Grade Expectations

Your Test Results Are In

This is not a note that America wanted to see in the margin of its test results, but it's how one researcher described new federal data on student math and reading achievement. "I don’t know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they’re bad. I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine." The poor grade is due to several factors, many related to the lost learning time during the pandemic. And like the general effect of the pandemic, the impacts on academic performance are not being distributed equally. "Academic recovery is increasingly a split screen: top students are making up lost ground while struggling students are falling further behind. The overall decline in scores was mostly driven by the drop in student scores among those at the low end." WaPo (Gift Article): Students aren’t recovering from covid. Test scores are getting worse.

+ Here's a test for you. How will these results be filtered and used? A) Politically B) Politically C) Politically or D) All of the Above. While you're pondering your answer, here's a reminder that today's struggle over the future education is, like so many other issues, a religious battle—one that could be decided by the Supreme Court. (I'll skip the quiz on which way this Court leans.) Supreme Court to hear church-state fight over bid to launch first publicly funded religious charter school.

+ Meanwhile, Trump to sign sweeping executive order to expand school choice. "The Department of Health and Human Services would be directed to issue guidance that explains how states receiving block grants for families and children can use that money for faith-based and private institutions."

2

Strike That, Reverse It

Maybe the Constitution still has a role in American life and maybe Congress still controls spending. (Or maybe the administration is just planning something worse.) The spending freeze that sent shockwaves across the nation yesterday has been rescinded. "President Donald Trump’s budget office on Wednesday rescinded an memo freezing spending on federal grants, less than two days after it sparked widespread confusion and legal challenges across the country." (Widespread Confusion and Legal Challenges is the name of my next album...)

3

A Clean Shill of Health

"With concerns about conflicts of interest, his views on abortion, and generally strange behavior (such as dumping a dead bear in Central Park), there is much to debate. If Republican senators skirt around his falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings, it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights. As Benjamin Mazer recently wrote in The Atlantic, Kennedy is not simply a conspiracy theorist, but an excellent one. He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality." (That last sentence looks pretty good on an application to work for the current administration). Will the Senate stop RFK Jr? The prognosis is not good. The Atlantic(Gift Article): This Is About More Than RFK Jr. (At least RFK Jr is a good health diagnostic tool. That he's even being considered for this role shows how sick America is.)

+ Here are some outtakes from the RFK Jr confirmation hearings.

4

Space Invaders

"Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday. The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start." Are we all aliens? NASA’s returned asteroid samples hold the ingredients of life from a watery world.

5

Extra, Extra

Fork Yourself: "The OPM email, with the subject line 'Fork in the Road,' was reminiscent of one that Musk sent Twitter employees after buying the social media platform in 2022. He fired many of the company's employees; others quit in droves." Trump invites nearly all federal workers to quit now, get paid through September. (Can he even make that offer without Congress? An evergreen question...) Wired: Elon Musk Is Running the Twitter Playbook on the Federal Government.

+ Gitmo Baywatch: At signing of Laken Riley Act, Trump says he plans to send migrants in US illegally to Guantanamo.

+ Joint Beefs: "The Pentagon is pulling the security clearance and detail of Gen. Mark Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the latest longstanding enemy of President Donald Trump to suffer retribution in his new presidential term." (And with that, the Pete Hegseth era begins...)

+ AI Yai Yai: "Russia’s breakthrough in the ’60s Space Race did not signal the end of spending big dollars on space research. And DeepSeek’s success doesn’t mean spending billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, such as GPUs, is useless or will stop any time soon. The US DeepSeek freakout is, instead, our greatest mass hallucination since… well… the drone fantasy in New Jersey a few weeks earlier." The real DeepSeek revelation: The market doesn’t understand AI. (If only there were some tool we could use to learn about it...) Meanwhile, Alibaba says it has an AI model even better than DeepSeek.

+ Fait accompli(ce): "The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to dismiss former special counsel Jack Smith's caseagainst Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, President Trump's former co-defendants in his classified documents case."

+ Goalposts Moved: Chiefs-Bills AFC title game delivers record audience of 57.4M viewers. (I think we can stop asking the question: Are you ready for some football?)

+ Sign Language: "Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her young daughter, Lindsay." NYT (Gift Article): Mother Chimp and Daughter Share a Special Sign.

+ I Must Be in the Front Rodent: "If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo." Gary Shteyngart in The New Yorker: How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s.

6

Bottom of the News

"Instagram, TikTok and other social-media sites are usually overwhelmed by people showing off what they bought. This year, people are pivoting to something else: displaying how they’re buying nothing." WSJ (Gift Article): The Americans Pledging to Buy Less—or Even Nothing. (Doing this for a year would be a breeze for me. It takes me at least 18 months to research anything I plan to buy...)