Will Flanders, Cory Brewer, Lauren Greuel, Brooke Smith and Kyle Koenen:

Education in Wisconsin stands at a crossroads. Wisconsin has a strong educational foundation, an established system of public schools, and educational options that give families choices beyond their assigned district schools. But Wisconsin should aspire to more. After important reforms in the 2010s, progress on student achievement has slowed, and the state has lost ground on several national measures.

At the same time, Wisconsin faces renewed efforts to roll back policies like school choice and Act 10 that have expanded opportunity and strengthened the state’s educational system. For decades, Wisconsin was regarded as one of the nation’s strongest performers on measures of academic achievement. The goal should be to build on Wisconsin’s strengths and ensure that the state is once again among the nation’s leaders. The Wisconsin Education Comeback offers an optimistic agenda for doing exactly that.

In terms of raw national rankings, Wisconsin continues to perform respectably. But Wisconsin’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have declined from their pre-pandemic levels, reflecting a broader national decline in student achievement.

1 Wisconsin remains above average in eighth-grade performance, while in some earlier grades and subjects it has fallen behind its previous performance. Wisconsin’s relative performance also does worse when results = are adjusted for student demographics. Wisconsin continues to have one of the largest black-white achievement gaps in the country.

2 Wisconsin’s recovery from pandemic-era learning losses also has been slower than in many other states. Wisconsin’s approach to COVID of closing public schools has been devastating for Wisconsin students. Among states with available data, Wisconsin ranks 33rd of 38 states in math recovery and 30th of 35 in reading recovery since 2022.

3 Wisconsin students remain roughly a third of a grade level behind their 2019 peers in math, and more than half a grade level behind in reading. Wisconsin is hardly alone in confronting these challenges, but the experience of states recovering more quickly provides an opportunity to identify policies that could accelerate improvement here.

At the same time, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has made it increasingly difficult for Wisconsinites to understand where the state stands academically. In the past, Wisconsin aligned its state assessment (Forward Exam) proficiency standards with NAEP proficiency benchmarks, providing a useful point of comparison with a consistent, independent national measure. In 2023-24, the DPI altered this approach and since the new proficiency levels are not directly comparable with prior years, it is more difficult to evaluate long-term trends in state assessment results. Wisconsin should prioritize transparency and comparability so that parents and policymakers can accurately understand both the state’s progress and the opportunities for further improvement.

Wisconsin is also confronting significant demographic and financial changes. The state’s school-aged population has declined by 5.8% since 2013–14, and state demographic projections forecast an additional 11% to 16% enrollment decline over the next decade. Despite this fact, the number of non-charter public schools has declined by only about 2%, while public school staffing has actually grown by 13.5% over the same period. Districts have also gone to referendum at record rates to raise additional local revenue, while meaningful school district consolidation is avoided.

4 These trends raise important questions about how Wisconsin can organize and fund its schools most efficiently as enrollment continues to decline. Wisconsin is addressing these issues from a position of substantial investment in public education. Average revenue per student across the state now stands at $18,746 annually, putting Wisconsin in the middle of the pack nationally in education spending.

5 The experience of states like Utah and Mississippi demonstrates that strong or improving academic results do not necessarily require the highest levels of per-pupil spending.

6 Mississippi, which spends well below the national average per pupil, moved from 49th to 9th in the nation in fourth-grade reading between 2013 and 2024.

7 Utah spends less per pupil than almost every state in the country, yet consistently ranks among the top states nationally for education quality.

8 Both examples, and a plethora of research, suggest that how education dollars are used matters more than how much is spent.

—–

Preview of tomorrow’s speech from DPI: https://t.co/9D4sXdgtqT

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) September 23, 2026

More.

——

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

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I’ve known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: “Is this the end of us?” My answer was, “Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I’ve spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn’t quite right. I’ve sat in screening rooms where four years of people’s labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there’s really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don’t care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

Joanne Jacobs summary

In 2025, South Carolina’s high school graduation rate hit a high of 87 percent, reports Hechinger’s Ariel Gilreath. But only a third of seniors were college ready by graduation, based on their test scores and classwork. “More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic.”

South Carolina is trying to raise expectations. A new state law bans schools from setting “grade floors,” which set a minimum of 40 or 50 out of 100 instead of zero, even if no work is turned in. The idea is to persuade students who get a slow start not to give up on a passing grade.

But students have figured out they can pass with very little work, says Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school history teacher.

“At any high school graduation, I promise you, there will be a child who walks across the stage where every teacher in the room is going to go, ‘Wait, how did they graduate? They didn’t do anything,’” said Kelly.

Preston Cooper

Key Points

• Four-year colleges where entering students have higher SAT and ACT scores tend to have higher completion rates.
• When entering students have a lower-bound SAT score (or equivalent) of 1300, colleges have a predicted completion rate of 90 percent. But when entering students have a lower-bound SAT score of 900, the predicted completion rate falls to just 51 percent.
• The relationship between standardized test scores and college completion rates remains strong even after controlling for other factors, such as the student body’s socioeconomic and demographic distribution and institutional resources.
• The recent movement toward reinstating standardized testing requirements may help colleges ensure that the students they admit are academically prepared to complete college.

Executive Summary

Most selective colleges and universities stopped requiring standardized tests in admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have now begun to reinstate them. These policy changes highlight the role academic preparation plays in college completion outcomes. This report links the standardized test scores of students in the entering class of 2018—one of the last entering classes before the test-optional movement gained steam—to six-year college completion outcomes as of 2024.

Test scores and college completion have a strong relationship. Institutions where admitted students’ test scores are higher tend to have much stronger completion rates. For example, an institution where entering students have a 25th percentile SAT score of 900 has a predicted completion rate of just 51 percent. But an institution with a 25th percentile score of 1300 has a predicted completion rate of over 90 percent.

Erin Gretzinger

Panelists also pointed to the competition Madison schools are facing from other public school districts, charter schools and private schools.

———

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

Charles C. W. Cooke

‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

————

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

Washington Free Beacon:

The initiative’s website states that it is ‘historical material,’ and its leaders no longer list it as their employer on their LinkedIn pages

A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.

The center’s sudden closure comes as a surprise: It continued to update its public database tracking state attorney general actions relevant to its climate priorities until Aug. 31, the date of its apparent closure. It also released an episode of its in-house podcast, Recharged with the State Impact Center, less than three weeks prior to that date. And in its 2025 “year in review” report released last December, the center indicated that it would continue operating throughout 2026.

But prior to its closure, the center was coming under increased pressure for effectively paying the salaries of state law enforcement agencies that were pursuing lawsuits in line with the center’s priority of going after energy providers.

The center, which did not announce the closure in a press release or social media post, now states on its website that it is “historical material as it existed on August 31, 2026.” While much of the website remains intact, its contact email is now listed as a private non-NYU address, and a page identifying members of the center’s advisory board has been removed. Its now-former executive and deputy directors no longer list the center as their current place of employment on LinkedIn, according to a Washington Free Beacon review.

Katherine Bindley:

The storied venture-capital firm is investing $35 million in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22. Though named the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, the school will operate as an independent business led by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy.

“The idea is to create an AI-native education offering so that these students can be ready for jobs at the top leading tech companies, or to start their own tech company,” he says. “In the modern world, knowing how to build and ship things is even more important than it’s ever been.”

John Friedman, dean of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and an economist who has studied long-term outcomes from college, says having top industry leaders speak to students is an obvious plus from which students will benefit.

Douglas Belkin:

“Judgement is the skill that learning produces,” the committee wrote, “and it is the university’s most important contribution to a modern democracy.”

The report described a risk-averse student body anxious about the cost of college and finding a good job. Employers, the committee wrote, hold a “jarring” skepticism about the current generation’s ability to handle workplace demands, solve problems without clear answers, and recover from setbacks.

In many instances, the committee recommended a return to the basics. That includes more project-based learning and teaching time management strategies such as “navigating competing priorities, assessing workload, anticipating expectations, and adapting to personal and academic circumstances.”

Cornell students who pay full-cost spend nearly $400,000 for an undergraduate degree. The committee found expense along with opaque pricing to be a source of public distrust. But it advised against shortening the time to a degree to three years or leaning in to online education, and instead suggested establishing a task force to develop a new tuition model.

For the university’s own finances, the report urged school leaders to push for robust federal and state funding, following the Trump administration’s attacks on research dollars. Regarding research, the committee recommended examining “publish-or-perish incentives that emphasize quantity over quality.”

Nicole Wizman:

The whole operation ran for just 203 days, was managed under a no-bid contract (awarded directly, without competition) by Cherokee Nation Management & Consulting (CNMC) — which is owned by the Cherokee Nation, a tribe headquartered in Oklahoma. According to Pomona whistleblowers, CNMC may have released children into the hands of labor and sex traffickers.

Breaking the $782 million down: CNMC received around $707 million through a no-bid contract to set up and run Pomona. HHS then paid the Fairplex another $75.65 million for the site itself. Roughly 8,450 kids passed through the facility, where they each received a cot, meals, clothes, a medical screening, case management, some schooling and recreation, and a ride to their sponsor. Divide the CNMC contract alone by the number of children that passed through the facility, and it comes to $83,656 per child — or $92,608 if you include the separate Fairplex payment. HHS said children at its emergency intake sites spent an average of about two weeks in care, which would put Pomona’s implied cost at roughly $6,615 per kid, per day — or $3.85 million for every day Pomona operated. 

“In California, every child goes to sixth grade camp,” Herb Morgan, the Republican candidate for California State Controller, told Pirate Wires in an interview. (For those outside the state: this is a common California rite of passage.) “You get on a bus, you go to the camp with all your classmates. There are adults there that supervise. You do crafts, you shine a rock, you make a wood box, you shoot a bow and arrow.” The two weeks costs $800 to $1,100 total, food and lodging included. 

“So the question is,” Morgan asked, “what is this money for?”

Ariel Gilreath:

Two days after South Carolina’s grade floor law was signed, faculty at Harvard University passed a policy capping the number of students who can receive A’s to 20 percent of an instructor’s class plus four students. The move was a response to perceived grade inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic: A report from the college showed A’s made up two-thirds of the grades given to undergraduates at Harvard in the spring of 2025. 

Some education experts blame grade inflation in K-12 classrooms for contributing to the problem at the college level. 

“It’s hard to hold the line at the higher ed level if you have kids coming into higher ed who are less prepared than they used to be,” said David Griffith, national research director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

This spring, testimony from educators and advocates on grade floor policies alarmed South Carolina legislators. The state is “hurting these kids” by having grade floors in schools, Rep. James Teeple, R-Charleston, said during a committee meeting.

In 2025, South Carolina’s on-time high school graduation rate was nearly 87 percent, a 10-year high point for the state. At the same time, only 33 percent of seniors were considered college ready by graduation — a metric on the state’s report card based on college admissions test scores and advanced classes. More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic. 

Robert Pondiscio

Steven Wilson’s The Lost Decade¹ is not just a book—it’s a requiem. It’s a mournful recounting of a moment when the education-reform movement, particularly the “no excuses” charter school model, seemed poised to deliver on an audacious promise: With focus, energetic effort, and commitment, schools could close the achievement gap between black and white students, lift low-income children out of poverty, and rewrite the script of American education.

For a brief, shining moment, we had it right. And then we lost our nerve. Wilson’s book, a meticulous autopsy of this rise and fall, is both a sympathetic chronicle and a call to a reckoning. The tragedy isn’t that “no excuses” failed—it’s that we convinced ourselves that it did.

Let’s rewind the tape. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the first charter schools were opening and promising to be “engines of innovation” that would shake American education from its somnambulance, a new breed of inner-city school emerged: unapologetically rigorous, laser-focused on results, and built on the insistence that poverty need not be destiny. Schools like KIPP (the “Knowledge Is Power Program”), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and the Noble Schools didn’t just talk about high expectations—teachers and staff embodied and enforced them. Stealing a page from the era’s “broken windows” policing model, these schools sweated the small stuff. There were crisp school uniforms, homework assignments every night, students sitting up straight with eyes tracking the teacher, along with carefully crafted lessons and an ambitious curriculum. No more hand-wringing and no more alibis to explain away our multi-generational failure to adequately educate minority children and lift families out of poverty. More than a charter school model, no-excuses was a rallying cry: No child is a failure. We, rather, have failed children.

Wall Street Journal:

In a letter to Berkeley’s lawyer, the Justice Department says Berkeley Law violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Asian and white applicants during the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles. Those two admissions years were after the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that race preferences are unconstitutional.

“This discrimination is apparent from the significant disparity in objective academic metrics between racially preferred applicants, and applicants from non-preferred races,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote. In 2025 black law school applicants were 5.8 times more likely to be admitted than white applicants with comparable applications. In 2024 the black candidate was 6.5 times more likely to be admitted.

The appearance of deck-stacking gets worse with the LSAT scores. Between 2021 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of admitted applicants, disaggregated by race, hardly budged. The median Asian score was 172 in 2021 and in 2025. The median white score was 171 in 2021 and 172 in 2025. The median black score was 165.5 in 2021 and 167 in 2025.

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has suggested schools should use proxies for race in the admissions process as well as in faculty hiring. A school could use “unstated affirmative action,” Dean Chemerinsky said, and keep quiet about it. “What if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements, but still wants to do it,” he remarked about faculty hiring, according to the Justice letter.

By Natalia Mochernak and Amanda Velasco:

Seven current and former UCLA employees alleged in at least 22 separate whistleblower and retaliatory reports that the university’s head of strategic communications fostered a toxic work environment and mismanaged department funds, according to court documents. 

Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications since 2019, filed a lawsuit against the UC Board of Regents on Aug. 26 to block the release of an investigative report that she claimed would damage her reputation. The investigation – which was conducted by Grutman Law, P.C. and commissioned by the UC Board of Regents – includes details about Osako’s conduct and workplace relationships, according to court filings. 

UCLA posted in its whistleblower portal Feb. 20 that Grutman’s investigation substantiated multiple allegations brought forth in the whistleblower reports and that they forwarded the findings to Chancellor Julio Frenk’s office, according to court documents. Osako has remained in her position since.

Veronica Dagher and Anne Tergesen:

Many Americans dream of relocating in retirement to stretch their nest eggs, and they often do it by moving to low-tax states.

Choosing a state with no income tax, like Florida, or lower tax rates promises relief for retirees tapping 401(k)s. But such moves are rarely just about savings. For some, total spending remains almost the same, or even rises, but funds shift toward upgraded amenities or travel.

About 60% of retirees who move after retiring went to a more affordable area, and pocketed capital gains from their houses, according to a 2023 Vanguard study. It found these retirees can also typically unlock around $100,000 in home equity by doing so.

But lower-cost areas aren’t always what they seem. While state income-tax burdens might shrink, property taxes can jump, or vice versa. Many states exempt Social Security from state income tax, but only a few offer similar treatment for retirement-account withdrawals. Other costs, such as homeowners’ association dues or home insurance, may rise.

Seven retirees opened up to us about their finances, the tax breaks they gained, the costs that surprised them and how their new ZIP Codes changed their lives.

Daily Dodge:

The Beaver Dam Unified School District has received a $125,000 grant through Meta and the ChangeX grant program to support the second phase of its research-based mathematics curriculum.

The funding will help strengthen math instruction focused on problem-solving, critical thinking and real-world applications. It also will provide teachers with additional curriculum resources and instructional support.

The grant follows a $50,000 award BDUSD received through the ChangeX program in June to support technology resources and robotics. The district applied for the additional funding in August to address curriculum needs.

Ryan Cashman, BDUSD director of business services, said the district will continue seeking opportunities to bring additional resources into its schools.

“We are very appreciative of this contribution and will continue to look for opportunities to maximize resources and bring additional investments into our schools that directly benefit students,” Cashman said.

Danielle DuClos:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction faces a backlog of 150 license misconduct investigations and is asking state lawmakers to double its team dedicated to reviewing and gathering evidence.

The request follows a Cap Times report last fallthat revealed the department has investigated hundreds of educators following allegations of sexual misconduct and grooming, and the department dedicated scant resources to conducting those probes.

Department spokesperson Chris Bucher said last year the agency had one full-time and one part-time investigator, and he called those staffing levels inadequate to handle the 113 investigations conducted each year, on average.

Lawmakers later questioned State Superintendent Jill Underly about the staffing levels and why the department she leads hadn’t previously requested more funding or positions specifically for licensing investigations. Lawmakers called Underly and other top education officials to testify following the Cap Times report.

At one hearing, Underly told lawmakers the Department of Public Instruction would welcome additional resources to move faster through investigations but she didn’t know how many more investigators would be helpful.

Department officials are now asking lawmakers for two more full-time paralegal positions dedicated to license investigations in the 2027-2029 state budget. The positions would cost $350,000 over the two years.

———-

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

Coleman Hughes

It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter Najya to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.

At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.

Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.

When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”

————

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

Alex Tabarrok:

Nikole Hannah-Jones famously sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.

The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false. The problem isn’t funding. The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.

Nationally, there haven’t been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades. NHJ has reckoned with her failing her own child but she has not yet reckoned with the failure of her entire educational philosophy.

The role of ideology in blinding NHJ is dramatic. NHJ’s daughter earns high grades in her math classes but she fails standardized tests. Most parents, especially conservatives, know what that means. The classes are a lie. But NHJ is blinded by ideology and assumes it’s the standardized tests that are biased. It’s only when her daughter demands to go to a better school that she and her daughter confront the truth:

Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.

The confrontation is almost disastrous:

My child’s confidence wilted like an unwatered plant. She started to develop an almost debilitating anxiety around taking tests. She became sullen at school and began to act out. For the first time ever, I got messages from teachers about Najya’s behavior.

Fortunately, Najya battles back and recovers but much more could be said here about the costs of social promotion, DEI and mismatch on the so-called beneficiaries.

Ironically, NHJ invokes the heroic history of Black Americans integrating schools to justify keeping her own child in a segregated one. Painful.

————

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

Rich Calder, Susan Edelman, Deirdre Bardolf:

Failing the New York State teachers’ exam really paid off — especially for a Queens man who learned this month he’s getting a $2 million windfall over it.

Roughly 5,200 black and Hispanic ex-Big Apple teachers and once-aspiring educators are expected to collect more than $1.8 billion in judgments after the city stopped fighting a nearly three-decade federal discrimination lawsuit that found a certification exam was biased.

It’s the largest legal payout in city history.

As of Friday, 225 people who failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test used for teacher licensing from 1994 to 2014 had already been notified they’re getting settlements of at least $1 million, according to an analysis of Manhattan federal court records. 

Court rulings found the exam violated civil-rights laws, allowing far more white candidates to pass.

The case is expected to generate hundreds of other future million-dollar awards.

Herman Grim, 64, of Queens, on July 5 was awarded the biggest judgment to date — a jaw-dropping $2,055,383. 

It includes $1,583,114 in back pay for time never clocked, lost interest accrued, and other compensation.

————

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

————-

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

Andrew Rotherham

In my view, given her profile, previous writing and past statements, Hannah-Jones deserves credit for doing this in public rather than sweeping it under the rug one way or another. Few would have noticed if she didn’t revisit her choice this way, or if she quietly used the various carve outs available to people with power to get her kid into a better situation and move on. Much of the criticism coming at her since the article published is just people who don’t like her taking the chance for an easy dunk. It’s about priors, not the case she’s making here. 

I get it. Even besides the various internal Timesdramas she’s had a hand in, the stealth revisions The Times did to 1619 Project text as well as the walk back of its central claim are a problem. Some aspects of that project are questionable—is there really a direct line from plantation economics to Excel spreadsheets?—even as overall it raises questions people should reckon with. (Sloppy consumption of that work helped fuel the debilitating performative adult politics circle jerks in education non-profits that shoved a focus on improving academic outcomes for underserved kids to the sidelines not to mention actual public policy activity in the same vein). And Hannah-Jones has been no friend of many school improvement efforts anyway. (I don’t have a dog in the, in my view reductionist, 1619 v. 1776 fight because I think America wasn’t truly one country until 1865 when the issues of slavery and secession were settled.) Still, it never hurts to have some grace, and this is a noteworthy article for her to write. You should read it. 

That said, there are problems with it worth exploring. The article is less compelling for what it says than for what it doesn’t. (And on the theme of credit where it’s due, Derrell got there first. In 2017.)

Broadly, yes, this is a first-person testimonial not an analysis of the system, but she does nonetheless implicate the system and its structural issues in ways familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with her work. So it’s odd and fair game that she then fails to discuss reform or the broader context in New York City schools. Successful models in the public system that aren’t simply the result of skimming never come up. Neither do the successful and popular charter schools (some so successful officials are fighting to squelch their data.).

———

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

Eugene Volokh

In Magistrate Judge Lara Eshkenazi’s opinion Monday in Mercante v. Tarzia (E.D.N.Y.), defendant’s counsel (Coleman) filed an exhibit containing “wire transfer instructions to [plaintiff’s counsel’s] firm’s bank account”:

Exhibit F purports to be redacted, and a white box with the word “REDACTED” covers the bank account information.  The exhibit cover page also states that the bank account information is redacted.  However, Mr. Coleman failed to adequately redact and remove the sensitive financial information, as the text is accessible by copying and pasting, or by clicking and moving the white box covering the text.

The court concluded that this didn’t qualify as contempt of court (based on of its failure to comply with a protective order, “which prohibits materials marked ‘confidential’ from being filed on the public docket”):

While the mistake reflects some carelessness on Defense counsel’s part, his initial attempt to redact the information and immediate acceptance of responsibility for his error leads this Court to conclude that Plaintiff has not carried her burden of demonstrating by clear and convincing evidence that Defense counsel was not reasonably diligent in attempting to comply with the Protective Order.

But the court granted sanctions against defense counsel, in the form of having to pay expenses for “data breach mitigation” services:

Joe Tabor, Riya Kapoo

Reforms could diminish the risk of new crimes committed on pretrial release.

Three years ago today, Illinois became the first state to entirely eliminate cash bail.

The measure was part of the larger crime bill known as the SAFE-T Act. For Chicago, the results of ending cash bail have been mixed.

Here are three things to know about the end of cash bail in Chicago:

• Almost half of all defendants arrested in Cook County cannot be legally detained after their first court appearance.
• When comparing similar defendants, more were released, and more were charged while on release, after cash bail ended.
• Overall crime has dropped, but that is in line with national trends.

Reforms such as easing the process for prosecutors to file a petition seeking detention and allowing detention for repeat offenders or those deemed a threat to animals or property would mitigate the problems with the measure.

Why 50% of Cook County arrestees avoid pretrial detention

Gregory Gundersen:

Intermediation

Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract unit of value, called money. They reason that if everyone uses stones to represent value, then people can transact when they would like, rather than when both parties are willing and able to barter. The villagers have abstracted value.

Supply. The villagers picked special gray stones to be money because the stones were portable, durable, and most importantly hard to collect. The only way to get them was to walk an hour outside of town and spend all day sifting through the riverbed. Sometimes, a villager would do this and only find one or two special stones. And so like any other job—winemaking, farming, cobbling—the job of collecting stones was self-regulated by the value of the activity. If the villagers collected too many stones, like they did after a flood cut open a new seam of special stones in the riverbed, then the cost of goods would go up and the relative value of stones, and thus collecting them, would go down. Or vice versa. So the villagers decided that anyone could collect stones, just as anyone could forage for berries or dye cloth. More or fewer people would do it as demand changed.

Debt. The rancher has a problem with money. He raises cows, but this takes a long time, much longer than it takes the dairy farmer to gather fresh eggs. He must go long periods of time without earning more stones. So the villagers decide that some people can simply pay for goods later. The two parties just record the details of the trade on a piece of paper and settle up later. The person who owes money is said to have debt, while the person who is owed money is said to have credit. For example, the woman who owns the general store in town is happy to let the rancher buy on credit, since she has known him since they were both children. However, she does not sell on credit to strangers or to people who do not pay their debts.

Wall Street Journal:

The federal program soon will let Americans get an Education Freedom Tax Credit of up to $1,700 for donating to scholarship organizations. “Illinois residents: Take Advantage of Indiana’s EFTC Program,” the billboard says. “Turn your donation into opportunity for students and a tax credit for you.” The sign shows two smiling students, framed against Lake Michigan, with the Chicago skyline behind them.

Sponsoring the ad is the Institute for Quality Education, based in Indianapolis, which plans to participate in the federal program as a scholarship granter. Luring donors from across the state line could be a windfall: Illinois residents are as eligible as anyone to take the federal tax credit, but they can’t make those donations to local scholarship groups as long as Mr. Pritzker refuses to opt in.

Signing up for the scholarships shouldn’t be a hard choice for states. Colorado’s Democratic Governor describes it as “free money.” Funds can be used at schools both public and private, including for tuition, tutoring, after-school programs, uniforms, or support services for students with disabilities. Yet Mr. Pritzker has dithered, not wanting to cross the teachers unions.

Leaders of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association signed a letter urging Democratic Governors to reject the federal program. Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said accepting the scholarship money would “normalize a voucher scheme that Illinois has already rejected.” She means the state’s defunct Invest in Kids tax credit, which funded thousands of scholarships, and had a waiting list of more than 24,000 children, until Illinois Democrats killed it in 2023.

Dan Rockmore:

As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward.

When I’m in New York, I take spin classes on the Upper East Side. The students—it’s a class, after all—pack into a dark, humid room. The music is loud. The air reeks of effort. When the black light hits, our towels fluoresce. “I can do that!” we shout, answering the instructor’s call. Everyone is working.

It is not especially pleasant. It is not supposed to be. We have chosen, quite deliberately, to subject ourselves to forty-five minutes of physical discomfort for benefits accrued down the road: better health, greater strength, a future version of ourselves that will justify the soreness tomorrow morning. Moreover, we are doing this by engaging in an activity that, in the real world, we might very well avoid because there are perfectly good machines to do it for us. A car or an e-bike can more easily get you from point A to point B. Yet no one in the class doubts that what we are doing is necessary. No one would dream of outsourcing it. It wouldn’t make sense.

I’ve been thinking about that room a lot lately, because I spend most of my professional life in a different kind of room entirely—the university classroom—and, as with the spin class, we now have machines that can do much of what we ask students to do in the name of training. Unlike with spinning, the effect has been to call the whole enterprise into question. Rather than “I can do that!,” the refrain I hear most often from students and colleagues is: “Why are we doing that?” I’m starting to think that the gym, of all places, might have some answers.

I teach mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth, and, on the first day of a large introductory course, I always ask the students to tell me, by a show of hands, how many of them are skilled at a sport or an instrument. It’s usually all of them. I ask whether they had to practice to become good, a question that is met with lots of nodding and a hum of general assent. The same is true for math, I tell them, and by extension for critical thinking, for writing, for argument. They nod. They understand the analogy immediately and completely.

On September 15, three New York Times journalists spoke at UW–Madison’s Pyle Center about why trust in the news is low and what they do about it: editor Patrick Healy, White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Chicago bureau chief Julie Bosman.

They explained how they decide what to cover, from Wisconsin’s governor primary to a two-hour Oval Office interview with President Trump. They talked about why they ask pointed questions instead of trading insults, and how they tell fair criticism from bad-faith attacks.

Students pressed them on bias, money, and the paper’s opinion pages. Note that an ID was required to enter and visitors had to pass through security screening.

The full transcript and photos are here.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released Know My School: Wisconsin’s School Performance Dashboard, a new and improved interactive school data explorer, which provides parents, taxpayers, and policymakers with the clearest picture yet of how Wisconsin’s school districts perform, spend, and grow. The dashboard can be accessed at KnowMySchoolWI.com.

The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “While most of the data displayed on our dashboard is available on the Department of Public Instruction’s website, it’s often disjointed and difficult to draw conclusions from. Our updated dashboard will serve as an important resource to districts, parents, and taxpayers. WILL values transparency and accountability for schools regardless of sector. This dashboard helps achieve those ends by demonstrating how taxpayer money doesn’t drive student outcomes; student proficiency remains low despite DPI’s lowered standards, and that more families continue to choose alternatives to traditional public school.”

Erin Gretzinger

In setting a $609 million preliminary plan for this school year’s budget, the Madison school district is counting on lawmakers to fulfill their promise to boost how much the state reimburses school districts for providing special education. ### Note that total spending is far higher: $989,102,432 for 25,003 students or $39,559 per student.

June, 2026 Madison School District Budget Book.

In the current state budget, lawmakers pledged to up the reimbursement rate from 38% to 45% by this school year. But the state has fallen short of fully funding that increase because lawmakers set aside a pot of money that’s too small to keep up with all the costs schools are reporting.

Public schools are required by law to provide special education services to all students who need them, meaning schools must divert money from other places if needed to pay for special education costs not covered by the state and federal government. Over the past 25 years, state aid for special education increased by about 82%, but the costs reported by schools grew by about 103%, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Last school year, the Madison school district set aside about $62 million from its general fund — which is fueled by local property taxes — to pay for special education services. About 4,260 Madison students, or 17% of the district, had a disability last school year, according to state enrollment figures.

This year, the stalled boost in state aid for special education has created unpredictability for Madison schools and others trying to craft balanced budgets, said Bob Soldner, the district’s assistant superintendent of financial services. Fulfilling the boost would provide more than $5 million for the district, he said. That amount of money could cover scheduled pay raises for all staff, for example.

“Our hope is … the new Legislature and the new governor are going to live up to the commitments and fully fund what they said they’re going to fund,” Soldner said. “That’s a big uncertainty, and it’ll continue to be an uncertainty until the spring of 2027 when we get a sense of, is there going to be some legislation to come through, and is the state going to meet its commitment to reimburse special education costs?”

f higher state aid levels don’t come to fruition by the end of the school year, Soldner said the School Board could tap the district’s budget reserves meant for emergencies to cover the pay raises, but that move would have “immediate negative consequences.”

“Once we use that one-time safeguard, it’s gone,” he said. “The way the state has backed away from its commitment to share in the cost of local public schools has put our district in a bind anywhere more than this past this school year.

…..

Last year, the district raised its property tax levy by 20.4% — the largest hike in more than three decades — after voters approved$607 million for two referendums.

……

Over the last decade, the district’s staff levels have risen faster than enrollment, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Budgeted positions for non-union professional staff made up the bulk of the increase, while budgeted positions for teachers and student support staff slightly decreased.

———

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

Teagan King:

If the software flags a student’s reflection as concerning, the school principal and student services team are alerted, and district staff will decide on the appropriate response, Leia Esser, the district’s executive director of student and staff supports, said in an email.

Responses can include a teacher check-in, family contact, connection with a school mental health provider or community services and other resources.

“If a response suggests an immediate safety concern, staff follow the same safety and crisis response procedures they would use if a concern were shared in person,” Esser said. “Sown to Grow supports identification and communication, but MMSD educators remain responsible for every decision about follow-up.”

———

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

Nicholas Bagley, Robert Gordon

The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can savegovernments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

Although few in number, the worst employees in most jobs are very bad — worse than the bell curve would predict. These “bad apples” can also spoil morale and productivity for others.

JD Busch:

For example, The Latin School of Chicago tells parents that its nearly $50K tuition only covers 85 percent of the school’s overhead, and that giving pays for one of every five school days. Yet the US Department of the Treasury is moving to kill the tax exemption entirely for schools like Latin and Francis Parker, institutions which are “flagrantly violating the law, by their own admission,” according to a local philanthropist with close ties to the Chicago private school community.

The proposed regulation (REG-119986-25) observes that a private school is not operated for charitable purposes if it “adopts, maintains, or enforces any policy or practice that discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin” in any educational policy, admissions policy, scholarship program, athletic program, “or other school-administered or school-supported program.”

“The operative concept here is ‘any purpose,’ and good intentions are not an excuse,” the donor suggests. The proposed regulation suggests that racial discrimination in education is against fundamental public policy “regardless of the intent behind it,” including where it is “defended as serving remedial or diversity-related objectives.”

18,000 schools are in scope

Wall Street Journal:

Empire State high schoolers have been measuring their knowledge on Regents exams since 1878. They must take five exams—English, math, science, social studies and “any additional” test. But starting in 2028 they’ll no longer have to pass the exams to graduate. A Board of Regents commission recommended this change in 2023, and on Monday the Regents voted to instruct the state Education Department to move ahead.

State officials insist they’re not rejecting rigor, but their ideas for replacing the graduation standards aren’t reassuring. Though details aren’t final, a state Education Department statement notes that state tests will be one of “multiple sources of evidence” that schools and districts use to assess students. Others include teacher observations and “performance-based learning experiences.”

Districts will also have to find a way to measure students for graduation by a new “portrait of a graduate,” who can be only 1/6th “academically prepared.” His other five attributes can include “reflective and future focused” and a “global citizen.” You can’t make this stuff up. This graduation overhaul is about “creating deeper, more meaningful educational experiences,” said state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.

Allysia Finley:

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have been matched by an astonishing decline in student learning. More evidence arrived last week from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures skills of 15-year-olds around the world every three to four years.

Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three-fourths of countries. U.S. math and reading scores fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning and trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Canada and Australia.

“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?

This American Life:

Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an essay about her decision to send her daughter to a segregated, low-income school. The essay was influential on parents and policymakers, and Nikole spent a decade hearing from people about how it changed their thinking. Now, she hears from one more person: her daughter, in a conversation ten years in the making. 

———

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

Jim Zellmer:

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level.”

Flash forward 28 years to a July 29 Rotary Club event. Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard highlighted recent improvements in literacy in district schools. But he pointed out that proficiency rates still hovered around just 40% at the elementary, middle and high schools he listed.

“We should not be sitting in a place where we can say 60% of our students are not proficient at their grade level in reading,” Rebecca Kundert, the district’s senior executive director of curriculum and instruction, said in follow-up remarks.

As Wisconsin embarks on another major effort to improve reading, the history of previous initiatives shows why sustained attention matters.

“It’s complicated,” one retired teacher said at the Rotary talk. Many factors add complexity, including readiness to learn, distractions, leadership turnover, attention spans and civic malaise.

Nearly three decades have passed without Madison reaching that goal, even as the district spends substantial money. It has a total budget equivalent to about $26,000 per enrolled student — far above average.

But Wisconsin doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Other states have significantly improved their reading proficiency.

50can:

A 50-STATE SURVEY OF 23,000 PARENTS

The “State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents” is the second edition of a 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research. The survey report offers an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

The 275-page report is available for download in full and by question or state.

Robert Schmad:

A program designed to assist businesses impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota has been shut down following widespread fraud concerns, according to local news reports.

The board of Hennepin County in Minnesota, home to Minneapolis, approved $2 million in funding for local businesses impacted by Operation Metro Surge — a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota launched in December 2025. The county received roughly 300 applications and ultimately distributed about $500,000 to 82 applicants, while more than 200 applications were flagged for potential fraud, according to local reports.

“The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it’s a problem because clearly there’s no fear out there,” Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde said, according to Kare 11. “Until we get it where people fear things, then they’re gonna keep doing it.”

Robert Ordway

Evan Barker’s tell-all reveals a party in turmoil.

On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.

Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.

Nearly two years later, the full story behind Barker’s split from the Democratic Party is told in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. While she isn’t the first person to write about Kansas, the working class, or the Democrats’ fall, Barker is the first to do it with a true insider’s perspective. The solution she offers reads less like a fix than a final warning to a party that looks to be spiraling out of control.

A 20-Year Diagnosis

In 2004, before Barker had entered politics, Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas?, arguing that Democrats had drifted toward economically conservative policy while wading ever deeper into culture-war territory. His prescription was illustrated by example: the state’s most successful Democrat, Governor Kathleen Sebelius, won by doing the opposite. She focused on issues people like Barker’s family cared about—health care and school funding—while steering clear of hot-button social fights. Diagnosis and prescription were delivered together. That was before social media, algorithms, and Super PACs came along to flatten any bottom-up narrative a candidate might otherwise build.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh–grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.

Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.

I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysisby EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these de 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.

more. Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Published 2016)

———

Renu:

But it’s just unfathomable to me that NHJ wasn’t (at least I assume this from the piece) checking her daughter’s homework every night, wasn’t practicing math drills, wasn’t forcing her daughter to read books at higher grade levels, etc. (Also, this isn’t a stay-at-home-parent luxury; my father is a cardiologist who, even amidst brutal on-call schedules, helped me prepare for spelling tests.)

Critics of academic excellence such as NHJ (and the Bo French’s of the Right) demonize Asian families (many of whom are low-income and/or immigrants) for prioritizing education, discipline, strong study habits, delayed gratification. Yet, then they turn around and act shocked when their children aren’t getting into NYC’s specialized high schools or UT, blaming racism or some silly Asian immigrant conspiracy.

———

Daniel Friedman:

But then it turned out her kid really couldn’t do math. And, like her daughter, she didn’t learn anything.

———-

Adam Kushner:

By the time our son was in fourth grade, he was on level with his peers — and well behind where my wife and I had been growing up. We’d just had a third child. We moved to a nearby suburb feeling like we’d betrayed an ideal.

Nikole stuck with it, though — until Najya began wondering, in middle school, why her education was subpar. What happened next is the subject of today’s cover story in The Times Magazine. I spoke to Nikole about it.

———

She thought my support of the Specialized High School Admission Exam, the SHSAT, was racist. I thought her school politics were deeply misguided, and well, quite racist.

Unlike Hannah-Jones I have nothing to walk back.

———

The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones

———

Susan Edelman:

Nicole Hannah-Jones and @nytimes did not disclose that her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, sits on the. 24-member Panel for Educational Policy, and chairs the contracts commitee, which oversees millions of dollars spent by the city Department of Education.

———

Let’s be clear: her project was not limited to subjecting her child to her “political virtues.” It was subjecting every child to it.

———

Her failure was not moral but analytical. She thought the schools were failing from not enough money, parental involvement, or administrative attention—all of which she was in a position to provide.

If her diagnosis had been correct, her decision would have been laudable.

———-

Some truly wild stuff in Nikole Hannah Jones’s quarterly New York Times article, like this understanding description of randomly filling in standardized test answers

———

Everything she documents is a management and accountability failure rather than a resource failure. NYC spends $36k per pupil, the highest of any large district in the country. There haven’t been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades.

———

To purposefully subject your children to this environment distills progressivism to its core, and is the same reason blue cities are full of homelessness and crime. They truly believe antisocial behavior is ok, and to enforce any kind of rules is oppressive

———

I remember a Madison school board member (years ago) making the argument to parents that they should stick with underperforming schools…

———

Agreed. But Hannah-Jones can still be faulted for not doing her homework. The evidence that her analysis was empirically wrong was already widely disseminated, and not just among policy wonks, when she made her decision.

———-

Back in 2021, the NYT Mag did a story about Minneapolis’ desegregation plan, which took the novel step of sending white children to predominantly black schools. There was a striking passage in which a white mother who was gamely participating in the plan and who had joined the PTA, expressed some disappointment that no one from the administration had informed the parents of a recent shooting. The reply: “This is what we live with every day.”

———

Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly

———

The creator of the 1619 Project sent her young daughter to a struggling public school, convinced that upper-middle-class parents could lift it up. A decade later, the results are in.

———

Kat Rosenfield:

Actually, what bothers me about this: the essay makes public what should have been a private apology for Hannah-Jones’s failures as a mother, and in doing so not only elides the apology she should be making for her failures as a journalist but refuses to acknowledge them at all

———-

Why wouldn’t she think she had the power to transform her daughter’s school?

———

In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

———-

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

Michael Strong

Schooling is one function that is almost universally dominated by government managed institutions around the world. The belief that governments should provide “public schools” and that those schools were an “investment in human capital” and that they were “vital” for democratic citizenship are among the most deeply embedded beliefs around the world. Many people would be shocked that anyone would question it. There are mountains of research purporting to show the value of public schools.

But one of the most valuable concepts in economics is that of “opportunity costs.” What might have been if governments had not come to dominate K12 education in the 20th century?

A Skeptical History of “Public Schools”

Thomas Jefferson is often regarded as the father of public schooling because of his 1781 proposal in “Notes on the State of Virginia”,

This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor [i.e., superintendent], who is annually to choose the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools [high schools, in effect] of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of [Virginia], for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.

George H. Smith, summarizes Jefferson’s later views on education,

Throughout most of his life Jefferson favored providing three years of free education to all (free) children, rich and poor alike. By 1820, however, Jefferson had changed his mind. Only pauper children should receive free schooling; those parents able to pay tuition should be required to do so. Jefferson believed that the fees of parents who could afford to pay would cover much of the cost of educating pauper children. The remaining expenses would be minimal: “To a county, this addition would be of about one-​fifth of the taxes we now pay to the State, or about one-​fifth of one per cent.”

He was also against compulsory attendance laws,

“It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”

Jefferson’s model was much more similar to a system of voluntary private schools, with a modest state subsidy for “paupers” (plus scholarships for the super elite) than anything remotely similar to contemporary public schools.

Horace Mann is the real father of public schooling. He was influenced by the statist Prussian system,

——-

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

Bill Gurley:

This is a topic that has been weighing heavily on my mind for over five years. I hope we can find a way for eveyone to move forward with “inquiry” as the true-north. For the best interest of the globe.

Searching for Feynman — Resource Links

——-

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

more.

Natalie L. Marchant, Lise R. Lovland, Rebecca Jones, Alexa Pichet Binette, Julie Gonneaud, Eider M. Arenaza-Urquijo, Gael Chételat, Sylvia Villeneuve:

The Cognitive Debt hypothesis proposes that repetitive negative thinking (RNT), a modifiable process common to many psychological risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may itself increase risk. We sought to empirically examine relationships between RNT and markers of AD, compared with anxiety and depression symptoms.

Methods

Two hundred and ninety-two older adults with longitudinal cognitive assessments, including 113 with amyloid-positron emission tomography (PET) and tau-PET scans, from the PREVENT-AD cohort and 68 adults with amyloid-PET scans from the IMAP+ cohort were included. All participants completed RNT, anxiety, and depression questionnaires.

Matthew Syed:

Really? If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism. It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. We know this because she alluded to many at the time of her (again, widely acclaimed) “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) speech. She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters. She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night.

———

More.

Jill Lepore:

This August, an MIT committee of faculty, students, and staff released a remarkably thoughtful report on “AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training.” Its many cautions included the warning that “as a community, what should worry us most is that many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to learn.”

By contrast, Harvard’s administration appears oblivious to such concerns — notoriously so. Harvard College Dean David J. Deming’s recent recommendation that student use of AI in writing-intensive classes should be not only accepted but encouraged, is only the most outrageous instance. This policy was, fittingly, the leading example cited in a Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane.”

Has Harvard indeed lost its mind? The comparison with the MIT report, set against a growing body of empirical research into the effects of generative AI on learning, is a good place to start answering that question.

While of course noting the astounding benefits of AI in many areas of academic research, the MIT report takes careful stock of the ways in which reliance on AI risks the abandonment of crucial educational experiences, including the problem set, the take-home exam, office hours, study groups, and undergraduate research opportunities. In the latter case, the committee found that instructors were considering outsourcing research assistance to AI instead of hiring undergraduates, presumably on the grounds of cost-savings and efficiency. The committee inquired, “But if those criteria come to dominate our decisions, we all have to ask, ‘What is it that we are here together to do?’”

Ian Bogost

Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.

Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of studentsoutside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.

Then COVID-19 revealed that the credentialing process could continue if campus life was reduced or even eliminated entirely. Considerable controversy and confusion accompanied this moment; some students tried to sue expensive universities on the grounds that a closed campus was not worth the full-freight price. But in the end, credentialing proved entirely possible with a compromised or absent version of campus life.

Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut). Suffering through a term paper no longer inherently affords opportunities to take a break to get a late-night coffee with your fellow students, to commiserate with hallmates over a difficult professor, or to reach an unexpected realization while drunk at a house party. Social and academic progress are no longer woven together. No particular quantity of shared time or deliberation is required to carry out one inside the other.

Ivan Johnson:

Still, that doesn’t stop people from trying to sell us the idea that it can. Every time a new technology shows up, the companies who stand to profit from it look at education and see a problem they can solve, because solving it would also make them economically successful, in a market worth a great deal of money. It’s really just Upton Sinclair’s old point. He wrote about efficiency being valued over humanity, looking hard at working conditions in the wake of the industrial revolution. He said it’s hard to get someone to see something clearly when their income depends on not seeing it. So the pitch comes fast, and every time, they tell us this one is different. It never is.

I have two stories from my own career where I chose the sales pitch over the people in the room who actually knew better, buying a company’s promise that a piece of technology would just make things better, and finding out that it didn’t. I think we’re about to make that same mistake with AI too.

Smart boards

If you don’t know what a smart board is, that’s because they were dumb. A smart board was a touchscreen panel mounted over a section of a classroom whiteboard, with a projector bolted above it throwing the image down. It ate up about seventy-five percent of your usable whiteboard space, and it worked maybe a quarter of the time.

At my last school, I went to a conference, got sold, and installed them in every classroom, over the objections of teachers who begged me not to take their whiteboard space away. The bill was over fifty thousand dollars. Within two years, almost every teacher in the building had quietly retreated to the small strip of real whiteboard they had left. I eventually took every one of them down and kept the projectors, which is, of course, what everyone eventually used in classrooms anyway: a whiteboard and a projector.

Much later in my career, I watched one of the most gifted middle school Waldorf science teachers draw by freehand in chalk  a cell in more depth and more beauty than I had ever seen in a textbook or on a slide. It made me question whether I needed a projector in the room at all.

Ishani Desai:

Each species has its own migration pattern.

Some species, such as the dark-eyed junco, nest in Canada and then fly in the winter to the United States, Dr. Osterhaus said.

“These birds are really trying to maximize their survival and fitness,” he said.

Generally, the fall migration contains more birds because the summer’s breeding season has concluded, said Catherine Quayle, the communications director for the Wild Bird Fund, a nonprofit that rehabilitates injured or sickened birds and other animals.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Because they are always written by committees they read like what committees write. They say nothing. And often at great length. Nobody ever looks at a strategic plan after it is finished. Employees hate these exercises because they see them for what they are and managers like them for the same reason. Because what they are are distractions. A strategic plan never deals with any real underlying concerns about a workplace and it never provides concrete clarity about the organization’s basic goal or an individual employee’s role in it. 

The only people who benefit from these things are the consultants who churn them out, no doubt using boilerplate phrases recycled from client to client. 

So, the only good thing you can say about the strategic plan coughed up by the Madison schools last month is that it is mercifully short, at only 11 pages of fog. Last month, the Madison school district revealed its five-year strategic plan, two years in the making. They essentially puffed up five clouds. Like all of these things, this plan is so vague as to be ephemeral. It’s a lot of nothing.

Here are the plan’s five guiding principles: 

• Future-ready student experiences.
• Organizational alignment and improvement. 
• Professional excellence and talent development.
• Culture of connectedness and well-being. 
• Family, community and industry partnerships.

This is what you get when you pay $240,000 to a consultant from North Carolina. If you have the slightest idea of what any of those word salads actually mean please write in below and educate us.

———-

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

Steve Stewart-Williams:

For years, we’ve been told that universities discriminate against women and racial minorities – and that White men are the chief beneficiaries of this biased system. A growing body of research suggests, however, that the reality is now closer to the reverse.

The latest example comes from a new paper by political scientist Scott Desposato. Desposato tracked more than 400 political science PhD students who entered the job market in 2023. His question was whether they’d secured a tenure-track assistant professorship by the following autumn.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, female and underrepresented-minority candidates were considerably more likely to have done so than non-minority men. Was this because the former had better credentials? Apparently not; the disparity persisted even after statistically controlling for PhD-program rank, publication record, degree status, and academic subfield.

Based on Desposato’s findings, John Holbein on Twitter/X calculated the chances of four hypothetical individuals landing a position: a White man, a White woman, a minority man, and a minority woman. The candidates were identical in every respect, other than their sex and race. As shown in the graph below, the White man had around a one in four chance of getting the job, whereas everyone else had closer to a one in two chance.

How important was identity in determining who got hired? The answer seems to be “very.” Co-authoring a paper in the American Political Science Review – the discipline’s flagship journal – substantially increased a candidate’s chances of securing a position, just as you’d expect. But it didn’t increase their chances nearly as much as simply being female or an underrepresented minority. Only a solo-authored APSR paper was worth more on the job market than these demographic variables.

Jeffrey Selingo:

For years, public universities have aggressively recruited out-of-state and international students, charging them higher tuition. But those pipelines may be drying up.

When prospective students visit the University of Alabama, they begin their tour at the Catherine and Pettus Randall Welcome Center, a gleaming white three-story Italianate-style structure with a stacked front porch. The building, which once housed a mental hospital and is on the National Register of Historic Places, opened up on campus in 2024. In the escalating contest for teen-age attention and allegiance, an admissions “welcome center”—with an auditorium for presentations to high-school students and their families and iconic spaces for Instagrammable moments—is now a must-have for universities. But Alabama’s might be the most extreme example.

Once inside, families are met with a mix between what one might find in a modern museum, and while waiting in line at Disney World to ride the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. Floor-to-ceiling screens welcome visitors, displaying the individual names of prospective students in lights. As the visitors wend their way through the halls, toward the theatre where the admissions-information session takes place, they pass a series of carefully crafted photo and video exhibits highlighting various aspects of the university and the surrounding city of Tuscaloosa. The facility’s crown jewel is the Roll Tide Room, which is wrapped entirely in monitors playing clips from Alabama football games on a continuous loop.

The point of this is to persuade teen-agers from all over the country to choose Alabama. “You have to differentiate yourself at the front door,” Matt McLendon, who oversees the school’s undergraduate-enrollment operation, told me during a campus visit. “Not all undergraduates even here now were predisposed to consider us at first.”

For much of its history, Alabama, like other flagship institutions—that is, the best known public university in a given state—focussed on attracting students from within its own borders, competing in a ground game against nearby rivals, such as Auburn University. Over the past two decades, though, the University of Alabama has transformed its student body, increasing its share of new out-of-state undergraduates from just twenty-three per cent in 2002 to sixty-five per cent in 2022, according to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

This trend is not confined to Alabama. The N.C.E.S also found that, in that same time span, the number of high-school graduates leaving their home state for a public university elsewhere has more than doubled. In 2002, about a quarter of the arriving undergraduates at the University of South Carolina came from outside the state; now roughly half of them do. In that same period, new out-of-state undergraduates at the University of Oregon increased from twenty-eight per cent to fifty-six per cent. At the University of Oklahoma, the number jumped from twenty-four per cent to forty-five per cent. The University of Wisconsin-Madison gradually raised its out-of-state enrollment cap and then totally eliminated it in 2015. Within six years, nearly half the first-year students on the Madison campus came from other states.

At the average flagship’s main campus, nearly four out of every ten undergraduates now come from another state. New Jersey kids go to Penn State instead of Rutgers; Illinois residents head off to the University of Missouri instead of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For students, going to college out of state is a chance to get away from home—and from their high-school classmates—or to experience what they perceive as “big college” life, such as Saturday tailgates and a thriving social scene centered on fraternities and sororities. But it’s the schools themselves that benefit most from this system, as they are able to charge much higher tuition for out-of-state students. Total costs for in-state students at Alabama run $34,600 this academic year; for out-of-state students, the list price is nearing sixty thousand dollars. Though the quality of the school’s football program cannot be denied, many of these students are coming from states such as Illinois, Georgia, and California, which are also known for big universities with prominent football teams, school spirit, and a vibrant Greek life. (Not to mention that at any big public university, you are still likely to encounter tens of thousands of new people who have never even heard of your high school, even if it’s in the same state.) In other words, these students are paying twice as much as they would otherwise—for a similar product.

Rachel Mergen:

Suspiciously high English growth scores led state administrators to invalidate exam scores recorded by Arcadia Middle School during the 2025-26 school year.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction began an investigation Aug. 7 after vendor Education Analytics reported a “very high value-added growth” score for the middle school’s seventh grade in English Language Arts.

The department provided a letter to the Daily News on Thursday that was originally sent Sept. 9 to Arcadia School District Superintendent Lori Frerk.

Robbie Sequeira:

Declining birth rates mean fewer students.

And that means more districts grappling with whether to close or merge schools.

“The big shrink” is how Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, described what is happening nationally. 

“When there are fewer young people, obviously it’s going to change the shape of public education,” Roza said. “As more and more schools are existing that are half empty, some downsizing needs to take place for them to live in their current financial structure, and districts are really loath to do that.” 

Driven largely by declining birth rates but worsened by several other factors, district and school board decisions to close and consolidate schools can draw anger and anxiety from parents and students. Many states are stopping short of forcing mergers, but taking a variety of steps to encourage them. 

The expiration of one-time federal pandemic relief funding has worsened the financial pressure on school districts, Roza said.

The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated interest in homeschooling, virtual education and other alternatives to traditional public schools, according to Megan Bowen, high school director at the U.S. Career Institute, a Colorado-based online education provider.

And the immigration crackdown also may play a role. Before being elected and becoming House speaker in the Colorado legislature, Democratic state Rep. Julie McCluskie was a public school employee at Summit School District in one of the state’s rural resort towns. She told Stateline the reasons for the state’s yearly decline in public school students — and in her district — includes heightened immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration.

Todd Wallack

A public college known for letting students earn a bachelor’s degree in less than a year is drawing scrutiny from its accreditor about the quality of its online program.

Enrollment has skyrocketed at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, a small state school near the Canadian border, as word has spread that it offers fast, affordable degrees.

The school’s online YourPace program enrolled nearly 4,100 students during last academic year, a 30-fold increase since 2018. Administrators say most students can complete their degrees in under a year for less than $10,000 in tuition.

But that growth and reputation for speed have also led to an examination by the New England Commission of Higher Education.

Lily Kepner

But as of Wednesday night, UT’s new student application did not include a new Social and Cultural Analysis or American Studies majors. Applicants could select both Urban Studies and the Race Indigeneity and Migration majors, which are also offered in the social analysis department.

Gerald Posner

Someone I’ve known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. I like him and run into him regularly in the neighborhood. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. The other day, he told me he respected my article in The Free Press, in which I said I’d leave my longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, if it stood behind a virulently antisemitic Palestinian novelist. Then, out of the blue, he asked me a question in the tone people use when they already assume the answer.

“Do you think there’s a genocide in Gaza?”

No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Then he explained why I was wrong. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Everybody knows that.

That was the whole of it. He did not cite a study or a court ruling, not even a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that “everybody knows” is where investigations begin, not where they end. I am also a lawyer by training, which means that when I look at the Genocide Convention, the tribunal judgments, and the legal threshold the word actually requires, I am not reading them as a journalist translating a foreign language. I know what the standard is, I know where it comes from, and I know how rarely — and how carefully — international courts have applied it.

Joanne Jacobs:

Lowering standards boosts graduation rates, he writes. “But if math gaps aren’t addressed early, catching up is harder and costlier, and students pay the price.” 

“Among students designated as college-ready by their high school coursework, only 47.6 percent are projected to pass intermediate college algebra,” they write. “Consequently, colleges nationwide, including elite institutions such as Harvard University, have had to establish introductory and remedial math courses to close foundational algebraic skill gaps.^“

Among other things, the report recommends screening all students for math performance so those who need it can get extra help before they’re so far behind that it’s hopeless.

The Economist:

Schools are relabelling offices faster than they are cutting them.

Dropping politically charged terms from office and job titles can allow universities to retain staff and pursue the same goals while attracting less scrutiny. Jerry Cirino, sponsor of Senate Bill 1, which banned DEI programmes at public colleges and universities in Ohio, says he’s broadly pleased with compliance, but that “the practice is still going on, they’re just calling it something different.” Even some DEI advocates acknowledge this. “Some people have changed the language they use publicly, but the underlying work is very similarẠỊsays Emelyn dela Peña, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

The Economist obtained payroll records from several large state-university systems to measure the effect of the crackdown on staffing and salaries. These records cannot establish whether DEI work itself has been scaled back, only whether staffing costs have declined. The data show that spending on DEI staff is falling, not just in many Republican states but in several Democratic ones too. Yet the decline was modest-even at institutions that swiftly eliminated their DEI offices.

More.

Corrinne Hess:

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is considering offering a three-year education degree to save their students money, while getting teachers into classrooms faster. 

Chancellor Thomas Gibson said discussions are currently underway with the School of Education to move the reduced-credit degree forward, but there is not a definite timeline. 

“We know there’s a great need not only here in the city, but across the state, to produce  more teachers,” Gibson said during an interview with WPR on Friday, “I feel very optimistic that this is a program that we would be able to deliver and receive significant support for.” 

————-

Foundations of Reading Results: UW-Milwaukee

Susan B. Edelman:

A Brooklyn jury has ordered the city Department of Education to pay $4.15 million to a 70-year-old man who said a teacher sexually assaulted him in a public school closet at age 13 — a betrayal he kept secret for nearly 57 years.

After a nine-day trial in August, the six-member Kings County panel found the city Department of Education 100% responsible for the abuse by failing to act on prior complaints that the same teacher —a “serial sexual predator” — had molested other boys. 

“The school knew about the danger and failed to protect him,” said attorney Jeff Herman, whose law firmrepresents the survivor, Antonio Vargas.

Secrets of OPM:

Take this simple IQ test: If you could invest $9.5 billion once and get back more than $40 billion every year, forever, would you make the investment? This is not a trick question. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or Warren Buffett) to say “yes.” In fact, it’s a no-brainer. For those of you doing the math, that’s a 400+% annual return. Sign me up!

Yet Democrats in Congress failed the test, as did The New York Times, armed with a report from the Government Accountability Office that never even attempts the second half of the math. Why?

First, the facts.

The Trump Administration has reduced the total size of the federal government by roughly 270,000 employees since the beginning of the term. That’s a nearly 10 percent reduction. There are about 2 million employees still today, leaving the federal workforce at its smallest level since the 1960s.

In most organizations, headcount reductions come through restructuring: an across-the-board layoff of some fixed percentage or shutting down particular divisions. In the private sector, few legal rules govern severance, but employees generally receive one to two weeks per year of service.

The federal government is similar and different.

By law, federal employees are entitled to one week of severance per year of employment for their first 10 years and then two weeks for every year thereafter. There are caps and a modest age bump for employees over 40, but in general the government tracks the private sector.

Where the federal government differs is in the tools available to reduce headcount.

The legacy reduction-in-force procedures that were in place when the Trump Administration took office were overly complex and made it difficult for agencies to meaningfully reduce headcount in this way. Large-scale RIFs were subject to lengthy administrative and judicial appeal procedures that included three layers of review and often took years to complete. That is why fewer than 12,000 of the headcount reductions were executed through a RIF. We at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management have since revised these rules to make the process, including appeals, more efficient and to emphasize merit as the basis for determining RIFs. The old practice prioritized tenure.

Jessica Winter:

This trajectory is embodied by Code.org’s most famous champion, Barack Obama. In 2013, Hadi Partovi, a co-founder of Code.org, persuaded the President to record a video to kick off Computer Science Education Week and the first Hour of Code. “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future—it’s important for your country’s future,” Obama said in the video. The following year, Obama visited a high school in Newark to participate in an Hour of Code, where he donned a Code.org baseball cap and used a laptop decorated with a Code.org sticker. By 2025, however, Obama was opining that “unless you are really good—like, one of the top one per cent in terms of understanding how to code—you’re better off with a liberal-arts education.” Partovi, who is an alumnus of Microsoft, has remarked that A.I. has obviated much of the “busywork of computer science.” In June, his organization announced that it was “entering its next chapter,” and rebranded itself as CodeAI.

The nonprofit’s website currently features a list of top donors: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the private-equity firm Vista, the Gates Foundation, and the Ballmer Group, the last of these named for another former Microsoft C.E.O. and centi-billionaire, Steve Ballmer. Each of these oligarchic fun houses has staked a significant share of its future wealth—and, together, the future of the global economy—on the rapid expansion of A.I. technology.

The coding missionaries of the twenty-tens made errors both practical and philosophical. They were wrong, obviously, about computer-programming skills as a guarantor of students’ future employment prospects. But that miscalculation was, itself, premised on the unexamined assumption that a K-12 public education should be essentially vocational and therefore—almost by definition—aligned with corporate interests. In 2021, David Banks, then the incoming chancellor of New York City Public Schools, gave a speech in which he lamented that the city’s schools were producing graduates who “don’t even have the skills to go into industry.” Teachers, he went on, were failing to address an urgent question: “What is it like to work at a place like a Google or a Microsoft?”

———-

Years ago, I asked three Madison k-12 Superintendent candidates if they preferred to hire the most capable teachers or whomever and tell them what to do. They answered with a mashup. Tech tools are, imho, a response to any number of real or perceived issues.

Jeffrey Tucker:

The 4th Grade McGuffey’s Reader (1901 edition) is shockingly engaging. Every story and poem is amazing with a vocabulary far beyond most adults today. This poem alone blows up modern partisan political rhetoric.

Ryan Christopher Jones

In addition to their technical and aesthetic mastery, the images express a sense of utopian optimism. The photos in this essay, all taken from 1962 to 1968, reflect a post-World War II confidence that grand infrastructure could tame and re-engineer where “nature” fell short. Big projects were utilitarian in their capacity to solve large-scale water resource problems, yet they also communicated that the nation — or in this case, a colossal state that essentially functions as a nation — was the hero to slay Western water scarcity. Like many such projects, it was intended to be witnessed and celebrated by citizens — a perpetual reminder that the state was working to solve its water problems. As anthropologist Brian Larkin put it, its visual grandeur serves “to rearrange the hierarchy of its functions so that the aesthetic dimension of infrastructure (rather than its technical one) is dominant.” Thus infrastructure at this scale does tremendous political work. These photos reflect the mid-20th century’s political philosophy, back when residents rallied behind the social spectacle of large public works projects more readily than they do today. With the recent removal of the Klamath dams and the ongoing push for more removals, the public is perhaps now more willing to celebrate water infrastructure’s elimination than its construction.

Happy Thursday, Renuka & Jane:

Thank you for running!

I write with a question. Note that 37% of Wisconsin 4k to 3rd graders scored below the 25th percentile, Madison did worst: 43.7%, despite spending $26K per student – now $28K. The data is from the 2024-2025 early literacy screener provided by Districts to the Wisconsin DPI. www.sedso.io/maps/wi/

How will you vote, if presented with legislation to overturn Wisconsin Act 20’s provision that?

“Wisconsin Act 20 requires school boards to have adopted a written policy specifying criteria for promotion from third to fourth grade by July 1, 2025. Then, beginning Sept. 1, 2027, a school board may not promote a third grader to fourth grade unless the student satisfies the criteria in that district’s policy.”

https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/09/wisconsin-reading-improvement-school-literacy-reforms-education-opinion/

Overturning attempts to address our long term, disastrous literacy results is not a new political tactic: Observe our 1998 – 2026 literacy history:

www.sedso.io/history/

You’ll note DPI (Evers) mulligans and the attempt to delete the early literacy teacher content knowledge requirement.

Thank you for taking the time to respond and best wishes,

Jim

Jane McCormick’s response:

Hi Jim,
We are on the same page. I wholly support not advancing any child to the fourth grade who cannot read at grade level. Doing so sets that child up for failure in every single class moving forward. Being able to read at or above grade level must be the standard. And phonics is the gold standard and should never have been abandoned. Educators who are too focused on ‘feelings’ have sunk the futures of thousands of children. This is an abomination.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a kid being held back. Many have done it voluntarily in my lifetime. It also can become an excellent motivator at that age to help a child become more serious about the importance of reading and its far reaching implications if they do not.

You have my 1000% support.

Thank you for reaching out on this very important subject. Anything I can do to support this cause is extremely important to me and what motivated me to run in the first place.

Best regards,
Jane

Jane McCormick
Republican Candidate for Assembly – 77th District

Jane for Dane AD 77
PO Box 5165
3310 Lake Mendota Dr.
Madison, WI 53705
jane@janefordane.com
www.janefordane.com
(608) 286-2291‬

Renuka Mayadev

No response as of Friday evening, 18 September 2026

Websites: Jane Renuka

Chicago Tribune:

Meet Eric Witherspoon, the interim school superintendent of Evanston/Skokie School District 65. We only wish he were working for the Chicago Public Schools.

Witherspoon inherited a fiscal mess at the Evanston/Skokie school district, which overspent for years, created positions it could not afford to support and accumulated a hefty deficit even as it had to adjust for declining enrollment, meaning it was serving some 25% fewer students than was the case just eight years ago. The district also opened a new school, Foster School, that it didn’t really need but that the Black community in Evanston argued long had been promised to them.

The debate over the need for that school is moot. It’s open. Now Witherspoon has to sort out the finances.

So far, he is pulling no punches arguing that $20 million has to be excised from the District 65 budget.

His comprehensive plan, which he outlined at a public meeting of the school board on Monday, includes aligning staffing levels and compensation with peer districts (District 65 was out of whack), closing two under-enrolled schools, reducing “purchased services,” aggressively seeking efficiencies and seeking out new revenue opportunities. When faced with the inevitable opposition, especially since Witherspoon’s plan is building on prior cuts and budget reductions, he has pointed out that if these things are not done, District 65 simply will run out of cash. And then where will the district’s kids be?

Consider this quote from the board meeting, as reported in Evanston Now: “School districts cannot afford to operate buildings which are at 64% capacity.”

———

Madison is adding bricks and mortar amidst declining enrollment.

Zhang Can:

1. A growing number of doctoral graduates from elite global and domestic universities are bypassing traditional careers in academia to become secondary school teachers in China’s major cities, driven by an oversupplied labor market and fierce competition for university posts. [para. 1] At Shenzhen Middle School, all 21 prospective hires hold master’s degrees or higher, including five PhDs. [para. 2] These include a Tsinghua electrical engineering PhD teaching math, a Cambridge electrical engineering PhD teaching physics, a Fudan materials physics PhD for chemistry, and a University of Chinese Academy of Sciences PhD recruited as a math Olympiad coach. [para. 3]

2. The trend is not new for Shenzhen Middle School; a 2019 hiring list featured 20 graduates from Tsinghua and Peking University plus one from Harvard, following Principal Zhu Huawei’s 2017 push for world-class status. [para. 4][para. 5] Currently, the school employs more than 100 teachers with doctoral degrees, over 150 graduates from Tsinghua and Peking, and more than 100 alumni of top global institutions like Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. [para. 6] The phenomenon extends to tier-one and tier-two cities, as seen in 2021 when the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University hired nine PhDs or postdocs from top institutions, and in 2025 when Suzhou High School hired 10 Tsinghua/Peking graduates and eight with doctorates. [para. 7][para. 8][para. 9]

3. This shift has sparked public debate over perceived underemployment. Qi Yifan, a Tsinghua optical engineering PhD joining Tianjin No.1 High School, defended his decision on social media, stating that helping hundreds of students enter top universities could yield a greater societal contribution than working in an isolated research post. [para. 10][para. 11]

————

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

By Their Own Compass:

Christian missionaries have regularly been at the forefront of travel adventurism over the last 500 years, sent by their churches to parts of the world few back home knew much about, and often at great personal risk.

And while they were regularly showing up in regions that hadn’t invited them and weren’t always receptive to what they were selling, their stories remain some of the most fascinating that history has to offer – particularly those of the missionaries who were more ambitious than most.

.In this episode, we take a closer look at the efforts of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest who set out to convert China from the emperor on down; Mary Slessor, who tried to personally save as many Nigerian-born twins from infanticide as she possibly could; and Samson Occom, a Mohegan convert whose fundraising tour of England aimed to fund a school for training other Native Americans – a school better known today as Dartmouth College. Yes, that one. (But also this one. And this one, too.)

And yet their accounts of the places they visited didn’t just shift opinions back home or capture something significant about a moment in time – sometimes their efforts genuinely changed the lives of the people they encountered, and, just as often, ended up changing the missionaries themselves.

The Freeman:

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference—where their children attend college—and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.

In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.

For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin—these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC—an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants—has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.

This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.

States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.

Don Boudreaux

Deirdre McCloskey proposes to replace the term “capitalism” with “innovism.” I agree with her that the former term, because of decades of ignorant propaganda – and because the essence of “captialism” isn’t capital, but entrepreneurial innovation – unfortunately conveys negative impressions to too many people. (For alerting me to the Barron’s piece I thank Steve Kaufman.)

Editor, Barron’s

Editor:

You describe Trump’s vision of the American economy as “state-directed capitalism” (“How a Trade Deal With Japan Could Change the Face of U.S. Energy,” September 16). Although the “state-directed” part is unfortunately accurate, the “capitalism” part is inaccurate if by “capitalism” is meant the innovative and competitive free-market process that alone is responsible for modernity’s prosperity.

Genuine capitalism, by its very nature, cannot be state-directed. It is driven by entrepreneurs and investors, in competition with each other, spending their own (and only their own) money to create goods and services to offer for sale to consumers who are unmolested in choosing how they spend their own (and only their own) money. The result is economic dynamism that incessantly improves the living standards of almost everyone.

What you call “state-directed capitalism” is categorically different. It’s politicians and bureaucrats, facing virtually no competition, spending other people’s money to produce goods and services that these same government officials decide ahead of time must, by hook or crook – through the use of the likes of tariffs, subsidies, and regulatory mandates – be purchased by consumers. The result is economic stagnation that improves the living standards only of politicians, their apparatchiks, and special-interest groups.

Katherine Bowser

But while teachers’ salaries grew over the last decade, their buying power shrank as pandemic-era inflation drove up the cost of living—making such milestones harder to afford. The median sale price for a new home, for example, rose from $280,400 to $429,000 between the 2014–15 and 2024–25 academic years.¹

In this District Trendline, using data drawn from NCTQ’s District Policy Pathfinder, we examine teacher salaries in 133 of the largest districts²in the United States. We find that teacher salary growth over the past 10 years looks a lot different after accounting for inflation, and that in some large districts, salaries fall short of what teachers need to meet basic living expenses.

The average starting salary of a new teacher rose by 33%

Figure 1 shows year-to-year trends in unadjusted salaries for beginning teachers across our sample. Between the 2014–15 and 2024–25 academic years, unadjusted salaries for new teachers rose 33% on average, growing just shy of 3% in an average year. The pace picked up more recently, with the average district in our sample raising starting pay by 4% in 2022–23 and 5% in 2023–24. 

Cory Turner:

Five-hundred colleges and universities in the U.S. now share one alarming distinction: At least 40% of recent students who borrowed federal loans aren’t paying them back. That’s according to the latest federal nonpayment-rate data published by the U.S. Education Department.

The data looks at the roughly 17 million borrowers who entered repayment for the first time between January 2020 and May 2025.

“These numbers are really jaw-dropping,” says Eileen Connor, head of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a nonprofit that advocates for borrowers and that reviewed the data.

At many schools, more than half of recent borrowers are at least three months late on their payments or have already passed nine months, which means they’re in default.

What’s going on?

One explanation is that pandemic-driven disruptions to the student loan system have left many borrowers feeling confused. But Lisa Collenbaugh’s story offers another possibility: Many of these troubled schools charge too much for too little — and aren’t being held accountable.

Collenbaugh enrolled in one school on the list, UEI College, more than a decade ago, agreeing to pay nearly $20,000 for a short-term training program to become a computer systems technician. But she says the program didn’t deliver the life-changing skills she had hoped for. “I thought that I was gonna actually be prepared for a career path and my life was gonna change because of that. And looking back, it’s like, ‘Oh, they got me.'”

Cindy Cohn, Bruce Schneier

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses it in immigration actions and against people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest. It’s also increasingly part of private security systems, such as facial recognition at venues such as Madison Square Garden and networked Flock license plate capture systems on roads and in parking lots.

The interrelation between private and governmental mass surveillance is worth examining. Surveillance is the business model of the internet; companies like Google and Facebook constantly spyon their users’ behavior. From the National Security Agency (NSA) relying on data collected by telecommunication and internet companies, to local sheriffs and ICE agents relying on cellphone location data and privately managed automatic license plate readers, governments primarily obtain the mass surveillance information through private companies. Increasingly, access doesn’t just come through legal processes, either. FBI Director Kash Patel recently confirmed in congressional testimonythat the agency is purchasing information on Americans from data brokers and intends to continue to do so.

This pipeline from private collection to governmental collection means that as companies collect more information for surveillance capitalism purposes, more is available to law enforcement as well. And as the technology for mass surveillance and analysis improves, especially with the increased use of AI technologies, the problems attendant to mass surveillance grow as well.

Adriana Petrizzo:

Over the last three weeks, the News’ Data Desk surveyed the class of 2030 to gauge their current views, experiences and expectations at Yale. The questionnaire was sent to 1,634 first years and received 517 total responses, representing about 31.6 percent of the class. The number of responses varies by question. 

Scroll to read about first years’ high school extracurriculars, political views and more.

Background and identity

The majority of respondents are starting Yale at 18 years old — 80.4 percent — although 1 percent are beginning at 20 or older. Four percent took a gap year, and the most popular reason for doing so, at 33 percent, was to complete an internship or pursue specific interests.

The most popular state of residence is New York at 12.1 percent, followed by California at 10.3 percent and Texas at 8.2 percent. Among international students, the United Kingdom and Singapore are the most common countries of origin, at 1.4 percent and 1.2 percent of all responses, respectively. Overall, only 13.2 percent of respondents are from rural areas. 

Twenty-nine percent of respondents identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer or questioning, with the largest percentage identifying bisexual, at 11.7 percent overall. Additionally, 1 percent identify as non-binary, 1.8 percent as genderqueer and 2.8 percent as transgender. 

Most students — 56.8 percent — are not very religious or spiritual, and 19.5 percent identify as agnostic. The majority of students  — 52 percent — speak more than one language. 

Just over half of respondents — 54.1 percent — receive financial aid, and 10 percent overall expect to take out loans. Of those receiving aid, the greatest number of students receive full aid, at 20.9 percent of respondents, followed by 76 percent to 99 percent covered, at 15.2 percent of respondents. Most respondents — 94 percent — receive at least partial financial support from their parents, but 4.1 percent will be paying their way through Yale alone. 

There are just about as many legacy students as there are first-generation students. Just under 5 percent of respondents have a relative currently attending Yale, and 17.1 percent have a relative that attended Yale in the past, with the most popular relative being a parent at 56.7 percent. 

Of legacy respondents, 100 percent of those with relatives in Benjamin Franklin, Timothy Dwight and Pauli Murray colleges chose not to be placed into their relative’s college, while 100 percent of those with relatives in Branford and Pierson colleges chose to be placed into their relative’s college.

Todd Bookman:

New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald announced his resignation from the bench on Tuesday, effective immediately, after being accused of violating the state’s judicial code of conduct for his role in orchestrating a payout to a top ally last year.

MacDonald’s departure marks a sudden and stunning end to his five-year tenure leading New Hampshire’s judicial branch. The 64-year-old has been out on medical leave since late July, with no explanation provided for his absence.

In a resignation letter released Tuesday morning, MacDonald said, “I believe this is in the best interests of the New Hampshire Judicial Branch. I accept responsibility and accountability for my conduct.”

News of MacDonald’s resignation came simultaneously with an announcement from the New Hampshire Supreme Court that he had admitted to violating several sections of the state’s judicial code of conduct. The ethics probe centered on MacDonald’s handling of an unusual personnel maneuver last year in which Dianne Martin, a top judicial branch employee and longtime ally of MacDonald’s, was laid off and then immediately rehired into another position, allowing her to cash out nearly $50,000 in accrued benefits.

According to records released Tuesday, the state Judicial Conduct Committee — an independent panel of judges and lawyers that investigates allegations of wrongdoing by state judges — determined that MacDonald failed to “promote public confidence” in the judiciary, failed to perform his duties competently, and failed “to avoid favoritism with respect to the removal of Dianne Martin” from her position. Rather than challenge the committee’s ethics charges through a public trial, MacDonald chose to resign.

Eric S Raymond:

First we recaptulate standard x-risk argument: we build AI substantially smarter than humans → it becomes an autonomous optimizing agent → its goals are misaligned → instrumental convergence makes it seek power and resist correction → superintelligence lets it acquire decisive strategic advantage → humans lose control permanently.

Here are the main counterarguments:

• Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act. Present LLMs are much more naturally described as systems that produce outputs in response to inputs than as organisms pursuing long-term objectives. Doomers incorrectly ascribe to them drive to replicate and seize resources because they’re smuggling in premises from observing biological systems.
• Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not. They have context-dependent behavior, conflicting heuristics and corrigibility produced by training. Increasing competence doesn’t necessarily turn such a system into a paperclip-maximizing von Neumann–Morgenstern agent.
• Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn’t entail wanting to escape it. Being able to manipulate humans doesn’t imply spontaneously deciding to do so. Critics argue that some doom scenarios slide from “an AI could do X if instructed” to “therefore a sufficiently capable AI will do X.” In present reality, AIs don’t do anything a human doesn’t tell them to do. This seems unlikely to change.
• Recursive self-improvement doesn’t entail an intelligence explosion: “AI can improve AI” establishes a positive feedback loop, but positive feedback needn’t be explosive. Semiconductor design software already helps design better computers; compilers can compile better compilers. Feedback loops encounter diminishing returns and external bottlenecks.
• Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. Human dominance may depend heavily on language, accumulated culture, institutions and cooperation rather than merely individual cognitive horsepower.
• Superintelligence isn’t omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things. The physical world has latency and friction. Recent criticism of biological-doom scenarios makes this point particularly clearly: designing a hypothetical pathogen digitally is very different from successfully producing and deploying one.
• Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.” In reality there may be many checkpoints: developers can notice anomalous behavior, revoke credentials, shut down servers, change architectures, restrict networks, regulate deployment, physically seize data centers, and learn from less-catastrophic failures. This has been formalized as the checkpoints-for-intervention argument.

Sara Oberle:

A local teacher spoke at last night’s board meeting and I’m cc’ing all teachers bc we all feel this:

———-

“which moved Student of the Marking Period off an administrator’s plate onto ours, weekly.

At the last faculty meeting we were asked to post objectives and write success criteria for every single lesson, in kid-friendly language, which is not part of the DTGSS Framework. We were told to enter extensive iReady math and ELA data into a grade-level spreadsheet. Data already visible in iReady. Staff are entering it a second time, by hand. Words Their Way too, which is already in DSC.

Nothing came off our plates. Not one thing. And not one minute was added to the day to do any of it.

You bought a reading curriculum before the pilot was half over. You didn’t trial anything against it. That’s not a pilot – that’s a purchase with a word in front of it.

And now we’re teaching a program that takes hours of planning to deliver well. Hours that do not exist. The presenters at yesterday’s PD confirmed that to me themselves.

You tell us to build relationships with our kids. You never asked what it would do for this district if you built one with us. You fill every minute of our day, then give us PD on relationship-building – to teach us something your best teachers were already doing before you got here.

And when you do ask us – survey, committee, this podium – most of us have stopped believing it changes anything. The decision’s already made. You’re checking a box. You do what you were going to do and count on nobody saying anything.

Some of us have students who beat the district proficiency rate by three and four times, every year.

Not one person has ever asked us how. Instead we’re told that telling kids we want them to hit a stretch target motivates them to hit it. Spend a day doing what we do and you’d hear how that sounds.”

———

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

More.

Civlab:

Our agents monitor official sources to track every appointment, departure, and structural change in the graph.

Stewart Mandel, David Ubben, Sam Khan Jr.:

College football’s most carefully guarded secret is the amount of money flowing to the players on each roster. The financial resources a program allocates to build its team each offseason dictate fair expectations for the next season, but precise figures are hard to come by.

This summer, The Athletic’s college football staff tried to find them.

AJ. Bayatpour

No other state funds its K-12 schools the way Wisconsin does, and there’s hope an influx of new faces at the state Capitol in January will lead to a new funding formula.

Currently, Wisconsin’s school funding system is a combination of several different aid sources. The base is revenue limits introduced in 1993, which are the combined totals of state aid and local property taxes each school district is allowed to spend.

“It wasn’t based on need or property wealth or how responsible a district was being,” Quinton Klabon, senior research director with the conservative Institute for Reforming Government, said. “It’s just kind of random and lopsided.”

There has been bipartisan concern over the school funding formula but not consensus on what should replace it. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers told CBS 58 last week during an interview in De Pere the formula is very confusing, which creates challenges in trying to address it.

———

One proposed new formula

Klabon has proposed a simplified formula. Each district would receive $14,000 per student without exception. On top of that, districts would get an additional $3,000 per student who qualifies for the free and reduced lunch program. 

The state would cover 50% of districts’ special education costs, which would be an increase from the 42% reimbursement rate currently in place. There would also be a 0.7% maximum property tax rate.

Using a sports analogy, Klabon said it would be similar to instituting both a salary cap and a salary floor.

_______

More.

———-

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?

Miriam Pawel:

When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, U.C.L.A. saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving Black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier. “We are enrolling one of the most academically accomplished and diverse classes in our history,” the admissions director wrote. Since then, applications have risen at all nine undergraduate campuses, the most prestigious have become increasingly selective, and the university retains and graduates students at record rates.

Yet just five years later, the University of California is embroiled again in a very public battle over whether to reinstate the SAT. Faculty, whose 2020 recommendation to retain the test was overruled, have led the charge. In a widely circulated letter and opinion piece (both edited with the help of artificial intelligence), a math professor who organized the campaign blamed the test-blind admissions policy for a troubling increase in undergraduates who lack basic skills.

Math literacy is a real issue, not only in California, and not only since the elimination of the SAT for admissions. The argument that reinstituting the standardized test will rectify the math crisis, however, obscures a more fundamental debate over the mission of this elite public university and the longstanding tension between its twin goals of excellence and access.

The University of California is an educational juggernaut that has helped propel the state to its status as the world’s fourth-largest economy. It has arguably made its most important contribution not in Nobel Prizes, patents and scientific breakthroughs but in the lives of those not born into privilege. At a time of obscene wealth and inequality, that role has never been more important. The SAT fight is a proxy for a far more complex challenge: the university’s responsibility to remain true to its founding mission, crucial if the Golden State is to maintain its reputation as a land of opportunity and dreams.

Maryellen MacDonald:

Do you know about baby sea squirts? These little marine creatures begin life actively swimming around, searching the ocean floor for a good home. When they find their spot, each sea squirt glues itself down and never moves again. Because it no longer needs to be active, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.

Even though mature sea squirts are brainless, they can teach us a big lesson: Brain health requires being active. This lesson is especially relevant for parents and educators, because there are a lot of forces these days that keep kids passive. Media messages don’t help. The internet has over 26 million websites comparing babies and young children to another sedentary marine organism: sponges. Psychologists, pediatricians, and educators are using the kids = sponges comparison to convey that kids are rapid learners who soak up information. That’s true, but the sponge metaphor is a terrible way to get that message across. It implies that babies and children are passive, just absorbing up what goes on around them, like sponges. That idea is not only wrong; it’s harmful.

Sydney Gladu:

Lots of people don’t want us to tell this story. Today we released the trailer. 

Some of the pushback was expected. Administrators and educators from Centennial High School were largely unwilling to revisit the past. Katy and I have both been hung up on more times than we can count. I have sent dozens of emails that will never get a reply. One administrator told Katy, “Why don’t you look into a more recent story? Didn’t this happen 20 years ago?” Another administrator said, “I’d prefer to not go down that road.” One teacher you’ll hear about this season told me in an email, “This is not Watergate,” and declined to answer any questions about his alleged behavior. I expected that.

 even some people who have nothing to do with this story weren’t sure about our excavation of it. I remember the first time a peer asked, “Is this really a good idea to report on, given everything public school teachers in the U.S. are facing right now?” My blood boiled. I tried to imagine this person saying that directly to a survivor: “Are you sure what you endured is worth putting more burden on educators?”

The implication is clear: their story isn’t worth the trouble. But that tacit tolerance is exactly the problem. It’s the narrative many survivors ruminate on as they stay silent for years. “Just move on … it’s not worth dredging up the past …” And yet, every year there continue to be stories about educator sexual misconduct, in all 50 states, at all grade levels.

The latest data from experts in the field says 17% of students will be the target of educator sexual misconduct during their K-12 education. That’s nearly one in five. And studies show nearly 89% of teachers wouldn’t report suspected abuse by another educator.

That’s not only a failure of individual educators. That’s a failure of the system. The system didn’t make it easy for teachers to recognize or report abuse 20 years ago. And it doesn’t make it easy now.

Dean Saitta:

When it comes to theories of institutional neutrality and free expression, two of the pillars of the “Chicago Trifecta” — the 1967 Kalven Report and the 2014 Chicago Principles — are well known. But the third, the so-called Shils Report (named after its primary author, the sociologist Edward Shils), has been given much less attention in recent years. That’s too bad, because the report’s recommendations are especially germane in the current moment of disciplinary self-reflection and soul-searching.

The Shils Report was originally published as “Report of the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment” in The University of Chicago Record in December 1970. Edward Shils chaired the committee. The report emphasizes the university’s primary function to generate and disseminate knowledge, and the singular importance of merit and accomplishment as criteria for hiring, promotion, and tenure. It stresses the need for uniformity and equity in making such decisions. It alerts hiring committees to the dangers of “narrowing the range of intellectual interests” within academic departments, since this threatens the well-rounded training of students. And it champions excellence in teaching and embraces a variety of considerations for its evaluation.

The most immediate provocation for the Shils Report appears to have been the controversy surrounding the nonrenewal of a contract for an assistant professor named Marlene Dixon on January 7, 1969. Dixon taught in the sociology department at Chicago, which was also home to Shils. Dixon, a feminist and Marxist, was a very popular professor whose work was seen by students as being relevant to the times. Her dismissal prompted great student outrage. They saw her dismissal as politically motivated and demanded that her contract be renewed.

The students almost certainly used the Dixon dismissal as an opportunity to protest other 1960s causes such as America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the lack of women on the Chicago faculty, the university’s Kalven Report-justified reluctance to engage with social-justice issues, and increasing gentrification of the institution’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Significantly, they also wanted more student say in the appointment and retention of professors. In fact, they made this their second great demand, alongside Dixon’s reappointment. These two demands were presented to President Edward H. Levi on January 17, 1969.

Robert Pondiscio

My students and I learned this lesson the hard way. When I became a fifth-grade teacher in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school more than 20 years ago, I walked in not understanding what struggling readers looked like. More than four in five of my students had failed the previous year’s state reading test; with minimal training and no experience, I expected to encounter children who were hard-pressed to read the words on the page.

Instead, in five years at PS 277, the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing community school district, I never had a student who could not decode. Some read more fluently than others, certainly.³ But they could read the words. What they struggled to do was understand them. “I read it, but I didn’t get it” was a common refrain I heard again and again.

The distinction matters because reading is actually two different things that we routinely conflate. The first is decoding: turning the squiggles on a page into sounds and words. Decoding is a skill and a transferable one. We can agree on the pronunciation of made-up words like rigfap and churbit because once you understand the relationship between letters and sounds, you can apply that knowledge automatically even to invented nonsense words you’ve never seen before or memorized.

But reading comprehension is different. It’s inseparable from vocabulary and background knowledge. We tend not to notice this because when we read about familiar subjects, the knowledge we bring to the text does its work invisibly. Consider this sentence:

Corrinne Hess:

Last fall, Wisconsin became the 36th state to limit cell phones in schools with bipartisan support. Now, a Republican lawmaker plans to introduce legislation that would create screen-free classrooms through second grade. 

State Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, says research shows young children have the least to gain and the most to lose from spending time on screens. 

“My hope is that we can provide a better environment for learning for our students across the state,” Steffen said. “And one of the ways the research has shown, and teachers and parents have asked for, is to eliminate laptops and tablets for our youngest learners.”

Marsbit

In a remarkable breakthrough, two high school students from Oak Park High School, Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, with guidance from UCLA postdoctoral researcher Daniel Soskin, have solved an open problem related to the theory of Lorentzian polynomials—a field pioneered by Fields Medalist June Huh. Their 75-page paper, “Bounded Ratios for Lorentzian Polynomials,” is now available on arXiv. The research investigates the constraints on coefficient ratios within Lorentzian polynomials, extending prior work that characterized bounded ratios for quadratic polynomials to polynomials of arbitrary degree. The core challenge was determining which coefficient ratios have a universal upper bound across all polynomials in the class and identifying the optimal bounds. The students heavily utilized AI assistants, specifically Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for computational exploration, proof idea generation, and editing. They emphasize that while AI provided helpful suggestions, some were misleading, and all calculations and arguments were independently verified. This achievement is particularly notable as it follows a recent open letter signed by 25 Fields Medalists, including June Huh, expressing concerns about AI’s impact on mathematical rigor. The students’ work demonstrates how AI can lower barriers to entry, enabling talented pre-university researchers to engage with advanced mathematical frontiers.

JD Busch:

The Latin School of Chicago, Francis Parker, Shipley, and thousands of other National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) members could lose their non-profit status

The trade association that writes the DEI playbook for Latin, Parker, Shipley, and hundreds of other private schools just told its members, in writing, that they are probably breaking the law, and that the schools, not NAIS, are the ones facing liability. In a document obtained exclusively by Chicago Contrarian, NAIS warned its members that the bill for its DEI recommendations — actually, its requirements for remaining a member in good standing — is coming due. Specifically, the schools, not NAIS itself, will pay the price unless they stop discriminating on the basis of DEI and “Belonging and Connection,” among other catch phrases for treating different racial and ethnic groups “equitably” rather than equally whether in the classroom or on the payroll.

After years of stalled literacy efforts, Wisconsin’s latest reading law offers a fresh test of whether schools, policymakers and the public can stick with reform, Jim Zellmer writes:

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level.”

Flash forward 28 years to a July 29 Rotary Club event. Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard highlighted recent improvements in literacy in district schools. But he pointed out that proficiency rates still hovered around just 40% at the elementary, middle and high schools he listed.

“We should not be sitting in a place where we can say 60% of our students are not proficient at their grade level in reading,” Rebecca Kundert, the district’s senior executive director of curriculum and instruction, said in follow-up remarks.

Neetu Arnold:

In my outreach, the organization sidestepped key questions about the changes to its scoring methodology. And often when it provided information in response to one question, the answer introduced more inconsistencies and unresolved tensions.

Some background: In 2022, the College Board began changing its scoring methodology for nine subject exams. Prior to the change, the board typically reevaluated its scoring methodology every 5 to 10 years at the direction of a small panel of experts per subject. But the board said that this method sometimes led to volatility in passing rates from one year to another. So, it switched to a system called Evidence-Based Standard Setting (EBSS). Under EBSS, the College Board relies on feedback from hundreds of college professors and more granular student data.

Prior to the implementation of EBSS, all the affected exams had passing rates below 60 percent, according to the College Board. After implementing EBSS, all of these exams had passing rates between 60 to 80 percent, which the board calls a “success rate historically achieved in most other AP subjects.”

——-

More.

Chris Rickert:

A Verona teacher charged earlier this month with carrying on a sexual relationship with a former student has been fired, the Verona School District said on Wednesday.

Halla Nelson had been a music teacher at Badger Ridge Middle School and Core Knowledge Charter School. She was placed on unpaid leave on Aug. 31, a day after allegations surfaced that she’d had sex several times with a then-17-year-old male student in 2019.

On Sept. 9, she was charged in Dane County Circuit Court with felony sex assault of a student by school staff.

In a letter Wednesday to school district families, Superintendent Tremayne Clardy and school board President Jen Murphy say the District’s internal investigation into Nelson is complete and “based on the evidence reviewed, the (district) Board of Education concluded that the employment allegations against Ms. Nelson were substantiated and they violated (district) policy.

Paul Schofield

Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical wisdom that comes with years spent in their specific disciplines, educating students.

Alex Oliveira:

Blue states with strong teachers’ unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than Republican states where educators don’t have as much say over policy, a shocking new analysis found.

At least eight of the ten states where students had the worst literacy scores were liberal strongholds with politically powerful teachers’ unions, while just five were Republican and one was a swing state, a recent assessment from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found.

New York — where more than half of third- to fifth grade students failed their reading proficiency exams this year — was among the worst-performing states, and also had some of the strongest teachers’ unions.

——-

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?

Saying the quiet part out loud, this NYC regent claims that asking a black high school student to have basic competence in reading and math is like “asking a fish to climb a tree” https://t.co/Img9dFcZEF

— Diane Yap (@RealDianeYap) September 15, 2026

Chad Aldeman:

By the time new students arrive at Rutgers-New Brunswick, they have likely spent years in New Jersey public schools. And yet, too many of them still aren’t ready for college- level math, which costs them time and money and can make it harder to earn a degree and launch a career.

The burden of addressing those math gaps falls on the state’s higher education institutions, including Rutgers, the state’s flagship. Worse, by lowering the bar for what it takes to graduate high school, state policymakers have played a role in making those preparation gaps even wider. While this report focuses on the effects on Rutgers students and faculty, a more useful question for state policymakers is why so many students are arriving underprepared at the doors of the state’s public colleges and universities.

State leaders congratulate themselves on rising high school graduation rates, which reached a record high last year of 91.8%.

But this stat is obscuring the fact that New Jersey, like some other states, has diminished what it means to earn a diploma. Over the past decade, New Jersey has steadily expanded the ways students can satisfy their high school math requirement. On the 11th-grade New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (“NJGPA”), only 58.5% of students were deemed “graduation ready” in math in 2025.

The difference between these achievement levels —a graduation rate of nearly 92% versus a math proficiency rate under 60% — is due to the state’s introduction of alternative graduation pathways.

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Annika Bereny:

Over the past decade, UW-Madison has repeatedly turned to its alumni network to fund major projects like Morgridge Hall, which opened its doors a year ago, and Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall, set to open this month.

The $267 million Morgridge Hall was funded entirely by donors, including $140 million from its namesakes, John and Tashia Morgridge. The building at 1205 University Ave. is home to UW-Madison’s new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. 

A few blocks east, the $115 million Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall was partially funded by donors, including $20 million from alumni Marvin and Jeffrey Levy. The building at 930 W. Johnson St. serves students and faculty in the humanities disciplines. 

The Levys, the Morgridges and alum Bjorn Borgen also provided a combined $120 million in donations for the $420 million Phillip A. Levy Engineering Center at 1430 Engineering Drive, which seeks to increase the capacity of UW-Madison’s engineering school and draw more students. In 2023, Republican legislators withheld funding for the building and then reversed that decision as part of a deal over DEI programming.

Erin Gretzinger

“Although we had some negative stories, that did not tell the story that was going on in everybody’s school throughout the school year,” Reed said in an interview. “And that is the kind of space I wanted to be at.”

Brad Saron, the superintendent since 2015, left the districtat the end of last school year. As the district’s new leader, Reed said school officials can’t be “naive” that bad things may be happening, and he is confident the district has enacted adequate changes.

Reed said he wants to home in on the future of the district and concentrate on other challenges, including inadequate state funding, losing students to nearby charter and private schools, and gaps in student achievement.

“I have shied away from continuously speaking on something that’s happened prior to July 1st (his start date) to give my staff an understanding and feel for what it looks like to work on a new environment and a new team,” he said. “I think I have pushed where we’re going — not where we’ve been — as a district norm.”

Reed’s path into education started as a football and track coach at the high school he attended in Chicago. A mentor at the school encouraged him to go into teaching, and he worked his way up the ranks to become assistant principal of the school.

Reed went on to lead other schools across the Midwest, including West Milwaukee Central High School. He most recently worked as an assistant superintendent of Rockford Public Schools in Illinois.

Reed was named one of three finalists for the Sun Prairie superintendent job earlier this year. The school district said it held more than 60 focus groups with over 130 participants and reviewed survey responses from more than 1,300 individuals in its superintendent search.

Daniel Litt

Three years ago, AI systems could not reliably add two numbers. A year ago, internal models at OpenAI and DeepMind received the equivalent of a gold-medal score on the IMO. Now, these systems are autonomously resolving major open questions. It’s hard to imagine this trend continuing for another year, but I expect it will. It is clear that this will require a radical rethinking of our profession.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk titled The End of Mathematics. If you only read the title¹, you might guess that this talk was about how, soon, AI will “solve” math. That’s not what it was about. The talk instead laid out a gloomy vision of the future, in which, despite the possibility of AI systems that are robustly superhuman at mathematics, the design of our institutions causes human understanding of mathematics, and possibly even mathematical progress in the abstract, to stall. I think we will avoid this future, but I also think it is plausibly the default if academic mathematics does not adapt. Despite my relative enthusiasm for the use of AI to do mathematics, I share this view with many of its detractors.

Here I want to lay out, instead, a positive vision of the future of mathematics, and the human practice of mathematics. I claim we can deepen human understanding even as the production of interesting mathematics becomes less dependent on it.

This essay will take as a premise that AI systems that are robustly superhuman at most or all aspects of mathematics will be here soon. But the concrete changes to our institutions I propose only require accepting the weaker premise that the production of mathematical text is becoming increasingly disconnected from mathematical understanding.

What are we even trying to do here?

I think it has now become clear that there is no consensus in the mathematical community as to what our goals are. Some of us want to solve problems; some of us think of mathematics as play or as poetry. For some: “Wir müssen wissen  wir werden wissen.”² Some of us think we are penetrating the mysteries of the platonic realm. Some of us think the goal is to embody love of and understanding of mathematics,³ and to transmit that love and understanding to the next generation. 

Roshan Fernandez

His daughter, Estela Whitney, was tasked with feeding food scraps to the piglets and refilling their water. Once, she was hours late and the pigs were hungry. “I’m going to be a lot more careful to not make that mistake again,” she said.

She hopes attending the Mountain School, which draws high-achieving students from around the country, will help distinguish her college applications. The curriculum includes rigorous academic options, like AP Calculus, in addition to practical and outdoorsy courses, such as “creative handiwork” and environmental science.

“I have good enough grades to get into a good college, but I want something that’ll make me stand out,” she said. She lives in Buenos Aires but wants to attend college in the U.S.

On the Mountain School’s Instagram account, tucked between photos showing students hiking and tending to lambs, is a post highlighting recent attendees’ acceptances to Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth and UC Berkeley, among other colleges.