Neo-Neocon:

As I said in my post yesterday, I think that this directive of the Obama administration on transgender students in public school bathrooms is likely to anger a lot of people (even many liberal Democrats) about federal government intrusion into local control of education. The GOP has the opportunity to exploit that anger and emphasize that they favor localities regaining the upper hand in decisions involving the education of children. Whether it be Trump or other down-ticket GOP candidates, this is an issue that I think could resonate, and it is not tied to specific things such as what bathrooms transgender students will use or the curriculum of Common Core. It has to do with whether the federal government will further take over an important societal function—the education of children—that has traditionally been something over which parents and communities have wanted to exercise a great deal of control.

Michael Bloomberg and Charles Koch:

During college commencement season, it is traditional for speakers to offer words of advice to the graduating class. But this year the two of us—who don’t see eye to eye on every issue—believe that the most urgent advice we can offer is actually to college presidents, boards, administrators and faculty.

Our advice is this: Stop stifling free speech and coddling intolerance for controversial ideas, which are crucial to a college education—as well as to human happiness and progress.

Jacob Kastrenakes:

Not getting your child vaccinated is dangerous and dumb, and the Ontario government wants to educate the parents who think otherwise. It introduced legislation this week that, if passed, would require parents to attend an educational session before they’re allowed to get a vaccine exemption for their child.

A “local public health unit” would run the educational sessions; exactly what they’d involve still needs to be determined. The government says “public health units and other stakeholders” would be involved in deciding what they look like.

Corey Williams:

Karen Zamora:

Besides being named Minnesota Teacher of the Year on Sunday, Abdul Wright scored two firsts.

Wright, who teaches eighth-grade language arts at the Best Academy in Minneapolis, is the first black male to win the honor, and also the first charter-school teacher so honored.

“I know that I have an opportunity to give young people who come from across this country, especially African-American people, a model of excellence to aspire to,” Wright told the gathering at the Radisson Blu hotel at Mall of America in Bloomington. “I know I will represent every educator in this room and every parent in this room. I want you to know that I will be deserving of this award.”

As his name was announced, Wright stood and had the other finalists come in for a group hug.

“Everyone in this room is deserving of this award,” he said. “We come from a diverse group of backgrounds, and we all have our own experiences. And to know that so many people who come from all over the state have one thing in common, and that’s to make our students rock stars.”

blockly:

With the President’s recent #CSforall initiative and an increasing focus on STEM, all signs point to the need to establish standards and best practices for teaching computer science to young children. The consensus in the industry is that the best way to introduce computer science and computational thinking to young children is through visual programming languages. Get rid of painstaking syntax to give kids flexibility and control of software at a young age.

Vauhini Vara:

Teachers pack their items outside of Everest College, in City of Industry, California, one of the shuttered Corinthian Colleges.

Last year, I met fifteen former students and graduates of Corinthian Colleges who had taken a remarkable action to protest the collection of their student debt. Corinthian, a for-profit institution that was, at the time, facing a financial meltdown and several lawsuits over alleged fraud in its recruitment process, had recently started shutting down or selling off its campuses. The students, calling themselves the Corinthian Fifteen, had organized a “debt strike,” refusing to repay their student loans even at the risk of going into default. Their argument was that the Department of Education shouldn’t collect on loans that students were misled into incurring, especially since they earned a degree that was all but worthless or, in some cases, found that their college had shut down before they could graduate.

Related: connected math and the math forum audio/video.

Andrea Peterson:

When asked to list their biggest concerns, nearly two out of three respondents cited identity theft, while nearly half brought up credit card or banking fraud. About one in five listed data collection by the government.

The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.

Luke Spencer:

looking at a globe close up is a wonderful thing. Interacting with a round replica of our world gives an entirely different sensation to say looking at Google maps and even a physical atlas doesn’t really give the true geographical sense of our planet. Two dimensional maps, often relying on the Mercator Projection, can show Greenland to be the size of all of Africa when it’s really more like Mexico. It takes a globe to really see that Texas may be the largest state in the continental U.S. but Australia’s largest state is three times its size. Or that the entire eastern seaboard of America fits quite comfortably into Kazakhstan.

For Peter Bellerby, a passion for globes has quite unexpectedly turned into a successful business—his company is one of the world’s only remaining traditional globe makers. “I think everyone has some sort of soft spot for globes,” he explains. “Maps are wonderful but globes are tangible and tell so much more of a story.”

Anil Ananthaswamy:

At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival premiere of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, director Woody Allen was asked about aging. He replied with his characteristic, straight-faced pessimism. “I find it a lousy deal. There is no advantage in getting older. I’m 74 now. You don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser … Your back hurts more, you get more indigestion … It’s a bad business, getting old. I’d advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.”

Creaking bones and bad digestion notwithstanding, is that really the only face of aging? Turns out, it’s not. At least for the fortunate few, old age may not be Woody Allenesque; instead old age is when they become compassionate and wise. Yes, wise.

Chi Luu:

Of course, some may consider the prose stylings of Charles Dickens a bit overwrought and irrelevant to contemporary life. (If you believe this “scientific evaluation,” he writes no better than the dark and stormy posturings of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, because statistics never lie.) If you’re not a huge fan, you might say that Charles Dickens gives you the creeps… and you would be right, because he was the first to coin the expression, in David Copperfield (1849): “She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps.’” The truth is, Dickens was something of a linguistic revolutionary in his day and his influence on the English language can still be seen today. Other common expressions we use today, such as to “clap eyes” on someone, “butter-fingers,” “slow-coach,” and even “fairy story” were all things Dickens said first.

Matt Phillips:

Swedish colleges and universities are free. Yep. Totally free.

But students there still end up with a lot of debt. The average at the beginning of 2013 was roughly 124,000 Swedish krona ($19,000). Sure, the average US student was carrying about 30% more, at $24,800.

Ethan Barron:

Legal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by 890 U.S. college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent.

But the students’ claims may be derailed by a dispute over whether they should file their cases individually, rather than as a group.

Hundreds of U.S. college students and alumni in 21 states joined the original lawsuit filed in January by the four Berkeley students. On April 29, another 180 filed a separate lawsuit making the same claim: that Google’s Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes.

Langerman Blog:

Conversing with my colleagues during our weekly management meeting is always a bit exasperating. Their marathons, mountain bike challenges and adventure races put my weekend activity of pruning roses to shame. The insult to injury is that these activities always take place in some exotic location. Think of a beach, desert or some God forsaken area in the wild. It was during one of these sessions that it struck me that I needed a constructive hobby.

It is self-evident to people that know me that a sport related hobby will not cut muster with me. The closest I come to exercise is ambling down the escalator to have lunch with a colleague. So where to start? I had to first figure out what my “thing” is. This is far easier said than done. I always imagined myself as an Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. What could be better than exploring an ancient cave, blowing dust off some ancient tablet and deciphering messages that were hidden for thousands of years? Throw in a bi-plane, a gorgeous girl, a couple of Nazi thugs and you have yourself a great hobby. As an example consider a cryptic statement like “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν”.

Junaid Mubeen:

The challenge is to hit 9000 dead-on.

I was surprised. My nephew is in Year 8 and punches above his weight in maths. I have seen him rattle off multi-digit addition problems with maddening accuracy. Why had the solution eluded him?

I scribbled away, beginning with trial and error before turning my focus to the Ones column. That already narrows the choices, because the four digits in this column must add up to 10. Regardless of how I rearrange the four numbers, the final digits must comprise 4,4,1,1 or 3,3,3,1 or 4,3,2,1. I continued down this path, hoping to systematically arrive at the solution. It was exhausting work and I could see why my nephew was struggling — there is no obvious combination that works, and there are a lot of possibilities to burn through.

Ben Steverman:

Almost 20 percent of Americans 65 and older are now working, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the most older people with a job since the early 1960s, before the U.S. enacted Medicare.

Camille Puglia:

Our current controversies over free speech on campus actually represent the second set of battles in a culture war that erupted in the U.S. during the late 1980s and that subsided by the mid-1990s — its cessation probably due to the emergence of the World Wide Web as a vast, new forum for dissenting ideas. The openness of the web scattered and partly dissipated the hostile energies that had been building and raging in the mainstream media about political correctness for nearly a decade. However, those problems have stubbornly returned, because they were never fully or honestly addressed by university administrations or faculty the first time around. Now a new generation of college students, born in the 1990s and never exposed to open public debate over free speech, has brought its own assumptions and expectations to the conflict.

As a veteran of more than four decades of college teaching, almost entirely at art schools, my primary disappointment is with American faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom failed from the start to acknowledge the seriousness of political correctness as an academic issue and who passively permitted a swollen campus bureaucracy, empowered by intrusive federal regulation, to usurp the faculty’s historic responsibility and prerogative to shape the educational mission and to protect the free flow of ideas. The end result, I believe, is a violation of the free speech rights of students as well as faculty.

What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American Revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness — when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them.

What I have just sketched is the political psychobiography of the past 45 years of American university life. My premises, based on my own college experience at the dawn of the counterculture, are those of the radical Free Speech Movement that erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in the Fall of 1964, my first semester at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Berkeley protests were led by a New York-born Italian-American, Mario Savio, who had worked the prior summer in a voter-registration drive for disenfranchised African-Americans in Mississippi, where he and two colleagues were physically attacked for their activities. When Savio tried to raise money at Berkeley for a prominent unit of the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was stopped by the university because of its official ban on political activity on campus.

The uprising at Berkeley climaxed in Savio’s fiery speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, where he denounced the university administration. Of the 4000 protestors in Sproul Plaza, 800 were arrested. That demonstration embodied the essence of 1960s activism: it challenged, rebuked, and curtailed authority in the pursuit of freedom and equality; it did not demand, as happens too often today, that authority be expanded to create special protections for groups reductively defined as weak or vulnerable or to create buffers to spare sensitive young feelings from offense. The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more.

Neil Gross:

IN 1979, in a short book called “The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class,” the sociologist Alvin Gouldner took up a question then being vigorously debated by social analysts: Did the student movements of the 1960s signal that the highly educated were on their way to becoming a major political force in American society?

Dr. Gouldner’s answer was yes. As a man of the left, he had mixed feelings about this development, since he thought the intelligentsia might be tempted to put its own interests ahead of the marginalized groups for whom it often claimed to speak.

Today, with an ideological gap widening along educational lines in the United States, Dr. Gouldner’s arguments are worth revisiting. Now that so many people go to college, Americans with bachelor’s degrees no longer constitute an educational elite. But the most highly educated Americans — those who have attended graduate or professional school — are starting to come together as a political bloc.

Matt McFarland:

To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor’s overworked teaching staff.

But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot.

Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson’s true identity to students until after they’d turned in their final exams.

Students were amazed. “I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!” wrote one in the class’s online forum. “Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!” said another.

Quoctrung Boi:

The percentage of families earning middle-class incomes fell in nearly nine out of 10 major metro areas across the country between 2000 and 2014, according to new research by the Pew Research Center. The study defined middle-class households as those making between two-thirds and twice the national median income. That was roughly $42,000 to $125,000 a year for a family of three in 2014, though adjustments were also made for the cost of living in different areas.

Angelo Codevilla

Our ruling class’s forceful exaltation of the persons, proclivities, and symbols by which it defines itself, along with its pretense that its preferences trump reality, defeat themselves by their absurdity. That absurdity stems from its members’ conceit about who they are.

Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media, backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. They end by demanding that we substitute their will for what our very senses tell us is reality—because they please to be who they are.

There is a sense in which the ruling icons of political correctness—lesser Americans are racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and infested by pathologies for which they must make amends—are petty partisanship meant to squeeze the last drops of voter participation out of the Democratic Party’s habitual constituencies. But our Progressive rulers’ partisanship is more. It is identity politics waged as war.

Ignoring the irony, Obama described what the war is about by accusing Americans unlike himself (and the progressives to whom he was speaking) of being inferior because of their “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Specifically, he said, they “cling to guns or religion.” Hence, pursuing identity war requires breaking the American people’s grip on their sense of worth, on their very connection to reality. That is why, over decades, our Progressive ruling class has penalized Americans who say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, re-written schoolbooks, etc.

Peter Wood:

NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course “Men in Literature.”

Editor’s note. The following is a fairly lengthy (3,300-word) essay introducing a new case of bias against a faculty member. Professor Dennis Gouws is a tenured professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts who has run afoul of college authorities who in 2014 abruptly began to find fault with his teaching a long-established course, “Men in Literature.” In 2016, they cancelled his course, culminating a long campaign of petty hostility against him because of his scholarly and professional interest in “biological maleness.”

We present this case in detail because it exemplifies a development in the campus culture wars that has not yet come into focus for many observers. The Gouws affair shows the intensification of efforts by campus feminists to use bureaucratic authority to enforce their ideological preferences on the faculty as a whole.

Professor Gouws is an academic engaged in teaching his courses, expressing his opinions through ordinary channels, and advocating for open debate over his ideas. He is not someone who was spoiling for a fight, but his department, his dean, his provost, and his president decided that his views were impermissible. This is his story.

* * *

The attempt to marginalize, discredit, and silence the views of faculty members who dissent from the current campus orthodoxies never stops. It happens at large universities and at small colleges. It happens in the sciences and in the humanities. It happens on big public issues that everyone cares about and on small matters that could hardly muster a quorum on a rainy afternoon.

It happens explicitly at some colleges and universities that wear their leftist commitments to “social justice” openly, like armbands, and it happens implicitly at other colleges and universities that try to maintain the pretense of intellectual openness while crushing dissenting views behind closed doors.

Put all the pieces together, and the picture of the faculty side of contemporary higher education is pretty grim. Faculty members, no matter their private views, know that the price of open dissent is very high. It doesn’t really matter whether a faculty member has tenure. There are plenty of levers besides the threat of job loss. Course assignments. Teaching loads. Promotions. Salary increases. Sabbatical leaves. Petty harassment. Departmental ostracism.

Caitlin Dewey:

Google’s “knowledge panels” materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:

Betty White is 94 years old.

The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.

Taipei is the capital of — ahem — the “small island nation” of Taiwan.

If you’ve ever Googled a person, place or thing — which, survey suggests, you almost definitely have — then you’ve encountered these aggressive, bold-faced modules, one of Google’s many bids for your fleeting attention. Since their quiet, casual introduction in 2012, knowledge panels and other sorts of “rich answers” have mushroomed across Google, appearing atop the results on roughly one-third of its 100 billion monthly searches, not only in response to simple, numerical queries like “Betty White age,” but also to more complex, nuanced questions like “capital of Israel” or “D.C.’s best restaurant.”

To Google, that’s proof of its semantic search technology; to Googlers, it’s a convenience that saves them a few clicks. But to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it’s a looming public literacy threat — one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook’s trending topics are curated by humans.

“It undermines people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions,” said Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher who studies knowledge production online. “And that is something I think we really need to study and process as a society.”

Ni Dandan:

In Dr. Yu Huiju’s office at Xin Hua Hospital, there are no chairs for her patients. It’s a trick that she picked up from other doctors working in one of Shanghai’s biggest pediatrics departments, she told Sixth Tone.

“People come with so many questions that if I give them a chair, they keep raising one question after another,” she said. “But I can’t afford the time.”

In one morning, Yu will typically see around 36 patients, without allowing herself so much as a sip of water or a trip to the bathroom. This kind of heavy workload is very common for doctors in China.

While in the U.S. there are fewer than 700 children for each doctor, in China there’s one pediatrician for every 2,300 children, and the ratio is growing worse.

Between 2010 and 2015, the number of pediatricians in China dropped from 105,000 to 100,000, and earlier this year the central government estimated that 200,000 more doctors are needed to solve the current staffing shortage. With an expected baby boom on the way as a result of the recent implementation of the two-child policy, China’s child-doctor shortage could become even more pronounced.

Eric A. Hanushek.

Ogechi Emechebee:

Once accepted, students focus on techniques that will prepare them for college and beyond such as organization, writing, reading and self-advocacy. The program also takes students on college campus tours and works to place them in paid summer internships.

Johnson said Thursday that donors have given $1.4 million in scholarships for the students.

“This celebration is about you,” he told the students. “The community is here to support you and we’ll support you throughout your journey. You will persist and succeed.”

The keynote speaker was Gloria Ladson-Billings, UW-Madison’s Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education. Her speech was delivered using several phrases millennial youth today use such as “turn up,” “stay woke,” and “take several seats.” She advised students to “turn up” for class by showing up on time and taking their studies seriously.

dw.com:

Even for the skeptics among us, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this anniversary: 75 years ago – at the height of the Second World War – a 31-year-old German civil engineer called Konrad Zuse presented the Z3. It was the first programmable, automatic digital computer – and was widely viewed as the child of a family of machines we take for granted today, from desktop computers and mobile devices to the massive data centers controlling the world.

Compared to the phones and pads we carry in our pockets, however, the Z3 was huge. It was a cluster of glass-fronted wooden cabinets and wiring looms.

And its use was not intended for gaming or social networking on trams and in school yards, but for the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing-flutter.

Alice Truong:

It’s a common adage in Silicon Valley that 90% of startups ultimately fail. To understand why that’s the case, a pair of researchers meticulously pored over 193 blog posts—startup postmortems, if you will—written by founders examining what went wrong.
 It was a heartwrenching experience for Kerry Jones, an employees at data-marketing firm Fractl, to be involved in the project. “It’s extremely emotional, and I think it’s really obvious how much of their lives most people sink into their companies,” she says. (Here’s one sample from Zirtual founder Maren Kate: “I cry for all the employees we hurt. I cry for all the clients we infuriated. And I cry for the investors we let down.”)
 There are, of course, limitations to this data set. For starters, there are fewer than 200 posts in it, and they all were written by founders willing to share their stories—or the portions of their stories that they were willing to reveal, anyway. “There isn’t some outside entity that went in and evaluated this company,” Jones notes. “That’s something important to keep in mind.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Teach for America‘s Education for Justice pilot, which trained would-be teachers in social justice and cultural competency, has been canceled, writes Stephen Sawchuk in Ed Week. College students took courses for a year to prepare to teach in low-income, minority communities.

TFA is cutting 150 positions, including its national diversity office, notes Sawchuk. “Still, this is somewhat surprising news. After all, the pilot was one that TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard announced in 2014 to great fanfare.”

After nearly a year of E4J, Kailee Lewis, a future TFA corps member, believes telling teachers they’ll show low-income students “what’s possible when they work hard and dream big” is a false and dangerous lie.

Laura Waters:

ew Jersey may be the Garden State, but don’t think you’ll find any country bumpkins in Newark, the state’s largest city with a school district that enrolls 44,000 children. Every Newarkian knows that mayors, city councilmen, and ward operators control municipal elections, including the three seats up this year for the nine-member School Advisory Board (SAB). Consequently, voter-turnout rates on school board candidate election days typically hover at a sparse 7 percent; residents know it’s not their vote that truly matters.

But the April 19th school board election three weeks ago was different because “an army of charter parents” found their voice — and started speaking as one.

Chris Rickert:

Comparing Madison’s daycare and early childhood education programs with Madison’s public schools would not be apples-to-apples. But the quality of care available to Madison’s young children appears to stand in stark contrast to the quality of education those children later receive in Madison’s public schools.

Everyone knows about the district’s racial achievement gaps, but quality overall is also solidly mediocre, according to the most recent state report card and other state-reported metrics, including test scores.

Despite this, Madison administrators and School Board members have long resisted spending tax dollars to educate Madison students at schools they don’t directly control

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results and a focus on adult employment.

Marie Sugo:

Once, when I asked my friend from a small tribe in Burma how they would say “breakfast” there, she told me that they didn’t have a word for it because they only ate twice a day–lunch and dinner. I happen to have a lot of friends who speak English as their second language and that made me realize that a language has a lot to do with its culture’s uniqueness. Because of that there are some untranslatable words.

Pat Lee:

The report by Pew Research Center found that the share of the middle class fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas examined from 2000 to 2014, including major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which saw a relatively sharp drop in its middle class.

For many areas, a big culprit in the declining middle was the falloff in manufacturing jobs during that 14-year period, when factories shed about 5 million workers from their payrolls nationally.

“The 10 metropolitan areas with the greatest losses in economic status from 2000 to 2014 have one thing in common — a greater than average reliance on manufacturing,” the Pew report said, referring to places such as Detroit; Rockford, Ill.; Springfield, Ohio; and the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area in North Carolina.

Mikhail Zinshteyn:

The converging trends of falling state investment, rising tuition, and stagnant incomes has finally pushed higher education out of the grasp of low- and middle-income Americans, even at community colleges, a new report contends.

College is less affordable now, when adjusted for inflation, than it was before the economic downturn, student financial aid no longer is enough to fill the gap, and low- and middle-income families already are having trouble making ends meet just to cover living expenses, the report said.

Discover Maps:

visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge that can be used by anyone in order to dramatically improve the discoverability of research results.

We are going to provide a large-scale system of open, interactive and interlinked knowledge maps spanning all fields of research. Around these maps, we will develop a space for collective knowledge organisation and exploration, connecting researchers, students, librarians, journalists, practitioners and citizens.

The Economist:

motivated people into teaching is a struggle in many countries. Low pay is often blamed, especially when it is combined with long working hours. The difficulties of teacher recruitment, one argument goes, is why pupils in some countries do so poorly in school. But data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest that—at least for educational outcomes—neither hours nor pay matters much. Japanese and South Korean pupils are neck-and-neck near the top of the PISA rankings of 15-year-olds’ literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge. Their teachers are paid about the same, but put in vastly different hours: a whopping 54 hours per week in Japan, compared with 37 in South Korea. Pupils in Estonia, which has the lowest-paid teachers in the group, do better than those in the Netherlands, where teachers’ salaries are five times as high and hours just the same. Even when GDP per person is taken into account the Netherlands is unusually generous to teachers, and Estonia unusually stingy.

PBS Newshour:

OGECHI EMECHEBE:

At the direction of the Legislature, the UW System recently created the new Office of Educational Opportunity to oversee the creation of charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee without oversight from local school districts. How do you react to that?

I’m opposed to the concept. I find it objectionable that the state has allowed one person to essentially make decisions that our local community can make through school boards and allow that person to authorize who can operate a school that’s not accountable to the public but has a call on our resources. I find that offensive. It’s repugnant that they think it’s acceptable policy when I think most people in Madison would say it’s unacceptable policy.

The best defense is a good offense and having our public schools be the best public schools we can is certainly one of the strong directions that we need to emphasize. We’re fortunate to have really good schools in Madison but I think we need to do even more to bring in staff voices and parent voices into the schools to have the public own them even more. If we see proposals coming in for non-public charter entities, we can actively organize an opposition to those sorts of things if we’re concerned as a city that we don’t want to have our public dollars controlled by non-public entities without any oversight.

There have been mixed reactions to the district’s new Behavior Education Plan. What have union members said about the BEP?

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.

Sally Weale:

Men are less likely than women to go to university, those who do are more likely to drop out and those who complete their course are less likely to get a good degree, according to a thinktank report.

Universities are being urged to set themselves targets to recruit more male students amid growing alarm about the widening gender gap in higher education.

One of the report’s authors said the underachievement of men in higher education was a national scandal and called on universities to focus funding for widening participation on young men.

Ryan Quinn:

The West Virginia Board of Education has approved alternative teacher certification programs for Kanawha and seven other counties, including a McDowell County program that will begin to bring Teach For America’s services to the state.

At the board’s meeting Wednesday, members also heard criticism from school administrators about their plans to start giving entire schools and counties A-F grades; approved significantly amending a construction and renovation plan at the Romney Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to drop the cost from $45.5 million to $16.5 million; returned control over personnel issues to the local school board in Gilmer County, one of the state’s last two takeover counties; and approved a plan for Kanawha’s St. Albans High to reduce student instructional time in order to incorporate 30 minutes of teacher collaboration into each school day.

Thomas Sowell:

Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited — and then disinvited — to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech.

Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author of a very insightful book titled Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

In short, Jason Riley’s views on race are different from the views that prevail on most college campuses. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. But that was before academia — and the education system in general — became virtually a monopoly of the political left.

Patricia Cohen:

For seniors graduating from the University of Michigan this month, employers have been lining up since the fall to offer interviews and boast of their companies’ benefits. Recruiters would ask when their competitors were coming, said Geni Harclerode, the university’s assistant director of employer development, and then they’d say: “Well, we want to come the week before.”

“This has been one of our largest seasons of hiring,” she said. “The job market has been very good.”

The outlook for many high school graduates is more challenging, as Vynny Brown can attest. Now 20, he graduated two years ago from Waller High School in Texas, and has been working for nearly a year at Pappasito’s Cantina in Houston, part of a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants. He earns $7.25 an hour filling takeout orders or $2.13 an hour plus tips as a server, which rarely adds up to more than the minimum, he said. He would like to apply to be a manager, but those jobs require some college experience.

“That is something I don’t have,” said Mr. Brown, who says he cannot afford to go to college now. “It’s the biggest struggle I’ve had.”

Chris Vick:

That’s a quotation from a blogger’s review of my book, Kook. A response to the risky, and sometimes illegal, activities the characters get up to. Set in a world of die-hard Cornish surfers, Kook is about a young guy (Sam) falling for a girl who is, in every way, trouble. Jade is obsessed with riding the biggest wave she can find, as soon as she can find it. Whether she’s ready to or not. And that’s only part of what Jade and her crew get up to. It’s not just the surfing. It’s fighting, raves, drinking, getting into trouble with the police.

Rachel DiCarlo Currie:

While I normally cast a skeptical eye on fashionable trends in American education, count me among those who fully support the “gap year” between high school and college. Already a growing phenomenon, its popularity will surely increase following the announcement that Malia Obama will delay her inaugural semester at Harvard until the fall of 2017. As the New York Times noted earlier this week, a bevy of research and anecdotal evidence suggests that gap-year students arrive on campus better prepared—academically, socially, and emotionally—than their non-gap-year classmates. University administrators have thus become some of the biggest advocates for postponing enrollment.

What they don’t seem to appreciate is that the gap-year trend represents a subtle indictment of their institutions. After all, if people believe that a gap year will accelerate students’ maturation, help them cultivate practical and/or vocational skills, make them more sophisticated, or give them (in the words of journalist Susan Greenberg) “a newfound sense of purpose and perspective,” the implication is that colleges will fall short in each of these areas. For that matter, the gap year raises important questions about why so many people are attending college in the first place.

Chris Newfield:

The simplest political question posed by the ongoing Katehi crisis is, “Can state government trust the University of California to clean its own house?” The non-firing of Linda Katehi says, “No.” It’s hard to imagine a better targeted confirmation of UC’s reputation in Sacramento for poor management. If we didn’t have the Katehi Affair, Jerry Brown would have had to invent it.

Yes she deserves due process, yes women chancellors deserve it as much as male chancellors do, and yes the campus view should be decisive rather than UCOP’s. But UC’s bureaucracy should have prevented the chancellor’s “mistakes” before they happened, or an internal investigation should have caught them before the Sacramento Bee did, or President Napolitano should have completed her investigation before she tried to fire Chancellor Katehi, or she should have succeeded in firing her on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence she already had. None of these things happened.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom inverviews Tom Mullaney

EFF WASSERSTROM: When we spoke at Microsoft, you stressed that many things about China’s current place in the IT world fly in the face of past conventional wisdom about characters and alphabets. What exactly did you have in mind?

TOM MULLANEY: When it comes to technologies of communication and the Chinese language, we live in a time that hardly anyone could have anticipated at the dawn of the 20th century. Not only are Chinese characters still with us — they are one of the fastest, most widespread, and successful languages of the digital age. More than ever before, Chinese is a world script, and China is an IT giant. This would shock the many people who, for the past two centuries, assumed that such an outcome was conceivable only if China got rid of character-based writing and went the route of wholesale alphabetization — which it did not. This outcome was not supposed to have been possible — and yet here we are. What did we miss?

You argued at Microsoft that once we get to computers, any notion that using Chinese characters rather than letters is a disadvantage gets exploded. Would you elaborate on this — and, for those who haven’t followed these issues, say a little about the long history of claims that using characters inevitably impedes adopting new technologies ?

This is a really important question, and one that comes up a lot when I give lectures and do consultations at tech companies like Google and Microsoft. In the Q&A to my Google Tech talk back in 2011 — “A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley” — we spent a good two hours on this, in fact. This is also a major inspiration for the computing and conference this weekend at Stanford (Shift CTRL: New Perspectives on Computing and New Media).

Ever since the mass manufacture of typewriters began in the U.S. in the 19th century, engineers and entrepreneurs imagined a day when this new technology would conquer the Chinese language and open up a vast new market to Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and more — just the way it had other languages and markets in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

It never did (for reasons I explain in my new book coming out soon from MIT Press), and yet the fantasy didn’t die. It was renewed in the age of computing and, by the 1990s, seemed to many to have come true: computers throughout China began to look “just like ours,” even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which today is ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Western world, people began to assume that the Latin alphabet had finally “conquered” Chinese — just like they assumed it always would. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Jillian Kay Melchior

Mizzou’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, Ellen De Graffenreid, received a disheartening email last fall at the pinnacle of the crisis on campus. A disgruntled parent wrote to the university’s Board of Curators, describing how her son, a sophomore, considered transferring out, while their two high-school-aged children “have all but eliminated Mizzou from their college list.”

WATCH: Exclusive: Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up a landmine in the desert

Someone had forwarded the note to the university’s Department of Marketing and Communications, adding: “I’m sure you already know this but you have a PR nightmare on your hands.” De Graffenreid, in turn, forwarded it to the college’s leadership, adding the letter from a parent was “pretty representative of the middle of the road people we are losing.”

New correspondence reviewed by Heat Street and National Review depicts the cataclysmic backlash against the University of Missouri as its administrators grappled with demands from rowdy protestors, a hunger-striking grad student, and a boycotting football team. The protests ultimately toppled both the president and the chancellor.

Nico Savidge:

Just before the UW-Milwaukee professors’ meeting Tuesday, Walker’s office issued a scathing statement deriding the no-confidence votes and faculty tenure.

“Some faculty bodies … appear more interested in protecting outdated ‘job for life’ tenure than about helping students get the best education possible,” Walker said. “The university should not be about protecting the interests of the faculty, but about delivering value and excellence to Wisconsin.”

The governor’s rebuke of faculty illustrates an important limit to their symbolic resolutions: While Cross may be unpopular enough among many professors to prompt no-confidence votes, he still has the backing of the Board of Regents that controls his job, and both he and the Regents have support among Republicans lawmake

Dr Joyce Stallworth:

Over my 25 years as a teacher turned university professor and administrator, I have watched countless numbers of students enter and leave college – most are well prepared to harness the realities of life after leaving the college cocoon while others are less well equipped. Freshmen arrive on college campuses with different levels of academic preparation; different aptitudes and proclivities; and different goals and agendas for their first substantial attempt at making it on their own. Parents, while you still have some modicum of influence over your children’s decision-making, please:

Do all you can to ensure that they do not pursue fields of study that offer very few prospects for gainful employment after graduation. Even if your children decide during their college matriculation to apply to graduate school, they need to pursue undergraduate majors that will yield solid prospects for employment. Graduate school plans change, and you want to avoid their boomeranging back to your house. I have seen, for example, a scant few nursing, engineering, mathematics or science education, accounting, and finance majors without multiple job offers after graduation. I have seen tons of psychology, sociology, English (and I was one!), and political science majors end their university matriculation jobless. The goal must not be singularly focused on getting accepted into college; the goal is graduating from college prepared for the next stage of life. Therefore, post-graduation planning must start with the admissions process, not as an afterthought while sending out graduation invitations.

Molly Beck:

More than 100 school districts have spent $138 million above their state-imposed revenue limits without voter approval since 2009, according to an analysis from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Since that year, school districts have been able to spend above their revenue caps without first going to voters if the money is being used for projects that are intended to improve energy efficiency in the district. In all, 147 school districts have used the exception.

According to the report, school districts rarely took advantage of the exception until 2012 — after Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers tightened revenue limits for districts.

MIT:

An international group of mathematicians at MIT and other institutions has released a new online resource that provides detailed maps of previously uncharted mathematical terrain.

Spotlight team reporters Jenn Abelson, Bella English, Jonathan Saltzman, and Todd Wallack, with editors Scott Allen and Amanda Katz.:

Steven Starr reached into the back of his hallway closet and fished out the old camera, a gift nearly 50 years ago from the man he says molested him.

“It’s like a talisman or a grim reminder,’’ he said, holding the dusty Minolta Autocord in his Los Angeles apartment. Not that he could ever forget what he alleges happened to him when he was 11 at the Fessenden School.

In 1968, he was a lonely sixth-grader from Long Island when he met James Dallmann, a Harvard graduate who taught geography at the all-boys private school in West Newton and was an avid photographer.

Kate Linebaugh:

Third-grader Andrew Calabrese carries his backpack everywhere he goes at his San Diego-area school. His backpack isn’t just filled with books, it is carrying his robotic pancreas.

The device, long considered the Holy Grail of Type 1 diabetes technology, wasn’t constructed by a medical-device company. It hasn’t been approved by regulators.

It was put together by his father.

Jason Calabrese, a software engineer, followed instructions that had been shared online to hack an old insulin pump so it could automatically dose the hormone in response to his son’s blood-sugar levels. Mr. Calabrese got the approval of Andrew’s doctor for his son to take the home-built device to school.

The Calabreses aren’t alone. More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. The systems—known in the industry as artificial pancreases or closed loop systems—have been studied for decades, but improvements to sensor technology for real-time glucose monitoring have made them possible.

Rachel Korn:

On Friday, Harvard University announced its plan to ban students from being in final clubs, fraternities or sororities while at the same time holding leadership positions in official campus organizations, such as the student newspaper or sports teams. The move came after months of heated discussion over the role of such clubs in the Harvard social scene and concerns about sexual assault and gender discrimination.

But at least some of the clubs are putting up a fight. And even in the absence of threatened lawsuits, the school faces challenges just implementing its new rules.

An advisory group of faculty, students and administrators will develop procedures for putting the rules in place, with further details of who is in that group being released in coming months, according to spokeswoman Rachael Dane.

Ken Lorg:

Here are 10 tips on how to do good in school and also get good grades in school.

Know what you are good at, and what you are not good at

Find every single thing you’re good at first, then everything you are not so good at and what you aren’t necessarily the best in. Put both on a big sheet of paper and stick it in your room somewhere where you can see it every day. Once you see your weaknesses every day, psychologically, you will start to try and get rid of them.

Nature:

Before publishing this article, the editors of Nature asked me to declare any competing interests. This is routine practice with most journals and is intended to address the serious issue of bias in research. The problem is that after competing interests are disclosed in published research, almost nothing is done with them.

Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi:

Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi are undergraduate sophomore students at the University of Washington (UW) studying Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and Business Administration, respectively. The two met their freshman year and connected over a shared interest in invention and problem solving.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

College bound high school students can now learn from one of the best sources in the country. The Concord Review is offering a two-week intensive expository writing workshops, led by a Harvard Ph.D. historian. The workshop will be held on the campus of Regis College, just west of Boston in Weston, Massachusetts.

Thirty percent of students published in The Concord Review have been admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale, and many have gone to other Ivy League colleges, and MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Caltech, and so forth. The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has written: “We have been very happy to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by a number of our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admission decisions…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

132 of the TCR authors have gone to Harvard—11%.

The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only journal in the world for the academic history papers of secondary students, now with 1,198 essays (average length 7,400 words) by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.

Students who work on research papers during the TCR Summer Program are not guaranteed to be published in the journal, but the work they will do gives them an advantage in preparation for expository writing in college over their peers who do not have such practice.

There are very few opportunities for high school students to work on serious term papers in history. Most of the emphasis is on STEM and personal writing, and usually high school teachers have so many students that they cannot possibly find the time to advise students on a 5,000-word history paper. A national study, commissioned by The Concord Review, found that a very large majority of high school teachers do not assign term papers, and colleges only ask for the 500-word personal essay. As a result almost all of our high school graduates arrive in college never having written a serious research paper. This is the reason so many colleges, even Harvard and Stanford, now require a writing course for all their first-year students.

The instructor for the course holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Harvard University, and has advised many Harvard undergraduates on their honors theses.

The course is full for this Summer, and includes students from Korea and China, as well as from across the United States. Students are welcome to join the waitlist at tcr.org/summer.

Charles Murray:

I continue my exploration of the scores for the bubble quiz that have been registered on the NewsHour website, now numbering more than 50,000.

If you want your child to grow up clueless about mainstream white America, what are the zip codes that have the best track record?

And the winner is… zip code 10023.

To answer that question, I used the 50,464 cases with a score on the bubble quiz and the zip code where the person lived at age 10 that were available as of yesterday morning when I started this exercise. I asked my statistical software to calculate the median bubble score for every zip code represented in those 50,464 cases. Since I couldn’t make any judgments about zip codes that were represented by just a few people, I chose 10 as the lower limit of scores that I would examine more closely. There’s still a lot of room for oddball results with a sample size of 10, but this procedure gave me a useful starting point for examining patterns.

David Weinberger:

The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers, and, worse still, polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page.

Perhaps our attitude to the net has changed because we now see how bad it is for knowledge. Or perhaps the net has so utterly transformed knowledge that we don’t recognize knowledge when we see it.

For philosopher Michael P. Lynch, our fears are warranted — the internet is a wrong turn in the history of knowledge. “Information technology,” Professor Lynch argues in his new book, The Internet of Us, “while expanding our ability to know in one way, is actually impeding our ability to know in other, more complex ways.” He pursues his argument with commendable seriousness, clarity, and attunement to historical context — and yet he misses where knowledge actually lives on the net, focusing instead on just one aspect of the phenomenon of knowledge. He is far from alone in this.

Elise Young:

Free lectures, admission to athletic games and concerts, even shuttles to Trader Joe’s are some of the perks that neighbors of Princeton University get from New Jersey’s only Ivy League school.

A growing number of residents, though, resent the gestures. Riding a national wave of discontent with nonprofit institutions, they’re suing to challenge the tax-exempt status of Princeton, whose $22.7 billion endowment makes it the fourth-richest U.S. university. The outcome could cut homeowners’ annual property taxes, averaging $17,699, by a third. It also could end the freebies that make Princeton a cushy oasis while other New Jersey towns, burdened by high public-worker costs and flat state aid, struggle to maintain basic services.

Joseph Livingstone:

“As if being 1984 weren’t enough.” Thomas Pynchon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, marked the unnerving year with an honest question about seemingly dystopian technology: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” The Association of American Publishers records that by 1984, between 40 and 50 percent of American authors were using word processors. It had been a quarter-century since novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in which he saw intellectual life split into “literary” and “scientific” halves. Pynchon posited that the division no longer held true; it obscured the reality about the way things were going. “Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors,” he wrote. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.”

The literary history of the early years of word processing—the late 1960s through the mid-’80s—forms the subject of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s new book, Track Changes. The year 1984 was a key moment for writers deciding whether to upgrade their writing tools. That year, the novelist Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer—itself named for the error message it spat up so often; and Gore Vidal grumped that word processing was “erasing” literature. He grumped in vain. By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)

Sarah O’Connor:

One day last week at 9.29am I hunched nervously over my keyboard and prepared to do battle with an entity called Emma. We were each primed to write about the official UK employment data at 9.30am and file our stories to my editor. I was sure Emma would be quicker than me, but I really hoped I would be better.
Her creator, a start-up called Stealth, calls her an “autonomous artificial intelligence” designed to deliver professional services such as research and analysis. Since it is fashionable to predict that AI will supplant white-collar workers including journalists, I wanted to put it to the test.

Emma was indeed quick: she filed in 12 minutes to my 35. Her copy was also better than I expected. Her facts were right and she even included relevant context such as the possibility of Brexit (although she was of the dubious opinion that it would be a “tailwind” for the UK economy). But to my relief, she lacked the most important journalistic skill of all: the ability to distinguish the newsworthy from the dull. While she correctly pointed out the jobless rate was unchanged, she overlooked that the number of jobseekers had risen for the first time in almost a year.

Susan Pinker:

Adults often make snap judgments about babies. First impressions lead us to assign them personalities, such as fearful, active or easy to please, and with good reason. Fifty years of evidence shows that babies begin life with traits that set the stage for how they interact with the world—and how the world reacts to them.

That might be one reason why siblings can have such wildly different takes on their own families. Once a mother has assessed her child as shy or fussy, she tends to tailor her behavior to that baby’s personality.

But what if babies make hard and fast judgments about us, too? Just because they can’t say much doesn’t mean they don’t have strong opinions. New research shows that babies are astute observers of the emotional tenor of adult interactions and censor their own behavior accordingly. Published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, the study shows that infants who get a glimpse of a stranger involved in an angry exchange with another stranger will then act more tentatively during play.

Alan Borsuk:

A couple of weeks ago, Means outlined a plan in which an unknown number of schools (maybe three?) would be designated to be part of the new program — and the agency that would run them would be MPS itself, with oversight from an independent school operator.

The teachers would be MPS employees, the money to run the schools (at the charter school funding rate, which is about $2,000 less than what MPS itself gets) would go to MPS and the schools would go back to being regular MPS schools in five years if performance improved.

There are ideas for programs at the schools raised in Means’ proposal, which generally are in-line with the “community schools” initiative that MPS itself is trying to grow. This involves extending more services to students and their families, while making changes to academic programs.

I spoke to many of the key players last week. Just about everyone is edgy and uncertain what’s going to happen next.

Related: “an emphasis on adult employment“.

Thomas Ricks:

But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.

I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.

Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.

VICTOR WANG & QI XU:

In the wake of a report released last month that revealed the lack of ethnic and political diversity among Yale Law School professors, the law school community has begun a conversation about why that gap exists, and how to address it.
The report, which was written by a committee of faculty and students over the past year and disseminated in March, addresses diversity and inclusion within law school students and the faculty body. According to the report, although the law school’s faculty diversity levels are comparable to those of peer institutions, students still have concerns about racial, gender and political diversity among professors. After the release of the report, law students interviewed by the News voiced concerns about the lack of specificity in the section on faculty diversity, as compared to the section on student diversity. While the student section offered concrete suggestions for improvement, the section on faculty simply urged the administration to reconsider its approach to faculty diversity “more systematically” than it has in the past.

Law school administrators highlighted steps they have already taken steps to improve faculty diversity, such as extending offers to the most diverse slate of faculty in recent memory for next year, and soliciting funding from the University’s new $50 million faculty diversity initiative.

“[The lack of specificity in the faculty diversity section] is both intentional and inevitable,” said James Forman LAW ’92, a law professor and one of the co-chairs for the committee. “It is the faculty that makes the decision about who to hire. All [we] can do is to raise consciousness, put pressure and make sure the faculty understands that the issue is important. I don’t think you will ever be in a scenario where you find much more concrete information than what we got in the report.”

Timothy Martin & Melissa Korn:

Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: Make the wealthiest universities pay for it.

Elite U.S. schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups. State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits—or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.

“College costs have outpaced health-care inflation, and at the same time, there’s this benefit for endowments,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, complaining in an interview about the funds’ tax-free status. “I don’t want to assert a conclusion, but let’s put this in the ‘I’m just saying’ category.”

Mr. Roskam and two other Republican congressional leaders have asked 56 private colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion—including Harvard University, Yale University and Stanford University—for detailed information about their holdings and policies for rewarding large donors with naming rights.

Janet French:

teaching, Lisa Hilsenteger dutifully practised fire drills and mock school lockdowns.

But there was no rehearsal for commandeering a bus full of her young students through a burning city.

“There’s nothing more terrifying than to be in a crisis and not have your children with you,” said Hilsenteger, now out of harm’s way in Athabasca.

As a wildfire encroached on Fort McMurray Tuesday afternoon, Hilsenteger, the principal of Father Turcotte Elementary School, greeted busloads of children arriving from three evacuated Catholic schools in the city. Most families picked their children up from their school, or from Father Turcotte, but when downtown Fort McMurray was evacuated at 4 p.m., 15 children remained.

Julian Ring and Madeline Stocker:

Over the next three weeks, 177 faculty and staff must decide whether or not they want to take the College up on its offer to retire early in exchange for a relatively hefty severance package.

The deal, which administrators are projecting will save the College between $1.5–3.5 million per year, is known as a voluntary severance incentive package and is the first step in the administration’s long-term plan to cut spending while slowing the rate of tuition increase.

The payout is relatively straightforward. If a qualifying faculty or staff member — one who is at least 52 years of age, has held their position for 10 years or more and for whom the combination of age and service is a minimum of 75 years — chooses to take the deal, the College will pay the retiree one year’s salary and waive health insurance premiums for the first year after retirement.

“The places I’m familiar with that have done it have found that it’s really been a win-win,” College President Marvin Krislov said. “It’s helped people retire in a way that preserves their dignity and gives them some extra money, and it helps the institution in that it allows for predictability.”

Related: “An emphasis on adult employment“.

University of Cambridge:

To coincide with our 600th anniversary, Cambridge University Library has released a free downloadable iPad app that allows readers to leaf through the pages of texts that changed the world, including those by Newton and Darwin, and the Bible that sparked the printing revolution in the West.

Words that Changed the World brings together six revolutionary books from the collections of Cambridge University Library and offers readers the opportunity to leaf through the pages as if they were holding the books themselves. See the minds of great thinkers develop the theories and concepts which form the foundation of the modern world.

These unique copies of world-changing books were previously only accessible to visitors to the Library: we are now freeing them to be studied across the world as we celebrate the 600th anniversary of our foundation. Images showing these books from cover to cover give the experience of handing these priceless works, while experts discuss specific points of interest via videos to enable the reader to further understand the texts.

Mike Zamansky:

Yesterday, I ranted on about the College Board. This led to a Facebook hosted discussion which got me thinking a little more:

Advanced Placement exams basically exist because we don’t trust our high school teachers.

I usually use phrases like “society doesn’t trust” but let’s personalize it this time – for parents, think about whether or not you trust your kids teachers? Do you a large private, unaccountable organization more?

If you teach an advanced placement course, in order for your class to be listed as AP you have to submit your syllabus to the college board for approval. This sounds like they’re setting a standard but it’s not. I can point to a bunch of teachers who have submitted identical syllabi where sometimes it’s accepted but ofttimes it’s rejected. This is the syllabus we submitted originally for Stuy. Yes, we have high achieving kids, but given the fact that the syllabus was approved originally and that Stuy students just about all score 4 or 5 on APCS-A should tell you something about the level of care or competence of the College Board.

Related: Dane County, WI AP course offering comparison.

Muut:

required by law to write you a favourable reference letter when you leave. But since the letter must always sound positive, it can be interpreted in the most cynical way.

Flash forward more than a hundred years and we arrive to a situation where Germany, alongside with Switzerland, are the only countries in Europe where the employee has the right to a reference letter in which their performance is graded, the Arbeitszeugnis.

Not only that, the letter must be “kindly” written, not to “impede career advancement”. Should the employer not comply with this requirements, it will be an open invitation for a lawsuit.

This might sound like an advantageous situation for the employees, but after years of interactions, we’ve arrived to a status quo of misleading grades and hidden meanings that allow companies in Germany to grade you positively or negatively on each job you’ve had while avoiding any legal danger.

Olivia Lowenberg:

Are the expectations and demands for public school teachers too high? According to a new poll, they might be.

The poll, which was conducted by the advocacy organization Center on Education Policy, found that while teachers themselves may feel reasonably satisfied with the state of their own classroom, when it comes to the profession itself, the vast majority feel discontented and unheard by policymakers at both the state and national level.

“The last decade has been a turbulent time for many teachers,” Maria Ferguson, CEP’s executive director, said in a press release. “Teachers seem to be growing weary of the demands being placed on them and the inability to get their voices heard.”

CEP found that 46 percent, or nearly half, of teachers said state or district policies impeded their teaching. The vast majority of those surveyed, 94 percent, said their opinions weren’t taken into account in state or national decisions, and 77 percent said the same was true at the district level.

Shaun Walker:

After a buffet lunch, the four returned home and opened a bottle of champagne to toast Tim reaching his third decade. The brothers were tired; they had thrown a small house party the night before to mark Alex’s return from Singapore, and Tim planned to go out later. After the champagne, he went upstairs to message his friends about the evening’s plans. There came a knock at the door, and Tim’s mother called up that his friends must have come early, as a surprise.

At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at everyone to put their hands in the air. Upstairs, Tim had heard the knock and the shouting, and his first thought was that the police could be after him for underage drinking: nobody at the party the night before had been 21, and Boston police took alcohol regulations seriously.

Steven Walters:

The UW-Madison political science professor, an Ozaukee County native, was stunned by what northern Wisconsin residents told her in diners, coffee shops, back rooms and barns between 2007 and 2012.

“I did not expect to hear it, but many of the people I listened to in rural areas exhibited a multifaceted resentment toward urban areas,” Professor Katherine J. Cramer writes in her new book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

“That resentment was part of a perspective. I call it rural consciousness. It is a perspective rooted in place and class identities that convey a strong sense of distributive injustice.”

WHAT IS “rural consciousness”?
“First, rural consciousness was about perceptions of power, or who makes decisions and who decides what to even discuss. Second, it showed up with respect to perceptions of values and lifestyles. Third … it involved perceptions of resources or who gets what.”

Cramer listened over a period that spanned the end of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s second term, the first two years of controversial Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his Act 10, Walker’s survival of a recall vote, and the Great Recession. She left her UW office to bravely walk, often unannounced, into informal gatherings that bond rural residents and transmit gossip and perceptions.

Inside Higher Ed:

Nearly 150 deans of law schools have written to the Law School Admission Council to demand that it stop plans to kick out the University of Arizona for that institution’s decision to accept the GRE as an admissions test, in addition to accepting the Law School Admission Test. Arizona announced the shift in February, following analysis that found the GRE predicts first-year student performance. That prompted the Law School Admission Council to threaten to kick out Arizona for violating a rule to admit “substantially all” applicants based in part on LSAT scores. The law dean’s letter states that the rule should be changed, and that taking action against Arizona denies a law school the right to experiment.

John Perazzo:

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’” said Johnson.

Fon Boudreaux:

one form or another on earlier occasions, but that is so probing that I ask it again: What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916? 21.7 million 2016 dollars (which are about one million 1916 dollars)? Would that do it? What about a billion 2016 – or 1916 – dollars? Would this sizable sum of dollars be enough to enable you to purchase a quantity of high-quality 1916 goods and services that would at least make you indifferent between living in 1916 America and living (on your current income) in 2016 America?

Think about it. Hard. Carefully.

If you were a 1916 American billionaire you could, of course, afford prime real-estate. You could afford a home on 5th Avenue or one overlooking the Pacific Ocean or one on your own tropical island somewhere (or all three). But when you travelled from your Manhattan digs to your west-coast palace, it would take a few days, and if you made that trip during the summer months, you’d likely not have air-conditioning in your private railroad car.

Reuters:

Facebook lost the first round in a court fight against some of its users who sued the social networking company, alleging it “unlawfully” collected and stored users’ biometric data derived from their faces in photographs.
 
 The judge presiding over the case in a California federal court on Thursday turned down Facebook’s motion seeking dismissal of the suit.
 
 Facebook filed the motion arguing that the users could not file a complaint under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) as they had agreed in their user agreement that California law would govern their disputes with the company, and that BIPA does not apply to “tag suggestions.”

Kaleem Caire:

As a “distinguished alumnus” of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I say “bravo” to Chancellor Blank. I am looking forward to meeting with her to discuss the recommendations that have been put forth, and how quickly and thoroughly they will be implemented. We need transformational leadership, not just a few easy-to-implement solutions, and we need full implementation — soon.

As an alternative to jail time, the university should partner with UW students, faculty, local community organizations and the Dane County district attorney to implement a serious restorative justice process to address both the racist and anti-racist graffiti war that’s been waged on the campus. The three young white men who aren’t students and who were recently arrested for spray painting racist graffiti should be included in this as well.

Jail time, in these cases, can harden hearts, not heal them, and lead to future criminal and violent acts by these young people and/or others. It can also satisfy a person’s wrong-headed desire to be a martyr for illegitimate movements steeped in the promotion of violence and hatred. Is that what we want in our community?

A better strategy to change behavior long-term in these cases is to address the core of the problem — to heal people’s hearts while addressing ignorance and hate head-on. Those directly engaged in the crime, and those directly and indirectly hurt by it, should be included. And it should include more than a few conversations.

Molly Murray:

Hidden behind the state’s steady population growth, economists and planners see an alarming trend. People 55 and over are moving into Delaware from more expensive states in waves large enough to make up for the exodus of young people leaving to seek better jobs and more exciting lifestyles.

In 1980, 30 percent of the population was between 18 and 34. Today that figure has dropped to 23 percent – even as the number of those 18-to-34 has grown exponentially compared to the overall population. These millennials are the largest such population in the last three decades, surpassed only by the “Baby Boomers.”

About 61 percent of people born in Delaware now live somewhere else. A century ago, 40 percent of native-born Delawareans moved out of state. Much of this migration has consistently been young, well-educated people seeking opportunity elsewhere.

Business and industry were the old model for economic growth. High tech jobs are the stars of today’s economy, and wherever there’s growth in that genre, millennials come with energy and ambition to expand urban redevelopment.

Brandon Zatt:

He then launches into a demonstration of free software that presents literature and poetry lesson plans complete with 3D graphics and animation. This particular software, called The Emperor’s New Clothes, is aimed at 12- and 13-year-olds and comes with desert or tropical backdrops, options to view proceedings by day or night and the ability to add animated graphics of the emperor himself, all of which is meant to excite children’s interest and help them better visualise the lessons.

“For a very long time,” says Liu, “knowledge was very expensive. But the internet has somehow solved this problem. Now lots of knowledge, especially information, is free. I think we can all feel this, it’s become a part of our society now.”

Ann Lukits:

A new study challenges the notion that girls are better at reading than boys.

The research, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that boys outscored girls on reading tests if they were told the tests were a game. But boys scored significantly lower than girls when told the tests were assessments of their reading skills.

Previous research has shown that girls read more often than boys, but most studies have focused on the gender gap in math that favors boys, researchers said.

The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls age 9 years old on average, from four third-grade classes at three schools. All classes received a silent reading test that required students to underline as many animal names as possible in three minutes from a list of 486 words (animal names comprised half the list). Two classes were told the test was an evaluation of their reading abilities, and two were told it was a new animal fishing game designed for a fun magazine.

In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls.

Caveat: The study was relatively small and involved children who were still learning how to read.

Fiona McDonald:

No more physics and maths, Finland to stop teaching individual subjects
The future is all about learning by topic, not subject.
FIONA MACDONALD 24 MAR 2015
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Finland, one of the leading educational hotspots in the world, is embarking on one of the most radical overhauls in modern education. By 2020, the country plans to phase out teaching individual subjects such as maths, chemistry and physics, and instead teach students by ‘topics’ or broad phenomena, so that there’s no more question about “what’s the point of learning this?”

What does that mean exactly? Basically, instead of having an hour of geography followed by an hour of history, students will now spend, say, two hours learning about the European Union, which covers languages, economics, history and geography. Or students who are taking a vocational course might study ‘cafeteria services’, which would involve learning maths, languages and communication skills, as Richard Garner reports for The Independent. So although students will still learn all the important scientific theories, they’ll be finding out about them in a more applied way, which actually sounds pretty awesome.

Jeremy Rogalski

The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street.

Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school.

“I thought it was a joke, I couldn’t believe this was happening,” White said.

We asked her son about his classroom experience.

I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?”

Nathanial White: “No sir.”

I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word of French?”

Nathanial White: “Bonjour, but everybody knows that.”

The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school.

Keith Humphreys:

Two years ago, the Washington state began an unprecedented policy experiment by allowing large-scale production and sale of recreational marijuana to the public. The effects on public health and safety and on the relationship of law enforcement to minority communities will take years to manifest fully, but one impact has become abundantly clear: Legalized marijuana is getting very cheap very quickly.

Marijuana price data from Washington’s Liquor and Cannabis Board was aggregated by Steve Davenport of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. After a transitory rise in the first few months, which Davenport attributes to supply shortages as the system came on line, both retail prices and wholesale prices have plummeted. Davenport said that prices “are now steadily falling at about 2 percent per month. If that trend holds, prices may fall 25 percent each year going forward.”

Natalie Marsh:

GFA will use the McGraw-Hill Education software, ALEKS, in a College Algebra and Problem Solving course showing the company’s development beyond its rank as a textbook provider.

Targeting K-20 students, the software gives personalised instruction based on the individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. The GFA deal marks the first time the adaptive software has been used in a MOOC format.

“ALEKS helps us take one of the most daunting classes – college math – and personalise it to meet students where they are and help them steadily master the concepts critical to their ultimate success,” said Adrian Sannier, chief academic technology officer for EdPlus at ASU.

Greg Richmond:

Charter schools celebrate a milestone this year: 25 years. In our nation, 6,800 charter schools serve nearly 3 million students. Many of these schools are achieving extraordinary results.

But instead of celebrating the contributions made by charters to public education over 25 years—and there is plenty to celebrate—I’d rather focus on what must change.

The Economist:

new report from PayScale, a research firm, calculates the returns to a college degree. Its authors compare the career earnings of graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, net of financial aid. College is usually worth it, but not always, it transpires. And what you study matters far more than where you study it.

Edward Snowden:

And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

William Anderson:

The law was not controversial at first. Female college enrollment grew (today, the female-male undergraduate ratio is 57 percent to 43) and women’s collegiate sports were just catching on. Title IX helped increase female participation in college sports, which became the law’s main focus for more than 30 years.

I was on the University of Tennessee men’s track team in the early 1970s, which received substantially more support than the women’s program. We stayed in nice facilities on road trips, while the women piled numerous athletes into one room. Those not lucky enough to have a bed slept on the floor.

After the U.S. women’s soccer team defeated China in the 1999 world championships, broadcaster Robin Roberts claimed Title IX was largely responsible for the team’s success, and most people agreed.

But despite its apparent successes, Title IX—or, more specifically, the government’s interpretation of Title IX—has helped turn college campuses into battlegrounds.

Sean Stevens:

A new book by education professor Joanna Williams explores how changing ideas about the purpose of a university have altered the concept of academic freedom and provided a foundation for student censorship in the U.K. The book is called “Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge” and Williams was recently interviewed by Inside Higher Ed.

In the interview Williams discusses her model of academic freedom as a “marketplace of ideas” where even the most controversial, contentious, and/or reprehensible views are given a public hearing:

@baekdal:

When discussing the future of newspapers, we have a tendency to focus only on the publishing side. We talk about the changes in formats, the new reader behaviors, the platforms, the devices, and the strange new world of distributed digital distribution, which are not just forcing us to do things in new ways, but also atomizes the very core of the newspaper.

But while the publishing side of things is undergoing tremendous changes, so is the journalistic and editorial side. The old concept of creating a package of news was designed for a public that we assumed was uninformed by default, but this is no longer the case.

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus. When writing for the uninformed, your focus is to report the news, which is what every newspaper is doing today. But when focusing on the misinformed, just reporting the news doesn’t actually solve the public’s needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.

Jonathan Bennett:

This text began life as a lecture to the Athénée Royal of Paris in 1819.

First launched: April 2010

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning::

Increasingly college students throughout the United States complain of perceived slights they call microaggressions, they demand safe spaces where they can be protected from harmful ideas, and they ask for trigger warnings to alert them to course material that might cause discomfort. We have argued that these are all manifestations of victimhood culture — a morality in which people display a high sensitivity to slight, handle conflicts by appealing to authorities, and seek to portray themselves as weak and in need of help. Older moral injunctions to ignore minor and unintentional offenses get cast aside, and those who successfully identify as victims or allies of victims gain a kind of moral status.

Moral cultures reflect their social structures, and victimhood culture is no different: It occurs in a context where there is cultural diversity, social equality, and stable authority. Victimhood culture thrives on modern college campuses because these conditions are present. Yet as the contributors at Heterodox Academy have pointed out, the diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender expression at college campuses is counterbalanced by a homogeneity of political views. And though this is not something we’ve discussed previously, we believe the presence of one form of homogeneity amid other forms of diversity shapes conflict on college campuses and is crucial to understanding the moral climate we see there. To see why, consider how the presence or absence of diversity shapes morality.

Te-Ping Chen and Miriam Jordan:

As a high-school student in this eastern Chinese city of 4.6 million, she dreamed of going to college and studying education. But most Chinese universities are uninspiring, she said. She heard cheating was pervasive and that many people skip class. Students are required to study “Mao Zedong thought.”

Just getting in takes years of study for the gaokao entrance exam, which is like the SAT on steroids. Students must memorize poetry tracing back to the 7th century. Few of the millions who take it get into China’s top universities, with competition in Ms. Fan’s home province of Jiangsu particularly fierce.

Going through such a process “where I don’t learn anything” would be soul-crushing, said Ms. Fan, 20 years old. “There’s no meaning there.”

There was another option: America. She had heard it was dangerous and wondered if she’d need to carry a knife. Her parents were against it.

Laurie Futterman:

everyone had the desire and ability to complete a four-, six- or eight-year college program, how would that impact society? Who would maintain America’s transport systems? Who would build its skyscrapers, and space shuttles? Who would wire and plumb our structures? Who would take our X-rays, build and fix the engines that keep our cities running?

Preparing high school youth for success in the world today requires a vastly different educational experience than a generation ago. Today, many of America’s students are not meaningfully engaged or motivated in their high school academic experience. And as they grow closer to the launch pad, students are fraught with anxiety. For some, it’s the stress of being accepted into a university, for others, it is a time to match skills with interest as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Our society and educational systems over-emphasize college entrance while noticeably disregard the merit of trade and vocational career achievement. It is unfair and impractical to think that every high school student desires or is able to attend a four-year university right out of high school. Some students need time to explore before deciding on higher education pursuits, some may not be able to meet the rigors of academic challenge, and others may have a distinct calling altogether. Whatever the reason, choosing vocation over college should be a decision made with the same resources and in the same regard as choosing.

R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy:

neighborhoods of varying degrees of affluence, suburban public schools are typically better resourced than their inner-city peers and known for their extracurricular offerings and college preparatory programs. Despite the glowing opportunities that many families associate with suburban schooling, accessing a district’s resources is not always straightforward, particularly for black and poorer families.

Moving beyond class and race-based explanations, Inequality in the Promised Land focuses on the everyday interactions between parents, students, teachers, and school administrators in order to understand why resources seldom trickle down to a district’s racial and economic minorities.

Related: “THEY’RE ALL RICH, WHITE KIDS AND THEY’LL DO JUST FINE” — NOT!.

Doug Ericsson:

Gary Bennett wants to assure you he’s not out to destroy the Madison School District.

The former legislative staffer leads the new Office of Educational Opportunity at the University of Wisconsin System. That makes him the unofficial “charter czar,” the guy who now has the ability to bypass local school boards and authorize independent charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee.

It’s a controversial idea, deemed by opponents as unnecessary at best, poisonous at worst. Critics believe independent charter schools siphon money and resources from traditional public schools. Supporters contend they’re needed to stimulate innovation and correct failures in the current system.

In an interview, Bennett acknowledged that his new role is viewed negatively by some, but he suggested he’s not the enemy. At times, he spoke rather kindly of the Madison School District.

“We have good schools here,” said Bennett, 33, who has lived in Madison since moving to the city in 2008 to attend UW Law School. “We just need more good schools in more areas.”

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.