Erin Gretzinger:

Regardless of whether new school buildings happen, elementary schools set to be at less than 65% utilization 10 years from now include Stephens, Lapham and Marquette, Jeffrey Erlanger (formerly Lindbergh), Mendota, Lowell and Sandberg. Middle schools set to be at less than 65% utilization in 10 years include Black Hawk, O’Keeffe, Sennett and Sherman.

District officials previously said schools below capacity could become sites for additional programming. Green said the third round of draft maps will focus more on possible programming options.

“We want to hear from families what else they would like to see, and we want to do that by maximizing our school spaces and our school facilities,” Green said. “Might that be STEM programming? Might that be arts? Might that be additional dual-language immersion programming or some other programming, as well?”

The school district will host several more input sessions on the second round of draft scenarios, with the last session taking place next Monday. Recordings of some second-round sessions are available to watch on the district’s website. An interactive map showing the current draft maps and the proposed changes will be available on the district’s website by Oct. 12.

——-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Andy Kessler

Universities can take advantage of AI rather than ban it. The sage-on-a-stage format is over. Learning is experiential. As corporate America rejects college branding, graduates would benefit from more hands-on experience. Universities may be uniquely positioned to implement what I call “virtual apprenticeships,” real job experience while still at school.

I suggest all students spend their entire junior year on team projects. Assignments might include building nuclear autonomous buses or robots that cook. Cross-discipline self-organizing teams will form. You’ll need engineers and coders, but also prelaw and political-science majors to clear the regulatory path, philosophers and marketing majors to write press releases, designers, nutritionists, etc. 

Self-paced AI-tutored instruction can help students learn what they need as problems arise. A smart entrepreneur might even create a student transfer portal to recruit talented students from other universities.

According to Gallup, in 2013, 70% of Americans said college was very important. Today it’s only 31%. If universities don’t change, more than a few will implode, while others will wither away over decades. AI and alternative forms of learning are already rising. Something radical is needed to stop the decay of our once great universities. Who will step up?

Samara Kalk Derby:

The mother of a Wautoma High School senior who was seriously injured during a homecoming football game against Waupun on Friday night said Sunday that he is unable to walk or talk.

Dom Rooney, who turns 18 on Tuesday, was taken by Med Flight to Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee after being hit in the head during the game. His mother, Kimberly Kozlowski, said doctors diagnosed him with a traumatic brain injury.

A team of specialists who work with functional neurological disorder will assess Dom on Monday and determine next steps, Kozlowski said.

Dom plays on both the offensive and defensive lines and has played all four years of high school, she said.

Soos Mate:

Charlie Munger said: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”. The issue with Academic Research, in my opinion, is that the outcomes have drifted very far away from the original goal, which I believe to be the advancement of scientific understanding, and training of the new generation of researchers. Academic research was meant to be about breaking new ground, keeping to honesty and good scientific conduct, being clear and upfront about uncertainties, errors, and mistakes, and improving our common understanding of science, all the while training the new generation to follow these goals and principles.

Recently, I have bumped into multiple cases where I believe the correctness of the results, the honesty of the people writing them, or the lack of curiosity once they are told that their results are wrong, incorrect, faulty, or misleading, has been unsatisfying. Simply put, researchers are not too interested in learning that their papers or reports are wrong, and/or misleading others who don’t happen to know that the results are — known to the authors, and a few select others to be partially — incorrect.

The issue is, once you published the paper, and got the promotions and fame, it doesn’t matter that the results are wrong, and known to be wrong or misleading, and potentially doing harm to the advancement of science. It’s not your problem. It’s someone else’s problem. In fact, when I challenged the authors of one such paper, considered state-of-the-art, and known to the authors to have incorrect evaluation, one of the author’s response was along the lines of acknowledging the issues, but refusing to retract the paper, and instead asking if it’s bothering me in publishing my paper.

Ben Weingarten:

Americans overwhelmingly believe congressional seats should be distributed solely based on the number of U.S. citizens in each state. They also think there should be a citizenship question on the census.

Those are two of the key findings in a new survey, obtained exclusively by The Federalist, indicating significant public support for policies — long opposed by the left — that the Trump administration is pursuing pertaining to the crucial decennial count.

The survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates on Sept. 23, shows that of 1,000 likely voters, nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, believe the congressional apportionment base should be comprised solely of U.S. citizens.

Strikingly, not only four in five self-identified Republicans, but also 54 percent of Democrats and nearly 60 percent of independents polled also somewhat or strongly agree with a policy that would necessarily exclude illegal aliens and other noncitizens from the count.

Matthew Haag:

The omission stemmed from a dispute with the New York State Education Department, which ordered the operator of the A.P. program, the College Board, not to share the data with U.S. News, citing student privacy concerns. Three other states — Colorado, Maine and Vermont — also withheld their A.P. scores.

The result was a stunning collapse for schools that had long dominated the list, such as Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the acclaimed specialized school, which plunged to No. 2,561 in the nation from No. 33.

Wall Street Journal:

While the UAW has struggled to unionize auto plants in the U.S. South, it has had success organizing on college campuses. These include the University of California, California State University, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, the University of Southern California and Penn State.

The UAW claims to represent more than 120,000 workers in higher education, largely graduate students. Incredibly, the UAW has more members at the University of California than it does at General Motors . Last year it organized 24,500 workers at universities. Yet despite those gains, UAW membership overall has shrunk by about 23,000 since 2016.

——-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Via US attorney General Todd Blanche’s Report

….. which details Weaponization of the Department against these parents — from attempting to get the National Security Division involved to ignoring repeated warnings from employees that leadership’s actions could be unconstitutional.

Along with the report, we’ve released hundreds of exhibits and emails that make official and verify what many Americans had guessed: the Garland DOJ worked hand in hand with WH officials and the National School Boards Association to chill free speech and parental rights while they threatened to prosecute parents and label them domestic terrorists.

Read the full report and our remedies here: justice.gov/opa/media/1464…

————

Five Days in October: What the Justice Department’s 2026 Report Reveals About the Federal School-Board Investigation

Introduction to the Materials

On October 5, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published The 2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools[cite: 1, 3]. Prepared by Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Weaponization Working Group pursuant to Executive Order 14147, the 273-page document investigates the origin, drafting, and execution of former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum[cite: 1, 3, 4]. That 2021 directive mobilized federal law enforcement agencies and created a national task force to address alleged threats against public school administrators and board members[cite: 4, 5, 18].

Drawing from internal emails, congressional disclosures, and the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) after-action review, the report argues that federal power was improperly deployed to intimidate parents exercising their First Amendment rights[cite: 5, 6]. While the document represents an administration-led critique of prior policies, its released emails and official records highlight fast-tracked decision-making, widespread internal DOJ skepticism, and critical lessons regarding government accountability[cite: 5, 8]. Below are the top ten core takeaways every parent, student, and taxpayer should know, followed by ten obscure but salient details buried within the report’s evidence.

Ten Most Important Points for Parents, Students, and Taxpayers

1. Origins in Private Lobbying: The Garland Memorandum was directly prompted by a September 29, 2021 letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden, which requested federal intervention under the PATRIOT Act and characterized public school board protests as potential “domestic terrorism”[cite: 4, 6, 7].
2. Pre-Existing White House Collaboration: Internal emails reveal that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven collaborated for weeks with White House Senior Advisor Mary Wall prior to sending the letter, providing advance draft summaries so White House officials could brief DOJ leadership before public release[cite: 7, 8, 9].
3. Widespread Internal DOJ Resistance: Career prosecutors and attorneys across the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Criminal Division, Civil Rights Division, National Security Division, and FBI strongly questioned the initiative, noting that the reported conduct was almost entirely local and protected by the First Amendment[cite: 8, 10, 11, 13, 15].
4. Unresolved Warnings and Rushed Execution: The Garland Memorandum was drafted and finalized over a single weekend—just five days after the NSBA letter—without DOJ leadership ever formally addressing or resolving the constitutional and jurisdictional concerns raised by internal staff[cite: 4, 11, 17].
5. Creation of the FBI “EDUOFFICIALS” Threat Tag: Following the memo, the FBI established a specialized threat tag (“EDUOFFICIALS”) and opened 25 “Guardian” assessments into parents and school board incidents[cite: 19, 20]. Six were assigned to Counterterrorism, seventeen to Criminal Investigations, and two to Weapons of Mass Destruction[cite: 20].
6. Zero Resulting Federal Prosecutions: Despite deploying federal task forces, FBI threat-tracking, and interagency coordination, the working group found no record of any federal criminal prosecutions resulting from the investigations into parents[cite: 20].
7. Chilling Effect on Public Speech: Parents and advocates testified at DOJ roundtables that the threat of federal scrutiny and FBI investigation paralyzed civic participation, causing attendance at public school board meetings to drop significantly[cite: 20, 21, 40].
8. Formal Retraction and Apology by NSBA: On October 22, 2021, following widespread backlash from state associations, the NSBA Board of Directors issued a formal apology to its members, stating there was “no justification for some of the language” in its original letter[cite: 4, 7].
9. Formal Rescission of the Policy: Pursuant to Executive Order 14147, the Justice Department formally rescinded the Garland Memorandum and dissolved all associated task forces and reporting protocols[cite: 3, 5].
10. Five-Point DOJ Remedial Plan: The DOJ announced five concrete remedies: offering targeted individuals access to review their FBI Guardian files, attaching cautionary disclaimers to closed records, reviewing files for constitutional violations to issue formal apologies, awarding $1.5 million to train school resource officers on parental rights, and funding teacher training on First Amendment protections[cite: 22].

Ten Obscure but Salient Points

1. The “Anti-MAGA Task Force” Warning: On October 2, 2021, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll warned against linking school board threats with election threat initiatives, stating leadership “might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force”[cite: 13]. Public Integrity Chief Corey Amundson replied: “Exactly! Stupid, stupid, stupid”[cite: 13, 15].
2. “This Is Ridiculous” Internal Assessment: On September 25, 2021, Robyn Thiemann in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General emailed colleagues attempting to find a federal crime in the NSBA’s claims, concluding bluntly: “This is ridiculous”[cite: 10].
3. Draft Language Proposed Deploying the National Guard: Early internal drafts of the NSBA letter contained explicit requests to deploy the Army National Guard and Military Police to local school district meetings, a clause interim CEO Chip Slaven later cut to avoid public backlash[cite: 111].
4. FBI Leadership Was Blindsided: FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg confirmed internally that the Bureau was “caught off guard” and did not receive the memorandum “in time to stop it,” noting DOJ pushed the directive “unilaterally”[cite: 16, 17].
5. First Amendment Boundaries Noted by DOJ Attorneys: Addressing allegations surrounding groups showing up at meetings or performing Nazi salutes, ODAG attorney Myesha Braden noted that individuals can perform such acts “all day long” unless violating another’s constitutional rights, adding that “the constitutional right part is what appears to be missing”[cite: 10].
6. National Security Division Demanded Removal: An attorney in DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) requested that NSD be removed from the school board task force, pointing out that DOJ does not “start a narrowly focused task force every time some group believes they are the subject of threats” and that no national security nexus existed[cite: 18].
7. Disregarded Loudoun County Restroom Assault: The report details how a 15-year-old disabled student was sexually assaulted in a Stone Bridge High School restroom stall on May 28, 2021[cite: 4, 128, 129, 130]. Despite being notified the same day, Superintendent Scott Ziegler publicly declared at a June 22 board meeting that no restroom assaults had occurred[cite: 4, 137, 138].
8. Scott Smith’s Arrest and Gubernatorial Pardon: Parent Scott Smith was tackled and arrested at the June 22 Loudoun County meeting while confronting officials over his daughter’s assault[cite: 4, 38]. He was aggressively prosecuted by a Commonwealth’s Attorney who was later disqualified from the case by a circuit judge for lack of impartiality, before Smith received a full gubernatorial pardon from Governor Glenn Youngkin[cite: 4, 38, 39].
9. Targeted Retaliation Against Parent Advocates: Parent activist Ian Prior testified that after being designated “enemy number one” on a local school board list, he faced online defamation, had mailers sent urging neighbors to shun him, received a box of coal on Christmas Eve, and had his home’s electronic dog fence wiring severed[cite: 48, 49].
10. Presidential Phone Call and Board Appointment: On October 6, 2021, President Biden placed a personal 15-minute phone call to NSBA President Dr. Viola Garcia to thank her for submitting the letter[cite: 23, 81]. One week later, on October 13, 2021, Dr. Garcia was appointed to the federal National Assessment Governing Board[cite: 23, 81, 82].

Occasionally, I’m asked why things are as they are; let’s say our literacy disaster. I’ve long found the League of Women Voters lobbying AGAINST AB446, a predecessor of Act 20 to be informative. – From an ongoing history of our disastrous literacy results:

Curiously, among the organizations that registered against AB446 — a predecessor of 2023’s Act 20 — was the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, lobbying [screenshot, just in case] on the same side as the teachers’ union (WEAC) and the state’s school‑board and administrator associations.

Season with then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 (!) Madison Rotary Club remarks:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

A 2013 interview with then California Governor Jerry Brown further illuminates this topic:

“In an April 2013 FT interview (“Second coming”), Jerry Brown was asked about the reports of a lasting feud with Bill Clinton after their 1992 primary fight. He replied:

“There was no feud. No permanent enemies, no permanent friends … only permanent interests. Somebody said that. A Frenchman?”

An aide sitting nearby checked a phone and supplied the actual source: Lord Palmerston. The line Brown was paraphrasing is Palmerston’s 1848 statement that Britain had “no eternal allies, and … no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.”

The same interview also covers the 1992 debate in which Brown accused Clinton of funneling state business to Hillary Clinton’s law firm, and Clinton’s famous reply that Brown was “not worth being on the same platform” as his wife. Brown’s point in 2013 was that the old clash had not hardened into a permanent personal enmity.”

Teagan King:

Madison students will get free eye exams, prescription glasses and other care directly at school through an expanded partnership between the Madison School District and two nonprofits.

The Madison School Board approved a new Vision Van program at its meeting Monday, providing students with school-based vision screenings, referrals for specialized care and free glasses.

The district added nonprofit Vision to Learn to its existing Bright Eyes partnership with nonprofit Combat Blindness International, which has provided vision screenings to a portion of Madison students at no cost since 2014.

……

All students, regardless of ability to pay, are eligible to reduce barriers for students in accessing eye care. An agreement between Vision to Learn and the Warby Parker Pupils Project, which partners with local groups to provide screenings and glasses, covers the costs

Corrinne Hess:

School Boards for Academic Excellence was created in 2023 as the “reform-minded alternative to the National School Board Association.” 

The group now operates in 38 states with 45 partner organizations. 

In Wisconsin, the group’s partner is the conservative law firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. 

SBAE Executive Director David Hoyt said the group doesn’t typically work directly with school districts, but is in talks with the Watertown Unified School District to audit its curriculum. 

“The status quo is not working for students, and we’re going to need to do things differently in order to improve academic outcomes,” Hoyt said. “I don’t know every single thing that happens in the school district of Watertown, so I won’t pretend to be an expert on the local issues there. But the interactions I’ve had with their administration and their school board, I think those are people whose hearts are in the right place, and they’re trying to make things better.”

The Watertown School District is located about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison and has about 3,000 students. According to the latest state report card, about 48 percent of students are “advanced” or “meeting” expectations for reading and 47 percent of students are “advanced or “meeting expectations for math. 

In a Sept. 4 email to Watertown Interim Superintendent James Feil, Hoyt proposed SBAE would conduct an audit of existing math and reading curriculum and provide a report to how it aligns with state standards; conduct off-site training with the Watertown School Board and in-person governance training. 

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@SBAENetwork favors maintaining and even elevating academic standards. Oh, it also opposes racial discrimination.

——-

There are plenty of Grant Industrial Complex k-12 examples. Here’s one: Gates Foundation small learning communities.

———-

A deep dive into this topic is long overdue, particularly taxpayer funds moving through various NGO and higher education orifices.

Cremieux

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court declared by a 6-2 vote that American universities that accept federal funds were no longer allowed to racially discriminate when making admissions decisions. The case—SFFA v. Harvard—concerned the fact that Harvard was making decisions using students’ race as a variable in admissions.

Advocates on the side of Harvard argued that racial discrimination was necessary practice to preserve diversity. Opponents argued that racial discrimination was wrong and illegal. The opponents are best described as ‘correct’; but the advocates do also have a point, albeit one that should only be responded to with ‘So what?’: racially-fair admissions should undermine diversity, because certain groups—namely, Asians and Whites relative to Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S.—tend to have higher levels of academic achievement.

So, three years on, has the verdict in SFFA v. Harvard resulted in universities becoming less ‘diverse’ and more reflective of what a fairly-admitted student body would look like? The answer is ‘partly’, not entirely. A recent article in Econ Journal Watch looked into this and reached just that conclusion. But why? From the changes or lack thereof alone it’s hard to tell. But the most likely possibility is that universities are still discriminating even though the Supreme Court has declared doing that to be illegal.

The Department of Justice has been looking into this issue using the methods I outlined when I showed that Columbia and NYU were still discriminating. They’ve recently opened cases against UCLA’s medical school, Yale’s medical school, UC Davis’ medical school, UC San Diego’s medical school, Duke Law School, George Washington’s medical school, UC Berkeley Law School, UC San Francisco’s medical school, and UCLA Law School. They’ve also sued Harvard for withholding race-related admissions documents, run broader compliance reviews at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Irvine, and began a broader investigation into fifteen medical schools.

Every university the DOJ has opened an investigation into so far is almost-certainly discriminating. We know this because each of the universities shows a considerably higher odds of admissions for students from favored racial groups—Blacks and Hispanics—as opposed to the ones that universities have historically wanted to discriminate against—Whites and Asians:

Globe and Mail:

Canada received a devastating report card last month, showing how academic test scores are collapsing and the country’s education system is failing students.

Canadian 15-year-olds’ performance on science, math and reading, which has been dropping for two decades, reached new lows on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). 

The chart below shows that since 2006, Canada has declined by 37 points in reading, 42 points in math, and 24 points in science. The drop is equivalent to one to two years of lost learning for the average student. 

Other tests, such as the international TIMSSmathematics assessment, and Ontario’s EQAO tests in math, reading and writing, also show Canadian students are struggling to master the basics. 

Canadians shouldn’t be reassured by the fact that the country remains a relatively strong performer globally,tied for 12th in reading, and ranking 11th in math and ninth in science out of the 91 countries and economies evaluated on PISA. In the year 2000, Canada was second in reading, sixth in math and fifth in science out of the 32 countries measured that year.

Paul W. Bennett, director of the Schoolhouse Institute and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says that between 2015 and 2025, Canada’s deterioration was around 8 to 9 points worse than the average OECD decline in each subject.

Paul Kirschner, Nidhi Sachdeva:

This is the second in a series of posts about teacher expertise. The first is here.

It’s strange that in our society, expertise is important in just about all professions except teaching. It’s ‘normal’ that expertise matters in medicine, engineering, aviation, law, and architecture. We don’t say, “Any experienced pilot will do,” or “A surgeon with a decent survival rate is good enough.” Yet in education we’re strangely enough tempted to treat teaching as though ‘good enough’ is good enough and that it’s possibly more important to look at things like personality, enthusiasm, or simply enough years in the classroom than expertise.

Spoiler alert!! Good enough isn’t good enough.

Teaching’s a very serious profession with expertise at its core. The problem is that teacher expertise is often hidden in plain sight. When we look at an expert teacher it looks really easy. They explain things clearly, quickly notice student confusion, ask the right questions at the right times, and shift the pace, adjust their examples, and respond to errors and misconceptions in ways that seem almost natural. And that apparent ease is misleading, because all of this is possible as a result of expertise.

Great teaching isn’t accidental, mystical, or reducible to charisma or other personality traits. It’s built on knowledge, judgment, and years of deliberately working on the gradual development of expertise.

Good teaching vs. expert teaching

Let’s begin with a subtle but essential distinction. A good teacher is already doing something difficult and important. Good teachers know their subject, plan thoughtfully, manage their classrooms, explain and instruct, and care about their pupils. None of this is trivial. But expert teaching goes further. Expert teachers don’t simply do the basics better. They see more, notice more, infer more, and respond more precisely.

That matters because classrooms are complex and full of ambiguity. While one pupil’s silence may mean they’re thinking deeply, by another it could signal confusion, disengagement, anxiety, or just mind-wandering. A correct answer may signal deep understanding, but it may also reflect superficial rehearsal or even luck. A noisy classroom may be productive or chaotic and a quiet one may be focused or anxious. Teaching is full of subtle (and not so subtle) signals that must be interpreted and acted upon. Expertise lies partly in knowing which signals matter, what they’re likely to mean, and what then to do.

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Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024: Wisconsin Educator Preparation Programs

Philip Greenspun:

A search for “cornell nytimes.com” yields a full page of results related to students having purportedly engaged in various sex acts on campus back in 2024:

Nothing newsworthy other than one night of sex has occurred at an Ivy League institution with 26,500 students and more than 3,000 faculty members. How is that possible? Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, explains in Virtue Hoarders:

For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.

The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable. It was after 1968 that the PMC gradually shifted its allegiance from workers to capital. Since that time, the most successful and visible segments of the PMC have brazenly put their smarts at the service of the bosses.

As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.

How can the elites in the PMC serve their capitalist overlords? Distract people from serious attempts to confiscate and transfer wealth from the most successful capitalists, e.g., the billionaires who can’t buy Bernie, to the deserving working class. What’s a good distraction? College students having sex.

———

The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

Esteban Elizondo:

At Yale University, an A officially means “excellent.” But in the 2024-25 academic year, more than four out of every five undergraduate grades fell in the A range.

A recent Yale Daily News report found that 80.75 percent of grades awarded at Yale College were As or A-minuses, up from 78.97 percent in 2022-23 and 67.23 percent in 2010-11.

ColonelRETJohn Mills:

I am very supportive of a post K-12 system that actually creates and delivers tangible value in science, math, technology, and other actual skills and capabilities.

Degrees in Women’s Studies, Transgenderism, psychology, etc. are interesting, but deliver graduates that have little to offer but street protests, purple hair, and poorly made coffee.

Cornell just published a report stating the obvious.

$400,000 for a four year degree in nothingness is a waste of everyone’s time, except for the racket of the current post K-12 system and the Federal Student Loan Program that is being largely shut down by the Trump Administration.

There is nothing in the Constitution about a perpetual Education Industrial Complex that is a front for money laundering.

All I can say on this one is that I’m not tired of winning and happy to see the post K-12 system run into the brick wall of reality.

Transcript, slides & audio:

On October 1 at the Pyle Center, UW–Madison economist Ananth Seshadri gave a talk with a deliberately provocative title and a serious argument underneath it. Wisconsin went from nine wins in 2021 to four in 2025. He doesn’t think the explanation is play-calling.

His case is that the university has a pattern. Wisconsin built the winning football model of the 1990s by finding undervalued players, developing them and keeping them. Then the rules changed: schools can pay players directly and players can transfer freely. The old advantage stopped working, and the response was slow.

He argues the same slowness shows up elsewhere. Indiana built the Kelley School while Wisconsin’s business school sank. Wisconsin founded a computer science department in 1964 and was still reorganizing its structure decades after the market moved. Tuition has been frozen by statute for years, which he calls a price control. Capital projects run through a state process that takes years longer than it takes peers to build.

Football, in his telling, is just the version everyone can see. If an economics department loses five faculty, nobody notices. If a football team loses, 80,000 people do.

His proposals are institutional: let prices rise, move money toward where demand actually is, give athletics the ability to borrow and decide quickly, and be honest about who carries the risk.

The full transcript is online with all 93 slide photographs placed where they were taken, plus the audio. Select any timestamp to hear that moment of the talk.

Readers may find Marc Eisen’s coverage of David Krakauer’s time at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery worth a look.

Elizabeth Wolnik:

More taxpayer-supported spending on education doesn’t equal better academic results. That’s the central finding of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s September 2026 report, The Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success, released the day before State Superintendent Jill Underly’s State of Education address. WILL documents and lays out what the real state of K12 education in Wisconsin – near-record per-pupil spending, slow pandemic recovery, declining NAEP scores on the Nation’s report card from pre-pandemic highs, and a weak link between extra dollars and better student outcomes. Wisconsin once ranked among the nation’s strongest academic performers, but progress slowed after the reforms of the 2010s. NAEP scores have declined from pre-pandemic levels despite record levels of funding.

Wisconsin remains above average in eighth-grade performance but has slipped in some earlier grades and subjects, and its standing looks worse after demographic adjustment. Wisconsin still has the largest black-white achievement gap in the country among states. Recovery from pandemic learning loss has been slower than in many states, and WILL notes that Wisconsin’s decision to close public schools during COVID was devastating. Among states with available data, Wisconsin ranks 33rd of 38 in math recovery and 30th of 35 in reading recovery since 2022. Students remain roughly one-third of a grade level behind their 2019 peers in math and more than half a grade level behind in reading. 

What’s more, DPI has made those trends harder to track. Wisconsin once aligned Forward Exam proficiency with NAEP benchmarks. In 2023-24 the department changed that approach. The new categories are not comparable with prior years, so parents and policymakers cannot easily measure long-term progress. 

The money is already substantial. Average revenue per student stands at $18,746, placing Wisconsin in the middle of the pack nationally. Enrollment has fallen 5.8 percent since 2013-14 and is projected to drop another 11 to 16 percent over the next decade. The number of non-charter public schools fell only about 2 percent. Staffing rose 13.5 percent. Districts have gone to referendum at record rates while avoiding meaningful consolidation. At the same time, Mississippi moved from 49th to 9th in fourth-grade reading between 2013 and 2024 while spending well below the national average. Utah spends less per pupil than almost every state yet ranks among the top performers. Both examples, and a large body of research, show that how dollars are used matters more than how much is spent. 

Wisconsin already offers private choice, charters, and open enrollment. Research finds positive academic outcomes for choice participants at lower public cost, about $5,980 less per K-8 student and $3,486 less per high-school student. However, nearly 70 percent of families remain ineligible for the statewide parental choice program because of income caps. Entry-point rules also block many students who attended private school the prior year. Other states have moved to universal eligibility. WILL also warns of renewed efforts to roll back choice and Act 10. 

——-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4:30–6 p.m. ET

Location: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138

Overview 

HGSE’s new Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leaderhelps superintendents navigate political challenges, build trust, and lead effectively. Join us to explore their evolving civic role in a changing landscape for education and democracy.

HGSE faculty member Jennifer Cheatham and three former superintendents, who are currently Senior Fellows for the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, will focus on what it means to lead school systems as democratic institutions: building broad-based coalitions across sectors; engaging families, students, and communities as partners rather than constituents; navigating polarization and misinformation; and using the bully pulpit of the superintendency to advance inclusion, equity, and civic engagement.

Panelists will share concrete examples of civic leadership in action—from community-wide visioning processes to cross-agency collaborations and student voice initiatives—and reflect on the skills, dispositions, and supports superintendents need to sustain this work over time.

This forum invites educators, policymakers, students, and community members to consider how superintendents can help renew faith in public institutions, foster civic learning and participation, and ensure that school systems serve as engines of both academic excellence and democratic vitality.

Welcome: Martin West, Academic Dean and Shattuck Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Moderator: Jennifer Cheatham, Chair of the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, Senior Lecturer on Education, and Faculty Chair of Field Engagement, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Former Superintendent, Madison, WI

Speakers – Senior Fellows, Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Russell Booker, CEO, Spartanburg Academic Movement; Senior Fellow, The EdRedesign Lab, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Former Superintendent, Spartanburg, SC 
• Kyla Johnson-Trammell, CEO, Oakland Thrives; Former Superintendent, Oakland, CA
• Michael Matsuda, Executive in Residence, Loyola Marymount University School of Education; Former Superintendent, Anaheim, CA

Event Attendance & Registration

Askwith Education Forums are accessible, free, and open to the public unless otherwise noted. Registration is required. Please arrive at least 15 minutes early for seating, to engage with the community, and to enjoy light refreshments before the Forum.

Virtual registrants will receive a Zoom link the day before the event. 

An invitation to speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Education does not imply an endorsement of the speaker’s views or values by HGSE, Harvard University, or members of its community.

For accessibility needs or accommodation requests, please contact askwith@gse.harvard.edu in advance of the program. See the FAQ tab for details.

————

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience

More.

I & I Editorial Board

The job market is booming for young people – but not those with college degrees. Are employers finally coming to realize that colleges these days mainly produce coddled, know-nothing, whiny, entitled brats?

A recent analysis from Burning Glass Institute found that unemployment among those 22-34 years old without a college degree is lower than it’s been in decades, but those with college diplomas are having a much harder time finding work than before. 

“For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst.”

The Journal says that AI is contributing to this unprecedented education divergence in job prospects, because companies are replacing entry-level white-collar jobs with AI just as colleges churn out more graduates than ever. At the same time, the shortage of skilled workers is making it hard to replace the many who are now retiring.

There clearly is a mismatch. But this isn’t exactly new. The oversupply of college graduates and lack of skilled workers has been a long-time problem. Former “Cheers” star John Ratzenberger, for example, has been raising the alarm about skilled worker shortages for decades.

So why is it affecting employment opportunities now?

Here’s a clue.

A Columbia University professor recently won a national book award for a volume arguing that white paint is racist. We kid you not.

“I discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” said author Wendy Walters.

Greg Lukianoff:

It’s at once hard to believe it’s already been 25 years and, given the job, to feel like that’s way too short a time. I feel like I’ve gotten to be 20 different people since I started at FIRE. I was hired at 26, had just turned 27 by my first day of work, and the following 25 years have included some of the hardest years of my life and many of the best.

But here I am, having gone from working with five other people to a team of 140 of the best and most principled people in the business, getting to do the work I went to law school specifically to do.

So after 25 years, what are my plans for the rest of my career? More, harder, bigger, smarter.

FIRE has become an important force for good in the United States and for the future of free speech, and I want to make sure we remain one. I want us to reach more people, help more people who are censored, create even better precedent, and help educate a generation—or more—about the eternally radical idea of free speech and why we must never take it for granted.

Thanks to everyone who helped make these amazing 25 years possible. And given that my dad just turned 100 and seems to be doing pretty well, I’m aiming for another 50.

Erica Meltzer, Melanie Asmar:

Tutoring. SAT prep. Summer camp. Field trips.

These are just some of the things that education advocates hope to offer public school students through the federal scholarship tax credit, a major school choice expansion that has the potential to become the one of the largest sources of federal funding for schools. 

The list includes things that well-off families provide their own children as a matter of course, as well as things that public schools used to provide that now feel like luxuries. 

A small but growing set of organizations — school districts, charter schools, public school foundations, start-up nonprofits, and after-school providers — is working to turn a tax credit primarily designed to cover private school tuition into a benefit for public school students. The extent of their success could determine how many children are ultimately helped by the tax credit, and influence whether more Democratic governors in particular opt their states into the program.

“Critics would say this wasn’t created for us,” said Sara Hazel, the president and CEO of the Denver Public Schools Foundation, which raises money for Colorado’s largest school district and hopes to use tax-credit dollars for tutoring and after-school scholarships. “I believe there’s money on the table, and public school students should benefit from that. That’s the bottom line of why we’re doing this.”

Some are enthusiastic, like New York charter school leader Ian Rowe, who wants his students to have, yes, SAT prep, but also horizon-expanding experiences like going up in small planes with trained flight instructors to spark an interest in aviation and aerospace careers.

Christopher J. Ferguson:

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it’s no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light. 

The problem is that the researchers’ conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April – another blow to the public’s faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.

“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”

Sally French

Drones are increasingly showing up at the intersection of spatial analysis, regional planning and site selection. One of the leaders driving that integration is Julia Pilarski, Project Manager of Real Estate & GIS at the Detroit Regional Partnership (DRP).

Julia Pilarski is the Project Manager of Real Estate & GIS at the Detroit Regional Partnership (DRP) and an FAA Part 107 Certified Drone Pilot. At the intersection of technology, economic development, and spatial strategy, Julia leads industrial site identification across an 11-county region while overseeing the Verified Industrial Properties (VIP) portal, GIS integrations, and drone aerial operations. In addition to teaching herself web design to build better digital tools for site selectors, Julia actively cultivates Detroit’s future tech pipeline through her work with the VIP x CODE313 Drone Pilot Program, empowering youth with hands-on drone skills and STEAM career pathways.

Julia sat down with The Drone Girl to discuss how aerial imagery transforms site selection, how Detroit is building an urban drone corridor and how self-taught skills shape high-level regional strategy.

The Economist:

ATIENCE, CONSISTENCY and frugality are fine habits for an investor. They are not, however, common virtues among newborn babies. The little bundles of joy are impulsive short-term thinkers. They are also some of nature’s biggest freeloaders, living entirely beyond their means.

All the same, for new parents with a soft spot for the magic of compounding, like your columnist, a baby presents a tantalising investment opportunity. Many decades of life and potential returns stretch out into the future: $1,000 invested today with a real annual return of 5.2% (the average for global stocks over the past 125 years) would be worth $58,000 by the time the child is 80.

Lauren Lumpkin:

The Trump administration took a major step Thursday toward launching the nation’s first federally funded school voucher program, set to steer billions of tax dollars to private schools — but also, perhaps, to public school students. 

The Treasury Department released long-awaited rules that will govern the first-of-its-kind effort before it’s implemented in January. States must decide whether to participate, and many Democratic governors had said they would wait for the regulations before making a decision. 

It’s a tricky call. Most of these governors oppose voucher programs, which direct public money to private schools. But in this case, the program is funded entirely with federal money, so if they don’t participate, they will be passing up an opportunity to funnel additional dollars into their states’ public schools.

The voucher-like program, called the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, was created by last year’s giant Republican tax and spending bill. It provides a 100 percent tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs), which will pass along the money to families. It was designed to primarily benefit students attending private schools, but SGOs may also be set up to help pay out-of-pocket expenses for public school students, further complicating the politics for Democrats. 

Governors have until Jan. 1 to opt in. Thirty mostly Republican-led states have already joined. Most of the remaining states that have not rejected the plan are led by Democrats.

The proposed regulations include income limits for eligible families, protections for scholarship funds, and details on how the funds can be used. States cannot restrict the types of schools that benefit, Treasury and Education department officials said, meaning public funds could go toward a religious school that bars LGBTQ students or a private school that doesn’t have certified teachers.

There will be a 60-day public comment period on the proposed rules.

Anjali Adukia, Matthew Bonci, Paula Dastres Gallardo, Emileigh Harrison, Jake Nicoll & Teodora Szasz:

Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions described in text on the same page. Nearly half of pages show zero overlap between the emotions described in text and those shown in images. This pattern persists across time, contexts, and identities. Household purchases and library inventories suggest content may be endogenously shaped by consumer demand favoring “positive” cover imagery, implying market forces narrow the emotional landscape children encounter.

Matthew Gwyther:

Matthew Gwyther, a freelance journalist, last month produced and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Sucking Up: A Guide to Sycophancy Through the Ages.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Trump administration might be writing its own chapter in the history of toadyism, but the perils of sycophancy have been made clear since the Garden of Eden. In “Paradise Lost,” John Milton conjures the scene as the satanic serpent beguiles Eve with a silken- and fork-tongued speech telling her that she’s almost as beautiful as God himself:

Musa al-Gharbi:

To recap: the education system in the U.S. has long been defined by a deep cultural contradiction. On the one hand, advocates for mass education hoped to use the classroom to integrate the marginalized and uplift the disadvantaged. On the other hand, their conception of these “others” was bigoted and condescending and elites’ desire to empower others was tempered by their greater desire to preserve and enhance their own social position and to keep the poor and minorities “in line.”

In practice, irrespective of intent, mass and elite education work synergistically to reinforce and legitimize social inequalities. When this mystificationsystem is functioning well, inequalities derived from differences in educational attainment and educational “quality” come to be viewed as natural and appropriate. They come to be seen as reflecting, first and foremost, the superior grit, discipline, hard work and cultivated talent of those who manage to get degrees (and especially elite degrees) as compared to those who don’t.

As beneficiaries proceed from elite pre-K, to elite primary and secondary schools, to elite colleges, and into elite jobs at elite firms, they grow increasingly confident they “deserve” or are entitled to the comfortable jobs, above-average (dual) incomes, and relatively stable homelives that likely await them. Over time, an implicit (and often explicit) conviction will grow that those with fewer or lower-status credentials are reciprocally unworthy of working the same jobs, enjoying the same lifestyles, and being afforded the same respect or deference as people like themselves.

The elitist side of this cultural contradiction has been a very successful project. The egalitarian side of the contradiction has been much less effective. Basically, nothing works well in the education space to reduce observed disparities in academic performance, let alone broader socioeconomic divides. Virtually all efforts have been great disappointments.

For instance, you might think the big difference between rich and poor students is the funding available to each. You’d be wrong: the schools with the most poor and minority students generally receive more per capita than those catering to the richest and whitest students. More importantly, there just isn’t a strong connection between spending, educational outcomes, and long-term life prospects.

Governments in the U.S. spends an average of $17.6k per student per year in public schools. The average private school tuition nationwide is $15k per student per year (i.e. 15 percent less than public school allocations). The latter tend to have higher test scores, graduation rates, college completion, and lifetime earnings. Throwing still more money at public schools is unlikely to erase observed differences in outcomes.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Timothy Shanahan:

The latest reading test results should be troubling to all.

I’m reacting to the PISA results that were recently issued (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2026). PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment – is the test used to compare nations in academic performance. These reading, math, and science results were from a 2025 test administered in 91 countries.

Usually, our concerns about PISA scores have had to do with how many countries have passed us this time in the reading ability of their 15-year-olds. Not this time. No, this year we held service – no new nations outdid us.

But only because almost everyone declined in reading this time around.

It appears to me that this nearly universal drop is mainly because of the 2020 pandemic. The first shock of the pandemic deprived most kids out of face-to-face teaching for a year or two. That certainly trimmed their reading sails.

But the aftershock of this kind of thing can be almost as humbling. Historical analyses of pandemics reveal that they leave in their wake a tsunami of antisocial and asocial behavior. That’s why we experienced increased crime rates that have only recently begun to come down in most places.

The asocial effects seem to be lingering longer. The schools of many countries have been experiencing the same chronic absenteeism rife in the United States. Many kids never returned to school after COVID and large numbers of those who did have spotty attendance (Barragan Torres, 2025; U.S. Department of Education, 2025).  

Time matters when it comes to learning. Fewer days, fewer hours, fewer lessons means lesser gains in academic achievement (Carroll, 1989; Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliave, Cahen, & Dishaw, 1981; Gay, Sonnenschein, Sun, & Baker, 2021; Smith, Lee, & Newmann, 2001; Walberg, Fraser, & Welch, 1986). 

The PISA report itself emphasizes an unfortunate decline in classroom discipline across the world since COVID. There is more misbehavior these days which reduces the amounts of instruction even for those kids who manage to show up.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Sam Siedow:

Eden Prairie High School’s football game against Minnetonka was evacuated on Friday night amid a reported shooting and a major police response.

The Eden Prairie Police Department said officers responded to the homecoming game at about 8:40 p.m. after a report of shots fired.

At an emergency news conference outside an Eden Prairie fire station, police said two people were shot and suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Both were taken to Hennepin County Medical Center for treatment.

In an 11:42 p.m. Facebook post, the Eden Prairie Police Department said the shooting is believed to have been targeted, and that no arrests have been made. The department said the investigation is ongoing and that additional information will be provided as it becomes available.

———

Jason Robertson:

Eden Prairie MN had their Homecoming Football Game shut down because of Somali Gang Fights.

150+ Somali started a gang fight at their Homecoming game

I don’t think people not from here will understand how big of a deal that is

Eden Prairie/Edina, that whole corridor of cities are first ring suburbs of Minneapolis and are the Safe, Nice, Rich Neighborhoods

——-

Mary Moriarty:

Let us be very clear: there are no “roving Somali gangs terrorizing people.”

The Trump administration is, once again, using a campaign of hatred and fear to try and divide us.

It will not work.

——-

Becka Thompson:

practice the school protects kids from the law. This is because almost all districts got rid of school resource officers. They shield them from the law because they don’t want to deal with mom and dad, or they think they can rehabilitate at school or, yes, they’re ACAB activists.

No matter what the route it leads teens to not have any “soft accountability” before making the choice to bring a gun to school.

Years ago I had a Somali parent ask me what to do with their child. They were a mother and they feared for their child but that boys don’t listen to their mothers past age 8 or so.

Get mad at me all you want, it’s my lived experience. In this long conversation I realized the cultural issues went way beyond them not listening to a female teacher.

I don’t need to put in the disclaimer “not all” but I will. I have had countless Somali students who were so respectful and kind and wanted to break out of that culture and “make it” in the USA.
By not enforcing laws and school rules we leave all of them vulnerable first.

When my Somali student was murdered and it was swept under the rug as “accidental” I knew in practice what my gut told me: by turning a blind eye, we first harm them. (And see hw quickly the news was willing to buy the absolutely stupid story of an ‘accident’ while ‘studying’)

———

Tom Weiler:

. @JonJustice , @StarTribune out did themselves with the update “2 injured”

• 2 injured during the evacuation?
• 2 injured players, cause long medical felay, fans evacuated

———

Bill Glahn:

Did the homecoming queen get a gun? As always, no arrests have been made, no victims named. These suburban disturbances appear to occur within a unique form of black holes, from which only certain information cannot escape, with local media standing guard at the event horizon, just to make sure.

I’ve mentioned the adjacent southwest suburban cities of Eden Prairie and Minnetonka a few times lately, as the two host the sprawling headquarters of the health insurance giant United Healthcare. The cities are prosperous and usually peaceful.

Until last night.

———-

Amanda:

first they came for the state fair and police negotiated with them. last year they shot up or threatened to shoot up multiple high school graduations including WAYZATA.

now they’re engaging in gang violence in Eden prairie and Minnetonka. For the non-Minnesotans who follow me, to put this into perspective, when I went to Minnetonka 10 years ago the nickname for our school throughout the state was “White Castle” because of how little diversity and wealthy everyone apparently was. The high school is so nice it feels like a college campus.

———-

John Hindraker

Every Democratic politician immediately chimed in to try to make the story about guns rather than Somali gang violence, but once again, no one is fooled. Firearms have been around for what, 600 years? And there has never been any shortage of firearms in Eden Prairie. It isn’t guns that are new, it is violent gangs. This story will continue to reverberate as voters make up their minds about the midterm elections

———-

Much more.

Will Flanders:

This article treats an apparently easy process to start a private school as if it’s a bad thing. I think low barriers to entry are great. The beauty of a private relative to a public school is if it doesn’t meet the needs of students, it will close.

Michael Torres:

Ok…so…in sum, a group of investigative reporters attempted to commit performative fraud (I guess?) by launching fake private schools in 3 ESA states, but didn’t do any investigation into the extent this performative fraud is happening in real life or prove that they could even recruit students/families to join their fake schools…all in an allusory attempt to establish a dearth of quality and thereby advocate for greater state regulation of private schools and microschools…and while conveniently leaving out research from @ua_edreform and NC State University showing students in these programs are performing very well academically.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.ua…

Danielle DuClos:

For years, county leaders have authorized budgets where spending outpaced anticipated revenues, looking to reserves, or rainy day funds, to balance the books. The county’s chief financial officer estimated last spring the county would yet again face a more than $30 million deficit for 2027.

Marc A. Thiessen:

Before the 2022 midterms, Americans were facing the worst inflation in 40 years, a collapse in real wages, the highest murder rate since the 1990s and the worst border crisis in U.S. history. Yet, despite these headwinds, Joe Biden got one of the best midterm results of any president since John F. Kennedy. 

Well, today, things are better by nearly every metric. The border is secure, and the violent crime rate is falling at a historic pace. The poverty rate is at a record low. Real median household income is at the highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1967, while inflation was 3.4 percent in August — higher than most would like, but slightly below the post-1957 average. The economy is growing and has created over 1 million new private-sector jobs since President Donald Trump took office, and the unemployment rate is just 4.1 percent. Growth is being driven by the private sector, not by inflationary government handouts.

In other words, the economy is objectively in great shape. Nonetheless, polling shows that three-quarters of people rate it as poor or fair, and Republicans are bracing for a blue wave in November that could sweep them out of power on Capitol Hill. 

So, what gives? 

Here’s why so many are sour on the economy: Consumer prices today are 27.2 percent higher than they were in January 2021. Something that cost $100 when Biden took office now costs about $127. That is a massive increase in prices in just over five and a half years. 

Biden bears the lion’s share of the blame for that cumulative increase. The consumer price index rose 21.4 percent from January 2021 to January 2025 (Biden’s term), while it has risen just 4.8 percent since Trump took office. In other words, of that $27 in rising costs, about $21 came on Biden’s watch, while about $6 was on Trump’s watch. 

RQ1, Seth Lewis, Nick Mathews:

Welcome to another edition of RQ1! For those who are new, we are Mark Coddington, Seth Lewis, Tamar Wilner, and Nick Mathews — four former journalists turned academics, now teaching and researching at Washington and Lee University (Mark), the University of Virginia (Seth), the University of Kansas (Tamar), and the University of Missouri (Nick). This edition was written by Seth and Nick.

Quick programming note: We’re nearing 5,000 subscribers! Please help us cross that threshold and reach the people who could benefit from this work by forwarding this to a friend or sharing it on LinkedIn or elsewhere. We don’t ask for paid subscriptions, but we do appreciate whatever outreach you can provide.

In trying to keep pace with all the new research about news and journalism, we hope to give you in each edition a quick breakdown of a notable piece of new research, and also to highlight other interesting work you might want to check out. We can’t cover it all, of course, so consider this a sampling of some of the most interesting findings in news research.

If you have ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply — we’d love to hear from you. And if someone has shared this email with you, then you can subscribe here:

Over the past decade, nonprofit news has been seen as one of the bright spots in U.S. journalism — an emblem of hope for the future amid a landscape littered with failures and financial struggles.

With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions out there are grim. Largely in response, more than 6,000 nonprofit foundations have made major investments in local news initiatives, totaling some half a billion dollars or more in direct funding for journalism. As a result, the number of U.S. nonprofit news organizations has been growing by double-digit percentages year-over-year, with an estimated 550 such organizations in operation.

It’s fair to question whether this is sustainable. But, in the meantime at least, what’s not to like about this arrangement — this major push to subsidize local journalism at a time when the for-profit model for it is rapidly vanishing?

The simple Negroni can tell the story of a century of human progress.

My latest for @WSJFreeEx
https://t.co/gc2IURL8hQ

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) October 1, 2026

Jonathan Leaf

Georgetown University Islamic Studies professor Jonathan A. C. Brown is a jerk. That’s not what’s notable or important about him, however.

That he’s a creep is something he has repeatedly demonstrated. Brown is a descendant of President Grover Cleveland. Raised as an Episcopalian, Brown converted to Islam when he was in college, and he’s now a true believer, if one who displays the sense of entitlement of someone from the direct lineage of a U.S. president.

Thus, a few months ago, Brown responded to a British member of parliament’s expressions of concern about the Pakistani grooming gangs that raped tens of thousands of young Christian women by tweeting out, “Get over it.” When he was told that this was gross, immoral and insensitive, he said it a second time.

by  Alex Tabarrok:

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.” Yes, but do note that no student is banned from any major and the lending rule is mild. Undergraduate programs must show:

that their graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma holder…[and] graduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than the typical bachelor’s degree holder. (emphasis added).

Think about how low that bar is. The comparison group for an undergraduate program is working adults aged 25-34 with nothing more than a high school diploma. A college program that can’t beat that has almost certainly made its students worse off. For graduate programs the bar is the lowest of several bachelor’s benchmarks, including bachelor’s holders in the same field. A master’s in social work need only beat people with a bachelor’s in social work. A program must also fail in two out of three years before it loses loan eligibility. The Department estimates that about 5% of programs will fail in the first year.

I mocked the term “predatory lending” when it first became common in the financial crisis but in this case predatory lending fits the bill because the real borrower isn’t the individual student. Under income-driven repayment, the taxpayer is a forced co-signer, and it’s the taxpayer who gets predated.

Most expansions of the student loan program have been motivated by the picture of an enterprising student who works hard and wants to major in mechanical engineering or nursing but because of their poor circumstances they can’t afford college. “Credit constraints, asymmetric information, you can’t collateralize human capital,” said the economists. Nice theory, what’s the practice?

tenobrus:

fundamentally i think most discussion of qualia gets the situation exactly backwards. the assertion tends to be that things like “seeing red” or “feeling joy/pain” are raw experiences, the fundamental unit of the universe, and it is both possible and important to identify those experiences in a highly substrate-independent manner.

i think the truth is that there’s no such thing as globally coherent mind-independent qualia. i think this is sort of obvious when you actually think about it. there is nothing it-is-like for you to be a whale. you are not a whale. the brainstates it experiences are quite different from your own. there is no plausible way to directly identify them. you can translate, but only lossily. what you think of as the qualia of “seeing red” is really “seeing red as you”. it is your humanbrainstate of seeing red. we have a little leeway on this. of course you can see red multiple times in your life and abstract over them and have a more general sense of seeing red. and likely the neural patterns that make up seeing red are abstractable somewhat, we can say that my seeing red is quite close or sanely translatable to yours. but the thing we are talking about when we talk about “seeing red” as humans is not some universally translatable platonic object out there in the universe. it’s a verbalization of our very specific brains. alien minds do not have red qualia. or pain qualia. or joy qualia.

that’s not to say alien minds can’t be conscious, and that’s not to say that they won’t see some wavelength and have some consistent correlated mindstates about it. but the question of “how do we identify those mindstates as being the same as ours when we see red?” sort of dissolves. they’re not the same, they’re obviously not the same. the raw experience is completely different. the whole thing we’re thinking of when we talk about experience is entirely about ourselves.

Leadership Institute:

About the Event

Save the date! Join us for a day of school board governance training at the Upper Midwest School Board Leadership Conference. This one-day event will bring together school board members, candidates, and education leaders from across the region for practical, solutions-focused training designed to strengthen leadership and improve governance.

Topics will include:

• Effective school board governance and leadership
• Robert’s Rules of Order and board procedures
• Legal updates impacting school boards
• Building productive board-superintendent relationships
• Education policy and legislative developments
• Parental rights and community engagement
• Best practices for serving students and taxpayers
• Strategies for leading with confidence and integrity

Whether you’re a newly elected or experienced board member, you’ll leave with practical tools, valuable connections, and actionable ideas to better serve your district and community.

Mark your calendar for November 14, 2026. 

Erin Gretzinger and Olivia Herken:

More and more Wisconsin school districts have gone to referendum in recent years, citing financial stress. Local property tax levies — which help fund public schools — have reachedthe highest level in over 30 years. Schools are experiencing staff shortages and budget shortfalls, and school leaders say student achievement is dropping as state funding hasn’t kept up with inflation.

Crowley and Tiffany’s plans on how to give the state’s education system a boost vary, and they have different priorities. Certain parts of their plans also lack details, leaving some funding questions up in the air.

Here’s more detail on both candidates’ plans:

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Natalie Winters:

A think tank co-founded by Facebook’s first president wants at least 100,000 visas a year—and has already identified more than 1,700 counties that could qualify.

The ambition is national. EIG’s blueprint identifies more than 1,700 potentially eligible counties, home to 58 million people. It proposes a minimum of 100,000 visas annually.

These communities’ economic pain has become the sales pitch for changing who lives in them.

And the campaign is still being pushed in Washington.

EIG’s first-quarter 2026 lobbying disclosure lists Heartland Visas and the Heartland Visa Act of 2024. Its second-quarter filing, submitted July 20, names them again. Together, the filings report $360,000 in lobbying expenses across the organization’s policy agenda; they do not break out spending on this visa campaign.

The documents name John Lettieri and Catherine Lyons as lobbyists. This is an organized effort to turn a demographic proposal into federal policy.

Andrej Karpathy:

We’ll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Writing. Something I’ve had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it’s a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I’ve tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for “80% of the way to ASD-STE100” because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:

Nadia Scharf:

• A new state budget provision requires Universities of Wisconsin faculty to meet minimum credit hour teaching requirements.
• Some professors worry the new policy does not account for other essential duties like research, grading, and student mentorship.
• Faculty say some classes don’t map neatly onto credit hour requirements, which they worry could impact student experience.
• One university leader says he doesn’t expect faculty responsibility to change much.

One month into the new school year, a new Universities of Wisconsin requirement that faculty members spend a certain number of hours in front of a class has meant frustration for many – not because of what they’re now required to do, but because of what they say it doesn’t account for.

In 2025, state legislators approved a last-minute state budget that increased funding for the Universities of Wisconsin, also known as the UW system, by $256 million, the largest increase in 20 years. But those funds came with strings: among them, UW faculty would be mandated to meet credit hour teaching requirements. These workload requirements went into effect at the start of this school year.

Under the new mandate, all full-time faculty and academic staff must teach at least 24 credits per academic year, with a carveout for UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, where professors are expected to produce more research. There, the minimum workload is 12 credits per year. A typical college class is three credits. 

Aaron Withe

Thanks again to the Yale Political Union for inviting me to take part in such an important and spirited debate.

Resolution: “Ban Public-Sector Unions”
Result: 35 Yes, 25 No

In the UK, I watched my family get taxed to own a TV, taxed to drive a car, and hit with a 40% income tax rate and 20% sales tax. It was never enough, because nearly one in five workers is on the government payroll.

Public-sector unions don’t just bargain. They grow the state so they can grow the dues. That’s the model, and that’s why I argued to ban them.

———-

We didn’t wait to get fined. New York’s new law lets the attorney general investigate us and ask a court to block our mail before a single envelope goes out, just because we plan to tell public employees they can stop paying union dues.

———-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Rebecca Loroff:

More schools are going to referendum as fewer voters indicate they want to support them. According to a Marquette University Law School poll from February, a record number of voters, 60% to 40%, said that lowering property taxes was more important than increasing funding K-12 for education. At the same time, the Wisconsin Policy Forum also found that 2025’s 94 referendum questions were the most in an odd-numbered year since 2007 and that almost 40% of these questions were “retries” — where voters rejected a referendum question, and a district goes back to the voters to try to pass the measure again.  

Shaw said that while school referendums were originally meant as a way for communities to exercise local control, it seems to be contributing to funding gaps between districts. According to another report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the gap in per-pupil funding between the top 90% and the bottom 10% of districts has grown in the past 20 years from 24.6% in 2005 to 37.6% in 2025.

…..

The lawsuit was filed in April by Law Forward and the Wisconsin Education Association Council. The plaintiffs are the Wisconsin Public Education Network; the Wisconsin PTA; the Necedah, Adams-Friendship, Beloit, Green Bay and Eau Claire school districts; and other education associations and individuals. They are asking the court to rule the current school funding formula unconstitutional.

“We’ve exhausted every opportunity that democracy affords us in this work, and it seems to fall on deaf ears,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane, a Sun Prairie-based parent and director of Wisconsin Public Education Network. “If our lawmakers aren’t going to do their job, it’s time for the courts to hold them accountable for doing it.”

The group’s position is that the state needs to “align its spending priorities with the priority needs of our children,” DuBois Bourenane said

She called the current funding system “antiquated and deeply broken” and “picking winners and losers” among students.

“We have a school funding system that’s based more on property tax relief than it is on meeting the needs of kids,” she added, saying that Wisconsin has fallen short with students with disabilities, English language learners and students from lower-income households.

In response to the initial suit in April, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a statement, “This complaint is another meritless attempt by liberal activists to defund the state’s highly successful school-voucher program and interfere with the Legislature’s authority to fund public schools. We will vigorously defend against this suit and are confident that the courts will soundly reject it.”

Lawsuits related to school funding have had mixed success in court across the country. In 2000, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state’s funding formula was constitutional, but left the door open for the current case to be brought.

As the lawsuit plays out, Shaw sees the next election as an opportunity for voters and their representatives to consider their priorities — and to envision “what equitable planning and adequate funding looks like” for their schools.

——-

“application bloat”

“Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Richard D. Kahlenberg:

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

John Sailer:

Over the last half-decade, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects designed to influence academic policies, both in the sciences and other disciplines. The aim was to foster a progressive conception of social justice in these fields. In pursuit of this end, the foundation earmarked nearly a million dollars for a project titled “Creating Inclusive Scientific Societies through Policies and Practices,” over a million for a project on “Faculty Online Learning Communities for Gender Equity,” and over $2 million to foster “racial equity focused departmental change.”

Through a public records request, I’ve obtained the proposals and progress reports for dozens of NSF grants designed to promote social justice. Although funding for these grants was eventually halted by the Trump administration, the projects illustrate an important facet of recent higher-education policy. Many of the university policies that promised “social transformation” didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were actively encouraged by outside funders—often by the federal government itself.

Accreditation—the peer-review process which enables universities to receive federal grants and student loans—has recently become a policy battleground, with accreditors wielding significant power over both universities and academic disciplines. In 2020, when Oregon Health and Science University’s medical school issued an extensive diversity action plan—which promised “consequences” for employees who failed to support “DEI, anti-racism and social justice”—it specifically pointed to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the medical-school accrediting body, to justify the overhaul.

The NSF actively promoted DEI-focused accreditation policies. The proposal for a $1.2 million program on promoting “community engagement” in STEM, which I obtained through a records request, notes that the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology was exploring changes to its criteria “that would incorporate JEDI [justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion].” The proposal promised to “support broader JEDI efforts in the general criteria for engineering.”

Another grant funded a conference designed to “identify and share best practices and strategies to integrate IDEA principles in accreditation criteria”—referring to an acronym that stands for “inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.”

Scholarly societies have become another flashpoint in debates over higher education. Critics argue that many of these societies, which have the power to shape entire disciplines, have become increasingly politicized.

Again, through its giving, the NSF played a role in promoting this politicization. In one million-dollar grantthat received funding in 2024, a group of psychologists proposed a series of social-justice reforms to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The proposal, which I obtained via a records request, asserts that “[r]edistributing resources (such as moving different people into leadership roles) is not enough” and that the society’s “governance structures do not yet reflect its stated values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Its solution: review and rework the society’s criteria for leadership development, academic awards, conferences, and publications.

Rebeka Zeljko:

The program will include Louisiana State University (LSU), Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University (MSU), and Hillsdale College. Notably, LSU was founded as a military school in 1853, known as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy.

Each member school will be designated a “Distinguished Military College,” requiring the institutions to maintain “exceptionally high standards of cadet discipline, tactical instruction, and military organization.” The schools would also earn the prestigious “Honor School” status, granting priority for officer commissioning. (RELATED: Hegseth Announces New Standards Targeting ‘Fat Generals’ And ‘Beardos’ At Quantico Meeting)

“From the Ivy Leagues to most liberal arts colleges, our colleges and universities have become anti-American, DEI-worshipping, woke factories,” Hegseth said during his State of the Force address. “Qualities like grit and courage were replaced with political correctness and social justice. God and country traded for Che Guevara and critical theory.”

——-

Hillsdale:

Hillsdale will fund its participation in the Corps of Cadets program without taxpayer funds, just as we replace G.I. Bill scholarships through the private generosity of donors. Our mission calls us to teach in order to ensure the blessings of civil and religious liberty carry on.

Craig Warmke:

Universities that are slow to adapt risk a cascade of further problems. If students continue to use AI to elide cognitive friction, they will fail to master the material and enhance their skill sets. A hollowed-out education then threatens the credential’s credibility. 

The public is already concerned: 46 percent of respondents in a July 2026 Gallup poll expected AI to make degrees less important over the next five years. AI could make degrees less important by providing motivated learners inexpensive alternatives with the chance to learn at an accelerated pace. 

[RELATED: MIT calls for faster curriculum changes as AI completes coursework]

Cheaper AI alternatives could dampen student demand right when public confidence in higher education has already cratered. Merely 36 percent of adults with a bachelor’s degree expressed having at least “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Among all respondents with lower confidence, perceived political agendas, and high costs were the leading reasons. And these considerations exert negative pressures on demand amid a shrinking pool of potential college students due to demographic reasons.

The barbell strategy requires more human interaction, which requires more staff time. But perhaps AI could help finance the costs with savings elsewhere. 

Jennifer Hoff

The district admits enrollment declines and budget woes continue, as the plan also redraws attendance boundaries and merges some programs.

“I don’t know if they’re really considering community and the families that will be truly impacted,” said Young.

District leaders answered most of the questions people brought forth and will hold six more listening sessions, including Thursday at Washburn High and Friday at Edison High that both start at 6 p.m.

The district vowed to bring the input to the school board that can make changes to the proposals, but is expected to vote on something Nov. 10.

Philip Greenspun:

For twenty years, Carnegie-Mellon University has been dishing out fat helpings of climate and hurricane doom. 

What’s the most obvious place to set up a new campus for 3,500 students and keep them safe from ever-more-intense hurricanes and relentless sea level rise? How about Miami, Florida?

Alexander Russo:

To get past the current education stalemate, journalists, practitioners, and parents need to rethink prior positions and efforts — starting with our own. I’ll go first.

I’ve always been skeptical about the practical and political feasibility of school integration — as well as the value of focusing on it as a school reform priority.

That much should be clear from all the writing and commentary I’ve done on the topic, including Some Questions About This American Life’s ‘The Problem We All Live With’ and Questioning 70 years of integration. (More links below)

But at the same time, I was for several years deeply convinced that the lack of racial diversity among education journalists was a core problem — that newsrooms needed to be integrated as much or more than schools — and that I should try and do something about it. 

Some of my pieces from that era start with 2016’s Just how white is education journalism? all the way to 2022’s Racial diversity in education news? Two steps forward, one step back.

Only now am I realizing how misguided my efforts were, how much they contradicted my skepticism around school diversity, and how deeply rooted they were in my personal desire to avoid being seen as racist.

Caitlin Flanagan:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.

Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.

Galen Hendricks, Nick Johnson, Rita Jefferson:

Overview

• Big cities are important drivers of the American economy, and the taxes they collect fund public services that help those communities thrive.
• While most local governments in the U.S. are largely funded by property taxes, large cities are a bit different, with more diverse revenue.
• Only about half of the nation’s 50 largest cities rely mostly on property taxes. While all these cities collect at least some property tax revenue, the share varies.
• Another third of the 50 largest cities collect the bulk of their revenue from consumption taxes.
• The high reliance on property and sales taxes in these big cities results in low- and middle-income taxpayers paying a larger share of their incomes than high-income families in these places.
• By contrast, three cities collect the largest share of their revenue from income taxes, and four other cities get at least some revenue from income taxes. Income taxes tend to tax low- and middle-income families less than higher-income families, injecting progressivity into local tax codes and improving fairness for taxpayers.

The Education Gadfly

The viral article by Nikole Hannah-Jones— “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”—sparked an outpouring of responses from opinion writers far and wide, as did the accompanying This American Life episode. As a public service—and because of the opportunity I believe this moment provides to the school reform movement—I am tracking all of the posts we spot. If we missed any, please let us know at TheGadfly@fordhaminstitute.org. (Last updated October 1, 2026.)

—Mike Petrilli

——-

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Lydia Moynihan:

As the university system increasingly becomes a wildly expensive bastion of anti-Western sentiment, key figures in Silicon Valley are betting on alternatives to higher education. They argue that even the Ivy League is no longer producing the best candidates — nor are they even accepting some of the most qualified students.

“It used to be the case that you could rely on somebody who went to an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent to be top notch,” said Jordan Hirsch, who runs Palantir’s semester-long intensive Meritocracy Fellowship, which accepts high school graduates.“But that’s not the case anymore… we suspected that there was a lot of talent being missed.”

Palantir has become a pioneer of the effort to offer alternatives to the conventional four-year undergraduate degree — and now it’s planning to double the size of its third semester-long intensive.

The company’s four-month fellowship begins with a five-week crash course in Western civilization — studying philosophers like Aristotle and heroes like Churchill — with classes taught by visiting professors, journalists, and researchers alongside executives such as CEO Alex Karp and CTO Shyam Sankar.

In addition to spending the five weeks studying the classics and history, students also build software and later embed with a Palantir team for their assignments. 

“What we’re trying to build is what we think the college environment should be — and do it in five weeks,” Hirsch said. “The mission is to support, sustain, and resuscitate the most important institutions, both commercial and government, in the West, in the United States in particular.”

He wants students to leave with an appreciation for “individual dignity, individual liberty, human agency, and… a real love for America, for all of its imperfections.”

Hirsch estimated that nearly 700 people applied last year for 26 slots. Applications for the next class open Oct. 15, and Palantir hopes to take as many as 50 fellows.

———

More:

It’s not school that’s dead. It’s the institutions that hijacked it. School, the real one—that of the Athenian Academy, the Renaissance workshops, the master and apprentice—is going to be reborn. More demanding. More just. Without debt, without dogma, without a degree as a lifelong annuity.

A school that will no longer produce graduates, but polymaths. Free minds, capable of coding, thinking, building, and doubting. They’re the ones who will create the value of the next fifty years.

———

Dissident Teacher:

I built an antidote to the America-as-villain history and English lessons taught in too many of our public schools. 

I wish the schools would do this. I spent 24 years trying from the inside, but the system is too sclerotic. The older teachers are too comfortable to push back enough, the younger teachers too poorly educated. The curriculum companies are captured. The School Boards are tied down by state regulations.

———

“application bloat”

“Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Erin Gretzinger

Just 44 students opted out of using Chromebooks last school year, according to district records obtained by the Cap Times under the state open records laws. This school year, that number jumped to 249 students — a 466% increase.

While the number of students opting out remains a fraction of the district’s more than 25,000 students, the uptick reflects a growing desire among some parents for the Madison Metropolitan School District to change its approach to technology use in classrooms.

“It’s my perception that districts or private schools that are on the cutting edge of this are cutting down on screen time for kids in schools, and I really hope that Madison will do something that will move more in that direction,” said Sarah Catalano, who declined a Chromebook for her kindergartner at Lapham Elementary. “This feels like the only way that I really have as a parent to voice my disapproval or send a message to the district of how I would want it to change.”

……

A Madison school district analysis of Chromebook activity this spring found students’ average screen time exceeded the district’s own recommended limits across all grade levels.

Analysis of Student Screen Time and Chromebook Integration. Please see the attached memo for the analysis of student screen time and Chromebook integration: Pages 72 – 75.

———

“application bloat”

“Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Democracy Restored:

Today, Democracy Restored (DR) released a new report that exposes a secret, well-funded, and coordinated national campaign by the Left to target conservative attorneys with lawfare and barfare.

DR’s report, “‘Shame Them and Make Them Toxic’: The Left’s Campaign to Attack Its Political Opponents Using Lawfare and Barfare,” examines the organizations, political operatives, funding sources, and publicity strategies behind what Democracy Restored calls the “Lawfare Consortium.” Democracy Restored Senior Counsel Karin Sweigart presented the report Wednesday at “BARFARE: Stopping Bar Discipline as Political Warfare.”

The report connects hundreds of data points to expose the Lawfare Consortium’s key figures, targets, publicity tactics, geographic strategy, and funding sources. Spearheaded by The 65 Project, this network of Democrat-aligned activist organizations includes Hillary Clinton insider and Media Matters founder David Brock and former Obama “Ethics Czar” Norm Eisen. As Brock told once told reporters, their goal is not merely to file grievances against their targets, but to “shame them and make them toxic” in their communities and firms.

While cases involving John Eastman (disbarred), Cleta Mitchell (resigned from her law firm), Rudolph Giuliani (disbarred), Kenneth Chesebro (disbarred), and Jenna Ellis (suspended from the bar) have attracted national attention, DR’s investigation examines the secret machinery behind those headlines. Drawing on disciplinary records, court documents, nonprofit disclosures, and organizational publications, the report identifies a recurring strategy: file complaints, publicize accusations, amplify coverage, and use subsequent developments to renew pressure on attorneys and their employers.

Between 2016 and 2026, DR counted 181 bar complaints and related filings targeting 122 lawyers, five firms, and 44 non-lawyers across 34 jurisdictions in 26 states. Ninety-two of those filings were tied to the 2020 election.

——-

More.

Norm Eisen and his partners were behind having Trump affiliated attorneys disbarred. They are still at it to this day as they recently filed a complaint against Ed Martin.

KPMG case:

In Stein v. United States (2006), Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that the U.S. government violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by coercing KPMG to withhold legal fees from its former partners and employees. 

North Dakota State Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, PDF:

Richard D. Kahlenberg:

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

Bruce Baker:

In a new brief (full PDF here), I estimate a stochastic frontier model of district efficiency using the National Education Cost Model: roughly 129,000 district-years for about 8,100 districts in 38 states, 2009–2024. The frontier is the best outcome achievable at a given level of spending relative to cost. Each district’s efficiency is its distance from that frontier, expressed as the share of its current resources a fully efficient district would need to reach the same outcomes. I estimate it with and without state fixed effects, because (more on this below) comparing test scores across states is its own can of worms.

The headline findings:

• Money matters, with diminishing returns. A 10 percent increase in resources relative to cost raises frontier outcomes by about 0.07 SD nationally, and about 0.09 SD when comparing districts within the same state. That’s not nothing. It’s a lot.
• Most districts are about equally efficient. The median district operates at about 86 percent efficiency, and nearly three-quarters of district-years fall between 80 and 90 percent. There is a long lower tail, but there’s no evidence here of a system drowning in waste.
• The tail has been growing, and it’s growing within states. The share of districts below 80 percent efficiency doubled, from 11 percent in 2011 to 22 percent in 2024, and the pattern is the same when districts are compared only with others in their own state.
• The “bloated administration” story is tiny. Within their own states, the least efficient districts are more heavily staffed across the board, with more teachers, more aides and more administrators, and they are also smaller and higher-cost. The general administration gap between the most and least efficient districts works out to something like $80–100 per pupil. Anyone promising to close achievement gaps by trimming the central office is selling something.

Florida is efficient. New Jersey is better.

Rank states by average efficiency and you get Idaho, North Carolina, Utah, Florida and Georgia at the top, with Rhode Island, West Virginia, Connecticut, Wyoming and New Jersey at the bottom. Cue the triumphant op-ed about Florida.

———-

Commentary thread:

You are using a measure of “cost” that has your conlclusions baked in as an assumption! Very sneaky.

———

Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Bruce Baker: [more]

My critiques of Marguerite Roza, the Edunomics Lab, and Education Resource Strategies — with receipts. Every quotation is verbatim from the linked post or article.24

The short version

I’ve spent an embarrassing share of my career, seventeen years and counting, cleaning up after Marguerite Roza. It has come in two waves. The first ran from 2009 to 2014, when she was at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and then advising the Gates Foundation, and her work was all over the federal policy conversation. The second started in 2025, when the Edunomics Lab she now runs at Georgetown began handing state policymakers graphs so bad I made a video about them. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) comes up less often, but it keeps turning up in the same places. Its founder, Karen Hawley Miles, co-wrote the Houston/Cincinnati weighted student funding (WSF) “success story” with Roza. Stephen Frank presented ERS slides alongside Roza’s fabricated graph at the 2011 Regents symposium. And ERS graded Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding against Baltimore’s own formula.

It comes down to the same four problems, over and over:

——-

Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Larry Ferlazzo:

I’ve got nothing against most university professors, and count several as friends.  I have learned much from some of them, and continue to do so.

However, my mind was a big boggled when I read yesterday’s New York Times article, 30 Ideas for Fixing U.S. Schools, Ranked by Experts.

Not one – not a single one – of these experts were practicing K-12 teachers. When I asked ChatGPT to examine the biographies of the many professors consulted for the article, it found that less than a third had ever taught in a K-12 classroom.

Again, that does not mean that many of them cannot offer important insights.

But, clearly, The New York Times reporters do not understand the concept of subsidiarity, which suggests that the people closest to problems – most affected by them – often have excellent ideas on how to solve them.

I do know that at least one of the professors contacted for the article did bring this up to them. I’ve got to wonder if anyone else did.

The article is worth reading.  However, as a recently retired high school teacher, here are my relatively low-cost (and evidence-based) ideas  on how to improve schools (it’s important to note that there is not ONE WAY to fix schools – it requires lots of little ones):

* Dramatically expand the use of peer tutors.  I’ve been on this soapbox for years, but the idea of hiring boatloads of adult tutors is just not a realistic strategy (see The “High-Dosage Tutoring” Bubble Appears To Be Popping, & That’s Why I’ve Been Pushing “Peer Tutoring” For Years, Instead).

* Create ninth-grade support classes for students that provide them with the prior knowledge they need to be successful in their content classes. I’ve written about how we did this at our school at This Is the Most Effective Teaching Strategy I’ve Seen in 23 Years.

——

If the Top Four Experts (NY Times article) Ran the Rankings: How to Fix U.S. Schools, Reordered

AJ Edelman:

1. Obama nationalizes student loans. Everyone and their cousin now can take out 250k for gender studies degrees
2. They get no jobs. Demand we repay their loans. Say they were lied to. “Predatory!”
3. Trump ends loans for degrees that don’t repay
4. Socialists lose their mind, demand they keep being able to take out the loans they claim were predatory.

Michael Kinsley:

John D. MacArthur got rich by selling one-dollar life insurance policies through newspaper ads during the Depression. “Dubious” is how Parade magazine charitably described this scheme in 1976, by which time MacArthur was a self-made billionaire and self-styled colorful old codger, fond of shoveling leftover food into his pocket at banquets. When MacArthur died in 1977, he left almost the entire billion to a foundation named after himself and his wife. MacArthur’s own soft spots were for dogs, trees, and the handicapped. But his foundation’s first original venture is a “Prize Fellows Program” designed to “honor a small number of exceptionally talented individuals who have given evidence of originality and dedication to creative pursuits.” The first 21 fellows have just been chosen, with the help of 100 secret nominators scattered throughout the country. Each winner will get $24,000 to $60,000 a year for five years (tax free) plus health care and other expenses, so that they all may “devote themselves to their own creative endeavors.” The net effect of John D. MacArthur’s entrepreneurial life and philanthropic afterlife, then, will have been to take one dollar each from a large number of poor and ignorant people, assemble the money into somewhat larger amounts, and give these piles to a very few members of the prosperous, educated elite. 

Emma Ayer’s

In this essay, Thomas Klingenstein argues that the Right has made a category error: treating lawfare as a series of discrete legal disputes when it is better understood as a system of political power. His answer isn’t simply better defense, but counterpressure — a new public-interest law firm, led by Jeff Clark, meant to defend conservative lawyers and make lawfare more costly to practice.

The deeper question, however, is whether an adversarial legal order can remain genuinely adversarial when one side commands the institutions, money, and professional machinery of enforcement. Klingenstein’s argument is that formal neutrality is not enough; power also depends on whether institutions exist that are willing and able to contest it.

Lawfare is the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate, distract, defame, or destroy an opponent. Over the past decade, the Left has built a powerful, well-funded network that is carrying out Lawfare against our advocate class. The Left raised at least $183 million last year.

To examine lawfare, we must consider the current context, which is this: we are at war, a cold civil war, against a domestic regime which wants to overthrow America. It is correct to call it a “war,” and not just an unusually wide divide, because the contest is between two moral orders. From a given moral order there flows a given set of laws, values, customs, and other aspects of culture. Obviously, a society can have only one of each. The moral order of the enemy regime rests on group outcome equality. The moral order of our regime, on the other hand, rests on individual merit. These two moral orders—individual merit versus group quotas—are utterly irreconcilable. You can’t admit people to college (or anything else) based on both merit and group quotas. It’s one or the other. This is why today the two political parties can agree on almost nothing. The Left knows that because it knows that it is at war. Thus, it plays by wartime rules. The Right, on the other hand, does not know it and so continues to play by peacetime rules, which include trying to reach across the aisle, a sucker’s game in a war.

One of the most powerful weapons in the Left’s arsenal is Lawfare. But we on the Right don’t understand this; we don’t understand either the nature or power of the Left’s Lawfare.

It’s time we learn.

The 65 Project is the best example of leftist Lawfare. Devised by Melissa Moss and David Brock, two Democrat operatives with ties to Hillary Clinton, the Project has sought “not only [to] bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame [Right-wing lawyers] and make them toxic.”

Zilan Qian and Kayla Blomquist:

This is a background explainer on China’s AI ecosystem covering the main institutional and commercial actors, how AI policy and regulation are structured, and how frontier AI risk is discussed in China. It is descriptive rather than argumentative and does not make direct policy recommendations. It draws on Chinese-language primary sources for laws, plans, and official statements, and on published analysis for questions of discourse and interpretation. 

Information is current as of 25 September 2026. Several developments discussed in Sections 4 and 5 are recent and still unfolding.

Background

Similar to the US, discussions like the balance between AI development and regulation, AI misinformation, and AI’s impact on labour markets exist in China. However, there is no comparably visible system of competing ideological camps or interest groups in China. 

Three major structural differences between the US and China result in different AI discourse dynamics: 

• The state promotes and restrains AI simultaneously. The state treats AI as both a strategic technology to develop and a source of political, economic, and social risks to manage. The balance between these goals shifts over time, rather than consistently upholding a pro- or anti-AI stance. Chinese AI policy since 2017 has been a recurring tension between development and control.^[1] 
• AI companies are not prominent political actors. Chinese labs or big AI companies do not fund think tanks or run public campaigns. AI researchers in China tend to focus primarily on technical development, with less emphasis than their Silicon Valley counterparts on broader narratives about shaping humanity’s long-term future.^[2]
• Monetization and distribution prospects drive “open” model release practices, which in turn bolster national competitiveness. Chinese developers lean “open” more consistently than their US counterparts, but not uniformly. Firms have increasingly adopted hybrid approaches, releasing some models openly while holding others behind APIs. These decisions are largely driven by prospective routes to revenue and distribution in domestic and international markets, at times reinforced by the stated philosophies of several founders. The state has separately backed the open-source ecosystem, where wide diffusion serves international reputation, discourse power, and global market share.

Martin Hackworth:

The academy and the media have, for some time now, worked overtime to position themselves beyond parody. It’s paid off. 

From the most recent of an exhausting series of examples, I give you Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell, who, after spending the better part of a career positioning himself as an expert on AI in higher education, has been exposed for using AI to wholly (or almost wholly) generate recent opinion pieces in major newspapers and scholarly work in academic journals, without attribution.

You simply can’t make this stuff up. Some things parody themselves better than anything else possibly can. 

Schnell, who is currently under investigation by a committee convened at the behest of the president of Dartmouth College, was exposed through parallel investigations by Dartmouth student journalists and the boondocks news website, Semafor, using Panagram to determine how much of Schnell’s recent academic and opinion work was AI-generated. 

The answer, according to The Dartmouth, was astounding. “Schnell’s works published in 2026 have a median ‘AI-written’ text percentage of 96%.”

It gets better, when The Dartmouth reached out to Schnell for comment, his reply, via email, was found to be 100% AI-written by Panagram. A recent Schnell op-ed column in The Washington Post, Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem, was flagged by Panagram as 100% AI-written. 

What Schnell lacks in originality, he more than makes up for in consistency. There’s that, at least.

Lucia Tramonte, Herbert Emery

Yet for about two decades, Canadian 15-year-olds’ mathematics skills have declined in every province. As our aspirations for a knowledge economy went higher, our educational outcomes sank steadily lower. 

For years, Canadian politicians and economists have promised a “knowledge economy” future. 

In the 2000s, Canadian economist Tom Courchene and many others argued that Canada’s prosperity would come from transitioning to a knowledge economy requiring a higher human capital workforce. 

Recent federal budget speeches highlight the need to invest in skills and training that workers will need for the “good-paying jobs of tomorrow.” And now, Ottawa’s “AI for All” strategy has set a goal of 250,000 AI-related jobs.   

Despite all of that, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows Canadian youth have not advanced in these skills, and most have even seen declines.   

——

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

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Jesse Smith

Now, I do not think these critics are all of a kind, but rather fall on a range. At one end are those who seek to defend the sort of research critiqued in the report, not on the merits, but rather through a strategy of “deny, deflect, disparage.” Those at the other end simply want our conversations about these matters to be more empirically grounded. To the former group, there isn’t much to say that will be constructive. To the latter, I reply: OK, fair enough.

Admittedly, for those of us who have long been observing, documenting, and decrying ideological scholarship, these dismissals can feel like a bit of gaslighting. Higher ed reformers have published books, articles, and edited volumes, blogged, tweeted, held conferences, and founded organizations, all dedicated to calling out and addressing this very problem. Given all these receipts, it is tempting to dismiss the dismissals of ideological scholarship as an act of willful ignorance.

Yet if we’re honest, we must admit that none of these efforts add up to a point estimate, a hypothesis test, or any other concrete empirical statement of the sort the report’s critics demand.

If a skeptic asks us just how serious or extensive the problem of ideological scholarship is, really, then we can regale them with tales of slanted sloppy scholarship and outlandish activist absurdities for days on end. But suppose they interrupt us and demand, “OK, OK, I get the gist. It sounds bad. But what’s your evidence?” We might respond in some puzzlement: “What are you talking about? I’ve been sharing evidence this entire time!” “No,” the skeptic counters, “you’ve been giving me anecdotes. I want something hard. What percent of scholarly claims are compromised by ideology? What proportion of published research falls below appropriate scholarly standards?” At this we might hesitate, stammer a little, and admit we can’t produce a figure. To which our skeptic, shaking their head ruefully, might sigh, “You really had me going there. Come find me when you have a spreadsheet in hand.”

Emil Kirkegaard: 

An English vocabulary test of 108 items in two formats: for most you pick the word that matches a given meaning; for the harder ones you pick the two or three words out of five that are synonyms. The words are rare on purpose — this is a test of the top of the vocabulary range, not of everyday English.

Vocabulary is the single best short measure of general intelligence in adults who grew up speaking the language. The items were calibrated on 499 US adults recruited through Prolific in 2023, and your score is reported as an IQ relative to White US adults of your age (vocabulary keeps growing into the 60s, so the same score means less at 70 than at 25). If English is not your native language your score will mostly reflect exposure to it, not intelligence. 

«

Matthew Yglesias:

I think it’s less understood that this specific fiasco in early literacy was downstream of the education theory world’s broader turn against explicit instruction. 

This has always struck me as a bit odd because “teaching things to people” is of course a human endeavor that exists outside the context of “being a K-12 teacher.” And it seems to me that outside of school, explicit instruction is the dominant instructional method. 

I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion. You trim the stem. You cut in half from end to end. You peel the skin. You make vertical slices that leave the root intact, then horizontal slices, and then another set of vertical slices across the third dimension. Here’s a neat graphic from “The Art of Manliness.” There are also many videos demonstrating this method. 

There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it. 

A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown. Chopping a bell pepper is a little different, but you can be shown that, too. You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping. Because even though some people really love cooking and find it to be an amazing avenue for self-expression, it’s also useful to know how to chop vegetables, and the best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it and then given the opportunity to practice. 

Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea. 

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them. 

But while there’s certainly more to life than explicitly instructing novices in the basics, across a huge range of domains, that really is the foundation of knowledge. You need to master sounding words out before you can analyze literature, and it’s extremely helpful to have your times tables and other basic math facts memorized so that your brain can think about more elevated mathematical questions without constantly tripping over the calculations. 

The association between fuzzy educational practices and left-wing politics strikes me as rather contingent. 

The Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, for example, all ran school systems that would read as strikingly “right-wing” by American standards (of course, these regimes weren’t exactly defunding the police, either). Antonio Gramsci also apparently had traditionalist ideas about elementary education.

———

Quinton Klabon:

Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, both use mathematics programs that do not work for most students. It should be scandalous.

“Learn the rules, then break them,” is obvious advice, yet both ignore it!

Explicit instruction schools outperform productive struggle ones.

———

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

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

That’s the amount Illinois school districts want for renovations, additions, fieldhouses, career centers, and “21st-century learning.” The cost to taxpayers of all those proposals over the next 30 years, if passed, will be nearly $4 billion when interest costs are included.

There’s more than just debt taxpayers will be on the hook for when it comes to school districts. There are several rate-hike referendums and a few 1% sales-tax-hike proposals, the biggest being for Lake County. Those hikes, if passed, will hit residents with another nearly $2 billion in new taxes over a ten-year period.

If that weren’t enough, there are 56 other bond and tax hike initiatives for various municipalities and library, park, and community college districts. They total another $315 million in borrowings (nearly $600 million in total costs to taxpayers when interest is included) and another $300 million in taxes over ten years tax as a result of rate increases. 

It’s impossible to satisfy Illinois politicians’ desire for more money. Never mind the highest-in-the-nation property tax rates, the spiking energy costs, and Illinois’ shrinking school enrollments – our local politicians everywhere want more. Unsurprisingly, talk of spending reforms and efficiencies for tax relief is nowhere to be seen. Share this piece with someone who still thinks Illinois taxes aren’t the problem.

We also know Illinois has the eighth-highest revenues in the country dedicated to K-12 education. When you add up all the local, state and federal dollars, Illinois takes in $26,200 per student – more than 42 other states (U.S. Census data). It’s by far the most in the Midwest. Indiana, Iowa and Kentucky all collect $7,000 to $9,000 less per student, and yet their student outcomes on national tests are on par with those of Illinois. Illinois doesn’t need more money for education.

———-

Overfunded”

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Jamie Dimon:

Since World War II, America has fostered economic and military relations, trading with more than 100 nations and forming more than 50 military alliances. The levers to accomplish our foreign-policy goals include trade policy, through tariffs, quotas, investment policies, regulatory barriers and other instruments. Another lever is industrial policy, which encompasses subsidized loans, tax rules, export credits, immigration policies, government investment and development finance.

We need to exercise all these tools to protect national security and resiliency. Foreign economic policy should maximize growth and competitiveness, both in the U.S. and for American companies doing business internationally. This would strengthen our allies economically and bind them closer to the U.S. and like-minded Western democracies. If the economic and military bonds among the world’s democracies weaken, there could be negative consequences for America. Our adversaries want to see our allies far less dependent on the U.S. and far more dependent on them.

Aakash Gupta:

The US government launched a single front door to every federal website once before. September 22, 2000. Bill Clinton announced it by webcast, gave the team 90 days, and a Berkeley professor named Eric Brewer donated the search engine for free.

That site is still online. It got renamed USA.gov in 2007. In one 2024 survey, 13% of users said they’d recommend it.

FirstGov indexed 27 million pages and let you search by topic instead of by agency. The press release reads almost word for word like today’s pitch, right down to the demo use cases of student loans and campground reservations.

So what went wrong the first time, and what’s different now?

The government never owned the engine. Brewer’s nonprofit paid his own company Inktomi to write the code, the code stayed proprietary, the donation was scheduled to dissolve in 2003, and GSA ended up having to procure a replacement from scratch. The front door was borrowed technology sitting on top of 22 agencies passing a hat to fund it.

America.gov runs on Gemini and Grok. Gebbia called them “great partners behind the scenes” this morning, and reporters couldn’t get an answer on how the models were procured. Borrowed engine, again.

The structural difference is the executive order. Clinton’s 1999 memo asked agencies to put their top 500 forms online. Today’s order directs every agency to integrate its public-facing services into America.gov, which means the door and the rooms behind it finally answer to the same person. Whether this version ages better than the last one comes down to that line, not the chat interface.

——-

Tyler Kim:

Instead of opening a bunch of tabs across different agency sites and trying to figure out which information actually matters to you, you can ask America a question and get the relevant answer from across 29,000+ official government websites, with the source and what to do next.

This looks better than any tech keynote since forever https://t.co/1VtnBirNko

— Alex MacGregor (@alexmacgregor__) September 30, 2026

Todd Bishop:

But if Lapsa and co-founder Tom Feldman were starting the Kent, Wash.-based rocket company today, he told a Seattle audience Monday, he’s not sure they’d do it here.

Lapsa cited factors including a political climate that vilifies successful companies and their founders; a state that does less than others to court promising startups; Seattle’s public schools, which he described as a failed institution; and the push for a wealth tax on unrealized gains, which he said would put startups out of reach for anyone who isn’t already wealthy.

“What will it take to ensure the next Stoke builds here, too? If Stoke were starting today, I’ll be straight honest with you: I’m not sure we’d make the same decision,” he said.

Lapsa delivered the keynote at “Manufacturing the Future in the PNW: Space, Defense & Robotics,” a Seattle Space Week event hosted by Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle.

The speech, which he read from multiple sheets of printed paper, drew on his family’s story and at one point left him choked up. The crowd gave him a standing ovation at the end. The talk was the buzz of the afternoon and the Space Week kickoff at the Museum of Flight in the evening.

Robert Pondiscio:

The U.S. already spends far more money per pupil than nearly every other nation on the planet. And our teacher salaries are above average. We should be at least a little curious how the money is spent and why outcomes are mediocre.

Jillian Forstadt:

In the wake of falling reading scores, schools across Pennsylvania are rethinking the curriculum they use to teach students to read and write. To support this, state lawmakers asked the Pennsylvania Department of Education to create a council to review the many different curriculum programs vying for district dollars.

But the reading experts and classroom educators Pennsylvania assembled for that council aren’t being leveraged in the way the law intended, according to multiple council members, education advocates and state lawmakers. They say that’s resulted in a rushed process, bungled by third-party consultants and uneven adoption across the state.

Without strong guidance, some council members warn students and parents may end up with “the cheapest thing available” instead of programs more effective at bringing up test scores. The final product, they add, could confuse school districts more than it helps them.

Instead of analyzing programs and recommending the best options, Drexel University professor Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo said she and her fellow council members are positioned as “more of a sounding board” for decisions already made by the Department of Education and consultants from the San Francisco-based education research firm WestEd. 

That’s counter to what one legislator who drafted the bill behind the council intended. 

In October 2024, lawmakers passed a bill ordering state education officials to assemble a 20-member council which would create a list of curriculum options school districts can adopt to meet the General Assembly’s standards for evidence-based reading instruction. 

Subsequent legislation in 2025 required them to come up with lists of universal screeners — used to assess students’ proficiency three times yearly — and professional training courses for teachers aligned with the latest research in reading instruction. 

But DeCarlo said the council has been presented with lists already reviewed and near-ready for release, without rigorous inspection by council members. 

“There’s not, ‘Should we include this screener? Should we include this professional development?’” she said. 

“Everything’s behind the scenes,” said Candace Hall, vice president of the Pennsylvania branch of the International Dyslexia Association, who frequently attends the council meeting as an onlooker. “They were talking about, ‘What does the document look like?’ And I’m thinking, is this the best use of our time? Is this the best use of the professionals on the other end?”

James Vaznis:

The law guarantees that each district will receive at least $30 more per student each year, but Beacon Hill lawmakers and Governor Maura Healey have repeatedly increased that amount due to escalating school costs. This year’s minimum increase in aid per student is $160, which about 85 percent of districts receive.

It took years of advocacy among teacher unions, families, and district leaders — worried about wealth gaps among districts — to obtain the original overhaul. New Bedford, Brockton, and Worcester threatened to sue the state amid stalled debates. 

“It was a long overdue I-O-U,” said New Bedford Superintendent Andrew O’Leary. “Those of us who worked in urban districts for a long time had seen the result of the fiscal inequities. It was constant budget crises and constant compromises.”

Beacon Hill lawmakers included language about closing achievement gaps to ensure prudent spending. Districts are required to file plans with the state detailing how the aid is being used to close these gaps.

The infusion of state aid has been a boon for New Bedford schools, insulating it for now from widespread budget cuts, which have afflicted other city departments in New Bedford. 

The city expects to receive $271 million in state education aid this year, a more than 60 percent increase from the 2019-2020 school year. The aid covers about 85 percent of what the state requires New Bedford to spend on education, including charter-school tuition payments.

The aid has allowed New Bedford to expand pre-K, upgrade school buildings, hire a more diverse workforce, and create inclusive learning environments for students with disabilities and English language learners.

The investments have produced some achievement gains, even as the district tries to boost MCAS scores to pre-pandemic levels.

Students who are chronically absent from school — a barometer the state watches closely — dropped to 21 percent last year, after hitting 48 percent during the 2021-2022 school year. More students are taking Advanced Placement exams and passing them.

Allysia Finley:

Universities across the country are slashing admissions to doctoral programs and freezing faculty hiring as they come under financial strain. Facing a $160 million deficit, the University of Chicago paused admissions this year into more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, including anthropology, social work, social thought, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and visual arts. 

Brown University suspended doctoral admissions for six humanities and social-science programs including Egyptology and Assyriology. “The University faces an urgent need to address the increasing cost of supporting Ph.D. students, which now ranges from a total of $700,000 to $1 million per student,” a faculty committee reported this spring. “The current costs are unsustainable and are already having significant, negative consequences on research productivity and graduate education more broadly.”

Neetu Arnold:

U-M President Domenico Grasso:

“The proposal has become the subject of extensive media coverage…

I worry further that our students could bear the consequences of those misperceptions, including being unfairly portrayed as coddled or unprepared”

Sean Davis:

As shocking as this news may be to some, I am not surprised to learn of this behavior by Jack Smith and the Biden administration. At the direction of the Biden administration, the federal government illegally censored The Federalist, tried to bankrupt us, and was eventually forced to admit it had zero legal authority to do any of it.

We took these thugs to court and won when we learned of their illegal censorship efforts, and we will explore all legal options going forward to deal with Jack Smith’s lawless and un-American attempts to silence us by spying on us.

Nobody in corporate media said a word in our defense when we were illegally censored. Outlets like CNN and the New York Times, which posture as First Amendment purists, had nothing to say about the Biden administration’s illegal attempts to punish us for our rigorous and accurate journalism.

I have zero doubt that they will be similarly silent today, because they are partisan hacks who supported Jack Smith’s egregious lawfare every step of the way.

Unlike corrupt corporate media, The Federalist will always fearlessly and accurately report the news, even in the face of never-ending Democrat assaults on the First Amendment, free speech, and freedom of the press.

We will never back down, and we will never stop reporting the facts and defending the greatest nation and greatest people on earth. Hillary Clinton couldn’t stop us, Joe Biden couldn’t stop us, and Jack Smith’s corrupt thuggery won’t stop us.

———

Catherine Herridge:

@ChuckGrassley told the hearing Smith obtained communications from at least 18 media outlets:

• 60 Minutes, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, LA Times, Mark Levin Show, Media Research Center, NBC, NPR, NY Magazine, Reuters, The Federalist, The Washington Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.

-Collection of media records is no small matter and may get not break through in the coverage

• Smith critics say it is more evidence of ‘government overreach’

——-

Never confirmed by the Senate.

——-

But that is NOT the context of the requirements under the Stored Communications Act. The requirements pertain to the subject of the subpoena, not anyone in that person’s universe.

———

“I request that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber or any other person, other than as necessary to comply with this request.”

———

Jack Smith submitted “cloaked in secrecy” phone record subpoenas for the very people in Government who have lawful oversight over him. The only reason we know this is because one of the companies (AT&T) decided to inquire as to the reason for the subpoena and secrecy and they pushed back on Smith. Let that sink in.

Jay Caspian Kang

How could someone who has written so forcefully about the very real problems facing low-income schools really believe that she can solve them with a transfer of privilege? Class and racial segregation are harms in themselves, and it is simply a fact of American society that, when you have a school for rich kids and a school for poor kids, the rich kids will fare better at just about everything. The project to ameliorate these harms has consumed much of the education sector for the past forty or so years, and very little progress has been made. Hannah-Jones has spent much of her career writing about how racially imbalanced outcomes, especially in education, were the product of segregation, yet, when it came to her own daughter’s academic career, it seems as though she didn’t give segregation enough credit.

But what I found most confounding was whom Hannah-Jones repeatedly blames for the failed experiment: Najya’s teachers. Hannah-Jones gets so mad at Najya’s fourth-grade teachers that she writes them an e-mail and copies the school’s principal. As the son of Korean immigrants, I can recognize this as tiger-parent behavior—exactly the sort of thing that a frustrated, upwardly mobile immigrant mother would do right before she pulled her kid out of the public-school system and enrolled them at the local Catholic school. “Our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers,” Hannah-Jones concludes—a line that could have come out of any school-choice, charter-school, or even right-wing education-reform pamphlet from the past three decades.

When Najya struggles with math during her freshman year at the predominantly white and Asian, academically screened high school that she chooses, Hannah-Jones does what countless bourgeois parents have done before her: she pays for math tutoring, and presses her class privileges in service of her child. Within this framing, she is the outraged mother bending the public system to fit her child’s needs. Hannah-Jones, who in the past has written forcefully against tutoring, has determined that these parents might have had a point.

———

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Becky Jacobs:

“Enrollment at UW-Madison is steady and stable, with a minor 1.6% fluctuation compared to fall 2025. Fall 2026 is our second highest undergraduate enrollment ever,” Greg Bump, a university spokesperson, told the Cap Times in an email Monday.

The university “recently graduated two larger classes and, along with peers, has seen declines in its master’s and Ph.D. student population, which may have been influenced by research funding and international issues,” Bump added.

UW-Madison welcomed 8,587 first-year students and 1,194 new transfer students this fall. While the number of transfer students decreased from the previous year, the number of first-year students marked a slight uptick.

The total of first-year students coming from Wisconsin continued to climb, with 3,920 residents among this fall’s freshmen class.

The university reported a record number of applicants seeking spots in its incoming class. Applications have steadily increased since 2009, and the number of new freshman applicants has more than doubled in the past decade from over 32,000 in 2016 to nearly 74,000 last school year.

UW-Madison says 75,234 students applied to become first-year Badgers this fall.

Gabby Herzig:

Four miles west of downtown New Haven lies a sprawling 720-acre piece of land. Exactly a century ago, two of the world’s greatest golf course architects carved 18 holes into a portion of that terrain, and a masterpiece was born: The Yale Golf Course.

C.B. Macdonald and his protegé, Seth Raynor, built what is unequivocally considered the top college golf course in the United States. “A back-breaking job over an untouched plot of rugged land whose hazards and greens have the kind of dimensions that one would have expected of Michelangelo,” Herbert Warren Wind, a Yale graduate and a dean of American golf journalism, once wrote.

Generations of Yale alumni have revered the course’s iconic bones, the often sub-optimal conditions excused as “shabby chic.” But many of them finally grew tired of watching the place wither. A course that Masters winner and architect Ben Crenshaw once called a “national treasure” deserved more, so the alums raised more than $30 million for a restoration project, recently completed by Gil Hanse, one of the leading modern golf architects. His work on Yale was widely considered one of the most highly anticipated projects of the year in the golf industry.

That is why, five months after the course’s April reopening, many members of the Yale community are now looking at the grass conditions and the course’s business plan, and are asking: What is going on?

“If someone gave you a Rembrandt, you’d take care of it,” says Jim Hoak, a 1966 Yale alum and financial supporter of the Yale Golf Course restoration project. “We’ve got a Rembrandt of golf course architecture.”

Minneapolis Times:

Requiring drivers in driverless cars is only the beginning. There are centuries of labor-saving inventions left to undo. #waymo mpls.pub/retro

Roland G. Fryer Jr:

This study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing management training for principals in traditional public schools in Houston, Texas, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across two years, principals were provided 300 hours of training on lesson planning, data-driven instruction, and teacher observation and coaching. The findings show that offering management training to principals significantly increases student achievement in all subjects in year one and has an insignificant effect in year two. We argue that the results in year two are driven by principal turnover, coupled with the cumulative nature of the training. Schools with principals who are predicted to remain in their positions for both years of the experiment demonstrate large treatment effects in both years – particularly those with principals who are also predicted to implement the training with high fidelity – while those with principals that are predicted to leave have statistically insignificant effects in each year of treatment. 

———

More.

Steven Crowder:

An audience member asks Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy how he can claim conservatives aren’t discriminated against in academia, after she had to lie about her political views on papers to graduate college and fears being passed over for promotions because of her politics.

Hailey Young:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senate Faculty Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution on grade inflation, urging a Yale College committee to develop grading policies that keep grades meaningful while minimizing harm to students and faculty.

The College’s Committee on Teaching, Learning and Advising, which the resolution is addressed to, is set to release recommendations on grade inflation in November, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis told the News earlier this month. A full faculty vote on that guidance is “anticipated in” December, according to a FAS-SEAS Senate press release.

“We hope these principles will help the Committee on Teaching, Learning, and Advising develop a policy that makes grades more meaningful, while also fostering the learning and intellectual exploration we want for our students,” Michael Farina, chair of the FAS-SEAS Faculty Senate, said in the press release.

The resolution comes after Yale and other Ivy League institutions have identified grade inflation as a concern in the past year. As the document notes, in April, the University’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education recommended that Yale establish GPA guidelines of “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard,” and provide percentile rankings for students.

Matthew Yglesias

The problem here isn’t about politics at all; it’s about life and work and an attitude toward work that I’m afraid I’ve seen from a lot of younger people over the past 10 years. If your boss wants you to do something, just go do it! If you find the work unpleasant and don’t want to keep doing it for the long term, that’s fine. Nobody stays in a job forever, and it’s always reasonable to want a better one. 

But you know what’s a good way to get a better job? Work really hard at the job you have and impress people. Feed the chameleon! 

When you’re young and don’t have the experience or knowledge of your more senior colleagues but also don’t have competing family responsibilities, you should be the one who is willing and eager to take stuff on and become a valued member of the team. 

Last week, I flew to Burlington on Monday to speak at Middlebury College that evening, then back to D.C. on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I took a train up to New York City for a dinner about energy policy, then returned to D.C. on an early morning train so I could appear on a Thursday afternoon panel. It was a kind of exhausting week, but I also like my job and it’s nice to talk to college students and in the end it was all fine. 

A kind reader asked for an update to the order and cost rankings to improve US schools based on the top four experts only.

Here it is:

The New York Times asked 37 researchers to rate ideas for reversing a decade of falling reading and math scores. We asked four AI assistants to size up those researchers, and four names rose to the top: Tom Kane, Matthew Kraft, Thomas Dee and Eric Hanushek.

So what happens when you re-rank the ideas using what those four have actually published? Tutoring and the science of reading keep their crowns. School accountability leaps from eighth place to third. Paying and keeping great teachers climbs. And ideas that mostly add money, like bigger budgets, across-the-board raises and smaller classes, slide down the list.

One catch: the Times didn’t publish how each expert voted, so this is our estimate based on their research, not their actual ballots. It covers the 19 ideas whose ratings appear in the article.

Four AI assistants score the experts behind the NYT’s school-fix rankings.

David Blaska:

If the Brewers can compete why can’t our schools? 

State school boss Jill Underly in her annual State of Education address last week asked Wisconsin voters to cough up more tax dollars and while we’re at it, stamp out competition to the government school monopoly. Because (the part she didn’t say), public schools can’t compete. Not on education results, not on price, not on parent satisfaction. At least, not all of them, all of the time.

Speaking in the Capitol Rotunda 09-24-26, Underly blamed “decades of below-inflation funding,” and attacked school choice as a diversion of public dollars into “unaccountable, private systems,” according to the Heartland Post.

Unaccountable? Except to the parents who CHOOSE those schools. As more parents are doing, especially in David Crowley’s Milwaukee. More money? The Wisconsin Policy Forum finds public school enrollment has plummeted 9.2 percent since 2011 even as overall staffing rose 7 percent.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce puts current statewide average funding per student at $18,592. That’s double the amount 25 years ago and 50 percent higher than a year of tuition at UW-Madison.

We quote again the Reforming Government Institute:

Madison’s district is squandering immense financial advantages. … middle-class Madison ranks in the 89th percentile among big districts nationally in school funding. They pay 1 adult for every 6 students, relying on local taxpayers to fund the lowest ratio [students to staff] of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts. 

[While] Madison’s test scores are near the state’s bottom. Controlling for poverty … Madison ranks 13th of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts on the Forward Exam and 12th on the ACT.

———-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Erin Gretzinger:

Chuck Moore, executive director of Impact Christian Schools, agreed the voucher cap lifting won’t significantly impact Madison private schools largely due to capacity limits. The nonprofit supports more than two dozen private Christian schools across Wisconsin, including several in Dane County.

“I think there’s a very big misunderstanding by people about the cap being lifted,” Moore said. “Even though there was a cap, it wasn’t impacting any of the (Madison) schools.”

Few public school districts have hit the cap in recent years. Last school year, private schools in three districts — Manitowoc, Watertown Unified and West Allis-West Milwaukee — had a total of 135 students on waiting lists due to the cap, according to the state’s education agency. Over 23,000 students statewide received vouchers the same year.

Moore said private schools in the Madison area are much more limited by capacity than a state-imposed cap. For example, Lighthouse Christian School, which serves about 300 students in grades K-8, recently expanded its facilities by 7,000 square feet to accommodate increasing demand, and school leaders hope to add high school grades down the line.

“Our biggest challenge is finding enough schools with enough spaces to fill with kids that are interested,” Moore said. “It’s a good problem to have.”

State aid for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program comes out of the money allocated to public schools. Last school year, Soldner said the Madison district lost about $6.6 million in state aid that was redirected to vouchers through the statewide program.

Under state law, school districts are allowed to increase local property tax levies to account for the loss of state funding for vouchers, shifting the tax burden to local residents. That path is how the Madison district has historically responded to vouchers rather than cut programming or use one-time funding to cover costs, Soldner said.

Madison’s School Board adopted a resolutionthis summer calling on state lawmakers, City Council members and county officials to increase transparency on property tax bills to show precisely how much money is going toward vouchers.

———

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Kelsey Piper:

But in this respect in particular, I’m on Hannah-Jones’ side. Student grades ought to reflect how well a student is doing. If a student is getting good grades, their parents ought to be able to assume that they’re adequately academically prepared for the next year’s material.

This is, these days, broadly not true.

——-

“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District

More “A” grades in the Madison School District

Robert Pondiscio:

I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere. The report cards and grades she received that concealed her elementary-level deficiencies were not caused by insufficient funding. These failures—all of them—were evidence of incompetence.

The injustice in Najya’s story is not that her school enrolled mostly poor minority children. It is that a school serving these children—an astonishingly well-fundedschool—was permitted to function this poorly.

A competently managed school puts a qualified teacher in front of children every day. When that teacher is absent, it has a plan for maintaining instruction. Teachers are expected to assign work, examine it, and provide feedback to students. They assess what children know and can do. Grades and report cards convey meaningful information to students and parents. When a child falls behind, someone notices and intervenes. Principals are responsible for making sure those things happen.

All of this should be obvious, yet has gone almost entirely unremarked upon in the voluminous response to Hannah-Jones’s recent essay about her daughter’s education. The piece has renewed arguments about integration, school choice, hypocrisy, parenting, and whether Hannah-Jones deserves credit for admitting that the decision she defended so passionately and aggressively harmed her daughter. But we should make sure not to lose sight of two more important lessons. The first concerns the stunning degree to which debates about education take institutional competence for granted. The second concerns a generation of education reformers who, whatever their overconfident mistakes, would have recognized instantly the failures Hannah-Jones describes and refused to excuse them.

The response to Hannah-Jones’s essay has been remarkably generous. She has been praised effusivelyfor the candor and courage required to admit that the choice she made for her daughter was a mistake. The praise is undeserved. Bravery requires more than confessing error after its consequences become impossible to ignore. Hannah-Jones did not merely make a private decision about her own child. She used her considerable influence to turn that decision into a moral argument. For years, she mocked, condescended to, or condemned parents and education reformers who believed disadvantaged children should not have to wait for some larger social transformation before receiving a decent education. She treated parents who sought out better schools for their own children as not merely making a different choice, but perpetuating inequities.

——-

More.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Dominic Pino:

Reforms for greater responsibility will have to be bipartisan too.

Washington Post:

The 2030s are crucial because, if present trends continue, the United States will begin running out of fiscal space by the end of the decade.

What does that mean? Think of debt as water inside a pot made of soft clay. The potter is the American workforce, and the government is pouring the water. The national debt is the total accumulation of water in the pot. The amount of room left in the pot is fiscal space.

Fiscal space is the difference between the government’s current level of debt and the maximum amount of debt it could take on before undermining confidence in its ability to pay it back. The government needs fiscal space so that it can manage events, such as major wars, recessions, pandemics or natural disasters, that might require an unexpected surge in borrowing.

The potter can make the pot larger by adding more clay and shaping the clay that is already there. That’s what economic growth does. For most of American history, the government has had plenty of fiscal space because the U.S. economy grew as the population expanded. If a crisis happened, the government could use up some of that fiscal space without having to worry about the pot overflowing.

Noah Smith

Giving students good grades when they don’t understand the material is the hallmark of a crappy school. In fact, this epidemic of fake grades is spreading; University of California professors are complaining that their students can’t do middle-school math. This is partly UC’s fault, for dropping standardized tests as an admission criterion, and letting in unprepared students. But blame also lies with the crappy schools who hand out A’s without actually teaching. 

What can fix our crappy schools? Hannah-Jones blames a lack of funding for low-income predominantly Black schools:

[N]ationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

This is absolutely ridiculous, and represents a very basic math error. Obviously what should matter here is spending per student, not total spending. We spend more on predominantly white districts than on predominantly nonwhite districts because there are a lot more predominantly white districts in America!

———-

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Vikas Shah

Once that direct connection is established, everyone is suddenly capable of reviewing code, changing code and making their own code, and therefore maybe their gatekeeping nonsense is no longer necessary.

That’s the negative version of it. The positive version is that there’s a loss of identity here for an entire class of developers who saw themselves as particularly gifted in this regard, and they were, and they were very highly paid to be able to do the tricks with the computer. Now those tricks have been widely distributed, and they are a little unsure what their place in the future is going to be, which I completely understand. We’ve gone through that many times in history, too: the Industrial Revolution, ATMs.

I just gave a keynote at Rails World last week where I used the parallel of painters who were doing portraits, and then, at the advent of the camera, that was suddenly a different thing. I think the camera is actually a good example here because, just like with software, if you wanted to have your portrait taken in the 1800s, you had to pay a master painter to do it over the course of three months. Who could afford that? Royals, aristocrats and basically no one else. What’s happened now is that we went from maybe tens of such portraits made every month to two trillion images snapped every year, primarily with smartphones. That means everyone suddenly has the capacity to capture a portrait and therefore create a memory.

Now, is the world better off because we went through that? I think hugely so. Was it better off for the people who trained to be really good at photorealistic portraits? Maybe not. Many of them pivoted and became Impressionists and other forms of artists. But that specific skill stopped having economic value in the same way, and I think the same thing is true of software development. We’re now all going to be able to create our own software. The mechanical notion of taking some requirements and turning them into code is not going to have economic value going forward.

[Editor’s note]: “Agent Luther” is David’s reference to Martin Luther, whose challenge to the Catholic Church in the 16th century rested partly on the idea that believers could read scripture for themselves rather than through the clergy. Here, AI agents play Luther, and programmers are the clergy.

Why AI now writes better code than almost any programmer

Elizabeth Martin:

Dr. Martin argues that violence against educators has become dangerously normalized, with society and school systems increasingly treating physical and verbal abuse as an expected part of teaching rather than an urgent workplace safety crisis.

Dr. Martin argues that violence against educators has become dangerously normalized, with society and school systems increasingly treating physical and verbal abuse as an expected part of teaching rather than an urgent workplace safety crisis.

When a student assaulted me, I braced myself for shock from the people I shared my story with. What I didn’t expect was the calm resignation in their responses, as if what happened was unfortunate but not surprising. Navigating the physical and emotional aftermath was hard, but realizing how normalized teacher violence has become was harder still. It left me wondering why society seems so willing to accept harm as part of the job.

The assault happened in seconds, but its impact has lasted years. A frustrated high-school emotional support student, tall and physically strong, suddenly tackled me through the classroom door during an escalation. I was 22 years old, a new mother with a six-month-old baby at home, and overnight my life shifted into a cycle of surgeries, medical appointments, and long recovery. The experience reshaped who I was; not just as a teacher, but as a wife and a mother trying to heal while caring for my child.

Dave Cieslewicz

Here’s a modest idea: what if we took schools off the property tax? I mean entirely. 

Doing that would address multiple problems while creating one big new one. 

First, the good news. Here are the problems it would address. 

High property taxes. Wisconsin has the 10th highest property taxes in the nation and schools make up 44% of them.

The cost of housing. The cost of living is the biggest issue right now (well, maybe next to data centers and AI) and housing is a big part of that. Governments are tying themselves in knots trying to address it, all the while ignoring the obvious thing they could do to bring housing costs down: cut property taxes. By this one sweeping act we would significantly reduce monthly mortgage and escrow payments, putting owner occupied housing in reach for more Wisconsinites. And we would put some downward pressure on rents, at least theoretically allowing renters to save for a down payment on a home. Since home ownership is the way most families create generational wealth this should be a policy priority. 

Inequities in education. School districts that are able to pass referendums are doing fine. In Madison the school board has so much money flowing in from its record $609 million in referendums passed in 2024 that it’s building a brand new bigger $100 million school building to replace one that is only half full now with a projection for even smaller enrollment in the future. On the other hand, districts with stingier (or smarter) taxpayers are struggling just to make ends meet. School funding based on referenda is bad public policy.

———

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs