August 11, 2026

HMM: New York’s ELA scores soared in 2025 and crashed in 2026. The numbers tell us it may be a mistake.

The results across NYC schools look very similar – schools consistently increased a lot in 2025, then decreased about the same amount in 2026.

Let me state the obvious: data does not usually look like this. If you’re a reader of this Substack, you see the releases from states as we put them out. Outside of the pandemic, proficiency rates typically move by a couple of percentage points (or less) in a given year. Increases of 4 or 5 percentage points are notable. The huge gains in 2025 here are implausible, and they seem even more so with the decline in 2026.

The fact is, this data looks like someone made- and then fixed- a mistake. So I got curious – could we understand that mistake better? The detailed 2026 data isn’t out yet. But the mistake seems like it was made in 2025. And we do have the technical manuals from 2025 and the detailed data on scores by school, group and district. (Shout out here to the API from our Education Data Center – you, too, can make these graphs in a few minutes).

I dug into the data. Here’s what I learned.

The full report gets pretty technical, but this conclusion stands out: “We should try to train ourselves to be more skeptical of results even if we wish they were true. I, as much as anyone, would love it if introducing phonics would increase proficiency rates by 12 percentage points in a single year. But that number isn’t realistic based on what we know about testing. And this should have been figured out, and fixed, last year.”

But as even the New York Times had to admit, in creating the Mississippi Miracle, teaching phonics certainly does help.

Posted at 5:22 pm by Stephen Green

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: How ‘Israeli’ Came to Mean ‘Jewish’ in the American Press.

New York Magazine’s new issue gives new meaning to the term “food Nazi.” The latest edition is dedicated to the proposition that Jews can never fully belong, that they are always visitors to society but never at home. The magazine uses food as the specific lens through which to view this blood-and-soil worldview.

The line getting the most attention is the magazine’s description of the State of Israel as “the land mass currently called Israel,” a declaration that New York Magazine doesn’t recognize the Jewish state. And that indeed is quite newsy. But the publication’s discussion of Jews in New York itself makes the story package not just geopolitical gobbledygook but a direct attack on Jews anywhere.

The conceit behind the story package is the emergence of a restaurant and cultural scene referred to as SWANA, which stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa. Jewish Israelis, while geographically part of SWANA, are not included, “given the political framework” of the term.

Much of the writing in this story package tries to dance around that particular point, but every so often it comes through: “Israelis,” in the context of this new progressive dogma, means “Jews.” An Arab who lives in “the land mass currently called Israel” is obviously not being excluded from this club. Indeed, the “political framework” of the category would elevate what the magazine terms a “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” as first among equals.

There is of course much irony in the fact that, before 1948, “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” would have meant Jews, especially during the portion of the Mandate when Arabs in the Holy Land still considered themselves part of a Syrian polity. But I digress.

John Podhoretz tweets, “This is the first issue of NEW YORK under James Murdoch’s ownership.”

According to Wikipedia, “In 2020, Murdoch and his wife each donated US$615,000 to the Biden campaign. In September 2024, he was one of 88 American corporate leaders who signed an open letter endorsing vice-president Kamala Harris for president.”

Exit question:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT COULD PROBABLY BE HAD PRETTY CHEAP, CONSIDERING:

I’m not sure “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” applies here.

Posted at 5:06 pm by Stephen Green

THIS FEELS CORRECT:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green

ICYMI: Trans Rep Sarah McBride Has a Sad but I Can’t Stop Laughing. “‘This strategy of cutting off conversation and even cutting off relationships, it was done from a good place,’ McBride claimed in the video, equating family-destroying temper tantrums with moral suasion.”

Posted at 4:20 pm by Stephen Green

WHY RESTAURANTS AND GROCERS DON’T DONATE FOOD:

One of the favorite targets of food activists are businesses that throw away excess or expired food at the end of the day instead of donating it. Some of them throw it out because of the logistical and staffing challenges associated with getting food donated properly, but most of them — especially those dealing in perishable items — are simply afraid of the liability involved if someone gets sick.

Activists will respond that no one has ever been sued for donating food, and that food donors are protected by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act, which means that the idea of being sued for donating food is a myth and an excuse that businesses use to not be bothered enough to the right thing.

But there’s the thing. If farms, restaurants, and grocers start donating the food they usually throw out, then two significant things will happen:

1. The composition of donated food will change drastically. Lawsuits for food donations are low at present in part because most donated food is non-perishable (e.g. canned food). The stuff that businesses throw away, on the other hand, is usually perishable and, therefore, much more likely to get someone sick.
2. Non-perishable donations are statistically rare precisely because of item 1. If those donations were to increase, the instances of people getting sick are statistically guaranteed to increase as well, along with the likelihood that someone will get sued.

And thus:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA: Cornell bans processing wild game on campus after bear butchering incident. “Chin said he and his friend checked on campus rules before they brought the bear to their dorm kitchen, and found that they would not be breaking any. He also said they needed to find a place quickly because they didn’t want the meat to spoil.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

NIMBYS AND DATA CENTERS: Rod Martin gets email, lots of it, especially when he writes about the importance and potential benefits of AI-related data centers. In his latest on the issue, he responds to a recent raft of critical email and in the process provides a historically, economically and technologically informed case for more data centers.

Posted at 3:35 pm by Mark Tapscott

TAPPER, LOL:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: American warship downs drones with laser weapon. “According to Lockheed Martin, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble employed its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance system, known as HELIOS, to engage and neutralise four drones during a Navy-run counter-UAS event. The activity took place last year and was disclosed publicly as part of the company’s latest financial update.”

Cool. Now do at least 40.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Agent J is going to be awfully busy between now and November:

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

‘WOKE ONE’ DERAILED MY LIFE. AOC can’t laugh off its excesses:

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you?

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred.

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics.

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago.

Facing such scrutiny, [Francesca] Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

But in the meantime: Panic at the Wisco: Dems Realizing Hong Might Cost Them Midterms.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHITE PRIVILEGE. SHOT: Fresh jalapeños linked to Salmonella outbreak in 27 states, and a recall is underway.

CHASER:

(Although the notion that white people don’t like hot food is basically BS. Come to the south and walk through the Ace Hardware grilling isle with spice rubs labeled “Ass Prolapse” and “Esophagus Roaster” and the like. Now moving to New England there was a distinct lack of spice, it’s true.)

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years!

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

Indeed: Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague.

The Spectator’s tweet concludes, “Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’. These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll