Liam Dillon:

The argument that property taxes make Americans renters in their own houses has fueled the biggest anti-tax uprising in half a century, and local governments are scrambling.

A rebellion sweeping the nation gathered adherents in the parking lot outside northeast Ohio’s largest flea market on the Saturday before Memorial Day. Before making their way to stalls selling whirligigs, handmade soap, and peanut-butter Buckeye brownies, dozens of people stopped at folding tables where volunteers hawked petitions to abolish property taxes. Few needed much convincing before adding their names.

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident wearing a Cleveland Browns coat to fend off the damp chill. “Why would I pay property tax?”

Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question. Fueled by the rising cost of homeownership — soaring home prices, mortgage rates and insurance bills — they are revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century. The 1970s property tax uprising that one journalist called a “Revolt of the Haves” reshaped American politics. The depth and breadth of today’s proposals threaten to do so once again.

In the last two years alone, plans to substantially reduce or altogether repeal property taxes have emerged in more than two dozen states. Georgia, Indiana and Wyoming already sliced residents’ tax bills by billions of dollars. Republican governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have Florida or Texas competing to see who can lower property taxes the most. Gubernatorial candidates elsewhere are putting tax reform at the center of their campaigns in the hopes of staving off insurgencies that risk overrunning their tenures. Public figures as disparate as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Francesca Hong, the socialist who narrowly lost the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, have joined the cause.

————

Via a Facebook post

Syovata Edari • is at CocoVaa Chocolatier

Madison doesn’t need a property tax increase. It needs a new City Assessor and a full audit of all tax-exempt properties.

I recently discovered that a 25,000-square-foot commercial property next to my building – a for-profit daycare franchise (Casa de Corazón / Tuskerz Inc.) – was, in my opinion, unlawfully removed from the Madison tax roll for two years, costing the city tens of thousands in lost revenue. It is only being put back on the roll now because I launched an investigation.

The City Assessor defends this by claiming she has “wide discretion” to grant exemptions to for-profit businesses. That claim has zero basis in Wisconsin law.

Property tax exemptions are strictly governed by statute and subject to the doctrine of strict construction: taxation is the rule, exemption is the exception, and any doubt must be resolved in favor of taxability. An assessor cannot rely on a “hunch” or the way she “feels” about a business. Or her personal relationship with their corporate lawyers.

In this case, the Assessor justified the exemption using an unverified, off-the-record phone call with the applicant’s attorney claiming a 10% sliding tuition scale. A claim that’s contradicted in their own sworn statements and not documented anywhere. My own investigation, including recorded staff calls and the applicant’s sworn Form PR-230, proves there are zero fee reductions for the public, with tuition reaching $2,200 a month. The only discount is an internal employee fringe benefit, which does not make a commercial franchise a “charitable organization.”

The Assessor also bizarrely claimed that a temporary pandemic relief grant received by nearly every daycare somehow justified the exemption.

While the Assessor used sweeping, unauthorized discretion to shelter a massive commercial property, my own taxes in the same commercial cul-de-sac were hiked by an unprecedented 96%. Even after fighting and getting a partial reduction, my assessment remains 43% higher than all of my neighbor comparators. I’m still fighting.

How many other commercial properties has this office let off the hook while gouging regular taxpayers? A rigorous audit of exempt properties would likely recapture millions in lost tax revenue and maybe bring some real relief to Madison residents.

Why isn’t anyone reporting on this? When commercial properties are exempted from property taxes, that tax burden doesn’t disappear, it just shifts to everyone else. Homeowners pay it directly, renters pay it through rent, and businesses pass higher property-tax costs along through the prices of tood, goods, and services. When you pay rent or buy from a local business, you’re paying property taxes too.

Madison is completely out of control with its property tax exemptions.

Because the City fails to rigorously track or audit the cumulative loss in revenue, taxpayers are left in the dark about how much wealth is drained from the tax base to subsidize an ever-expanding exempt industrial complex whose value to this city is highly questionable.

———

Teacher Content Knowledge Test Results: Early Literacy Foundations of Reading.

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Craig Moffett:

…… but they’re also gaining knowledge at something like 10x the rate of anybody else so they aren’t just miles ahead, they’re pulling away.

That, I think, speaks really eloquently to what is the most valuable part of the Elon Musk ethos — that you move so fast that you accumulate knowledge at a rate that is completely different than anybody else. Their cumulative knowledge is extraordinary.

Chris Powers

This week Chris sits down with Ross Perot Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group. Ross founded Hillwood in 1988 and built Alliance Texas, his masterpiece, a 1 of 1 27,000-acre development.

Molly Gibbs:

Some districts have proposed “detracking” — removing accelerated classes — as one way to close persistent academic achievement gaps.

Joanne Jacobs:

The school board voted last year to eliminate ninth-grade honors biology, placing all students in the same class and asking teachers to “differentiate” instruction for students at different levels. 

“Merging courses promotes equity by ensuring all students have access to the same foundational coursework and higher expectations,” according to supporters, Gibbs writes. It removes the stigma of non-honors classes.

But two of the three candidates for two open school-board seats oppose de-laning. “People go to private school and that takes dollars out of the public school system,” said John Craig, an engineer. Tech executive Avery Wang also promises to maintain honors classes. The third candidate, Linda Henigin, a teacher’s aide, said she sides with detracking but also wants students to have access to advanced courses.

“Craig and Wang are part of a larger group of school board candidates across the Bay Area running on the promise to push back against the trend in the region’s school districts — including in Oakland Unified, Fremont Union, Morgan Hill Unified, San Francisco Unified and Los Gatos-Saratoga Unified,” reports Gibbs.

——-

Related: Madison West High School English 10 and eliminating honors courses.

Scott Van Voorhis:

These are just a few of the 2,015 reports of student-on-student sexual misconduct that occurred at Boston Public Schools over a six-year span (2018-2019 to 2023-2024) — documents that BPS officials have done their best to keep from seeing the light of day.

The number of reports would have been significantly higher were it not for two factors. First, during the COVID-19 pandemic, BPS ceased in-school classes for about a year. Second, as explained later in this report, incidents of sexual misconduct are greatly underreported for a multitude of reasons.

The first five years of records were secured only after a lawsuit was filed against Boston Public Schools in Suffolk Superior Court by a freelance reporter represented for the initial portion of the litigation by the Pioneer Institute. The reports for the sixth year were obtained in response to a public records request filed subsequent to the conclusion of the lawsuit. (BPS officials demanded $1,600 for school years 2024-2026, which the freelance reporter was not in a position to pay.)

Sean Salai:

A study published Wednesday finds that American doctoral dissertations in history, literature, philosophy, arts and culture are becoming more critical of Western culture, even as fewer people complete them.

The American Academy of Sciences and Letters reported that humanities dissertations dropped 49% from a historic peak of 33,473 in 2015 to 16,951 in 2025. The dataset overrepresents large research universities, with declines most pronounced at elite schools.

Meanwhile, the share of words tied to identity politics and social theory grew tenfold from 1960 to 2025, with a sharp acceleration after 2019. That includes terms such as “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” “patriarchy,” “oppression,” “queer,” “equity,” “diversity,” “whiteness,” “marginalization,” “privilege,” “diaspora,” “disability,” “gender,” “feminist,” “systemic racism” and “social justice.”

Jonathan Turley:

Cornell University has long been an example of an academic echo chamber where conservative and libertarian faculty have been largely purged from departmental ranks. For example, a study by The College Fix found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 98 to 1 among Cornell professors across six of the humanities departments. Cornell professors disrupt events, launch campaigns to fire the remaining conservative faculty, and foster a cancel campaign culture on campus. However, the faculty recently decided to review its own record and found . . . wait for it . . . that there really are no concrete measures needed to address their own overwhelming ideological bias.

According to a 238-page faculty report from the Committee on the Future of the American University, there was no consensus on ideological bias or how to handle it. Moreover, some faculty members insist that, while there is an ideological imbalance, it is not a problem because liberal faculty can offer explain or incorporate conservative values when needed.

The report boldly states that “[t]his report asks how the university must adapt to honor its quietly revolutionary purpose in American life. The answer cannot leave the university exactly as it is today.” However, one thing apparently does not have to change: the faculty’s ideological orthodoxy.

The report has that certain feel of an academic confab product, including a self-congratulatory observation that “disagreements did not curdle into outrage.”

The report acknowledges the ideological diversity problem but leaves it maddeningly undeveloped and ultimately unaddressed:

Sarah Manavis:

In the autumn of 2024, Annie was ready for something new. She was living in the southern United States when her husband received an unexpected job offer that would move them to a town just outside London. They were in their twenties with no kids. “We wanted to take a risk,” she says.

While researching their new destination on Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram, Annie found Americans eager to explain how enchanting life in the British suburbs could be—all the benefits of a small town, just a short train ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world. The more she read, the sunnier her expectations about the UK’s health care system, social culture, and European transportation systems became.

They moved before the end of the year. But the reality of life in the UK was dramatically different to what she’d imagined. “There are huge misconceptions about access to quality health care, standard of living … the quality of life is significantly lower than in the US,” she says, citing the challenges she experienced with the National Health Service’s maternity care—having moved while pregnant with her first child—as well as the lack of disposable income in Britain, thanks to lower salaries. “Things in the UK that are considered luxury items are very common” in America, like a dishwasher and dryer, she adds.

Annie says she experienced a high amount of anti-American sentiment straight away. “I found it particularly surprising how people feel so comfortable mocking my accent and culture, even in a workplace environment,” she says. “The UK is very much a place of ‘it is what it is,’ but as Americans we are taught to always improve and strive for better things.” Annie and her husband now have an exit plan for summer next year, the earliest their employers would allow them to relocate back home.

Aaron Sibarium

The flagship law review at the University of California, Berkeley, is poised to delete all internal application records after the Washington Free Beacon reported on the journal’s use of personal statements to promote a “diverse membership,” sparking concerns that the journal is attempting to destroy evidence that could be used against it in the event of a discrimination probe.

The California Law Review will vote tomorrow on a document retention policy that would require the journal to delete all “Write-On application materials following the conclusion of each year’s Write-On process,” as well as any materials related to the election of the journal’s Holistic Review Committee, an eight-person body that grades applicants’ personal statements, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Members of that committee have pledged in writing to “uplift Native voices,” weigh “diverse life experience” against “technical editing abilities,” and “integrate anti-racist sentiment” into the selection process, the Free Beacon reported in August. The proposed policy would eliminate any record of those pledges, making it harder to sue or investigate the journal for race discrimination.

At least one editor has argued that the move would raise legal concerns about the destruction of evidence and could expose students to criminal liability.

“[I]t seems that the provisions relating to designated communications and to candidate statements could be construed as being intended to avoid the creation of the kind of evidence that was recently leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, and to bar editors from reporting it,” the editor wrote in an email to the law review on Tuesday. “If I were a federal prosecutor or immigration services officer, I might regard this as a system designed to enable violation of the civil rights laws by engaging in discrimination on racial and other grounds through the selection of [Holistic Review Committee] members that publicly stated their intent to do so.”

US Department of Justice:

This week the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (ED-OCR) entered a voluntary university-wide settlement agreement with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) to end antisemitism and race discrimination. The settlement agreement resolves investigations conducted by the Civil Rights Division and ED-OCR under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin (protected characteristics).

“Title VI requires that all students — regardless of their ancestry or race — receive equal treatment under the law at federally funded colleges and universities,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Higher ed policies and practices that tolerate antisemitism or favor certain racial groups over others, frustrate our color-blind justice system. The Civil Rights Division commends UNC for its cooperation in meeting its obligations under federal law without the need for litigation; we hope other institutions will take note and do the same.”

“Today’s agreement with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is an important step in upholding civil rights laws and restoring the American people’s confidence in higher education,” said Assistant Secretary Kimberly Richey of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. “The Trump Administration is holding schools accountable for antisemitism at American universities and ensuring that institutions, which have no problem accessing generous taxpayer support, follow all federal laws and ensure safe learning environments. Because of today’s agreement with UNC, aspiring students will be assessed based solely on their merit — not race — and Jewish students can thrive without the threat of antisemitic discrimination.”

Under the settlement agreement — which applies to all undergraduate, graduate, professional, and other schools, components, and programs — UNC will take several steps in key areas:

Wall Street Journal Readers:

Estrangements between adult children and their parents are on the rise in the U.S., creating “a cultural tipping point,” according to William Doherty, a therapist and professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota, who spoke to WSJ’s Elizabeth Bernstein about it. Readers debated the reasons for the social shift—and whether it’s a problem exacerbated by social media or therapists themselves. Here, edited for space and clarity, are a selection of those comments.

I am a small town 70-year-old psychiatrist. I have seen many hundreds of patients horribly abused or neglected as children who rightfully abandoned their parents. I have only seen a couple of patients emotionally nourished as children who abandoned their parents. I see far more cases of adults horribly abused as children who cling to their former or active abusers due to a “trauma bond.” I suspect the rate of unfounded rejection as well as the rate of founded rejection of parents varies dramatically by location and socioeconomic class. Unfounded rejection of parents is likely the result of privilege (often encouraged by well-meaning therapists) while founded rejection of parents is much more common among those without privilege. Of course there are exceptions.—Joel Rice

Greg Lukianoff:

Early one gray morning in late April 2026, I found myself walking around Copley Square alone, cheering.

I was in Boston for a gathering of people from across the political spectrum worried about the future of small-l liberalism. The city had gone unusually cold overnight, which suited me fine. The Irish, British, and Russian parts of my family tree have never entirely understood why other people complain about gray skies. I went out for coffee before the conference sessions started, and it was just cold enough that I could occasionally see my breath whenever I laughed or took a sip. It made the effect more theatrical than the weather probably deserved, which was unfortunate for anyone hoping not to notice me. My laugh has never been accused of subtlety. To people crossing Copley Square, I probably looked like an overcaffeinated man listening to a playoff game.

But I was actually listening to Yale’s newly released Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which I had converted to an audio file from a PDF, something I do all the time (it lets me keep moving). And every so often, I literally cheered in response to what I was hearing.

Yale president Maurie McInnis had appointed ten faculty members to investigate why Americans had lost so much trust in higher education and what Yale itself ought to do about it. She also gave them wonderfully dangerous instructions for any committee: “think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.”

They did.

The report confronted problems FIRE and I have been talking about for much of my twenty-five-year career: political homogeneity, free speech, self-censorship, grade inflation, administrative bloat, academic rigor, and the increasingly murky question of what all this enormous institutional machinery was actually for.

It cited a ratio of thirty-six registered Democrats to every Republican across Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and School of Management. That’s bad, though hardly the worst in elite higher education. Nearly a third of Yale undergraduates did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The median grade was an A. Yale’s published annual cost was $94,425 plus travel. And the real amount of money Yale spends per student per year is probably closer to $200K–which may sound nice until you realize how many students that amount of money could educate the hell out of if spent more judiciously.

But what had me cheering was the premise underneath the report, which was that maybe the public had noticed something.

This sounds like a very low bar until you’ve spent a quarter century watching higher education respond to criticism. I’ve often joked about what I call the Silver Spoon Rule. The name owes a little to the Golden Rule, but much more to the rules preferred by the silver-spoon set: It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault… even when it obviously is.

And to my delight, Yale had broken the Silver Spoon Rule.

Michelle Goldberg:

Until recently, I thought my worst New York City experience was the time I was waiting to cross Houston Street and a cackling vagrant punched me in the face. That, however, was before I started the process of getting my oldest kid into a public high school.

New York has an almost purely school choice system; most families don’t have a default high school that they’re zoned for. The admissions process, a mix of meritocratic culling and sheer chance, is time-consuming, psychologically taxing and so byzantine that it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t endured it.

“I was somehow holding it together with all the balls in the air until this high school process,” Eva Pinkley, a single mother in Brooklyn, told me last week, as her neurodivergent son worked on an application essay with a coach she could barely afford. Now, she said, “I’m completely falling apart.” An education reporter I know contemplated moving out of the city after seeing high school applications up close. Friends of mine who’ve endured the process say the only consolation is that it makes applying to college seem easy.

I’d heard how miserable it was before it was my turn, but was still shocked by it, in part because of a stroke of particularly bad luck. My kid will, I think, be fine — I will go to great lengths to assure it — but I’m not sure how people with fewer resources cope. And the whole nightmare made me curious about how it got this way, and who all this punishing complexity serves.

———

Teacher Content Knowledge Test Results: Early Literacy Foundations of Reading.

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Patrick Healy, Nikole Hannah-Jones:

In her 23-year career as a journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Nikole Hannah-Jones had never asked herself that question before. Then again, she told me, she had never written a piece as personal and vulnerable as her September article in The New York Times Magazine, “In Fighting For Every Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

The 8,000-word piece grapples with the consequences of her and her husband’s decision to enroll their daughter, Najya, in predominantly Black, low-income schools in New York City. The article is a follow-up to one Nikole wrote 10 years ago about Najya, who is now a teenager — and who now disagrees with her parents’ schooling decisions for her.

To write the piece with integrity, Nikole said, she had to lay herself bare — and, in doing so, exposed herself and her daughter and effectively handed ammunition to critics of hers and her choices. So for a quick minute, as she read some of the online criticism of the article, she wondered if it was worth it.

I recently spoke with Nikole about that, what went into writing the piece, readers’ reactions and whether she agreed with any of the criticism. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. (A slightly more condensed version of the interview is available as a video.)

PATRICK HEALY: You had to make the decision about whether to put a very public spotlight on your daughter. How did you go about making that decision?

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: With the original essay, I had never intended to write about our family’s experience. But then our school became embroiled in this national integration fight. I had been covering these issues since my first job, and it seemed impossible not to write about it.

———

A comprehensive list of the responses to the Nikole Hannah-Jones article

Do you trust the news? The New York Times at UW–Madison

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

Madina Touré:

“Now you are the head of that system, a system that despite what Mayor Mamdani promised during his campaign, remains under mayoral control, and so there is no buck to be passed now,” she said, to a swell of applause. “You have the system. So while I appreciate the work you have done today, we want to talk about the work you will do.

“I don’t think anybody here tonight came to hear platitudes or vague proclamations,” she added.

Hannah-Jones made waves among educators and parents last month with an essay in The New York Times about her decision to send her daughter to a majority-Black, low-income school. While hailed by many as a clarion call for integration of schools in the city, Hannah-Jones herself wrote of how she now questioned herself for making that decision to send her daughter to the school. Tuesday night’s town hall brought much of the private discussion of the story to a head, bringing together the writer, Samuels, students, parent leaders and advocates to debate how the city can advance school integration.

Samuels repeatedly defended his community-driven approach to integration, citing working groups that are developing proposals focused on integration and academic rigor. He said the administration is laying the groundwork by engaging communities, establishing structures for those conversations and building the capacity of superintendents who will lead the work.

“I don’t believe the best way to integrate schools is by large proclamations,” he said. “We’ve seen that happen before and we’ve seen that that hasn’t necessarily worked because you have an organized resistance against that and so on. So what I believe is that we have to work with communities.”

His emphasis on process did little to satisfy Hannah-Jones, who accused him of being coached to avoid answering questions about the city’s integration plan. Samuels denied it and maintained that the administration was already carrying out parts of its approach.

Adam Lehodey:

On October 13, Columbia University juniors Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma published an opinion piece on the alleged rape of “Jane Doe” by seven members of a fraternity at Cornell. Dissenting from general campus opinion, they argued that it was “worth taking a pause before jumping to wide-sweeping conclusions” about the case, and that the prevailing rhetoric—that women lack meaningful agency when choosing to perform acts they may later come to regret—was infantilizing.

Seething responses flooded in. “Brother you gotta go kill yourself,” one read. “I hope this follows you around forever,” read another. “[H]ope both are shown the same cruelty you carry in your heart for someone you don’t even know,” read a third. The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, “a non-partisan coalition for free speech and open discourse,” condemned Sundial, where the piece was published, claiming that it “promotes rape culture.” Such opinions simply should not be permitted, arguedthe Columbia Political Review.

That the piece was published, and that Sundial is standing its ground, is a good sign for free speech on campus. But as the backlash demonstrates, conformity to an apparent socially acceptable position continues to take precedence for many students at America’s most prestigious schools.

Ian Leslie

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer-winning reporter on race and inequality, has written an extraordinary essay for her employer, the New York Times. In it, she reflects on her decision to send her daughter to bad schools, out of principle. Despite having access to high-performing schools in her area of Brooklyn – schools with largely white, middle-class intakes – Hannah-Jones and her husband decided to send their daughter to largely black, largely low-income schools.

They did so out of solidarity with poor black families. It seemed unfair to them that their daughter should be set apart from and above other black kids in a selective school system that, in her view, discriminates against them. Hannah-Jones and her husband believed they would be able to improve their daughter’s schools by virtue of their middle-class connections, money and advocacy, and that they could compensate for any shortcomings in their daughter’s education with private tuition.

It did not turn out well. The essay opens with a dramatic scene in which her daughter, Najya, then 13 and at middle school, confronts her mother in the car home from school. Najya and her trio of “black girl nerds” had been plotting their futures in higher education. When they looked up how their school did in the academic rankings they discovered the unpleasant truth. Now, Najya wanted to know why her mother sent her there despite the better local options.

Hannah-Jones answered her with arguments that she had made many times in public (ten years ago, she wrote a piece for the same paper about taking this decision for Najya’s elementary school). She talked about standing in solidarity with other black families. She said that schools should not be judged solely on test scores, anyway. But in the face of her daughter’s uncomprehending fury, her conviction wavered:

“Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

The essay then goes back in time to recount all the problems that Hannah-Jones and her daughter had faced – first at Najya’s elementary school, and then at her middle school. Both schools were terrible. At the elementary school, the school cafeteria was chaotic, kids running wild and fighting with virtually no adult supervision. The school’s principal proved very difficult to engage and its teachers seemed to take an awful lot of time off. On doing her own investigation of Najya’s reading and maths scores, Hannah-Jones discovered that nobody had been checking her error-riddled work.

Emily Kopp:

The Biden administration’s “Censorship-Industrial Complex” had grander ambitions than controlling just what Americans said about COVID-19, new documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — who served as the “nation’s doctor” shoulder-to-shoulder with Anthony Fauci during the COVID pandemic — sought to apply “maximum pressure” on social media companies like Meta and to broadly manage “health and medical misinformation” across American society.

In May 2026, the Trump administration announced a settlement agreement in its lawsuit over the suppression of conservatives’ First Amendment rights, championing it as “an important milestone in the battle for free speech in our country.”

The documents draw from the summer of 2021, when the Censorship-Industrial Complex was at the height of its powers. 

Murthy did not reply to requests for comment.

Bill Glahn:

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

Operation Metro Surge could prompt teacher layoffs in St. Paul.

Yes, the crackdown on illegal immigration has somehow led to fewer illegal immigrants.

But more than 500 English learner students, many of whom were immigrants, never returned after the surge or did not enroll as new students this fall.

The Occam’s Razor explanation for this “unexpected” phenomenon is that these English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students have returned south of the border, along with their parents.

Consequences following causes is played off as tragedy,

Because much of the district’s funding is based on how many students are enrolled, the decrease in students will mean a budget shortfall of $4.9 million this school year.

I don’t think that it’s generally understood how effective Operation Metro Surge was in its stated goal of enforcing America’s immigration laws. That said, St. Paul’s school district is not the only locality experiencing a shortfall in ESL students, but all should have seen it coming. That too many ESL teachers were hired is on the district’s administration, and not a burden to be carried by the district’s property taxpayers.

And public school districts aren’t the only entities whose business model depended on ever-increasing levels of illegal immigration. As for St. Paul schools, taxpayers have already been generous enough,

The budget concerns and proposed cuts come less than a year after St. Paul voters approved a $37.2 million-a-year referendum.

Chris Arnade

It’s an ambitious book that tries to answer why democracy is working in the US, when it wasn’t then in France, and consequently what is necessary for a healthy and successful nation. That democracy, and thus human equality, was inevitable, and would eventually come to every western country, including his France, is one of his foundational theses, stated as an observable fact, and even a sign of God’s will in his introduction:

“Everywhere we look, the various events of people’s lives have turned to the advantage of democracy… The gradual unfurling of equality in social conditions is therefore, a providential fact… God does not need to speak for himself in order for us to discover the definitive signs of his will; it is enough to examine the normal course of nature…”

It’s a long book, dense with observations, asides, and theories, but in the very first few pages you get a sense of who he is, even though he rarely mentions himself. He is an intellectual, a scientist, interested in the big questions, but not confined to the lab or to the library, because he believes the key to understanding is found by experiencing as much of life as you can and talking to as many different people as possible. He was an early ethnographer, and while he didn’t exactly walk across the US (his journey took him from New York to Green Bay to New Orleans to Georgia and back to New York), given the times he couldn’t fast forward past anything he thought uninspiring. He had to travel slowly, and he was also curious, didn’t confine himself to a precise agenda, and let events take him where they would. Not surprisingly I immediately liked him.

Democracy in America is his notes from that long trip cobbled into essays, and they reveal a man working through frustration with what he left behind — a country stumbling, often violently, out of monarchy towards an incipient democracy he sees as inevitable. He arrives in the US smitten, with a child-like admiration for this new country, glowing with praise, like a man who’s found his new love, but over time as that relationship wears on, doubts take shape, disappointments, and he begins to question the human condition. If this democracy (the ultimate form of government) in a country gifted with perfect conditions — isolated from foreign conflicts, with inexhaustibly rich land, with citizens of solid moral stock — is peak human flourishing, is it really that much better than what he left behind, or does every society come with a very ugly side of inequality? With the US in particular that is the state of “Negroes” and the “Indian races.”

Democracy in America, like any rich text, is impossible to summarize in a few bullet points — there are enough observations in it, often conflicting with each other, to give most readers with a political agenda “I told you so” material. He doesn’t hold back, isn’t shy to throw out whatever theory his travels inspired, even if it might conflict with what he wrote several pages before. I don’t say that as a criticism, because if you spend nine months traveling across a new land, writing about what you see and hear, open to the evidence, what comes out won’t fit neatly into any ideological box. Dogmatic thinking can’t survive being immersed in the world because the world is too complicated for that. 

There are however a few core themes running throughout which struck me because they are surprisingly similar to what I found two hundred years later. 

One is that for democracy to work the citizens need to have a shared moral code, and from that a shared purpose. Or, culture matters more than all else. He is very explicit and unwavering on this point — that while policy matters, geography matters, all of that is downstream of having citizens with “the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same ways, the same customs and among whom thought will circulate in similar forms, depicted in the same colors.” These new Americans share a worldview of what it means to be a good citizen, and have the same concept of a fulfilling life. 

“I have said earlier that I considered customs to be one of the important general factors responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States. By customs I mean the term used by classical writers when they use the word mores — the different concepts men adopt, the various opinions that prevail among them and to the whole collection of ideas that shape mental habits. Thus I include in the use of this word the entire moral and intellectual state of a nation”

His customs (mores) are what I’ve called Thick Culture3, those views of life, and how it should be lived, that are so ingrained in people that they don’t realize they hold them. They are the foundational principles of the society that a person is born into, and which if they follow correctly, result in a purposeful life. What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?

What does he see those to be in the US? It is a desire for independence, religion, and material wealth.

That is, you can only give the people freedom to do whatever they want, complete autonomy, if they themselves don’t want to do everything because there exists a greater authority than government — God.

Nathan Heller:

It was the Friday before Labor Day, a lowering sun, when James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, spilled off a train and turned to work. He had reached the end of the track in New Jersey. His destination, the Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, was three miles in from the shore. In the normal course of things, Daunt, who is tall and English and who often has the look of someone trying and failing to be invisible, would weave across the final stretch by bicycle—he has a folding Brompton—but the afternoon was muggy, and the traffic unkind, so he crammed into a rideshare car. On the map, Eatontown looked minuscule, but on the approach it unfurled: shopping mall after shopping mall, lawn after lawn, all cloverleafs and big-box stores and the straightaways that Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in the area, called “no place left to hide.” It was also, a lot of people would have said, no place to put a bookstore. To Daunt, it was the landscape for a new, improbable kind of success.

Though less known than many authors, Daunt leads a bookselling empire of unprecedented scale. For seven years, he has been the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in the United Kingdom, Waterstones. He is the founder of what may be London’s most beloved independent bookshop, Daunt Books, whose reputation extends so far beyond the literary world that, when the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted an exhibition of influential bags, in 2020, it included the Daunt Books tote alongside a specimen by Chanel. In recent years, the British chains Foyles and Blackwell’s, as well as other independent stores in the U.K., have come under Daunt. So have the Tattered Cover, in Denver, and Books Inc., a chain around the San Francisco Bay. Daunt oversees more than a thousand stores and nearly twenty thousand employees, and presides over four billion dollars annually in sales. “He controls more than twenty per cent of our entire market,” the publisher of a major American imprint told me. “He is, I think, respected—and feared.”

——-

Teacher Content Knowledge Test Results: Early Literacy Foundations of Reading.

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Joseph Pisani:

“Do you have a cool job and a big heart?,” read a sign taped to a New York City lightpole. “Let me shadow you. I’m 16 pls.”

The flyer is from high-school junior Avi Lichtenstein, who is so worried about his future that he’s asking strangers if he can follow them to work.

“Every night I’m like, ‘What am I going to do with my life?,’” the curly-haired teen says. “I just couldn’t put my mind to rest.”

He came up with the plan last month. Using about $500 of his savings, he paid two guys he found on Craigslist to plaster the city with more than 300 flyers. His goal for the school year: follow one person a week to get a better idea of what he wants to do before he applies to colleges next year.

It’s working. He’s shadowed a dog groomer, a radio show host and a ramen shop owner, and is reviewing requests from an airline captain and a tattoo artist. One went so well, he was offered a part-time job.

“I see this new Roblox video on the sidebar next to my history assignment — what am I going to choose?”

ELLE FISCHER, 18, Madison, Wis.

She wishes YouTube had allowed her to turn off distracting recommendations.

Elle Fischer recently graduated from high school in Madison and is studying to become a middle school teacher. She thinks the district’s YouTube crackdown is a good start, but she wants schools to go further by assigning students less work on screens.

She said she kept YouTube open in a pinned tab throughout high school and procrastinated by watching “Bridgerton” clips or videos of people playing “Roblox.” She felt isolated even when surrounded by her classmates, all tapping away on their Chromebooks.

“A big part of learning is being engaged with other people and socializing with classmates, figuring out how to work together on the same problem,” she said. She worries that’s been lost in the modern tech-focused classroom. “Especially after Covid,” she said, “everybody needed that, but none of us were getting it.”

——

More.

Ariel Zhang:

Want to coast through spring semester? Avoid LSMP 4210B. Maybe steer clear of FNCE 2570, too.

As Penn students prepare to select classes for the spring semester, The Daily Pennsylvanian analyzed more than 1,500 undergraduate-level courses using Penn Course Review student ratings — which are sourced from end-of-semester surveys — to find which classes students consider to be the hardest, the easiest, and everything in between. Courses are rated on a scale of zero to four in areas such as difficulty, workload, amount learned, and overall quality.

The figures are based on aggregate ratings across all semesters with available data. 

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With a 3.83 out of four, LSMP 4210B — a capstone course for students in the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management — has the highest difficulty rating of any course. FNCE 2570: Foundations of Asset Pricing follows at 3.82, and STAT 4760: Applied Probability Models in Marketing comes in third at 3.70. 

The easiest-rated non-language class was EAS 2420: Energy Education in Philadelphia Schools, with a 0.58 difficulty. EAS 2420 only ranks behind SPAN 0800: Spanish Conversation, a half-credit course. 

Among the 1,271 courses with available ratings in both categories, difficulty and workload show a strong positive correlation. Three courses rank in the top 10 for both most difficult and most work-intensive: LSMP 4210B, CIS 4550, and ESE 4730. LSMP 4210B was rated the most work-intensive class, at 3.95 out of 4, followed by CIS 4550: Internet & Web Systems at 3.85.

Erin Gretzinger and Will Briggs:

The request translates to $3,600 of annual funding per student over the next four years — a figure district leaders say is the difference between the level of state aid in 2010 and today. In 2022, Middleton-Cross Plains voters approved a $65.5 million operating referendum that spread the funding across four years.

“We asked (the community) for a four-year referendum, our hope being that sensibility would return from the state, and they would fill the gap that they started to take away in 2010,” Hesselbein said. “That has not happened … so what we’re asking our community is to fill that gap once again.”

——

26.9% of Middleton-Cross Plains’ 4k-3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group compared to Waunakee’s 31.5%.

Sean Stevens:

FIRE has documented more than 200 attempts to deplatform campus speakers in 2026 alone, with pressure coming from across the political spectrum and raising serious concerns about freedom of expression and government interference in academic life

Campus deplatforming attempts have reached a disturbing new milestone. For the first time since FIRE began tracking these incidents, more than 200 attempts to prevent invited speakers from appearing on campus have been recorded in a single year — and 2026 still has nearly three months to go. The previous record, set just last year, has already been shattered. And the problem isn’t confined to one side of the political spectrum.

The attempts are being initiated by actors across the political spectrum — with attempts from the right of the expression exceeding attempts from the left both last year (116 to 64) and this year (96 to 74).

Recent incidents include:

Wall Street Journal:

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin presents herself as a moderate Democrat, but there’s nothing moderate about her warning to students last week not to work for the Trump Administration. Do so at your peril, she said, because you might end up in legal trouble.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that,” she said at a University of Chicago forum last week. “I want that deterrence message.”

Deterring public service: Now there’s an inspiring message to a young person about American self-government. 

Ms. Slotkin, who has presidential ambitions, has been one of the leading Democrats in promising to investigate what she calls the corruption of the Trump Administration. We don’t recall her criticizing Hunter Biden’s attempts to cash in on Joe Biden’s Presidency. But her double standard doesn’t mean she’s wrong about investigating the various Trump family business deals since 2025. They deserve the scrub they will no doubt get in the next Congress.

——

Kaelen Deese:

The complaint cites the Senate Ethics Manual’sprovision allowing discipline for conduct that “unfavorably reflects on the institution as a whole,” even outside official duties. It also invokes the expectation that senators demonstrate “a proper respect for the principles of ethics and morality.”

CASA argues that threatening legal consequences for accepting employment with a sitting president undermines First Amendment association rights. Those are the group’s allegations, rather than findings by the committee. The request centers on whether her comments damaged the Senate’s reputation and discouraged lawful political participation.

———

Michael Bickel:

Thankfully for those who still believe we should not punish young patriots who wish to serve their country, the midterms are only two weeks away — and now we know exactly what Democrats plan to do if they retake power in Washington. They won’t just go after President Trump and his inner circle of advisors; they’ll go after young staffers throughout every level of government, and they will do so with the full weight and authority of Congress and their dark money donors. If they are successful, conservatives coming out of college looking to serve their country will be deterred from doing so.

———-

Mark Davis:

This is exactly the kind of damage they want to inflict, and the great irony is that I was the one accused of voter intimidation.

As @MZHemingway said years ago, “The process is the punishment.”

Politics and Higher Education: Slotkin Edition.

———-

First, we expose it. We talk about it. We understand it. But most importantly, we accept it. We accept the fact that there are significant numbers of senior members of the political class who are eagerly seeking to implement a dictatorship which will strip us of our rights as Americans if they are not stopped. Think about what Slotkin said. She wants to put people in jail – without any consideration of whether they actually committed any crime or not – in order to scare citizens of the other party away from participating in their own government. She thinks this is a good thing to do. She wants to do it. And until a spotlight got thrown on it by a social media platform that was no longer covering for her faction, she was happy to talk about it. She’s not ashamed she got caught. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong. Like the rest of the daddy-issue revolutionaries, she’s excited by the opportunity to rule.

Ashley Rindsberg:

inside wikipedia’s six-year editorial battle to frame lab leak as a partisan ‘conspiracy,’ and to manufacture consensus about one of the most important scientific questions of our time.

Over the past six years, the most socially and economically significant scientific question of our lifetimes — where COVID-19 came from — has been quietly decided by a small group of editors on Wikipedia. The answer this cluster of accounts has produced is being fed into search engines, AI systems, and what passes for a public record online.

Lab origin, one of the two major competing theories concerning the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, has been cast not simply as false, but as a conspiracy theory tinged with racist undertones. This question was settled by Wikipedia editors long before science ever produced a conclusion (it still hasn’t) and far from any lab studying the issue.

For me, the topic has special significance. In early 2021, I began reporting on lab origin, starting with how the media distorted the issue from the earliest days of the pandemic. I chronicled the media’s effort to shut down the lab leak debate, uncovered a major anomaly in Chinese PPE exports that destabilizes China’s official pandemic timeline, exposed Harvard’s role in brokering a meeting between Anthony Fauci and the head of China’s then-second biggest real estate firm to “coordinate” on pandemic response, and was the first — and, to my knowledge, only — journalist to report on Fauci’s role as head of America’s biodefense command.

When you set aside the tangled mass of general confusion and highly specialized knowledge — genetic sequences, virus chimeras, dual-use treaties, track II diplomacy, biosafety ratings, and elaborate funding structures — what you get is a story about how information is controlled.

——-

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

Edward Blum

Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions, the evidence is overwhelming that the practice hasn’t ended — it simply went underground.

Fortunately, the U.S. Justice and Education departments are bringing the lawbreaking to light. In August, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told Duke University’s law school that it had violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon concluded that Duke “continues to intentionally discriminate,” citing internal communications reflecting “a sustained, determinative emphasis on racial diversity in admissions and a deliberate effort to preserve racial outcomes.”

“There are people who feel that the point is to sow distrust about the whole election system. There are very few people who are noncitizens who end up voting very few. Very few. And so therefore what’s the purpose?” 60 Minutes asks Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying. It’s not to sow distrust. The distrust is there,” says Dhillon. “And so all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really in volume.”

State audits have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, though it does happen. https://t.co/j2tq385kj6

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 18, 2026

More.

Mike Lee:

By Leslie Stahl’s logic, it’s wrong to require air travelers in America to go through TSA screening because (1) very few air travelers carry out terrorist acts (indeed, “the numbers are tiny”), and (2) mandatory TSA screening tends to “sow distrust” in the safety of air travel.

ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.

@ElissaSlotkin https://t.co/p7NBJpDcQW

— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) October 17, 2026

More on lawfare.

Glenn Reynolds:

On Sunday, former President Barack Obama denounced the Trump administration’s investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud as un-American. 

In America, we don’t go after our political opponents, he said.

This from the man who sent his Internal Revenue Service after Tea Party protesters, and whose running mate, after he became president, treated traditional Catholics, COVID-vaccine skeptics and parents who spoke out at school board meetings as potential terrorists.

Not to mention raiding Donald Trump’s home and sending FBI agents to rifle through Melania’s underwear.

Now Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), speaking at the University of Chicago, is calling for targeted prosecutions of Trump staffers. 

Slotkin observed that while Trump has presidential immunity, the people around him do not. 

She wants those prosecutions to scare away young conservatives who might want to go into politics. 

“I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’  I want that deterrence message sent.”

——

Rice promised in February that Democrats will punish people, companies and institutions who have “taken a knee to Trump.”

“It’s not going to end well for them.”

“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming.”

“There will be an accountability agenda.”

Jonathan Turley:

Slotkin seemed to go full Col. Walter Kurtz in the middle of the interview.

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

“When you weaponize the DOJ against political opponents, it’s a threat to democracy. When we do it, it’s a virtue!” – Elisa Slotkin perfectly lays out the Democrats’ platform.

However, the one thing that EVERY totalitarian regime in world history has had in common is the fact that one of their first official acts after achieving power is to outlaw dissent.

Isaiah Taylor:

When I think of the hundreds of people, young and old, who have put their lives on hold—sacrificing good jobs, foregoing hundreds of hours with their young families—in order to serve their country, and then I watch this from a sitting Senator… absolutely sickening

and:

Imagine growing up seeing the demopublican government uniparty be utterly incompetent for your entire life, unable to build new energy, exporting factories, failing over and over at its ambitions in space, becoming bigger and more bloated and slower year after year until it threatens to eat the entirety of the U.S. economy, with the same geriatric 90 year olds piddling away the future year after year

Then suddenly you have an administration which accepts a flood of young people in government at every level, from the lowest bureaucrats to the halls of the White House…

Elissa Slotkin:

Spare me the pearl-clutching — especially from Republican Members of Congress and online MAGA grifters who have cheered President Trump’s weaponization of the government against those he doesn’t like, as recently as last week. This is a subject I know something about: Less than a year ago, Trump directed the DOJ and FBI to investigate me, and then tried to criminally indict me for a 90 second video, exercising basic free speech. The same free speech you’re exercising now, lying about what I said in this clip. If not for an anonymous group of grand jury members standing up for America’s laws, I’d be criminally indicted for sedition. President Trump has turned the government against people, with raucous support from you and virtually all D.C. Republicans. So spare us the manufactured outrage.

Emily Underwood:

This isn’t what you originally said, to be clear. You said you wanted to use the legal system to bring “signature cases” against Trump officials to dissuade young people from working in the administration, not to, you know, prosecute actual crime.

Chicago Thinker:

Our Senior Editor @MichaelBicksel to @ElissaSlotkin: You said you want young conservatives deterred from serving in government. You should apologize for saying that and set the record straight.

More.

Jeff Clark:

1) This is not our philosophy. I don’t want to penalize young Democrats who serve Democrat politicians. I want to persuade them by the force of our ideas and our fidelity to the Constitution.

2) Slotkin speaks like a Democrat engaged in a psyop against the American people. Just as one would expect a CIA agent turning CIA tools around to apply them inside our nation against the American people would do.

Ashley Rodriguez:

Anderson regularly posts videos about the bagel business he started in 2023 and broke down the weekend’s sales for the shop’s 25,000 followers: on Friday, they sold about 1,000 bagels. On Saturday and Sunday, they sold about 1,500 bagels each day.

“In 2023, when I started … the demand was just not what it is,” he said. A brick-and-mortar at that time “would have been a huge risk.”

Arguably, Barrett’s Bagels is one of the city’s most anticipated new retail openings. Part of that is the approach Anderson, who worked at Madison Sourdough and Batch Bakehouse, takes with the bagels.

Another is how, through his social media presence, Anderson has been upfront and revealing about the ups and downs of business ownership, taking followers along for the journey.

For example, he notes that food business margins are thin, but customers often don’t see the realities of financing a food business. “It gives people a way better understanding of why things are priced the way they are.”

——-

Benjamin Rothove:

After eight years of development and more than $8 million spent by the city of Madison, Wisconsin, Maurer’s Urban Market will open in the Bay Creek neighborhood later this month. Local officials have pitched the store as a measure to prevent a “food desert” in that part of town.

The truth: Maurer’s is right across the street from another grocery store. And within a mile of three others. How this glut came to be is a good illustration of why the government is not cut out for the grocery business.

In 2018, Madison officials feared that a local Pick ’n Save, a supermarket owned by Kroger, was going to close. A municipally owned property was being redeveloped nearby, so the city required all development proposals to include space for a grocery store. It eventually settled on a proposal from a private developer to build an apartment complex with a grocery store on the first floor.

——

Police monitor oversight board wants $40,000 to sue the City of Madison.

More.

 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

Jo Ellison

This week I received a glossary of terms from the managing editor’s office, helping to explain the jargon known as journalese. It was intended for new starters and trainee journalists, but it was still a gripping read.

The glossary was an amalgam of classic Fleet Street favourites — “shoe-leather journalism”, “angle”, “sweep” and “colour” — mixed with terms that reflect more digital times. Several of the terms listed spoke quite generally to the profession, others had evolved according to the whim and personalities of those within. Today’s lingo now includes words such as “computational journalism” and “fastcharts”, to reflect our data-driven dynamism. But even though we think digitally about our stories, old print-media terms such as “drains” and “decks” persist. 

Journalese boasts a long, arcane tradition. When I first started on a paper, at the turn of the millennium, the language of the newsroom was still rooted in the letterpress. It was an era of “busted headlines”, where words wouldn’t fit the allotted type space, “galley proofs” and “copytakers”, which referred to a team of, mostly, women who would type out stories dictated over phones.

Chris Marquis:

Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”

When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.

The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.

Exhibit A – Proposed Amicus Curiae Brief of Kevin Kelly — Document #2112, Attachment #1

——-

Adam Eisgrau:

BREAKING: @NYTimes bestselling author, @Wired founding exec editor, futurist and now amicus for defendants Kevin Kelly has broken w @OpenAI plaintiff authors to eloquently and compellingly urge the Court that gen AI training creates broad public benefits & is classic fair use

Scott Stevenson:

Why good bets can’t be easily explained in words.

Why does legibility bias persist across society, even when we are aware of it? One answer is: it soothes people. We are conditioned from kindergarten onwards to believe that there is a crisp, clear structure to the world. That there are crisp reasons why things happen. In the world of startups, that illusion is demolished if you stick at it long enough. But large organizations “cast the illusion” of legibility to soothe and create a sense of order among employees, while those in the inner circle of upper management face messy reality head-on.

Also in organizations, communication bandwidth means that you need crude, simple stories to get the ship headed in the right direction. Simple stories are a necessary evil in management. But big decisions at the top of an organization are not actually being made this way. Simple stories are a tool to motivate and direct people in approximately the right direction.

If someone has spent years at a large company, and has not been in the “inner circle” of management—it is easy to see how they might confuse the tool that is being used to motivate them with the process in which effective decisions are actually being made.

People misunderstand the utility of simple stories. They’re more of a management tool, a political tool, a motivation tool, and a marketing tool than a decision making tool.

mercor

AI benchmarks have multiplied in recent years, but coverage of economically valuable work remains limited. To measure this, we compiled relevant benchmarks to measure their coverage of American jobs. This Benchmark Map is our first step toward building a comprehensive, continuously updated resource for understanding AI capabilities across the economy

Alex Wang:

Outer productMLP (ReLU)MLP (Gated)Self-attentionRetrieving a character from memory. The recall worsens as the number of memories grows.

Large language models today can recall obscure facts from every corner of the world. Most recently, I was running late for a friend’s board game night, so I asked Astra to remind me the rules to Dune: Imperium. It gladly narrated them to me as I drove over and helped me remember the rules well enough for me to play again. We’re so used to asking models about anything that we take their vast knowledge for granted.

How do models remember so much information? And how much can they store?

In this post, I’ll go through an intuitive way to look at linear maps, MLPs, and self-attention as different kinds of memory stores. From this intuition we can derive some heuristics for how much memory each layer can store.

---

The key property that characterizes a “good” memory store is its ability to recall what it stored. After all, even if we could store infinitely many facts, it’s not very helpful if we can’t recall them when we need to. The more memories we store, the more they interfere with each other when we try to recall one. So throughout the post we’ll focus on one quantity, the interference-to-signal ratio, which measures how much the other memories get in the way during recall. The number of memories a store can hold before the interference grows as large as the signal is its capacity.

We’ll develop this perspective and show how you can go from a linear layer to something better, an MLP, which improves both capacity and recall, and then all the way to self-attention, which has very good recall and can store a potentially unbounded number of memories. With 64-dimensional keys, that’s a jump from about 64 memories, to about 2,700, to over a million.

Florence Bason and Christopher Redding:

This study examines the extent to which state adoption of Science of Reading (SoR)-aligned policies was associated with changes in fourth-grade reading achievement. Using longitudinal state-level panel data from 2003-2024 and quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DiD) methods, the study estimates relationships between SoR policy adoption and NAEP Grade 4 reading outcomes. Findings suggest that SoR-aligned reforms are associated with modest but gradually emerging improvements in reading achievement, with stronger effects observed at longer post-adoption periods. Effects are not uniformly distributed across student groups, with more consistent positive associations observed for White students and students not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Results further suggest that coordinated policy environments may matter more than individually adopted literacy policies.

Alliya Shibli:

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But the origin story of the business is similar to that of many small and medium-sized companies operating today. It began in the family home — and may never have got off the ground had it not been for the efforts — and considerable patience — of Denny’s parents.

New research by Starling Bank into the role parents play in the creation of UK start-ups found that 38 per cent of young founders were living at home when they launched their first business, with a third saying that their parents provided services such as cooking their meals and doing laundry so that they could focus on the task at hand.

A third of those surveyed also used the parental home as the business address, such as Chester Robinson, who roped in his mother, Oyinda, to trial products and make deliveries.

Each year, Hillsdale College recognizes an excellent school with the Henry Salvatori Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Salvatori Prize winners are exemplars of Hillsdale College’s K-12 Best Practices. You can find recent Salvatori Prize winners on the map above, and learn more about the prize here.

Megan L. Blonigen and Graham W. Lee:

The returns followed Harvard’s August disclosure of its $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest initial public offering in history. The position was worth more than all of the endowment’s other reported public holdings combined.

Harvard’s tax liability jumped from $317 million to $1.9 billion, most of which reflects estimated future taxes on unrealized investment gains under the new rate. The tax is expected to cost Harvard roughly $300 million each year. Though the higher rate will take effect in fiscal year 2027, the University is required to book the effect of the law this year.

The modest surplus follows the operating loss of $113 million the University reported in fiscal year 2025 — its first since the pandemic and its largest deficit since 2011 — amid the Trump administration’s mass cuts to federal research funding earlier that year.

Kalra and Barakett attributed the modest 1.5 percent margin to “elevated legal costs along with other pressures that show little sign of abating.”

Harvard reported a 58 percent increase in legal fees in fiscal year 2025, according to University tax returns, a dramatic rise amid court battles with the Trump administration and multiple federal investigations. Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 acknowledged the surge at a Sunday event, calling the costs “mind-boggling.”

But efforts to cut costs were effective in some areas, according to the report. “All other expenses,” a category that includes legal fees, rose just 1 percent, with continued increases in legal costs “partially offset by broader cost-saving initiatives.”

Rebecca Furdek:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board (HEAB) and HEAB Executive Secretary Tammie DeVooght Blaney to end a race-based quota for minority student enrollment at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). To qualify for millions in taxpayer funding for medical training and research, the medical college must “make every effort to ensure” minority students comprise at least five percent of its total enrollment.

WILL represents Citizens Defending Liberty, an association of Wisconsin taxpayers fighting to stop their tax dollars from supporting unconstitutional discrimination. The lawsuit seeks to strike down the racial quota requirement and ensure medical students receive equal treatment regardless of race.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek stated, “Wisconsin should be opening doors for future doctors while treating every applicant equally. Instead, state law ties millions of taxpayer dollars to a race-based admissions quota. Every aspiring doctor deserves a fair shot and our clients should not be forced to bankroll unconstitutional discrimination. We’re suing to restore merit and equal treatment to our medical schools.”

Background: Wisconsin law requires MCW to “make every effort to ensure that at least 5 percent of the total enrollment” consists of minority students as a condition of receiving state funding. The complaint identifies nearly $14 million in state funding for MCW for 2026–2027. MCW also received over $428 million in federal funding in fiscal year 2025, meaning the admissions quota may also implicate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Taken together, Wisconsin taxpayer dollars support research and medical training at MCW, but only if the college works to meet the state-enforced racial enrollment quota. WILL’s lawsuit seeks to end that requirement and protect equal treatment regardless of race. Earlier this year, WILL secured a unanimous Wisconsin Supreme Court victory in Rabiebna v. Higher Educational Aids Board, striking down a race-based state program. That win opened the door to new legal challenges, like this lawsuit.

Charlie Barone:

On Oct. 9, Mike Petrilli asked his readers what a big blue wave would mean for education. In the same post, he called it “laughable” to think Democratic governors would rush to join the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit before the election.

That same day, Governor Kathy Hochul opted New York in but, in fairness to Mike, he had already counted NY in because of her earlier statements. Hochul said she would join “if, and only if, all schools and students, including those in our public schools, could benefit,” and added, “I’m not going to leave money on the table.” 

Hochul’s decision was consistent with what Rick Hess predicted in Education Next. School choice is popular with Democratic voters, he argued, so Democrats will regulate it rather than repeal it. 

Mike may be right about other governors not opting in before the midterms. Some new ones may simply leave their predecessors’ opt-ins in place and rumors and hearsay suggest other Democratic governors will opt-in before the January deadline but they will be face significant political headwinds. In my home state of New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill, who is still undecided, will now have to take into account all the millions of North Jersey dollars that could flow into New York if she chooses to stay out. Those losses would compound in the southern part of the state, where I live, if Governor Shapiro opts-in Pennsylvania.

Petrilli worries that reform does better when Republicans win, and he isn’t wrong about how hard it is in some blue states. I think he overlooks, though, that while there are some real red state success stories, most red states are lagging behind in reading and math achievement along with their blue-state counterparts. Outside of the Southern Surge, most red-state leaders are pushing vouchers and ESAs, not evidence-driven reform.

But Petrilli also wrote that “blue-state reform doesn’t have to be worse, just different.” I agree. Here’s a few thoughts on what “different” could look like.

1. Keep the opt-ins and build the public side

House Democrats Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) are cosponsoring a bill to repeal the tax credit. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and has 35 Democratic cosponsors., Even with a Democratic Congress, however, those bills would face a presidential veto which Congress would never be able to garner enough votes to overcome. Meanwhile, 31 states, including Democrat-led Colorado and New York, have opted in or are on track to.

The better move for a new Democratic governor in, say,Ohio or Georgia, is to keep the opt-in and help build scholarship organizations focused on public-school students. Those organizations could fund tutoring, summer learning and special education services. Hochul’s announcement got the message right. Now someone must do the work behind it.

2. Make reading about kids, not labels

Petrilli notes that passing a science-of-reading law in Massachusetts was hard enough to win an award. It shouldn’t be. Teaching children to read using what the research shows works is not a right-wing idea. Democratic governors should adopt proven curricula, train teachers in them, screen students early, and tell parents plainly how their children are doing. Even though Massachusetts’ win wasn’t easy it was ultimately successful and that may bode well for other states, including in those states that have passed laws but need to strengthen them.

3. Fewer tests, better information

A new bill from Bonamici would examine state testing “with an eye toward eliminating unnecessary assessments.” Cutting redundant district tests is fine. Weakening the annual statewide tests that let parents compare schools is not. The goal should be results that reach teachers and families in time to act on them, not a year later, and data that is comparable and can be disaggregated within a state across all publicly funded schools.

Lingling Wei:

In explaining the gap, Yi describes what he calls a contamination cycle: Census figures were adjusted upward using education and household registration data that had themselves been exaggerated. Schools padded enrollment by 20% to 50% once funding shifted from local governments to the central government. Hospital birth records swelled after rural insurance began covering deliveries.

The politics of population
Today, with Beijing tying birthrates to local officials’ performance reviews and rolling out pro-natal subsidies, local governments have every incentive to overstate the numbers, Yi said, both to win political credit and to secure subsidy funds.

Scholar’s Monograph—China’s Population Data Manipulation.

2005 (!) Ed Hughes:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Eno Sarris:

But the thing that has perhaps separated the Brewers and Rays from other organizations that have also bought all the technology and tried to be on the forefront of the data revolution is that they’ve always had good process. The insights they gain from the data sourced from the tech they’ve bought are put into action up and down their organization. It takes great communicators to turn all that data into insights that the best coaches can use to improve their players.

Perhaps that’s why both teams have frequently hired analysts in the blogosphere for their baseball operations departments. There are Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs alumni aplenty in their front offices.

———

“We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes” – W. Edwards Deming.

Karl Mathiesen

…… and players had to respond to events that were bringing the world closer to a full-scale attempt at deploying solar geoengineering tech, even when they may not have a full picture of what had truly occurred—or what any of the others were up to.

The first session set the tone. Distrust and disinformation dominated. As participants discussed rules governing outdoor experiments in an attempt to agree an international deal, players representing both the US and China told the group they could not sign a deal that constrained their pursuit of research considered to be in their “national interest.” Nor could they accept a deal that would see their superpower rival taking the lead technologically. Speaking to WIRED, Jeffrey Nielsen, a major in the US Army who played the role of a US national security attaché, summarized the position as “worse than no deal at all is any deal that favors China.”

Tensions escalated when the team running the simulation handed the Russian delegates an “intelligence report” indicating they had found a plane near the Bering Strait believed to be involved in a US geoengineering research program. The US team—which was indeed flying research missions—accused Russia of disinformation.

Meanwhile, the US became convinced China was also conducting research and developing its own program. Beijing’s representatives had tried to insert language into a mooted deal that would ensure no retroactive punishment for past experiments. Then, China approached a player representing SpaceX to float the idea of a technology-sharing program. In a private discussion away from the group, the SpaceX player immediately reported the Chinese approach to the US team. The US demanded an international investigation. The finger-pointing continued, and countries abandoned the talks. 

Annika Sirtori:

Humanities departments across American colleges graduated their lowest number of majors in 2025 since 1991, according to a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

At Stanford, the popularity crisis is nothing new. 

The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by the University in the humanities and arts has fallen 56% since 2003. This decline, from 324 in 2003-2004 to 143 in 2025-2026, has continued even as the overall number of undergraduate degrees granted has increased.

The reasons for this decline vary. According to nationwide research conducted by the Academy, students are driven by “concerns about employability, the effects of high-stakes standardized testing in humanities subjects and decreasing interest among young people in teaching as a career.” 

Assistant Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Jeff Schwegman has worked on “demystifying” the humanities at Stanford since 2014.

Stanford students in particular, he said, are wary of the absence of a clear career “escalator” in the humanities — a predictable, linear pathway to employment. In the process of reaching the top of the college escalator, high-achieving students have their comfort zone and identity shaped by an experience where their goal is clear: get in. 

Leana S. Wen

There are many reasons to criticize the Trump administration’s dismantling of social safety net programs, which has stripped essential health care and food assistance from millions of Americans. But one policy change deserves credit: The administration has finally allowed states to restrict people from using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to purchase soda.

New research shows that these restrictions are achieving their intended effect. They have reduced purchases of unhealthy sugary beverages, which could save hundreds of millions of dollars annually in health care costs.

Proponents of the SNAP restrictions have argued for decades that a program with the word “nutrition” in its name should not subsidize purchases of sugary beverages that have no nutritional value and contribute to obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases. Agriculture Department data from 2011 found that about 20 percent of SNAP benefits went to junk foods such as candy, chips and sugary drinks.

Such consumption drives poor health outcomes among SNAP recipients, who face disproportionately high rates of diet-related chronic diseases. Meanwhile, taxpayers effectively pay for it twice, first by subsidizing the purchases of unhealthy foods and then by covering the costs of treating diseases.

Pelle Martens

But the moment somebody finally says, “No, this is actually unacceptable,” everybody suddenly becomes an expert in appropriate behavior.

“There’s no need to be aggressive.”

“You’re making things uncomfortable.”

“Couldn’t you have handled this privately?”

And my personal favorite: “That’s just how they are.”

What a fantastic little sentence. Apparently, if you’ve been an asshole for long enough, it becomes part of your identity, and everybody else is expected to adjust accordingly. Turns out treating people like shit is perfectly acceptable as long as you’re consistent about it.

And the strangest part is that people genuinely believe they’re being fair. They want everyone to get along. They don’t want another exhausting meeting, another family argument, or another friendship becoming awkward. They just want things to be “normal”.

I understand that. Nobody enjoys constant conflict.

But there’s something seriously backwards about expecting endless patience from the person being mistreated while treating the person responsible like an uncontrollable weather phenomenon.

At some point, surely, we’re going to have to ask why everybody’s adjusting except the person causing the fucking problem.

Robert Pondiscio:

By a considerable margin, Emily Hanford is our most consequential education journalist. This is not idle praise. Few reporters covering any field can claim to have changed professional practice and state policy as measurably as Hanford’s work on reading instruction has. Beginning with her landmark 2018 report Hard Words and culminating in the first season of her investigative podcast Sold a Story in 2022, Hanford has done more than merely expose the weaknesses of instructional practices like balanced literacy and three-cueing and the people who promoted and profited from them. She’s done as much to make the “science of reading” a national issue as all but a handful of researchers, policymakers, and advocates.

Recall that for decades, we have sought to improve reading scores with standards, testing, accountability, and incentives. All of these policies demanded that schools and teachers produce better results. But for the most part, teachers are not incompetent, indifferent, or negligent. Many have been trained badly, taught the wrong things, or given poor guidance and curriculum materials. Hanford called attention to the ways that teacher preparation went against the grain of what we know, or at least should have known, about teaching reading effectively. Teachers were not sinners, but sinned against—misled, and, well, sold a story. This re-framing has made Hanford something of a hero among teachers.

Season 2 of Sold a Story, which debuts today, seems likely to put that hero status to the test. It is no less powerful, meticulously reported, or convincing than Season 1. But its central message is challenging and less comforting, and it will be hard for teachers to embrace: an entire set of ideas and values many teachers admire and believe makes them good at their jobs might actually make them less effective.

The seven-part series (I’ve previewed the first four episodes) makes an unlikely hero of the late Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann and Direct Instruction (DI), the highly structured approach to teaching that he pioneered. The name is somewhat misleading. It conjures an image of teachers standing in front of the classroom, just telling children what they need to know. Rather, DI consists of carefully sequenced lessons, scripted teacher language, precise explanations, and educators who anticipate students’ misunderstanding and how to respond to them. Nor is DI casually constructed. Engelmann and his colleagues wrote, tested, and refined the program in front of children, revising it when faced with evidence of students struggling or misunderstanding concepts or material. Hanford quotes a former Engelmann colleague who described DI’s central premise: “If the kid hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it. That was our basic rule.”

———

Teacher Content Knowledge Test Results: Early Literacy Foundations of Reading.

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Eric Revell:

Mike Rowe, CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which helps the next generation get training in the skilled trades, told FOX Business that it’s “been very surreal for me to watch the skilled trades come back into something like favor.”

“I don’t want to overstate it, but I can tell you that not a week goes by that I don’t hear from the CEO of some consequential company or some industry leader who is straight up freaking out over the barriers to recruiting,” Rowe said, adding that many large U.S. companies are establishing their own training programs to attract workers to the skilled trades.

“A lot of companies are doing things to grease the skids to accelerate the whole learning process,” Rowe said. “Everybody is hiring, and nobody is quite sure how to come at it because they’re all competing with each other for the same worker.”

———

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Anne-Françoise Hivert;

Since 1967, teachers could only physically intervene with students if their safety or that of others was at risk. Starting in August 2027, they will be allowed to ‘hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room’ if the student disrupts the class. 

The current legislation only allows teachers to use force if a student poses a danger to themselves, others, or school property. The teachers’ union (Danmarks Lærerforening) has long called for greater flexibility, arguing that it is increasingly difficult to manage students who disturb class and refuse to keep quiet or leave when asked.

The proposed law would allow teachers to physically intervene if a student harasses or insults others, or “significantly” disrupts lessons. Teachers would be allowed to “hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room against their will.” Examples given include: “If a student throws food during a home economics class and, despite repeated warnings, continues or refuses to leave the room when asked.” Or, “if a student listens to loud music on

John Eastman

I’m overwhelmed and overjoyed by the number of amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court in support of my Cal Bar cert petition. 14 amicus briefs, representing 21 different organizations and 36 individuals, many of whom have also been targets of Barfare. All (but 1!) are terrific. I’m particularly partial to this line from the Article III Project brief: “John Eastman is an able lawyer of sound character who rendered service to the President of the United States.” 😇The briefs are all available here: supremecourt.gov/docket/DocketF…. First Amendment scholars, Liberty Legal, Am First Policy Inst, Oversight Project, MacIver Institute, Nat’l Legal & Policy Center, America’s Future and Citizens United et al., Life Legal Foundation, APA Watch, Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, among others. Collectively, they tell a powerful story both of the First Amendment violations we’ve raised but also of the broader risk posed by barfare, particularly in intensely partisan election disputes. All of them are worth the time to read. And many thanks to everyone who participated in preparing these important briefs. The California Bar waived response (pretty common), so the Supreme Court clerk has now distributed my petition and these amicus briefs for consideration at the Court’s Nov. 6 conference. Pray that the Justices do two things at that conference: 1) CFR–Call for a Response from the California Bar; and 2) CVSG–Call for the Views of the Solicitor General.

——-

Somewhat related:

An amusing result of this new survey is that Democratic-voting workers had a startlingly high net-favorable view of Socialism while also saying that taxes were too high and they oppose government ownership stakes in companies. (Link next.)

University of Austin

On Tuesday evening, at our Constitution Day event on campus, UATX announced an $11 million gift from Gail Jaquish and Steve Kenninger to build the university’s law program and endow the chair who will lead it. Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit delivered the address. The essay below, by UATX’s general counsel Adam Biggs, explains what we intend to build, and why this is the perfect time to do so. — The Editors

Today is Constitution Day. On this date 239 years ago, the Framers gave us all a republic governed by laws meant to secure individual freedom and hard-won liberty. Its future depends on forming new generations of legal minds prepared not merely to discuss the Constitution, but to keep it.

Keeping the Constitution demands lawyers who understand its original meaning, and fewer and fewer do. At the University of Austin (UATX), we built a tuition-free undergraduate program to form citizens and leaders who not only know our founding principles but will defend them. But the country needs a bigger, bolder version of that program, one that forms its future lawyers the same way. We will build it, and we cannot let anyone stand in the way, least of all the American Bar Association (ABA).

The ABA is a private trade association that has spent seventy years making sure no one builds a law school that doesn’t conform to its exact vision for legal education. Nearly every state treats graduation from an ABA-approved school as the only practical gateway into the profession. Through its accreditation standards, the ABA’s council micromanages how every law school in the country is organized, staffed, and financed. The model it enforces is expensive and outdated, and it stifles anyone who tries to build something different. Don’t conform, and your students can’t take the bar in most states.

This state-assisted monopoly hurts law schools, students, and America.

Its impact on tuition is most glaring. Adjusted for inflation, tuition at a public law school is more than five times what it was in 1985. At a private school, it has more than doubled. A student who graduated from a public law school this spring paid about $94,000 in tuition alone and about $166,000 in total cost of attendance for the degree.

We’ve long known that the ABA drives up tuition.

Jon Marcus

It was in the quiet of the summer when a new president at Louisiana State University said the school would lay off 25 administrators, including several who were high in the campus hierarchy, and shift the savings to faculty hiring and research.

“Transformational change,” the president, Wade Rousse, called it. He was “streamlining operations and finding efficiencies so the university can focus on” its faculty.

The move got limited attention outside Baton Rouge. But similar layoffs have been happening at universities and colleges nationwide in what may be a little-noticed tipping point in U.S. higher education. 

A decades-long increase in the number of employees on campuses who don’t actually teach — disparaged by critics as “administrative bloat” — is starting to reverse, new data suggests. 

The number of noninstructional employees at U.S. universities and colleges — the many people on campuses who don’t actually teach — fell last year more than it has at any time in at least the last decade, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR. 

And while the newly reported CUPA-HR figures cover only through the end of 2025, universities and colleges have continued to lay off noninstructional employees since then.

Reagan Allen:

Few high school students have ever looked at a Saturday morning SAT or ACT and thought, “This is exactly how I want to spend my weekend.” But while standardized tests may be unpopular with teenagers, it is the children who are wrong—exams are one of the few remaining measures colleges can use to compare students from different schools and backgrounds.

The University of Wisconsin System, however, will continue to allow prospective students to apply without them. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has extended its suspension of the ACT and SAT requirement through the 2027-28 academic year, even as research continues to point to the usefulness of standardized tests in predicting college success. But while standardized tests may be unpopular with teenagers, it is the children who are wrong.

It’s easy to see why. The tests are stressful, and the push to drop them began with concerns that they were biased against minority students. By dropping the requirement, the University of Wisconsin may hope to gain a competitive edge by attracting applicants who prefer not to submit SAT or ACT scores. But the research keeps pointing the other way. A University of California task force, cited in a later Dartmouth report, found that test scores line up more closely with college success than high school GPAs do, and grade inflation is the obvious suspect. Paired with grades, scores give a much fuller picture. 

Class rank doesn’t help much either, since it can’t be compared across different high schools. Standardized tests can. A test score means the same thing no matter which high school the student came from, which is more than anyone can say for a GPA. It’s one number universities can compare across every high school.

——

More.

Derek Thompson:

I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony—I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others—but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence. 

———

Only about 10% of people have the initiative to consistently organize social gatherings.

When they ran institutions anyone could and did join, we all benefited. Now you have to be close friends with them to benefit, which means most people miss out.

———

Participation Inequality:

User participation often more or less follows a 90–9–1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

David Bessis:

“The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.”
—Bill Thurston

My best theorem is one I never wrote down.

It crystallized one bright morning in Lausanne, Switzerland, as I was preparing for my last invited conference talk. The proof felt so obvious—and the result so compelling—that I made the reckless move of editing my slides at the last minute. Time was running out and I could only include the announcement as an informal remark at the bottom of the last slide, instead of stating it as a proper theorem.1

I had already quit academia and founded a machine-learning startup. I knew I would be too busy to write a clean proof and publish it. That was my excuse for being sloppy. I just wrote the remark and abandoned the slide deck as a message in a bottle.

My hope was that some bright young mathematician would pick it up someday and formalize the result as part of a broader theory. If I lucked out with the intrinsic randomness of attribution, I thought, it might even be remembered as the Bessis cellular decomposition theorem.

But that was stupid. By claiming the result, I had killed the incentive for anyone to write it up.

If I had to pick my second best result, it would be Theorem 0.5 in my old preprint on Garside categories. I had high ambitions for this paper, yet I ended up not submitting it anywhere. The creative process had drained me, and I left active research before regaining the courage to clean up the preliminary sections.

Southwest Voices:

On Oct. 8, 2026, Minneapolis City Council announced a resolution coauthored by 10 Council Members demanding Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) leadership stop the Transformation Plan, joining an overwhelming consensus of local, state, and federal elected officials speaking out against the three proposed options for “school transformation,” which would close 15-16 MPS schools as soon as the 2027-28 school year. 

Now, over a dozen state, local, and federal elected leaders have voiced their opposition to the proposed Transformation Plan options. Alongside families, educators, and neighbors organizing across the city, these leaders are calling for options that strengthen and stabilize our schools – instead of undermining the future of our district by closing schools and driving families away.

To date, elected officials who have made public statements raising concern about the proposed options for “school transformation” include:

Tricia:

Money-wise, SpaceX pays $25M a year, rising 2% every year, which comes to more than $800M over 25 years. There’s also $20M up front to help get ready. Superintendent Tommy Byler told us it’ll be split between the school board, the police jury and the sheriff, and the schools expect about $10.2M a year.

Our schools are already strong. Vermilion is an A district, ranked 11th in Louisiana and top in Acadiana, and 6th in the state on this year’s LEAP tests. They’ve still been squeezed by falling oil and gas money and fewer students, and the parish has roads, bridges and water projects waiting on funding. This money builds on a solid base, and he told us the first of it is planned for teacher bonuses. 🎉

3,000 permanent jobs averaging about $92,600 a year, plus up to 34,500 construction workers at the peak. This is massive for our area. Between Lafayette and Vermilion parishes, we’ve lost over 11,000 oilfield jobs since 2014. That’s more than 6 in 10. And it’s not just promises. The deal includes penalties if SpaceX misses its job goals, and they’re on the hook for repairing our roads.

This is a huge change for a quiet corner of Louisiana, but Freshwater City is no stranger to heavy commerce. Once the lock opened in 1968, crew boats, supply boats and jack-up barges poured through. From then until 1992, it averaged over 34,000 big boats a year. That’s around 90 a day.

Robin Rivaton

The heavy state involvement correctly perceived by observers belongs not to Beijing but to those local governments, of which China has thousands, and which compete with one another for investment and prestige. These local growth machines and the competition between them are what drives China’s stunning economic success, and what the Western world must embrace to keep up.

———

The State of Reading Around the World: Every country that sat the PISA reading assessment, shaded by its most recent result. Zoom into the United States for state NAEP results, and into Wisconsin for district screening results.

Kevin Kelly:

Instead of a central AI brain, AI is like a gas, composed of zillions of tiny interacting AIs that create an atmosphere. These zillions of minds are like eukaryotic cells in your body, or hundreds of varieties of bacteria in your gut. They form a presence. They are woven together into a vast network of intelligences that create an AI background. This society of AI minds is not so much seen by humans, as it is felt.

Unlike the AI of today, it will be deeply embodied – into robots, vehicles, buildings, and devices. But its embodiment will be so wide, so deep, so pervasive, that it will become the background.

AI might be thought of as a superorganism that is so vast that, like an ocean, it becomes the environment. This environmental AI, like many environments, can become imperceptible to those immersed in it. We’ll only notice it when there is a gap, a disconnection, or it goes down.

Like a coral reef, an AI superorganism will be composed of thousands of species of minds.

Some of these AI minds might be very narrow and dim, just a notch above being stupid, maybe as smart as an insect. Others might be math geniuses. Most sub-AIs will be engineered in the middle to do specific boring and niche tasks.

Gabriel Sison:

Scholars say situation adds to larger concerns about AI usage producing high volume, low quality articles

Scholars are raising questions about AI usage and academic quality after University of Chicago statistician Nicholas Polson wrote more than 200 academic papers this year using AI. 

“The question needs to be: do these add anything of value and should we rely on them or not?” Ivan Oransky told The College Fix in a recent interview. Oransky is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks academic retractions, and a New York University journalism professor.

A tenured professor, Polson’s papers primarily focus on advanced math and statistics such as statistical parameterization and financial markets. Some of his research highlighted on the University of Chicago’s website includes measuring the “energy cost” of using AI and analyzing the odds of cheating. 

Recently, however, concerns about the large number of articles Polson was producing prompted SSRN, a pre-print server for academic papers, to retract 253 papers that he wrote or co-wrote within the past year, The Washington Post reported. 

In comparison, he wrote 10 published papers in 2018, 14 in 2017, and 12 in 2016, according to the “Research” page on his website.

When asked why it removed his papers, SSRN told the Post, “The most significant issue was the unusual submission activity.” 

Dave Michaels:

The Justice Department has warned the American Bar Association it may face an antitrust investigation if it fails to change rules that limit the role part-time professors play in teaching law students.

The department delivered the message in a new letter to the ABA’s accreditation council, whose quality standards cover most law schools. The Oct. 7 letter—signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—said adjunct professors are cheaper and often have more real-world experience. Limiting how much they can teach hurts education and puts upward pressure on tuition costs, Woodward said.

The limits “cannot be clearly explained by differences in real or perceived quality in the instruction of full-time or adjunct faculty,” wrote Woodward, the department’s third-ranking official.

The missive adds to the Trump administration’s campaign against the country’s largest association of lawyers, which has come under fire from Republicans who say the group favors liberal political positions and shouldn’t have so much power to set professional and educational standards.

The ABA sued the Trump administration last year over actions it took against some elite law firms.

Wall Street Journal:

What is New York Gov. Kathy Hochul thinking? Her decision to appoint state Attorney General Letitia James as the special prosecutor in the case of seven Cornell male students alleged to have known of or engaged in the rape of a female undergraduate couldn’t be a worse decision for the cause of transparent justice.

As Justin Dillon writes nearby, Ms. James appears to have prejudged the evidence before she has seen it. “What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” Ms. James wrote on Facebook before she was appointed by Ms. Hochul. “To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.”

That should be disqualifying on its face. A prosecutor is supposed to examine the evidence and make a judgment about whether a jury would find the accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Ms. Hochul says she lost confidence in the local district attorney who declined to bring charges, but how can the public have confidence that Ms. James isn’t prejudiced against the male students?

CBS News

A Wyoming microbiology graduate student from China has been arrested on accusations she poisoned the tea of a colleague who had pending patents and with whom she didn’t get along, then tried to flee the country after police questioned her.

Aili Wang, 32, was arrested Oct. 6 at Los Angeles International Airport, where prosecutors allege she sought to return to China. With her were laptops, electronic storage devices and documents now in the possession of police, who allege Wang was seen on surveillance video rummaging through the desk of the victim who specialized in technology for disease treatment – research similar to work she’d done in China.

Wang remained jailed without bail Tuesday in Los Angeles. She allegedly bought a chemical, acrylamide, over eBay, and it was first detected when the alleged victim’s wife and others tested water from the coffee maker he used to brew tea.

U.S. officials for years have accused China of stealing intellectual property from American universities.

The microbiology professor overseeing both graduate students, Mark Gomelsky, said the accusations left him reeling. He was uncertain if the victim will fully recover.

Milwaukee Superintendent Questions Affordability of Half-Empty Schools

The head of Milwaukee’s public schools is being blunt with parents: MPS likely cannot afford to keep as many teachers in the district’s half-empty schools.

Superintendent Brenda Cassellius told parents at a recent community forum that while students and parents would like a full slate of teachers, counselors, and assistant principals at every school, it is just not possible.

“While we’re waiting for families to trust us and send their kids back, do we have the additional resources to continue to stand up those schools is the bigger question to the community.” Cassellius said. “This year alone we stood-up $25 million worth of stand-ups at schools that were underutilized.”

To stand-up a school means to pay extra to keep a teacher, or counselor, or administrator in a particular school building even though there are not enough students or enough dollars to justify that on paper.

Cassellius and MPS are trying to close a $46 million budget deficit from the 2024 school spending plan. The current school budget closes that gap on paper, but a slew of reports warn that because of declining enrollment, and the fewer state dollars that come along with that, as well as spending increase MPS could be looking at a new $400 million deficit in just five years.

Cassellius has talked about closing schools to offset those costs, but Milwaukee’s teachers union and some parents are against the idea.

——-

More.

“While we’re waiting for families to trust us and send their kids back, do we have the additional resources to continue to stand up those schools?” Cassellius said, and you wonder:

——-

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Kristoff:

That is why the small organized minority beats the large disorganized majority, almost every time. Not because it is right. Because it shows up.

Now look around. The grant-funded NGO, the bureaucracy defending its budget, the activist network with full-time staff, the lobby with an office next to the ministry. Each has a lot to gain from one more rule, one more program, one more subsidy. The families paying for it each lose a little – and they are busy raising children.

Vice organizes itself, because vice pays its organizers. Virtue has to be organized, because its rewards are spread across everyone.

Olson saw the long-run consequence too. In a second book he argued that stable nations slowly fill up with these organized interests, each defending its slice – until the whole country stiffens and growth stalls. Germany and Japan boomed after the war partly because defeat had swept the old coalitions away.

So what do we do? Olson’s own logic gives the answer.

Make the dispersed costs visible. The coffee nobody notices becomes a bill everyone can read. That is what telling the truth does.

Give the virtuous a reason to show up beyond duty: friendship, community, careers, joy. Movements that last give their members something to belong to.

And remember that the majority never needs to organize all at once. A committed minority is enough to start – the long march proved it. The rest follow once they see they are not alone.

———

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Noumeer Mohammad, Sanjay Gulat

There is a strange contradiction unfolding in global education. As technology makes learning cheaper and increasingly detached from place, conventional wisdom says the physical university campus is becoming redundant. Knowledge is a few clicks away, and students can absorb a lecture, a course, or an entire degree’s worth of information from the comfort of their homes.

India is doing almost the opposite. It is building more universities, expanding campuses, and increasingly attracting some of the world’s leading institutions to establish a physical presence within its borders. The Universities of Southampton, Liverpool, Bristol, and York, in the U.K., alongside the University of New South Wales, in Australia, are among those setting up campuses in India, a market that already serves more than 43 million higher education students, with enrollment growing significantly over the past decade.

This is not simply a response to population scale, though scale is part of the story. India is projected to add hundreds of millions of urban residents by 2050, and its young population will continue to drive demand for education and opportunity. The more interesting story is not how many campuses India is building, but what those campuses are being built for. As the market evolves, there is a growing need for strategic business and health-centric training disciplines in the country, through high-performing universities and centers of excellence. 

For centuries, universities were organized around the delivery of knowledge. Classrooms, lecture halls, labs, and libraries existed because information was scarce and had to be physically delivered to those who wanted it. Today, the internet and AI have inverted that scarcity. Information is abundant, immediate, and increasingly personalized. A student no longer needs a room, a building, or even a campus to access what a professor knows.

Jeff Yass

Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, a Harvard alumnus, has given more than $500 million to his alma mater over four decades. Now he is pledging $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University. It is the largest individual gift in higher-education history and includes $2 billion for a new Miami campus that CMU says will invert the traditional higher education model, organizing learning around societal challenges rather than majors. That’s exactly what higher education needs: investment in new, competitive experiments.

Higher education is failing students, and the American people are fed up. Seven in 10 Americans, including majorities from both parties, say higher ed is headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Yet in 2025 donors gave nearly $80 billion to colleges and universities. Harvard raised $1.3 billion.

No matter how much money donors throw at the problem, classroom instruction at elite institutions keeps getting worse. In a 2024 survey at Harvard, 45% of students said they were reluctant to share views on controversial topics in class. Sixty percent of grades at Harvard College were A’s in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 24% in 2005-06. That doesn’t sound like an environment of rigorous debate and scholarship.

Under pressure from powerful critics, elite universities have begun to make changes such as adopting statements of institutional neutrality, capping grade inflation, promising to protect open inquiry and establishing civics centers. These changes are cosmetic.

Undergraduate education comprises three elements: students, teachers and classes. If admissions policies, faculty and curriculum don’t improve, administrators haven’t changed anything. They’ve maintained the status quo while trying to deceive the public and get critics off their backs.

For all the Trump administration’s efforts to use federal funding as leverage, elite universities are too wealthy to feel significant pressure from withheld government subsidies. Harvard last reported its endowment at $59.9 billion. In fiscal 2025 the return on the endowment was 11.9%, and the university paid almost no taxes. Administrations at these schools whine about funding cuts because they feel entitled to taxpayer money, but they aren’t hurting.

For the same reason, private donors can’t make much of a difference at these schools. Donations to Ivy League schools get you invitations to cocktail parties and, for the big shots, your name on a building where activist professors who hate you teach classes in which you are the villain.

Adam Ozimek:

A Department of Energy loan to Tesla was a successful industrial policy for pushing the electric vehicle industry forward because it helped a critical company survive. But it could succeed only because electric vehicle technology was on the verge of commercial viability. In contrast, a 1980s government program to develop a synthetic fuels industry failed because synthetic fuels, at the end of the day, did not make economic sense in the long run even with a billion-dollar boost.  

It can be extremely hard to know in advance whether the economics are on the side of a particular industrial policy, and thus a large dose of humility is in order. But I believe there is a case that drones at least have a good shot at being the target of successful industrial policy.

Let me begin with a simple sketch of my policy idea that I would like to pitch here for the very first time: Drone to the Top. 

• The federal government will commit to spending a fixed amount annually, for 10 years, on drone swarms for organizations that want to use them for the public good. 

• Organizations will submit short proposals for how they’d use the swarms in innovative ways that generate public value. 

• Every year the federal government pre-approves a list of drone makers whose supply chains are in the U.S. or selected allies.

• The federal government picks winning organizations who then get to choose which drone maker suits their particular needs, and the government buys a drone swarm for them.  

• The federal government advises winning organizations on implementation and then publishes annual reports of what was learned from the year’s case studies. 

The result of this is organizations across the U.S. with access to drone swarms for purposes of the public good, and drone industries located in the U.S. and allied nations getting what is called an “advance market commitment” that lets them know there will be demand. 

Equistamp, Connor Tabarrok:

Cursor’s Composer 2 was built on Kimi K2.5; an open-weight model made by Moonshot AI. To adapt the open-weight model to their own specific use case (coding), Cursor retrained Composer 2 on its own examples and rewarded the model for doing coding tasks well. It is now commonplace for companies to build this way, trusting that retraining existing architectures on data they control guarantees a clean slate. The easy proliferation and difficult removal of backdoors proves this trust to be misplaced. Abackdoor is a hidden behavior learned during training. A model with backdoors acts normally until it meets a specific trigger, then carries out a fixed response. Whoever shaped a model during training predetermines that fixed response long before anyone uses the model.

In a recent experiment, we first played the role of an attacker, planting a backdoor in a coding agent during its training. Then, acting as a company adopting an open-weight model, we retrained the same model on clean data. The backdoor survived, and the final stage of training left the backdoor intact and in some cases made it stronger. Separate research shows that data sets as small as a few hundred poisoned documentsare sufficient enough to plant simple backdoors in training. Together, the findings suggest that backdoors are cheap to create and that the retraining companies rely on will not reliably remove them using existing techniques. Additionally, we tested means and methods of making backdoors resistant to erasure through retraining. We call these methods Persist BD, and document them in the paper here.

The Jefferson Council:

The tuition figure Virginia reports for UVA is the university’s lowest price. Depending on what they study and how far along they are, many students pay thousands of dollars more.

Ask what it costs to attend the University of Virginia this year and you’ll get a clear answer: $17,336 in tuition and required educational fees for an in-state undergraduate. That’s UVA’s base rate, the number news stories use and the number that shows up when UVA is compared with other Virginia colleges.

Now picture two students from the same Virginia high school who both start at UVA this fall. One enrolls in Arts & Sciences and pays $17,336. The other enrolls in Engineering and pays $28,400, which is $11,064 more for the same year at the same school.

Neither student is paying an unusual price, for UVA anyway. UVA doesn’t have one tuition rate. Its Board of Visitors sets twelve rates by school and year of study, and for students who start at UVA out of high school, they come to seven different prices.

One university, seven prices

Here is what UVA charges Virginia undergraduates for 2026-27, from lowest to highest: 

Tim Harford:

And yet with every turn — and now, every Google search — AI confronts us with slick yet forgettable summaries and confident, plausible confabulations. Cheerleaders for AI keep telling me that these fictions hardly ever happen any more. My own lying eyes tell me a different story.

To put it another way, the telephone makes superficial contact easy. That can be the beginning of a more meaningful human relationship, or it can be a replacement for it. Large language models offer the same temptation when it comes to gathering knowledge. A superficial survey becomes effortless. Do we let it catalyse deeper research and understanding? Or replace it?

The choice is ours. Put like that, it verges on being a moral question. We can easily imagine what Screwtape might have made of that.

Harriet Ryan:

The second baseman stood 3-foot-6. The shortstop weighed 44 pounds.

At a club baseball tournament east of Los Angeles this summer, the 6-year-olds on teams from as far away as Arizona were too young to pitch the ball themselves, but their parents were spending thousands on baseball.

There were club dues, tournament fees, hotels, transportation, uniforms and equipment. An app offering “advanced statistics” and video of at-bats was $191 a year. Even watching from the stands has a price—this tournament had a $60-a-head pass for spectators. Spending $10,000 a year is common.

“Nowadays…in order to get certain opportunities, you have to pay money,” said Carlos Avila, the national director of ZT Athletics, a private-equity backed company with three 6-and-under teams in the tournament. “People are trying to get ahead of the curve.”

America’s national pastime, played by generations of children up and down the economic spectrum, is increasingly a sport for rich kids. Many adults remember Little League and rec programs, dad coaches and the snack shack. Youth baseball is now an intense and costly year-round endeavor dominated by for-profit enterprises.

Transcript, with audio:

On October 12, the Madison Literary Club heard a paper by James Troupis, a Madison lawyer for nearly fifty years and a former Dane County circuit judge. Skyler Croy, an attorney at Hurley Burish who teaches constitutional law, responded.

Troupis began with a dry idea. Under Article III of the Constitution, courts may hear only real “cases” in law or equity. A playground quarrel is not a case, and some questions belong to Congress or the president, not judges. Lawyers call these “political questions,” and for most of American history courts stayed out of them.

That line moved in 1962. In Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Tennessee’s legislative districts, some of which had nineteen times as many voters as others. The decision was right, Troupis suggests, but it opened a door that has never closed.

What replaced the old line, he argues, is a scorecard. We now count judges by the president who appointed them, and a ruling “against type” reads as betrayal rather than independence. He cites polling showing faith in the judiciary falling from 59 percent in 2020 to 35 percent by 2024. He offers no easy fix.

Croy pushed back on where the pressure comes from. When Congress won’t act, presidents act alone, and the courts inherit the fight. He also told the story of Justice Charles Whittaker, so torn over Baker that he never cast a vote in it.

The audience was sharper still. One member argued these are not ordinary times and the threat to the rule of law comes from one direction. Another asked what happens when a court rules and the ruling is ignored. Courts have no army and no purse, Troupis replied; they depend on everyone else’s good faith.

Troupis was the Trump campaign’s lawyer in Wisconsin after the 2020 election. In 2024 the state charged him over the alternate-elector certificates that followed. He has pleaded not guilty, the case has not been tried, and the law presumes him innocent. Croy’s firm represents him in that case.

The full transcript and audio are online. Select any timestamp to hear that moment, and follow links to every court case mentioned.

“Education Consumers”

“too many states have chosen to tell parents their children are on track when they aren’t” say Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings in a new Ed Week piece linked below.

These charts compare the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 4th gr reading and math reports with the state testing reports.

The discrepancies are surprising.  If judged by national standards, students in most states are not as proficient in reading and math as the state tests say they are. Link to more charts below.

——-

To get education back on track, let’s start at the top

By Margaret Spellings & Arne Duncan

However, Washington can’t simply send dollars to states and call its job done. The president and Congress should reestablish a clear national commitment to education excellence—setting ambitious goals for student outcomes, investing in research, preserving measurement, and ensuring parents and taxpayers can see whether students are on track.

We’ve done it before. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the federal government spurred states to raise standards. States set expectations for districts and schools to serve every child. Students responded, with average reading scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds rising for the first time in decades. Scores for 9- and 13-year-olds even reached historic levels from 2008 to 2012. We need to get back to a balanced federal-state approach that benefits all students.

A priority for the federal side must be a national research agenda. Federal investments in research have rewritten our approach to education, enabling stakeholders to move beyond assumptions to identify best practices. The federal government’s core obligation should be to support research and evaluation so states invest in proven, high-impact strategies.

If the federal government can focus on its responsibility to provide research funding and accountability, and states on setting standards, we can create a federal-state compact that commits both levels of government to advancing a focused set of national priorities: common-sense goals, evidence-based strategies, distinct measures of progress, and public transparency.

————-

“The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices”

————-

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Zoey Elwood (Wisconsin Watch)

Act 10 largely eliminated collective bargaining for most public employees and required public workers to contribute more toward their pensions and health insurance. It also put stricter certification requirements on unions, making it more difficult for them to remain certified. 

The changes did not apply to public safety unions representing police and firefighters, which is one of the key issues being raised in the latest court challenge.

Before Act 10, public employees could bargain over wages, vacation days, pensions, mandatory breaks, promotions, contracts and other work-related issues. 

Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, said local governments, state agencies and school districts were required to sit down and bargain with unions over these subjects. If disputes arose, they would go to arbitration and mediation. Act 10 significantly changed that process. 

“There were these very real obligations that the state had to, and the local governments had to interact with these unions,” Stein said. “Now that’s — for many public employers — that’s not the case.”

He added that government bodies can now unilaterally adjust healthcare benefits, giving local government employers an “upper hand” in changing some working conditions.

Act 10 also required unions to hold recertification elections every year. To recertify, unions had to receive a majority vote from all members, including those who did not vote.

Stein noted that contrasts with most democratic elections, where a candidate needs a majority of the people who actually show up to vote. Under Act 10’s union recertification requirement, however, nonvoters are counted as “no” votes. 

Stein said that made it difficult for unions to pass the annual recertification votes, causing many local unions to disband. He also noted that the only permitted subject of collective bargaining under Act 10 is a base wage increase up to the rate of inflation, diminishing the value of union membership. 

“So, it was tough to recertify your union to be the official bargaining voice for the employees, and then if you did that, there wasn’t a lot that the union could actually bargain for,” Stein said. “As a result of that, many unions didn’t even try to recertify; they just disbanded.”

Wisconsin’s public sector union membership rate fell by nearly 29 percentage points between 1985 and 2025 — the largest percentage decline of any state, according to a report from the Center for Economics and Policy Research. The report shows a significant drop coinciding with Act 10’s passage in 2011, with the public union membership rate falling from 46.6% in 2010 to 18.5% in 2025.

———

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Notes & Links on Wisconsin Act 10.

Milwaukee Pension Scandal Primer – archive copy.

Teacher Union and the 2026 Wisconsin Governor Election

Erin Gretzinger:

Project Read AI has a lesson generator for teachers to develop practice texts based on specific concepts and words their students have learned so far. Another feature allows teachers to input students’ spelling data — often used as a proxy for how well students are decoding — to help identify common mistakes and generate tailored lessons.

The platform is based on a reading curriculumdeveloped by the University of Florida Literacy Institute. A recent study found the institute’s curriculum led to eight months of extra instruction for kindergarteners and a year-and-a-half of additional instruction for first graders, according to Education Week.

Project Read AI’s student tutor costs $15 per student with a minimum of 100 students required. Teachers can get a limited free version of the practice text generator, while schools must pay $1,000 for their entire staff to have unlimited access.

Beyond One City Schools — one of the early adopters of Project Read AI — some school districts using all or parts of the platform include Orange County Public Schools in California, Saint Paul Public Schools and the Minneapolis Public School District.

——-

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Matthew Yglesias:

For some people who are just kind of normie Democrats, that means give your neighborhood public elementary school a try as a first resort. I’m not asking anyone to sacrifice their kid’s welfare for the sake of the collective good. But is a year or two in a school that didn’t ultimately work out really that bad? Educated, affluent parents opting out of public education has, in fact, killed a lot of potentially functional school communities. Public schools only work if people with financial and social capital participate. If you’re the kind of person who would tell a pollster that you strongly support public education, you should try to actually support it by enrolling your kids and attending P.T.A. meetings and pitching in. You might find, as Kate and I did, that you really like your neighborhood school and its community and that it can be rewarding, both for you and your child, to meet people from different walks of life who you might not otherwise get to know.

And on the flip side, I know plenty of people in D.C. who happily send their kids to charter schools (which have incredibly high market share in our very charter-friendly city) but then, in their day jobs working in politics, they have nothing to say about the national Democratic Party walking away from charters entirely. I find that kind of weird. There isn’t one objectively correct way to live life or think about the world, and a little hypocrisy around the margin isn’t the worst possible outcome. But I think it would be broadly beneficial if more people made more of an effort to develop some coherence between their stated political values and their actual lives.

Imani Cruzen:

St. Mary’s University of Minnesota will create a St. Paul Catholic high school focused on trade and technology, the university announced Monday.

Starting in 2028, ninth grade students will be able to prepare for employment, industry credentials and apprenticeships and have the opportunity to earn a defined number of college credits through St. Mary’s University while in high school.

The school will be named Blessed Santiago Miller School of Trade and Technology after Blessed James “Santiago” Miller, a graduate and faculty member of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota who died in 1982.

“For more than a year, the Board of Trustees and I have been considering how Saint Mary’s can respond authentically and distinctively to the changing educational, workforce, and societal needs of our time while remaining faithful to who we are as a Lasallian Catholic university,” said Rev. James P. Burns, St. Mary’s president, in a statement Monday.

The school is funded by a group of anonymous donors as part of a restricted gift that will be used to purchase the property and fund its initial operating budget, according to university officials. That budget includes salaries, maintenance, security, insurance and related expenses for the first positions at the school.

The initial trade school grounds will be at the St. Francis de Sales campus at 650 Palace Ave. in St. Paul’s West Seventh neighborhood.

Ed. note: This is testimony given by Peter Shulman at today’s Assembly Education Committee regarding Assembly Bill 4121, which would eliminate the high school graduation proficiency test (NJGPA).  Shulman is recommending the committee not take action on this bill without reflecting on what a high school diploma truly means in New Jersey. His testimony is timely, given that yesterday the NJ Department of Education released state assessment scores, which showed, according to NJ Spotlight, “most of the overall performance numbers remain below pre-pandemic levels and continue to show gaping achievement gaps.” 

Thank you to our Assembly Education Committee for introducing this important topic. As a former NJ Deputy Commissioner of Education and a parent of two NJ public school students, ensuring that our public school students graduate (as noted in statute) “prepared…for success in post-secondary degree programs, careers, and civic life in the 21st century” is of deep importance to me. As you consider Assembly Bill 4121, I would urge you to first interrogate what a New Jersey high school diploma really represents. 

While it is unacceptable that tens of thousands of New Jersey public school students graduate each year unprepared for college, the fact that these same students were told they are ready for college is dishonest and unfair to them: 

1. All 11th graders take the NJGPA – which is a reflection of 10th grade reading, algebra and geometry. In 2025, over 40% of them could not pass the math section of the NJGPA. This alarming level of performance came after the State Board of Education lowered the cut score in 2023. And this metric is not an outlier as similarly low levels of proficiency can be found in NJSLS scores starting in 3rd grade and reflected in statewide SAT and ACT scores. Yet over 90% of all NJ high school seniors receive a diploma, which signals to each individual graduate that they are prepared to succeed in their post-secondary degree program. But as the NJSLA and NJGPA results warned us, almost half of all 1st year college students aren’t prepared and require remedial coursework, leading to millions in debt and more than a 50% reduction in their chances of degree completion.
2. For the students who can’t pass the NJGPA, they take a proxy assessment to qualify for a diploma. These assessments include the PSAT, ACT, SAT, and Accuplacer. However the required passing scores on these proxy assessments are significantly below what the College Board (SAT) and ACT cite for a student to be college ready. For example, the College Board states that an SAT score of 480 and 530 in reading and math, respectively, represent college and career readiness. But NJ only requires scores of 450 in reading and 440 in math – which are considered by College Board as “Not Yet Approaching” (their lowest tier of readiness). This is dishonestly hiding in plain sight.
3. If a student doesn’t pass the NJGPA or meet the low thresholds of the proxy assessments, they can opt for the 3rd pathway which is the portfolio appeal. Over 16% of 2024 graduates used this pathway to satisfy their math graduation requirement. While well intended, portfolio submissions take up tremendous time and they have never been correlated to post-secondary success – but almost every student’s portfolio results in a diploma.

While high school graduation is an exciting milestone, we do a life-altering disservice to tens of thousands of students and their families when we issue a diploma that we KNOW does not represent readiness for post-secondary success.

Megan Brenan

Decline spans major subgroups; women, Democrats and people of color remain most positive

Three in 10 Americans (31%) think a college education is “very important,” four percentage points below last year’s reading, the previous low among the seven times Gallup has asked this question since 1978. As recently as 2013, more than twice as many U.S. adults (70%) said college was very important.

At the same time, the percentage of U.S. adults who say a college education is “not too important” has risen from 6% in 2013 to 29% today, while the percentage saying it is “fairly important” has increased from 23% to 39%.

In the earliest years of Gallup’s trend on this question, those considering a college education to be very important increased sharply from 36% in 1978 to 64% by 1985. In the past decade, the perceived importance of college has plummeted, with those saying it is very important now slightly below its 1978 starting point.

This year, Gallup’s Aug. 3-24 poll finds that the percentage of U.S. adults viewing college as “not too important” nearly matches those rating it “very important.” The 64-point gap between them in 2013 has shrunk to just two points today.

Fight 4 Illinois:

Check out the top 10 municipal pensions in Illinois (excludes school superintendents and community college staff). “Public servants” with $225K to $375K yearly pensions?

Terrance Tao:

The advent of modern AI tools is disrupting many
long-established professions.

My own field of mathematical research – which has been
largely stable for almost a century – has proven to be
particularly susceptible to this type of disruption.

Jo Ellison:

The glossary was an amalgam of classic Fleet Street favourites — “shoe-leather journalism”, “angle”, “sweep” and “colour” — mixed with terms that reflect more digital times. Several of the terms listed spoke quite generally to the profession, others had evolved according to the whim and personalities of those within. Today’s lingo now includes words such as “computational journalism” and “fastcharts”, to reflect our data-driven dynamism. But even though we think digitally about our stories, old print-media terms such as “drains” and “decks” persist.

Journalese boasts a long, arcane tradition. When I first started on a paper, at the turn of the millennium, the language of the newsroom was still rooted in the letterpress. It was an era of “busted headlines”, where words wouldn’t fit the allotted type space, “galley proofs” and “copytakers”, which referred to a team of, mostly, women who would type out stories dictated over phones.

One editor would harry us about our deadlines, continually fretting about how we had to be “off stone”. He was referring to the old practice of assembling the letterpress into its final format, after which no one could make any changes and not one comma could be moved. The expression was already deeply anachronistic — the printing site had long been digitised — but I liked to imagine some old dude like Moses at the printers, heaving engraved tablets of rock around the room.

James Freeman:

Back in the Windy City, kudos to the Tribune editorial board for explaining the opportunity cost of driving away the state’s most successful people: “After all, persons who are willing to donate $3 billion to an institution of higher education are not to be found on every street corner.”

Of course New York politicians in general and the mayor of New York City in particular have also been unwelcoming and in some cases downright hostile to wealth-creators like Mr. Griffin. Leftists who enjoyed the mayor’s nasty media stunt outside Mr. Griffin’s Manhattan apartment can now reflect on whether it was worth removing the city as a possible landing spot for the largest individual gift in the history of U.S. higher education.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction today announced eight schools across the state have been named Wisconsin Blue Ribbon School winners, recognizing them for exceptional academic performance and success in closing achievement gaps.   

“It is an honor to recognize these exceptional schools,” State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly said. “This achievement is made possible by the students, educators, staff, families, and leaders who work every day to create school communities where everyone can learn, grow, and take pride in their success.Congratulations to each of these schools on this well-deserved recognition.”    

Blue Ribbon Schools are honored in two categories: Exemplary High Performing Schools and Exemplary Gap Closing Schools. High Performing Schools rank among the state’s highest-performing schools, determined by student assessment scores. Gap Closing Schools excel in narrowing performance disparities between individual student subgroups and the overall student body over a period of time. Wisconsin’s 2026 honorees are: 

• Dunwiddie Elementary School (Port Washington-Saukville School District) – High Performing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results 25.7% < 25th %]
• Hillcrest Elementary School (School District of Waukesha) – High Performing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results 27.1% < 25th %]
• Wauzeka Elementary School (Wauzeka-Steuben School District) – High Performing and Gap Closing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results 16.4% < 25th %]
• Prairie View Elementary School (Beaver Dam Unified School District) – High Performing and Gap Closing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results 30.3% < 25th %]
• Little Chute Middle School (Little Chute Area School District) – High Performing and Gap Closing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results]
• Oostburg High School (Oostburg School District)– Gap Closing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results]
• Fall Creek High School (Fall Creek School District) – Gap Closing [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results]
• Grantsburg Elementary School (Grantsburg School District) – High Performing  [4k-3rd grade 2024-2025 early literacy screener results 25.5% < 25th %]

———-

———

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Marc Joffe

Many think of the League of Women Voters as an unbiased source of voter information. But, in the Bay Area at least, nothing could be further from the truth. LVW Bay Area has received funding from local transit agencies and is earning that support by campaigning on behalf of their $17 billion transit sales tax.

Nationally, LVW represents itself as “a nonpartisan, grassroots nonprofit dedicated to empowering everyone to fully participate in our democracy. [W]e engage in advocacy, education, litigation, and organizing to protect every American’s freedom to vote.”

But in the Bay Area, LVW signed a contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in 2018, under which MTC, BART, AC Transit, and other agencies paid it up to $75,000 to continue publishing its bi-monthly newsletter, Bay Area Monitor.

The Monitor, which no longer appears to be publishing, ran a favorable story on transit-oriented development (TOD) while the contract was in force. Other articles addressed regional planning and climate change, popular topics for sponsoring agencies.

While MTC and its partner agencies no longer fund the Monitor, LVW Bay Area remains closely aligned. This month, ballot guides reaching mailboxes in all five Measure RTM counties featured arguments for the tax signed by “League of Women Voters Bay Area, Louise Rothman-Reimer, Co-President”.

——-

AB446 Legislative links and lobbying information. (League of Women voters is against!)

More.

Ritu Agarwal and  Prabhudev Konana

As generative AI and paper mills flood academic publishing with industrial-scale fraud, higher education faces a reckoning: The metrics built to evaluate faculty productivity are now accelerating the decline of scientific integrity. Once a quirky incentive problem, it has become a governance and reputational crisis. Paper mills have evolved into AI-powered factories producing thousands of automated manuscripts and fake peer reviews, overwhelming journals and making fraud harder to detect.

This escalation does not occur in a vacuum. Wiredcaptured it bluntly with the headline “The Black Market for Fake Science Is Growing Faster Than Legitimate Research, Study Warns,” based on work by Northwestern University scholars. It includes data manipulation, purchased authorship, paid citations and manufactured results.

This is not about isolated bad actors; these are not bugs in the system. Academic leaders often express shock when fraud is uncovered. They should not. When careers depend on publication count and count itself becomes the defining success metric, some will cheat to seek prestige.

Ethan Soifer:

Aldermen have warned Mayor Brandon Johnson what they will not support. 

Chicago faces a projected budget deficit for at least the 27^th straight year.

In advance of negotiations on how to close it, a group of 29 aldermen have demanded reforms, writing to Mayor Brandon Johnson that Chicago needs to address the structural imbalances in its budget and not rely on “one-time money” to “paper over a permanent problem.”

Those aldermen say they will not support a head tax on corporations, a property tax increase or relying on revenue from Springfield that has not yet been approved. They want the city to reduce wasteful spending and improve government efficiency.

Johnson has said he will not raise property taxes.

The city projects it faces an $882.4 million deficit for fiscal 2027, on top of the $85.1 million gap it still has to fill for the remainder of 2026. The mayor has said he plans to close the remaining 2026 gap with bond refinancing.

The projected deficit is driven primarily by a projected growth in expenditures of $554 million, or 8.9%. That would bring corporate fund spending to a record $6.76 billion.

Personnel will continue making up the majority of corporate fund spending, increasing by $52.7 million from 2026. Financial costs, including bond payments, are expected to skyrocket by 86%, or an additional $282.1 million. Pension costs are slated to go up by $90.5 million.

The rapid growth in spending is part of a trend. Since 2019, corporate fund spending has increased by nearly $3 billion, or 74%. Historically that has been driven primarily by growth in personnel-related expenditures, such as salaries and benefits, pensions and overtime. Despite substantial growth in city revenues over that time, the unsustainable growth in expenditures has created recurring budget shortfalls.

Making matters worse, corporate fund revenue is projected to fall by $244 million. That decline is attributed to a fall in one-time tax revenues used to plug previous budget shortfalls, not a reduction in the tax base or a decreasing tax burden on Chicago residents.

Patrick McIlheran:

Wisconsin amendment would bar unjust preferences, defeating agencies’ so-sue-me attitude

One of the best sales pitches for a constitutional amendment on Wisconsin’s November ballot comes inadvertently from the proposal’s critics.

It goes like this: Racial discrimination is already illegal, so whatever you do, Wisconsin, don’t shut down the government’s ability to go on racially discriminating.

The text of the amendment puts it in the embroidered language of law, but the question posed to voters is straightforward: Should Wisconsin’s constitution “prohibit governmental entities in the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration?”

Since racial discrimination polls about as well as influenza, you’d figure a yes vote is a done deal. Still, critics are trying.

A leading one, the head of the League of Women Voters Wisconsin, Debra Cronmiller, gave it a try in an interviewwith WisPolitics, saying that voting against racial discrimination would be meaningless — and meaningfully bad.  

Joel Klein:

But Ms. Hannah-Jones’s article makes clear “what went wrong.” Her daughter, Najya, and her classmates “were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.” And the failure to educate “poor Black children” isn’t limited to Najya’s school or even to the Hannah-Joneses’ city: “There was nothing exceptional about what I witnessed at P.S. 307. I had observed and reported on similar educational malfeasance in Detroit, in Durham, in St. Louis, in Tuscaloosa, in Birmingham.” Ms. Hannah-Jones writes.

If Ms. Weingarten wants to “learn what went wrong,” she should start by looking in the mirror. Her union is the primary reason New York’s public schools fail to educate so many children, especially poor black children.

Ms. Hannah-Jones chronicles a wide range of unprofessional practices at Najya’s school. Teachers refused to check homework or administer mandatory assessments. They were contemptuous of their students, thinking they had no ability to learn. They made up grades. They stopped calling on Najya in class, making her “so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers.” They repeatedly ignored Ms. Hannah-Jones’s efforts to find out how her daughter was doing. Some were absent for long periods. Kids were left without substitute teachers and allowed to run wild and assault one another.

A debacle of this scope can’t be explained away by a lack of money or overwhelmed teachers—the usual excuses rolled out to defend failing schools by shifting blame to “the system.” Najya’s school is extremely well-resourced, spending more than $50,000 per pupil each year, and it has a low student-teacher ratio. More important, the transgressions Ms. Hannah-Jones documents had nothing to do with resources. They were intentionally harmful acts by uncaring teachers, who disrespected their students and refused to do the most basic and undemanding parts of their jobs. They didn’t even try.

This kind of persistent, comprehensive and unchecked behavior can persist only in the absence of accountability. These teachers knew there would be no consequences because their jobs are protected by policies and practices artfully designed by their union.

Nicole Ault

States do a disservice to students by emphasizing fuzzy concepts over knowledge.

High-school students in New York have for nearly 150 years taken exit exams to graduate. While the Empire State is phasing out these Regents Examinations, it’s phasing in a new standard it calls a “portrait of a graduate.” That’s a list of six qualities the state thinks should describe a high-school graduate.

New York now wants its high-school graduates to be “academically prepared. The rest of the qualities that make up the portrait are nicely nebulous: “critical thinker,” “creative innovator,” “effective communicator,” “reflective and future focused” and a “global citizen.” Guidance is forthcoming, but the state says the portrait will “guide instructional decisions” and “assessment strategies.”

———

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Eli Baumwell

This commentary was originally published in the West Virginia Watch.

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia announced a lawsuit last week over the unconstitutional underfunding of public schools. I’m not exaggerating when I say this may be the most important case we have filed in my 10 years with this organization.

The promise of a free education is fundamental to our democracy itself. It’s so vital that it was enshrined as a right in our 1863 state Constitution, and courts have interpreted that right to mean that schools must not only be adequately funded, but also fairly funded from county to county.

And yet, West Virginia sits at or near the bottom of most national rankings. Politicians have blamed schools, teachers and parents for poor educational outcomes, when the true cause is in black and white on the balance sheets.

During the 2022-23 school year, West Virginia’s average per-pupil expenditure was $14,909 — a total that includes state, local and federal money.  While $14,909 was the reported average, the actual amount per student spent by counties ranged from a low of $12,158 in Barbour County to a high of $22,500 in Doddridge.

That gap gets even wider when you look at only the funding within the state’s control. Combined state and local education funding per pupil ranged from $10,542 in Barbour County to $24,924 in Tyler. In a system that requires that education funding be allocated fairly, some counties receive double the funding of others — not only presenting constitutional concerns, but driving averages up in a way that hides how significantly underfunded many West Virginia counties are.

Across the country, states spend more on education in counties with high rates of students with disabilities and students experiencing poverty because providing quality education to those students is often more expensive. In West Virginia, we do just the opposite: we spend less in counties with the greatest need, and more in counties with higher property wealth.

Chief among the many flaws in West Virginia’s school funding system is the failure to account for special education services. West Virginia’s special education funding is worse than it was decades ago. Because these services are required by law, failure to provide sufficient funding means that school districts need to dip into funding that would otherwise be used for general education services, or to cover the costs of keeping schools operational.

————

“Overfunded”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

Jordan Weissmann:

Most of America’s major cities have made little to no progress reducing racial segregation in their public schools over recent decades. Many have slid backward, and are more polarized today than they were at the turn of the century.

These challenges were highlighted in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s wrenching New York Times Magazine piece in September about her experience sending her daughter to poor, intensely segregated public schools in New York City as part of a campaign to fix them — only for her child to fall behind in her education and demand a change to a more selective school with few Black and Hispanic students. The essay ends with both the writer and subject frustrated: Hannah-Jones with the seemingly insurmountable barriers to improving and integrating schools, and her daughter, with the burden of confronting these structural barriers on her own.

But Washington, DC, the city I’ve called home on and off for most of my adult life, is one of the few standout exceptions to these trends.

During the 2000s and 2010s, its public schools underwent a dramatic set of reforms that helped improve teaching and student achievement. At the same time, the number of white students leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about 20 percentage points, the largest drop among the country’s 50 biggest cities.

Recently, I called Kaya Henderson, DC’s former top schools official, to ask about that era of progress, and whether she thought the policies she implemented had helped encourage integration. If not, what had? Her answer surprised me a bit: It simply wasn’t a question she had ever really pondered.

“For me, integration was never the point,” Henderson said. “Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.”

Gregory Conti:

On May 30, 2020, five days after the death of George Floyd, the head of a prominent DC-area think tank issued a stentorian condemnation of the killing and the bigotry she said had enabled it. Echoing The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery…at the very center of our national narrative,” Kay C. James described racism as a “fatal wound” that had permanently bloodied the American project. “How many more black people must die,” she asked, “until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country?”

Such statements were to be expected from a progressive nonprofit or a virtue-signaling corporation. James, though, was the president of the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think-tank that would go on to develop Project 2025 in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Just five years after James made her statement on Floyd, her successor, Kevin Roberts, would plunge the institution into turmoil by defending Tucker Calson’s interview with a Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, who has stated that “white people are every single bit justified in being racist.” (Roberts subsequently apologized.)

The contrast is a synecdoche for the arc of the contemporary right. Haunted by the legacy of “Peak Woke,” conservatives are now rejecting the terms of a cultural settlement that prevailed, with bipartisan support, through Donald Trump’s first term. Behind all the culture-war bluster stood a GOP establishment that was positively tame by today’s standards, less extreme than liberals portrayed it at the time, and more accommodating of progressivism than many Republicans recall. 

The first Trump administration celebrated the “contributions of our great minority-owned businesses” and maintained the racial set-asides that gave them preference. The second barred affirmative action in federal contracting.

In 2017, a year after Trump said Caitlyn Jenner could use the women’s restroom in Trump Tower, Texas Republicans killed a bill that would have limited transgender access to public toilets. As of 2026, almost half of US states have passed such measures.

The stated objective of Trump’s first term was border security, a goal that mainstream Democrats professed to share. The stated objective of his second—mass deportations—is anathema to the center-left.

Claes Bäckman:

Everything from the workshop in one place: the slides, the Claude Code skills we use in the hands-on blocks, the setup guides, and the exercises. Bookmark this page. It stays up as the tools change, and the skills repository is updated as I revise them.

Ambar Colón

Nearly four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened, workers are organizing a union, citing “increasing workloads” and benefit rollbacks that have stirred concerns about their future with the organization.

In a letter distributed to colleagues on Wednesday morning, the workers allege that foundation leadership has met their concerns with “vague responses.” As a result, the letter states the Obama Foundation and Obama Presidential Center have a “high turnover rate” and workers “continue to leave, taking with them their institutional knowledge and expertise.”

The union did not have numbers on how many employees have left since the center opened in June, but it represents workers across a wide range of roles, from museum greeters and ticket takers to behind-the-scenes staff who put together exhibits or work in development, communications and marketing.

———-

The Soviet Union collapsed at 50%…France is at 57% and striking for more, mindblowing