Escape From Safety

Will Fitzhugh:

High School students planning to go to college should know that they will face reading lists of nonfiction books and be asked to write research papers. The vast majority of American public high school students are not asked to read a single complete nonfiction book or to write a term paper before graduation. But they suspect that the safe spaces of fiction readings and personal writing will not prepare them well enough for college. In many cases their teachers have neither the inclination nor the time to help them with History research papers, and while some students, such as many of those published in The Concord Review since 1987, have set up Independent Study programs which let them write such papers, others may want to make use of the services we offer to serious secondary students of History:

One: The TCR Academic Coaching Service matches high school students working on a History research paper online with TCR Authors now at or recently graduated from Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. Personal advice and guidance from a successful older peer (many are Emerson Prize winners) can be inspiring and productive for secondary students struggling with serious term papers. Contact Jessica@tcr.org (Manager of the TCR Academic Coaches).

Two: The TCR Summer Program offers a two-week course on the writing of serious History papers by secondary students, with two sessions in the United States and one in Korea in 2017. Contact: steven.lee@tcr.org (Manager of the TCR Summer Program). tcr.org/summer.

Three: The National Writing Board provides a unique independent assessment service for the History research papers of high school students. Our reports by two Senior Readers now average five pages. Inquire at tcr.org/nwb.

Four: The Concord Review can provide students with examples from the History research papers published by 1,200 high school students from 44 states and many other countries since 1987. This journal remains the only one in the world for the academic History research papers of secondary students. These papers have served many students as useful models of research and writing to inspire and guide them in their own reading, research and writing. Seek them at tcr.org/bookstore.

Will Fitzhugh, Founder
The Concord Review
National Writing Board
fitzhugh@tcr.org; tcr.org/subscribe

The Limits of Liberalism at Harvard

Corey Robin:

One of the claims you hear a lot these days is that the new progressive coalition of the liberal left will consist of women, people of color, and urban professionals of the sorts you find at universities or in the media or Google or places like that. This coalition was first mooted by the McGovern campaign, and a lot of breathless commentary now sees the Democratic Party, particularly in its Clintonite wing, as the fruition of that vision. On any given night on Twitter, you’re sure to find some liberal journalist or academic braying about his happy association with this constellation of forces.

But the recent, successful strike of Harvard’s dining hall workers, many of whom are women and people of color, is a useful demonstration of the limits of that vision. While Harvard’s liberal scholars get $10 million grants to study poverty, Harvard workers like Rosa Ines Rivera are forced to manage realities like this:

In Trouble with the Service Economy

Adrian Wooldridge:

One of the great things about the emerging world is the service. In the West people spend their lives battling self-service checkouts or mesmerised by automated voices that tell them their custom is very important. In the emerging world waiters compete to pour your tea and masseurs vie to pummel your body. In Delhi I was once approached by a man who, Q-tip in hand, offered to de-wax my ears. But the service economy contains bear-traps for naive foreigners.

I once visited Tata Steel, in the depths of the Bengali jungle. Getting there condemns you to passing through Kolkata airport, which is run by the communist-dominated local government for the express purpose of humiliating itinerant capitalists. The man standing next to me in the security queue struck up a conversation about the evils of the British Empire. It was so humid that I couldn’t see through my glasses. The only thing that kept me going was the prospect of being pampered.

As soon as I arrived in my hotel, the Indian genius for service kicked in. A charming man knocked on my door, introduced himself as my personal valet, and promised to get my suit dry-cleaned, my clothes washed and my shoes polished so that I could see my face in them, and deliver my belongings to my room by sunrise. Exuberant at the thought of being treated like a maharajah, I handed him everything I wasn’t wearing.

Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run

Thomas Frank:

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

NJEA’s Math Problem: New Jersey Will Never Be Able to Fully Fund Pensions Without Concessions

Laura Waters

It’s just so Jersey. Senate President Steve Sweeney, gubernatorial-hopeful, makes the fiscally responsible decision to delay a Senate vote on a constitutional amendment that would require the state to fully fund teacher pensions. Irate NJEA leaders, still clutching a grudge over Sweeney’s involvement in the state’s 2011 pension/health benefits reform law, hang the eminent legislator out to dry and make an early endorsement of Phil Murphy, a Goldman Sachs multimillionaire who makes fantastical promises about fully funding pensions yet surely knows better..

Hence, New Jersey continues its long history of making promises to retired teachers that it will never keep.

1 in 4 U.S. teachers are chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school

Alejandro Matros

More than 1 in 4 of the nation’s full-time teachers are considered chronically absent from school, according to federal data, missing the equivalent of more than two weeks of classes each academic year in what some districts say has become an educational crisis.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights estimated this summer that 27 percent of the nation’s teachers are out of school for more than 10 days of regular classes — some missing far more than 10 days — based on self-reported numbers from the nation’s school districts. But some school systems, especially those in poor, rural areas and in some major cities, saw chronic absenteeism among teachers rise above 75 percent in 2014, the last year for which data is available.

Civics: Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run

Thomas Frank:

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Four Nations Are Winning the Global War for Talent

Adam Creighton

The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries.

Falling transport costs combined with growing competition for talented workers have seen the ranks of highly skilled immigrant workers living in a group of mostly advanced nations (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) swell 130% to 28 million over the two decades to 2010, with the number from non-OECD (typically poorer) countries surging 185% to 17.6 million.

Academics Write Rubbish Nobody Reads

Daniel Lattier :

Professors usually spend about three to six months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will, therefore, be read by…

… an average of 10 people.

Yes, you read that correctly. The numbers reported by recent studies are pretty bleak:

– 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once.

– Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read.

– Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

So what’s the reason for this madness? Why does the world continue to be subjected to just under 2 million academic journal articles each year?

Many academic articles today are merely “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended.

Teleportation, the next generation: Chinese and Canadian scientists closer to a quantum internet

Stephen Chen:

Chinese and Canadian scientists say they have successfully carried out a form of teleportation across an entire city.

The two teams working independently have teleported near-identical versions of tiny particles called photons through cables across Calgary in Canada and Hefei in Anhui province.
The forms of teleported photons were destroyed in one laboratory and recreated in another more than 8km apart in the two cities through optical fibre.

Similar experiments have been carried out before, but only within the same laboratory.
A physicist not involved in either of the studies said the research was a step forward in the development of a “quantum internet”, a futuristic particle-based information system that could be much more secure than existing forms of digital data.

Quantum networks make eavesdropping almost impossible because the particles used cannot be observed without being altered.

$500,000 to fulfill the 18 contracts for first-year writing instructors

Colleen Flaherty

Faculty members in English at Ohio State University say 18 non-tenure-track lecturer jobs have been saved, at least for this year. The university maintains that their jobs were never at risk. Faculty members said earlier this week that Ohio State had been struggling to come up with approximately $500,000 to fulfill the 18 contracts for first-year writing instructors, which extend through summer. They organized against midyear cuts on social media and in a stock letter to Bruce McPheron, provost. Some traced the funding issue to the university’s conversion from quarters to semesters, but were unsure why it became an urgent problem now, several years after the change and well into the academic year.

Faculty members said they were told Monday that their contracts would be honored, but the university said it was always its intention to fulfill them and attributed concerns to miscommunication. Benjamin Johnson, university spokesman, said via email that Ohio State “values the role that our lecturers and other associated faculty play in supporting and furthering our overall educational mission” and that the College of Arts and Sciences “will be working with the Department of English to address these budget challenges. We acknowledge the concerns expressed regarding the associated [faculty] and regret any confusion.”

A Bold, But Unemployed, Academic

Scott Greenfield::

They have a point. What was he thinking, bucking the forces of social justice in academia using that most nefarious of weapons, reason.

Apologia: In the past, I’ve been critical of academics for their failure to call out flagrant intellectual dishonesty, particularly when I’ve been informed privately that they despise what’s happening on campus, but to speak out would be to invite being called “racist” and “misogynist.” I’ve called them coward for failure to take a little heat.

In light of this incident, perhaps I was hasty and unfair. I don’t have to answer to a 12-member committee of “intellectuals” mumbling gibberish, so it’s no big deal to shoulder the SJW’s epithets. They, on the other hand, could be out of a tenured job (which is a pretty sweet gig).

New grammars would harm British schools, says Ofsted chief

Rowena Mason

British schools deserve to score only 6.5 out of 10 compared with education systems in other countries and would be further set back if new grammar schools were allowed, the chief inspector of schools has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, said the UK education system was getting better since it had been in “special measures, in intensive care, in the 70s, 80s and much of the 90s”, but an expansion of grammar schools planned by Theresa May would stall progress.

Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy

James Manyika, Susan Lund, Jacques Bughin, Kelsey Robinson, Jan Mischke, and Deepa Mahajan

Working nine to five for a single employer bears little resemblance to the way a substantial share of the workforce makes a living today. Millions of people assemble various income streams and work independently, rather than in structured payroll jobs. This is hardly a new phenomenon, yet it has never been well measured in official statistics—and the resulting data gaps prevent a clear view of a large share of labor-market activity.

Civics: Staffing President Obama’s Cabinet

David Dayen

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

Turning around Wilson Charter School

New Schools for New Orleans

When I was growing up, my biggest obstacle to academic success was my self-esteem, which held me back from trying hard in school. Although my parents taught me about the impact of a good education, I didn’t believe I could do well, so I never put in the effort I needed to excel. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that that I started listening to my parents and mentors, who encouraged me to pursue my goals and live up to my potential.

That’s why when InspireNOLA took over Andrew H. Wilson in 2015, our goal was to create an environment where both the culture and structure would bring out the best in our students. We had experience taking two other charter schools- Alice Harte and Edna Karr- from a “D” academic rating to an “A,” and we were excited about working in a turnaround environment to support a similar transformation at Wilson.

InspireNOLA started by recruiting teachers and administrators who shared our vision of student excellence, and were willing to use data from our quarterly benchmark assessments to drive instruction and curriculum in the classroom.

Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning

Moritz Hardt, Eric Price & Nathan Srebro

We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in su- pervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the protected group are avail- able, we show how to optimally adjust any learned predictor so as to remove discrimination according to our definition. Our framework also improves incentives by shifting the cost of poor classification from disadvantaged groups to the decision maker, who can respond by improving the classification accuracy.

In line with other studies, our notion is oblivious: it depends only on the joint statistics of the predictor, the target and the protected attribute, but not on interpretation of individual features. We study the inherent limits of defining and identifying biases based on such oblivious measures, outlining what can and cannot be inferred from different oblivious tests.
We illustrate our notion using a case study of FICO credit scores.

NC governor candidates: teacher pay, school spending, pre-K, public education

News & Observer

As part of an assessment of how the state is doing heading into a critical election Nov. 8, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer asked the candidates for governor about their plans for education. Here are answers from Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his challengers, Democrat Roy Cooper and Libertarian Lon Cecil.

Q: North Carolina per-pupil spending lags well behind the national average and behind its neighbors. Should North Carolina spend more in its public school classrooms, and where should it find the money?

Cecil: NC clearly needs more spending in the classroom and teaching positions. This will have to be achieved by reducing the overhead of non-teaching “administrators” and assuring that additional funding be insulated from any new administrative skimming.

Madison spends more than most, $18k/student.

Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China

Ana Swenson:

To economic historians like Joel Mokyr, there’s nothing inevitable about the incredible wealth and health of the modern world. But for a spark in a little corner of Europe that ignited the Industrial Revolution — which spread incredible advances in technology and living standards first across the north Atlantic coast in the 1700 and 1800s and gradually around the world — we could all be living the nasty, brutish and short lives of our ancestors centuries before.

Mokyr, who teaches at Northwestern University, dives into the mystery of how the world went from being poor to being so rich in just a few centuries in a forthcoming book, “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.”