Will Briggs:

As part of the transfer, the state Transportation Department will issue an up-front payment of $37 million, which will be placed in a new city fund for future transportation projects. By vote of the City Council, $15 million of that payment will be earmarked to assist with the north-south bus rapid transit line planned to run along South Park Street.

Setting aside those dollars will also help the city in its efforts to receive federal funding for the larger bus rapid transit line from Fitchburg to Madison’s north side, Spieler said.

The state’s annual $300,000 connecting highway aid payments to the city will cease as part of the transfer agreement. Madison will also become ineligible for future state payments for reconstructing the highway.

The city could offset the loss of state funding with future federal funding. Park Street and other parts of U.S. 151 will become eligible for Surface Transportation Grant-Urban grants — a source of funds for existing city roadways — starting after a decade, Deputy City Engineer Chris Petykowski told the Finance Committee last week.

Corrinne Hess:

This fall, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay will be the first campus in the public university system to offer students a reduced-credit degree. 

Students interested in the bachelor’s degree in computer science will have the option of finishing their coursework in about three-and-a-half years, or with 100 credits. 

That’s down from a traditional 120-credit, four-year degree program. 

Computer science majors still have the options of taking the four-year program, said Kate Burns, UW-Green Bay’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. 

Burns said computer science was chosen as the first reduced-credit major given the high demand for technology-related careers throughout the region. 

“We noticed that our computer science students were getting jobs before they finished their degrees, and to us, that was really a signal that the students were ready and the workforce was ready,” Burns said. 

Jon Mooallem:

In 1970, Mary-Dell Chilton was a perseverant but underemployed young chemist teaching part-time at the University of Washington in Seattle—a position she’d leapt at only because, after months at home caring for an infant, she was desperate to get back to work. 

One of her students gave a presentation about a recently published paper about a tumor-producing disease that affected grapes, stone fruits and other crops. The paper claimed that a common soil bacteria, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, was actually transplanting its own genes into the DNA of the affected plant—genes which, once expressed, spurred the growth of those tumors.

“I just absolutely did not believe it,” Chilton recalled. In the 2018 book “Seeds of Science,” journalist Mark Lynas writes that Chilton even cold-called the paper’s lead author in Belgium, Marc Van Montagu, just to tell him she thought his results—this idea that a bacteria was going around smuggling its DNA into a plant—were “nonsense, total nonsense.”

International Mathematical Union:

The Fields Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.

The medals and cash prizes are funded by a trust established by J.C.Fields at the University of Toronto. For 2026, the prize funds from the University of Toronto are supplemented by generous support from the Fields Institute.

Royce Podeszwa:

Another failed referendum in the Hustisford School District on April 7 means the district will start the dissolution process. 

Voters rejected a $3.75 million referendum 861-612. 

Todd Bugnacki is interim superintendent for the Hustisford School District. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that means the district’s students and assets will be divided between neighboring districts. 

Intercollegiate Studies Review:

Read Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and you’d never mistake it for a book about dinosaurs. Yet more than 25 percent of college English majors in a 2024 Kansas study thought otherwise. The confusion traces to a single word: Dickens describes London’s mud as so thick it “would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus” waddling up the street as part of an extended simile, not a plot point. Many students missed the joke entirely.

This miscomprehension is not surprising, argues Rose Horowitch in a thorough and unsettling article for The Atlantic. Drawing on recent studies, she argues that America has become a postliterate society. Many have traded books and newspapers for TikTok and tweets, with devastating consequences.

Horowitch points out that teachers are assigning fewer and shorter books (if any at all), even in classes built around the written word. Meanwhile, some pre-K schools now hand tablets to three-year-olds. How can attention spans survive these practices, especially when instilled at such a young age?

Horowitch acknowledges that book sales are up, book clubs are back in fashion, and audiobooks are thriving. But she notes that this is confined to “a dwindling proportion of the population.” Horowitch believes that the collapse of literacy means societal trouble for the majority of Americans.

John Hindraker:

I think it is generally understood that red states outperform blue states by any possible measure. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity offers a new analysis that reaches that conclusion. This approach is unique because it tries to eliminate other variables, and isolate the importance of political philosophy:

[W]e needed to use more sophisticated statistical analysis to account for these other, non-political factors. We want to be able to say with a high degree of certainty that “Other things else equal Red States have higher rates of economic growth.” Specifically, in order to more confidently examine the issue we needed to use modern multivariate techniques such as regression analysis to isolate from other explanatory factors. After better controlling for such non-political factors as temperature or the presence of oil or gas deposits, does being a Red State still mean that the welfare-enhancing growth in incomes exist? Do politics really matter?

The answer is a resounding “yes,” as the report below indicates.

Madison has benefited greatly from the Obama era $38,000,000,000 back door electronic medical record federal taxpayer subsidies.

Gary Frankel:

How academia accidentally recreated medieval hierarchy.

In 2009, an anonymous university support staff member wrote to C.K. Gunsalus—a prominent academic who specializes in the study of higher education administration—looking for advice and, frankly, a little bit of kindness. The staffer claimed that many of the faculty members at their institution, including a number heavily involved in campus activism, refused to treat them with any respect. Their collective attitude towards non-academics, even those who worked for the university, was akin to that reserved for “a servant or a child.”

Gunsalus’ answer, which Inside Higher Ed published as an advice column, amounted to little more than word salad. But the gist of her response was that the employee should simply grin and bear it. After all, those rude academics were just trying to signal their authority, and who is to say that the anonymous employee is as good at their job as they think they are? Sometimes, professors simply need situations explained to them in a more scholarly manner.

Project on Government Oversight:

• That is $712.6 billion in federal spending that the public can’t tell exactly where it went beyond the state locations.

Subaward reporting, required by federal law, should explain where federal funds go after being awarded to intermediary recipients such as state agencies. The subaward data, however, is fundamentally broken and incomplete, offering little to no additional information on the flow of federal funds.

• In our review, prime awards only had local-level data for 20.7% ($198.3 billion) of awarded federal grant funds.
• Subaward data only accounted for an additional 5% ($47.6 billion) of federal grant dollars that could be tracked to the local level.

According to our review, the vast majority of direct payments were trackable to the local level, though a few programs showed signs of significant errors in the data. However, the granularity of the local place of performance for these awards was limited.

Lee Habeeb:

“As laboratories of democracy, the top states in this year’s report are demonstrating that low-tax, light-touch regulatory policies attract families, businesses, and opportunity,” said ALEC President and Chief Economist Jonathan Williams. “Meanwhile, states at the bottom of the rankings continue to lose residents to those embracing economic freedom.

Ana Maria Constantin: 

On Sunday evening, as Spain and Argentina played out the World Cup final, the mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a short message on X. The Jacobian conjecture, he wrote, is false. He thanked a friend for asking about it, and another friend, “fable,” for working during the match.

That second friend was Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest AI model. Together they had produced a counterexample to a problem that had resisted mathematicians for 87 years. It was 216 characters long.

The Jacobian conjecture was set out by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. In rough terms, it says that a certain kind of polynomial map, one whose Jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant, must be reversible with a neat polynomial inverse. It became one of the field’s most stubborn open problems. Stephen Smale put it on his famous 1998 list of challenges for the 21st century. New Scientist calls it the hardest maths problem an AI has yet cracked.

Ann Althouse summary:

Congressman Brandon Gill asks Smithsonian Museum director Anthea Hartig at the House Oversight Committee hearing today.

It’s quite an exchange. Gill has a very well-planned set of question designed to destroy Hartig, and Hartig’s defense is almost entirely restricted to long silences and diligent note-taking, as if she’s endeavoring to learn from Gill:

Sarah Schwartz:

Third grade retention policies could lead to better student scores, even before any children are held back, a new study suggests.

The findings, from researchers at American University and Syracuse University, add another wrinkle to an ongoing debate over retention policies tied to reading scores, which require students who aren’t proficient readers by the end of 3rd grade to repeat the year.

Eighteen states currently have retention policies on the books, some part of recently passed “science of reading” laws, according to a tracker maintained by the advocacy group ExcelinEd. 

For You

Critics of these retention policies argue that holding kids back can have negative social-emotional consequences, and doesn’t always lead to better outcomes for children who are retained.

But its proponents say that the benefits outweigh the potential harms, in large part due to the way retention policies can prompt schools to beef up their support systems for struggling students.

Manuel Bagues Milan Makany Giulia Vattuone Natalia Zinovyeva:

We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women’s careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions.

Colleston Morgan:

That’s why we’re sharing two new resources to help Milwaukee voters make informed decisions:

• Our Get Involved hub and Voter Informationpage, with everything you need to know how to register, find out what’s on the ballot, and make a plan to vote.
• Our Where They Stand candidate guides, with detailed, cited breakdowns of where every candidate stands on K-12 education issues.

This spring, we laid out CFC’s student-first policy priorities for the state’s next leaders:

1. Fix Wisconsin’s Broken School Funding Model, an antiquated relic that’s failing both schools and property taxpayers, by joining 30+ other states in adopting a new formula that instead funds students, not sectors;
2. Embrace & Protect Families’ Access to School Choice, recognizing that more than 100,000 students – 1 in 5 statewide – exercise some form of choice, and that here in Milwaukee, families have led the fight for this right for 30+ years;
3. Hold Every School Accountable for Student Outcomes, addressing the concerns of more than 90% of voters that lowered academic standards are resulting in students not being prepared for the future; and
4. Address The Ongoing Challenges at MPS, acknowledging that even with some recent progress, the state’s largest district remains one of the most troubled urban school systems in the country, both academically and financially.

All year, we’ve engaged directly with candidates for governor and in contested Milwaukee legislative races, asking where they stand on that agenda. Some answered. Some went quiet. We believe voters deserve to know either way, which is what Where They Stand is for.

Clear differences have emerged on the issue of K12 education in the crowded Democratic field for governor:

More.

——-

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?

Ed Finkel:

Dive Brief:

• Massachusetts became, in June, one of the latest states to pass science of reading legislation, codifying evidence-based practices, statewide literacy screening and teacher training requirements, and creating new accountability measures for student performance in grades K-3.
• While the state has long had a more “laissez-faire” philosophy toward curriculum and instruction, the law sets in motion expectations and benchmarks that will require “major ramping up” on the part of some districts, according to Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former state secretary of education.
• Laura Davis, senior research scientist at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, theorized that Massachusetts has been a later adopter due to its high performance on national tests overall. But she noted that with national declines in reading scores over the past decade, momentum has picked up across the country and even globally to revamp curriculum, develop higher-quality instructional material and boost professional development. 

Dive Insight:

“It seems like a good time, regardless of the state and its achievement profile, to join in and ensure the resources that support instruction are there to make sure students have access to early literacy,” Davis said.

The new law will require significant training on evidence-based phonics instruction that might be limited somewhat by union contracts, but “it’s not going to be enough to do a one-shot training,” Reville said. Districts and the state will also need to build out data systems to track results, such as fewer students requiring intensive remediation by the 3rd grade.

——

Meanwhile Wisconsin DPI Literacy czar Kaylee Jackson:

Jackson believes Wisconsin will see impacts of Act 20 on test scores within six to eight years based on what she has observed in other states.

——-

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?

Jim Meigs:

They lied to the public, concealed their own roles in laying the groundwork for Wuhan’s dangerous research, and conspired to discredit scientists like @Ayjchan who exposed evidence that the virus was likely manipulated by Wuhan researchers.

The latest batch of slack messages reveals that they all talked—and joked!—about this behind the scenes, even as they told the public the lab leak theory was “just a conspiracy theory,” as Fauci repeatedly said.

This is a scandal for the ages. And we still have not gotten the full accounting we deserve.

———

Why is German press covering this story better than @NYTScience & @nature & @NewsfromScience ?

———

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

Tosin Akintola:

Since 2019, public school enrollment has fallen by 2.84 percent nationwide, an exodus of roughly 1.4 million. K-12 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Yet the amount spent on public schools nationwide grew by 34 percent from 2019 to 2024, according to NCES data.

Much of that is thanks to the nearly $190 billion Congress provided to state and local governments through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), in three separate batches from March 2020 to March 2021. Now that the ESSER funds are largely spent, school districts are grappling with staffing decisions made during a spending boom that seems unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

In its 2026 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey of public school officials across the country, research organization RAND found that “54 percent of district leaders” were worried about a budget shortfall, even though educational spending has increased across all levels of government, even after adjusting for inflation. On average, the U.S. spends about $17,644 per student, according to NCES. It’s an increase of 34 percent from the NCES’ 2019 estimate of $13,187.

Still, more money hasn’t led to better student outcomes. At each grade level and across subject areas, there’s a decline in current achievement when compared to student benchmarks from 2019. In 2024, the most recent data available, only 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders were reading at or above a basic level, the lowest performance tier used by the National Center for Education Statistics. 

———-

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?

Anna J. Egalite

District leaders may be starting to see there’s more to be gained from embracing school choice than trying to eliminate it.

In rural North Carolina, one public district is testing a microschool model where middle schoolers study with AI support and learn entrepreneurship by helping run an Airbnb. In rural Indiana, another district leader helped launch a nature-based public microschool after watching families who did not see traditional schools as a good fit for their children consider homeschooling.

These experiments are small and in their early stages but point to an important shift: Some forward-thinking public school leaders are beginning to treat the exercise of school choice not simply as a threat but as a source of valuable information. As homeschooling remains elevated after the pandemic and states expand charters, vouchers, and education savings accounts, district leaders are hearing loud and clear that many families want something different. Public schools need to understand what that “different” is.

West Virginia Board of Education President Paul Hardesty recently put the new reality plainly: Public schools are “competing for enrollment, whether we want to believe it or not.” The only viable response, he argued, is to become “more accommodating, more receptive and more accessible to parents and students.” That is exactly the right mindset. And to become more responsive, public schools need better information about why families are leaving and what they are seeking instead.

edtrust:

Despite the state’s top national ranking, about half of middle and high schoolers lack the support needed to read at grade level.

EdTrust in Massachusetts released a new report, Beyond the Early Grades: The State of Adolescent Literacy in Massachusetts, which finds that nearly 150,000 students in grades six through eight and 10 are not meeting grade-level expectations in English language arts (ELA), with especially troubling disparities for Black and Latino students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and students from low-income backgrounds.

In recent years, Massachusetts has invested significantly in early literacy through initiatives such as Literacy Launch and the recent passage of the Right to Read Law, which establishes statewide requirements for evidence-based literacy instruction and curriculum in grades K-3. While these efforts represent important progress, the report contends that the Commonwealth’s literacy agenda must also support schools in meeting the needs of tens of thousands of students entering middle and high school without strong foundational skills, as well as students who demonstrated reading proficiency in the early grades but now struggle as texts become more complex and literacy demands intensify.

ground news:

Michigan elementary school teachers will be required to take literacy training by the 2031-2032 school year, under a new law signed by Gov.

Ann Manov:

Maybe it will. In the years since Trump was first elected, the GOP has shifted its battle tactics. Rather than just letting humanities departments die off, red-state legislatures have flooded public universities with something like a Works Progress Administration for academics. These new programs, dubbed civic centers, are designed to reclaim and “save” the humanities from their capture by the left, reinstate ideological diversity in higher education, and restore Great Books programming. To my surprise, I learned that the most important of these centers—the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education—was stationed at my humble alma mater.

Many of the Founding Fathers believed that our democratic republic’s prosperity would depend on a system of rigorous public education. The duty of legislatures, wrote John Adams, was to secure the general diffusion of “wisdom and knowledge” among the people. George Washington’s last will and testament included a proposal and bequest for establishing a national university. (It was never realized.) Benjamin Rush wrote that a national system of public education would bind Americans together and turn them into “republican machines” ready to “perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” 

The contemporary civic-center movement, which claims to uphold this mantle, was born in Arizona in 2017, when Arizona State University set up the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at the behest of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. When the center attracted criticism in outlets like the New York Times, its founding director issued a statement defending its “mission to reconnect liberal education and civic education.” This is the thesis underlying the civic-center movement: that there is a natural affinity between a liberal-arts education—often combining materials like the Federalist Papers and lectures on John Locke and John Stuart Mill—and an ability to bridge differences and participate with informed enthusiasm in the American political process.

Mark Poiler:

The NSA kept 1 lecture in a vault for 40 years. In 2024 they released it. It’s Grace Hopper explaining the future of computing in 1982.

The channel that posted it: the National Security Agency’s own YouTube.

Hopper stands at a podium in Navy uniform, a captain, and talks to a room of NSA staff for 90 minutes across 2 reels.

The title: “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People.”

She compares the computer industry to the early automotive one, all custom parts and no standards, and argues software will become the hard problem, not hardware. She was right by decades.

She invented the first compiler and gave COBOL its shape. She kept a clock that ran backwards on her wall to prove rules can be questioned.

The tapes were too degraded for normal release, so the agency restored them before posting.

40 years in an NSA archive. 90 minutes. Now free.

Josh Blackman:

This unusual opinion suggests something happened behind the scenes over the past ten months.

For years, Justice Kagan was overtly critical of the Supreme Court’s approach to emergency applications. In written dissents and public speeches, Kagan fed into the nefarious “shadow docket” narrative. She may as well have blurbed Steve Vladeck’s book. Yet, I’ve noticed over the past year or so that rhetoric from Justice Kagan has faded. Indeed, Kagan testified that she would rather “not now . . . call it the shadow docket . . . because we have done . . . a better job . . . where appropriate [of] explaining ourselves, at least to a moderate degree.” Kagan added, “we have gotten more experienced in these constant requests that are coming to us about requests for emergency relief . . . and we have issued opinions, and sometimes majority and dissenting opinions accordingly.”

Kagan was almost certainly referring to Trump v. Cook, which might be the slowest emergency docket case of all time. Remember, President Trump purported to remove Governor Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve on August 25, 2025. Twelve days later the District Court granted a preliminary injunction. Four days after that, the D.C. Circuit denied the government’s motion to stay. The case reached the Supreme Court on September 18, 2025. It would take the Court more than 280 days to decide the case in its “interim” posture, with more than 80 pages of majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions.

Justice Alito’s dissent laid out the glacial chronology.

Kelsey Piper

The war on standardized tests is shooting the messenger.

My grandmother — whose family fled Austria in 1939, when she was three — grew up in New York City. When she was in middle school, she passed the extremely selective test to attend Bronx Science, one of New York City’s specialized public high schools. From there, she went to Barnard and then to law school in an era when very few women did.

So while I live on the opposite coast these days — much to her consternation — I have always had a special place in my heart for New York City’s competitive specialized high school system, an engine of immigrant mobility and opportunity. Admission to these schools doesn’t require an essay or an interview, nor does it consider any facts about who you are. You just take a test and prove what you can do.

These are some of the best public schools in America — and right now they’re at the center of the same type of debate that is playing out at public schools all over the country: If a program has unequal benefits for children, should we destroy it?

Share

The most competitive of NYC’s specialized high schools is Stuyvesant. If the thing you want from high school is the opportunity to take the most challenging courses available alongside peers who are extremely smart and hardworking, Stuyvesant is probably the best school out there: It offers not only 30 or so AP classes but also several years of undergraduate mathematics courses.

And in the 2026-27 admitted class of 777 Stuyvesant students, only 21 are Latino and only three are Black.

City Councilman Lincoln Restler responded to these results with a call to end fully exam-based admissions: “We urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process,” he wrote.

Oscar Gill-Lewis:

Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker. He is a Senior Fellow at both the Cato Institute and the European Centre for International Political Economy. He previously wrote for SpeakFreely about Simon’s Paradox. His latest book is called “Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations”.

Oscar: Today I’m here speaking with Johan Norberg, historian, writer, academic, all of the above, great speaker as well, also author of the book Open: The Story of Human Progress, the Mirage of Swedish Socialism, the Capitalist Manifesto, In Defence of Global Capitalism, just a titan in the liberty space, so thank you for joining us. 

Johan Norberg: Oh, my pleasure, thanks for having me. 

OGL: So on Wednesday, the Finnish government introduced about a billion euros in tax cuts. Do you think this is a blow to the mythos of the idea of democratic socialist Nordic welfare states? 

JN: I think so. I think the Nordic welfare states have been in transition for a long time, away from what many outsiders still think is some kind of socialist model. It’s not anymore, because we tried it in the 1970s and the 1980s, and it ended in spectacular failure. Just look at my own country, Sweden. We had 25 years without any real wage increases, without creating a single net job in the private sector. That’s a disaster. The big entrepreneurs, big companies like Aikin, Tetra Pak, H&M, they left Sweden during this period, and after that, politicians from all across the spectrum, even on the leftist side, agree that no, we can’t punish innovation, risk-taking, and education in this way anymore. We have to have an open market model. It’s not perfect; we haven’t gone all the way, but it’s certainly a blow to the old perspective of how the welfare states function. 

OGL: Absolutely. So obviously you wrote the Mirage of Swedish Socialism for the Realities of Socialism project, and one of the things that I found interesting that you wrote about was that in the 1960s, that Sweden was, as you used James Otteson’s terminology, capitalist-inclined, and that it was doing quite well, economically successful, but then there was the transition in the 1970s and 1980s to a sort of more socialist-inclined way of governing. Why do you think there was that switch, there was the transition, that if everything was going so well, why change? 

Douglas Guth:

The community college, which serves 2,000 students across 15 counties in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, begins outreach in fifth grade. Students from local school districts are invited to the Escanaba campus, where they learn about potential careers as well as the basics of college life.

Children get a window into continuing education, whether examining insects through a microscope or learning how various metals burn at different temperatures. Visitors also get a personal welcome from President Nerita Hughes, who is happy to meet young minds at their “sweet spot,” she says.

“These are kids who are going into middle school, where they’re percolating ideas of who they want to be, and starting to identify a career path,” Hughes says. “Back in the day, when I was in school, you went to a parent or a mentor. You can still do that, but that’s not as prominent. So how do we reach kids early to start talking about this?”

Sheel Mohnot:

In 2005, Vanderbilt admitted 34% of applicants, and its middle 50% SAT range was 1280–1460. Today, it admits under 5%, with a middle 50% SAT range of 1510–1560.

They are opening a San Francisco campus for 1000 full-time students next year, and Jensen Huang just donated $75M to the campus

They moved from being compared mainly with the likes of Emory and Georgetown to competing directly for students with Northwestern and Duke.

Very smart how they did it, definitely some lessons that apply broadly:

• They recruited aggressively at Northeastern prep schools and top high schools nationwide… the chancellor would visit the schools that sent the most students to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and Penn (ALWAYS GET ON THE PLANE!)
• Built relationships with influential college counselors, so Vanderbilt would appear on the same recommended lists as the Ivies and Duke
• Specifically decided to attract Jews (the chancellor decided that Jewish students would strengthen the university’s intellectual life) by building out more Jewish life (Hillel center, kosher dining, Jewish studies program)… and it also helped shed the image of a traditional, insular Southern school dominated by white Christian fraternities
• Used generous need-based aid and merit scholarships to win students from more prestigious schools
• Sold a distinctive product: elite academics, SEC sports, a strong social scene and a real campus experience

Elizabeth MacDonald:

President Obama has been called out for falsely claiming college students’ costs would drop when the U.S. government took over all new federal student loans in 2010. Instead public university tuition has soared 55% and private tuition rocketed up 65% in lockstep with federal backing and subsidies. This, as universities sit on endowments that dwarf Wall Street hedge funds. Lawmakers say it’s to pull back their nonprofit taxfree status as universities gouge middle class families, sandbagging students with loan debt in the hundreds of thousands of dollars where they can’t afford to buy homes for their families.

Samuel J. Abrams:

The University of Austin (UATX) recently did something that should be commonplace in higher education but is surprisingly rare. The new university posted its entire undergraduate reading list online – 224 books, essays, and primary sources, course by course and professor by professor -for anyone to examine. Regardless of one’s views of the school itself, that decision deserves attention and every college and university in America should consider doing the same.

The reading list itself is serious and demanding. Students read Dante’s Paradiso and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Plato and Machiavelli, Montaigne and Tocqueville, Jane Austen and Melville. A course on the ideological experiments of the twentieth century pairs Solzhenitsyn and Arendt with the primary documents of the regimes themselves.

More importantly, the school’s list reflects genuine viewpoint diversity and that is exactly what higher education should aspire to. This list is not an ideological monoculture; in economics, students read Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Keynes alongside Hayek, Mises, and Sowell. In a course on the legacy of slavery taught by Coleman Hughes, the students read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project essay and the historians’ letter challenging it, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” and Hughes’s own reply, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Thomas Sowell’s history of slavery. This back and forth and the competition of ideas in the classroom because of the well balanced syllabi is exactly what genuine viewpoint diversity looks like and it deserves recognition.

Eric

The Constitution was built on a deliberate compact between the people and the states. What happens when significant portions of that compact are no longer accepted?

The Constitution was ratified by the states as a binding compact. The original 13 states consented through their legislatures. Every state admitted afterward explicitly accepted the same framework. This was never meant to be a temporary or easily discarded agreement.

The Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights was originally a restraint on the federalgovernment. The 14th Amendment changed that by incorporating most of those protections and making them binding on the states as well.

Yet today we see sustained, deliberate resistance in multiple states to core Bill of Rights protections:

• First Amendment (speech, religion, assembly)
• Second Amendment (the current “assault weapon” cases are only the latest example)
• Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections in criminal justice and regulatory contexts

When states treat the Bill of Rights as optional, they are rejecting a central part of the constitutional settlement.

Federal Supremacy and Enumerated Powers

Paul Boghossian:

Recently, a committee I chaired released a reportentitled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” Commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, the committee’s charge was to investigate the complaint, increasingly heard not only from those within academia but also from parties outside it, that the standards of scholarship being upheld within the humanities (broadly construed to include the qualitative social sciences) had eroded. More specifically, the complaint was that the relevant standards of scholarship in these areas had become increasingly subordinated to political agendas.

The committee that was assembled to investigate this worrisome charge was a distinguished one (the membership can be found on the front page of the report). Partly reflecting my role in assembling the group, it included, in addition to me, three philosophers (one of whom also ranges widely over literary and African American studies), two historians, one linguist, one sociologist, one anthropologist and one literary scholar.

The committee proceeded by having appropriate subsets of its members look closely at the following fields (often in consultation with outside experts and with the help of two research assistants): philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies. The subject-specific teams generated reports which were then reviewed by the entire committee to inform its findings, which it summarized thus:

Bryce Elder:

The road to Heckmondwike was paved with good intentions. Once, it was a railway serving the textile mills. Then it became a disused railway line known only to enthusiasts of hiking and heroin. Now it’s a family-friendly greenway dotted with scrap-metal sculptures of sheep. 

The West Yorkshire town is typical in how light entertainment filled the void left by heavy industry. Children as young as five were once put to work in these mills. Now they have the run of the place. Heckmondwike’s big days out are the Christmas lights switch-on and Hecky Fest, a music festival where the bouncy castle gets higher billing than the acts. There’s a miniature zoo to the south and a pitch site for travelling fairs to the north. All the pubs in between do chips and beans in small portions. Although only about a tenth of the local population is of a bouncy-castle-compatible age, it’s the one minority that catches no heat on Facebook community groups.

This is good. Having kids around a place is civilising. Only a curmudgeon or a teenager would want the town organised any other way. 

Quinton Klabon Summary:

• Mississippi reads better than Wisconsin because of our child poverty (theirs is the nation’s highest, their poor kids score 1st)
• Wisconsin kids cannot read because they do not have glasses (totally happens, not the root cause)
• no Act 20 knowledge

——-

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?

Greg Lukianoff

I am excited to announce that an adapted chapter (with a ton of new data) from Rikki Schlott and my book ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ will be the cover story at Reason magazine next month. It describes what we call the Conformity Gauntlet — the incredibly difficult road you have in academia if you step out of line or question the ideological orthodoxy. 

As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.

In the first part of the piece, Rikki and I explain the research which shows that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements function as political litmus tests. I mean, of course they do, but Nate Honeycutt at FIRE has done some really interesting experiments proving what should be obvious.

We then take the reader on an imaginary tour of academia from the point of view of an independent-minded highschooler and demonstrate how many conformity pressures he or she will face on their way to becoming a scientist. Layering the threats to free speech and conformity pressures on top of each other is key to really understanding how the Conformity Gauntlet works, because no single case really conveys how bad it’s gotten for freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought on campus on a systematic basis.

Chad Aldeman

In April, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the 50 states and Washington, D.C., took in $1 trillion in federal, state and local revenue for K-12 public education in the 2023-24 school year.

One. Trillion. Dollars. 

That’s a remarkable milestone. And while it doesn’t tell the whole story — it represents only revenues, not expenditures — it speaks to five trends that help explain where K-12 finance stands today.

More money, fewer students 

On an inflation-adjusted basis, schools had 22% more money to spend in 2023-24 than a decade earlier. One-time federal relief funds played a role here, and as a result, federal revenues had the largest jump in percentage terms (up 65%). But schools rely much more heavily on state and local funding, and those revenues also rose by 18% each. Meanwhile, schools served about 500,000 fewer students, a decline of 1.1%. 

Put differently, schools are serving fewer students with substantially more money than they did a decade ago.

The national averages mask wide variation across the states 

On average, public schools spent $17,619 per student in the 2023-24 school year. But there was enormous variation, with places like New York and the District of Columbia spending more than $30,000 per student, while states like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi spent closer to $11,000 or $12,000 per child. 

——

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?

Oregon Journalism Project

The county seat of Malheur is Vale, population 2,000. Located 12 miles west of the Idaho border, the Vale School District has 865 students and, according to OJP’s analysis, enjoys an attendance rate other districts dream of—83%. That’s 18.5 points above the state average.

The start of its attendance recovery began in the 2021–22 school year, when McBride, the Vale superintendent, received an email from a local court official that floored her:

School districts across the state could no longer issue citations to parents for truancy violations.

This change occurred because, a few months earlier, lawmakers from both parties passed Senate Bill 817. Coming in the wake of George Floyd Jr.’s murder in Minneapolis, the bill wiped out juvenile justice fines, costs for court-assigned lawyers, probation fees, and other “aggressive and racially discriminatory fees,” according to the advocacy group Our Children Oregon.

But the bill also eliminated using the court system to enforce attendance laws, specifically the use of citations and fines. In doing so, according to a recent survey by Attendance Works, Oregon became one of only two states with this specific prohibition.

McBride and other superintendents thought the change was crazy. “[Now] there wasn’t a lever to say, no, you must send your child to school,” McBride said

——

Commentary.

Harmeet Dhillon

Elizabeth Bernstein:

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials,

so she did as she was told.

She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart?

After decades of urging families to communicate better and work on their issues together, some therapists are now taking an opposite tack: They’re encouraging estrangement as a means of self-care.

Proponents of the trend hold that advising patients to consider a cutoff from a close relative or spouse they deem toxic or unsupportive can protect their mental health and allow for emotional growth. Meanwhile, critics-many of whom are researchers who have studied relationships for decades-say that it encourages self-centeredness and self-delusion and ruins families.

——

More.

Jessica Calefati:

An Anne Arundel County Public Schools policy that protects students’ right to be called by their chosen name at school is the target of a federal lawsuit filed by parents who say it conflicts with the family’s religious beliefs. 

Plaintiffs John and Jane Doe, represented by an attorney at America First Legal Foundation, allege teachers and staff at an area high school lied about and hid their child’s gender transition last school year because of district policy. 

The lawsuit, filed last week, is America First Legal’s latest effort to bring conservative influence into public schools. The nonprofit was founded by Stephen Miller, an influential advisor to President Donald Trump, and has taken aim at other policies designed to support students regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Here’s what to know about the school system’s policy and what’s at stake. 

US Senate Committee:

Featured Files

CBP Wanted to Question and Search Peter Daszak. The FBI Said No.

July 20, 2026 – Newly released documents show CBP built a formal targeting action to question President of  EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak on his return from the WHO’s COVID-19 origins mission — before the FBI stepped in and asked agents to stand down.

The Record So Far

Fauci’s Two-Decade Relationship with the Intelligence Community

June 6, 2026 – Newly released documents trace Dr. Anthony Fauci’s connections to the national security and intelligence apparatus back to 2003, showing his involvement in reviewing CIA and National Intelligence Council reports on bioweapons threats years before COVID-19. The release includes the email exchange in which Fauci directed Kristian Andersen to report furin cleavage site concerns to the FBI and MI5, records of classified national security briefings provided to Fauci in 2021, and a Marine Corps DARPA fellow’s inspector general memo alleging that a 2018 EcoHealth Alliance DARPA proposal — never publicly disclosed — describes the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

New Documents Show Years of Warnings and Workarounds Before NIH Scientists Were Charged With Attempting to Smuggle Monkeypox into U.S.

———

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

——-

New Slack Messages: Proximal Origin Authors Privately Doubted Their Own “No Lab Leak” Conclusion

———

The $8.9 million NIH grant to Andersen and Garry (NIH grant AI151812) was not “awarded automatically.” It required Fauci’s signature. Which Fauci did not provide until the fraudulent paper that he had commissioned from Andersen and Garry appeared in print.

———-

To everyone who threw up the “proximal origins” paper as strong evidence of zoonosis:

— credulous people like you believed it;

— bad-faith actors espoused it without believing it;

— its own authors, we now know from the Slacks, didn’t believe it before or after publication.

———-

A year later, when a 2018 grant proposal surfaced that planned to insert the exact same kind of feature into bat coronaviruses that we see in SARS-CoV-2, Andrew Rambaut said: “We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.”

x summary

Drawing from a 2026 OECD survey, the claim notes U.S. tertiary-educated adults lag globally, with 14% at the lowest literacy levels compared to 8% worldwide, amid K-12 roots where only 33% of 12th-graders read proficiently. Federal subsidies and $1.7 trillion in student loans fuel tuition hikes, with average public four-year costs nearing $26,000 yearly and critics decrying poor outcomes like graduates focused on ideology over skills. As enrollment dips and alternatives like trades gain appeal, voices call for reforms such as ending unlimited loans to restore accountability.

This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time.

Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

The Snow Report:

There’s no shortage of odd, confusing, infuriating, ill-founded and contentious claims in education, and in the wider social chattersphere that sits around it, but surely there’s one that we can put to bed for good and for all: the idea that it is the job of parents to teach their children how to read – and by extension, that parents are to blame when children struggle in this endeavour.

There are many reasons why this cosy, middle-class-meme-cum-system-level-excuse-for-schools needs to be exploded and I’ll address as many as I can here. 

First of all though, I think we can agree that reading is a fundamentally important life-skill and one that is best fostered in the early years of school. Reading is the means by which students engage with the academic curriculum and have the opportunity to succeed at school. The downstream benefits of successful early reading achievement yield the kinds of investment returns we can only dream of for our financial portfolios. When students become proficient readers in a timely and smooth way, they are more likely to succeed academically. When students achieve academically, they are more likely to display prosocial, on-task behaviour in classrooms. When students display prosocial, on-task classroom behaviours, they are more likely to feel a sense of attachment to school, to stay at school, and to exit secondary school with open doors to postsecondary training, education and/or employment. When schools have early reading instruction nailed, they are also going a long way to addressing student wellbeing. It’s hard to be self-regulated, calm, and ready-to-learn if you are locked out of the writing system by which learning is transacted in classrooms (see references at the end of this post).

——-

More.

Peter Lindblad:

Enrollment in the Monona Grove School District is projected to decline, according to Sarah Kemp, of the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Lab.

“In five years, you’re looking at anywhere between a little over 3,000 [to] as little as 2,986,” said Kemp, who manages the organization’s School Enrollment Projections Program.

Kemp presented the Lab’s study to the school board on Tuesday, July 14. She reported that the biggest drop-offs are expected at the elementary school level.

In a somewhat related move, the board voted unanimously to add nine new 4-year-old kindergarten spots to its open enrollment offerings for 2026-27.

Overall, Kemp noted that enrollment in the district over the last 10 years rose from 3,069 in 2026-27 to 3,158 in 2025-26 for a 3% increase. This applies only to resident, in-building students, she said.

During that stretch, looking at 4-year-old kindergarten, the numbers were steady, according to Kemp. A 3% decline has occurred in grades 5K to fifth. There was also a slight decrease of 1% at the middle school level, while the high school has seen the most growth with an increase of nearly 19%.

Gregory Kearney, Joshua D. Rauh:

The results for Illinois were especially stark. In 2023, pension contributions absorbed on average of more than 21% of the portion of expenditures related to employees covered by the pension systems (this is spending on instruction, administration, operations and other categories directly linked to covered employees).That is the second-highest burden in the country. Since 2015, this share has risen by more than five percentage points. Adjusting for inflation, Illinois schools’ pension contributions increased by $1.9 billion over this period, while total associated education expenditures including those contributions grew by only $1.3 billion. 

This has put growing pressure on other important education expenditures. If pension spending’s claim on the budget were still at 2015 levels — 15.3% — Illinois school districts would have had an additional $1.72 billion in 2023 to use for educational costs with a direct bearing on student learning — think salaries for new teachers, new classroom resources or additional support services such as counselors or teacher aides.

Worse, these numbers probably understate the actual problem significantly. This is because the funding ratios largely depend on optimistic investment assumptions embedded in pension accounting, with the state mostly assuming long-run returns of roughly 7%. And if actual returns fall short of the rosy assumptions, the state’s required contributions made on behalf of school districts will jump.

In our analysis, we addressed this uncertainty by re-estimating Illinois’ unfunded liabilities using market-based Treasury yields — a relatively conservative benchmark. The resulting change in the projection was substantial. Under this approach, annual pension contributions would need to increase from roughly $7 billion today to more than $15.7 billion. That would push the budgetary burden of pension contributions to nearly 37% of all covered employee spending.

Jonathan Turley:

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debatethat I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors. 

Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

kirschner-ED:

Two notes before you begin reading this post. The first is that this piece is longer than it should be. It’s a synopsis of three posts by others totalling more than 5000 words with my own thoughts added. If it’s too long, then here’s a synopsis of my synopsis:

This post synthesises recent critiques of Alpha School by Robert Pondiscio, Jared Cooney Horvath, and Dylan Kane, examining its claim that students can complete academic learning in two hours a day through adaptive software and AI tutoring. While the model may offer genuine efficiencies and valuable enrichment, its assertion that students learn 2.6 times faster remains difficult to evaluate because the underlying data, methods, student selection, and wider school conditions have not been independently scrutinised. Moreover, they argue that rapid progress on software-aligned assessments does not necessarily demonstrate durable learning, long-term retention, or transfer to unfamiliar contexts. The post also questions whether screen-based, adaptive systems encourage deep understanding or merely teach students to optimise for task completion, potentially replacing human judgement by the teacher with increased monitoring by the system. More fundamentally, it asks whether Alpha is reducing academic subjects to content that should be mastered as quickly as possible, overlooking the role of teachers, other students, discussion, shared intellectual culture, and sustained engagement in developing knowledge and independence. Alpha should therefore be regarded as a possibly promising educational experiment, not yet as evidence that AI can replace teachers or make conventional schooling obsolete.

The second is that I was aided in this exercise by ChatGPT (for example in writing the above synopsis). Not the least in helping to turn my acquired Dunglish into something resembling English.

I’ve been bombarded in the last few days by blogs, articles, Substacks, etc. about Alpha School. Apparently – understatement – there’s a kerfuffle about the school with supporters, detractors, and people on the fence. This a synopsis of three recent pieces that I found in my feed. One is from Robert Pondiscio, one is from Jared Cooney Horvath, and one is from Dylan Kane. All three pose more questions than answers, and that’s why I’m combining them here for you. I definitely advise everyone to read the original pieces as well as follow these three.

Alpha School makes an extraordinary promise: children can complete their academic learning in just two hours a day, using adaptive software and AI tutors, and spend the rest of their time developing practical skills, pursuing projects, and following their interests.

Wall Street Journal:

A federal judge recently blocked the Trump Administration’s effort to rein in a giveaway for higher-education graduates who work in government or social advocacy. The message to Republicans in Congress is to get with it and limit this student-loan subsidy favoritism.

The 19-year-old Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is the monster progeny of George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Its initial goal was to encourage young people to pursue jobs in government and at nonprofits, though these lines of work no longer need subsidizing, if they ever did.

Graduates can have their debt discharged after working 10 years for government or a 501(c)3 nonprofit and making modest payments during that time. As of January, the government had discharged $90.6 billion for some 1.2 million borrowers, averaging $75,000 per person. The aggregate limit for undergraduate loans is $31,000 for students who are dependents, so this means most beneficiaries have advanced degrees.

The left-leaning Student Borrower Protection Center estimates that more than nine million workers—roughly a quarter of federal student loan borrowers—are eligible for the program. An Education Department report last year found that the biggest beneficiaries are employees in K-12 schools (28%), higher education (15%), and healthcare nonprofits (12%).

The Economist:

visitor to the playground at Valbyparken, a green expanse in Copenhagen, is in for three surprises. The first is that the sprawling public children’s park is built on what was once a rubbish tip for the Danish capital. The second is the free coffee on offer for harried parents. But perhaps the most unexpected is the eagerness of the playground’s staff to hand out knives to children. Or axes, if they prefer. Or even, for tots bored with mere weaponry, some fire-starting equipment. Off you go, kids, and do be careful (oh and parents please keep an eye on them). Sprogs of an age that in most countries would barely be allowed onto a swing unattended scamper away to whittle sticks and soon imagine themselves carving their own magic wand, or the oar of a Viking longship.
The knife-dispensing strategy may appear to some as an oversight that keeps the local hospital bustling with injured kids in summer. On the contrary. Injecting a dose of risk into children’s free-ranging fun is a feature, not a bug. The nature-based playground offers a litany of ways for children to get bruised, bumped, scratched and dirty. There are trees to climb, brambly branches to rearrange, tricycles to ride (often into each other), a play pond to stumble into, then trails to get lost in far from nosy parents. Adult chaperones may fret about lurking hazards, but their peace of mind is secondary. “It’s children who need to be aware of every step they take,” says Helle Nebelong, a former Copenhagen city official who designed the place at the turn of the century. “They must take responsibility for their own safety.” A cadre of young staff are there to catalyse play rather than stymie it.

Richard Dooling:

George Orwell closed his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” with six rules for writers, the first of which commands: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” It is the rule against clichés—don’t beat dead horses, cry over spilled milk or freeze like a deer in the headlights.

“The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Authors and academics are often the worst abusers of ready-made phrases and buzzwords. They put their readers to sleep by deploying trite phrases in the passive voice. Good, honest writing isn’t only hard work; it can get you canceled for being direct about a controversial topic.

Enter artificial intelligence, which can flag clichés by analyzing the frequency at which figures of speech occur in data sets. But replacing clichés with something vivid and original is a harder task. In Orwell’s parlance, large-language models show us what they are used to seeing in print. These models are like giant looms. They select complementary textual threads from vast data warehouses and weave them together to create tapestries of prose.

Amanda Geduld:

There’s a prevailing principle in the U.S. that funding disparities are at the root of education inequality, with poorer districts receiving less money than their wealthier counterparts. But a recent study has actually found the opposite, documenting that over the past nearly 50 years high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts across all 50 states actually spent more per student on average.

That being said, a number of these districts face higher labor costs, which offsets at least some of that advantage, according to the research from Brookings.

The findings “raise questions about what I see as a predominant narrative that local property tax finance means that poor schools don’t have as much money and that that is a core, structural cause of inequality, and I just think it’s not,” said Sarah Reber, a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings and the report’s lead author. 

“That doesn’t mean giving poor schools more money wouldn’t help. It could help,” she added, but “if we’re spending all of our time … focused on the level and allocation of school funding, we’re missing other important things.”

To do this work, Reber and her colleagues used data collected by the Census Bureau, which surveys school districts on their spending and enrollment. They then divided districts into five groups, or quintiles, based on poverty rates and racial composition, with the first quintile being the least poor and the fifth being the most and the first quintile having the lowest share of non-white students and the fifth having the most.(Credit: Brookings)

They found that spending allocations across these five poverty brackets is U-shaped, with the poorest and wealthiest districts spending the most. Since the early 2000s, the poorest districts have outspent even the wealthiest ones. Part of this U-shape can be explained because states send more money to high-poverty districts, while affluent public schools are more likely to be in wealthier, higher-spending states.

——-

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?

Nate Silver:

In today’s newsletter, I argue this is the sweet spot for the DSA. DSA members are very college-educated (80% BA+) but not particularly well-off (45% HHI incomes below $60K). Their class status is ambiguous. But they tend to be very liberal on culture as well as economics.

——-

Downwardly mobile elites are the bread-and-butter of the Dems.

——-

Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

——-

There is a ton of discussion about this today. But note that while THE BEST cohort for Dems is low-income ppl w/ a graduate degree, there is only a 4 percentage point gap to the highest income cohort. What this shows more strongly is that advanced education is associated with leftism.

——-

This is where your DSA problem is coming from, right here. It’s all people who grew up upper middle class, or who inserted themselves into a traditionally upper middle class milieu, and then found out that no one wants to pay them $150k to hear them spout off Critical Theory.

Megan Greenwell:

It’s three weeks until Mississippi’s standardized test season begins, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.

Evidence of what’s at stake hangs all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin is in her first year teaching eighth-grade English. Inside her classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear pouches labeled “Data Wall” shows the current reading level of each student. The school hallways are lined with posters listing schoolwide scores on an earlier practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi would assign their school if that practice test had been the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F.

Jefferson County is one of the smallest in Mississippi; 6,800 people spread across 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It’s also one of the poorest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, where the only public elementary, middle, and high school are all based, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stoplight. The county is 13 percent white, but most of those families send their kids to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are Black.

Inside Hamberlin’s classroom, it’s time for test-prep drills. This period has 20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

Much of literacy instruction at Jefferson County Middle School now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin doesn’t lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptive software program, so each can focus where they need the most help.

Their teacher can’t blame them for being sick of these exercises. The students’ lives, and hers, are dominated by the looming Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), the set of annual standardized exams that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and math. Test prep is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, identify the central idea of a passage, analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday brings a practice test.

———

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?

NJ Gov Sherrill

Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals answered “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.

This happened under the previous administration and, upon learning this information, I immediately ordered my chief counsel to launch an investigation to get to the bottom of what occurred. I also ordered the removal of any residents from our voter rolls who were erroneously added between June 2023 and June 2024. The new MVC Administrator that I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for administering the system.

Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted. They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.

——-

Patrick Marley.

Megan McArdle

Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association, was not one to stay silent while outsiders claimed that her field had abandoned rigorous argument in favor of social justice orthodoxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it.

Her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real.

“They used AI,” said the Princeton anthropology professor, apparently unaware that using artificial intelligence to survey large bodies of text is an increasingly common method in many social science fields. She rambled about a couple of passing references to Socrates as if this somehow discredited the report. (Did you know the ancient Greeks had enslaved people?) She asserted that teaching there are two sexes would be “the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.”

When the interviewer pushes back on that last point, she tries to dodge and weave, but has no idea what an effective dodge would be. So we end up watching an unintentional comedian take repeated pratfalls, such as suggesting that people who believe sex is binary maybe “want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY,” and that teaching that sex is binary is as inappropriate in a classroom as debating the pros and cons of interning Japanese people. Perhaps this sounds more coherent if you are fluent in Anthropologese, but to those outside the tribe? Woof.

It makes for painful reading, not just because Rouse can’t seem to untangle her foot from her tonsils, but because she exemplifies some of the deepest problems with academia today. She also illustrates the reasons those problems haven’t been fixed.

Marian L. Tupy

Three days before his 2025 inauguration, Donald Trumplaunched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. That May, he dined with 220 of its largest holders, some of whom bought up the coin expressly to secure invitations. In October Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder who had been convicted of violating money-laundering laws. Binance had assigned a team to develop the stablecoin for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture tied to the Trump family. The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money. Last year Paramount agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million—with some payments made to his future presidential library—to settle a lawsuit it had called meritless, and within weeks the government approved its $8 billion merger with Skydance.

Each episode has been reported, with people raising questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior. But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man.

Mike Greenberg

April 3, 2012, began like any other day for Ken Jouppi, a longtime bush pilot in Alaska. He was scheduled to fly a passenger and her groceries from Fairbanks 110 miles north to the village of Beaver. Hidden in the passenger’s luggage, though, were three cases of beer—two Budweiser, one Bud Light—intended as a gift to her husband, who worked in Beaver as the local postmaster. 

The beer was illegal to bring to Beaver, which voted to prohibit alcohol in 2004.  Before Ken could take off, state troopers searched the plane and discovered the beer. Ken insisted he did not know about the beer. He was nevertheless charged, convicted and sentenced to the statutory minimum: a $1,500 fine and three days in jail.

But the State wasn’t done with him yet. For the past thirteen years, prosecutors have also been trying to forfeit his airplane, a Cessna U206D, worth about $95,000. And this past April, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the harm of a single six-pack of beer warranted seizing something as valuable as an airplane. 

Jouppi v. Alaska.

Paul Vallas:

When word spread the Chicago Board of Education was planning cuts to teaching staff to narrow the $732.5 million budget deficit, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates declared their plan was “unsatisfactory and dead on arrival.” She alone demanded Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly address the shortfall claiming CPS schools are being shortchanged $1.6 billion in funding under the Evidence‑Based Funding (EBF) formula.

Since the May board meeting, Davis Gates has been joined by Mayor Brandon Johnson to demand the state step in and finally “fully fund” Chicago’s public schools. To listen to Johnson tell it, the impending budget cuts and layoffs to teachers and support staff are a sad tale of repeated betrayals, letdowns, and, above all, disappointing failures of nerve among lawmakers in Springfield to take the necessary action to meet its financial obligations under the EBF to the Chicago’s schools.

The Evidence‑Based Funding (EBF) formula was supposedly designed to ensure every school district has the resources necessary to provide a high‑quality education and to direct new state resources toward the most underfunded districts to counter historic funding inequities. Unfortunately, it has provided an excuse for continuous increases in school funding without regard to a district’s academic performance, while protecting underperforming districts from enrollment losses.

———

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?

United States Department of State:

Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.

Ground News:

• This fall, the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York will introduce Sally, an AI-powered humanoid robot, to high school classrooms to assist educators and students in specialized robotics courses.
• Serving roughly 1,300 students, 79 percent economically disadvantaged, the district participates in the Woz ED STEM Pathway program and purchased the robot from Realbotix for $57,590.
• Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel said the robot features a “lifelike appearance” and uses “education-specific safety guardrails” to provide personalized support, with students accessing 24/7 homework help via unique identification codes.
• In an official statement posted earlier this month, the school district confirmed the robot will “never replace teachers, staff members, or meaningful human interaction” and will not store personal student data or record video.
• While some praise the initiative as innovative, critics warn that classroom AI could exacerbate inequality in underserved populations, marking a significant test for embodied artificial intelligence in live educational environments.

Jonah Goldberg:

I spent part of the week at Liberalism for the 21^stCentury—LibCon 2026—an annual conference put on by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, a relatively new organization headed by my friend Shika Dalmia, long associated with Reasonmagazine and now publisher of the UnPopulist.

I am interested in opportunities for right-left collaboration on issues such as the rule of law, free speech, free trade, and similar things that traditionally fall under the heading “liberalism,” and so I try to go to things like this when I can. They are, as we say around here, worth our time.

The lineup presented some opportunities for political intermixing: There were familiar libertarian types such as Dalmia and Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, left-liberal types such as Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen, idiosyncratic liberals such as Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk, and a fair number of regular ol’ conservatives, including me, David French, and Bill Kristol. I can hear the keys clicking as emails are written denouncing the last of these, or, at the very least, tartly informing me that he is no longer a conservative; about that I will write only that while he and I may have some wide and deep disagreements about the best way to approach the current political moment in these United States, in conversation Bill Kristol strikes me as being, if anything, more conservative in the genuine sense of that word than he was 20 years ago—more skeptical, less ideological, free from party feeling, more interested in preservation and continuity, etc. 

It is a good mix, but an uneasy one. 

I try to put on a friendly face when I encounter some of the lefty types here, many of whom I have exchanged some pretty harsh words with in the past. There is nothing in particular that I wish to retract, but this is a conciliatory occasion. My efforts meet with decidedly mixed results. I do not blame my interlocutors for this: My attempts to be friendly must seem as disturbing and unnatural to them as it does to me.

Erin Gretzinger:

Two ad hoc committees plan to hold virtual public hearings Thursday to get feedback on a list of community proposals submitted for renaming Lindbergh Elementary on the northeast side and Elvehjem Elementary on the east side. Both schools are named after controversial figures.

Charles Lindbergh, a pioneering American pilot and former University of Wisconsin-Madison student, made antisemetic statements and in 1938 accepted a medal from the Nazi government. Conrad Elvehjem, a former UW-Madison president, signed a racial covenant in the 1930s preventing Black people from owning homes in his neighborhood.

Lindbergh died in 1974, while Elvehjem died 1962. The schools have been named after both for decades.

The School Board approved establishing two committees in March to pursue renaming the schools. The district typically limits the number of renamings to two per school year.

———

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?

Wenyuan Wu:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Universities in the West today would be tragically unrecognizable to their medieval and early modern founders. Pursuits of truth, knowledge, scientific facts, inquiry and critical scrutiny, shared purposes of higher education rooted in both classical and modern practices, are overshadowed by the cancerous spread of subjective postmodernism.

Cancel culture and self-censorship have neutralized institutional neutrality. Professor Owen Anderson, who teaches world religions and ethics at Arizona State University, received a failing annual performance review following anonymous student complaints alleging a “Christian bias.” All the professor did, against the university’s recommendation to incorporate “decolonizing and anti-racism ideologies” into classroom instruction, was to pose scholarly questions about the theory of the “highest good” and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that Professor Anderson is a vocal critic of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), so much so as a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the school’s DEI training, contextualizes the penalty.

Last year, the University of California (UC) decided to scale back a social-justice-themed postdoctoral program that used DEI-based hiring criteria. The decision was met with a firestorm of faculty protests. Leftist professors, many of whom were hired through the program’s incentive structure to retain participating scholars, coordinated a highly effective campaign to pressure the administration. The campaign began with an open letter from anonymous “Concerned UC Faculty, administrators, staff, professorial colleagues, and constituents,” opposing the program’s elimination and supporting UC’s core values of DEI. It also included an elaborate toolkit with action alerts, talking points, a mass email campaign, and a sample press release. Subsequently, a petition with more than 1,000 signatures and endorsements from unions and nonprofits was submitted to the UC president, who was also invited to a press conference organized by the graduate student union. Unsurprisingly, UC is now reversing course and reviving the program.

Todd Wallack:

Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further

reducing the number of kids at some schools.
Some districts are also coping with population shifts, as families move to the suburbs or other parts of the country.

In addition, Roza noted that families in some parts of the country, such as Florida, have enrolled their children in private schools, taking advantage of taxpayer-funded vouchers and scholarship programs offered in a growing number of states, or charter schools, which are publicly funded but generally operate with some degree of autonomy.
All that means more closures, sometimes year after year. School administrators acknowledge that the moves can be hard on students, families and neighborhoods.
“It’s very difficult,” said Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. “Public schools have always been anchors of communities.”
The Philadelphia district said schools have 70,000 more seats than are needed because of enrollment declines, and many of its aging school buildings need repairs.
In May, Philadelphia’s school board voted to close 17 schools, rejecting a recommendation to cut even more. Students, teachers and others rallied before the meeting to try to stop the closures.
To ease the burden on families, Watlington said Philadelphia decided to gradually close campuses over the next decade to give students time to graduate from their current schools. The district also created a transition office to help families affected by the changes.

Eugene Volokh:

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned {the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis}.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they arewrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.

Trevor Griffey:

Contrary to what most journalists and many academics argue, an “oversupply” of people with PhDs is not the primary cause of the decline of tenure for college facultyin the U.S.

First, there is not a large “oversupply” of people with PhDs for faculty jobs in higher education, if we include non-tenure track jobs in our estimate of the “job market” for faculty. And why would we exclude those jobs? The vast majority of college faculty in the United States today are ineligible for tenure. As Marc Bousquet argued in his 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation: “We are not overproducing PhDs; we are underproducing jobs. There is plenty of work in higher education for everyone who wants to do it. The problem is that this enormous quantity of work no longer comes in the bundle of tenure, dignity, scholarship and a living wage we call a ‘job.’” (pp. 40-41)

Second, analysis of non-tenure track employment for college faculty reveals that the replacement of faculty teaching jobs with gigs has gone hand-in-hand with the systematic devaluation of the PhD as a credential for teaching college courses in humanities, social science and STEM fields (PhDs are not generally necessary to teach in a number of professional fields). People with PhDs not only face fierce competition for tenure track positions in their fields, but must also compete with doctoral students and people with terminal Masters degrees for teaching positions off the tenure track. This has effectively undermined the bargaining position of many people who receive PhDs, and reduced college student access to instructors who have ever published original scholarship in the fields that they teach in.

Stuart Hall, Jordan T. Camp:

In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University of Guyana, Rodney had resigned from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to accept the job. As he returned home to join his wife Patricia and their children in Guyana, Rodney was informed that the offer had been rescinded under pressure from the government of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. A revised version of Hall’s remarks was recently discovered in the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham; they are published here for the first time.

The “Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!” protest in London was just one episode in a global solidarity movement that erupted in support of Rodney, who by that point had established an international reputation following the publication of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). His scholarship focused on exploitation by the “colonial capitalist system.” Yet Rodney also argued that formal independence, including Guyana’s, was not the fulfillment of anticolonial struggle: on the contrary, it had resulted in the ascension of a governing class—exemplified by Burnham’s rule—that spoke the language of national liberation and socialist movements while advancing interests contrary to those of workers and peasants. Independence, Rodney warned, had not fundamentally altered the “map of the world” or shifted the material conditions of the masses.

The year 1974 was a pivotal historical moment—or as Hall and Rodney might say, a conjuncture. That year, Rodney became a member of the newly formed Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, a multiracial class alliance formed to resist the U.S.-backed Burnham dictatorship. The organization challenged the Burnham regime’s nationalist narratives, which portrayed racial conflicts between African and Indian working people as inexorable features of Guyanese society. For this work, Rodney and his comrades were subject to multiple arrests and harassment.

re: Jess Coleman, The Supreme Court’s Originalists Are Cracking Up, TNR (July 7, 2026), <https://newrepublic.com/article/212556/supreme-court-originalism-trump-barbara>. 

In Trump v. Slaughter (2026), the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion announced: “[I]n Federalist No. 77, Hamilton said that the Senate’s consent ‘would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint,’ but it remains a subject of scholarly debate whether Hamilton meant ‘displace’ in the sense of ‘remove’ or ‘replace.’” Jess Coleman objects. Coleman affirms the correctness of the ‘displace’-means-‘remove’ position, and he announces that the contrary position is ‘bizarre.’ 

I have argued in academic journals since 2010, that is, long before Trump entered politics, that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language means ‘replace’ and not ‘remove.’ Those who argue that ‘displace’ means ‘remove’ tend to clip only one sentence from Federalist No. 77, but if you read the entire paragraph in which that sentence appears, you will see that the discussion is better understood as involving replacing officers, as opposed to simply removing them. See <The Avalon Project : Federalist No 77>. 

Furthermore, in his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution, Joseph Story affirmed that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language was about replacing, as opposed to removing, officers. See <THE NEW REFORM CLUB: Strained (and Sloppy) Readings of the Constitution and Strained (and Sloppy) Readings of Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77 (Updated)>. More recently, it has come to light that, in his private correspondence to Senator Webster, Chancellor James Kent affirmed that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language was speaking to replacing, as opposed to removing, officers. See <https://reason.com/volokh/2025/11/20/chancellor-james-kent-on-hamiltons-federalist-no-77-and-modern-academic-commentary/>. 

Chun Han Wong:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is employing the sort of autocratic tactics once wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to stamp out opposition and stack the leadership with acolytes as he prepares to extend his reign.

In a throwback to the most powerful Communist leaders of the 20th century, Xi has purged dozens of senior officials—even his own protégés—overseen the growth of a cult of personality and demanded absolute loyalty.

His goal: dictate China’s destiny for years to come in order to expand the country’s power and match the U.S. in military might and economic clout. Now in his 14th year as party leader, the 73-year-old Xi has eliminated conventions put in place after Mao to prevent a return to one-man rule.

But such strongman tactics come with risks. In squelching debate and stoking a climate of fear, Xi has made policymaking more arbitrary and mistakes harder to correct. Without clear succession planning, Xi also risks the fate that befell Stalin and Mao, whose deaths in office unleashed struggles for power that ended up unraveling their political visions.

Carl Campanile:

New York is spending more on education than any state in the nation despite shrinking schools and 12% fewer students than 15 years ago, an eye-opening new report found.

Empire State enrollment could see another double-digit decrease by 2031 as population growth stagnates and birth rates plummet — which would mean New York is shedding students faster than anywhere in the US except California and New Mexico, according to the report by budget watchdog the Citizens Budget Commission. 

The reckoning will force policymakers to consider controversial decisions: closing or merging schools and reducing staff or continuing to prop up facilities with a dearth of students, the report said.

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Value Proposition Tracker

New York State and its localities also collect more from taxpayers than any other state and spend the third most per capita in the country. While this delivers the nation’s highest average per-student spending, it produces middling performance. The State’s broad and deep social safety net has been critical to supporting economic opportunity, but outcomes have not always kept pace with spending.

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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?

Shannon Whitwort:

“It’s not all of them, but it’s always them,” is something I hear constantly. This means that every time you hear about some sort of antisocial behavior, the perpetrator is almost always a black person acting like a fool.

My kids aren’t doing that, and I cannot imagine under what circumstances they would, given they know the consequences my wife and I would impose as parents. I talk to my children, especially my son, about being situationally aware and leaving a scene well before anything bad develops. 

Similarly, I teach at Milwaukee Lutheran Middle & High School, where 97 percent of the student body is inner-city, economically disadvantaged black kids. The entire staff, from the principal, the teachers and the counselors to the people in the lunch kitchen are constantly talking to our students about following a more Christ-like life, making better choices. We teach them that grown, mature people don’t fly off the handle at the slightest provocation or resort to violence or other foolishness.

Our school is not immune from these problems, but I personally believe that constant messaging does make a difference with most of our students. I spent over 22 years as a litigator, with a number of those years being a prosecutor or in criminal defense. I believe this experience in the criminal justice system provides me with insight into how people are motivated to make the decisions that wind them up in the system.

Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D

Interestingly, I first met Mark in the offices of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), the predecessor to the Badger Institute. At the time, I was an economics doctoral student, and Mark was a professor of education at UW-Milwaukee. That chance meeting changed both of our lives, but especially mine. Over the years, we went on to publish three books, more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, countless op-eds, a few economics curricular materials, and six Badger Institute reports (and Mark co-authored another five studies for the Institute as well). More importantly, I found a mentor and one of my closest friends.

Mark was an absolute giant in the field of economic education. He authored or co-authored much of the core curriculum developed by the Council for Economic Education that K-12 teachers continue to use today. His curriculum vitae was among the most impressive you will ever see, with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Mark was also a unicorn — the rare professor in a major school of education who championed free markets and school choice. He advocated for phonics-based reading instruction, a reduced role for Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction in teacher licensing, market-oriented economic education for all Wisconsin students, and expanded educational choice.

Alison Somin:

A Washington Post essay highlights an important concept but falls short.

‘Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan famously wrote in his dissent in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. It would take decades to dismantle the Jim Crow system of racial segregation challenged in that case. Through those years, Harlan’s vision of colorblindness shone as a moral North Star to the civil rights movement.

Yet recently, the Washington Post published a storytitled, “How ‘colorblind Constitution’ went from conservative notion to legal pillar.” Its subheadline reads: “The once-obscure concept has been cited in recent landmark Supreme Court cases, but some …

Adele Uphaus:

The Spotsylvania School Board on Monday voted against implementing pre-hire drug testing of employees, but also voted against postponing discussion of the topic indefinitely.

A motion to develop a policy for implementing drug testing of new hires and rehires who work directly with students in any capacity failed by a vote of 4-to-3, as did a substitute motion to consider implementing testing only of new hires and rehires who work with elementary and special education students.

Board members Larry DiBella (Berkeley), Rich Lieberman (Lee Hill), and Lorita Daniels (Salem) supported both motions, while Belen Rodas (Chancellor), Carol Medawar (Courtland), and Jennifer Craig-Ford (Battlefield), joined board chair Megan Jackson (Livingston) in voting against them.

“I do struggle with this,” Jackson said. “As a parent, I was shocked to learn that we don’t do this. But from a school board member lens, it doesn’t seem like the best idea…  I think the sentiment is good, but I think we have also learned that your knee-jerk reactions are not always in the best interest of the school division.”

Adam Goldstein & Greg Lukianoff:

Canada is steadily transforming free expression from a right into a privilege — one that regulators, tribunals, and government officials can withdraw whenever they decide another interest matters more

Maybe. But two things happened at once here, and both are bad.

First, the categorical safe harbor is gone — so whether a sermon or a quoted verse is protected now depends on context, audience, and how a prosecutor reads the room. Second, in the horse-trading that got the bill through Parliament, the government also dropped the longstanding requirement that the Attorney General personally sign off before a hate-speech charge can proceed. In the absence of these two barriers, clergy and ordinary believers now get to wonder, in advance, whether saying the quiet part of their faith out loud will be read as hatred by someone with the power to charge them.

American law has a name for what happens when people must guess what they are allowed to say and, because of the uncertainty, end up not saying anything at all: a chilling effect. We have little doubt Canadians will feel that chill, even in wildfire season.

There’s more. Close behind the Combatting Hate Bill, a new Ottawa bylaw taking effect August 1 will mandate a 50-meter “bubble zone” (that’s about 164 freedom feet) around schools, hospitals, places of worship, daycares, and care homes. Inside the bubble, protest is simply banned. Not “protest that blocks the door,” or “protest that disrupts planned events,” but any protest at all. A councillor actually proposed narrowing the mandate to only prohibit conduct that actually obstructs access, and the motion lost. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s analogue to the ACLU, warned that two people standing on a sidewalk reading a pamphlet about peace would now be in violation of this bill. This is an intentionally broad blanket ban on expression that was once protected in Canada.

Ed Zagorski:

The Watertown Unified School District has some work to do, according to student and parent surveys reviewed last week by School Perceptions Senior Research Director Derek Gottlieb and the WUSD Policy Committee.

Out of 2,061 surveys sent to students, 1,393 responded, representing a 68% return rate.

Students’ overall satisfaction with District schools was 5.91 (on a scale of 0-10), down from 6.06 last year.

Gottlieb said 2,935 parent surveys were sent out and 409 parents responded, resulting in a 14% response rate.

WUSD parents were surveyed on a scale of 0-10 regarding their likelihood to recommend schools to friends and family members. Eleven percent of parents responded extremely unlikely, while another 11% responded extremely likely. Twenty-two percent were neutral, bringing the overall score to 5.61. This is a 16.3% decrease from last year’s score of 6.74.

Regarding the school district’s educational excellence, the parent rating was 3.07 in 2026 (on a scale of 1-5), down 8.1% from 3.34 last year.

On another question, “The school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” parents scored 2.08 in 2026. This score is a 24.9% decrease from last year’s 2.72.

———

315 Watertown 4k-3rd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Susan Svrluga, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

Those critics want the elite university to follow Harvard in fighting federal ultimatums. Yale has been accused of racial discrimination in medical school admissions.

University President Maurie McInnis publicly acknowledged last week that the school was in talks with the Justice Department, which concluded that Yale’s medical school discriminated based on race, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. Critics say the department cherry-picked data and used flawed legal arguments, but the investigation expanded to Yale’s law school and undergraduate campus.

Austin Berg:

Just 27 students are enrolled at Frederick Douglass Academy, which was built to serve more than 1,000 kids.

Frederick Douglass learned to read in secret.

He understood from a young age that literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

But at Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago, the school is so under-enrolled that Illinois cannot publicly report how many of its students read proficiently. There simply aren’t enough tested students to publish the results without risking their anonymity.1

Douglass Academy has 47 classrooms built to serve 1,008 kids. But only 27 students are enrolled there. 

At 3% utilization, it is the emptiest big-city school in the country, according to Chicago Policy Center research.2

Meanwhile, CPS personnel records show Douglass currently employs 28 full-time staff members.3

In a district that once served nearly 600,000 studentsand now serves 312,000, and where one-third of school buildings sit at least half empty, Douglass illustrates the consequences of poor facilities planning: fewer opportunities for students and higher costs for taxpayers.

If a student in Illinois misses more than 10% of school days in a year, they are considered chronically absent. At Douglass, 100% of seniors are chronically absent.

And while the state couldn’t report test scores for the most recent school year, not a single 11th-grade student at Douglass could read or perform math at grade level in the 2023-2024 school year.

This isn’t due to underfunding. In the 2023-24 school year, Douglass spent $93,000 per student.

The real issue is simple: Research has long shown that very small high schools struggle to provide the breadth of academic courses and extracurricular opportunities available at larger schools.

——

More.

Sean Stevens:

Both sides do it, but not in the same way.

“Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature,” said the late Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Philip Kerby. “Sex is a weak second.”

The data say Kerby was right.

FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database has now documented 2,057 attempts to prevent or punish campus expression since 1998, and one fact immediately stands out: censorship campaigns are remarkably bipartisan.

Of the total, 985 attempts came from the right of the expression while 952 came from the left. The rest came from both, from actors whose ideology could not be identified, or they involved non-ideological disputes.

But while censorship efforts from the left and the right occur with similar frequency, they take fundamentally different forms.

Efforts from the left typically originate on campus and are usually led by students, while efforts from the right typically originate off campus and are usually led by activist groups, public officials, or wealthy donors. Efforts from the left tend to use op-eds, social media, and online petitions to get their message across while efforts from the right threaten budgets, launch investigations, and demand resignations.

Another major difference is that efforts from the left tend to be more successful — about 50% succeed, compared to only about 40% from the right.

——

Greg Lukianoff

Some usual suspects who like to pretend things aren’t that bad on campus saw the data—showing that roughly 70% of students think professors should be reported for saying “offensive” things—and immediately countered with, “Oh, they’re only saying that about when professors sexually harass them!”

No, they aren’t. The students mean forbidden opinions even if they are, in fact, correct.

I featured the NDSU data a while back but thanks to Stu for sharing it more broadly.

——-

More:

There are so many corners of higher education that have zero interest in helping themselves regain credibility.

Mark Cuban:

But wait. North Carolina seems to know it’s not the perfect deal.
On July 10, 2026, the plan’s board voted to hand the job back to Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC. The new contract starts January 1, 2028 and runs through December 31, 2031, with two optional one-year extensions. Until then, Aetna keeps running the plan through the end of 2027.
What we know: Blue Cross won both jobs this time — medical administrator and pharmacy benefit manager, replacing CVS Caremark. The state expects roughly $12 billion in costs over three years and claims about $1 billion in savings. The state also toughened the process: it canceled the first bidding round in April 2026 because no bid met its minimum requirements, and on the pharmacy side Blue Cross was the only bidder that met them all. Separately, new “preferred provider” deals with UNC Health and Novant Health start in 2027, steering members toward those systems with lower out-of-pocket costs.
What we don’t know yet — because the actual contract documents haven’t been made public: whether the new deal fixed the pennies-on-the-dollar problem, what Blue Cross actually promised on discounts and cost growth, what happens if it breaks those promises, and what the pharmacy pricing terms look like. We also don’t know what it means for one company to now hold the medical contract, the drug contract, and the network design all at once — less conflicted than the CVS arrangement, but a lot of eggs in one basket. Last time, the state posted every contract document publicly about seven weeks after the award. If it does that again, taxpayers will be able to check the fine print for themselves by early fall.

———

and

All you need to know is that after all the legal changes and scrutiny thrown at PBMs and insurance companies, NOT A SINGLE ONE has said they will result in lower costs for employers or patients.

———

Healthcare cost are putting an extreme pressure on school districts’ finances ($94,500,000 in Madison!)

More.

Handre:

The unreadability is the point. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the thing, admitted in 2013 that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and credited “the stupidity of the American voter” for its passage. You couldn’t debate what you couldn’t read, and Congress couldn’t be held accountable for text it delegated to unelected agencies to write after the vote. This is legislation as fog machine. Complexity becomes a moat.

Ask yourself who swims in that moat comfortably. Not you. Not your doctor. UnitedHealth and Aetna employ floors of compliance lawyers who parse those 20,000 pages for a living, and every page raises the cost of entry for any upstart insurer who thinks he can serve customers better. No central planner can possess the dispersed knowledge to price medical care for 330 million people. The regulators know this too, at some level. Their answer wasn’t humility. Their answer was paperwork: an estimated 165 million hours of it annually, a tax paid in human lifetimes.

Stuart Loren

Chicago’s pension funds just had the kind of year that’s supposed to fix things. Returns came in between 11% and 14%. Contributions hit records, including $272 million in supplemental payments. And yet, according to the city’s annual financial report, our pension debt grew — up $500 million from what the city reported last year, to $36.4 billion. If a banner year cannot reduce that shortfall, it’s fair to ask whether this system is sustainable.

That said, there was some improvement. The funded ratio rose from 25.4% to 28.1%, driven by asset growth of 14%, while liabilities grew just 3%. The catch is scale: The funds hold only $14 billion of assets against $51 billion of liabilities.

At that size, more than $3 billion went just toward servicing existing obligations, consuming nearly every dollar the city and its employees paid in. Real progress belongs to the funding schedule: For example, the police fund is now on pace to hit its statutory funding target. But that schedule only works by growing the taxpayer’s bill every year for decades.

As a result, pensions are crowding out spending on essential services. In 2025, the city paid $2.9 billion into its four funds — 23.5% of its entire operating budget. Over $900 million came from the $6 billion corporate fund — the discretionary pot at the center of recent spending fights. Property taxes tell the same story: Over 80% of the city’s portion of the levy goes toward pensions. 

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe:

Ironically, an honest discussion of our apocalyptic moment would have resonated most powerfully with young people. They understand and fear the existential dangers of climate change, artificial intelligence, demographic collapse, and nuclear weapons. Benedict could have taught the young the particularities of the biblical apocalypse, including the totalitarian peace and safety that precede it. Such a discussion would have revealed reasons for hope, as we seek the bravery to “be not troubled” (Matt. 24:6). One cannot imagine a more qualified person than Benedict to lead such a conversation. Now we must make do without him.

It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is. Benedict already did that, as this essay, which I wrote with my friend Sam Wolfe, attempts to show. My humble hope is that others might succeed where Benedict failed, in answering the question: Facing the hour of darkness, how can we recover faith in the future?

Eschatology enraptured the young Joseph Ratzinger. Sometimes autobiography disguises itself as biography; this is a rule to remember when reading Ratzinger’s 1957 The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (his Habilitationsschrift, which qualified him for a professorial appointment in the German university system). He wrote that “Bonaventure’s theology of history presents a struggle to arrive at a proper understanding of eschatology. . . . [T]he theology of history does not represent an isolated area of Bonaventure’s thought. On the contrary, it is related to the basic philosophical and theological decisions which provided the basis for his participation in the bitter controversies of the 1260’s and 1270’s.” Ratzinger excavated these “controversies” because he thought that “it would not be difficult to work out applications to the present,” even seven centuries later. “Precisely at the present moment,” he added, “­theology has every reason for remaining in ­contact with its own history.” He chose not to identify those applications and those reasons, because “the task of the historian is to present his findings and nothing but his findings. . . . At times this limitation has disturbed me.”

Whatever its limitations, Ratzinger’s exposition of Bonaventure established his genius. It translates Bonaventure’s medieval density for the modern mind. As he proceeds, Ratzinger seems to be on the point of adjudicating questions the Church has ­neglected for centuries, questions reaching to Christianity’s mysterious core. At this core lies the problem to which Ratzinger devoted the final ­section of his treatise: How and when will the world end?

J.D. Tuccille:

Give the world’s control freaks credit where it’s due: No matter how creepy their proposals are, there’s always another nanny someplace eager to double down with an even more intrusive scheme. So, as Americans debate the wisdom of drunk-driver kill switch mandates for cars, their counterparts in Europe now require that new vehicles include in-car cameras that constantly monitor drivers. The result is an escalating race in government-dictated automobile surveillance that we’ll all have to pay for, even if we plan to bypass or sabotage it once we’re off the lot.

Helen Pluckrose:

Writing before Herbert’s arrest, Kevin Lister, a maths teacher who lost his job for refusing to honour a trans-identified student’s pronouns, responded in the way a liberal should. He defended the free speech of a trans activist whose movement had championed the very principles that contributed to his dismissal and had done so in a highly authoritarian way. I greatly admire Mr. Lister for that consistency. It would have been easy for someone with his experiences to become authoritarian in turn—or simply remain silent and enjoy the schadenfreude—but he did neither. Lister wrote:

This has got nothing to do with Aberdeen University, I don’t even know why they are investigating it.



He should not be sacked for his vile and ignorant posts because to do so continues the terrible attacks on free speech that are happening in the UK.



Instead he should be free to demonstrate his ignorant and self centred behaviours. The only things Aberdeen University should be interested in is that he is not allowed into women’s spaces and he is not allowed to compel anyone’s speech such that they must use his language.



Equally, staff and students at Aberdeen University should be entitled to express their views on what they want to see happen to him without fear of reprisal.



This is at the core of my coming case at the Upper Tribunal against the DBS.



I have been kept on the Children’s Barred List for posting concerns on social media about the sexualisation of the class room, buying babies on line, and the social transitioning of children.

Tracy Jan and Holly McDede:

The Trump administration has launched a national crackdown on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers, following a KQED-ProPublica investigation into California’s teacher disciplinary system.

In guidance issued last week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon cited the news outlets’ reporting in May that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools.

McMahon threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that fail to protect children from teacher sexual misconduct. She called on states and school districts to scrutinize their laws and regulations to prevent educators who have engaged in sexual misconduct involving students from obtaining new positions elsewhere. Citing previous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other studies, McMahon said the Department of Education has observed a “troubling and recurring pattern” of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by school employees going uninvestigated. 

“Unfortunately, many administrators and State educational regulators have apparently preferred to sweep these incidents under the rug and have ‘pass[ed] the trash’ to another school,” McMahon wrote in an open letter to state schools chiefs on Friday, referring to teachers who go on to work in different schools after findings of sexual misconduct.

McMahon said the Department of Education intends to increase its monitoring of school systems to ensure that they comply with federal law. The Trump administration will also examine states’ laws and regulations to determine their effectiveness in protecting students, she said. 

Daniel Cody

A Florida student accumulated a monumental 11.99 GPAthrough an atypical high school routine, prompting local schools to change how they weigh courses.

The high marks by Vaibhav Bhaskar, who is on his way to Duke University to study finance and economics, earned him a new state record, beating out the Sunshine State’s previous top 11.84 grade point average, according to the Palm Beach Post. 

To keep track of his ambitious milestones, Bhaskar relied on a physical reminder of his objectives. 

“I have a whiteboard in my room, and I listed five goals on it for my high school career back when I was a sophomore,” Bhaskar told The Post, noting that his top aims were to “become valedictorian” and “break the state GPA record.” 

Soulmate Keynes:

Most weeks since my eldest child was born three and a half years ago, I have filled in the parenting spreadsheet. At the time of writing, it has over 1,000 rows, with a “P” to mark every morning, afternoon and evening of parenting that my husband and I have done. It also includes a chart illustrating which of us is in credit (me) and by how much (as of today, 7.5 days and 24 bedtimes).

Let’s just say that it wasn’t my husband’s idea. “It’s at a time in our lives when we don’t exactly need more admin,” he told me on Sunday evening, during a formal interview conducted in our living room. Still, he has no plans to stop logging his hours. The spreadsheet monitors how close we are to fulfilling our shared objective: dividing childcare as evenly as we can.

I have struggled to find data describing how unusual we are. Not for having the spreadsheet — I know that’s weird. But for wanting to share the job of parenting evenly between us. Traditional attitudes towards child-rearing have softened over time, but surveys of Britons still suggest that our arrangement, of both parents working full time while our children are young, is frowned upon by many.

Dave Shiflett:

By some measures America’s 250th birthday puts a worthy notch in the historic timeline. A quarter-millennium is respectable, but we’re young compared with the oldest republic (San Marino, founded in 301) and a blink of the eye for Egypt, which unified into a single state more than 5,000 years ago. Closer to home, modern Canada is 159 years old, while Mexico counts 205 years since its independence from Spain.

Mom, more widely known as Peggy, recently attended a family gathering that included an 8-month-old great-grandson named Charlie and Charlie’s other living great-grandmother, Jody. Both grandmas reminded me how young America is and how much it has changed, mostly for the better.

Using mom’s life span as a yardstick puts things in perspective. Go back 98 years from her birth in 1928, and you’re at 1830, a mere 54 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and 31 years before the start of the Civil War, during which mom’s grandfather would serve in Robert E. Lee’s signal corps. Go back one more life span and it’s 1732, the year George Washington was born.

Her life, like America’s, has been rich in challenges. Her father deserted the family early on, leaving her mother to raise two daughters at a time when women were at a significant disadvantage in the job market. They never owned a car and for a time had to cook meals on a hot plate. “We were poor,” mom is fond of saying, “but we didn’t know we were poor.” She and her sister later went to college on scholarships and lived out their own American Dreams. Her sister, who went to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had a daughter who became a plastic surgeon and a son who became a doctor. Mom’s kids did well too, save for the son who became a hack writer.

Michael B. Horn:

For years I’ve hoped that school districts could take a page from other industries and “disrupt” themselves to optimize learning for each and every child.

I’ve changed my mind.

It’s not because districts can’t innovate. They can, and many do.

But a proper application of disruptive innovation theory shows that the vast majority of existing school districts will not drive the disruptive innovation needed to transform the education sector in the United States—not because they lack visionary leaders, but because districts themselves are the incumbent business model.

For those who haven’t followed all my past work on this topic, a bit of grounding.

Kerry McDonald

For Layla Coyne, choosing to attend a microcollege was a natural extension of her unconventional K-12 schooling experience. As a middle schooler, she left a traditional public school to attend Rock Tree Sky, a self-directed learning community in Southern California that offers part-time programming for local homeschoolers and charter school students. For high school, she continued at Rock Tree Sky while enrolling at Summit School, a public independent study program offered through the Ojai Unified School District. She also took dual enrollment courses through a community college and spent nearly a year studying in Paraguay. 

After graduation, Coyne continued taking community college courses while pondering her next steps. It was then that she discovered Thoreau College, a microcollege in rural Wisconsin, that offers summer and semester-long programs blending homesteading and agricultural skills with academic inquiry. After attending the month-long summer program, she knew she wanted to return for the full semester experience. “I just loved every part of it,” said Coyne, who was one of five students in the fall 2024 semester cohort. 

Thoreau College is one of several microcolleges that have opened in recent years, offering intentionally small, immersive programming and expanding the landscape of higher education possibilities. As the higher education sector struggles with declining public confidence, enrollment challenges and institutional closures, microcolleges emerge as a creative, collaborative model for post-secondary education.

At the microcollege, Coyne and her peers learned skills such as sheep-shearing, foraging and fire-making, while also reading and discussing the works of Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer and other nature-focused authors. “I think the intention of having a small community-based school is something that is very much desired at this moment when a lot of the world is getting more and more isolated,” she said. 

Average tuition for Thoreau College’s semester-long program is about $8,500, with additional fees if students wish to obtain college credit through a new partnership between Thoreau and Prescott College, a private, experiential college in Arizona.

By Becky Jacobs

About a month ago, a major chilled water line ruptured near the Charter Street Healing and Cooling Plant. The pipe was part of a system that provides air conditioning for much of campus, including academic buildings, research facilities and hospitals.

“The damaged section of pipe has been removed, and work is underway to install a permanent replacement,” Deej Lundgren, the UW system’s associate vice president for capital planning and budget, told the Board of Regents during a virtual meeting Thursday.

UW-Madison continues to calculate the total cost of the repairs and determine what caused the break. The university may seek additional funding from the UW system in the future, Lundgren said. The pipe was 4 feet in diameter and buried 20 feet underground, which made it “very challenging to get at,” he said.

“In partnership with the state of Wisconsin, it was determined that the current Engineering Drive utility project could be used to support the repair efforts,” Lundgren said.

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees: 

A top US lawmaker has urged the UK culture secretary to detail her plans to make big social media companies give greater prominence to trusted news sites, as American authorities push back against perceived attacks on free speech in Europe.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, warned that the proposals risked creating “a tiered information system” and called for a formal briefing by July 28, when a new culture secretary is likely to be in post under presumptive prime minister Andy Burnham.

Last month, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to give established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, amid concerns about online misinformation.

Under the proposals, first reported by the FT, content from news channels including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by social media platforms’ algorithms and special rules may be implemented at times of increased social unrest.

Russell T. Warne:

Abstract

Between October 1, 1966 and December 31, 1971, a total of 341,127 men joined the military under lowered physical (9%) or mental test standards (91%). Called Project 100,000, this initiative was controversial from its first announcement and has been the subject of commentary for more than 50 years. In various discussions, Project 100,000 has been portrayed as a cynical method of meeting military needs without drafting middle-class youth, a dangerous experiment that harmed vulnerable people, and a successful employment program. This literature review explores the context and empirical research on Project 100,000. The conclusion is that Project 100,000 met some of its creators’ goals and fell short of others. Though it ended over half a century ago, Project 100,000 still provides valuable historical, theoretical, scientific, and societal lessons for both civilian and military leaders

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

One interesting thread I’ve seen in many of the current screen/free play debates is the notion that growing up in the 70s/80s was a kind of youth utopia and children should be “free” (i.e., forced, possibly by government regulation) to return to those halcyon days. This is curious as, growing up during those years myself, I remember them very well. Neither parents nor children viewed those years as utopia. And government statistics generally found that youth who grew up during this period had some of the worst behavioral outcomes on record. So why are people so nostalgic?

NPR Corrections:

claimed to have uncovered $110,000 in fraud. In fact, it was $110 million in fraud.

Sudha G. Tilak

Long before photography became the visual language of empire, one Englishwoman was sketching the people she encountered across India with unusual curiosity and precision.

Emily Eden, a gifted artist and writer, belonged to one of Britain’s most influential political families. She travelled across northern India in the 1830s while accompanying her brother, George Eden, first Earl of Auckland, the governor-general of India.

Alongside princes, generals and courtiers, she drew servants, attendants, travellers, fakirs, Afghan and Sikh nobles, Akali warriors, hill communities and even the animals that accompanied imperial journeys. Her remarkably broad gaze set her apart from many contemporaries.

More than two dozen of her sketches were published in 1844 as Portraits of the Princes and People of India. They now form the heart of Princes & People, an exhibition at DAG in Delhi curated by art historian Mary Ann Prior, bringing together the complete published series of hand-coloured lithographs made from Eden’s original sketches.

Wall Street Journal:

The press is attacking the report as an attempt to censor independent museum curation, but that’s not how we read it. The 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, lays out in persuasive detail how the museum offers a largely critical view of American history that “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.”

Instead, the museum offers the message, captured in one exhibit, that when they founded the U.S., “early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.”

The report isn’t a cheerleading document seeking to hide America’s warts. What it seeks is a history of the U.S. that doesn’t resemble the 1619 Project in its partisan bias.

The report’s examples show the degree to which progressives have captured the history museum. In one exhibit, the Pledge of Allegiance was described as a tool to “instill American nationalism through flag ceremonies.” Nationalism? That’s a needlessly pejorative edge. How about patriotism?

John MCWhorter

Good God. Rouse genuinely thinks Fighting the Power is the essence of serious thinking, has never been questioned about it even this far into her career, and is incapable of even understanding what Lee’s questions are getting at. She’s not deflecting. She really has no idea how ridiculous she sounds.

I became an academic out of being curious about things. Gradually realizing since the 1990s that this kind of person is ordinary in the humanities and social sciences, is routinely given awards and high administrative positions, and is beyond the reach of rational discussion has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.