Milwaukee Business Journal:

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

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

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

—–

More.

US Department of Justice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Savanah Hernandez (@Savsays) August 6, 2026

Kevin Kelly:

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

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

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

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

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

Jukka Savolainen:

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

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

John Hinderaker

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

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

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

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

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

Adala Almotery:

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

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

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

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

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

George Wiebe:

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

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

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

 Teagan King:

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

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

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

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ashley McBride:

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

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

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

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

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

University of Florida:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kieran Velasquez:

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

Hollis Robbins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Waters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Cover Grades in the First Semester?

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

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

———-

Commentary.

More:

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

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

• Delayed students from adapting to college-level work

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

———

Scott Kupor:

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

FIRE:

South Florida State College Professor Vinita Prabhakar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIRE:

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

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

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

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

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

Amanda Albright:

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

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

Shalini Ramachandran

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

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

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

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

Helen Andrews:

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

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

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

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

Nir Evron:

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

Matt Taibbi:

Mother Jones on Dr. Anthony Fauci:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Anderson:

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger:

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

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

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Joanne Jacobs:

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

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

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

Scott Niederjohn & William Flanders:

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

——-

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

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Neetu Arnold:

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

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

Colbey Decker:

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

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

Official training below: 🧵

Douglas Belkin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isadore Knox Jr.:

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Benson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Friedman:

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

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

James Traub:

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Illinois Policy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

——-

Hannah Schmid

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

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

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

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

Alicia Anderson:

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

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

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

Evidence from Ohio’s natural experiment

——-

More.

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

Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and Katie A. Danielson

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

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

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

Michael Fumento:

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

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

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

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

Susie Kaeser:

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Benson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Cleveland-Stout:

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

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

Allysia Finley:

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

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

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

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

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

www link:

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

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

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

Boston Globe:

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

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

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

====

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

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Pat Garrett:

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

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

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

The story did not mention something ludicrous.

The mega-funded, wraparound-service, trauma-informed Silicon Valley Facebook school that just closed used balanced literacy for years.

“We were optimistic about its potential to help us grow our young learners into strong readers.”

——

Madison used Balanced Literacy for decades….

Danielle DuClos

Attorney General Josh Kaul is appealing a Dane County judge’s order for the Wisconsin Department of Justice to release a statewide roster of law enforcement officials in response to a request under open records laws.

The Badger Project, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates politicians and law enforcement, and the Chicago-based Invisible Institute filed the request for a database of state-certified law enforcement officers in 2023. The request sought 17 categories of information including the names of officers, employment dates, and dates or years of birth.

The newsrooms sought the information to help identify police officers convicted of crimes who weren’t disciplined and to track officers who have changed law enforcement agencies frequently, according to a lawsuit filed by the newsrooms.

The DOJ partially fulfilled the request in 2024 but denied providing the newsrooms with a list of all certified law enforcement, which is estimated to include more than 16,000 officers. Among other reasons for withholding the information, the DOJ said providing such a list would jeopardize the safety of law enforcement officers, particularly those who are undercover.

Dan Shafer:

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

His answer:

“In a way the establishment is the people who want things to go back to the way they were or stay the same way that they are now. And so many people who other people see as being part of the establishment will tell you how frustrated they are at how stuck things can feel. That, in fact, there’s kind of a secret coalition of a lot of people that are involved in politics and government and — a lot of people that aren’t — who want things to change.

I was struck by this when I ran for DNC chair. You know, the Democratic National Committee is like the ultimate embodiment of “the establishment.” And I spoke to every DNC member. And, to a person, they were frustrated; they wanted change. They wound up, you know, voting for the person that they knew rather than the new guy who’d been focused on Wisconsin. So didn’t win that race. Totally honored that.

But, in this moment in our country, the overwhelming majority of the country does not want to go back. And they recognize that what’s happening now is not working. It’s not working for any of us.

And I think that Democrats can fall into this trap of pointing out when Donald Trump or the GOP smash something, attack something, defund something, that we can react by saying, ‘we’ve got to defend it, we’ve got to rebuild it, we’ve got to go back to the way it was.’ Even though, all of us know that the way things were before, it may have been normal, but that didn’t mean it was OK.”

——-

Perhaps a far more interesting topic for Wisconsin residents: the explosive growth in out of state political spending….. Wikler seemed to be an effective enabler.

———

Spencer Pratt:

People listen to the stupid-smart guys, like him. Then they’re genuinely baffled when there’s a Kalashnikov pointed at their head as they’re staring at a cinder block wall behind the politburo headquarters. In a functional society, this clown would be a pariah. I have precisely zero empathy for his plight in NYC. He endorsed it. Now he can eat it, good and hard.

Patrick McIlheran:

Teens see the fallacy of the abolish-and-defund narrative

One recent July morning in a riverside woods west of Eau Claire, 13 high-schoolers took turns firing practice versions of PepperBalls at an old steel drum and un-abolishing the police.

It was, as Sgt. Mike Major of the Eau Claire Police Department put it, “the cool, the fun day for the kids, where we show them all the tools we have.”

They also saw how to work the little drone that scouts out rooms during a stand-off, and the big infrared one that revolutionizes lost-person searches. They tried out very realistic Airsoft versions of police sidearms and peered out the roof hatch of the SWAT team’s armored car.

The teens — and the half-dozen or more police running the day on the range — were on Day 2 of the week-long Junior Police Academy that the Eau Claire department’s been running every summer for a decade now. Earlier sessions were for middle-schoolers. This year, there was a week for older teens to see what patrol officers do, tour the dispatch center, and process a mock crime scene with detectives.

It’s not really career week, said Deputy Chief Ben Frederick, who led the junior academy program for years. Of about 500 kids who have gone through the program, the department has seen one become an Eau Claire officer.

Kaila R Norman, Wendy K Silverman, Eli R Lebowitz^:

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health concern for youth. Unfortunately, a substantial number of children and adolescents do not respond positively to current evidence-based interventions and/or relapse. As pediatric anxiety disorders are fundamentally a systemic phenomenon, focusing on the ways in which parents become involved in their children’s anxiety symptoms may be a promising alternative approach to treatment.

PURPOSE

To inform psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) about the phenomenology, associated neurobiology, and assessment of family accommodation (FA) as well as clinical interventions targeting FA. FA refers to ways that parents adapt their own behaviors to reduce their children’s anxiety-related distress.

Daisy Christodoulou

• Despite the current vogue for attempting to teach transferable skills rather than specific knowledge, the best evidence we have indicates that it is not possible.
• Our cognition is tightly bound to context. To the extent that transfer is possible, it depends on domain-specific knowledge.
• To facilitate “near transfer” of skills, teachers must identify the domain-specific knowledge that underpins skill and carefully sequence their lessons and assignments.

Spend any time working in education—either in K–12 schools or universities—and before long you will come across the concept of “transferable skills.” These are skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that ostensibly cut across traditional subject areas and are needed for many different kinds of jobs and tasks.¹

There are two particular reasons why, in our current climate, the idea of teaching transferable skills is so popular. First, we are living through a time of dramatic economic and technological change. Students and parents worry that traditional jobs, and the bodies of knowledge underpinning them, might become obsolete if artificial intelligence outperforms humans. As the British educator Guy Claxton put it, specific knowledge might quickly date, but “the generic ability to learn has no use-by date at all.” Therefore, schools should focus on helping students exercise their “learning muscles,” which will allow them to tackle any problem.²⁠ Perhaps knowledge of the law will stop being valuable, but communication and problem-solving will always be relevant.

Jonathan Derbyshire:

“Theory”, the name given in the US to an intellectual movement that emerged in France in the 1960s, would change the face of the humanities in American universities and in the process become a casus belli during the early skirmishes in what were later dubbed the “culture wars”. 

Eakin, who first fell “under the Frenchmen’s spell” as an undergraduate at Harvard, traces theory’s origins to the structuralist revolution in the human sciences, which, she asserts, was “really two revolutions in one”. First, the structuralists replaced Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist notion of a self imbued with agency and the capacity to choose with the idea of the impersonal system. And second, they anointed language the master system above all others. They took from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the view that language is a system without positive terms, in which the meaning of words derives entirely from their relation to one another.

The increasingly rancorous battles over the significance and implications of theory in the 1980s weren’t confined to the academy. In 1987, for example, the conservative philosopher Allan Bloom topped the bestseller lists with The Closing of the American Mind, a book that railed against the corrupting effects of “jargon derived from the despair of European thinkers”. Today, Bloom’s jeremiad continues to influence many of those who criticise the state of American universities from the political right. 

Via a kind reader, amidst our long term, disastrous literacy crisis:

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

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ezra Wallach

When he was a Mission High School student, Misael Villalta was grateful for the college counselors who guided him as he applied to selective universities. 

The college and career center helped him navigate the forms, scholarships, and financial aid that led to his acceptance to UC Berkeley. But once he arrived, Villalta realized that being accepted to one of the world’s top public universities didn’t mean he was prepared to succeed there.

“The challenge begins once students arrive on campus,” he said. “Many of us are academically behind our peers.”

Villalta’s experience reflects a growing gap between those who get into California’s top public universities and those who are ready for a rigorous academic experience.

Ray Smith:

Steven Clark had the unpleasant task of firing a 24-year-old—twice. Once was in a brief conversation with the new hire, who’d showed up late or not at all four times in his first week at a construction job. 

Then Clark had to do it all over again, this time with the guy’s mother. 

She called him a few hours later, pleading to give her son another chance. When Clark told her no, things got heated before he ended the call.

“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,’” says Clark, who is chief operating officer of a Fairbanks, Alaska-based staffing firm.

Samuel McIlhagga:

Dear Patchers — how does a national college dedicated to high speed rail work when its senior management doesn’t know anything about trains? Short answer: it doesn’t. 

Today’s story follows the byzantine ins-and-outs of a failed further education college in Birmingham. The National College for High Speed Rail opened in 2016-2017 in a blaze of positivity, excitement and, crucially, government and local funding. Back in 2017, the then Secretary of Education, Justine Greening sung the college’s praises as it opened: “It is part of how we are steadily transforming technical education in this country, training up a new generation of skilled young people.”

Yet, eight years later and the college has disappeared. At least £57.9 million was spent by both the central government, South Yorkshire’s combined authority and Birmingham’s local enterprise partnership. And yet, by the time the college closed in 2023, across both Birmingham and Doncaster, it had less than 20 students left. How could both the government and the college’s leadership team get it so wrong? How could the seemingly simple project of training young people to be railway engineers turn into a fiasco of legal challenges, rising budget deficits, harassment claims, and disproportionate executive pay? 

Pieter Garicano:

Everyone’s seen the old Harvard entrance exam, but how would you do at the 1878 exam to join the British Indian Civil Service?

“datarepublican”

Virtually every major Democratic campaign depends on a single private platform for voter, donor, and organizing data. Yet the ownership, regulatory gaps, and risks surrounding that infrastructure have received almost no public scrutiny. Apax Partners is what ties together Neville Roy Singham, China involvement, the Democratic party infrastructure, and much more

Jennifer Weber, Carolyn D. Gorman:

More than two decades ago, in 2003, Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen argued that suspensions and expulsions were funneling children—disproportionately black and Latino boys and students with disabilities—out of schools and into the justice system. They called it the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The phrase stuck, changing how schools discipline children.

Associating discipline with racism and diminished life prospects for minority youth, school districts increasingly responded by reducing suspensions and replacing them with mental health-oriented approaches like “restorative justice,” social-emotional learning, and “trauma-informed” practices. In Los Angeles, for example, the school board voted in 2013 to end suspensions for “willful defiance” after years of advocacy from CADRE, a Los Angeles parent organization, and the ACLU of Southern California. Similar reforms spread nationwide as educators and advocates viewed exclusionary discipline as the problem.

Rachel Louise Ensign and Paul Overberg:

When Fernando and Patricia Escobedo moved to the Willows, an affluent neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, 25 years ago, kids were everywhere.

About half of the homes on their cul-de-sac had children. Growing up, the couple’s twin daughters used to ride their scooters outside with other neighborhood kids. At an annual block party, they jumped around in a bouncy house and climbed into the local firetruck.

The twins are now in college—and the neighborhood feels a lot different. The Escobedos also have a 12-year-old at home, and Fernando said she is one of a few children under 18 on the block. The local elementary school has noticeably fewer kids. And Fernando said he’s more likely to see a retired neighbor gardening than a child on a bicycle.

“It’s not the vibe it was 10 years ago when there were still kids here,” he said.

With the nation’s fertility rate at record lows, the number of children under 18 is falling across the U.S. The decline is especially pronounced in big cities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Michael Inzlicht:

I became a social psychologist because I wanted to make the world a better place. After taking “Introduction to Social Psychology” with the legendary McGill professor Donald Taylor, I knew I had found my calling. Taylor — who sadly passed away during the pandemic — was a natural performer and storyteller who inspired countless young undergraduates to pursue careers in social psychology. For me, Taylor’s material came most alive when he talked about the psychology of prejudice.

Daisy Christodoulou

Key Points

• Despite the current vogue for attempting to teach transferable skills rather than specific knowledge, the best evidence we have indicates that it is not possible.
• Our cognition is tightly bound to context. To the extent that transfer is possible, it depends on domain-specific knowledge.
• To facilitate “near transfer” of skills, teachers must identify the domain-specific knowledge that underpins skill and carefully sequence their lessons and assignments.

Introduction

Spend any time working in education—either in K–12 schools or universities—and before long you will come across the concept of “transferable skills.” These are skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that ostensibly cut across traditional subject areas and are needed for many different kinds of jobs and tasks.¹

There are two particular reasons why, in our current climate, the idea of teaching transferable skills is so popular. First, we are living through a time of dramatic economic and technological change. Students and parents worry that traditional jobs, and the bodies of knowledge underpinning them, might become obsolete if artificial intelligence outperforms humans. As the British educator Guy Claxton put it, specific knowledge might quickly date, but “the generic ability to learn has no use-by date at all.” Therefore, schools should focus on helping students exercise their “learning muscles,” which will allow them to tackle any problem.²⁠ Perhaps knowledge of the law will stop being valuable, but communication and problem-solving will always be relevant.

The other reason for the current vogue for teaching transferable skills is political. Political partisans often cannot agree on what facts are, let alone which ones are important enough to be taught to children. Again, the transferable skills concept seems to offer a way out of this difficult problem. Instead of teaching children whatto think, we should teach them how to think. Instead of making decisions for them about controversial topics, give them the critical thinking and research skills to make their own decisions.

Cole Reynolds

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. 

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

Jared Gold:

But Nate Silver’s recent essay, “The DSA Sweet Spot: Highly Educated, Downwardly Mobile,” brings renewed attention to Turchin’s warning about college graduate overproduction, or elite overproduction: the idea that societies become unstable when they produce more highly credentialed elites than there are elite positions for them to occupy.

Silver finds that the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in America consists of voters with postgraduate degrees earning between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. He notes that this is “very much also the sweet spot for the DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America).

By Sarah Schwartz:

Two bills that would boost federal involvement in reading instruction passed out of a Senate committee on Thursday, signaling Congress’ continued interest in the “science of reading” movement.

One, the bipartisan READ Act, would put new requirements on existing federal literacy grants to support early screening for reading difficulties and evidence-based reading instruction, and shift some funding to states with the lowest reading scores.

Another, the 21st Century Dyslexia Act, would change how the reading disability dyslexia is classified under federal disability law, establishing dyslexia as its own category.

“In the greatest country in the world, we can’t resign ourselves to the fact that many children still struggle to read at grade level, and that only 1 in 3 students leave high school as proficient readers,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., one of the cosponsors of the READ Act, during the session of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday.

Both bills will now advance to the full Senate.

The READ Act and its committee approval demonstrate growing momentum in Congress for the “science of reading,” a movement that has been primarily led by the states. Since 2020, more than 40 states have passed legislationrequiring or encouraging schools to use evidence-backed practices to teach young children how to read.

Language in one of the House’s 2027 fiscal appropriations bills calls for convening a second National Reading Panel

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Brian Hamilton:

So, too, was the current status quo in Congress, where members get rich by staying in office.

The Founders were builders, not leeches. They didn’t want to stay in public office for the entirety of their careers. Public service was a short-term contribution of a private citizen to their communities and country.

Recall that, after the American Revolution, some encouraged George Washington to assume the role of king, since he basically had control of the military. To his everlasting credit, he rejected that notion. This was noted by no less than the king of England, who said that, upon forgoing royalty, Washington would be “the greatest man in the world.”

Needless to say, we are short a few Washingtons these days.

To date, more than 300 legislators have served for more than 30 years in Congress. Some 70% of the current members were career politicians before they made it to Washington. No Founder would have even thought to consider laws around term limits because they couldn’t have fathomed hanging out well beyond their welcome, all the while depending on the government dole for their salary.

The natural question is, why would legislators want to stick around for so long?

It turns out that, since 2004, the top 100 wealth gainers in Congress have averaged a 114% increase in net worth while in office, according to a recent Ballotpedia study. During the same period, the median U.S. household saw its inflation-adjusted net worth decline by nearly 1%. That means that for every $1 of wealth the average American lost, Congress’s top 100 gained $121. Wow. Today, at least 30% of senators are estimated to be worth more than $10 million, despite their taxpayer-funded base salary being just $174,000.

How is this possible?

One obvious explanation is that these politicians are privy to information that average Americans aren’t, yet they are still permitted to own and trade individual stocks. The 2012 Stock Act, which requires members of Congress to report stock trades worth more than $1,000 within a 45-day window, does nothing to curb legislators’ trading.

You would hope that they would want to act in the interest of the country without the appearance of personal gain. However, an investigation conducted by a consortium of news organizations that analyzed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports identified 78 members of Congress who violated the Stock Act.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always thought that you were supposed to make money from taking risks and adding value. It seems these guys are simply trading on their influence and knowledge. I think most Americans would be shocked to know how the system actually works in favor of the politicians.

While running for president in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) targeted President Lyndon B. Johnson, who added millions of dollars to his family’s fortunes while in Washington. Goldwater said that “small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.” Unfortunately, he was spot on.

Laura Nelson:

The school that Dr. Priscilla Chan co-founded for low-income students was designed to be different.

The vast fortunes being minted in other corners of Silicon Valley had mostly missed East Palo Alto, Calif., where the Primary School opened in 2016. Funded through Chan’s philanthropy with her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the private, tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.

The school joined a long list of efforts by the country’s wealthiest, dating back to Andrew Carnegie, to put their stamp on the American classroom. Then, after a decade of operation and more than $125 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Primary School shut down in June.

Anna Stokke:

Report | American Enterprise Institute

• Several popular ideas in math education are unsupported by high-quality evidence, used at the wrong stage of learning, or harmful to student learning.
• Among these are five common instructional practices: teaching multiple strategies for the same operation before students have mastered one reliable method, allowing technology to replace foundational knowledge and procedural skills, delaying the teaching of procedures until conceptual understanding is secure, teaching primarily through student-led problem-solving, and avoiding repetitive practice.
• Effective math teaching supports new learners through clear, explicit instruction.

Introduction

Math education is plagued with superficially appealing phrases and ideas that aren’t aligned with how students learn. Many students find math difficult or think they are incapable of doing it. Ideas marketed as quick fixes or ways to avoid the hard work necessary for learning math are therefore often attractive to educators and students.

Despite their appeal, many of the most popular ideas in math education are unsupported by high-quality evidence, are applied at the wrong stage of learning, or work against learning.

Here are five popular ideas in math education that should be reconsidered and abandoned.

Misconception 1: New Learners Should Learn Multiple Strategies

The Crimson Brand Studio:

The Harvard College Writing Center will no longer operate as a standalone unit after its director was laid off and its functions were consolidated as part of a restructuring in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, prompting swift backlash from current and former writing tutors.

In a Thursday email obtained by The Crimson, the center’s director, Jane Rosenzweig, told tutors that she was laid off and that they could potentially continue working through the Academic Resource Center. She was among dozens of College staff informed of layoffs and job changes last week as the school moves forward with a restructuring that will reshape several of its main offices.

The Writing Center offers support to students through one-on-one peer tutoring and other resources. FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm confirmed in a statement that “several offices and functions within the College have been consolidated, including the Writing Center.”

“Importantly, students will continue to be able to work with writing tutors and access other resources previously provided by the Center,” he added.

Rosenzweig, who has worked at Harvard for more than two decades, has also taught first-year Expository Writing courses and helped develop a new AI learning module required for all first-year students enrolled in Expos. She declined to comment on her layoff.

Glenn Reynolds

Well this didn’t age wellpic.twitter.com/prvxPsrHpF

— Julian Assange (@ImJulianAssange) July 29, 2026

Jeff’s response was “He saved lives. What have you done?” My reply was “Did he?”

A few of my friends came on to suggest, politely enough, that Fauci’s contribution was mostly negative and Jeff abruptly responded “Good-bye, Glenn,” and unfriended me.

Well, I will survive the shock of that blow, but it struck me — after all those years of disagreeing on politics, this was the straw that broke Jarvis’s back? Anthony Fauci? Especially now, when he’s the butt of self-incrimination jokes? In front of Congress, Fauci wouldn’t even say what color his tie was. (I’m trying to talk one of my distiller friends into putting out a limited run of Fauci whiskey, with the slogan “Take the Fifth!”) 

Why Fauci, and why now?

I think the answer is that Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule.

Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47.

Ann Althouse summary.

Derek Thompson:

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

•Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Why is the Education Department pulling student loan funding from college programs that leave students worse off financially? Find out in my latest for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/3RsL9PNmTq

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) July 31, 2026

Joanne Jacobs:

On the advice of Astor and others, schools have invested heavily “in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming,” Barshay writes. Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, fewer students are bringing weapons to school. But school shootings have increased.

School shooters aren’t responding to bullying or trauma, Astor told Barshay. They crave notoriety. “Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” he said.

“The more media attention a shooter gets, the more likely the event will inspire a future mass shooter,” warns the National Center for Health Research.

Trying to make schools safe and supportive places is important, Astor says. But preventing school shootings requires working with the media. He hopes to persuade journalists and social media companies to “adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims,” writes Barshay.

Catrin Wigfall:

When asked to estimate how much their state spends per public school student, parents and other adults guessed $5,000 and $6,000, respectively, both significantly under the average across all states ($15,591 using FY 2022 data) and even well below the lowest spending state, Utah, at $9,496 per student.

A national July survey by Morning Consult on behalf of EdChoice polled 2,250 adults and 1,300 school parents on a variety of education-related questions, including public school funding. Non-parent respondents estimated public school spending was around $10,000 per student, a guess that landed within actual spending ranges.

Source: EdChoice

Respondents were also asked whether they thought public school funding in their state was too low, too high, or about right. Without any information on how much their state spent per public school student each year, 54 percent of the general public said funding was “too low.” With information on how much their state spent, the percent of Americans saying funding was “too low” dropped to 37 percent — a decrease of 17 percentage points — and the percent to say funding was “too high” increased 10 percentage points.

Source: EdChoice

According to the Minnesota Department of Education’s latest numbers, Minnesota’s spending per student as measured by average daily membership (ADM) was $16,650 for FY 2024. (This varies by district.) Beginning with FY 2026, the basic formula allowance, which is the basic general education revenue component for school districts, will increase automatically each year at the rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) within a band not less than a two percent increase over the previous year or greater than a three percent increase over the previous year.

———

Hollly McDede:

This story was originally co-published by ProPublica and KQED

I was a new reporter at KQED in 2021 when former elementary teacher Joseph Brian Houg was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for sexually abusing 10 students. He’d taught at the same San Francisco Bay Area school for more than two decades. Were there warning signs?

I soon discovered parents on social media saying they had complained to school administrators for years about Houg. I also knew that schools could release such complaints if they were substantiated or if teachers were disciplined. So I filed public records requests with Houg’s school — something anyone can do.

I received 43 pages of records within a few months showing that parents had reported Houg to the principal at least four times since 2009. They complained about him for asking students to strip down to their underwear in his classroom in order to try on costumes for a play he was directing, and for coming into their changing room. They also complained about his touching boys’ chests or stomachs and tapping one boy on the butt. I learned that the principal had twice warned Houg to stop touching students. But he was allowed to keep teaching. (The principal said in a deposition that while Houg’s actions crossed professional boundaries, they were not reported to her as sexual.)

Over the next two years, I reported on similar cases of teachers remaining in the classroom after complaints of unwanted touching. Another Bay Area elementary school, in Benicia, reported a teacher to the state’s licensing body after he resigned due to accusations of misconduct. He was hired by another school, and his educator license remained in good standing until he was criminally charged. (He is currently fighting those charges.)

This raised a whole different set of questions for me: Should these teachers have been allowed to keep teaching in new schools? How much about a teacher’s disciplinary history did potential employers know? And what was the state’s responsibility for acting on, and sharing, the information it had about these teachers?

Carson Griffith: 

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”

Kate Armanini:

After a divisive debate, the Chicago Board of Education approved the district’s $9.96 billion budget Thursday, adopting an amendment that anticipates $150 million in state funding to reverse school-level cuts.

The district’s 2026-27 budget originally included the layoffs of 760 teachers, department cuts and a midyear spending freeze to close a $730 million deficit. The controversial amendment eliminates the spending freeze and plans to undo at least some of the planned layoffs.

But it’s unclear whether additional state funding will materialize.

Lawmakers already passed the state’s budget in June — closing their own $2 billion deficit — and Chicago Public Schools leaders say they’ve been given no indication that more funding is available.

CPS CEO Macquline King warned the budget amendment may leave the district vulnerable to midyear school cuts if the money doesn’t come through. Lenders will also “not look favorably” at unconfirmed revenue, which could lead to credit downgrades and higher borrowing costs, officials said.

“We need to learn from our mistakes instead of repeating them,” King said.

——

Angel Gutierrez:

My speech on the floor before the budget vote. I was prepared to vote on Sup. King’s and her team of experts budget on Thursday and unfortunately we did not have the opportunity, instead we voted on an unbalanced budget that adds “Phantom Dollars,” which is why I voted NO!

——

Related:

Heck, I would dig a little deeper on whether even more state aid is a good idea. Mostly, better performers and higher spenders lean local.

(County-based districts are a great compromise: equity by metropolitan area, then use state aid for the poor counties without breadwinners.)

And:

Other Boards have been angry with Milwaukee. Here is Waukesha on state aid.

~”When Milwaukee passes a referendum, they are passing on a tax increase to every other district. These referendums are killing us from a district that cannot even file its financial reports on time.”

Jon A. Shields:

Colleges, especially selective ones, contribute to class segregation in America by cocooning students in residential campuses that are culturally much like the neighborhoods they’ll one day occupy. That makes it all the more important that students take courses that expose them to the rich social-scientific literature on our growing class divide. Unfortunately, such educational encounters seem to be rare. Students need more opportunities to learn about their fellow citizens; otherwise, we fear that America will remain a mostly foreign country to the next generation of college graduates.

Matt Taibbi:

“Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthyintent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country…Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon… On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth… The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.”

— The New York Times

In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases(NIAID), about Covid, and US-funded gain of function experiments. “Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?” 

Fauci answered by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, for the first of 100 times: 

This ought to have marked a dramatic and final end to years of hagiographic worship of the man, and commenced a long overdue decision to investigate science’s role in causing the pandemic. 

No luck. The reaction to Wednesday’s hearing makes clear that there is no amount of evidence that will move half of the American population off its religious devotion to this invidious huckster-narcissist whose reckless behavior endangered the world. Nothing gets through. Documentary evidence doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the FBI and the Department of Energy point in that direction. Not even a desire for self-preservation — the investigation of Fauci and other scientists is a necessary precursor to learning how an engineered virus killed millions — will shake this segment of the population. 

A sample of the revelations that have been, and apparently will continue to be, ignored:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:

“Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

— U.S. Supreme Court, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Major Findings

1. The percentage of colleges and universities earning an overall “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight database has hit an all-time low — this year to 13.2%. This is an approximately one-and-a-half percentage point drop from last year, and is more than 55 percentage points lower than the percentage of red light institutions in FIRE’s first, 2006 report in which 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating. 
2. 69.4% of institutions now earn an overall “yellow light” rating. Though less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still restrict expression that is protected under First Amendment standards and invite administrative abuse.
3. A total of 76 colleges and universities now earn an overall “green light” rating, up from 73 schools as of last year’s report. Policies earn a green light rating when they do not seriously threaten protected expression. For the second year in a row, more institutions earn a green light rating (76) than a red light rating (66). This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30. 

Robert Pondiscio:

Of course, education policy, governance, and funding matters. But policy can only create the conditions for success. Ultimately, student learning depends on what teachers know and are able to do. That’s the animating idea behind “The Practice Project.”

Each paper in the series translates evidence from cognitive science, education research, and the accumulated wisdom of accomplished educators, thinkers, and writers into practical guidance for teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. Rather than prescribing new policies, adjudicating arguments, or promoting educational fashions, the papers in this initiative focus on the craft of teaching itself.

Significantly, this series is a joint effort of AEI and researchED, a UK-based outfit that is well-known overseas but remains something of a cult item here in the US. It’s an international community of teachers, researchers, and school leaders committed to improving evidence-based classroom practice through research and the dissemination of professional knowledge. I’ve been a fan since attending my first researchED conference in Philadelphia in 2018. In the years since, I’ve presented at their conferences in England, Canada, and Chile. I’ve been to several others not as a speaker but simply as an attendee.

Indeed, many of the contributors to this series are people I’ve met through the researchED community. I’ve seen them teach, discussed their work at the pub afterward, and watched teachers pack their sessions because they had something genuinely useful to say. The goal of “The Practice Project” is to make that expertise available to educators who may never have the opportunity to attend a researchED conference in person.

www:

Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be “the limit of human felicity.” A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe

Rachel Pritzker:

I believe it’s important to honestly reassess ourselves and our efforts periodically. And when I see how I’ve fallen short, to fess up to it and commit to doing better going forward. To that end, I’ve written about how easy it is to accidentally fuel toxic polarization and distrust more broadly. I have learned a few things the hard way, here are a few of them: 1/2

Jennifer Weber, Carolyn D. Gorman:

This view overlooks a basic behavioral principle: that consequences shape what children do next. Some consequences make a behavior less likely—that’s punishment. Others make it more likely—what B. F. Skinner called reinforcement. It doesn’t matter whether the reward is getting something good or merely escaping something bad.

Much classroom misbehavior is motivated by the desire to escape. The student is trying to get out of something he finds unpleasant, whether it’s work he can’t do, a subject he’s failing, or an audience he’d rather not face. For that student, a suspension acts as a reward—it gets him exactly what he wants, reinforcing the behavior. The harm is what the days outside of the classroom bring––disengagement and the growing sense that school is not where he belongs. Other misbehavior is motivated by desire for attention; in those cases, pulling the student aside for a one-on-one discussion is unlikely to be an effective deterrent.

The restorative-justice practices that have replaced suspension, such as mediation circles or discussion with a teacher, distribute the same kinds of unintentional rewards. A child escaping a math worksheet doesn’t care whether he gets a suspension slip or is placed in a restorative circle; either way, the worksheet is gone. Likewise, a child who seeks adult attention doesn’t care whether it’s punitive or therapeutic; either way, he got it.

Schools often––unintentionally––deepen the reward of attention through the use of mental-health programs. A standard response to repeated misbehavior is a visit to the school counselor or school psychologist. There the misbehaving student receives a caring adult’s undivided, one-on-one time. Students who need adult attention should get it, but not as the payoff for acting out.

Escape works the same way in reverse. The trip to the counselor’s office ends the math lesson just as surely as a suspension does. For the student acting out to avoid work that he cannot do, an effective response must ensure that the work does not go away. The assignment should wait for him––in the office, after school—so that the misbehavior no longer gets him out of it. And because the skill he lacks is usually the real problem, the lasting fix is help with the work itself, which will give the student more reason to want to stay in the classroom.

——-

Notes and links on Restorative Justice.

Kathleen Stock:

The progressive world loves a good fairy tale. Autistic and totally mute till the age of 11, Professor Jason Arday only learned to read and write at 18. Since then, he has blazed through the academic ranks, from a lectureship in physical education in 2016, to a Cambridge Professorial Chair in Sociology in 2023 — the youngest black professor ever appointed there. He has helped the Government with its antiracism strategies; advised on the national curriculum; guest-edited the Today program; and been the subject of a glowing profile on Good Morning America. His writing has been enthusiastically praised by James O’Brien and David Lammy. His fans now await his memoir, to be published in a month’s time.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

——-

Benjamin Ryan:

The Good Law Project insists Cambridge professor Jason Arday has not plagiarized and that claims that he has are part of a right-wing smear project.

Here are side-by-side comparisons of his compared with other people’s work:

Cole Reynolds

The plastic, nonlethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers, will be at the ready in a handful of schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado.

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. 

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

Jessica Poiner:

Good evidence shows that we’re stuck in a “learning recession.” We also need to consider the likelihood of a connected recession in something indispensable to student learning, namely effective teaching.

I often invite audiences to identify the same missing word in three eerily similar quotes by reputable educators over two decades. Each laments the gradual disappearance of something central to effective schooling. By the second quote, most of the audience correctly guesses that the missing word is indeed teaching.

The most recent example comes from author and consultant Michael Sonbert, whose observations in thousands of classrooms demonstrate that, however hard they work, “teachers aren’t teaching.” That is, they rarely provide explicit, sustained, whole-class lessons.

Instead, they’re more prone than ever to facilitate—to have individuals or groups complete assignments on screens or worksheets, often at their own (sometimes dawdling) pace. Sonbert dubs this shift the “biggest trend in teaching today.” It is tacitly confirmed by the photos that dominate education publications, which illustrate the pervasiveness of group activities involving crayons and colored markers.

None of my audiences balks at these findings.

Ella Hanley:

When Congress first passed IDEA in 1975, it pledged that the federal government would pay up to 40% of the additional costs of educating students with disabilities. The federal share has never reached that level, according to the National Council on Disability.

The Madison school district is facing a roughly $65 million gap between the federal government’s promised IDEA funding and what it currently provides, Superintendent Joe Gothard said.

IDEA requires public schools to provide a “free appropriate public education” to students with disabilities, meaning local school districts cannot legally reduce services because federal funding falls short. Instead, the district must make up the difference with state and local dollars.

“We’ve got to find a way to balance this out,” Gothard said. “To fully fund special education is the number one priority, and we’ve heard that at the state level.”

Between 2019 and 2024, Madison school district special education spending increased faster than general education spending, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. About one-sixth of the district’s more than 25,000 students receivespecial education services.

John Hillen:

The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

Will Flanders and Brooke Smith:

As students prepare for the 2026-27 school year, DPI has finally released spending data for the 2024-25.  While this continues a pattern of the DPI seemingly dragging it’s feet in releasing public school spending information, the data is still illuminating.  Despite the continual refrain that public schools are “underfunded,” the data reveals—yet again—spending that is near all-time highs. 

On average across the state, school district revenue is $18,859 per student.  This represents an increase of about $267 per student from last year without adjusting for inflation. 150 districts have seen a per pupil funding decline from last year, while 270 have seen an increase.  Though funding is slightly down by $203 from the 2023-24 school year after inflation adjustment.  This 1.06% decline is fully explained by inflation, which was approximately 3% between August 2023 and August 2024.  More pertinent than that is the long-term trend.  The figure below shows revenue per student back to the 2006 school year—the earliest available on the DPI website after they removed older data earlier this year.  

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Julia Amann:

There has never been a better time to be a math nerd.

New college graduates and Ph.D.s are now securing million-dollar pay deals from elite trading firms seeking to secure the best and brightest amid fierce competition from artificial-intelligence companies.

——

Yet:

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

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Tony Woodlief

The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education. 

These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored. 

Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results. 

If any school district needed help diverting struggling children from a path that begins with school suspensions and ends in prison, it was the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. Its schools serve a student community that is 57% black, in a county whose 2024 black out-of-wedlock birthrate was 80%, where nearly three-quarters of students come from low-income households and roughly the same percentage fall below grade level in reading and math, according to 2024-25 data. During the 2021-22 school year, before its wide-scale adoption of restorative justice, this district of roughly 20,000 students had almost 2,500 instances of violence, bullying and weapons infractions.

Who could blame LRSD for forming a partnership with the Tendaji Community Development Corp., which claims its alternative discipline methods “promote cohesion among students and administrators while fostering a growth mindset and positive relationships”? LRSD engaged Tendaji in 2022, paying it almost $1.5 million between 2023 and 2025 alone to provide digital social-emotional learning tutorials, on-site peer mediation and “restorative circles,” among other services.

What followed was a catastrophe. Since the 2021-22 school year, districtwide assaults by students on other students have jumped 118%. Assaults by students on teachers and staff have climbed 151%. 

——-

Much more on restorative justice, here.

A Declaration of First Principles was adopted by the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust in June 2026.

The declaration is organized around three core purposes:

• Pathbreaking research. Universities exist to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge.
• Transformative education. A university education is meant to teach students how to think rather than what to think.
• The covenant between universities and society. Universities depend on public, private and philanthropic support offered in exchange for education and research that serve the public good.

The full text of The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles follows.

Preamble

Emerging from a unique combination of the pre-revolutionary colleges and the Enlightenment tradition that reshaped Europe and found constitutional expression in the American founding, the modern university has stood as a bedrock institution of a free and self-governing republic — advancing discovery and the pursuit of truth. However, the substantial decline of public trust in some of America’s preeminent institutions over the past few decades has now extended to higher education.

This erosion of trust presents a defining challenge for the country. America’s universities have long stood as forums of pathbreaking research, transformative education, democratic deliberation, free expression, and transmission of our shared political and cultural heritage. They have served as essential engines of discovery, progress, and economic opportunity. Supported by government funding, private philanthropy, student and community investments, and public trust, universities have delivered breakthroughs in every domain. Through their advancement of civic thought, health, technology, economic development, and national security, America’s universities have engendered national prosperity and a highly productive, successful society. The tremendous success of this distinctively American system of research, education, and innovation has inspired respect, admiration, and attempts at imitation across the world.

To ensure this enduring success, American universities need to be firmly committed to their core purpose: the cultivation of a free and self-governing republic by the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge through reason, argument, and evidence, rooted in the pursuit of truth and discovery at the frontiers of human knowledge and in a university culture of free inquiry, wide-ranging debate, and academic excellence.

Mitchell Schmidt:

All five Democratic candidates in the race for governor — former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former state Department of Administration secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Rep. Francesca Hong and state Sen. Kelda Roys — told the Wisconsin State Journal they support a full repeal of Act 10.

The winner of the August primary will advance to November to face presumptive GOP governor nominee and U.S. Rep Tom Tiffany, who voted in favor of Act 10 while serving in the state Legislature. Tiffany has argued a repeal of Act 10 would cost Wisconsin taxpayers upwards of $2 billion a year. Long-shot GOP candidate Andy Manske has said the fate of Act 10 will be decided by the state Supreme Court.

The field of Democratic candidates were asked what they’d hope to do with regard to Act 10 if elected governor, and what specific components of the 2011 law they’d seek to repeal.

Here’s what they had to say:

——-

Rick Esenberg:

By traditional equal protection analysis, there is no argument that Act 10 violates the equal protection clause. Rational basis review does not mean “a rationale I find persuasive.” A rational basis often must include “things we had to do to get enough votes.” To say otherwise, would be a failure to acknowledge the nature of the legislative. While excluding classes on the basis of race, sex or for mere favoritism should be problematic, a law’s failure to be comprehensive can’t make it unconstitutional. Striking Act 10 down would be legislating from the bench which, frankly, has always been a big part of the progressive legal project.

——-

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dan Lennington:

It’s now been three years since the United States Supreme Court declared that race may never be used as a “negative” or operate as a “stereotype” in higher education. While that landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, dismantled affirmative action in admissions, race still lingers as a factor in many other areas of higher education.

One such area is financial aid—specifically grants and scholarships. The National Scholarship Providers Association estimates that 11% of all higher-education scholarships still contain eligibility requirements for race, ethnicity, or other demographic factors, even after SFFA.

Race-based scholarships, though, are facing increasing scrutiny. Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a race-based scholarship created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 1985. The scholarship provided taxpayer-funded grants to students based on need. Critically, however, the scholarships were available only for “minority undergraduates.” And even that definition further restricted eligibility by providing that only certain minorities qualified: blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. All other students were excluded because of their race. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the State on behalf of Kiki Rabiebna and Richard Freihoefer, a married couple. Kiki is a native of Thailand and Richard is a white American. They have a teenage son who is entering college in Wisconsin this fall. But because of race and ancestry, no one in the Rabiebna-Freihoefer family was eligible for the scholarship. The left-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with WILL and its clients, unanimously holding that the scholarship’s racial qualifications violated the 14th Amendment.

The left-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with WILL and its clients, unanimously holding that the scholarship’s racial qualifications violated the 14th Amendment. In the Court’s main opinion, Justice Ziegler explained that the Constitution requires “all individuals to be treated equally without regard to one’s race, ancestry, origin, or ethnicity.” And each citizen must be treated “as an individual—not as one member of a class.” 

Philip Marcelo:

A school district in a rural corner of upstate New York is hitting pause on plans to deploy an AI-powered, humanoid robot in the classroom after state education officials, teachers and local residents raised concerns, including the maker’s ties to a company that produces hyper realistic sex bots.

The Salamanca City Central School District’s board approved the nearly $60,000 purchase from Realbotix with visions that “Sally,” as the stationary robot with long dark hair has already been nicknamed, would enhance the education of high school students studying robotics and technology fields. 

“Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don’t even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally and she can explain it,” Superintendent Mark Beehler, said Tuesday. “The robot also provides opportunities for students to learn how the robot is maintained, how it is updated with new approved content, and how to troubleshoot issues.”

But as news spread in the small community located on the Seneca Nation of Indians reservation, parents and teachers worried about how students’ personal information would be used. Unionized teachers took aim at Realbotix’s sex doll sister company, even as district officials and the company itself stressed the two manufacturers operate independently.

Eugene Volokh:

A short excerpt from the long opinion in Pruitt v. Grosse Pointe Public School Sys., decided Friday by Judge Robert White (E.D. Mich.):

Plaintiff Gary Shane Pruitt, a parent, attempted to raise concerns with officials from the Grosse Point Public School System (the District) about the educational environment at the public middle school his child attends. Pruitt objected to the display of rainbow pride flags in classrooms. The District officials could have listened to Pruitt’s concerns and then defended a teacher’s decision to display the flag. Surely, the teacher only aimed to create a welcoming environment for all her students. Instead, Pruitt’s concerns were dismissed.

So Pruitt visited the school to record a video of the flag. He came with his son, after school hours, and only entered the school after receiving permission from a school employee. And despite the fact multiple school officials observed him in the school, he was never asked to leave. Weeks passed without comment or action from school officials.

Then Pruitt took his concern to a public forum—posting a video to social media showing the rainbow pride flag on display. The video included Pruitt’s voiceover calling the display of the rainbow flag political and divisive, and he called on parents to “speak out” about the “radical programing” from “groomer teachers[.]” In response, the school principal initially sent an e-mail to parents, affirming the non-threatening nature of the video and identifying its publication as the “political” speech of a “parent[.]”

But public criticism followed. The District, citing complaints from staff and community members for the “disruption to the educational environment[,]” issued Pruitt a no-trespass order. A picture of Pruitt’s face was posted at the entry to the school and the district threatened criminal prosecution if Pruitt violated the order.

Moreover, the District informed Pruitt in writing that his total ban on attendance at extracurricular activities could only be revisited “at the sole discretion” of the District. Eighteen months passed without so much as a violation from Pruitt, but his requests to lift the order were denied. Finding no resolution, he sued.

At bottom, Pruitt’s video criticizing public-school officials constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The way public schools educate children is a core matter of public concern and debate. The District retaliated against Pruitt for his speech with their after-the-fact imposition of a no-trespass order and threat of criminal prosecution. The timing of the District’s written correspondence in this case, as well as the content of the order itself, confirms as much.

Enrico Berkes & Ruben Gaetani:

We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more technical terminology tends to be adopted less broadly. We develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the diffusion of new ideas depends on the degree to which potential adopters can understand and process them. When introducing their discoveries, scientists face a tradeoff between technical communication targeted at their immediate peers and more accessible language meant to reach broader audiences. As knowledge accumulates and research at the frontier builds on deeper layers of prior work, this tradeoff increasingly favors specialized language, limiting diffusion.

Policy interventions that align scientists’ incentives can broaden adoption and increase the social value of scientific research.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Academia has a diversity problem, and people are starting to notice.

Oh, it’s not a race/gender diversity problem; academia has paid a lot of attention to that. 

It’s a political diversity problem.

One person raising alarms is Tennessee’s former governor, Phil Bredesen — a Democrat. 

Bredesen recently flagged research he’d done that showed virtually all (over 90%) of Tennessee faculty members’ political donations have gone to Democrats. 

How long, he asked, can such overwhelmingly blue higher-ed command political support, or even legitimacy, in a deep-red state like Tennessee (where more than 64% of voters went for Trump in the last election)? Good question.