Uncontested local races are a big challenge.

This topic arises – for me – with every election.

Friends scattered here and there occasionally ask, “what’s the deal with (Wisconsin/Madison)”. My response in 2010: One must understand the Milwaukee County Pension Scandal, recalls and Scott Walker victories there and later statewide.

More recently, a look at the uniparty, perhaps combined with apathy merits a deep dive. Further, I mentioned a Francesca Hong pro literacy vote (one of four democrats) during a recent South Madison Rotary talk.

Isthmus Voter Guide.

Commentary:
State Navigate Poll Briefing:

…recording which party primary voters are participating in. No one can truly say that they can give you the demographics of previous Democratic primary electorates in either of these states with at least a 95% confidence interval, especially on age demographics. This is due, again, to the voter file being incredibly poor: many voters in Wisconsin have a birth year of 1800, and we don’t believe in vampires. These generally are newer voters who skew very young; about half of voters who we polled with a birth year of 1800 say they are in the 18-29 age bracket. Thus, if you were to simply take the voter file’s birth year data, you’ll get a Democratic primary electorate that is majority 65+ and has less than 2% of voters under the age of 30. Absentee requests for the Wisconsin primary (which includes requests for Republican ballots) are 5-6% 18-34. Given that this age group has been notorious for voting late/on Election Day, we find it hard to imagine a Wisconsin Democratic primary electorate that is <8% 18-29. Maybe it is; we don't know for sure due to the ridiculousness that is the Wisconsin voter file.

Dan Shafer:

People are frustrated about “the establishment” in Democratic politics.

So, I asked Ben Wikler: To you, what is “the establishment”?

His answer:

Liz Mair:

Baldwin and Pocan are both pretty far left themselves. This doesn’t convey anything like “this is a moderate person who should be acceptable to moderates.”

That said, WI voters will vote for people all over the ideological spectrum. What they won’t vote for is crooks. So depending on who is seen as what by November, she might get through to the governor’s office, or she might not. TBD.

Hope Karnopp:

Campaign finance records show Reid Hoffman is the largest donor to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

Hoffman, a venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder, has donated $15.4 million to the state party, according to campaign finance records.

The Wisconsin Ethics Commission confirmed in an email that online records reach back to 2008, though Hoffman only began donating to the state party in 2019. Wisconsin passed legislation in 2015 that allowed unlimited contributions to state parties.

State online campaign finance records show Hoffman’s name twice; he has profiles under different addresses.

Hoffman’s combined donations place him far above the second-highest donor, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whose donations total about $5.9 million.

It is interesting that some Badger State residents accept Pritzker’s millions, given the general loathing on Illinois. Wisconsin Watch on Republican donors.

Jared Henderson:

To sum up this section: NLI is taking data from multiple sources, presenting it without sourcing, misdescribing the data, and contradicting the sources’ definitions. This is reckless, irresponsible behavior from an organization that claims to care about literacy. 

So far, I have focused on popular presentations of literacy data. We’ve seen that most of these presentations are seriously misleading. Do we conclude from that that there is no literacy crisis? Are we doing just fine?

We need to make some distinctions before we answer those questions. So far, we’ve talked about the ‘literacy crisis,’ but we haven’t said what we mean. 

I believe we can distinguish between three related problems:

1. The overall literacy rates. These numbers are not as bad as NLI and the like say, but there is surely room for improvement. 
2. Problems in literacy education. So far, we haven’t discussed this at all. 
3. Building and sustaining a literate culture. This includes getting college students and other adults to read books. 

…..

In sum, American literacy is getting worse, but it is getting worse primarily because the gap between highly skilled readers and struggling readers is growing.

……

In a 2000 meta-analysis, the National Reading Panel did find evidence that using phonics was a better way to teach reading, and it seems that the real problem with whole language learning was that it hurt the kids at the bottom the most. We withheld the most effective method from the kids who needed the most help!The averages, however, mostly remained the same. The more recent NAEP declines happened well after some schools decided to reintroduce phonics, and the decline in scores in both reading and mathematics indicates that there is something else going on. (Given the timing, COVID-19 seems like a likely candidate, though the downward trend was already starting in 2019.)

——-

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!)

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?

Steve Sinofsky:

The number of times over decades that companies have been found to be fingerprinting documents is very high. Never did the fingerprints remain.

The concerns were certainly that it was done without consent, but the problem is inherently controlling use of fingerprinting, the map from fingerprint to user, and expansion of the fingerprint itself and what data it carries. Can you know which user? What the prompt was? The date? The location? It turns out they know all that and once there is a fingerprint all of that is part of the record.

Erich Dylus:

Putting aside the constitutionality of this (and the vendor favoritism), have to imagine Anthropic’s output watermarking would be verrrry concerning for certifications like this

Alex Cui:

Claude’s watermark probably doesn’t work how you think. As the CTO of GPTZero, I’ll explain how Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are building text watermarking in this brief explainer and whether it can be defeated.

Almost all forms of watermarking that are fast and cheap enough for a frontier lab have the same formula, following the KGW method:

In generation:

Jill Tucker

The Oakland school board decided in a hastily called meeting last week to put a parcel tax measure on the November ballot, but in an as yet unexplained twist, district officials didn’t submit the paperwork to Alameda County election officials by Friday’s deadline.

A vote to renew the current Measure G1 parcel tax, which would have extended funding for educator raises, middle schools and other services, will now have to wait until 2028. County election officials confirmed they didn’t get a filing from the district and Oakland Unified will not have the measure on the ballot.

There appear to be two possibilities for missing the deadline: Either district leadership decided not to move forward despite the board’s vote, or they failed to get the required documents to the county in time.

Jared Henderson

It seems that every few weeks, a new article or video on the literacy crisis goes viral. Whether this is a video on YouTube, an article in The Atlantic, or a post on Substack, the message tends to be more or less the same. Americans are reading less; college students struggle to read whole or difficult texts; early childhood education is in decline. 

Shortly after making that video, I decided to take another look at the issue, dealing less with anecdotes and the history of reading education and looking at how American students’ literacy levels are faring in the modern education system. 

I am including these videos in the introduction of this article for a few reasons. First, to show that I played some role – the size of that role is unclear – in establishing the narrative that there is a literacy crisis. Second, to highlight how, in that second video, I discovered that some of the figures cited in discussions of the literacy crisis are unsupported or rely on a misinterpretation of the relevant data. Third, to allow you to see exactly what I said several years ago. That third point is particularly important, as I have come to believe that the literacy crisis is more complex than I previously understood, and so near the end of this article I’ll be explicitly correcting some of my previous claims. Most of them I still stand by—but there are a few important errors that I need to correct. 

In this article, I am going to defend two claims:

1. The data about literacy in the United States are being handled irresponsibly. Sometimes this is due to insufficient sourcing; other times it is due to combining statistics from multiple studies and drawing erroneous conclusions.
2. There is no single ‘literacy crisis.’ Instead, there are multiple problems facing American culture: early childhood education, adult literacy rates, and sustaining a literate (and literary) culture. Treating these as a single crisis will not allow us to adequately address each problem.

Ryan Zickgraf:

In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word “Nicaragua.” No, I wasn’t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. When I repeated it slowly, a hush washed over half of the room, and management later informed me that people “didn’t feel safe” with me in the building, as if I were strapped with a bomb, not a guy with a sheet of questions trying to get through Central America.

When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off — giggle off, really — what she now calls the “Woke One” era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” and that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.” AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she’d picked up from a New York City councilman: “Woke One was crazy.”

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way. 

Gerard Baker:

After all, a whole generation of people have learned nothing about rationing, the gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Berlin Wall or the reliability of late-Soviet-era nuclear power plants and can’t be expected to have discovered the history of failure for themselves. In the ivy-clad cocoons of intellectual solipsism where the latest crop of socialist leaders learned their history, Marxism never went out of fashion and was passed reverentially from generation to generation like a sacred fragment of Chairman Mao’s tunic.

But world-weary cynicism about the revival of a discredited dogma must not blind us to the perils it poses, nor deafen us to the reasons it is seemingly back with a vengeance.

Four in 10 Americans say they have a favorable view of socialism, according to Gallup. One-third of Democrats describe themselves as “democratic socialists.”

It’s tempting to dismiss the latest hot summer fad as the product of a postadolescent psychopathology. Recent college graduates are coming to the terrifying realization that artificial intelligence and their degrees in gender decolonization studies make them unfit for gainful employment. Yet ascribing this political disposition to academic garbage-in-garbage-out misses something important.

There’s a simpler possibility: The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn’t seem interested in accountability; the revival, after decades of stable prices, of inflationary pressures that are pushing the cost of living to painful levels—and not only for those with a taste for luxury burritos.

Michael Pershan:

Teachers are Ideologically Incoherent

In 1996, prompted by debates about phonics, a group of scholars surveyed over a thousand reading teachers about their beliefs and practices. As you’d expect from Hanford’s reporting, many teachers at the time reported being philosophically aligned with holistic literacy practices. 

But the results are way more chaotic than that. On the survey, 99% of teachers stated that phonics instruction was essential or important. At the same time 99% said that “contextual analysis” was essential—that’s the clue-based guessing practice that Hanford reports on, “cueing.” There it is, standing tall next to phonics.

Now, it’s 1999. In an NCES survey of first-grade teachers, 82.6% reported working on phonics daily. (Newer teachers reported teaching phonics at a lesser rate, at only 76.1%). 

Will Flanders and Scott Niederjohn:

Studies conducted over several decades have produced varying results. But new research suggests that some of that inconsistency may come from measuring the effects too soon. If we are going to judge school choice fairly, we need to give students enough time to benefit from it. That’s the central finding of new peer-reviewed research we co-authored examining the effectiveness of Wisconsin’s private school choice programs that shows significant additional growth in reading relative to public schools across all three programs.

Our research shows school choice benefits students over time

This research, published July 7 in the Journal of School Choice, represents the first ever student-level analysis of the Wisconsin and Racine Parental choice programs. Using data collected from the Department of Public Instruction, we matched students in the choice program with similar students in public schools.

Here’s what we found. Across the Milwaukee and statewide programs, the amount of time that a student participated in the choice program mattered. Students who participated for only one year generally showed little measurable difference from similar public school students. But students who remained in school choice for multiple years experienced significantly stronger growth in reading achievement.

Matthew Yglesias

If you give a test to a bunch of students at the beginning of the year and keep track of the 15 percent with the highest scores, then the odds are good that when you do a year-end assessment, those kids will, on average, be doing way better than average. 

Of course, position in the academic rank tables isn’t totally fixed. Because I attended a fancy private high school, I entered Harvard better-educated than a lot of the earnest strivers from random suburban public schools who I met. But those kids were mostly smarter than I am, and within a couple of years of being exposed to the same curriculum, it showed. 

But on average, the smartest kids in 2026 are also going to be the smartest kids in 2027 or 2028. A lot of the relevant stuff is inherent, and a lot of the stuff that’s not inherent — like family situation and home environment — is not readily subject to change. 

As a result, I think it’s always worth being a little skeptical about claims that extraordinary learning is taking place in selective institutions. If you took that top 15 percent and put them together in a special classroom called the Smart Kids Room, then kids in the Smart Kids Room would do way better on average than kids in the Normal Room. But on its own, that tells next to nothing about the actual instructional effectiveness of the Smart Kids Room. 

My read of the evidence is that a lot of what happens in gifted education — especially in the gifted and talented programs and specialized high schools that attract a lot of media attention because they’re in New York City — has essentially zero demonstrated educational value. It’s just sorting across a large population. But a recent Natalie Wexler post on “how to make ‘gifted’ programs more equitable” raises another dilemma of selective education: If we’ve hit on something that we have good reason to believe really works, why are we gating access to it?

Tyler Austin Harper:

In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.

Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.

All of this was the backdrop of the dean’s announcement to faculty, in the fall of 2021, that the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.” But as with all cultural revolutions, the real change would involve collective struggle.

More:

For the cover of the September issue, I wrote about why I left Bates College, the tenure track, and academia entirely. Come for the attempted lynching, stay for the union-busting, decolonial chemistry, and soft rabbits.

Maarten Boudry:

Amazingly, legacy media are not only extremely reluctant to acknowledge Cofnas’s role in exposing this scandal, but some of them (@nytimes) are even harsher on the whistleblower than they are on the fraudster himself.

Benjamin Ryan:

The Times reporters @samueljlovett and @EmilyPrescott30 also did not credit me as having identified in real time on X last week as three Cambridge academics removed their names from the Good Law Project letter backing Arday. I also reported those details for the Free Beacon, on Friday. And yet The Times claims that it is the one that “can reveal” this news.

I would like Times to credit my reporting immediately, along with the proper hyperlinks, including to both Substack and the Free Beacon, and add an editor’s note indicating that they failed to do so in the first place. (See the thread for those.)

This is just an incredible sound bite. She is truly an idiot. Totally detached from reality. https://t.co/QvffciI9aw

— Rob Schmitt (@SchmittNYC) August 10, 2026

Danielle Franz:

In 2019 AOC was happy to peddle the lie that the world would end in 12 years.

Now she’s planning a family for the 2030s.

I’m glad she expects a future. I just wish she’d told the twenty-somethings who believed her.

Wolfgang Richter:

I have decided to become the President of Cambridge University. Over the weekend I updated my CV with suppressed memories that returned to me once I realized how useful they would be for my career.

1965 – Born to a black single mother in Harlem (I have a rare pigment condition, which is why I appear white). I was born profoundly disabled, far more disabled than Jason Arday.

1981 – Sent to a Soviet labor camp where I contracted syphilis. I escaped by befriending a wolf over two years, tying a sled to him, and crossing Siberia while surviving on bark and moose meat.

Glenn Greenwald:

The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the ‘craziness’ of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated. The so-called “Woke 1” period is not something to laugh off. It was a repressive and destructive mob rule which unjustly destroyed careers and requires a reckoning.

More:

But the worst trait in leaders is obeying social pressure to spout deranged ideas:

Kat Rosenfield:

This piece is as maddening and fantastic as everyone says (no surprise, @Tyler_A_Harper has a gift for storytelling), but the best part might be this sense-making bit at the end; the hollowing of journalism and the arts flows at least in part from this same dynamic

Elizabeth Spring:

Cambridge University has played into the culture war surrounding DEI policies through its failure to thoroughly address allegations of plagiarism by Jason Arday. In future, the University must act quickly to respond to similar issues in order to protect the reputation of its academics.

As a Cambridge student, am I held to a higher standard of argument and evidence than the staff who teach me?

On August 5th, Jason Arday resigned from his position as Professor of Sociology of Education, stating that he wanted to ‘reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life’. His decision follows mass media speculation about the credibility of his academic work triggered by a study by ex-Cambridge professor Nathan Cofnas which demonstrated that Arday copied the works of others verbatim in his PhD.

Furthermore, Arday appears to have attributed one interview response to two different people, in separate publications, and questions are now being asked about the credibility of his personal stories, such as running thirty marathons in thirty-five days, and being threatened with a knife in his faculty building. This is in addition to new revelations about fabricated information on his CV.

In response to the mounting media attention, a letter of solidarity with Arday was published online by the Good Law Project. This letter framed the allegations against him as ‘fake accusations’. While available online for several days, the undersigned of the letter listed the names of several prominent Cambridge members including the heads of Jesus, Homerton and Wolfson College as well as professors from the departments of Psychiatry and Education.

However as the scandal surrounding Arday grew, all three college heads have removed or altered their signatures.

Jay Caspian Kang:

In my writing, and in my idle thoughts, I often return to Arjuna’s lament upon surveying the battlefield of Kurukshetra and finding that he must kill his friends and family. What is his duty in that extraordinary moment? What is my duty, then, in far more ordinary and less harrowing circumstances?

This question, which unfolds throughout a conversation with Krishna, appears in the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, a book I somehow did not know existed until I took a Hinduism class in college. I was not a good student, routinely skipping class, but, worried that there would be a price to pay for my truancy and bad grades, I tried, sometimes. A few books got read, including the Gita, which I didn’t really understand until my professor—the sort of charming, gray-haired stoic found in religion departments of liberal-arts colleges across New England—explained, in a capacious and friendly way, that one should do their duty without considering the outcome. And, even though I don’t remember doing particularly well in that class, I have spent the last twenty-five years thinking about Arjuna’s despair and Krishna’s command.

When I think about whether my nine-year-old will need to go to college, I mostly hope she won’t, because I don’t think this country should rely so heavily on a credentialling system that’s far too expensive, inaccessible, and time-consuming to be worth it. But I do worry that she will miss out on experiences like mine, when a nineteen-year-old was forced to read something he wouldn’t have otherwise and was guided toward a revelation, however banal or vain, by a patient professor. How do you place a value on something like that?

There will always be idealistic, ink-stained people who want to devote their lives to scholarly pursuits—their role to inspire young people to love ideas as they do. But this transfer, more than anything else in the academy, has been increasingly blocked by A.I. in the classroom. This past April, Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies, wrote a stirring Substack post in which she described a course she had designed, some years ago, about what people throughout history have been willing to endure for their faith. The class, called “Letters from Prison,” typically culminated in students trying to synthesize an overriding theme about what they had read. “When I began teaching this course four years ago, students struggled to come up with their own themes,” Peters wrote. But, through brainstorming and revision, the students would ultimately land on some understanding that both felt personal to them and proved they had grappled with the assigned texts.

Kainoa Lowman:

The Trump administration’s culture war on universities died this week—not with a bang, but with a whimper. 

On Monday, education secretary Linda McMahon sent an open letter to university leaders, asking them to publicly commit to addressing ideological bias among faculty, “unruly and violent protestors” stifling discourse on campus, and lingering DEI policies in admissions. “Americans’ trust in universities has reached record lows,” McMahon wrote. “For the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms.” 

McMahon’s polite request to please be less woke marked a dramatic retreat from one year ago, when the administration was steamrolling universities with a brazen extortion campaign that conditioned access to federal funding on compliance with MAGA’s cultural agenda. By the end of July, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brown had submitted to various administration demands—which ranged from curtailing DEI and trans rights to policing campus antisemitism, among other things—in exchange for the restoration of research grants.  

At that time, Princeton and Harvard were the two major holdouts, the latter having been the first school to hit back at the administration with a lawsuit. But in August of 2025, the New York Times published a string of stories suggesting that Harvard, which remained in settlement talks with the administration, was on the verge of caving and striking a deal. As veteran journalist and Washington Monthly contributing editor James Fallows wrote, the upshot of these stories “was that not even Harvard—[the] oldest, richest, most famous of the US universities—could defy Trump.” 

What has changed since then? How did the Trump administration go from cowing some of the world’s most powerful universities into submission, to gently pleading with academia as a whole?  

Ron Noble

When considering the need for more teachers from historically disadvantaged groups, including Black and Hispanic teachers, advocates often compare the diversity of the teacher workforce to student populations. While this is meaningful (it’s important that students see themselves reflected in their teachers!), it’s not realistic to expect parity between teachers and students because younger generations will always be more racially diverse than older generations. Comparing the diversity of the teacher workforce to working age adults, or working age adults with degrees, or even the population of newer teachers provides a much more meaningful and actionable approach.

www link

How does that actually work?

Illustrated science features for curious readers — real mechanisms, real researchers, and experiments you can run at home.

Will Flanders:

Learn more about our new peer-reviewed research on Wisconsin’s school choice programs next Wednesday at 11:30AM.

us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

Patrick McIlheran:

A major party’s likely nominee for governor, state Rep. Francesca Hong, says she favors good schools. “Every child deserves a strong and comprehensive education,” her platform says.

So why, as a matter of policy, does she want to close the particular schools providing measurably great education for working-class kids?

She did so again the week before the primary election. When an interviewer noted that 30,000 students in Milwaukee alone rely on school choice, she conceded merely that she’d be “sunsetting” school choice Milwaukee only after the rest of Wisconsin: “So that would be around 2030.”

Why would it be ever? By coincidence, as Hong calmly discussed upending the education of 61,000 modest-income Wisconsin kids, a new study was showing just how strong an education those kids get thanks to school choice.

Find two equally matched kids — same age, same family income, same home language, same part of the state, and, crucially, the same performance on the state’s Forward exam — and watch as one child goes to a district public school and the other to an independent school using a school choice voucher. After four years, compare their learning growth via that Forward exam.

The result: Among most Wisconsin children, using school choice put the typical kid 1.15 grade levels ahead of his public school match. In Milwaukee, using school choice for just two years puts a child 1.35 grades ahead of her peer.

——-

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!)

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?

Quinton Klabon:

I am not bashing the governor. But USNWR rankings are fake. (WY is 4th. I -adore- WY, but…no.)

Wisconsin is 22nd, based on demographic-adjusted NAEP national test rankings from 2024. (We were 23rd in 2019.)

Urban Institute says top 5 are MS, LA, MA, TX, IN, which makes sense.

——-

When I took office 7 years ago, Wisconsin was ranked 18th in the nation for public education. Today, I'm proud we're in the top 5.

From K-12 to higher education, we've fought tooth and nail for public education, and we're going to keep fighting for our kids and schools. pic.twitter.com/It6hYFsyDb

— Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) August 10, 2026

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Every young child in Wisconsin public schools — from 4-year-old kindergarten through third grade — now gets tested three times a year to check if they’re on track to read well. It’s a new state law. Madison’s first full year of results are in, and the short version is: most grades finished the year with fewer kids meeting the target than when the year started. That sounds alarming, but it’s partly because the target itself gets harder as the year goes on — so this report walks through what the numbers really mean, where the gaps between student groups are widest, and what’s still uncertain.

Peter Turchin:

In the last two issues of Global Macro Update, Ed d’Agostino has been exploring the question of why the cost of higher education has outpaced the rate of inflation — by a lot (see Why Is College So Expensive?and Is College Worth it?). Both Ed and his colleague, John Mauldin, have been aware of my work since the publication of End Times, and both have used structural-demographic theory (SDT) to understand how the world around us is changing. Ed, in particular, refers to elite overproduction as an important factor driving up the cost of the college degree, as well as simultaneously diminishing its worth. 

In today’s post I add to this discussion by analyzing two hundred years of data on the cost of annual tuition at the Yale College. It is fortunate that we have these data, because Yale is one of the premier universities in the United States; perhaps, even the most consequential one (although Harvard beats Yale in having produced a greater number of political elites, such as presidents and senators, Yale outperforms Harvard on elite production per graduate). Of particular interest, from the point of view of SDT, is Yale Law School, which (according to my informal calculations) has produced a remarkable number of counter-elites (including Stewart Rhodes).

Alysia Finley:

Covid dollars from Washington turbocharged hiring at public schools and papered over their structural budget problems. But now that the federal money is drying up, the red ink is starting to gush. According to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report on Friday, local government education shed 49,600 jobs in July—the leading contributor to the nation’s 23,000 employment decline.

Ground zero is the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second largest. Its overseers at the Los Angeles County Office of Education last month warned that the district meets the criteria for a “Lack of Going Concern” designation. In the business world, the terminology means a company is at risk of going bankrupt.

On current course, the district won’t be able to pay its bills next year. According to the county’s letter, in June the district ratified agreements with its unions despite repeated warnings by county officials that the contracts are unaffordable. The union agreements are projected to cost $1.13 billion this year and another $1.44 billion next year—money the district knew it didn’t have when it agreed to the deals.

The district even warned in February—a few months before agreeing to the labor contracts—that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs. “At some point, we reached a breaking point,” then-Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. (Mr. Carvalho resigned in late June amid a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe related to district contracts and an artificial-intelligence chatbot project. He has denied criminal wrongdoing.)

Nonetheless, the district agreed to boost pay for principals and assistant principals by 12% over two years, increase average teacher pay by 14% over two years, and raise compensation for non-instructional employees such as custodians, campus aides and cafeteria workers by 24% over three years, in addition to sweetening health benefits. To pay for this, the district sought to raid its retiree health benefits fund. That’s like tapping your 401(k) at age 64 for a holiday you can’t afford.

LAUSD’s problems mirror those of other large urban school districts: unsustainable spending, particularly on administration and employee benefits, combined with shrinking enrollment. For every dollar that a teacher earns in compensation, the district and state pay 30 cents toward his pensions.

A recent study by the Reason Foundation found that LAUSD’s inflation-adjusted spending on employee compensation grew by about 27% between 2013 and 2023 even as student enrollment shrank by 35%. Noninstructional staff like counselors, social workers, school nurses and administrators accounted for nearly all of the spending growth.

James Freeman:

Last week this column noted that the Democratic socialist running for Wisconsin governor is no longer calling to abolish police and the U.S. Senate. But like all true Marxists, Francesca Hong has yearned to destroy the traditions that unite us as Americans. How much has she changed?

It seems the only people excluded by the Hong signals were the overwhelming majority of Americans, who love to gather with friends and family for the treasured American holiday. The deleted Hong post should perhaps be preserved in the Smithsonian as the perfect expression of 2020 progressive nonsense. In a few short sentences, the author managed to express politicized Covid extremism, obsession with identity and contempt not just for the country’s faith and liberty traditions, but also for the creation of the country itself.

CNN’s Ms. Collins showed an image of the since-deleted post on screen and then tossed what she probably thought was a softball question to allow Ms. Hong to show how reasonable she’s become since those long-ago days of the early 2020s. But it turned out to be very difficult for Ms. Hong to deliver a straight answer.

Here’s an excerpt from the CNN transcript:

Camille Bromley

Giving her son psychiatric medication at 9 years old was not a decision Ms. LaBar took lightly. She thought about it every night for a week, then called the doctor and asked for a prescription at the lowest dose that would help him get unstuck from inside his own head.

More than 20 years later, as an adult, Mr. LaBar looks back on that moment with ambivalence and regret. It was the start of a prolonged pharmaceutical spiral that kept him on medication without egress. He believes that the years he spent on antidepressants kept him from feeling the full range of his emotions — from living a full authentic life, even. He was not alone: When he described his experience online, he encountered a multitude of others who had a similar story.

The release of Prozac, the first S.S.R.I. antidepressant, in 1988 was hailed as a revolution in psychiatric treatment. S.S.R.I.s were safer, with less burdensome side effects, than previous kinds of antidepressants; in the coming decades Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro and other drugs were readily prescribed to tens of millions of Americans. Far less thought, however, was given to how to take patients off them.

For what condition, whether diagnosed or suspected (menopause, chronic fatigue, anxiety, etc.), did you seek care for yourself or a loved one? What symptoms were present, and how long did it take for you to begin looking for answers?

Greg Lukianoff

• Universities’ double failure on antisemitism and free speech
• How does the First Amendment govern liability for AI? by Tyler Tone

A publisher does not become the guarantor of every idea it distributes, and a reader who acts badly on what he reads does not thereby transfer responsibility to the publisher.

*Tyler Tone’s last day at FIRE was this past week as he starts law school in the fall, and we’re sorry to see him go but wish him the best!

• Can students learn to disagree without becoming enemies? by Willa Mack & Isaac Apple
• Australia targets Telegram as Russia charges its founder with terrorism by Sarah McLaughlin
• College students aren’t becoming less polarized. They’re becoming less tolerant by Chloe Ratner

Neil Gross

The bad news is that this mostly congenial experience is made possible by a pervasive insularity. To a striking degree, young people now pick their college based in part on the school’s political reputation, make friends with and date other kids with similar political views, choose majors that reinforce their outlook on the world and generally gravitate toward what is ideologically familiar.

This self-sorting not only undercuts the development of the critical thinking skills that a college education is supposed to foster; it also deepens the polarization that is imperiling our country.

Social scientists distinguish between two kinds of polarization, ideological and affective. Ideological polarization occurs when people move further apart in their political beliefs and preferences. But affective polarization, which is the true scourge, takes place when your politics become a core feature of your identity, leading you to have negative feelings toward those who disagree with you.

Mezha:

Danish high school students will be required to defend their written assignments orally under new government measures aimed at combating cheating with artificial intelligence.

The Ministry of Education said that an oral defense will become mandatory for all written assignments completed at home and that it will work closely with schools to develop the best framework for implementing these changes.

The regulation takes effect immediately and applies to upper-secondary students, who are typically around 16 years old. The measure concerns approximately 9,000 students enrolled in the two-year HF (Higher Preparatory Examination) program, who are required to submit major written assignments each year, the ministry said.

The ministry is also urging upper-secondary schools to use screen-monitoring tools during exams and introduce firewalls to restrict the content students can access during classes and final assignments.

Sage Lattman:

Looking back now, the stripper pole may have been the beginning of the end. Dudley Co-op, the only “alternative” dorm on the Harvard campus, had its share of lefty undergrad accoutrements—a Communist Manifesto mural, communal vegetarian meals—but when the school banished the living-room stripper pole a few years ago, it was a sign that the historic co-living house had perhaps overstayed its welcome.

Last week, Harvard made it official, informing Dudley’s 23 residents that the co-op, based across two sprawling Victorians a short walk from Harvard Yard, would shut down after the coming academic year. The e-mail was notably unspecific: Tom Dunne, Harvard’s dean of students, described the choice as one of many “difficult decisions” the college has made about its “staffing and structure,” and promising to share more details about the co-op’s fate when fall classes start.

Maarten Grootendorst

Demystifying the Compression of Large Language Models

As their name suggests, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often too large to run on consumer hardware. These models may exceed billions of parameters and generally need GPUs with large amounts of VRAM to speed up inference.

As such, more and more research has been focused on making these models smaller through improved training, adapters, etc. One major technique in this field is called quantization.

Peter Leithart

I first met John Milbank, my doctoral supervisor, at a welcome event for new graduate students sponsored by the Divinity School of the University of Cambridge. During the meeting, each faculty member introduced him or herself and described an area of specialization. I don’t remember what anyone else said, but Milbank introduced himself as a theologian “interested in everything and in the God who is beyond everything.” That’s his specialty: Everything, and then some.

He wasn’t kidding. The scope of Milbank’s work is breathtaking, its depth intimidating, its difficulty notorious, his combativeness legendary. The density of his writing is partly an issue of syntax, which sometimes mimics that of postmodern theorists. More often, Milbank is tough sledding because his writing is a knotted fabric of reference. Milbank writes as if his readers will follow along as he tosses off sentences like:

Peter Leithart

I first met John Milbank, my doctoral supervisor, at a welcome event for new graduate students sponsored by the Divinity School of the University of Cambridge. During the meeting, each faculty member introduced him or herself and described an area of specialization. I don’t remember what anyone else said, but Milbank introduced himself as a theologian “interested in everything and in the God who is beyond everything.” That’s his specialty: Everything, and then some.

He wasn’t kidding. The scope of Milbank’s work is breathtaking, its depth intimidating, its difficulty notorious, his combativeness legendary. The density of his writing is partly an issue of syntax, which sometimes mimics that of postmodern theorists. More often, Milbank is tough sledding because his writing is a knotted fabric of reference. Milbank writes as if his readers will follow along as he tosses off sentences like:

Andrew Hill

“Please do not cut off a fountain of inspiration for the next generation of UK scientists and engineers,” wrote 200 celebrities in an open letter to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham last week. They urged him to save the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, where many children had experienced what they called a “spark moment” that ignited their interest in science. 

I sipped from that fountain. Jodrell Bank’s huge steerable dish stands incongruously on the Cheshire Plain a few miles from where I grew up. When I was about 11, I had a birthday party there. 

The spark did not catch. I faintly remember coming away with a pocket full of indecipherable ticker tape from one of the visitor centre’s machines and shivering outside watching the dish slowly alter position on its circular rails. That was it. You may have noticed that I am neither an astronaut nor an astrophysicist. 

Even had my visit kindled that dream, I would have been hard-pressed to realise it, given the tiny number of vacancies in those fields. As parents, we like to hear our children voice their cute career wishes, but at a certain point it becomes clear to them that they won’t lead a mission to Mars and might have to settle for more earthbound job opportunities.

Jukka Savolainen & Kevin McCaffree:

In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history at age thirty-seven, when he was appointed to a chair in the sociology of education. Now, after accusations of plagiarism and serial fabulation turned his appointment into a fiasco for his employer, he has stepped down from his position, saying: “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight.” 

Commenting on the Arday case, the ex-academic and Atlantic journalist Tyler Austin Harper argued that elite universities have a record of elevating “black mediocrities” into celebrated, first-ever positions—even as they “skip over actual black heavy hitters.” Another black academic posed an obvious challenge: What is the evidence, beyond Harper’s take on a few prominent cases? 

Nathan Cofnas:

“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?”

Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.

Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.

As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charitiesand raised more than £5 million.

Up until his appointment at Cambridge, Arday continued to face unspecified hardships. As reported by the Guardian in 2023, despite previously being a professor at Durham and Glasgow, “He has barely slept over the past 15 years…, working through most nights—often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet.”

He has received “hundreds of thousands of letters and emails” from fans “all over the world.” This indicates a level of fame comparable to an upper-middle-tier household name celebrity.

But how much of “the most ridiculous story ever told” is true?

Jesse Singal:

It’s easy to see how Jason Arday held on to his University of Cambridge professorship until Wednesday, despite facing significant accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty for years. After all, his story fit quite neatly into certain culture war grooves.

On one side was a scholar born to working-class immigrant parents in South London public housing who rose to become the youngest Black professor in the university’s 800-plus-year history. On the other were the forces of reaction, seeming to target him as part of a wide-ranging attack on tolerance and progress. In many academic circles, he was clearly the good guy.

Then, soon after Cambridge volte-faced from its longstanding insistence that there was nothing to see here, and announced its own investigation into Mr. Arday, he swiftly responded with an announcement of his own: He would resign.

Jesse Singal:

It’s easy to see how Jason Arday held on to his University of Cambridge professorship until Wednesday, despite facing significant accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty for years. After all, his story fit quite neatly into certain culture war grooves.

On one side was a scholar born to working-class immigrant parents in South London public housing who rose to become the youngest Black professor in the university’s 800-plus-year history. On the other were the forces of reaction, seeming to target him as part of a wide-ranging attack on tolerance and progress. In many academic circles, he was clearly the good guy.

Then, soon after Cambridge volte-faced from its longstanding insistence that there was nothing to see here, and announced its own investigation into Mr. Arday, he swiftly responded with an announcement of his own: He would resign.

If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack.

Mr. Arday was appointed in 2023, just 37 at the time. He tells a remarkable life story. Mr. Arday says he has autism, that he was nonverbal until he was 11 years old, and that he couldn’t read or write until 18. Nonetheless he claimed impressive achievements, including raising millions of dollars for charity via feats such as running 30 marathons in 35 days. At one point, he claimed that he ran 600 miles in six days.

Clare Amari, Meridith Kohut:

Since 2022, when a gunman killed 21 people at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has spent billions of dollars installing police officers at public schools. Under state law, officers are supposed to stay out of “routine student discipline.” But over the past few years, they have used physical force in thousands of cases, including to stop seemingly minor misbehavior.

The incident at Judson High offers an extraordinary glimpse into a confrontation gone wrong. What makes it so unusual is that the student and the officer, as well as a teacher, discussed it with a reporter. The 33-minute episode, from November 2023, was also captured on body camera footage, which was reviewed by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News.

Janelle Fritts

Property taxes are the primary tool for financing local governments. In fiscal year 2023, property taxes comprised 28.9 percent of total state and local tax collections in the United States, more than any other source of tax revenue, despite being levied almost exclusively at the local (not state) level. Local governments rely heavily on property taxes to fund schools, roads, police departments, fire and emergency medical services, and other services associated with residency and property ownership. Property taxes accounted for 70.0 percent of local tax collections in fiscal year 2023.

Some states with high property taxes, like New Hampshire and Texas, rely heavily on them in lieu of other major tax categories. This often involves greater devolution of authority to local governments, which are responsible for more government services than they are in states with greater reliance on state-level revenues like income or sales taxes. Other states, like New Jersey and Illinois, impose high property taxes alongside high rates in the other major tax categories.

While no taxpayers in high-tax jurisdictions will be celebrating their yearly payments, property taxes are largely rooted in the benefit principle of taxation: the people paying the property tax bills are most often the ones benefiting from the services (e.g., K-12 education, local surface roads, police and fire service, and parks). As Joan Youngman argues, a well-designed property tax, despite being the target of frequent political attacks, can be considered a good tax since it is usually transparent, simple, and stable, satisfying most of the principles of sound tax policy. Property taxes also tend to be more economically efficient than alternative sources of tax revenue. Although several states have recently discussed property tax repeal, the tax’s efficiency means that attempts to eliminate it and replace it with other sources of revenue are less conducive to economic growth than keeping the tax in place.

Jeff Fong:

American cities rely on money from Washington, D.C. Some of this is obvious, some of it much less so. But the federal fiscal regime that made this support possible is becoming harder to sustain. For decades, Washington could finance expanding commitments through debt without forcing immediate tradeoffs elsewhere in the budget. That era is ending.

Worse still, municipal exposure to a federal pullback is likely to manifest as what will appear to be fundamentally local failures. Residents who encounter deteriorating infrastructure, struggling schools, and shrinking public services will be unlikely to understand federal fiscal constraints. They will instead blame city hall.

US Sovereign Debt for Urbanists

For decades, the U.S. government borrowed money on uniquely favorable terms. The dollar’s status as the world’s post-WWII reserve currency gave the United States a borrowing advantage few other nations could match. Throughout the 2010s, interest rates were so low that there were seemingly no constraints on how much the federal government was able to borrow.1

Then COVID happened. Emergency spending pushed the gross federal debt-to-GDP ratio past 120%, and the subsequent rise in interest rates has made that enlarged debt load increasingly costly to carry.2Unlike previous debt scares — and there have been many — this one came with a structural change in borrowing costs. Interest payments on the national debt have already surpassed defense spending and are now on track to consume nearly a third of federal revenue within a generation.

At the Hoover Institution’s annual Monetary Policy Conference earlier this year, Stanford finance professor Hanno Lustig argued that Treasuries are beginning to lose their special status in international markets. Before 2020, investors accepted lower returns because Treasuries carried what economists call a convenience yield: a premium attached to their safety, liquidity, and money-like qualities. That premium, Lustig argues, has now disappeared, at least at the margin.

None of this means the United States is about to go bankrupt. But it does mean the era of easy fiscal choices is ending. As the cost of servicing the debt increases, Congress must borrow more, raise additional revenue, or devote a smaller share of the federal budget to everything else. Whichever path it chooses, the federal government will have less room to maintain the commitments on which American cities have come to depend.

Joanne Jacobs:

Years ago, as the Vietnamese “boat people” arrived in San Jose, I asked a high school teacher: 

“Is it true what they say about Vietnamese students?” 

“Yes!,” she said, with no need to ask what I meant. “They’re my best students.”

“But you teach English, and they’re still learning the language. How can that be?”

“They work harder,” she said. 

Sean Speer:

The UAW’s turn toward universities to reverse its declining membership is imposing costs on both its traditional industrial-worker base and the world of higher education.

In June, the president of the United Auto Workers celebrated the victory of one of “the UAW’s own” in a Democratic primary election. Shawn Fain wasn’t talking about a machinist from Flint or an assembly-line worker in Kokomo. He meant Claire Valdez, a program assistant in Columbia University’s visual arts department, who won the primary in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District with 58 percent of the vote. She will be prohibitively favored to win the seat in November. 

Valdez came to politics through her union. She joined UAW Local 2110 as a Columbia employee, served on her unit’s bargaining committee, and in 2022 was elected chair of a unit representing 500 administrative coworkers. Local 2110 holds some 30 contracts covering universities, publishing houses, museums, and law firms, and its Columbia units have included thousands of graduate student workers. 

Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D

Wisconsin students learn what markets do for society, which a leading candidate seems not to get

In 2018, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction adopted the Wisconsin Standards for Social Studies to guide economics instruction in the state’s public schools. Those standards introduce students to fundamental economic concepts including property rights, supply and demand, prices, profits, incentives, and competitive markets. The standards were carefully formulated by experienced teachers and curriculum specialists, and they reflect best practices in economic education. They do not endorse any political party or candidate, but they do present market economics as the framework through which students should understand how economies function.

Eco3min

For most of recorded U.S. history, children have far outnumbered older adults. The U.S. Census Bureau now projects that this will reverse around 2029, when, for the first time, there will be more Americans aged 65 and older than children under 18.

The shift is not a forecast about a distant century. In 1950 there were almost four children for every older adult. By 2024 the two groups were about 12 million apart and closing. The latest official projection puts the crossover at the end of this decade. This page documents the convergence using the Bureau’s own counts and projections, with the full dataset available to download.

TL;DR — The number of U.S. adults 65+ has risen roughly five-fold since 1950 (12.3 million to 61.2 million), while the number of children under 18 has stayed near 73 million. On the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 projections (middle series), older adults overtake children around 2029 — the first such crossover in U.S. history, and earlier than the 2034 date in the Bureau’s superseded 2017 projections. Eleven states and nearly half of all U.S. counties have already crossed that line.

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

No mention of abortion, curiously. Choose life.

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released groundbreaking new, peer-reviewed academic research analyzing more than 100,000 low and middle-income Wisconsin students between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years, finding that students who remain in Wisconsin’s private school choice programs for multiple years make significantly greater gains in reading than comparable public-school students. The analysis measures performance on the English/Language Arts (ELA) portion of the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

The study is the first comprehensive student-level analysis of the statewide Wisconsin Parental Choice Program and Racine Parental Choice Program, as well as the first student-level analysis of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 15 years. It is stronger than other research in recent years that relied on school-level analysis. The Wisconsin and Racine results have been peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of School Choice; the Milwaukee analysis using similar methods is currently under review at an academic journal.

The Quote: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “This groundbreaking research provides some of the clearance evidence yet; school choice is a win for students. Our peer-reviewed analysis focuses on low-and-middle-income Wisconsin students who are the sole participants in Wisconsin’s unique choice programs. Our research should serve as a fire alarm for states evaluating new limitations or even repealing their choice programs. Make no mistake, those students will suffer due to their misjudgment.”

Director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University-Wisconsin, Dr. Scott Niederjohn, stated, “Our research was subject to rigorous academic scrutiny during the peer review process. The result was clear: the longer students participate in the ‘Choice Program’ the better their academic results, on average.”

Philip Greenspun:

A post for those who are draining their 529 accounts to pay Harvard tuition, room, and board ($91,634/year total) and for friends who work at Harvard (A.K.A., the “dumb ones” who wrote their PhD thesis from scratch)… 

January 2024, the New York Times tells us that Claudine Gay “resigned” her job at Harvard University:

edunomics:

Once at scale, we think the federal tax credit scholarships could bring upward of $1,000 per student to public school districts. If public education wants in – it’s go time.

Our new piece in The 74 shares what leaders can do NOW to unlock this money. The article builds on our 30-min webinar where we put forth a model where public schools charge all students a flat fee (that almost no one pays) for access to a bundle of services (field trips, assemblies, tutoring, tech). Taxpayers direct some of their federal taxes to an SGO who then pays those fees.

Todd Wallack:

The Trump administration unveiled a proposal Thursday to overhaul the regulations for Head Start, the early-education program that serves roughly 700,000 children across the country. 

The proposal would eliminate many existing federal rules, shifting some authority to states and local authorities; add new dietary and physical fitness requirements for students; and cap administrative overhead payments. The changes could free up $2.2 billion to serve as many as 268,000 more children, administration officials said.

Education Progress:

For our press release on the lawsuit, see here.

Education Progress is proud to announce that we are partnering with Orion Impact Litigation to sue Curriculum Associates, the company behind educational technology app i-Ready, for false advertising. i-Ready is one of the most-used K-12 educational apps in the country, with Curriculum Associates noting that more than fourteen million students (or roughly a third of K-12 students in the United States) use it.

We are not the first to raise problems with i-Ready. Earlier this year, parent Ryan Moulton wrote the viral article “Our Experience with i-Ready.” In it, he talks about how his son went from loving math as a small child to coming home from school in tears saying that he hated it. Moulton outlines how some kids would hide in the bathroom to avoid the software, while others would describe it as torture.

Moulton describes his disappointment with the app’s user interface bugs and oversights, its repetitive and basic work, and an apparent lack of adaptation. Compounding this all was that he had believed the marketing: he thought that, if his kids were persistent and did the work they were supposed to do, the app would reward them with the math they needed to learn. It did not. Nor is this isolated to a single parent. Similar reporting has come out from Unherd, NBC, Karen Vaites, and others, with students and teachers alike railing against it.

Getting institutions right for adults matters. Getting them right for kids is a matter of fundamental duty. When you’re thirty, you have alternatives, you have options, you control your own destiny. If an institution hands you an experience that does not work as advertised, you can walk out. You can make arguments in the public sphere. You can decide, for yourself, how and where you want to spend your time. While you’re a child, though, you are at the mercy of the adults in the room.

Laura Sanders:

Trump accounts are here, and they’ve started with a bang.

This year parents and others have signed up for more than seven million of these new, tax-favored savings accounts for children, according to the Treasury Department. The accounts have taken in about $1.5 billion, with part of that coming from Uncle Sam’s gifts of $1,000 for each child born from 2025 through 2028.   

Now, the guardians of these children face a choice: Should they contribute to Trump accounts beyond the free money provided by the government, charities and employers? Individuals can put in up to $5,000 a year per child for young people until the year they turn 18, and the Trump account app urges savers to make additions.

Daniel Engber:

Even before the push alert about his resignation from the University of Cambridge this week, Jason Arday might well have been the world’s most famous living sociologist. In early 2023, Arday received a professorship at Cambridge; at 37, he was the youngest Black scholar ever to have done so, and his appointment made international headlines. A year later, he set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

But in the past two weeks, Arday’s near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic) tale has disintegrated. In July, a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas published a long Substack post reviewing apparent evidence of plagiarism in Arday’s academic work. Cofnas posted 36 passages from Arday’s 2015 dissertation, about student teaching, which reproduce or closely track text found in a 2009 dissertation from another scholar in the field, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Arday looks to have even copied from and rearranged Zwozdiak-Myers’s title, and in doing so to have misused an apostrophe.

Jasper Smith:

Historically Black colleges have, for generations, been known to show unbounded grace to students in financial need. Newly freed Black students built campus classrooms in lieu of paying tuition; college presidents waived fees for especially promising students; and even in recent years administrators overlooked deadlines to ensure that students, who may have been shut out of education elsewhere, still had a path to the American dream.

So it came as a shock last month when Howard University disenrolled more than 500 incoming students who had failed to meet its payment deadlines.

Howard has betrayed its mission, countless Black community leaders and families alleged in viral social-media posts.

But a Chronicle analysis found that an influx of applicants, coupled with dwindling federal funding resources, has forced a dilemma on the nation’s Black colleges: How can they expand enrollment to meet student demand without straining campus resources, destabilizing their finances, or pushing more students into debt?

Administrators see it as a battle for their bottom line amid outdated expectations of affordability at HBCUs.

Hoover:

Property rights are one of the cornerstones of a free society. In Property Rights: A Practical Guide to Freedom and Prosperity, Hoover Institution fellows Terry Anderson and Laura Huggins explore how secure property rights promote innovation, opportunity, and individual liberty while examining the challenges these protections face today.

Matt Barnum:

Ed-tech was once widely touted as key to improving learning, but these days many state officials, school leaders, teachers, and parentswant to get students off screens in class. 

Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, a nonprofit that convenes and trains educators on using tech, has watched this furor grow with a combination of sympathy and alarm. In his telling, the tech backlash is understandable, but the solutions — blanket restrictions in some cases — are not. Echoing many advocates and companies, Culatta insists that schools not throw the ed-tech baby out with the bathwater. Yet he readily concedes there’s a lot of bathwater.

Incidentally, ISTE recently rebranded from the International Society for Technology in Education to the International Society for TransformingEducation. Culatta, who’s led the organization for nearly a decade, says the name shift has been in the works for some time and is not a response to ed-tech’s brand crisis.

I’ve heard a lot recently from skeptics of ed-tech, which is why I wanted to talk to Culatta, who has emerged as a leading defender of the value of tech in schools. I was interested in Culatta’s take on why this backlash happened, how to tell good ed-tech from bad, and what role screens should play in early grades. 

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

All Posts Start Here:

I think you should almost never use AI to write – that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page – whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive^[1] thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.^[2]

I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and misleading. I’ll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings.

As you may know, I’m not anti-AI. I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts. I also think using AI for line and copy editing, or for rewriting a passage to make it clearer or tighter, is fine, as long as all the edits are deliberately accepted or rejected by a human. It’s just using AI to write text that I’m against.^[3]

And yes, there are various advantages to using AI for writing. For example, it’s less effortful and much faster than writing yourself. So the disadvantages of using AI for writing need to be substantial for it to be bad overall. As you may have guessed by now, I think they are.

Milwaukee Business Journal:

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 through an unlikely partnership between State Rep. Polly Williams, a working-class Democrat, and Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. Their shared vision to expand educational opportunity for Milwaukee families laid the foundation for Wisconsin’s school choice movement. Since then, the success of Wisconsin’s school choice programs has transformed the state’s educational infrastructure, raising important questions about how schools should be funded and how they should be held accountable for the education they provide. Yet even as choice programs have grown, questions persist: do choice schools primarily serve the wealthy, draining funding from public schools? Do they operate without accountability? How do you measure success given the wide variation in the student populations schools serve? How do you create a funding formula that is equitable for both public and private schools? And how do you motivate legislators to address one of the most complex education policy issues facing the state? The Milwaukee Business Journal recently talked with Rich Mannisto, Ed.D., president of Messmer High School; Henry Tyson, superintendent of St. Marcus Lutheran School; and Colleston Morgan Jr., executive director of City Forward Collective (CFC); to get their perspectives on the changes needed to create a funding and accountability infrastructure that better reflects today’s educational ecosystem.

MODERATOR: Wisconsin spends $14 billion a year on K-12 education, but is it being spent appropriately? There are financial accountability systems in place, but are they enough? What does meaningful accountability look like and who should it apply to?

RICH MANNISTO: Meaningful accountability measures a school’s ability to graduate eighth grade students and to launch high school students into successful careers. It is more than just making sure school finances are spent properly. It is really looking at test scores and other performance measures and then having processes in place to help an underperforming school move forward or suffer the consequences.
HENRY TYSON: It’s really quite simple. Rigorous financial accountability systems are in place and they are working effectively – apparently far better than in the public schools. However, more is needed in terms of performance accountability. No schools of any type that significantly underperform over multiple years should continue to receive public dollars. The accountability process should include withholding public dollars until the school can perform at an acceptable level. However, it can get a bit complicated because some schools, particularly high schools, serve a very specific demographic that is just not going to test well. Their models are designed to meet the realistic needs of those students and cannot be measured by a simple standardized test. Accountability is also contingent on appropriate funding. You can’t hold schools to the same standard when you don’t fund them equitably. We get very good results at St. Marcus but that’s in large part because we fund raise $3,000 for every single child that attends our school. That amounts to more than $4 million per year. If we did not raise that money, we would no longer be a high-performing school. Funding has to be addressed before we can get serious about accountability.

—–

More.

US Department of Justice:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today investigative findings that Duke University School of Law (Duke Law) intentionally discriminated based on race in granting and denying admission to its 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes. Duke Law’s discriminatory conduct violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), which banned race discrimination in higher education.

“Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it, including in our nation’s law schools.”

The Department’s investigation found that post-SFFA, Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions and engaged in a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes for its incoming classes. Duke Law revised its Mission Statement to express its goal to “help build and sustain a dynamic legal profession that embodies a commitment” to a number of stated values, such as equal justice, public service, and a “diversity of perspective and experience.” Duke Law’s application included short answer essay questions, which allowed candidates to discuss how they would further Duke Law’s mission. Admissions reviewers were then instructed to “tag” responses to these short answer questions. To capture answers related to “diversity of perspective and experience” reviewers used the “Diversity/Services” tag. Reviewers were also instructed to use tags to capture specific applicant characteristics that are commonly correlated with race, such as being a Pell grant recipient. Thus, while Duke Law’s published policies assert that admissions reviewers did not see racial demographic data, Duke Law directed its admissions staff to highlight applicant information that could be used to advance Duke Law’s racial diversity goals.

As a result, a black or Hispanic applicant has a substantially higher likelihood of admission to Duke Law than a white or Asian applicant with the same academic credentials. When qualifications are not similar, the result is starker: in 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median LSAT scores of admitted black applicants.

I visited Seattle’s $165 million dollar downtown library and it was OVERRUN with drug addicts.

Not only is this library filled with adults who are high on drugs, but they also offer FREE fentanyl test strips, syringes and injectable narcan that anyone, including children, can…

— Savanah Hernandez (@Savsays) August 6, 2026

Kevin Kelly:

13 The best choices today are those that lead to a greater number of choices in the future.

14 We seek those possibilities that increase future possibilities for all.

15 Individually we are better off with expanding possibilities for everyone.

16 Civilization is the process of creating the maximum number of opportunities that work for the maximum number of people.

17 To maximize the greatest good means to maximize the longest good, because most of those affected are yet to be born.

Jukka Savolainen:

In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history at age thirty-seven, when he was appointed to a chair in the sociology of education. Now, after accusations of plagiarism and serial fabulation turned his appointment into a fiasco for his employer, he has stepped down from his position, saying: “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight.” 

Commenting on the Arday case, the ex-academic and Atlantic journalist Tyler Austin Harper argued that elite universities have a record of elevating “black mediocrities” into celebrated, first-ever positions—even as they “skip over actual black heavy hitters.” Another black academic posed an obvious challenge: What is the evidence, beyond Harper’s take on a few prominent cases? 

John Hinderaker

We wrote here about the strange case of Jason Arday, the (allegedly) autistic man who says he couldn’t speak until he was 11, couldn’t read until he was 18, but wound up as a professor of sociology at Cambridge University. 

Arday was the ultimate DEI hire, oppressed in pretty much every possible way. But serious allegations of plagiarism were made regarding his PhD dissertation, and it turned out that pretty much all of Arday’s biography was fiction–the visiting professorships, the severed pig’s head, the whole thing. Initially, liberals at Cambridge defended him vociferously and local police investigated a journalist who looked into Arday’s credentials, but the last straw came when it developed that the book Arday claimed to have written was fiction, too:

The Telegraph also revealed that Prof Arday had repeatedly claimed that he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.

The book was listed in his biography description in published essays as well as in promotional material for speaking events, and was attributed to the Palgrave Macmillan publishing house.

There is no evidence that any book was written or published.

Adala Almotery:

The Madison School Board is considering a policy that would prohibit staff from messaging students outside of district-approved digital platforms and determine when schools must notify parents about allegations of sexual misconduct involving their child.

The school district aims to enact the policy by Sept. 1 to comply with a new state law that requires schools to adopt policies on appropriate communication between staff and students and train staff on how to recognize grooming. The policy would codify procedures related to a separate state law that mandates districts to notify parents or guardians of “credible reports” of misconduct by the end of the day when the report is received.

The policy proposal follows a high-profile case last school year. Prosecutors charged a Memorial High School teacher, Eliav Goldman, with grooming and educator sexual misconduct. Over the course of nine months, Goldman had exchanged over 130,000 messages with a student, according to the criminal complaint.

Although the Madison Metropolitan School District had guidelines discouraging teachers and students from communicating on personal devices prior to the charges, no written policies explicitly prohibit staff from texting or talking with students on personal devices.

A few months before the charges against Goldman, a Cap Times investigation found the district’s policies lackedresearcher-backed recommendations to prevent educator sexual misconduct, including policies limiting communication between students and staff to district-owned devices and accounts. At the time, school district leaders defended their policies as adequate.

George Wiebe:

The program was created to encourage municipalities to limit spending growth, but Schmiedicke said its formula has not kept pace with inflation, making it more difficult for the city to maintain existing services without exceeding the limit.

After voters approved a $22 million property tax referendum in 2024, the city anticipated future deficits in its five-year financial plan. But the projected shortfall for next year is larger than expected, he said.

The city has enough money in reserve to cover the deficit, Schmiedicke said. But officials may also consider creating a special charge for infrastructure costs to help pay for engineering work and street repairs.

 Teagan King:

A new Madison School District program will incorporate things like parenting strategy classes, mental health sessions and visits to the district’s planetarium to get families involved in their children’s schools and to connect them to community resources.

Family University, which will start this fall, will offer a mix of parent-oriented classes and family events, said Tyson Jackson, the district’s director of family, youth and community engagement.

The program aims to increase parent involvement in their children’s schools while providing parents with resources on topics such as parenting and job skills to support their participation in the local workforce.

“We’ve had in the past parent educational opportunities through different sorts of programs that might have had some similarities, but not to the full-blown context of what we’re looking to do here,” Jackson said.

The district’s new Family Advisory Council, made up of family representatives from district schools, identified workforce development and family wellness as the first two focus areas for Family University. Once the program starts this fall, sessions will explore financial literacy, career opportunities in the local economy, social media’s effect on children and healthy technology habits.

“We also want to meet families where they’re at: ‘Do you need support with employability skills?’” Jackson said. “That was one of the things that came up. Parents wanted to have an opportunity to increase their skills for employability.”

——-

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!)

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?

Ashley McBride:

It also found that average base pay for OUSD principals and assistant principals is 9% to 30% lower than neighboring districts. 

The highest paid principals in OUSD, those overseeing large comprehensive high schools, can earn up to $200,029. Principals of small and alternative high schools make up to $164,126, while the statewide average for high school principals in large districts is $187,055.

Compared to the state, OUSD principals earn lower salaries than average, even when at the top of their pay scales. Elementary principals in OUSD top out at $157,123, while the average pay for elementary school principals in larger districts across the state is $162,477. 

And longevity stipends, which employees receive as a retention benefit after spending a number of years with OUSD, are lower here than in neighboring districts. 

For example, in OUSD, school leaders receive a $1,300 annual bonus after 20 years, which doubles to $2,600 after 25 years of employment. In West Contra Costa Unified, administrators begin receiving $1,200 per year after just five years. Their bonuses increase every five years after that, reaching $4,500 per year after 35 years. 

University of Florida:

The University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education is proud to announce 21 faculty additions for the 2026–27 academic year, including 14 newly hired professors, one visiting professor, one professor of practice, two lecturers, and three previously announced professors who are arriving on campus this year.

The appointments bring wide-ranging expertise in philosophy, political economy, history, international relations, economics, religion, constitutionalism and classical thought. Together, the new and arriving faculty will strengthen the Hamilton School’s commitment to rigorous scholarship, outstanding teaching and the preparation of leaders for a free society.

The new faculty additions will deepen instruction across the school’s undergraduate majors and minors in philosophy, politics, economics & law; great books & ideas; war, statecraft & strategy; American government, history, literature & law; and Christian thought and culture (minor only), while supporting the continued growth of the school’s extracurricular academic programs and dedication to research.

This fall, the Hamilton School welcomes the first cohort of graduate students to the Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in history of ideas and in war, statecraft & strategy.

With these appointments, the Hamilton School will have 61 faculty members.

“The Hamilton School is delighted to welcome the extraordinary group of scholars who are joining us,” said Justice Charles T. Canady, director of the Hamilton School. “With their commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship, these new faculty members are ideally suited to carrying out Hamilton’s mission of educating the next generation of American leaders.”

Kieran Velasquez:

It was over a year ago that I spent a weekend in Bystřice pod Hostýnem with one of the former state-appointed directors of the TON factory. Walking with him through the picturesque streets of this quaint Czech town, something occurred that I have not forgotten since. Everyone we passed knew him, and he, them. Shop owners, retirees, young families, they all stopped, greeted each other, and exchanged pleasantries. It was through him that I first learned the story of TON, and what it signifies to the 8,000 people of this village tucked away in the Czech Republic.

Hollis Robbins:

Four years after ChatGPT caught so many by surprise, the primary role of higher education seems to be slowing down the public’s transition to the AI era. For many faculty, this is a win. For those focused on the future, this is the biggest institutional failure since the Victorian Post Office, with its monopoly on telegraph lines, dismissed the telephone because it had plenty of messenger boys. Adoption was slowed so much there were waiting lists for a home phone line into the 1970s.1

Fortunately, the AI frontier race has skirted higher education almost entirely, so universities can’t slow the models. But higher ed is a monopoly too. Nobody else is granting college degrees. I look around and see that except for a few scattered faculty voices across the country (people I’ve shared platforms with this past year) higher education has decided it’s business as usual, squabbling about athletics and anthropology, worrying about federal takeover when the real risk is technological competition.

Some facts. More than 90 percent of notable AI models released in 2025 came from industry: GPT-5, Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Llama 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infrastructure supporting frontier development is also overwhelmingly from industry. Global AI compute capacity has been growing 3.3x annually since 2022, doubling every seven months, driven by hyperscalers and enormous data-center investments. Some universities are entering the compute space. Ten New York universities spent two years and $340 million to get to about 400 GPUs. In 2024, xAI in Memphis stood up 100,000 GPUs in 122 days. In the past two years a site in Abilene, Texas got to 500,000.2

Even in China, DeepSeek, Alibaba, ByteDance, Moonshot and the other model developers are working outside of universities. Chinese universities may be producing more research and talent than U.S. universities because their missions are aligned with national goals. China leads in AI publication volume, citations, and patent output, even though the United States still produces more notable models and higher-impact patents. A Hoover Institution analysis of the 356 researchers appearing on DeepSeek’s foundational papers found that 53.5 percent of those with known affiliations had spent their entire recorded careers at Chinese institutions. Of the DeepSeek researchers who spent part of their careers abroad, over 70 percent ended up back in China. Universities are clearly part of the way China created a domestic frontier-research workforce.

Every grade in the district ended the year with fewer students at benchmark than it started — except third grade, which didn’t move at all.

An analysis of the district’s fall, winter, and spring early literacy screening results, required under 2023 Wisconsin Act 20.

Laura Waters:

At today’s State Board of Education meeting,  the new Camden superintendent, Alfonso Q. Llano Jr., and his leadership team gave an impressive presentation on their plans to move the district “from foundation to execution” by “rebuilding a strong instructional core in English Language Arts and math” and using “honest evidence,” “course correction,“ and outreach to recreate trust throughout the community. 

While there was no discussion of the poor outcomes for students (see here), there was also no attempt to sugarcoat the challenges. One is consistent drops in enrollment: In 2014, according to Llano, before the advent of renaissance schools (schools with charter-like autonomy and enrollment controlled by the district), Camden City Public Schools (CPS) had 11,258 students. In 2027, 13 years after renaissance schools replaced failing district schools and public school choice was embedded in the system, Llano projects enrollment will be down to 5,515, a 51% decline.  (Another 5,000 or so students attend regular charter schools.)

In other words, more than half of district parents are choosing to send their kids to Mastery, KIPP, or Uncommon (called Camden Prep here), charter networks selected by the Advisory Camden School Board during the short period allowed by the Urban Hope Act. 

That’s not a surprise: Outcomes for students in renaissance schools are better than they are for students in district schools. And this fact led to the most interesting part of the discussion among Board members because, as the presenters emphasized, CPS is drilling down on Career and Technical Education (CTE), boasting of having 14 options, the highest in the state.

But new board member James Williams, a “proud graduate” of Camden High School, pushed back: “You can’t let CTE circumvent higher education,” he argued. He wants a future graduate to become Camden’s superintendent and “we don’t want all our custodians coming out of Camden district schools.”

“We have to be very careful” when we say we have the “most CTE’s,” he cautioned. “There’s a difference between being a construction worker and a lab tech, devastating for those trying to make a living wage. Be mindful.”

University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and Arts:

The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is working collaboratively with faculty and staff across campus to design a pilot program that helps foster an environment where college students can acclimate to the demands of a University of Michigan education and pursue new academic challenges.

Beginning in fall 2027, the College will designate all LSA first-year students’ first-semester grades as pass (P) or no credit (NC) on their transcripts. While LSA students will still receive grades and instructor feedback in every course as they always have, final grades will not be recorded on their external transcripts and will not be reflected in their GPAs. LSA students’ official transcripts will state that all grades in the first semester are automatically designated as P/NC.

Why Cover Grades in the First Semester?

Helping all students establish early momentum has been recognized as the most important element in U-M’s campus-wide Student Success Initiative. We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.

Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys—core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education. For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences. LSA is investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration—rather than competition. 

———-

Commentary.

More:

For all those who see “covering grades” on transcripts as helping first-year students:

In 2016, Johns Hopkins reversed its 40+-year policy bc it did more harm than good

• Delayed students from adapting to college-level work

-Could place students at a disadvantage when applying to grad school/jobs

———

Scott Kupor:

This is a bad idea on so many levels, not the least of which is that it’s the wrong way to deal with anxiety/mental health concerns. From everything I’ve read (and experienced personally), the literature says that the way to overcome anxiety is to confront and manage issues (gradually) as they arise versus avoiding them – exposure therapy.

FIRE:

South Florida State College Professor Vinita Prabhakar.

SEBRING, Fla., July 29, 2026 — In a story stranger than fiction, a Florida college fired an English professor for nothing more than teaching literature in a literatureclass.

After professor Vinita Prabhakar assigned a commonly-taught short story for her freshman English course, South Florida State College President Fred Hawkins dragged Prabhakar into a meeting, complained the story was “political,” and ordered her to stop teaching it. 

A day later, he unceremoniously fired her. No hearing. No due process.

“For 20 years, I’ve taught students how to engage with stories that excite them, challenge them, and broaden their experience of what it means to be human,” said Prabhakar. “I don’t plan on stopping now. If what happened to me becomes the norm, colleges across America will become less curious, less vibrant, and less free.”

Now, represented by FIRE Legal Network Member Gary Edinger of Benjamin, Aaronson, Edinger & Patanzo and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Prabhakar is filing a federal lawsuit against Hawkins and the South Florida State College board of trustees seeking to vindicate her First Amendment rights.

“President Hawkins firing a professor for teaching a work of literature isn’t just a betrayal of every principle that a university is supposed to embrace,” said Edinger. “As a state employee, he also trampled over our client’s constitutional rights. The First Amendment doesn’t let public officials suppress ideas by firing the people who teach them.”

FIRE:

Far enough to investigate a professor over the phrase “word salad,” apparently.

Just ask Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University. He thought his colleague’s proposed Jewish Studies course contained too little Jewish content, so during a faculty meeting he described the proposal as rambling “word salad.”

In response, the colleague filed a harassment complaint, alleging the phrase “word salad” is discriminatory against his accent and Latino identity.

But instead of opening a dialogue, the university opened a harassment investigation.

Let’s be clear: This kind of criticism is not harassment. Professors should ask tough questions, test theories, and weigh in on each other’s proposals. Being offended by the term “word salad” doesn’t make it harassment under the law or even Hofstra’s own policies.

Amanda Albright:

Wingate University told thousands of high schoolers some good news: They were already accepted into the class of 2030, and they’d be receiving $24,000 of scholarships. No application required. 

The private college outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, with some 2,600 undergraduates, is one of hundreds of universities that are admitting students who haven’t even applied. While some colleges have been using the tactic — called direct admissions — for years, many more are now trying it out, as they fight for a shrinking pool of prospective undergraduates.

Shalini Ramachandran

AMY WARREN’S “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together. 

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

Helen Andrews:

American race relations are at a crossroads. In the years since our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s, our country has coped with its contradictions and imperfections by the very American method of muddling through. That has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable.

The first reason is demographic. Our racial bargain was made for a country that was biracial and almost 90 percent white. It will no longer work for a country where white people are a minority and the non-white population includes multiple races, including some that were hardly present in the United States when the racial bargain was struck. There were fewer Chinese Americans in 1960 than there are Egyptian Americans today and fewer Mexican-born Americans then than Venezuelan-born Americans now.

For Generation Z, the beneficiaries of our system of racial benefits are no longer a marginal 10 percent of the population. They are a demographic majority. Non-white Zoomers—and, to an extent, white women as well—benefit from both demographic predominance and an explicit or tacit boost in any head-to-head competition with white men, which, in combination, means that affirmative action is no longer a matter of white Americans sacrificing the occasional promotion. It means white men in particular are effectively shut out of many prestigious fields and institutions, especially in the lower rungs.

This is both unfair and unworkable. Unfair, because a white Zoomer does not feel toward the son of an Indian computer programmer or the daughter of a Mexican illegal immigrant the same moral obligation he feels toward the descendant of slaves. Unworkable, because the challenge of making every institution match our national demographics becomes more difficult as our diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room. Now it means finely calibrating multiple demographics, which requires putting race at the forefront of personnel decisions.

Nir Evron:

Early in John Williams’s 1965 campus novel Stoner, one of the characters, a brilliant young student called Dave Masters, holds forth on “the true nature of the University.” Masters wishes to disabuse his fellow students of the idea of the university as hallowed ground, where intellectuals worship at the altar of “the True, the Good, the Beautiful.” No, says Masters: The university is not a shrine to rationality and morality; it is “an asylum or … rest home,” where troublemakers like himself can be “safely irresponsible” without causing too much trouble. “We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it,” he concludes, “and that’s a triumph of natural virtue, or pretty damn close to it.”

Matt Taibbi:

Mother Jones on Dr. Anthony Fauci:

The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.

I wonder what Mother Jones would consider a smoking gun. On February 9th, 2020, appearing on the Newt Gingrich podcast “Newt’s world,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said the idea that Covid-19 came from a lab was a “conspiracy theory… without any scientific basis.” 

This was eight days after Fauci took part in a conference call with eleven other prominent scientists, including NIH Director Francis Collins, Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar, UK Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, Scripps Research Translational Institute Director Kristian Anderson, Germany’s Christian Drosten, University of Sydney Professor Edward Holmes, the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Rambaut, Tulane Virology Professor Robert Garry, University of Dundee Professor Mike Ferguson, and Ron Fouchier and M.P.G. Koopmans from the Erasmus Medical Center.

Thanks to the diary, we now know that just three of the scientists in that call — Fauci himself, plus the German Drosten and gain-of-function expert Fouchier — advocated for natural origin. Here’s how Fauci characterized the others:

“The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

This is Fauci in writing explaining that 9 of 12 scientists at a key meeting he attended at the beginning of the pandemic felt that “deliberate insertion” of a key mutation was possible, in part because a prominent Chinese scientist known to all had been working on that exact sequencing problem just miles from where the first cases were reported. To repeat the smoking gun line: “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.” 

Pete Anderson:

The Madison School District is consideringrenaming Elvehjem School because its namesake, Conrad Elvehjem, signed a restrictive covenant in 1931 keeping Black people out of a West Side neighborhood. I’d hate for that to be the last word on Elvehjem. He played a much more significant role in Black American history than that.

In the first part of the 20th century, pellagra killed over 100,000 people in the southern U.S. These were mostly poor sharecroppers and, while we don’t have a racial breakdown, it can be assumed that Black people were well represented among its victims.

It was thought to be a contagious disease and mental disorder because of the psychiatric symptoms it caused. Known by the “four Ds”— dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and, ultimately, death — its victims were stigmatized and often sent to insane asylums. Pellagra resulted in immense suffering and death.

Erin Gretzinger:

This coming school year, more interventionists will pilot the tool, though the exact number of schools involved is yet to be determined, Racine Gilles said. The district’s internal research team is working with curriculum and instructional staff to determine the scope of the pilot, as well as how the effectiveness and feasibility of the tool will be evaluated.

“Our next phase here will focus on the implementation of that,” Racine Gilles said. “We really want to learn … if it changes the outcome in terms of interventionist decision-making, and then also, of course, is it practical?”

As the district rolls out and continues to test the decision-making tool, both Racine Gilles and Iverson said the national award they received exemplifies the kind of work happening in their department every day.

“Our aim is really to help educators across the district understand what’s happening, why it may be happening, and what they might do next in response to that evidence,” Racine Gilles said.

Iverson added, “We all do pretty robust and top quality work that is ultimately in service of driving student outcomes to improve in our districts and making the futures of our students better over time.”

——-

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!)

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?

Joanne Jacobs:

You can’t really get Moby Dick (or Pinocchio) if you’ve never heard of Jonah and the Whale, writes Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic. You won’t understand why Harriet Tubman was called “Moses,” if you’re not familiar with the Exodus story. Bible stories belong in public school classrooms, he argues. Americans who don’t know about David and Goliath, Job, the parting of the Red Sea, the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan will not be prepared to understand America’s history or literature.

The new required-reading list in Texas has angered many liberals, who see it as “an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity,” Kirsch writes. The state school board has framed the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” not as religious instruction, but many are unpersuaded. A Dallas Morning News editorial called for including the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, he writes. 

“Saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths,” writes Kirsch. American students don’t study English because it’s better than other languages. It’s our language. And Western culture is our culture.

Scott Niederjohn & William Flanders:

This study examines the association between participation in Wisconsin’s private school choice programs and English Language Arts achievement using longitudinal administrative data from 96,241 students tested in 2018–2019 and 2022–2023. Propensity score matching compares voucher participants with similar public-school students, with exposure measured by years of participation. Sustained participation is positively associated with achievement growth. Statewide program participants gained approximately 0.14 standard deviations overall and 0.35 standard deviations after four or more years. Similar patterns appear in Racine. Findings suggest evaluations of school choice should emphasize long-term participation rather than short-term outcomes alone.

——-

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!)

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?

Neetu Arnold:

While criticisms of gifted education are not new, they have grown increasingly absurd. In New York, writer Katie Arnold-Ratliff, for example, recently questioned whether student giftedness was a myth. She originallytried to argue that gifted programs were pointless because “only 12.3 percent” of gifted students in a study “reached a level of eminence” by age 50, meaning “88 percent never” reached extraordinary levels of success such as becoming Fortune 500 executives or award-winning journalists.

Arnold-Ratliff’s article, however, represents the last gasp of a failed experiment. Attempts to replace gifted and talented programs with more “equitable” initiatives have proved damaging to both high-achieving kids and students struggling academically. Thankfully, some school districts are starting to reverse course.

Colbey Decker:

They looked Wisconsin parents in the eye & said Critical Race Theory wasn’t in schools.

Meanwhile DPI was training teachers on Paulo Freire’s method: personal conversion, “deconstruct the existing social order,” & praxis to “transform the world.”

Official training below: 🧵

Douglas Belkin:

When Natalie Strouse’s husband of 20 years died of cancer, she honored his memory by creating a scholarship in his name at the college where she taught accounting.

Each year, she helped select a student to receive a few thousand dollars at Notre Dame College, a small Catholic school outside Cleveland. But in 2024, the college closed. Strouse wanted to re-establish the scholarship at another institution.

She asked Notre Dame for the $30,000 endowment, which under the terms of the gift could only be used to support the scholarship.

Not possible, she said an administrator informed her. The money was gone.

“She told me they used it to pay the bills,” Strouse said. “I consider it theft.”

Ohio’s attorney general last year filed a complaint against 14 trustees and officers of the college alleging they improperly used more than $2 million of restricted endowment funds outside donors’ intended purposes. The defendants have denied allegations that they breached their fiduciary duties and failed to exercise proper oversight of the school.

Higher education is in real financial trouble and Strouse’s lost scholarship is one piece of the growing collateral damage. College leaders are cutting programs, laying off faculty—and digging into endowments to pay operating expenses. Boards of trustees are under intense pressure and some are turning on one another and the presidents they employ. In extreme cases, schools are covering day-to-day bills with funds that donors gifted for other purposes, without the donors’ knowledge or consent.

Isadore Knox Jr.:

Can one of Madison’s shining lights continue to shine?

The Southside Raider have been a shining light in Madison since the 1970s. It has been a community institution and legacy on the South Side, providing recreation and delinquency prevention for some of the most economically and socially challenged young people in diverse South Madison, through the sport of youth tackle football.

Three years ago, the Dane County Youth Football League disbanded as many of the suburban teams left to join other leagues. Two years ago, several Madison teams — Memorial Spartans Youth Football, Lancers Youth Football, Madtown Elite Football (formally Warner Park Youth Football) and the Raiders — met to try to keep the city teams together under Pop Warner Football.

Memorial declined, going to an Illinois league, and the other teams were not convinced to stay together. Last year, Memorial joined Madtown Elite and the Raiders in Pop Warner Football.

This year, the four Madison high schools decided to sponsor their own youth football programs, recreating a new Madison league under the leadership of Mike Harris, former Memorial High School head coach. This league included the Spartans, Lancers, newly resurrected Regents Youth Football, Eastside Football and Edgewood Youth football. The concept is to develop youth football as feeders to the high schools.

Adam Benson:

More than 80 grades were inflated without professors’ consent, prompting a state probe that confirmed the Conway-based institution didn’t follow its own standards, according to a State Technical College Systeminvestigative report, multiple interviews and privately obtained documents. 

At the center of the investigation was Gasque, who for months pressed college and state officials after accidentally learning of alterations affecting several of her students.

She said she was terminated for refusing to amend a grade from “incomplete” to a “withdrawal.”

Although Falbo-Gasque was still listed in the faculty directory, her office phone number had been disconnected.

HGTC spokeswoman Nicole Hyman said in an email that the college does not comment on individual personnel matters but added that HGTC “takes matters involving its employees and students seriously and follows established policies and procedures when reviewing and addressing concerns.”

“The College does not terminate employees for exercising their lawful rights or retaliate against employees for exercising those lawful rights,” she wrote. “All employees, including faculty members, are expected to fulfill the responsibilities of their positions and comply with applicable College policies, procedures, directives, and standards of conduct. Failure to meet these expectations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.”

Matt Friedman:

Another Democratic operative, granted anonymity for the same reason, said they spoke to three county superintendents who all told them the same thing: “When they see [registrations] come from the MVC, they assume it’s correct.”

Sherrill on Tuesday refused a Trump administration demand to turn over the list of 6,600 noncitizen registrants, and said the state had struck 4,500 of them from the rolls. The other 2,100, she said, had been referred back to county election officials for further examination because some may have been misidentified as noncitizens.

“The request had no legal basis, and I will always protect New Jerseyans’ personally identifiable information,” she said.

Sherrill’s disclosure also played into a lawsuit by the Trump administration that sought access to New Jersey’s unredacted voter registration list, with the Trump administration arguing it strengthened its case. But District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi dismissed the lawsuit Wednesday, saying that “whether the DOJ is acting in good faith is not relevant to this Court’s analysis and has no bearing on whether Plaintiff is entitled to the information it seeks.”

Thompson, the elections administrator, said county elections officials check each registration against a state database using Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers to confirm their identity, and that the information doesn’t belong to people who have died. But noncitizens can obtain both forms of identification. “It does not validate any kind of citizenship,” Thompsonsaid.

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are trying to deceive voters because they know that raising income taxes isn’t popular. Many voters for good reason don’t buy their promises that their “millionaire’s tax” won’t be extended to them. That’s the history of income taxes. Democrats inevitably seek to soak the middle class because that’s where the money is.

Witness Colorado, where Democratic lawmakers have in recent years enacted new taxes disguised as “fees”—for instance, on retail deliveries and rental cars. Calling them fees enables Democrats to circumvent a constitutional requirement that voters approve new taxes.

In response, voters put forward a ballot measure this year that sought to narrowly define fees and require voter approval for those that raise large amounts of revenue. The state Supreme Court this spring blocked the initiative on the dubious rationale that it ran afoul of a constitutional requirement that initiatives must be limited to a single subject.

The Justices—all appointed by Democratic Governors—said the initiative would create an unfair conundrum for voters and potential for corruption. The initiative presents a “danger of log rolling because it may attract a ‘yes’ vote from voters who support statewide voter approval of fees, but who would not support narrowing the definition of existing and new fees under Colorado law,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez wrote.

James Traub:

Earlier this summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a mandatory reading list for public school students that includes fairy tales and nursery rhymes for little children, stories of America’s founders and Aesop’s fables for elementary schoolers, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Langston Hughes for middle schoolers, Shakespeare’s plays and Dante’s “Inferno” for high schoolers — and passages or stories from the Bible for every grade save kindergarten.

In our highly decentralized educational system, states don’t tell teachers what books to assign — the model Texas will begin implementing in 2030 makes it an outlier. Yet almost all of the reaction to the list, pro and con, has centered on the Bible. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization that promotes strict separation of church and state, described the list as “a brazen promotion of religious doctrine” that threatens to convert public schools into Sunday schools.

This is a wild overreaction to what is, after all, a tiny fraction of the required readings. What’s worse, the whole debate obscures the pedagogical radicalism of what Texas has done in issuing a mandatory reading list full of classic works at all.

——-

Ideally, we might make sure that most kids can read, first!

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!)

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?

Illinois Policy:

CTU’s political spending has quadrupled to a record $4.2 million, despite losing most of its school board races.

The union ran its first-ever reported financial deficit on Davis Gates’ watch.

CTU has undergone multiple federal investigations over a lack of financial transparency, hiding independent audits from members for 5 years.

The union’s favorability among Chicagoans has collapsed to an abysmal 28.8%.

When union leadership prioritizes funding political campaigns (like funneling $2.3M to @ChicagosMayor, himself a former CTU “organizer”) over basic financial solvency, it’s not just teachers who lose. It is the taxpayers who are inevitably asked to bail out the system. This is happening as we speak.

How can the public trust CTU leadership to dictate a $10 billion @ChiPubSchools budget when they can’t even balance their own internal books without hiding the audits from their own members for years?

——-

Hannah Schmid

Davis Gates has tanked the Chicago Teachers Union’s reputation in Chicago since becoming its president in 2022. Teachers in other districts can expect her to do the same to IFT.

She has subjected CTU to multiple federal investigations and been plagued with other scandals, from running a deficit and quadrupling the union’s political spending to not paying her taxes and utility bills and sending her son to private school instead of letting her members educate him.

Teachers who don’t want to answer to Davis Gates can join the thousands of other education employees who have rejected union membership. Learn more at LeaveIFT.com.

Meanwhile, we’ve compiled a look at CTU and Davis Gates.

Alicia Anderson:

Few education interventions are more controversial than retention mandates, which require students to demonstrate minimal academic competence before moving on to the next grade. They are also some of the most well-studied, with a large body of research from a number of states—including Ohio—showing positive effects among students facing retention that persist for many years.

Now a new Ohio study led by American University professor (and former Fordham intern) Sarah Souders demonstrates that the benefits of retention requirements are even broader than previous research has suggested. It also points to an entirely different set of mechanisms through which these mandates boost student achievement, challenging narratives long embraced by both proponents and critics.

Ohio lawmakers dramatically watered down the state’s prior retention requirement in 2023. The evidence in the new study comes from the years just before this legislative change, and it starkly illustrates why weakening the retention mandate will have a significant negative impact on many more students than legislators may have anticipated at the time. The findings from the study provide compelling reasons to revisit that decision and illustrate how broader attacks on school accountability fundamentally misunderstand why high standards are necessary to ensure that all students can realize the full benefits of their academic potential.

Evidence from Ohio’s natural experiment

——-

More.

Another important research methods question is raised: when do policies take effect? Since the Ohio ID process for students at risk of failure begins in kindergarten, parents and educators have 2-3 years to think about possible third grade retention. Anticipatory effects are potentially large when they are telegraphed in advance.

Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and Katie A. Danielson

Walk into a second-grade classroom today and it may seem like little has changed over the past few decades: Teachers still greet students at the door. Classrooms still have colorful rugs and educational posters on the walls.

But the picture book the children are listening to isn’t being read by the teacher sitting beside them on the rug — it’s playing on an interactive whiteboard. The book itself isn’t even physically in the room. Instead, its pages (with added animations) are projected on a screen while audio narrates the text. Later, children wear headphones while clicking through individualized reading lessons. After lunch, they each complete their own adaptive math activities on Chromebooks instead of gathering at tiny tables to solve problems together.

These changes happened so gradually (and then so suddenly during the pandemic) that many parents don’t realize how different many aspects of elementary school have become. And it all happened with little public debate. Today, nearly 80 percent of school districts issue kindergarteners, first-graders and second-graders devices or allow them to bring them from home.
Screens are no longer occasional classroom tools. They organize the school day. This isn’t simply a story about technology. It’s a story about what happens when the medium through which children learn reshapes learning itself.
Elementary school always taught more than reading and mathematics. Children learned how to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements and explain their thinking. This was an essential aspect of growing up, it wasn’t just a nice byproduct of being in a classroom. When the relational aspect of learning is removed, the conditions that allow these skills to grow are also removed.

Michael Fumento:

If you believe in karma or that chickens always come home to roost, you have to explain why Mao and Stalin died in bed, and Hitler was able to choose his own way out. But watching Anthony Fauci on the witness stand before Congress taking the Fifth as fast as his lips could flap (more than 100 times), you could see some evidence that at least some hens become broiler chickens.

There he sat — the undisputed grand vizier of American public health — hedging his answers and reciting the familiar line about “following the science.” To the uninitiated observer, perhaps it looked like the noble defense of an overworked public servant unfairly hounded by partisan inquisitors. To anyone who has tracked his career since the 1980s, it looked like something else entirely: another verse in a long song of dodge, delay, and quiet goalpost-moving in furtherance of a career fueled by narcissism so extreme it should have its own place on the Periodic Table. (RELATED: Tracking Dr. Fauci’s Fallout)

The hearing was ostensibly about the origins of COVID-19, gain-of-function research, and the shifting, often contradictory directives that governed life for 300 million Americans during the pandemic. But the real subject was never the virus alone. It was the institutionalized rot of a public health establishment that has long preferred terror-driven consensus to rigorous, skeptical inquiry — an establishment Fauci built, nurtured, and came to embody. (RELATED: The Scientist Who Saw It Coming)

I first learned of the man’s blatant dishonesty when I worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1986-87. As I wrote in these pages almost four years ago, I had invited him to testify at a hearing, and he accepted. I received his CV in the mail, and it was surreal. I think the New York City phonebook back then might have been thinner. (RELATED: Fraudulent Dr. Fauci Bows Out Way Too Late)

Susie Kaeser:

Aug. 19 marks the beginning of the 2026–27 school year for about 4,600 students enrolled in one of the 11 public schools or two special high-school programs of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District.

The start of a new school year is exciting. For kindergartners it’s the launch of their 13-year public-education journey, a life-transforming process that we provide as a community and from which we all benefit. We can all be proud that this opportunity is available to all children, without exception.

It will be the 101st year that high school students have attended classes at the corner of Cedar and Lee roads and more than 115 years since students began matriculating at an elementary school on the site of today’s Boulevard School. Public education is an established part of life in our community and every community. It is the backbone of our democracy.

The school district’s mission statement spells out its civic and democratic purposes: “Our schools provide a challenging and engaging education to prepare all our students to become responsible citizens and succeed in college and career.” The district’s list of values—excellence, equity, integrity, trust and respect—gives more texture to the nature of this public institution, this government body. Public education is a big and important idea—the basis of our way of life—and it’s in trouble.

Constitutional scholar Derek Black explains in a forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal article that the founders “believed that our national experiment in democracy would fail without educated voters.” He ranks public education with voting, separation of powers and an independent judiciary as critical pieces of democratic governance. Public education is the holy grail when it comes to preparing voters to participate in self-governance. The founders understood a public system was the only way to ensure that everyone had an equal shot at education.

Adam Benson:

More than 80 grades at Horry-Georgetown Technical College were inflated without professors’ consent, prompting a state probe that confirmed the Conway-based institution did not follow its standards, The Post and Courier has learned.

The newspaper corroborated 86 grade manipulations through a previously unreleased State Technical College System investigative report, multiple interviews and privately obtained documents. 

“I wish I could unsee it, but I can’t,” said Valerie Falbo-Gasque, a Spanish professor who raised concerns with university officials about the grade changes. “This is a terrible injustice.”

Troubled by what she views as a profound breach of academic standards and ethics, Falbo-Gasque contends senior officials at HGTC have not been transparent about the findings and the reputational harm they could bring to the 60-year-old school.

HGTC spokeswoman Nicole Hyman said administrators learned of the grade changes in March 2025 and immediately launched an internal investigation.

“While there was no evidence of fraud, this revealed certain policy and procedure violations,” she wrote in an email. “The college immediately took appropriate actions to strengthen its processes and ensure that such grade changes, without faculty involvement, would not occur again. The March 2025 violations also included personnel matters.”

Nick Cleveland-Stout:

Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.

And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.

Allysia Finley:

Between January 2020 and December 2025, California added 249,920 establishments and 580,862 jobs in healthcare and social assistance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These industries accounted for 98% of the state’s private job growth during that period. The state’s biggest source of new jobs has been “individual and family services”—i.e., social work.

California has 12% of the U.S. population, 62% of its individual- and family-service establishments and 28% of the sector’s employment. Many of these entities are nonprofits run by progressives with advanced degrees in fields like urban planning, social work and public policy.

Progressive policies create social and economic dysfunctions—e.g., housing shortages and homelessness. Nonprofits lobby for taxpayer money to solve problems, only to exacerbate them instead. Rinse and repeat.

A report last week found that the number of people living on Los Angeles streets increased 7.9% compared with last year. Mayor Karen Bass (master’s in social work, University of Southern California) blamed President Trump and “funding cuts at the federal and state levels.”

“The Trump Administration has driven up the cost of gas, groceries, and rent—pushing more families to the edge—and slashed critical safety net funding,” she wrote. No mention that L.A. has been the country’s biggest beneficiary of federal money for homelessness. Or that 40% of the vagrants the city has put up in temporary housing wind up back on the streets, often because of drug addictions.

www link:

Kurt Kiefer, beloved husband, father, grandfather, brother, friend, and public servant, died peacefully on July 27 in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by his family. He was 65.

Kurt was the world’s largest optimist. His optimism was not naïveté, but a practice grounded in his belief that the world could be better and that thoughtful, determined people could help make it so. He was hopeful, curious, intellectually engaged, and guided by his unwavering character and integrity. Each year, he went to see A Christmas Carol, a tradition that reflected the values by which he lived: family, generosity, kindness, and the enduring possibility that people can change for the better.

At the center of Kurt’s life was Jone, his first kiss in seventh grade, his best friend in high school, and his wife of more than 45 years. Kurt loved to tell Abby and Oliver that they were “the product of a great romance.” Their marriage was exactly that: a long and affectionate partnership filled with books, travel, hiking, Packer games, Door County summers, and the family they were immensely proud to have built together.

Boston Globe:

Separating kids into different math classes based on their abilities is the the least-bad way for schools to meet the needs of student who learn at different speeds.

An age-old debate well-discussed in education circles has resurfaced because of the controversy in Cambridge over teaching algebra to eighth-graders: whether to group kids into different classes based on their abilities, a practice known as tracking.

Tracking comes with downsides. But it’s often the least-bad way for public schools to meet the needs of kids who learn at different paces, and Cambridge shouldn’t be afraid of returning to some form of eighth-grade tracking if its current system continues to struggle.

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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

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is demanding Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board (HEAB) immediately suspend Wisconsin’s Minority Teacher Loan (MTL) Program. The taxpayer-funded program gives loans to certain prospective teachers, but eligibility for the loans is limited based on race, ethnicity, and ancestry.

The program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and closely mirrors a race-based state scholarship program unanimously struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek stated, “Wisconsin cannot decide who receives taxpayer-funded educational opportunities based upon the color of their skin. The Wisconsin Supreme Court just unanimously struck down a nearly identical race-based program. Governor Evers and HEAB should follow the Constitution, end this discrimination, and ensure these opportunities are available to all Wisconsin students, regardless of race.”

Background: The MTL Program provides loans of up to $10,000 each year for three years to students pursuing teaching licenses in designated teacher-shortage areas. Portions of the loans can be forgiven for graduates who teach in qualifying Wisconsin schools.

But even students who meet the program’s academic, licensing, and teaching requirements are ineligible unless they belong to racial or ethnic groups specified by state law. A student who would otherwise qualify is prevented from receiving up to $30,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance solely because of his or her race.