Bruce D. Baker

“What has Mississippi done? Well, unlike Florida or Arizona, Mississippi has maintained effort to fund its schools and has actually surpassed Florida and Arizona on labor cost adjusted per pupil spending”

Important context for understanding Mississippi’s impressive progress in early reading.

On Miracles in Mississippi Here’s a quick summary of a thread I recently posted on both BlueSky and X. Storytime – for those who want to push some “southern” miracle in public schooling – using …

schoolfinance101.com/2026/02/11/o...

Meanwhile, Californians have continued to help pay for that large sucking sound states like FL impose on Federal Aid:

A few new slides - While FL continues to nosedive on student achievement, CA has mitigated losses, and moved passed FL (and these effects tend to be lagged - more so for cumulative effects of school quality picked up in 8th grade assessment)

A few new slides - and why the future is brighter in California than in Florida - diverging approaches on education investment (not to mention ideological bs in FL)

In earlier voucher debates, a common argument was: why should I pay for your uber when we fund public transportation?

I took that as a hypothetical - but now I am here coding up the costs of Ubers and Lyfts charged to Arizona taxpayers.

a close up of a painting of james t. johnson ALT: a close up of a painting of james t. johnson

By the way... did you know that in Thomas Jefferson's notes, he wrote a definition of birthright citizenship that explicitly states the English rule as it applies to foreign travelers?

He sure did.

Every accusation is a confession, or in this case a roadmap

This is how you do foreign policy. On the president’s privately owned social network that loses $700m a year to run a website

'One year of failure.' The Lancet slams RFK Jr.'s first year as health chief In a scathing review, the top US medical journal's editorial board warned that the "destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 in office might take generations to repair."

www.npr.org/2026/02/28/n...

Financing multiple, disparate education systems requiring duplicative governance, accountability and extraction of public funds by financialization.
Not to mention the multiple, long run downsides of a less educated adult population, especially when it comes to numeracy, math and science.

So, in the end, the taxpayers can be taking care of those who parents chose not to educate.

One might argue that we need a new, expanded SCOTUS that will not only roll back Mahmoud, Carson, Espinoza and Zelman, but also revisit Yoder and Pierce. A re-ravelling (un-unravelling), per se, of church-state separation (& limits of free exercise) and new emphasis on the rights of the child.

These programs have now been around long enough for cohorts of children to have lost entirely, several critical years of schooling, for which damages might reasonably be projected.

So, my ed law colleagues, lets figure out how to a) identify a class of children in an unregulated voucher state, who have b) been deprived of education due to "parental empowerment" and c) frame the causes of action (against the state, for its responsibility) on behalf of these kids.

Yes, the total lack of transparency of these programs and absurd, self-indulgent, parental expenditures of taxpayer dollars are eye catching. But the reason this matters is that children, with no choice in the matter, are being deprived of education (outright deprived) to their lifelong detriment.

One huge problem here is that the child, or children who were deprived of education (because this is how the money was spent) have no legal recourse for those damages - quantifiable, life long damages due to deprivation of education. All in the name of "parent empowerment"

Purchases from one Arizona ESA user, obtained by Craig Harris at Arizona 12 News

What makes the data recently obtained by AZ 12 News’ Craig Harris a new chapter in the ESA debate is the presence of unique IDs. Earlier data allowed statements about overall purchases; now you can see the set tied to a single account.

This account holder bought estrogen, progesterone & a pool.

Do Black electoral victories shift racial bias? Evidence from close elections Do Black electoral victories affect the degree of racial bias among White Americans? This paper examines changes in explicit racial attitudes and Impl…

"Anti-Black bias among White respondents increases following narrow victories by Black candidates, relative to close losses." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's (long past) time for blue states that send more in federal taxes than they receive back in federal aid to craft legislation to keep that money in state. No more blue state charity to red states if this is the game being played.

Prosecute.

We've been using AI (Neural Nets) to predict number patterns and sequences for decades (sometimes accurately, many times not). The average person isn't very good with numbers (in that way). Predicting word sequences "seems" more "human" but it's not! Same shit, different application.

No child should be kicked off their team and deemed an outcast by their government just because of who they are. Like Kara Young said — freedom isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.

Learn more about our work defending trans student athletes at aclu.org/morethanagame-bpj

Credit Where Credit's Due Dept.-
The nickname "Presidementia" is from the JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! NO KINGS PROTEST SIGN NICKNAME GUIDE. Many thanks to @jimmykimmellive.bsky.social & his writers! Save this chart for the upcoming NO KINGS DAY on March 28 next month. What's YOUR favorite nickname?
#PedoPrez

YouTube video by The Liquid People's Temple Idiocracy: Brawndo Has What Plants Crave!

Is AI (LLMs) our Idiocracy's Brawndo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqI...

Predicting word sequences, no matter how complex, including computer code, is neither "thinking" nor "intelligence." It's simply language/word sequence, code sequence prediction. Useful at times and in many specialized cases. But let's drop the hype.

The thing is, what they "made" was a tech tool that grabs content/text/substance created by others-humans (without compensation), puts it in a large info-blender, that sucks massive amounts of energy (at others' expense), to churn out an unsavory, unsatisfying yet predictable (literally) smoothie.

This is a helpful read if you want to understand the ridiculousness of what is being asked of teachers.

Imagine telling kids: Listen, rich people made this somewhat crappy product they're going to make you use when you end up having to work for them, so we have to teach you how to try to use it and that's a lot of work for both of us because it's pretty crappy.

That's called "AI literacy."