position.
“To date, the district has not issued its final 2022-2023 audited financial statements,” said S&P Global Ratings credit analyst David Smith. “The ratings’ placement on CreditWatch with negative implications reflects our view that there is at least a one-in-two chance of a lower rating in the next 90 days, pending the finalization of the district’s 2022-2023 audit and our assessment of whether its credit quality has deteriorated due to financial reporting irregularities,” Mr. Smith added.
The Mauston School District, which officials say is likely to dissolve in two years without additional funding, is putting its third operating referendum in less than a year on the Feb. 18 spring primary ballot.
During a special meeting earlier this month, the Mauston School Board unanimously voted to put a four-year, $7 million measure on the ballot, which will include a primary election for state superintendent of public instruction. That same referendum failed by 69 votes on Nov. 5, when it was rejected 2,635 to 2,566, or 50.7% to 49.3%.
Later in November, the district began the process of dissolving by the 2026-27 school year, saying it would no long be able to fund operations.
Mauston School District Superintendent Joel Heesch said area stakeholders advised him and the board to retry the $1.75 million per year referendum after the narrow rejection on Nov. 5.
The details, some of which even many conservatives are not aware, are crucial here. When faced with a nominee they don’t like—basically anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders—the left finds a way to make accusations of sexual misconduct. Here is the important part: These accusations are often completely fabricated and amount to criminal attempts at extortion. This is what they did to me.
The plan was to get me, a former drinker, to pin some crazy stuff on Kavanaugh whether any of it was true or not. This is why when Ronan Farrow called me in September 2018 and asked about me “and Brett Kavanaugh involved in sexual misconduct in the 1980s” he was so vague. I was accused by Farrow of doing something bad, somewhere, to someone, at some time during a 10-year period. That left room to extort me because I was given no facts to deny. They could claim I was anywhere at any time and then demand I sink my friend—or else.
On Sept. 24, 2018, I got a phone message from a sinister voice. “You like f**king with people?” it hissed. “I like to f**k with people too. Give me a call. We can work out a deal.” On Sept. 26, my lawyer asked me to come into her office. I sat down and she asked a direct question: “Who did you lose your virginity to?” Apparently, there was someone claiming that “in the context of a conversation about losing virginity” I’d talked about how I had lost mine. I’d lost mine, the claim was, in a group sex situation that may or may not have been rape. Among others, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter who fell for the Russia collusion hoax, went on MSNBC to claim that as kids “while at Georgetown Prep” some friends and I had group sex with an older woman. Mayer is now the lead hound in the media dogpile going after Pete Hegseth. In the end, I had to tell my lawyer the name of the girl to whom I had lost my virginity. Fortunately, the woman in question is a terrific person, a wife and mother now, and I can only assume she vouched for me because I never heard about it again.
Legislative Context: The post discusses the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) decision to not enforce Act 20, a law aimed at improving reading education by banning certain teaching methods. Act 20 includes requirements for schools to implement science-based early literacy instruction.
Personal Impact: Jenny Warner expresses her frustration with DPI’s decision, highlighting its negative impact on her dyslexic children and suggesting the curriculum choice is politically motivated rather than child-centered. She criticizes DPI for not following the law, which she believes would benefit her children’s education.
Call to Action: Warner’s letter is part of a broader advocacy for better educational practices in Wisconsin, emphasizing the need for DPI to focus on student needs over bureaucratic or political agendas. This reflects ongoing debates about educational policy and support for students with learning disabilities.
and I hope they stimulate a deeper level of discussion and better solutions moving forward. Ultimately, only President Trump can decide how his administration handles the January 6 cases, and he will be considering these issues from a different perspective than anyone else. In this article, I try to surface factors President Trump might take into account, but I realize that he may weigh those factors differently than I would. Even though there are many ways to approach this issue, I am confident that whatever President Trump decides will bring January 6 defendants relief.
However, after his trial it was discovered that the DOJ had engaged in outrageous conduct that violated Stevens’ civil rights. Because of that, Attorney General Holder moved to vacate Stevens’ sentencing date and dismiss the indictment. Judge Emmett Sullivan—a D.C. judge who has also presided in January 6 cases—found that the prosecution had been “permeated by the systemic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence” and granted the dismissal. The end result was that Ted Stevens was exonerated, but at the cost of his senate seat.
Compare that outcome to the recent Hunter Biden pardon. Hunter pleaded guilty to avoid a damaging trial, but he had not yet been sentenced when his father pardoned him. Essentially, Hunter was in the same pre-sentencing stage that Senator Stevens had been in when his case was dismissed. Judge Scarsi vacated Hunter Biden’s sentencing date and dismissed the case because a pardon had been issued, but Judge Scarsi declined to dismiss the indictment containing the underlying criminal allegations against Hunter.
Here we have to contrast two possible paths: pardons vs. exoneration in court. Depending on the path taken, the allegations against a defendant will either be dismissed, or the allegations will remain. If January 6 defendants receive a pardon from President Trump, any defendants who have already pleaded or gone to trial will have the same legal outcome as Hunter Biden: charges will be forgiven, but the allegations will remain. However, if Trump instead grants a temporary reprieve in all cases, the Trump Administration can then evaluate whether January 6 defendant civil rights were violated, which could justify convictions being vacated and indictments being dismissed.
A lawsuit alleging universities colluded to determine students’ financial-aid packages provides a glimpse into the ways top schools assess children of privilege differently from the rest of the applicant pool.
At Georgetown University, a former president selected students for a special admission list by consulting their parents’ donation history, not their transcript, according to the suit. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a board member got the school to admit two applicants who were children of a wealthy former business colleague, the suit alleges. And at Notre Dame, an enrollment official in charge of a special applicant list wrote to others, “Sure hope the wealthy next year raise a few more smart kids!”, according to the suit.
The motion, filed Tuesday in Illinois federal court, is the latest salvo in a lawsuit that began in January 2022. The plaintiffs, former students, initially accused more than a dozen elite universities with price fixing. Twelve schools have since settled. The motion on Tuesday seeks class-action status for the case against the remaining five schools: MIT, Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown and Cornell University.
For families embroiled in the college-application process and facing ever steeper odds to win entry to elite schools, the records feed suspicions that colleges have different standards for children of means.
High-earning government workers would also benefit more than lower earners.
House Republicans passed the bill after the election, perhaps as a payoff to the International Association of Fire Fighters, which declined to endorse Kamala Harris and has led the lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. Many firefighters retire in their early 50s and then work for private employers.
Thirteen GOP Senators have co-sponsored a companion bill, including Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Markwayne Mullin, John Kennedy, Mike Braun, JD Vance, Deb Fischer, Jerry Moran, Pete Ricketts, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott and John Boozman.
Social Security is headed for insolvency, but these Republicans don’t seem to care. The Weingarten gift would cost $196 billion over 10 years. That’s more than double the savings from raising the retirement age to 70, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
We know Republicans are phonies on spending restraint, but handing a huge victory to unions like the teachers and Afscme that back Democrats takes a special kind of political masochism. Please spare us any future whining about debt and deficits.
A 14-year-old north Queensland boy with a severe intellectual disability was wrongly convicted and sentenced to nine months’ detention by a magistrate who recorded guilty pleas to a series of charges, despite the child being incapable of instructing his lawyers and not verbalising a plea in court.
The boy – who has an IQ of 54 – spent 136 days in custody in 2023 and was convicted of 19 offences, mostly related to breaking and entering properties.
The convictions were overturned by the Queensland district court judge Ian Dearden, who published a judgment last week ruling that the sentencing children’s court magistrate “could not have been satisfied” the boy understood the charges.
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
According to a United Nations estimate, 230 languages went extinct between 1950 and 2010. If my profession doesn’t act, the language of business—accounting—could vanish too.
The number of students who took the exam to become certified public accountants in 2022 hit a 17-year low. From 2020 to 2022, bachelor’s degrees in accounting dropped 7.8% after steady declines since 2018.
While the shortage isn’t yet an issue for the country’s largest firms, it’s beginning to affect our economy and capital markets. In the first half of 2024, nearly 600 U.S.-listed companies reported material weaknesses related to personnel. S&P Global analysts last year warned that many municipalities were at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn due to delayed financial disclosures.
Our profession must remove hurdles to learning the accounting language while preserving quality. In October, KPMG became the first large accounting firm to advocate developing alternate paths to CPA licensing. We want pathways that emphasize experience, not academic credits, after college.
