🚨New working paper alert! 🚨 The US spends huge $ on special education services for students with disabilities. Is that spending effective? Today we released a working paper suggesting it is. "Special Education Substantially Improves Learning: Evidence from Three States" Let me explain...

Louder for the people attacking the Department of Education.

I wrote an update on the ACTS survey, which will likely leave 2.8 million students enrolled at public universities out of the data, at least this year. (I'm beginning to think that ACTS might not make it to 2027). wp.me/p6kg2q-kS

Great putter. Lousy driver.

As annoyed as I am to be cited here, it is a genuine delight to be able to say, "Madame Secretary, you know nothing of my work."

We now have 3 deadlines for the ACTS survey component: March 31: all private colleges & public colleges in 33 states April 6 (definitely subject to change): public colleges in the 17 states that filed suit against the Department of Education April 8: all colleges granted an extension

Good thread on why NCES used to do Technical Review Panels and engage stakeholders when changes were made to IPEDS.

Yesterday's meeting of the federal board overseeing accreditors was unusually spicy. It appears that some appointees of the administration have the goal of cutting off accreditors, while others are performing more typical oversight.

Hearing on the ACTS survey has begun (late). The hearing is on whether to grant a temporary restraining order. A thousand institutional research officers are holding their breath.

Gen X: you can buy stuff on your phone?

1/ MORE Controversy at this morning's #NACIQI meeting: Bob Shireman brings up the fact that an Education Department appointee, Joshua Figueira (Gen Counsel at BYU-Idaho) had been removed because he didn't support the dept's preferred chair at the previous meeting -

Louder for the people in the back!

Maybe OCR should issue a finding on the more than 2-year old complaint filed against Harvard on legacy preferences before tackling this "investigation."

Grateful for the chance to talk to @politico.com and Biance Quilantan about the ACTS survey. www.politico.com/newsletters/...

A valuable new addition to the lit on test optional policies. At Ivy Plus schools (~97K undergrads), scores predict FYGPA better than HS GPA, likely due to the fact that Iyy+ students mostly have (nearly) perfect grades. In the CUNY system (~125K undergrads), grades are a stronger predictor.

Even better than I expected.

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results. (One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

This is a really well-reported article. Nice work Lucia Gambacini and Cavalier Daily.

Only saw this for the first time today. America had never stopped being great. youtu.be/AYeDnOLfl0g?...

My very normie top four Buffy episodes were “Hush,” “The Body,” “Becoming Part 2” and “Once More, With Feeling” but I was always ready to argue for “The Zeppo” at #5. R.I.P. Xander/ Nicholas Brendon. www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/n...

Pope Leo is the first Pope to have ever experienced the US healthcare system, so there's that

Good to see ACTS getting more coverage. It was interesting to see @robertkelchen.com's comment on this piece that he had to spend time on this survey recently. I'm betting lots of Dept heads and Grad directors are being sucked into this effort to collect data on grad programs.

Another big testing org abandons remote testing. It's becoming clearer and clearer that remote testing is not secure and poses too big a risk to continue the practice.

I remember having an epiphany at a Census Bureau stakeholder meeting that united business and academics: Scientists use jargon to condense complicated concepts; business people use jargon to inflate simple ones.

I cannot emphasize enough how much time this massive expansion of federal admissions data collection is taking universities to complete. I spent two hours on it myself (central admin needed graduate test-optional status), and I'm just the head of a midsize department.

Rand Paul confronts Markwayne Mullin at his confirmation hearing to replace Kristi Noem about his history of advocating for violence to resolve political differences, including caning, fistfights, biting, dueling, and punching people in the face.

"Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility." Now do America!

Another entry for "charts that do not require annotation or in-depth analysis to indicate when the thing happened" www.cnn.com/2026/03/12/p...

Congratulations to our #AEFP2026 Early Career Award winner!

Perfect.

ok well good news for anyone who isnt a consumer i guess

And the Oscar for cringe goes to...

Happy March 15. Here is my favorite Ides of March meme:

John Salter Jr., Joan Mulholland, and Anne Moody at the Jackson, MS Woolworth sit-in on May 28, 1963. Taken by Fred Blackwell of the Jackson Daily News.

Ooof. ED doing worse than DOGE on trustworthiness.

Happy Pi Day! I'm grateful to the Purdue professor who reached out to the Indiana legislature back in 1897 to stop the state from officially defining pi as 3.2. Public university faculty have a special role to play in advancing knowledge (and stopping nonsense).

Except letter-grading meat started in 1927, after the end of the industrial revoltuon. And the evolution of letter grading was a long, messy process. If only someone had written a whole paper on the history of letter grading.

UPDATE: The court has set a temporary restraining order, which will extend the deadline for ACTS submission until March 25, with a hearing on March 24.

For the first time since COVID started, the number of applicants submitting a test score through the Common App outnumbered those who didn't. Impt to note this doesn't include UC or CSU schools, which would certainly put the non-submitter number on top.

To provide a comparison, the Department of Education estimated that the new college admissions survey will take 740,000 hours to fill out, and that is likely a substantial understatement. Colleges got about three months to do that work.

Technically, I said the data wouldn't be worth a damn. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...

I wrote a quick response to the states' lawsuit against the ACTS survey. States Sue Education Dept Over Controversial ACTS Survey jamessmurphy.com/2026/03/11/1...

A coalition of states are suing to stop the ACTS data collection. ag.ny.gov/sites/defaul...

@chrisbennettedu.bsky.social is always the most intelligent person to read on test optional admissions.

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

OUR FULL WRITEUP of tonight's big special election flip for Dems in NH. A few details: • The GOP candidate had to run as a write-in in the primary b/c he'd only just moved to the district • The GOP spent heavily, including their official campaign arm • School vouchers were a flashpoint And more!

Universities don't just teach students.

A new NBC News poll finds that AI has a lower approval rating nationally than ICE, Trump, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...