Virginia Postrel

To this Angeleno, by far the best analogy for Claude’s constitution is the show bible for a TV program. This siteoffers a good description of show bibles, as well as links to examples.3 Creating a show bible forces a prospective showrunner to do more than write a pilot episode. It requires articulating things like the show’s arc and tone and explains why the series should exist. 

A show bible serves two purposes. It is first an outward-facing sales document designed to get the show sold. Once the show is in production, the bible becomes the document that different writers use to keep track of the show’s evolution and maintain its continuity.

An AI constitution, like a show bible, is an important coordination tool across time and teams. “A lot of different aspects of the model’s behavior maybe have been spread across a bunch of different teams,” says Carlsmith. “Having a constitution allows a centralized point of design and intention.” Claude’s constitution tries to articulate what Claude is and to create a stable—and positive—character.

I learned why that is such a hard problem. Training an LLM like Claude has two stages. Pre-training is the process of vacuuming up the contents of the internet and any other sources the trainers can get their hands on to create the “foundation model.” Here, the LLM absorbs the patterns and variety represented in the training corpus: a vast sea of Reddit with a tincture George Eliot. That’s the training that allows an LLM to predict what human behavior (e.g., writing, images) in similar circumstances would be like.

The more you tell an LLM about your context and goals in the prompt, so it has a good idea of “similar circumstances,” the more likely you are to be pleased with the result—a helpful tip I need to remember! You aren’t programming a computer with commands that will be taken literally. It needs to know the request’s context.

Post-training is an ongoing stage of active intervention in which developers tweak the model so that its behavior and persona become more desirable and stable. Anthropic wants Claude to act as the “helpful AI assistant” that prioritizes safety, ethics, compliance with Anthropic’s commands, and helpfulness, qualities developed at length in the constitution. It can make small tradeoffs but should keep that order in mind. It shouldn’t be so helpful that it helps you kill your spouse.

Josh Moody:

A new government report shows that the vast majority of colleges lose money on athletics even at the highest levels, with students and the academic enterprise subsidizing sports.

Who foots the bill when college athletics can’t pay for themselves?

The answer, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is a mix of students—who heavily subsidize programs with athletic fees—and the academic enterprise itself. Virtually all programs rely on funding from outside athletics to cover costs, the report noted.

Released Wednesday at the request of Education and Workforce Committee Chairman, Tim Walberg, the GAO report found that college athletic programs are, for the most part, not self-sustaining. Altogether, 330 of 352 Division I programs—or 94 percent—lost money in the 2023–24 academic year.

Kimberley A. Strassel

The Supreme Court last week allowed Donald Trump’s ballroom construction to proceed, eliciting shock from the press corps. The court on Monday allowed the president’s mail-in voting order to continue, eliciting the same shock. This follows the shock after Trump administration wins on immigration enforcement, personnel firings, DEI and transgender orders, and dozens of other issues.

How long is the public meant to treat the press’s pearl-clutching as genuine, rather than part of a campaign to undermine the administration and the credibility of the high court?

The state of legal reporting has reached peak national embarrassment, a master class in fiction that rivals the reporting about Russia “collusion” and Joe Biden’s undiminished capacity. The media’s contribution to lawfare began in the earliest days of the first Trump term and has become only more brazen. The swings and misses are there for all to see, every day. Yet the formula is now so routine that nobody pushes back.

It works like this: The administration takes an action that offends liberal sensibilities. Interest groups rush to litigate, sometimes with prepackaged lawsuits. The press quotes liberal law professors and the litigators themselves as to why the suits are worthy. A liberal judge issues an injunction, which is treated as further proof of a lawsuit’s merit. The stories omit any critical analysis of standing, jurisdiction, merits or precedent. When a higher court corrects the legal overreach, the media, rather than acknowledge it got it wrong, insists the judges are in the tank for Mr. Trump.

Consider that ballroom case. When the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit last December to halt the project, the press corps pushed the litigation as a slam dunk. The stories all led with a quote from the suit, presenting as fact that “no president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever.” The pieces cataloged the laws the administration had supposedly violated, and the claim that any building required the “express authority of Congress.” Critics hailed the early August ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to halt the project as evidence of the trust’s legal firepower. 

Amy Gibbons:

Michael Gove has accused Cambridge University of peddling “toxic nonsense” to the next generation of teachers.

The former education secretary warned Cambridge’s Faculty of Education was letting the profession down.

He singled out Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of the university’s teacher-training school, for promoting an educational philosophy that displayed “all the weaknesses of modern academia”.

In a commentary in The Spectator, which he edits, Lord Gove described Prof Cremin’s book, Rewilding Education, as a publication that “doesn’t just display ignorance” but “flaunts and celebrates it”.

“The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves,” he said.

Prof Cremin’s book, published in 2025, calls for a stronger focus on children’s emotional development and more nature-based learning, with pupils setting the pace of their own education rather than following standardised lessons and tests.

Mark Tapscott:

Politicians on both sides of the partisan spectrum are proposing plans to subject the wealthiest Americans to significantly higher taxes as a response to the federal government’s rapidly increasing annual budget deficits, but such proposals are doomed to fail, according to a new analysis by the Cato Institute.

“Senators Elizabeth Warren (D?’MA) and Bernie Moreno (R?’OH) propose removing the Social Security payroll tax cap, subjecting earnings above $184,500 to the 12.4 percent combined employer-employee payroll tax. Senators Chris Van Hollen (D?’MD) and Cory Booker (D?’NJ) each propose exempting more wages from income taxes at the bottom while raising taxes on higher earners. President Trump has pursued a similar strategy of expanding tax exemptions, while President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000,” Cato Institute Director of Tax Policy Adam Michel explains in an August 12 analysis.

The flaw in all of those approaches, according to Michel, is that “each approach shifts more of the tax burden toward the top. One problem with this approach is that there are not enough high-income Americans to finance the current federal budget deficit, let alone fund additional spending or tax cuts.”

Scott Johnson:

Statistics also show that the total general government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has increased in almost all member countries of the European Union — a trend not seen in the United States. Today, general government tax revenue accounts, on average, for more than 40% of the European Union’s total GDP. The figure for some countries is lower (22.4% for Ireland), but higher for several others: Denmark (45.8%), France (45.3%), Belgium (45.1%), and Italy (42.6%). The total general government tax revenue (federal, state, and local taxes plus social security) in the United States in 1980 was 25.6% of GDP. Today, it is still 25.6%. On average, populations in European Union countries pay far higher total taxes than Americans do, despite significant US investment in defense. The gap between the European Union and the United States has become immense.

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More.

Warren Kinsella

The edict is in a memo from the Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News

The definition of that word is widely known and widely accepted.

The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”

By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.

On that terrible day, four airplanes were hijacked by 19 terrorists. They piloted two of those planes into New York City’s World Trade Center, destroying both buildings and murdering 2,753 innocent people. Two dozen of them were Canadians.

A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. There, 125 people were slain — military and civilian. The 59 people on board the hijacked American Airlines flight were also killed.

A fourth plane, a United Airlines flight, slammed into a field in Pennsylvania after the hostages attempted to seize control from the four terrorists. Thirty-seven passengers and seven crew members were murdered.

Lucas Pombo:

Last November, 72-time arrestee Lawrence Reed poured gasoline on a CTA Blue Line passenger in Chicago and set her on fire. The incident was so egregious that the Federal Transit Administration got involved, threatening to withhold $50 million in federal funds unless the CTA enhanced systemwide security. The CTA implementedits plan in March, but the benefits have been hard to detect so far.

Congress is poised to repeat the FTA’s ineffective intervention. The Surface Transportation Reauthorization—the government’s five-year approval of road and rail funding—features several similar attempts to improve public safety.

James Nuzzo:

Steven Prohaska writes in this letter to the editor:
“WalletHub’s gender equality study — which contrasts workplace environments, education, health and political empowerment for men and women — is fundamentally flawed.

The authors of the study state, “In certain states and for certain metrics where women showed an advantage over men, we treated the state as having gender equality.”

But when one group is better off than another, that’s not equality.

The study ignores substantial disparities in the other direction. Men are disproportionately represented in dangerous jobs, making up over 90% of workplace fatalities. Women now earn more college degrees than men and usually live longer. Most voters are women.

A study’s methodology cannot accurately be described as measuring “equality” if female advantages are scored as equality instead of inequality. A study purporting to assess gender equality should take a more balanced approach to measuring disparities.”

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee Public Schools is under federal investigation based on allegations about how the district considers race in disciplinary practices, the U.S. Department of Education said Aug. 18.

The department’s Office of Civil Rights announced its investigations into MPS and another school district – in Fayetteville, Arkansas – as it shared new guidelines against school discipline policies that aim to reduce racial disparities.

Fred Lucas

A taxpayer-funded study of children and young adults taking puberty blockers and hormone treatments found no improvement in youth mental health.

The Oversight Project, a watchdog group, obtained the final report of “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” and shared it with the Daily Signal. 

The National Institutes of Health first allocated a nine-year grant of up to $10 million for the study through the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The study was led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who specializes in “gender-affirming care.”

The study included people as young as 8 years old. The sample receiving puberty blockers included participants up to age 16, while the sample receiving hormone treatments included participants up to age 20.

“Over 2 years of medical intervention that started with blockers, mental health remained relatively stable and was on par with the population at large,” the final report says. “These youth showed no worsening of their mental or emotional health and suicidality decreased from baseline to 24 months. Mean scores on mental health measures remain stable in a clinically non-significant range over two years.”

The longstanding argument for advocates of “transing” minors has been that not doing so could cause depression or suicide among youth.

Matthew Yglesias:

As someone who is interested in monoculture events in general and the movie business in particular, I suppose I should have something to say about “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which is a huge hit and stands a decent chance of becoming the top-grossing film of all time in nominal terms. 

I saw it and I thought it was … okay. The third-best of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies? The third-best film Zendaya has appeared in so far in 2026? Which is just to say I sort of don’t get it. I don’t know anyone who is super enthusiastic about this movie but also nobody is outraged by it. For a big hit movie to also be sort of mid and unremarkable is I guess the kind of thing I used to expect from America’s old movie culture, when a much larger fraction of the population was in the habit of “going to the movies” pretty regularly. Because “Spider-Man” strikes me as a fantastic “going to the movies” kind of movie. Everyone basically knows who Spider-Man is and the movie will make perfect sense even if you are not up to speed on the latest M.C.U. lore. It has that kind of well-rounded quality where there’s a romantic plot and plenty of action but no hyper-violence and the Punisher is funny rather than alarming so anyone could enjoy it. 

But isn’t this sort of “Hey, let’s go to the movies!” vibe exactly what’s gone away in post-pandemic America, with its endless streaming and short-form options? Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I love going to the movies. But that’s why I’m still the guy showing up for stuff like “Crime 101” and “Tuner” — random cool genre movies that would have done at least okay in the 1990s but kind of drop without a trace these days. Not that I’m complaining; I’m glad people are enjoying “Spider-Man.” But I think it’s a little weird. 

Siddhartha Roychowdhury: I’m seeing an attempt by the media/Democratic politicians to redefine the Woke 1 era by compressing it from Covid/Floyd in 2020 to 2024. I’m pretty sure that DEI in hiring, dumbing down of curriculum, trans stuff, etc. goes back to around 2014/2015 at least. Are you and others noticing this as well? Should that concern those who don’t want a Woke 2 when Democrats are back in power?

The whole “Woke 1” discourse is a good joke, but it obviously lacks a certain kind of precision.

OECD:

Every morning, millions of children are expected to attend school. Yet many face barriers that prevent regular attendance. School attendance problems (SAP) are no longer a marginal issue; they have become a challenge affecting classrooms in nearly every country. This report synthesises evidence from the OECD Policy Survey on School Attendance Problems, literature and international large-scale assessments to give an account of key concepts, terminology and international trends, drivers, and consequences of school absences. It also takes stock of policies and practices for supporting school attendance and distils key messages and policy pointers emerging from the evidence presented in the report.

To support a concise international analysis, this report uses “school attendance problems” as a broad umbrella term and “absence” as a concise term for all forms of non-attendance among students formally enrolled in primary or secondary education. However, international comparisons are challenged by varying terminology.

The language and classification used can shape responses to SAP and experiences of students and families. The terminology can influence how absences are measured, interpreted and addressed. Distinctions, such as authorised and unauthorised absences, often determine whether interventions are supportive, disciplinary or legal. These classifications can also contribute to disadvantages for marginalised students and families.

Despite these challenges, international large-scale assessments (e.g. PISA and TIMSS) provide an indication of patterns. SAP have worsened over time in several education systems since early 2010s. They are more prevalent among certain groups, including disadvantaged and immigrant students. However, results differ by context, time, and between educational levels. Moreover, measures based on student self‑reports and school leaders’ perceptions often produce different pictures, underscoring challenges in measurement and comparison. Nevertheless, post-pandemic attendance remains a concern with many education systems reporting persistently higher absence rates following the pandemic.

Avery Frank and Cory Koedel;

• Since the turn of the century, growth in teaching and administrative staff in Missouri has greatly outpaced growth in student enrollment.
  • Growth in FTE teachers: +13 percent
  • Growth in FTE administrators: +35 percent
  • Growth in student enrollment: –4 percent
• Personnel growth has exceeded growth in student enrollment in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and more broadly, in about 85 percent of school districts statewide.
• While staffing has increased disproportionately, teacher and administrator salaries have declined in real terms since 2000.
• If school districts had maintained their staffing levels from the year 2000 (when they had more students than today), and used the savings to raise teacher salaries, the average teacher salary in Missouri could be $10,000 higher today, which amounts to a 17 percent raise.
  • Even a partial unwinding of the Personnel Boom (e.g., back to 2015 conditions) would free up resources to substantially increase teacher salaries.

1130 WISN:

This next item is interesting college aged kids on both sides of the Atlantic deciding to forego college and head right into the trades or into a career apprenticeship immediately after high school. The Wall Street Journal (47:10): has an interesting story about how more of the brilliant kids in Britain are turning down offers to go to places like Oxford and the UK’s top universities. Instead, they’re going into quote white collar apprenticeships. And I admit, I don’t know how some person with only a high school diploma is ever going to become a lawyer without a law degree, but this is the sort of thing that they’re talking about. A lot of these apprenticeships are in finance or other white-collar jobs. One girl the Wall Street Journal interviews was offered a place at Oxford and turned them down to apprentice at a law firm.

The college route would have given her a degree, she said, but also mounds of student debt, no real practical experience, and they say that it’s a dangerous position in a legal industry rushing to adopt AI productivity tools.

Erin Gretzinger:

In addition to creating Ambriz’s joint role, the agreement expanded Centro’s youth programming into Lincoln and Leopold elementary schools on the south side. While Centro has worked with the district for many years to provide programming to middle and high school students, Menéndez Coller said the elementary school level had been a missing link.

Norma Gallegos Valles, Centro’s director of programs, said the middle and high school programs center around uplifting students’ voices and building their confidence through different hands-on activities, field trips, tutoring and other programming. The expansion furthers the organization’s efforts to focus on key transition grades for students as they move from elementary to middle to high school, she said.

“Those transition periods are where kids really need a little bit more support,” Ambriz added. “Being able to continue that and now expand it even more has been very crucial — and what not only what our kids need, but also what the families are asking for.”

Ambriz said he wants to help address common challenges families face, such as finding stable housing. He is also helping spread word about the district’s boundary and attendance area review to encourage families’ participation in the process.

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2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Alex Tabarrok:

The Antitrust Academy is an online platform hosting hundreds of videos comprising a complete course in antitrust law and economics. Teachers include Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Jon Klick, Joshua Wright and others. I am an advisor. A great resource whether you are learning this material for the first time or need to brush up on some legal or economic doctrines.

Aaron Wagner:

“While statistics are not hard to understand, they are even easier to misunderstand,” Ramos said. “Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality. So, a basic but thoughtful introduction to these concepts can help people understand their own thinking better.” 

At the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, a market-research and survey company solicited questions from attendees to include in a nationwide survey given to a representative sample of the U.S. population. Ramos and his co-author, Samuel Anyaso-Samuel, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, submitted two questions that were used in this survey: “How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?” and “How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?” Ramos and Anyaso-Samuel analyzed the responses to these questions for this study. 

Of the 1,000 people surveyed, one-quarter reported that they had no understanding of statistics, while 37% reported limited familiarity. Slightly more than one-quarter said they had learned some statistics in school. 

This does not mean that people do not believe statistics matter, Ramos said. Nine out of 10 participants said they would use statistics more if they possessed more understanding. 

Piper Hutchinson:

A Louisiana teacher is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his constitutional challenge to a state law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in K-12 and college classrooms. 

The posters began going up in classrooms this summer, following the approval of a 2024 law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every K-12, college and university classroom at schools that accept state money. The law was mired in a legal battle until earlier this year, when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it could go into effect. 

Chris Dier, Louisianas’s Teacher of the Year for 2020, filed the motion asking for the Supreme Court to intervene. Dier taught at Chalmette High School when he won the honor and is currently on the faculty at Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans.

“I have spent over 16 years teaching my students that the Constitution protects every one of them — every faith, and no faith,” Dier said. “I respect the Ten Commandments and the place religion holds in millions of Americans’ lives, undoubtedly. But the state cannot turn my classroom into a place to deliver its own religious message or make me the messenger who delivers it.” 

In a statement through her spokesman, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill declined to address Dier’s petition but said schools should follow the law.

Following Louisiana’s lead, similar measures requiring Ten Commandments displays were adopted in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, which have been met with various legal challenges. 

Alexandra Witze:

The first telegram arrived in Singapore on a Monday, sent from the city of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). “Terrific detonations from Krakatau (volcanic island),” it reported. Soon afterward: “Stones falling. Village near Anjer washed away.” The wires continued clattering out news of bridges destroyed, boats smashed, lighthouses “disappeared.” By noon on Tuesday, the scope of the natural disaster was clear: “Where once Mount Krakatau stood the sea now plays.”

Within days, the source of the destruction was known worldwide. On the morning of August 27, 1883, a volcanic eruption had obliterated two islands in the strait between Java and Sumatra, and most of a third. More than 36,000 people perished, the majority in devastating tsunamis that raced outward from the colossal explosion.

Thanks to Victorian-era telecommunications, it was the first time in history that people around the globe could begin to document, in near real time, the immediate and long-term effects of a catastrophic volcanic eruption. What they learned over the next few years laid the foundations for the modern science of volcanology. And it was an especially eye-opening lesson in how the biggest eruptions can influence climate, agriculture and even the course of human history.

Global effects

In the months after Krakatau, drifting volcanic particles high in the atmosphere circled the globe, causing violently colored sunsets that contemporary artists captured in paintings, likely including the psychedelic background of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Oliver Traldi:

Academia is a place where very awkward people impose strict standards on one another. But these standards are localized, imposed by disciplines and departments. One group’s standards might be opaque to the rest of the university, not to mention the outside world. What passes for good scholarship in one discipline might seem ridiculous in another. 

The current crisis of the university can be traced partly to two types of attacks on these already precarious standards. The first has been the introduction of new disciplines that appear to have virtually no standards at all; the second is the relaxation of standards within the disciplines to accommodate new entrants and trendy topics. New interpersonal standards of emotional sensitivity and demographic inclusion have increasingly taken the place of intellectual standards of clever argumentation and strong evidence. But the enforcement of those new metrics turns out to be just as awkward and strict as what preceded them. Paradoxically, the harsh imposition of the new standards often is as insensitive and exclusionary as what came before.

The incompatibility of these two sets of standards accounts for at least some of the media firestorm around the late Jason Arday’s plagiarism and fabrications, and the subsequent focus on Nathan Cofnas, the Ghent University postdoc and whistleblower. Cofnas authored the initial articleoutlining apparently longstanding doubts about Arday’s scholarly and extramural accomplishments. Arday and Cofnas in some respects exemplify the broader shift in academic standards.

Marquette Poll:

Between 50% and 60% have said property taxes are more important in 11 Marquette Law School Poll surveys since June 2023. Prior to that, a majority said that school funding was more important in 16 polls from April 2015 through October 2022.

While voters think reducing property taxes should be a priority, 47% say schools are getting too little funding from the state, 39% say there is enough state funding, and 14% say schools are getting more than is needed.

Opinion is divided on Gov. Tony Evers’ 2024 partial veto which required increases in per-pupil spending limits for the next 400 years. Forty-eight percent say this was necessary to support schools, while 51% say this will mean tax increases for centuries. Partisans are sharply divided on this, with 86% of Republicans saying this will require continuing tax increases and 89% of Democrats saying it was necessary to support schools. Independents are evenly divided, with 46% saying it is necessary and 46% saying it requires ongoing tax increases.

Among registered voters, 53% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the job their local public schools are doing, while 46% are very or somewhat dissatisfied. Satisfaction declined from a high of 81% in March 2013 to a stable range of 60% to 69% from 2021 to February 2026. Satisfaction has declined from 64% in February this year to 59% in March, to 55% in July, and to 53% in August.

Sixty percent say public schools need to be held more accountable for student performance, while 40% say the schools are doing the best they can with the resources they have.

Opinion is close to evenly divided on the school voucher program that provides state funding for students to attend private or religious schools, as 48% would like to see the voucher program eliminated and 51% want to see it continued. Partisan differences are substantial, but not as large on this issue as on some others, with 68% of Republicans favoring continuing the voucher program and 68% of Democrats wanting the program eliminated. Independents are nearly evenly divided, with 49% favoring continuation and 50% favoring elimination of vouchers.

———

53% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the job their local public schools are doing. Satisfaction hit a high of 81% in March 2013 and was between 60% and 69% from 2021 to February 2026. Satisfaction has declined steadily since then. #mulawpoll

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student. More.

Brian R. Fitzpatrick:

We’re approaching the end of an era: New York State is scrapping its storied high school Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Initially administered in the 19th century, the Regents were the first standardized state assessments of their kind. And since the early 2000s, students have had to pass five Regents in four subject areas to graduate with the standard “Regents diploma.”

Under the new plan, however, students will take Regents only for federal compliance purposes; passing won’t be required to graduate. Instead, as part of a new framework called the New York State Portrait of a Graduate, a high school diploma will be based upon students’ demonstration of six vaguely appealing “interconnected attributes”: academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused.

The specifics of the new graduation requirements are still in the works, but so far, official documents indicate that students will “establish their readiness” through “exhibits of evidence,” apparently the state’s hazy umbrella term for tasks including “performances, portfolios, assessments, [and] presentations.” Also, “real-world projects” and “work-based learning” may be involved. Individual teachers will design, administer, and score their students’ “exhibits of evidence” according to a statewide rubric with mastery levels, rather than letter or number grades. I’m really leaning on quotes here because, frankly, most of the guidance is too nebulous to paraphrase.

Though some other states are similarly deemphasizing traditional state testing and developing “portraits” and “visions,” New York is an outlier in its aggressive effort to overhaul its entire assessment system—and to effectively give up on clear academic expectations. As terrible as that is, it’s also more than a little troubling that the Empire State has committed to dismantling the Regents requirements without a clear sense of what will replace them.

Parker Koppenjan:

Homeless camp has been source of fires, dead rats, and infectious disease Leptospirosis

A viral video taken by a parent recently dropping her son off at UC Berkeley prompted alarm by revealing large camping tents, trash, sleeping bags, garbage, tarps, dirty mattresses, bikes and other debris piled up in heaps and spilling out into the street for several blocks. 

“I just dropped my son off at @UCBerkeley housing and as we were approaching we saw this behind his apartments,” parent Lyanne Melendez posted on social media Aug. 19.

The video, which has racked up more than 3.5 million views, depicts a long-standing homeless encampment at Eighth and Harrison streets in the city of Berkeley. While city officials and residents have battled for years to clean it up, the video prompted a new wave of headlines.

Arvind NarayananJul 13, 2026

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available here, annotated with a lightly edited transcript. You can also view them below right here on this page, but the online version has animations, clickable links, and a much nicer experience overall.

Update [August 2026]: ICML has released the video of the talk.

I made three arguments. First, the AI as Normal Technology framework is a correct and useful as a way to think about AI’s impacts, unless and until there is some future discontinuity such as through recursive self-improvement. Second, even though we should take recursive self-improvement seriously, there is no milestone that companies might achieve in the lab that will suddenly put us all out of work. Third and finally, jobs of the future will be radically different, and a lot of adaptation will be needed. I shared my thinking about what this might look like and ended with a vision of human/AI “co-superintelligence”.

Now is a time of great excitement in AI, but it’s also a time of great anxiety in the AI community. I want to address that anxiety head on. How do we prepare for a future where AI will become capable of doing more and more of the work that we do today?

I lead a team at Princeton University trying to advance the science of AI agent evaluation. We try to go beyond the usual claims of “Look, capability is going up on benchmarks!” Those claims tend to be misinterpreted by the broader public as implying that agents are soon about to take all our jobs.

Maybe that will happen. But in our work we try to understand the factors beyond capability that matter for real-world deployment, and bring that understanding into evaluations.

The work that I’m better known for is the essay I co-authored with Sayash Kapoor called AI as Normal Technology. It’s a way to think about the medium-term future of AI and how to adapt to it — and in turn how to adapt it to the needs of society and the economy.

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a new report, “Charting A New Course: Improving The Charter School Sector in Wisconsin.” The report is the second in WILL’s Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success series and examines why Wisconsin’s in-state charter school sector has stalled while chartering continues to expand across the country.

Wisconsin was once at the forefront of the charter school movement, being one of the first states to enact a charter school law in 1993. Today, however, the state is falling behind. WILL’s latest report identifies major barriers in funding, authorization, regulation, and governance that make Wisconsin an increasingly difficult place to open and grow innovative public schools.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director Will Flanders stated, “Wisconsin once led the nation in education reform, but charter schools—a vital option for families—have stagnated in recent years. Families want and deserve innovative public-school options, but unnecessary and costly roadblocks prevent charter school expansion. Wisconsin must reverse this trend so our students can access real education options and thrive.”

Key Findings: Since 2015, independent charter enrollment has grown 35%. But over the past three years, enrollment growth has slowed to just 11.6% with Wisconsin ranking 41st out of 45 states in the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ 2022 ranking of state charter laws. To reverse this slowdown and revitalize Wisconsin’s charter school environment, WILL’s report identifies the following key takeaways:

Greg Lukianoff, Andrea Honeycutt:

In their 2015 article and 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg and Jonathan Haidt argue that cognitive distortions (practices like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning) and overprotecting children results in an external locus of control, helplessness and despair, and both the mental health crisis and the rampant culture of illiberalism on campus that we’re seeing today.

Certainly, the two major concerns from the 2015 article have borne out, with academic freedom and free speech on campus being threatened at an unprecedented scalesince 2014 — but especially since 2017 — and mental health of young people tanking to a degree even greater than even Greg and Jon ever predicted. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported consistent and rapid increases in the rates of suicide and depression in teens (12-17) and young adults (18-25) since at least 2012. Just last year, nearly 20% of teens (12-17) and a similar number of young adults (18-25) reported experiencing a major depressive episode. This is compared to just 7% in adults older than 25 last year, and just 9% of teens and young adults back in 2012.

Something is clearly happening, but what’s the cause? The recent documentary film “The Coddling of the American Mind,” directed by Ted Balaker, showcases how the adoption of what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” (a.k.a.  “Wokeness” — a term we don’t love) and its associated catastrophizing spirals led three of the film’s protagonists, Kimi, Lucy, and Saeed, into feelings of hopelessness and despair.

However, those are experiences of a select few students. Is there really a significant  connection between the illiberal ideologies on college campuses and the mental health decline of college students?

To find out, we used responses collected from FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings to answer two questions:

1. Are students with poor self-reported mental health also more supportive of illiberal protest?
2. Are students on the ideological left more prone to self-reported feelings of poor mental health? 

Susan B. Edelman

Tinkering with the number of points needed to pass New York’s literacy exams may have rendered them useless in gauging how well our kids are learning to read.

Something went wrong.

“It seems increasingly likely that something unexpected happened with the scoring of the reading tests last year,” says Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

His comments on the sharp decline in New York student literacy scores came after I learned that the state education department and its test publisher NWEA, under a five-year $50 million contract, tweaked the scoring of the 2025 tests.

Last year, Kathleen Moore of the Times-Union and I reported evidence that the state had lowered the passing benchmarks for some grades on the exams, raising doubts about claims of eye-popping academic progress.

After the state released this year’s scores, I asked Fred Smith, a researcher and former DOE testing specialist, to scrutinize NWEA’s 2025 technical reports, which provide detailed data on the scoring of its English Language Arts (ELA) exams. He confirmed our news reports.

Scores in several grades rose sharply in 2025.

But this year, all the gains evaporated. In NYC, scores fell an average 6 points in grades 3 to 8. But they plummeted nearly 14 points in third-grade, 6 points in fourth grade, and 13 points in fifth grade.

The state stands by the disturbing data, insisting it shows a real slide in reading proficiency from 2025 to 2026.

Some experts don’t buy it.

“The proficiency rates in NYC and the state as a whole look like they really haven’t budged since 2024,” Pallas told me.

Alex Tabarrok

The US discussion over datacenters is depressing. Datacenters do not use a lot of water, they produce very useful outputs, they are not a blight on the landscape. All of this is obvious. But I don’t want to restate the obvious. What bothers me most about the discussion is that people seem to think this is or should be a collective decision. No.

We have a simple set of rules that everyone must follow. You buy land from someone willing to sell it. You contract for electricity. You hire workers who want the job. Your obligations to your local neighbors come from the same laws that govern everyone else. We do not ask what the land, electricity and labor is for. If you follow the rules, that is nobody’s business.

This is the distinction North, Wallis and Weingast make in Violence and Social Orders (paper here) between limited access orders or the natural state and open-access orders. For most of recorded history large-scale economic activity depended on access to political power. In the natural state, “people outside the coalition have only limited access to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities.”  The dominant coalition controlled entry into valuable activities and created rents by granting privileges.

An open access order works through general criteria. Organizational formation is “open to everyone who meets a set of minimal and impersonal criteria.” In economic life, the transition entails “the ability to create economic organizations at will, open entry and competition in many markets.”

The key word is impersonal. The same conditions apply regardless of who wants to build or whether public officials admire the proposed use. The state is not necessarily laissez-faire but its role ends once you have complied with the impersonal rules.

Crier in the Wilderness:

I can’t use my degree in a helping profession, which supposedly needed more men, because it went woke. Now, I’m on my fourth career. I have been passed over for multiple positions because I was a man instead of a woman. The people who passed me over admitted to it. I finally gave up and started a business, but artificial intelligence and inflation undercut me. Some of those who helped me to establish my business even told me they were hoping to mentor a woman instead. In addition, even some of my customers wanted to work with a female-owned business.  

 

As a result, I can’t use the money I would otherwise have made to fund the Christian ministry I really had my heart set on.

 

I’m now a skilled tradesman. I live on my own, with no debt and money in the bank… but I have a non-zero chance of dying at work, and overwhelming overtime, which I can’t get out of. For the privilege, I had to be turned away at the door by multiple other trades, because they refused to work with some college boy.

 

By the way, women consider blue collar jobs trashy, no matter how well they pay, so there’s a distinct possibility that I continue to work massive overtime for nothing. They turn me down when I ask them out on dates, and then say there are no good men nowadays.

 

To put this another way, I gave up my twenties to extreme working hours that didn’t help. I’m now doing the same thing to my thirties. It will be decades before all the progressive hiring managers (usually women) retire or die, so there’s no way out.

Matthew Lau

With a new school year approaching, it’s time to remind everyone that Ontario’s public school system is a gigantic mess. Ontarians may not actually want or need such a reminder but the government and unions are determined to deliver it anyway. Their negotiations for a new contract have stalled before even substantially beginning, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario — which is essentially taxpayer-funded since public-school teachers are forced to pay union dues — is readying a strike mandate and the provincial government is preparing taxpayer-funded advertisements to criticize the unions.

As taxpayer costs mount, the quality of Ontario’s public education, already far too low and sliding for two decadesaccording to test scores, seems bound to deteriorate further. School violence and disorder have escalatedsignificantly in recent years. Many students regularly use artificial intelligence, but more than half of Ontario teachers report receiving no training from their school or board on how to instruct students on AI use.

John Lucas:

When rocked by the inevitable blow-back against Hannah-Jones and The Times’ false assertion that the desire to preserve slavery was a “primary reason” for the American Revolution, The Times appended a footnote seven months later that failed to acknowledge any error. The Times said only that it was making a “clarification” that its article had been “adjusted” “to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.”

Nonsense. The Times’ “adjustment” obliterates Hannah-Jones’ original thesis — that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary reason for the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate every July 4. The Times’ “clarification” is that slavery was “among the motivations” of some colonists who fought in the war.

That is not a “clarification.” It is a retraction by another name to avoid having to confess error and undermine their culture war against our founding principles and history. It gutted Hannah-Jones’ central point that the very founding of our present Country was poisoned by slavery. But The Times just slips it, falsely claiming that it is a mere “clarification.”

What a bunch of dishonest hacks.

Lars Faye:

One hope is that these models will end up accelerating learning as they are used for code generation. Junior developers can work with the same gravitas and confidence as industry veterans with their “personal AI tutor”. Knowing syntax is increasingly less important, and any knowledge or ambiguity gaps are filled by the AI tool. The deeper mechanics of the code stay abstracted away, since the developer sits higher in the stack.

JetBrains, a major player in developer tools, recently cited a study titled “The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers”, which painstakingly analyzed individual behaviors in live coding sessions, and tested their ability to learn coding with varying degrees of AI assistance. Their main takeaway was stark and counterintuitive:

“Participants thought it was like having a personal tutor. From the data in our study … we observed that they did not, in fact, use GenAI tools like a personal tutor. In fact, it was quite the opposite.”

The participants that leaned into heavier AI assistance:

John Burn-Murdoch:

One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation.

In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for Britain’s declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy well-paid professional and managerial jobs. 

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In much the same way, the standard explanation for why Britain’s non-graduates feel like distant second-class citizens to their degree-holding counterparts is that they have been failed by an education system that does not provide technical and vocational routes to a successful and respected career. But here, too, economic factors look more likely to be the real culprit.

One useful reference point is Germany, where school pupils specialise early into either academic or more technical routes, and those who choose the latter can be confident they will find relatively high-paying jobs. The country’s education system is a darling of those who believe achieving “parity of esteem” for people who do not go to university is simply a matter of reforms to schooling.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple. The status conferred by a particular qualification is a function of the job and salary it brings, not the piece of paper it’s written on. What really differentiates Germany from the UK, then, is its larger, higher-value and higher-paying manufacturing sector (German factory workers earn 50 per cent more than their British counterparts). Britain can tinker with its vocational routes all it likes, but without good jobs, the deficits in esteem, employment and earnings will remain.

Germany is also as much of a cautionary tale as a model to follow. With China’s booming electric vehicles industry rapidly eating into its automotive exports, I suspect the Germans may have their own moment of misdirected angst over vocational education a decade or so from now as the good blue-collar jobs dwindle.

In this sense, the most durable way for governments to ensure that both university students and their less academic counterparts can move through the education system confident of good financial outcomes for themselves is to have a dynamic economy and robust productivity growth.

David Runciman:

Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.

Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.

Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.

Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/bXCbK1y1QM

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 24, 2026

Taxpayer Funded Madison K-12 System:

Performance Objectives

Academic Achievement

MMSD will increase overall student academic achievement
Belonging

MMSD will increase the percentage of students who feel they belong in their school, as measured by the climate survey.

College Credit/Credentials

MMSD will increase the percentage of students who graduate with credits or credentials that provide postsecondary value

PDF Spanish version (I could not immediately find an English PDF version).

More.

There are two huge red flags with Madison’s new school-focus plan. One, it’s a five year plan that leaves thousands of kids behind. And two, the plan doesn’t mention reading until page 15.

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

John Burn-Murdoch:

Only occasionally in my work do I come across a statistic so astonishing that it stops me in my tracks. Earlier this week was one of those times.

While exploring data from the American Time Use Survey, which draws on detailed diaries to track how and with whom people spend every minute of a randomly selected day, I came across the following: on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.

Much has been written about the decline in socialising among young people over recent years, but these analyses — including my own — have tended to focus on societal averages. Doing so misses a critical part of this story: whether we’re talking about the long shadow of pandemic lockdowns, the increasingly enthralling digital environment or intensifying academic pressure, anti-socialising forces have had radically different effects on different young people.

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Chad Aldeman:

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that public education lost 50,000 jobsbetween June and July. The numbers are preliminary and don’t show which types of jobs were lost. They are also small in percentage terms (a decline of 0.6%). Still, they potentially mark the end of the post-pandemic surge in school staffing, which had been hitting new all-time staffing highs year after year.

The gains over the last few years have been quite large. In the 2024-25 academic year, for example, schools added the equivalent of 118,000 new full-time employees in various roles, even as they served 135,000 fewer students. That followed the pattern in 2023-24, when they added 121,000 employees as they lost 110,000 students.  

Still, the national numbers can be hard to grapple with, so The 74’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, and I have been focusing on teacher-specific data and mapping out how teacher-to-student ratios have changed across the country. We’ve now updated our charts using the latest datafrom the National Center for Education Statistics through the 2024-25 school year. 

For most parts of the country, the year-over-year changes are small. Among districts with sufficient data, we found that they employed 11,000 fewer teachers but served 225,000 fewer students. As a result, the ratio between these two figures continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate than it had in prior years.

——-

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student. More.

Dan Lennington:

🤑When UW-Madison wants tuition, they explain the rules on residency very strictly (“full twelve month period prior to enrollment”).
🗳️When UW-Madison describes voting, they tell students only half the story (“have resided in Wisconsin for at least 28 consecutive days”).
The standards are of course governed by different state laws. But UW-Madison’s voting explanation only says 28 days (Wis. Stat. 6.02), and doesn’t explain the more strict requirement in Wis. Stat. 6.10. As @RickEsenberg pointed out, it is not just 28 days, but this: “The residence of a person is the place where the person’s habitation is fixed, without any present intent to move, and to which, when absent, the person intends to return.” Meaning, like, you are actually a resident of Wisconsin and your real home isn’t your mom and dad’s house in Minnesota.
This came up because of an anecdote I heard about on-campus voter registration drives going on right now and what is being said to out-of-state students. These are just stories, but it would be nice if perhaps some reporters could go and ask the question: “what exactly are you telling out-of-state students about residence?”

More:

——-

Somewhat Related:

Exclusive: I found a buried official Chinese roster showing that before Steven Chu became Obama’s Energy Secretary, a CCP United Front group listed him as an “overseas honorary president.”

I found no prior U.S. reporting on it—and it never came up in his Senate hearing. 🧵

Melissa Whitler:

Minneapolis Public Schools lost out on $4.1 million in state and federal special education aid during the 2025-26 school year due to a district accounting mistake, raising questions about the district’s beleaguered finance office, which has been understaffed and working with outdated technology for years. 

The district has not previously disclosed the foul-up, which involved MPS underreporting its special education expenses and subsequently losing out on state and federal reimbursement. The school board was told about the mishap in January. In May, district officials toutednew procedures to increase state and federal special education aid by properly accounting for expenses, without mentioning the lost $4.1 million. 

The Reformer uncovered the error through a public records request. The lost funding is roughly enough to pay 35 teachers for a school year. 

The accounting error is the third multi-million dollar blunder reported by the Reformer since the abrupt departure of the district’s three top finance leaders in January. Finance department employees — including former Controller Aaron Gilbert — improperly withheld over $3 million from a healthcare trust account, before being ordered to replace the funds. The district also failed to properly file certain federal tax forms, which resulted in fines of over $5.3 million being assessed to the school district starting in 2023.

The district has suffered a collapse in enrollment in the past quarter century — and, thus, state and local funding tied to student population  — and is plagued by half-empty school buildings, rising labor costs and a student population with unique challenges. These factors have created a deteriorating fiscal environment.

Shuai Yang, Natarajan Padmapriya, Saw Seang-Mei, Chong Yap Seng, Lynette P. Shek, Peter D. Gluckman, Keith M. Godfrey, Johan G. Eriksson, Falk Müller-Riemenschneider, Evelyn C. Law & Jonathan Y. Bernard

Screen viewing time is associated with children’s academic and cognitive outcomes, but longitudinal studies are scarce, hindering identification of the most sensitive age periods. We assessed the associations of single and cumulative average screen viewing time with academic performance and working memory.

Methods

In the Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes birth cohort, parents reported their child’s screen viewing time at ages 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 6 and 8 years. At ages 9 and 10.5, trained psychologists assessed academic performance (Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Third Edition) and working memory (Letter-Number Sequencing task; Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth Edition). Associations of single and cumulative average screen viewing time with psychological outcomes were examined by multivariable linear regression (N = 502 children).

Results

Mean (standard deviation) screen viewing time ranged from 2.1 (2.0) hours/day at age 1 year, to 3.0 (2.2) hours/day at 8 years. In unadjusted models, higher screen viewing time from age 1 to 8 years was consistently associated with poorer academic performance at age 9 years and working memory at 10.5 years. After adjustment, effect sizes were reduced, but higher screen viewing time at ages 1 year [β= – 1.47, 95% confidence interval (CI): – 2.37 to – 0.57 standard points per additional hour per day], 1.5 years (β= – 0.95, 95% CI: – 1.85 to – 0.06), and 6 years (β= – 0.88, 95% CI: – 1.55 to – 0.21) had persisting associations with poorer academic performance at age 9 years. Greater screen viewing time at ages 1 year (β= – 1.12, 95% CI: – 2.07 to – 0.17) and 6 years (β= – 1.01, 95% CI: – 1.71 to – 0.31) was associated with poorer working memory at age 10.5 years. Cumulative average exposure models showed that screen viewing time over childhood was consistently associated with poorer academic performance but not working memory.

Ann Althouse summary:

“‘Education,’ he wrote, ‘consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.’ Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure. A lawsuit filed in Nebraska on Aug. 13 brings that argument into court — and could open a path toward universal school choice.”

From “Are public schools unconstitutional? A Nebraska court will decide. The challenge to compulsory education combined with public-school-only funding could lead to universal school choice” (WaPo)(gift link).

The headline is bad. The argument is about compelled public schooling, and the Supreme Court recognized long ago that parents have a right to choose to send their children to private school. The lively dispute is over whether privately schooled children are entitled to their share of public spending. If public school is the only free choice, then the choice is heavily weighted toward the government’s preferred speech.

The Hamburger article, in the WSJ, is “Is the Public School System Constitutional? Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.” The word “system” makes that headline less bad. The system is that if you pay your own way you can control your child’s schooling but government schooling is free.

Aaron Chatterji,  Jorge Guzman,  Joyce Ma  & Ryan C. McDevitt

Firms shape public policy not only from the outside through lobbying and campaign contributions, but also from the inside when business owners hold public office. We study this channel using a novel dataset that links state legislators’ personal financial disclosures to bill sponsorship records across 26 U.S. states from 2009 to 2023. The disclosures allow us to observe business ownership during legislative service and to distinguish entrepreneurs, defined as legislators who both own and actively manage a firm, from passive shareholders and employees. Applying a large language model to bill text, we classify legislation as pro-business and identify a subset of pro-entry bills that reduce barriers facing new firms. Entrepreneurs are a substantial presence in state legislatures, accounting for over 40 percent of legislators, and their representation varies primarily across states rather than within states over time. Although entrepreneurs do not sponsor more bills overall, they initiate a greater share of bills as first or sole primary sponsor. They also do not appear to be generic advocates for business. Relative to legislators with other business ties, entrepreneurs are no more likely to sponsor pro-business bills or bills endorsed by state Chambers of Commerce. Instead, they selectively advance pro-entry legislation, especially bills related to deregulation and innovation rather than antitrust or access to capital. These findings document an important channel through which entrepreneurs shape the policy environment for entrepreneurship from within political institutions.

Nicholas Decker

The recent Arday affair has led a lot of people to claim that academia is “rotten” or “broken” or “coasting on past glories”. This is inaccurate. Academia is doing just fine. When people assert this, they are both badly misunderstanding what makes academia good, and they are unfamiliar with the work that academia presently produces. 

For starters, academia is not really one thing, any more than Black people or Hungarians are. There are somewhere on the order of 15 million people involved in instruction around the world. The failure of some part of it does not make the whole rotten, because they are scarcely connected to each other. The Arday affair is an indication that the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge have low standards and do not produce useful work. We should also be skeptical of those journals which published him and work like his, and we should be skeptical of those departments which have similar opinions as to good scholarship as the Faculty of Education. But does the poor quality of his work have any bearing on the good work that is done elsewhere in the university?

I do not think so. I am only an expert on my corner of the world, economics. I will not attempt to evaluate the other departments. But I am extremely confident that economics is in a very good state. It’s the best it has ever been. People are producing work answering important questions with great data and the best possible methods with enormous practical consequences for public policy and individual action. This includes his colleagues at the University of Cambridge – I would highlight in particular the work of Florin Bilbiie, and of Vasco Carvalho.

That is all that academia need produce. What matters is the very best work, not the average. The costs of bad work are the taxes needed to pay them, and pulling the person out of whatever other line of work they would have done. (You’ll note that this indicates the harm of Arday was really rather small). Something which is of poor quality is read by no one and influences no one. Something which answers a good question well can introduce a new technology, or change public policy, potentially creating millions or billions of dollars in value.

Even within disciplines, it is fine to hire mediocrities. People do not necessarily know their quality going into a program. If they turn out to be a lemon, then faculty hiring down the ladder is insurance. It’s all part of paying for breakthroughs, and if paying for bad work is part of a system which produces great work on the whole, then it is worth paying.

If education departments are bad, it is not because they produce bad work, but because they produce no good work. I do think this is true, because they choose to use methods which have no chance even in principle of creating an advancement of the public’s knowledge. Sociology is the same way. To the extent that they are able to advance the knowledge of the public, it is when they embrace hypothesis testing and empirical falsification.

I certainly agree that Arday should have been fired, that it was wrong to protect him, that threatening critics with libel lawsuits is wrong (and a problem with Britain in general), that the Faculty of Education is a bad institution, and that producing fraudulent research is bad. I just don’t see what that has to do with academia as a whole.

Pat Garrett

Your Property Tax Bill in 2030
See how much three major policy changes could cost you and your family

In the years leading up to 2010, property taxes in Wisconsin were on a steady upward trajectory, with residents paying roughly 20 to 30 percent more than the national average. Those trends put Wisconsin near the top nationally in property tax burden.  

That trajectory began to shift in 2011. Reforms such as Act 10 and tighter limits on local spending were enacted to slow the growth of major cost drivers affecting local governments and school districts and ultimately reduce pressure on property taxpayers. 

For more than a decade, those reforms delivered results. Property tax growth stabilized, and Wisconsin moved closer to the national average on a per capita basis. The figure below demonstrates that progress. Wisconsin still ranks 10th nationally in property taxes as a share of home value, so there is still work to be done. But the trend shows that we’ve made meaningful progress over time. 

But that progress is now at risk. 

Several major policy changes on the horizon could cause the state to reverse course. If enacted, they would push Wisconsin back toward its previous position as one of the highest property tax states in the country. 

So what are the policy changes on the horizon? We’ll get into each in more detail below, but here is each policy under consideration that could have an impact on your property tax bill.  

——

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Wisconsin Act 10

Christopher F. Rufo, Kenneth Schrupp:

California will not stop taxing its citizens. The state slapsa 63-cent fee on every gallon of gas. Sales taxes exceed10 percent in some cities. The state’s highest earners pay a double-digit marginal rate to Sacramento on top of what they owe the feds.

One group, more than any other, has cashed in on this arrangement: California’s public-sector unions. For them, higher taxes are good business. More taxes means more state workers, which means more union members, more dues, and more power for union bosses. The union bosses, in turn, keep the dollars flowing, agitating for more tax hikes, more spending, and more state workers.

How powerful are California’s public-sector unions? We pored over disclosure forms and crunched the numbers. It turns out that, in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024, ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members collected more than $1 billion in dues and fees.

Many of these unions spend at least some of their revenues on lobbying. State politicians, playing their part in the scheme, devote more taxpayer resources to the public sector, inching California toward the kind of soft socialism that its leaders have long desired—no armed revolution necessary.

This is California’s billion-dollar union machine.

Unions exist to represent their members’ interests. In the private sector, unions negotiate against a corporation, whose executives have skin in the game. In the public sector, by contrast, unions negotiate against the state, which is spending other people’s money. In California, public-sector unions have exploited this dynamic to create a feedback loop that has made them the most powerful machine in state politics.

We focused on ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members. Our list features key players in the state’s labor movement: the California Teachers Association (CTA); the California Nurses Association (CNA); the California School Employees Association (CSEA); and various International Union of Operating Engineers, SEIU, and AFSCME chapters. These groups raked in more than $1 billion in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024—and show little sign of slowing down.

Their size is astounding. The ten unions have more than 1 million members. They list more than 1,500 employees and officers who administer the unions, organize the workers, and more. The unions’ combined membership equates to at least 6 percent of the state’s 2024 presidential-election voters and at least 29 percent of the state’s 2024 Democratic primary voters—more than enough to sway a statewide contest.

Those members pay annual dues. Some of the unions, in turn, send money to Democrats. The successful campaign of the current assembly Speaker, Democrat Robert Rivas, received funds from the political-action arms of CNA and CSEA. California’s eight statewide officials—all Democrats—received a campaign donation from at least one of the ten unions’ PACs at some point in their careers.

——

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Wisconsin Act 10

Noah Smith:

For intellectuals and commentators such as myself, for many policy wonks and academics, and even for many politicians, the question is how to make the American people happier. And the answers we come up with are usually economic ones — ideas for policies that will improve the material well-being of either the whole populace, or some segment of it. 

This is common on both sides of the aisle. On the left, centrists have embraced the Abundance movement, whose main idea is to give Americans more stuff — more housing, electricity, health care, and so on. For progressives and leftists, meanwhile, Medicare for All is probably the centerpiece idea. On the right, Trump’s trade agenda has usually been justified with claims that it will return good manufacturing jobs to the American working class. Even immigration restriction is usually couched in economic terms — the MAGA people claim that mass deportations will open up jobs for Americans, lower the price of housing, and so on. 

The roots of the country’s malaise, too, are often described in economic terms. Many people claim that the First China Shock — and the loss of good blue-collar jobs to offshoring more generally — left a disappointed, angry working class in its wake. Progressives decry corporate landlords that they claim raise the cost of housing, and blame grocery stores’ greed for the rising cost of food. Practically everyone agrees that inflation was the biggest reason Trump won the 2024 election.

Paul Graham:

How should universities prepare students to start startups? Y Combinator is in the perfect position to answer this question, because we get them next. We’re like grad school. And because YC has had 20 years to refine its model of what a promising founder looks like, you probably won’t find a better target.

What do the YC partners look for? It’s surprisingly simple. They want people who are good at building things and have a habit of doing it.

The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance. [1]

So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful founders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on “entrepreneurship”. It’s to do what universities already do best — to teach them computer science and mechanical engineering and molecular biology. [2]

Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career. Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don’t care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things.

But building should be understood in a very broad sense. It doesn’t mean all would-be founders have to study some form of engineering. Almost any kind of expertise that could be described as building or creating could be useful. It was useful to Steve Jobs to have studied calligraphy, for example; it was one of the reasons Apple dominated desktop publishing. So while math and science and engineering and design tend to be good bets, I would not want to draw a sharp line around them, because I can imagine other forms of building that could be useful. And of course you don’t have to major in something to be good at it. Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major.

John Tomasi, Tyler VanderWeele

A Gallup poll from June showed public confidence in higher education dropping yet again. A viral article in the Atlantic by a former professor has set off alarms about the depth, and apparent hypocrisy, of progressive commitments at elite colleges. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s recent call for universities to recommit themselves publicly to “rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service” could be read as an effort to restore public trust by realigning what universities tell the public they stand for and what they do in practice.
McMahon, readers of the professor’s story and disillusioned poll respondents all presumably hope that colleges will respond by reforming campus practices to better align with the ideal of the impartial university.

We share that hope. But if universities are unwilling to abandon the progressive commitments they hold dear, we propose an alternative: Admit it.

There is an ideal of the university, centered on open inquiry, that carries enormous prestige. In this model, truth is pursued impartially through reason and scientific inquiry. All ideas are welcome, but each requires evidence. Campus policies rest on excellence, humility, intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas.

But some universities depart from this ideal, and reasonably so. Religious colleges acknowledge that their search for truth is informed by faith. For instance, the mission of Providence College in Rhode Island states that faith and reason work together to transform lives and enlighten minds. Its policies reflect that mission. Other institutions — including women’s colleges, historically black colleges and military academies — teach and pursue knowledge through their own substantive lenses.

Vinay Prasad MD MPH:

Out of curiosity: I randomly picked 5 universities, and looked up their sociology department faculty. I randomly picked papers written by the faculty. Wow, my mind was blown. At least 60% was similar gibberish. Constant politically charged assertions— no underlying data. Anti-colonialism— everything is somehow a legacy of racial injustice and colonialism. Never mind— no actual data to support that claim. The climate catastrophe— Immigration injustice— the department looks like a Democrat think tank. I would even be ok with that, if it relied on good methods, or maybe even 10:1 included a scholar pushing Republican ideas— I mean even if just for funsies. I could find no example of a Republican idea from a sociologist department.

Jeffrey Tucker:

At an antique store over the weekend, I was startled to pick up a 1927 edition of the Hardy Boys to find it was written in higher English than one normally encounters for adults now. This was for 8-12 year olds! A century ago.

———

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Hard to believe: Nearly a third of applications to Normandale Community College are considered potentially fraudulent.

The school says it has processed about 29,000 fraudulent or potentially fraudulent applications. At one point, the rate was 42%.

Eric Rasmussen investigates. pic.twitter.com/IfQi7ezAhv

— Lindsey Brown (@LBrownKSTP) August 25, 2026

Grok notes:

Fraudsters use stolen identities to create “ghost students” who enroll online at open-admission community colleges like Normandale. The goal is to collect federal student aid (grants/loans) then vanish. Easy online apps, low barriers, leftover refunds after low tuition, post-pandemic remote learning, and AI bots enable mass submissions. It’s a nationwide issue hitting two-year schools hardest.

Nick Anderson:

An internal Harvard University review from five years ago suggested Asian American applicants would be let into the undergraduate college in much greater numbers if academic performance were the only criterion for admission, according to court documents made public Friday.

The review from Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, uncovered by the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit, appeared to indicate that applicants of Asian descent would constitute 43 percent of the admitted class at the ultra-selective university under a hypothetical “academics-only” model.

Cmart:

Claude has a very distinctive writing style: short punchy sentences and eyeball kicks. We have automatic highlighting tools that don’t even try to predict LLM use in a fancy statistical way, only match on phrase patterns that hardly anyone used prior to Claude, but which now appear everywhere thanks to Claude.

Most of the time, I don’t even need the highlighting tool. I’ll start reading something like this, or this, and think this is obviously Claude’s voice.

“Menu layout? Nearly the same. You’re not relearning a browser — you’re just using a cleaner version of what you already know.”

“K3 ships zero draft tensors — no MTP, no EAGLE — so the only speculative path is an external block-diffusion draft: RadixArk’s Kimi-K3-DSpark.”

In addition to Claude itself sounding like this, so do LLM that are even mildly distilled from Claude (such as Kimi K3). Maybe it’s also people who are exposed to enough Claude output to unintentionally pick up the style in their own writing. 😱

LLM output doesn’t have to sound like this! GPT-5 and Gemma 4 write more ’normally’. So, Claude’s voice is at least a semi-deliberate choice by Anthropic. It doesn’t appear to be Amanda Askell’s fault.

Maybe it has emerged from a few million RLHF nudges where someone picked sentence A as sounding better than B? Has Claude gradient-descended onto the style that people actually prefer in aggregate? I’m not sure I would buy that. The marketplace of ideas has long rewarded authors for using whatever style readers find compelling, and these incentives playing out over centuries did not tilt the total written record in a Claudey direction.

John C. Eastman

Time to revisit the Constitution’s Spending Clause limits.

The national debt of the United States just crossed $40 trillion.

That number is so large that it risks becoming meaningless. But consider this: the federal government did not reach $30 trillion in debt until January 2022. It added the next $10 trillion in just four and a half years. As of August 18, the Treasury reported gross federal debt of approximately $40.05 trillion—$32.27 trillion held by the public and another $7.78 trillion owed within the government itself.

The conventional debate over our fiscal catastrophe is familiar. Democrats blame Republican tax cuts. Republicans blame Democratic spending. Budget experts correctly point to Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, pandemic relief, and now the staggering cost of servicing the debt itself.

But there is another cause of our fiscal predicament that almost no one in Washington is willing to discuss: the federal government spends enormous sums of money on things the Constitution never authorized it to fund.

The chart below tells a remarkable story. At the founding, the federal debt was below 40% of the nation’s economic output, largely the legacy of the Revolutionary War. Successive administrations paid it down. After the War of 1812, it rose again and then fell. By 1835, President Andrew Jackson’s administration had essentially extinguished the national debt.

Robert David Graham:

Each point is the actual 2-element embedding vector learned for that byte token. The network predicts the next byte from the current byte.

Erica York, Emily Kraschel

• The top 1 percent’s income share fell for the second consecutive year from 22.4 percent in 2022 to 20.6 percent in 2023, and its share of federal income taxes paid fell from 40.4 percent to 38.4 percent.
• The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid nearly 97 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.

Patrick McIlheran:

Development-spurring TIF has consequences in Wisconsin’s taxpayer-protecting levy limits, but there’s a way around tradeoff

“There’s good TIFs and bad TIFs,” as one economic development figure, the head of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, put it to the Badger Institute last spring.

But good or bad, all uses of tax increment financing — a way of paying for public improvements through the added land value they eventually lead to as a way to spur development — can raise existing residents’ property tax bills, at least the way the tool is used in Wisconsin, according to another long-prominent voice on the issue.

“I’m not opposed to TIF,” said Duey Stroebel, a retired state senator from Saukville who previously had been in land development. “If you have a brownfield, by all means, you’ll benefit your taxpayers by getting that property back on the tax rolls.” But it does mean, he said, “you’re committing your taxpayers” — because of the way TIF interacts with the state’s municipal levy limit.

Tax increment financing was spotlighted this year after opponents of a data center near Port Washington complained that the city used the financing tool to pay for water and sewer infrastructure at the 647-acre site on former farmland.

Opponents saw the financing as a subsidy, but the city and regional development boosters pointed out that the data center developer paid for up-front for infrastructure the city will own. That owner will be reimbursed over time out of the additional taxes the city can levy on land suddenly made much more valuable by the development — which in turn wouldn’t have happened without the infrastructure. “It’s a closed loop,” as one observer said.

Corri Hess:

When students return to Wisconsin schools over the next few weeks, their cell phone use will be limited. 

Phones have been prohibited during class time since July 1. But some parents say the new law doesn’t go far enough — they would like to see all screen use limited in classrooms. 

“Our concerns are more widely around technology use and a healthy balance,” said Jacqui Shore, a Madison mom, middle school librarian and co-founder of Parent Check on Tech. 

The group was formed in May with about 30 parents. Today there are about 200 people involved. 

They say the default for students should be pencil, paper and physical books, not Chromebooks and other technology.  

Amy Martino, the group’s other co-founder, says they’re working on a petition for the Madison Metropolitan School District. 

“We’re leaning toward advocating for delaying one-to-one Chromebooks until high school,” Martino said. “And we would like to see device-free classrooms until grade two. And then a Chromebook cart or computer lab for third through eighth grade.” 

According to a report to the MMSD Board of Education in April by senior leaders in the district, there is a discrepancy between the recommended instructional usage of technology and the actual daily screen time logged by students. 

——-

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Frederick M. Hess:

Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.

This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”

Big, if true.

Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious.

Take grade inflation, a long-standing preoccupation of Mansfield’s. For the past decade, more than 80 percent of undergraduate grades at Harvard College have been A’s or A minuses. This May, Harvard’s faculty voted to impose a 20 percent cap on A’s awarded in each course. Dean Amanda Claybaugh predicted that the result would “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard” and might “encourage other institutions to confront” the problem of grade inflation with “rigor and courage.”

Punya Mishra:

Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that Khanmigo, the AI chatbot tutor he launched three years ago with world-changing ambitions, was “a non-event” for most students. “They just didn’t use it much,” Khan said. His own Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, put it even more plainly: “So far I am not seeing the revolution in education.”

The second was Dan Meyer’s sharp obituary on LinkedIn, titled “RIP Khanmigo & Edtech Industry Dreams of AI Tutors.” Meyer traced the whole arc: the TED talk predictions, the philanthropic subsidies, the increasingly aggressive way Khanmigo inserted itself into the student experience (because students wouldn’t seek it out voluntarily), and the steadily shrinking user projections. His conclusion was blunt: if Khanmigo died with every advantage in the world (early OpenAI access, Microsoft backing, government subsidies, Sal Khan’s Rolodex), what hope should the rest of the edtech industry place in chatbot tutors?

These are important pieces, and I’d recommend reading both. But reading them, I found myself thinking about a deeper question. Not whether the revolution failed (it clearly did) but why it was never going to work in the first place.

To explain I have to go back a bit in time, back during my days at MSU, when I was out there giving talks about technology integration and the critical role played by the teacher in this entire process. And further about the significance of students actively constructing representations of their understanding.

So in these talks I used to show a clip from the Charlie Rose show (see below). It’s an interview where Khan describes how he prepares to teach a new topic. And it’s wonderful. Here’s Khan on learning about, say, Napoleon and the French Revolution:

“I approach it from what my brain would like to see… I like to see a scaffold, I like to see a map… what is the Holy Roman Empire, like where, what is that now?”

He reads Wikipedia first, “just to get the scaffold.” He draws timelines. He copies maps and pastes them onto his digital blackboard. And then he does something genuinely important: he pushes past the surface until he hits the questions that textbooks skip. Here’s Khan on the neuron:

Elyse Goncalves and Veronica Dagher:

Personal-finance classes are expanding across U.S. high schools, and the subject’s importance is getting a nod of recognition this fall.

The College Board is rolling out a new Advanced Placement Business with Personal Finance course in a number of schools this coming school year. The course, announced last year, will cover entrepreneurship and business strategy alongside topics devoted to personal finance.

More than half of U.S. states now require students to complete a stand-alone personal-finance course to graduate. Business has been the most popular undergraduate degree for years, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Jennifer Mulhern, the College Board’s vice president for AP program access, said the new course is meant to better prepare high-schoolers for college business courses while also helping boost their personal-finance competency.

AP Business with Personal Finance fulfills the personal-finance requirement in many states, and Mulhern said the AP is still working to meet it in others.

Wall Street Journal:

The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, argues the defendants had a strategy of “falsely accusing CTU of ‘cooking the books,’” and other misconduct, so as to “weaken CTU in the eyes of its members, Chicago students and their families, voters, and the broader community.” Those criticisms, and the use by the Illinois Policy Institute and Mr. Berg of the word “toxic” to describe CTU, show intent to harm the union, the suit argues.

According to CTU, its approval among Chicago residents has fallen “from 70% to 28%.” That first figure looks high, since a public poll in early 2023 shows 44%. In any case, much of CTU’s legal complaint concerns criticism of its years of delayed financial audits. CTU bylaws say the union must annually “furnish an audited report” that “shall be printed in the Union’s publication.” The Liberty Justice Center and four CTU members sued in 2024, asking to force the union to comply. The audits have since been produced, and that suit is still pending.

In CTU’s telling, the “finalization” of the audits was “delayed for innocuous reasons,” including Covid and staff turnover. The Liberty Justice Center was aware of its explanation, CTU says, since it came up in the previous case. Yet the defendants kept criticizing the union, saying it needed to “come clean” and tweeting a mock picture of a cookbook entitled “Cooking the Books.”

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde:

In 2028, the median person on Earth will live on more than $10 a day for the first time in history (figures adjusted for inflation and for differences in purchasing power across countries).

In the last decade alone, the share of people above this threshold has risen from 41.3% in 2016 (3.11 billion) to 48.7% in 2026 (4.03 billion). Think about that for a second: we have pushed nearly 900 million people over this threshold in ten years, around 90 million people a year (slightly above the population of Turkey).

At the very bottom, we have also seen progress, though slower. In 2016, 12.6% of the world lived below $3 a day (947 million people). In 2026, the figure fell to 10.0% (826 million). This fall is harder to achieve because the poorest countries also have fast population growth. As fertility falls there, and I think it is already falling, we will cut poverty much faster.

Rep Rodriguez-Ramos

Last May, I authored legislation to require a full forensic audit of the Texas Education Agency.

We estimated that staffing increases may have been as high as 50%. On Wednesday, we received the final audit. #txlege

It was much worse than we imagined (🧵1/8):

(🧵2/8) In the past four years, wage costs for management grew by 64%, to $44.7 million, with an illegal ratio of one manager for every three and a half staff members (1:3.5), more than three times the number of managers the law allows.

Imagine if our schools had one principal for every three teachers. That would be extreme and ridiculous, but it’s exactly what the audit uncovered at the TEA.

Jesse Singal:

In a better world, the late scholar wouldn’t have been elevated to—and fallen from—such dizzying heights. 

There’s an exceptionally annoying thing writers do in the internet age: We type something like “I really didn’t want to talk about this,” and then we talk about it anyway, at length. 

I’m going to do that here, but I can explain. 

You’re probably familiar with the Jason Arday case by now.

Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at The Dispatch, a cohost of the Blocked and Reported podcast, and the author of the Singal-Minded newsletter. A former senior editor and writer-at-large at New York Magazine, his work has appeared in outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, and the Boston Globe. He is the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, and is presently working on a book about youth gender medicine.

Mark Clifford:

Crowds waited outside a Hong Kong courthouse on Friday for a verdict for Chow Hang-tung that was preordained at her arrest five years earlier: guilty of inciting subversion of state power.

The supposedly criminal act: Her pro-democracy Hong Kong Alliance held annual memorial services for those killed by their own government in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

Only the most naive could believe that Hong Kong has a fair legal system, in which a pro-democracy advocate could have a chance of acquittal. Ms. Chow didn’t benefit from a jury trial—that constitutional guarantee has been jettisoned in favor of handpicked judges. The arrangement has helped the government secure a near-perfect record of convictions in national security cases.

The trial of Ms. Chow and other leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance produced some unexpected fireworks. The 41-year-old dissident put Hong Kong’s legal system and the Chinese Communist Party on the spot as few others have.

Representing herself, Ms. Chow agreed with prosecutors that she had called for the end of one-party communist rule. But she challenged them to prove it was illegal. “The key phrase in this case, ‘ending one-party dictatorship,’ is by nature a call for the rule of law. It seeks to end a state in which the party stands above the law and to restore our inherent rights, including that of democracy,” she told the court. “This is not a trial of the Hong Kong Alliance or the defendants, this is a trial of Hong Kong’s justice system.”

Natasha Singer

Publicly, Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, was bullish. In an interview at the time, she said the partnership would help educators learn to use chatbots “safely, wisely and ethically,” while also getting them a seat at the table with behemoths like Microsoft and OpenAI as they developed and refined their A.I. products.

I pointed out to Ms. Weingarten that the union-industry deal might also present a fox-henhouse problem for schools. While her organization was calling for safeguards to protect children from A.I. risks, some trade groups representing Big Tech were working to block A.I. safety laws. She acknowledged the dissonance. “We are in it for the good of students and for the good of the country and for the good of families and to make sure educators actually play their rightful role,” she said. “Some of the companies that we’re engaged with are in it for profit. Those are two fundamentally different goals.”

After Ms. Weingarten announced her union’s deal with Big Tech companies, a few teachers and professors publicly warned that the spread of A.I. chatbots could undermine their profession, by outsourcing and automating core tasks like giving students feedback on their work. One of the more forceful educators was Lois Weiner, an education professor emerita at New Jersey City University and a retiree member of the U.F.T., who argued on Bluesky that the national union was selling out to corporate interests.

———-

Joseph Younis:

In other words, the study is simply just showing you that the degradation of LLM performance on medical diagnostic and management is a function of who is interacting with it, and that IS OBVIOUS. Being old doesn’t change that fact, it only potentially exacerbates it. It is not benchmarking individual model superiority.

Also, the better a frontier model gets is, presumably, a consequence of better inputs/refining and subsequent weighting, but patient lexicon, patient medical semantics, literacy, and patient technical language etc. are NOT the reference for training. So if I had to guess and based on my experience with frontier models, they’re probably not that much better.

———

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jeffrey A. Tucker:

What is the state, from whence does it come, and who controls it? One might suppose these questions have obvious answers. In reality the answer is elusive, not easily identified even by those who are part of the system. 

Trump found this out in his first term. He naturally assumed that the president would be in charge, at least as regards the executive branch. He found out otherwise when the agencies worked closely with the media to undermine him at every step. After a four-year hiatus, he came back with a real determination to be the president. 

It’s easier said than done. Cabinet-level appointees frequently complain in private that they face intractable bureaucracies with all institutional knowledge. They often feel like stand-ins or mannequins. Trump is the unusual president who has even attempted to be in charge. Most are just happy for the emoluments of office and the plaudits that come with it. 

In any case, anyone who reaches the heights in any state apparatus discovers that it is something different from anything described in the textbooks. 

Plato conceived of the state as organic to life itself, mirroring the structure of the human soul. The polity was divided between the rulers (philosopher-kings), the guardians (warriors), and the producers (workers). The state exists to achieve justice, where each class performs its designated role harmoniously.

Aristotle offered a more realistic view. While the state is organic, it is not soulful. It has definite functions to promote the well-being of all through laws and education, balancing the interests of different classes. Aristotle favored a mixed government to prevent tyranny and promote stability.

Moving forward to the Enlightenment period, theories of the state in the West evolved with the advance of technology and economics. Thomas Hobbes saw the state as essential for stopping civil war between factions. Without it, life would be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. To be sure, he was writing in the midst of the English Civil War. 

by Ian Kingsbury, David T. Marshall

• The evidence offers a warning: Charter schools, long celebrated for innovation and choice, risk marginalization unless they undergo a fundamental shift away from a system-centric approach toward a parent-centric model.

For decades, charter schools served as the vanguard of conservative education reform. Authorized as public entities yet free from many district regulations, charters promised innovation and competition that would elevate all schools. Initially pioneered by Democrats in Minnesota in 1991 and scaled nationally under bipartisan support,¹ the sector now educates almost four million students.²Yet the landscape has shifted dramatically with the advent of universal education savings accounts (ESAs).

Arizona’s 2022 universal expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Account program marked the first statewide parent-directed funding model open to nearly all families.³ Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship and related programs have achieved near-universal reach, serving over 286,000 students by 2025–26.⁴ The Utah Fits All Scholarship, though newer and with a capped budget, signals movement in the same direction.

Forrest Liu:

San Francisco doubled a mandatory ethnic studies course that perpetuates the model minority myth, told parents the textbook was copyrighted, and pushed it through on a consent calendar. I’ve spent years fighting anti-Asian hate. This is what it looks like in our schools.

TL;DR

SFUSD quietly doubled its ethnic studies mandate, adopted a contested “Liberated” curriculum parents weren’t allowed to read, and funded it with money voters restricted to arts and enrichment, all while the state’s own version of the requirement isn’t even in effect. A lawsuit now argues the district hid the vote, blocked public review, and misused restricted funds to push through a course that recasts Asian American success as complicity in whiteness.

To read the curriculum that San Francisco will now require every ninth grader in the city to complete, a parent last spring had to do this: call the district, book an appointment during working hours, travel to a district office, and examine the pages under supervision, because the materials could not be taken home, copied, or posted online. The district claimed that these materials were copyrighted. As a consequence, a mother who came to America for her child’s sake had to request permission to read what the state would teach him about who she is.

That is not an accident of bureaucracy. A public institution that is proud of its work does not need to hide it. When it conceals documents, schedules debate in the fine print, and pays for it out of a fund the voters walled off, it is telling us that it is unwilling to listen to our objections.

I have spent years of my life fighting anti-Asian hate. Grandpa Vicha, eighty-four, was killed on his morning walk. Elders in this city learned to cross the street when they saw a stranger coming. I did the concrete, unglamorous work of insisting that the harms inflicted on our community be recognized and prevented. But what San Francisco Unified did to Asian American families with this curriculum was not a street assault. It is something quieter and, in its way, more insulting. It is the state taking our children, telling them their success is a species of guilt, and refusing to let parents into the room to argue.

——

More.

Caroline Lin:

China’s state media has called for English-language terms related to artificial intelligence (AI) to be dropped in favour of standardised Chinese equivalents in a push to boost the country’s “discourse power”.

As AI technologies have rapidly spread in China, English terms have entered common speech in the country, such as “agent” and “LLM” for large language model, a commentary published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily noted earlier this month.

The article argued that reliance on foreign terminology would lead to “cognitive dependency” and ultimately undermine the country’s voice in global technology governance.

This latest call to action follows China’s official designation of ciyuan as the standard translation for “token” in March at the China Development Forum 2026. Ci means “word”, while yuan is often associated with fundamental elements or currency. Specifically, the yuan is the base monetary unit of China’s official currency, the renminbi.

The commentary said that reliance on foreign jargon could deprive China of the authority to define key concepts, stunt the growth of original domestic theories and hinder the development of a Chinese framework for talking about technology.

Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low

Generative AI has been promoted as the technology that could transform education by providing every student a personal tutor. We provide some of the first large-scale experimental evidence, from a two-year cluster randomized trial in 18 Tennessee middle schools in which randomly assigned students used Khan Academy with its AI tutor, Khanmigo, configured to coach rather than give answers, during existing daily remedial mathematics sessions. Assignment raises math achievement by 1.3 national percentile ranks per term, or about 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations over a school year; the implied effect of a full year of active participation reaches 0.14 standard deviations. These gains resemble those from Khan Academy practice without AI assistance. One explanation is that students used the tutor infrequently and, when they did, rarely engaged it in substantive mathematical dialogue: 96 percent of students tried Khanmigo at least once, but the median student messaged it on only a third of the days they practiced, and in only 17 percent of the exercise sessions in which they made a mistake. Messages that students did send were mostly bare answers or clicks on suggested prompts. The binding constraint appears to be engagement: realizing the promise of AI tutoring will require getting students to use it, not just giving them access.

Robert Shrimsley:

I have to say that as the parent who walked the kids to school every morning, I cherished that time and stretched it out well beyond the point where they wanted their dad accompanying them. The idea that you would lazily trade away storytime or conversation to some AI model is so entirely bonkers. Trust me, Sam, these are the times you miss when they are gone. Talking with your kids and teaching them how to converse, those are some of the best bits.

We have, of course, all had times when we just want a bit of breathing space. I admit that in my more harassed moments I may have bought myself 30 minutes by sitting the spawn down in front of a Baby Mozart DVD. It was part of a series called Baby Einstein, specifically designed to ease the guilt of parents who felt bad about parking their kids in front of the telly, by suggesting you were really improving their brain power rather than just buying yourself a quiet cup of tea. The various videos, Baby Bach, Baby Beethoven, Baby Backstreet Boys (well, maybe not) paired stimulating patterns with great music to bring out your child’s inner genius. Reader, I’m not sure it worked.

So I can empathise with the notion of any parent taking a quick break to retreat into their den, garden or head. But what is disconcerting about this particular case is the mindset of the man who thinks it’s a “cool use”. Much of the public promotion of AI, when you strip it back, is of the “you don’t have to bother with this any more”. Be it research, data analytics, coding, medical breakthroughs or overseeing the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

Ian Leslie:

What’s the problem with politicisation? First of all, as Runciman intuited, it is partly responsible for the precipitous decline in standing of what you might call the book-based disciplines. The share of students applying to study humanities and social sciences has plummeted. The principal causes are economic, for sure, but the decline is also self-inflicted. Academics have always been dismissed by right-wing politicians as crazed lefties out to brainwash the youth. I’m not sure the wise response to this charge was to lean into it.

Second, and more fundamentally, it destroys academic standards of integrity and quality. This is not just a by-product of politicisation but a structural feature of it. A political theorist at an elite university told me recently, in mild despair, that her discipline and others have been corrupted by identity-based epistemology: the idea that to criticise a claim on the basis of evidence or reasoning is to perpetuate an oppressive system of power-knowledge that has excluded certain groups. 

The point of scholarship and teaching, on this view, is not the pursuit or production of such knowledge at all, but rather the elevation of “marginalized” voices.1 The question is always one of identity, and the answer is always an evaluation of the claimant, not the claim. Is this claim being made by the right kind of knower? Are the students citing the right kinds of knowers? Degrees of marginalisation are directly proportional with epistemic authority.2 (Unless, of course, a putatively marginalized person is saying something that undermines this whole way of thinking, in which case you rip their character to pieces).

It’s not just that some academics are too tired to keep standards up; it’s that an increasingly number of them are opposed to standards on principle. Soon there will be no disciplines, just one grey uni-discipline comprising identity maths and personal experience (“auto-ethnography”). It’s a stupefying approach but an attractive one to many, not least because it is easy, requiring minimal reading or intellectual effort. Few students, and increasingly few academics, have read any thinkers before Judith Butler or Edward Said, and most aren’t very interested in doing so.3

Olivia Young:

Before asking taxpayers for more, the district might disclose the full cost of the litigation, refocus its priorities, and demonstrate measurable academic and financial accountability with the money it already receives,” he said. “Please put students before politics. Vote no in placing this $133 million package on the ballot.”

The U.S. Civil Rights Office says Jeffco policies allowing trans students to use bathrooms, play on sports teams, and share overnight accommodations based on their gender identity violate Title IX.

Jeffco leaders say their policy is aligned with Colorado law. The district recently filed a lawsuitseeking clarification on how to comply with what it says are conflicting state and federal requirements regarding transgender students. Leaders say there have been no new developments yet on the lawsuit and claim most Jeffco families agree with the district’s policies and actions.

“We’re not hearing a lot about the Title IX lawsuit. To be honest, it’s been pretty quiet since we asked the court to referee, so we’re waiting to see if anything comes of that or not. At this point it’s in a holding pattern, but we’re not hearing a whole lot from our community about that,” said Dr. Rob Stein, interim superintendent for Jeffco Schools. “We want to work with all families and all kids, and we want every kid to feel included and safe and comfortable.”

——-

Commentary.

Colorado’s Jefferson County K-12 system includes 75,000 students, 14,000 adults and plans to spend $1,311,331,884 during the 2026-2027 school year. That is 17,484.43 or more than $10,000 less than Madison’s 28,000.

Gillian Tett:

One of their objectives is a renewed effort to add a citizenship question: their appointees at the bureau have created a draft memo, which I have seen, that reads: “Application of this rule would exclude illegal aliens and other groups of foreign citizens from the population count for congressional apportionment.” 

A second — less obvious — battle is around privacy. Back in 1954, Congress passed a bill which includes a “Title 13” law that prevents any census publication “whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual under this title can be identified”.

……

Some social scientists — including those on the left — are uneasy about “fuzzing”. However, Maga groups are very critical. The Center for Renewing America, an organisation created by Russell Vought, a top Trump adviser and official, for example, argues that “the 2020 Census was the most inaccurate and unreliable in modern American history” — because of “fuzzing”. “Fourteen states had statistically significant overcounts or undercounts, resulting in at least six seats in the House of Representatives being illegitimately awarded to Democrats.”

…….

There is no easy solution. And while many Democrats argue that Americans need to discuss and measure race to tackle inequities, this is not the view of census leaders now. “Residence . . . [and] allegiance should be colorblind and should not depend on or be distorted in any way by any immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the draft memo notes. 

George Mitchell:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley is more of a threat to Wisconsin’s school choice programs than was Francesca Hong.

While I believe Hong’s chances in November were very slim, Crowley has a shot at winning.  His stated choice agenda — a cap on enrollment and more regulation — basically mirrors proposals advanced by Governor Evers. 

This is music to the ears of its opponents.  

Yet Milwaukee-based City Forward Collective inexplicably describes “Crowley’s support for Wisconsin’s voucher programs.” This magical thinking will contribute to an unwarranted sense of confidence among choice parents and the leaders of schools they have chosen for their children.

Based on Crowley’s stated views, it’s reasonable to assume he would sign bills that choice critics unsuccessfully advanced in the last legislative session. If elected, and if partisan control of the Legislature flips, choice opponents will use Crowley’s message as a starting point for undermining parental options.

Daisy Christodoulou:

In a previous article, I argued that the government’s plan for more vocational education at 14 was not a good one.

I’ve had a lot of positive responses to that article. In particular, a lot of people accepted my point that vocational education in this country often conflates two groups of students: the 10-15% of students with an interest and aptitude in technical education, and the 30-40% who struggle to get grade 4+ GCSEs in English and maths.

However, there was also one persistent question, along the following lines.

“OK, fair enough, I take your point about vocational at 14 not being a silver bullet for struggling students. BUT then what is the answer? We have such a problem with disengaged 14-16 year olds who have a terrible time of it in school. About 30-40% don’t get grade 4+ GCSE in English and maths – the so-called “forgotten third”. Also, we have so many NEETs who are clearly leaving school without the skills they need for the next step in life. What are we supposed to do about this problem? Are you seriously saying we should just carry on as we are?”

In this post I will attempt to answer that question, with the focus being on 11-16 school policy (not post-16 or university).

Before I do that, I will repeat and emphasise two points I made in my previous post.

Thanks for reading No More Marking! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Matt Calkins:

I really wanted the column to run. I didn’t think it would, but I felt obligated to try to get it in. 

Toward the end of last month, before the Seattle Storm hosted the Indiana Fever, I spoke to people attending a rally in support of Sophie Cunningham outside Climate Pledge Arena. The Fever guard had recently taken a stance against biological males competing in women’s/girls sports, and a few dozen folks showed up to express their gratitude for her position.

One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!”

I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in.

One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment.

So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.

I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it. He told me later that day that he and others were looking at it, but that it wouldn’t be ready for Sunday’s paper. Monday night, I got an email saying that his boss was hoping to talk to the top two newsroom editors about it on Wednesday. No feedback had been given to me. Thursday afternoon, my editor informed me that it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance. I didn’t buy this reasoning. If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days.

My response? To resign on the spot.

Carolyn D. Gorman and Jennifer Weber:

The school year has started for nearly half the country, and most teachers are nervously expecting misbehavior. “Students have become apathetic toward school rules,” one teacher told EdWeek Research Center in a recent survey, “and feel emboldened to disrespect or clearly ignore their teachers.” If students feel emboldened, it’s because they’ve learned they’ll likely get away with it. Consequences depend on conditions other than their behavior.

The Trump administration just issued guidance suggesting they want to fix that. On August 18, the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to states and school districts reminding them that discipline serves a purpose, and that school policies can’t intentionally “favor nor disfavor” students based on race. It’s the right message, but the administration is up against bureaucracy.

Discipline doesn’t exist solely to dole out punishment. Rules and procedures are necessary to maintain safe schools and orderly classrooms, which are prerequisites for learning. Discipline is also instructional. Children aren’t born with perfectly mastered patience, restraint, punctuality, and respect — skills and attitudes necessary for the adult world. Like any skill, those behaviors are learned by practice and shaped by consequences. School rules, or codes of conduct, make adults’ expectations for students predictable. Enforcement makes the consequences predictable when expectations aren’t met.

Over the past decade, the upsides of predictable discipline have taken a backseat to the perceived harms of punishment. In 2014, federal policy made discipline partly conditional on aggregate racial statistics after black students were found suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students, prompting questions about whether schools applied discipline fairly. Different rates of exclusionary discipline alone don’t prove discrimination; differences result from many factors, including differences in misbehavior rates. But schools were nonetheless threatened with federal investigations if their race-neutral policies, not intended to discriminate, produced a “disparate impact.” Administrators were motivated to reduce reported incidents, but misbehavior still happened.

Avery Martinez:

Two school districts in rural Wisconsin are facing a tough choice — consolidate and improve opportunities and finances — or stay separate and risk going it alone.

For School District of Loyal Administrator Chris Lindner, it’s a crossroads. A referendum in November will determine if the process to consolidate with the School District of Greenwood moves forward.

There are vocal supporters and opponents in both districts, located in central Wisconsin’s Clark County.

US Ambassador to Belgium

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities. Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.

Bad-faith idealogues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship – or polemical distortions of it. That’s wrong. Free speech means that controversial views are protected. And Cofnas’s views were known to Ghent University when he was hired.

James Paul

What exactly does a West Virginia High School Diploma certify?

Last year, 93% of our seniors earned one, the highest graduation rate in state history. Yet this spring, just one in five juniors demonstrated proficiency in math.

The gap between those two numbers has a simple explanation. A diploma attests that a student met the minimum requirements for graduation. It says little about what the student has learned.

More than 90% of West Virginia students in the class of 2025 sat for the SAT. The average math score was 437 out of 800. A mere 6% of students scored above

600. Another 17% cleared 530, the College Board’s benchmark for having a reasonable chance of earning at least a C in a first-semester college math course.

——-

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

—-

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

Marty Lueken

Educational choice in the U.S. has a long history, tracing all the way back to 1869 when Vermont passed the first choice program, the Vermont Town Tuitioning program. When it comes to the modern-day choice landscape, however, Milwaukee is where it all started.

Extensive research has been conducted on the programsince its inception, and new research continues to emerge. A new report is out from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), along with a peer-reviewed version that was recently published in the Journal of School Choice. 

Authored by Will Flanders (Research Director at WILL) and Scott Niederjohn (Professor of Economics at Concordia University), this new study evaluates the impact of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee, Racine, and Wisconsin (statewide) voucher programs on student English/Language Arts (ELA) achievement.

I asked Dr. Flanders some questions about his new study with Dr. Niederjohn. Below is our Q&A where he discusses the results of his research, what they mean, and some of the strengths and limitations of the study. A lightly edited transcript follows, with minor changes for clarity, grammar, punctuation, and readability.

Ivana Greco

In July, Angie Sullivan, co-host of the popular podcast, I’ve Had It, decided to tell her audience she’d had enough of homeschooling. Per Sullivan: “I think it’s just f***ing weird…that you want your kids around you all day, every day and all night.” She went on to say: “I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier.” 

Highlights

1. In her new book, ‘Skipping School,’ historian Dixie Dillon Lane makes a compelling case that homeschooling in the U.S. has moved into the mainstream. Post This 
2. No matter where a child goes to school in the next few decades, he or she will probably encounter both homeschooling families and educational changes sparked by the homeschool movement.Post This 

But is homeschooling still weird? In a new book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream, historian Dixie Dillon Lane makes a compelling case that homeschooling in the United States has moved into the mainstream. Once a quasi-illegal (or actually illegal) educational method relegated to the fringes, homeschooling is now almost … ordinary. While numbers vary, the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that in 2025, there were around 3.4 million homeschooled students in the United States, making up approximately 6.3% of the school-aged population. The adoption of “Education Savings Accounts” in many states—which often allow homeschool parents to use state funding to pay for approved educational expenses—promises to further fuel the growth in American homeschooling. 

——-

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

By Raffaele Huang

Computer geeks Tang Jie and Yang Zhilin were mere teacher and pupil more than a decade ago, with dreams of building a machine that could think like a human. Today, they are two of the Chinese artificial-intelligence tycoons who have U.S. AI pioneers looking over their shoulders with alarm.

Tang, a professor at Tsinghua University, co-founded Z.AI, one of the companies hot on the heels of Anthropic and OpenAI in capability and global usage. Yang, whom Tang once nominated for his university’s top academic award, leads another, Moonshot AI. Each company is valued at tens of billions of dollars.

The rapid rise of Chinese AI models has sparked a host of questions in both Silicon Valley and Washington. How did Chinese AI labs get so far so fast? Where did their AI models come from? Are companies like Tang’s and Yang’s stealing from U.S. models, and should their products be banned to protect American national security?

OECD

The OECD Teacher Knowledge Survey (TKS) is the first large-scale study of teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge with internationally comparable data from representative samples of teachers. In 2024, over 20 000 teachers from lower secondary schools in eight countries participated in this new optional module of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Teachers completed an assessment of their general pedagogical knowledge and reported on their professional experiences, practices, and perceptions. The results provide policymakers and researchers with valuable insights into the importance of pedagogical knowledge, where to find it and how to support its development.

Terence Tao

An essay, based on a public lecture delivered at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians, on how the mathematical community might respond to the arrival of artificial intelligence tools that are capable of performing research-level mathematical tasks. Rather than debating the capabilities of such tools, we condition on the hypothesis that these capabilities will arrive, and examine instead a question that is orthogonal to it: what the goals and values of mathematical research actually are. The problem-solving component of mathematics is used as a case study.

Hollis Robbins:

One of the biggest myths in higher education, I tell parents, is that accreditation has anything to do with the quality of a college or university. It doesn’t, by law. Since the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, all an accreditor can do is rate student achievement by the standard each institution sets for itself. That means no accreditor looks at the quality of any of the ingredients that go into any college course or degree: not the professor, not the reading list, not the time spent mentoring or writing letters of recommendation. Nothing about what makes a college “good.”

“No accrediting agency or association may be determined by the Secretary to be a reliable authority as to the quality of education or training offered for the purposes of this chapter or for other Federal purposes” (20 U.S.C. §1099b(a))

What parents can’t get their heads around is how a college can be fully accredited, can cost more every year, and yet still be worse than it was when they went. I’ve watched this decline for twenty years and I’ve never been able to explain it in a way that sticks. Then I read last week’s viral New York Times Wirecutter story about Talenti gelato.
Times writer Annemarie Conte explained that she had been a Talenti loyalist since 2012. Like millions of consumers, she loved the fancy flavors that came in a distinctive, reusable see-through plastic container with the screw-top lid. So when the Wirecutter team blind-tasted the vanilla and ranked it subpar, “thin, gray, foamy,” Conte didn’t believe them. How could a quality product go downhill so fast? She interviewed the founder and a food scientist and tracked down old labels from friends who had kept old Talenti jars. She compared the listed ingredients over the past ten years. Many had changed, and not in a good way.
I want to make two comparisons here. First, no higher ed accreditors do anywhere near the kind of work Conte does. I’ve been involved in accreditation reviews at four universities over the past twenty years. Regarding academics, at least, it’s pretty much all paperwork. Here are pieces of paper with numbers of courses, learning outcomes, names of professors with degrees after their names. There’s no equivalent of a taste test. There’s no concern with quality, by law. So there’s no attention to whether things have gotten better or worse over time.

Douglas Belkin and Josh Ulick:

Higher education is hitting a demographic cliff. After years of growth, the pipeline of 18-year-olds is dwindling—a result of lower birthrates.

The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. In some parts of the country—especially the Midwest and the Northeast—the declines have already begun.

You would think a shrinking pool of students would automatically make it easier to get into college. But that won’t necessarily be true everywhere, especially at the most competitive schools, higher-education analysts say.

It is impossible to precisely predict colleges’ admission rates in the future as those numbers depend on a lot of things, including the reputations of campus culture, sports team wins and even the weather. But the demographic cliff is hitting just as another phenomenon is coming into play: a flight-to-quality, where the most sought-after schools are attracting an ever-growing number of applicants, while less-attractive schools draw fewer.

Part of the reason is rising skepticism about the value of a college degree. More families reason that if they are going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, the diploma better pay off with a good job—otherwise why bother?

How large would Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z have been without abortion?

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Wisconsin funds its two public higher-education sectors very differently. In fiscal 2025 the state and local governments provided $14,099 per full-time-equivalent student to the public two-year sector, the Wisconsin Technical College System, seventh in the nation. The public four-year sector, the Universities of Wisconsin, received $6,974 per student, forty-third. For every taxpayer dollar supporting a technical college student, forty-nine cents supported a university student. Nationally, the two sectors receive roughly equal public support per student.

Mission does not explain the gap. Wisconsin’s technical colleges are unusually occupational: 96 percent of their sub-baccalaureate awards are in career and technical fields, second highest in the nation, while liberal arts and general studies account for less than 3 percent. That mix can raise costs. Even after allowing for it, the allocation remains extreme. Across several comparison groups of eleven to thirteen states with similar two-year missions, Wisconsin remains first or second in two-year support and seventh to tenth in four-year support. Wisconsin allocates just under fifty cents to its four-year sector for each two-year dollar; the median ratio in the matched comparisons ranges from eighty-five cents to $1.28.

The better-funded sector also has more taxing and capital authority. Wisconsin’s sixteen technical college districts may levy property taxes, issue debt, own their buildings, and ask voters to approve major capital projects. The Universities of Wisconsin have no levy, cannot issue their own debt, and do not own their buildings. Western Technical College received an answer on a $79.8 million referendum on election night. UW–La Crosse waited seven years and four state budgets for a science building.

Michael Torres:

In the early years of the Classic Learning Test’s existence, we believed that our fight for acceptance as a college entrance exam nationwide would happen in admissions offices. We were wrong. The legacy tests have lobbied to weave themselves into myriad state government mandates nationwide, making the college entrance exam business as political as it is academic.

Knowing this, the SAT and ACT are lobbying aggressively to try to maintain their political moat. In several states — including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, and more —  they’ve hired lobbyists, even if one or both had not previously had one, and worked side-by-side to oppose bills that would merely make CLT legal. Thus, what would otherwise be a relatively mundane conversation between admissions officers and the makers of a newer standardized test is instead a pitched political battle.   

Thus, what would otherwise be a relatively mundane conversation between admissions officers and the makers of a newer standardized test is instead a pitched political battle.   

It wasn’t always this way. When the SAT and ACT launched in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, they competed in a free market. Both sought to answer admissions offices’ need for an objective measuring stick to assist them in sifting through the rising flood of college applicants in those decades. The SAT took the approach of trying to measure aptitude. The ACT, on the other hand, sought to provide universities with a measure of how much a student had mastered the typical public school standards. Students and admissions offices sought one or the other based on their preference between the two distinct products. 

The end of this relatively free and competitive marketplace began in 2001. That year, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. With that law, the federal government enforced nationwide accountability on public schools via testing requirements, including an English and math test in 11th grade. At the same time, Colorado and Illinois became the first states to require all public high school juniors to take the ACT, paying for the mandate through the state budget.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

• UW-Madison data show the admission rate reached a record low in 2025. Just 41% of applicants were accepted.
• Complicating the admissions landscape is a new law guaranteeing Wisconsin students in the top 5% of their class receive automatic admission to UW-Madison.
• UW-Madison has published data showing which Wisconsin counties and public schools had the highest success rate at getting into the state flagship.

Homestead High School in Mequon hosts a college admissions presentation every year, offering families general advice about the application process.

This year’s presentation, however, was much more specific: How to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The perception is it feels more competitive,” said Melissa Bleidorn, mother of a Homestead junior and co-president of the school’s parent-teacher-student organization, which requested the presentation on behalf of concerned parents. “It’s harder to get in. You hear stories of kids who would have gotten in 10 years ago.”

It’s not just parents’ perceptions. UW-Madison data show the admission rate reached a record low in 2025. Just 41% of applicants were accepted, down from 57% in 2009.

Michael Inzlicht

Yes, the intrinsic messages reduced prejudice compared to the control group. But what really stood out was that the pamphlet with the then-current anti-prejudice messages—the more coercive approach—actually increased prejudice compared to doing nothing at all.

We didn’t believe the results at first, so we ran a second study and replicated the same pattern: positive effects for the intrinsic approach, but a clear backfiring effect for what we might now recognize (by today’s standards) as mild anti-racism messaging. As far as I know no one has replicated this work, and samples are small as was the custom in pre-replication crisis social psychology; so treat these results as provisional. Nonetheless, when looking back now, I think we accidentally discovered something interesting, man.

Fast forward to 2020, when anti-racism became a dominant framework for addressing racial inequality. At its core, anti-racism makes arguments rooted in the work of scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. As Kendi argues, “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.” In this view, passive non-discrimination isn’t enough. The framework requires a commitment to actively fighting racism; if someone chooses the path of non-prejudice or non-racism, they are unwittingly supporting passive racism.

US DOE:

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to reenvision America’s postsecondary quality assurance system. The proposed framework would simplify the Secretary’s process of recognizing emerging and existing accreditors; promote a better return on investment for students; safeguard against undue influence from private trade associations on accreditors; eliminate standards or policies that discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics; and promote academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and research integrity.  

For too long, accreditors – private, nongovernmental entities entrusted to serve as arbiters of educational quality and training – have acted as major gatekeepers to more than $100 billion in federal student aid annually. A small group of accreditors has dominated the higher education landscape for decades, driving up costs for American students and families and, in some cases, pushing colleges and universities to prioritize ideological agendas over a robust education focused on student outcomes, including whether students graduate on time, secure jobs in their field of study, and earn family-sustaining wages. The proposed changes would break up entrenched accreditation monopolies and reorient the sector to prioritize innovation, academic excellence, and student outcomes. 

“At a time when Americans have lost trust in higher education, the Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the accreditation system are intended to reorient our quality assurance framework so that accreditors prioritize student outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes or the promotion of divisive and unlawful ideological agendas,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent.“Instead of ensuring institutions offer high-quality educational programs that justify the time and cost of a college education, the antiquated accreditation system has contributed to inflated tuition, administrative bloat, and ideology-driven mandates on college campuses. The Department’s proposed changes to our higher education quality assurance system will improve college affordability, reconnect education to workforce needs, strengthen accountability, and restore confidence in our accreditation system.” 

Florence Hazrat

Shakespeare and friends would call punctuation “distinctions,” according to the Latin tradition, or “pointing,” because of the medieval practice of placing dots or points at different levels of the line. The first occurrence of the word “punctuation” happens in the French dialogue book Orthoepia Gallica from 1593 by translator and language teacher John Eliot, whose funny and colloquial conversations in facing columns on the page influenced Shakespeare’s witty repartee. Eliot challenges London French teachers to “find fault” with his “pricks, nicks, and tricks,” referring to his punctuation and rhetoric.

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He was certainly a flamboyantly creative writer and inspired teacher; yet one can take him seriously here: “Pricks” performed “tricks” as punctuation became a vehicle to think about the technological revolutions of the time, gender relationships, and literary genres reflecting social and historical concerns like kingship or geographical exploration.

Punctuation was also a channel for exploring interior worlds: the mind, memory, emotions. Particularly when something wasn’t working quite right: In a society that prized eloquence above all else, writers became more interested in depicting the delay, interruption, or even failure of speech rather than its glorious fullfilment. Perhaps the sons (and some daughters) of the humanists hesitated to put their faith in language quite as much as previous generations had.

Yet, considering how his own life was cut short so tragically at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen. 

And perhaps it was precisely the opposite: Writing had become so powerful at expression that it could now subvert itself without losing any of its magic. One such master of consciously suspended speech was the uncontested king of brackets: Sir Philip Sidney.

Walter Russell Mead:

The success of Christianity in China may be the least reported, most important story of our time. When communist rule opened with the expulsion of foreign missionaries, the confiscation of church properties and the persecution of Christian leaders, China’s approximately 3.4 million Christians composed less than 1% of the country’s 540 million citizens. After 77 years of intervals of tolerance alternating with intervals of repression, official statistics acknowledge 44 million registered Christians. These numbers are clearly too low. Independent estimates vary but range between 100 million and 130 million, or between 7% and 9% of the population. By comparison, the Communist Party claims a membership of about 101 million. Observers close to the house-church movement estimate that another 8% to 10% of the population would soon affiliate with Christian churches if government opposition to the religion ended.

Those numbers compare to the percentage of Christians in the Roman Empire when the Emperor Constantine ended Rome’s persecution of the new faith and offered freedom to all religions. Rome’s shift from persecuting Christians to forming partnerships with them helped stabilize a weakened political order and opened a new era in the empire’s history.

That raises an interesting question for China. As the legitimacy of the communist system frays, will an aspirant for China’s leadership someday follow Constantine’s example and seek Christian support? Both from patriotism and a concern for social stability, many Chinese Christians would be ready to meet a Chinese Constantine halfway.

Howard Husock

Back-to-school season, now under way, once meant a rush to buy student supplies, from No. 2 pencils to notebooks. Now it routinely highlights the tension between failing public- school districts essentially run by teachers unions and the achievements of the school-choice movement, as exemplified by charter-school networks like the Knowledge is Power Program and Success Academies.

Teachers unions emerged as power brokers in the 1960s, as seen in the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. But don’t overlook the role played by a different big-government education “reform” movement: school-district consolidation. 

There were more than 117,000 local school districts in the U.S. in the 1939-40 school year. The distance between individual voters and local school boards was small. But between 1930 and 1970, consolidation eliminated 90% of school districts and two-thirds of schools. This transformed “the small, informal, community-controlled schools of the nineteenth century into centralized, professionally run educational bureaucracies,” as education historian Christopher Berry has written.

This has affected both educational outcomes and the relationship among neighbors. Small government creates social capital: neighbors working together to ensure good schools. In rural districts, teachers might even live alongside parents—in the same town or even the same house.

All this fell away in the face of the misguided drive for efficiency and professionalism that experts thoughtwould improve educational outcomes and cost-effectiveness. Today, there are only 13,318 local school districts in the U.S., including the sprawling citywide districts of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The dreams of education professionals have proved elusive, if declines in reading and math scores are any indication.