Lisa Speckhard Pasque:

Muriel Simms had never been a principal before she walked into Lincoln Elementary School in August of 1988. The south Madison school did not have a good reputation.

“I get very angry with the perception that’s out there,” she said in an August 1988 Cap Times article. “I choose to ignore it.”

That story was headlined “Nobody’s more nervous than new principals,” but Simms was quoted as saying, “Really, I think I’m going to be so busy the first day, I won’t have time for the jitters.”

Simms was a little nervous when she returned to Lincoln earlier this month. She hadn’t been back since she left in 1994 to work as an equity coordinator for the district. While leading the school was the highlight of her career, being a principal is tough, and not all the memories waiting for her were good ones.

Pascal Wallisch Julie Cachia:

At the end of each semester, college students have a chance to give feedback to their professors in the form of student evaluations, basically “rating” them. On the whole, professors are often not really comfortable with this, which has led to a great deal of research on the topic. Critics of student evaluations tend to point out that they don’t really measure the actual teaching effectiveness of a professor, only perceived teaching effectiveness. They also readily point out that the correlation between student evaluations and future student performance is weak. There are other fundamental concerns: Arguably, student evaluations come at the worst possible time—at the end of the semester, when it is too late for the professor to change anything about the course and usually too early for the students to fully appreciate the utility of what they learned in the class. Finally, there are fundamental conflicts of interest involved, given that professors who grade more harshly tend to receive lower ratings, and students have clear interest in their grades while professors depend on receiving good ratings for promotion, tenure, and so on. We’re both researchers who have taught college students, so we’re quite familiar both with the process and the response from our colleagues.

Scott Jaschik:

The protesters stood all over the room, including at the front, where Blackman was attempting to talk. He said he wouldn’t have been bothered by their standing there — with signs denouncing him — had they remained quiet. But until they all left, they interrupted from all around the room.

The students protesting the event called Blackman a white supremacist and racist, and some shouted, “Fuck the law.” Many said that CUNY should not have permitted Blackman to speak, given the law school’s mission, which focuses on the public interest, public service and diversifying the legal profession.

The video of the incident arrives at a time when many higher education leaders have expressed concern about the impact of such incidents on the image of higher education. Even if the overwhelming majority of campus speakers, including those expressing conservative views, are not heckled, such incidents have attracted widespread attention from political leaders.

Elizabeth Harrington:

Teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten is plotting a teachers’ strike to shut down schools in Puerto Rico, according to a conversation overheard Friday in the first-class car of an Acela train heading to New York.

Puerto Rico is in the midst of implementing school-choice reforms, opposed by Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Last month Gov. Ricardo Rosselló signed legislation to increase the number of charter schools and voucher programs.

Weingarten said she does not want to use the word “strike,” but wants to use the strategy of recent teacher walkouts in Oklahoma and West Virginia as a model to fight against school-choice reforms.

“We never use the word strike,” Weingarten was overheard saying on the phone in a first-class car. “We are a human shield for the kids … teachers are doing this in the stead of parents and kids.”

Weingarten said the union’s goal should be “cloaking this in Oklahoma and West Virginia” and asked the unknown person on the other end of the line, “Does that concept work?” Weingarten also mentioned working with the “lobbyists we have” on the plan.

Wall Street Journal:

In Kentucky the protests have been about pensions, not pay, but the same Medicaid crowding out is taking place. The Bluegrass State was one of the first Medicaid expansion states under ObamaCare. Some 22% of residents—more than two million people—are enrolled. In 2008 Medicaid spending in Kentucky was $4.9 billion, but by 2017 it was $9.9 billion. The federal government paid $7.7 billion of that sum last year, but the burden has already begun shifting to states.

As for education, Kentucky’s public pension woes place it on par with New Jersey and Illinois, and teachers’ pensions are only 56% funded. Participants can draw full benefits as early as age 49, and some collect longer for more years than they’ve worked.

The Republicans who gained control of the Kentucky government in 2017 have made pension reform a priority. Legislation that passed in March leaves benefits untouched for retirees and current employees.

But it stops teachers from cashing in on accrued sick days at the end of their careers, a common strategy to game the system. And it shifts new hires to a hybrid retirement plan that operates more like a 401(k). The most optimistic estimates have the teachers’ pension running a $14 billion liability, and the changes make a dent of around $500 million to $800 million over 20 years.

Madison spent 25% of its 2014-2015 budget on benefits: “unsustainable”.

College Fix:

Protesters at Duke University crashed President Vincent Price’s (no, not him) address to alumni earlier today to demand, The Chronicle reports, “institutional change in labor practices and student support, among other areas.”

With shouts of “President Price get off the stage” and “Whose University? Our University,” the demonstrators invoked the school’s 1968 “Silent Vigil” which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

“These events would later be summarized as a turning point for Duke, but 50 years later so much has still remained the same,” junior Trey Walk said. “We are still here.”

Jack Julian:

The 19-year-old facing a criminal charge for downloading files from Nova Scotia’s freedom-of-information portal sits in a sofa in his parent’s living room in Halifax.

His bedroom is upstairs. That’s where police found him sleeping when 15 officers raided the family home last Wednesday morning.

His demeanour is polite, almost meek. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. He could easily pass for younger than 19.

“Computers have been a part of me for a very long time,” he said.

The teen has been charged with “unauthorized use of a computer,” which carries a possible 10-year prison sentence, for downloading approximately 7,000 freedom-of-information releases.

Kwame Anthony Appiah :

My son attends preschool part time at a private Montessori school, which goes up to middle school. I like the school, and he is very happy there, but I can’t afford to keep him there when he starts kindergarten full time.

I believe that free public education is an important aspect of our society. Our local public elementary school is generally considered a decent option, but I worry about how standardized testing has changed the public-school landscape in recent decades. My son is thriving in his current environment, and the approach of traditional public schools is significantly different from Montessori’s. If money were no object, I would strongly consider keeping him at his current school.

Tyler Cowen:

1. Houston. It still has plenty of Texas conservatives, but enough non-conservatives to elect a lesbian mayor. Mexicans fit along a political spectrum of their own.

2. Washington, D.C. and environs. The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be — just don’t think too hard about who actually lives here! Most of all, everyone is used to the fact that there are oodles and oodles of forces on the other side of the debate. No one flips out over this. Even the media types have a reasonable amount of non-left representation.

Alexandra Mullen:

Even Jane Austen devotees might have reached peak saturation in 2017, the bicentenary of her death, which, since her novels were published late in her life, follows on the bicentenaries of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). And, since Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together posthumously in 1818, there is another bicentenary this year. It would be a shame if some of the critical and popular work on her gets buried, because a remarkable percentage of writers on Austen are terrific: clear, passionate, informative, insightful, and very often good writers to boot.

In the 135 years since the first dissertation on Jane Austen appeared in 1883, scholarship on Austen has grown apace. By around the end of the First World War, large contours of the landscape had been shaped: Austen as moralist and humorist, Austen’s use of contemporary thinkers, Austen as cool-eyed artist. By the Second World War, the territory had expanded to include linguistic issues, such as Austen’s narrative experimentation and use of irony. Starting in the sixties, explorations into her juvenilia, letters, and manuscripts turned scholars back to revisit much of this ground; since the eighties, the application of various theoretical tools—historicist, political, postcolonial, feminist, narrative and so forth—have tested the soil samples with ever increasing intensity. Reception and response studies, like archaeological satellite photographs, spy out the traces of forgotten furrows ploughed by ordinary readers. And all the many Austen-inspired reimaginings—movies, vlogs, reworkings, sequels—are they the fertilizer or the earthworms continually revitalizing this earth? My metaphor and probably your patience are exhausted, but you get the idea: It’s a crowded field.

Phoebe Braithwaite:

Edtech is big business. Investors staked around $8.15 billion in educational technology in 2017, and Forbes predicts this will expand to $9.5 billion in 2018, with particular growth predicted in China which has the world’s biggest market of school-age children. The industry is estimated to be worth around $130 billion globally, and is growing at a rate of roughly 18 per cent year on year.

Fed up with Google’s dominance in classrooms, Apple has just launched a lower-cost iPad with hopes of muscling its way into more schools. Announcing a new 9.7-inch iPad which will support its Pencil stylus, the iPad comes with its iWork suite and a number of new apps. Apple is also offering 200GB of free iCloud storage for those in the education system. These can be bought by students and teachers for $299 (around £212) or for $329 for the rest.

Richard Phelps, via a kind email:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) boasts a long and proud history. First administered in 1969 to national samples, NAEP typically tests students in 4th, 8th, and an upper high school grade in a variety of subjects. Mathematics and reading are tested most often, but other periodically tested topics include science, history, civics, geography, technology literacy, arts, writing, and economics.

The NAEP is “low stakes,” given that neither students, nor teachers, nor schools face any consequences for test performance. Indeed, given the NAEP’s “matrix” sampling design, where only some individual classrooms within schools are selected to participate and, even then, only to administer one test section—just part of a larger whole—test scores cannot be calculated for individual students, classrooms, or schools.

NAEP had long reported test scores for some of the larger states—where sample sizes were large enough naturally to produce statistically representative results—and for smaller states willing to subsidize sample size increases. Around 1990, however, the federal government instituted a bi-annual “State NAEP” in mathematics and reading (and occasionally science or writing), covering the costs for any state wishing to participate. After the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, all states would participate.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Teachers and more than 180,000 non-proficient, struggling readers* in Wisconsin schools need our support

While we appreciate DPI’s concerns with a possible shortage of teacher candidates in some subject and geographical areas, we feel it is important to maintain teacher quality standards while moving to expand pathways to teaching.

Statute section 118.19(14) currently requires new K-5 teachers, reading teachers, reading specialists, and special education teachers to pass the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (WI-FORT) before getting an initial license to teach. The intent of this statute, passed in 2012 on a bipartisan vote following a recommendation of the non-partisan Read to Lead task force, was to enhance teacher quality by encouraging robust reading courses in educator preparation programs, and to ensure that beginning and struggling readers had an effective teacher. The WI-FORT is the same test given in Massachusetts, which has the highest 4th grade reading performance in the country. It covers basic content knowledge and application skills in the five components of foundational reading that are necessary for successfully teaching all students.

The annual state Forward exam and the newly-released results of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) highlight the importance of having high-quality teachers in Wisconsin classrooms. 65% of our 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the NAEP. Our national ranking has slipped to 34th, and all sub-groups of students perform below their national averages. Our black students rank 49th among black students in the country, and our white students rank 41st.

The revised teacher licensure rules that DPI has presented to the legislature in the re-written administrative rule PI 34, create a new Tier I license that provides broad exemptions from the WI- FORT.

We encourage the education committees to table the adoption of this permanent rule until it is amended to better support teacher quality standards and align with the intent of statute 118.19(14).

We favor limiting the instances where the WI-FORT is waived to those in which a district proves it cannot find a fully-qualified teacher to hire, and limiting the duration of those licenses to one year, with reading taught under the supervision of an individual who has passed the WI-FORT. Renewals should not be permitted except in case of proven emergency.

We favor having DPI set out standards for reading instruction in educator preparation programs that encompass both the Standards for Reading Professionals (International Literacy Association) and the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (International Dyslexia Association). This will enable aspiring teachers to pass the WI-FORT and enter the classroom prepared to teach reading.

We favor having DPI implement a corrective action plan for educator preparation programs where fewer than 85% of students pass the WI-FORT on the first attempt in any year. Students putting in four years of tuition and effort should be able to expect to pass the WI-FORT.

As written, PI 34 provides the following exemptions from the WI-FORT that we find overly-broad:
34.028 (2) (a) and (c) will allow an in-state or out-of-state graduate of an educator preparation program to become a teacher of record, with full responsibility for students, under a Tier I license without passing the WI- FORT. An employing district need not show a lack of fully-qualified applicants for the position. The Tier I license is granted for one year, but then may be renewed indefinitely under 34.028 (4) (a) and (b) through a combination of teacher and district request without the teacher ever passing the WI-FORT.

34.028 (2) (d) will grant a Tier I license to any graduate of an accredited college or university without passing the WI-FORT if an employing school district conducts a search for a full-licensed candidate, but cannot find an acceptable candidate. This is the “emergency” situation of teacher shortage under which a Tier I license might be justified, provided the district conducts a thorough search and explains why any fully-licensed candidates were not acceptable. This Tier I license is also granted for one year, but then may be renewed indefinitely under 34.028 (4) (c) without the teacher passing the WI-FORT and without any further requirement that the district seek a fully-licensed teacher.

34.029 essentially allows districts to train their existing teachers (licensed under Tier I, II, III, or IV) for a new position not covered by their current license. The teacher is granted a Tier I license in the new subject or developmental level, and training consists of whatever professional development and supervision the district deems necessary. These teachers do not need to pass the WI-FORT, either at the beginning or conclusion of their training, even if their new position would otherwise require it. The district need not show that it cannot find a fully-licensed teacher for the position. This license is granted for three years, at which point the district may request a jump-up to a lifetime Tier III license for the teacher in this new position. District training programs may be as effective as traditional preparation programs in teaching reading content, but without the teachers taking the WI-FORT, there is no way to objectively know the level of their expertise.

*There are currently over 358,000 K-5 students in Wisconsin public schools alone. 51.7% of Wisconsin 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the 2016-17 state Forward exam. Non-proficient percentages varied among student sub-groups, as shown below in red and black, and ranged from approximately 70-80% in the lower-performing districts to 20-35% in higher-performing districts.

65% of Wisconsin 4th graders were not proficient on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Non- proficient percentages varied among student sub-groups, as shown below in red and black, and all shown sub-groups performed below the national averages for those sub-groups. Black students in Wisconsin were the 3rd lowest-performing African-American cohort in the country (besting only Iowa and Maine), and Wisconsin had the 5th largest black-white performance gap (tied with California and behind Washington, D.C., Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois).

Foundations of Reading Test.

Wisconsin posts lowest ever NAEP Reading score in 2017.

Long time Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers is currently running for Governor.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Via a kind email:

What Does One City Offer?

A Tuition-Free Public Charter School

Full Day 4K and Kindergarten w/Joyful Children and Adults

A Deep Commitment to School Readiness and Closing Gaps

Strong Reading, Writing, Math and STEM Program

Project-Based, Student Centered Learning Model

Healthy Meals prepared by our Chef: Breakfast, Lunch and Snack

Beautiful Facility, Playgrounds and Classrooms

Dedicated, Effective and Diverse Teaching and Support Staff

A Community of Support among Children and Families

Wonderful Volunteers and Community Partners

Longer School Day (8:15am – 5pm) with 2-hour Nap Time daily

Longer School Year (234 days vs. 180 days)

Family Perks Discount Program (click here – learn more)

Sports and Fitness Academy (during school day)

Creative and Performing Arts Academy (during school day)

Young Children’s Writing Lab (during school day)

APPLICATIONS FOR FALL 2018
DUE MAY 5, 2018
Preparing Children for School Success, Leadership and Life
www.onecityschools.org

Enroll here

Kyle Chayka:

The camera is a small, white, curvilinear monolith on a pedestal. Inside its smooth casing are a microphone, a speaker, and an eye-like lens. After I set it up on a shelf, it tells me to look straight at it and to be sure to smile! The light blinks and then the camera flashes. A head-to-toe picture appears on my phone of a view I’m only used to seeing in large mirrors: me, standing awkwardly in my apartment, wearing a very average weekday outfit. The background is blurred like evidence from a crime scene. It is not a flattering image.
 
 Amazon’s Echo Look, currently available by invitation only but also on eBay, allows you to take hands-free selfies and evaluate your fashion choices. “Now Alexa helps you look your best,” the product description promises. Stand in front of the camera, take photos of two different outfits with the Echo Look, and then select the best ones on your phone’s Echo Look app. Within about a minute, Alexa will tell you which set of clothes looks better, processed by style-analyzing algorithms and some assistance from humans. So I try to find my most stylish outfit, swapping out shirts and pants and then posing stiffly for the camera. I shout, “Alexa, judge me!” but apparently that’s unnecessary.
 
 What I discover from the Style Check™ function is as follows: All-black is better than all-gray. Rolled-up sleeves are better than buttoned at the wrist. Blue jeans are best. Popping your collar is actually good. Each outfit in the comparison receives a percentage out of 100: black clothes score 73 percent against gray clothes at 27 percent, for example. But the explanations given for the scores are indecipherable. “The way you styled those pieces looks better,” the app tells me. “Sizing is better.” How did I style them? Should they be bigger or smaller?

Peter Jamison, Emma Brown:

Alarming news reached the upper ranks of D.C. Public Schools in spring 2013. In a city where families from Maryland have been known to illegally send their children to the public schools at the expense of District taxpayers, a new perpetrator had been found.

She sat in the chancellor’s office.

Angela Williams-Skelton, executive assistant to then-schools chancellor Kaya Henderson, was driving her grandchildren from the home they shared in Frederick, Md., to attend Miner Elementary School in Northeast Washington, an internal investigation found. The children’s mother, who also lived with Williams-Skelton, had allegedly evaded more than $130,000 in tuition payments required for students who live outside the District, according to current and former city officials.

Residency fraud is a persistent problem in the District’s traditional and public charter schools, contributing to a severe shortage of seats at desirable campuses. But Henderson did not act for another six months.

Rob Bluey:

Bluey: We’re here at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education. What’s your message to the attendees at this event?

Mitch Daniels: I believe that higher education as we’ve known it is in some jeopardy. A lot of institutions, at least, are going to have difficulty persuading sufficient numbers of students and their families in the future that they’re providing value commensurate with the cost that they’re charging.

I also suggested that there are big opportunities that we need as a society to have addressed. Large numbers of people who could better themselves in life if they were to complete that degree that they started and didn’t finish, or maybe do one from scratch. We’re going to need new ways and means of reaching them, since many of them are well beyond the stage in life where they can engage in old-fashioned residential education.

Bluey: From a policy perspective, what are some reforms that you would like to see for higher education?

Daniels: Government’s not the answer to every question. It’s not the hammer for every nail.

There are just as many ways in which government involvement has been a contributor to this problem than it is its solution. Clearly, it could help if student financial aid programs were much less complex than they are today. If it would simply deregulate many of the requirements that have been piled on to schools. It’s part of the cost problem.

Channel3000:

An airsoft BB gun was recovered from the backpack of a student at Madison Memorial High School Friday morning, Madison police said.

An educational resource officer recovered the BB gun just after 8:30 a.m. after receiving a tip that the 15-year-old boy had the BB gun on schools grounds, according to a release.

Donald Yacovone:

There it sat on a library cart with 50 other elementary, grammar, and high-school history textbooks, its bright red spine reaching out through time and space. As I opened the book’s crisp white pages, it all came back. My loud gasp startled those near me at the special collections department of Harvard University’s Monroe C. Gutman Library. Exploring the New World — published repeatedly between 1953 and 1965 — had been assigned in my fifth-grade social-studies class in Saratoga, Calif.

As part of a broader study of the legacy of the antislavery movement and the rise of the modern civil-rights era, I wanted to assess how abolitionism had been presented in textbooks. I imagined a quick look. Instead, I found myself immersed in Harvard’s collection of nearly 3,000 U.S. history textbooks, dating from about 1800 to the 1980s. Without intending, I had become engaged in a study of how abolitionism, race, slavery, and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught for generations.

Melissa Korn:

A multibillion-dollar industry has sprung up to help schools figure out how much to give each student.

“It’s become much more data-driven,” said James Day, vice president and managing director of financial aid optimization services at EAB Global Inc., a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. that works with more than 1,200 schools, including about 140 on financial-aid strategy.

Using econometric modeling, EAB knows that a $23,000 discount on a $50,000 sticker price has a 24% chance of luring a young woman with middle-of-the-road grades to a nearby private college in the Midwest. Bumping the scholarship up to $28,000 yields a 47% likelihood.

The approach can be controversial, especially at schools that don’t meet the full demonstrated financial need for poorer students.

“What we’ve seen is almost a closing of the doors for low-income students” while schools try to entice wealthier families, said Stephen Burd, a senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation who has studied the merit-aid wars.

Sam Hall, a senior at Chugiak High School near Anchorage, Alaska, was accepted to 10 liberal-arts colleges. An Eagle Scout and a strong student, he figured he might get a few merit scholarships. But not like this.

Tom Bartlett:

They’re waiting in the cold for Jordan Peterson, hands shoved in jacket pockets, serious books like The Gulag Archipelago and Modern Man in Search of a Soul tucked under arms. The crowd outside the University of Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre on a Tuesday evening in November is mostly male and mostly in their 20s. They’ve spent hours watching Peterson on YouTube, where he rails against the enervating evils of postmodernism, dissects the Bible at length, and offers fatherly advice about how to “change the world properly.” They recite his dictums on personal responsibility, like “Clean your room,” “Sort yourself out,” and “Don’t do things that you hate.” They devour the classics he deems must-reads — Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Orwell. When asked to describe him, they reach for superlatives: brilliant, breathtaking, wise. When asked to compare him, they turn to historical figures: Plato, Diogenes, Gandhi. They insist he’s changed their lives.

Soon the man himself will arrive and deliver an often dazzling, sometimes puzzling, rarely dull two-hour lecture on the symbolic and psychological underpinnings of the book of Genesis. Afterward he will field knotty questions from the audience on whether originality is really possible, the tension between honor and happiness, and the evolutionary upside of solitude. These questions seem designed to be difficult, as if the audience were engaged in a giant game of Stump the Guru. It’s during such sessions that Peterson is at his improvisational best, sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time. It’s a hearty intellectual stew ladled up by an intense 55-year-old psychology professor who gives the impression that he’s on the cusp of unraveling the deep secrets of human behavior — and maybe the mystery of God, too, while he’s at it.

Dani Deahl:

A new study titled Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies has found that more than half of Android apps directed toward children under 13 potentially violate the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), as reported by The Guardian. Additionally, the study — led by researchers at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley — says the apps that are improperly collecting and sharing data are all included in Google’s Designed for Families program.

The study looked at 5,855 child-directed apps, and the researchers said they “Identified several concerning violations and trends.” According to the study, 4.8 percent had clear violations surrounding sharing location or contact information without consent, 18 percent shared identifiers for ad targeting, 40 percent shared personal information without proper security protocols, and 39 percent disregard “contractual obligations aimed at protecting children’s privacy.”

Lily Kuo:

After several court battles, both sets of parents finally won custody of the embryos, and in January of 2017, with the help of an underground surrogacy agency, they drove to Laos to find a mother. Surrogacy is illegal in China.

In December last year, Shen and Liu’s baby, a boy, was born in a hospital in Guangzhou. Liu’s mother gave him the name Tiantian, or “sweet”. Last month, the family celebrated Tiantian’s first 100 days by holding a small party.

Liu’s mother, Hu Xinxian, told Beijing News: “Tiantian’s eyes look like my daughter’s but overall, he looks more like his father.”

After the birth there have still been legal complications. The new grandparents had to carry out DNA tests to prove their relationship to Tiantian and keep custody.

The grandparents have not decided how to tell Tiantian about his background. Shen Xinan, Tiantian’s paternal grandfather, told Beijing News that until Tiantian is older they will tell him his parents are overseas.

Chris Wood:

A pioneering fingerprint technique used to convict a drugs gang from a WhatsApp message “is the future” of how police approach evidence to catch criminals.

An image of a man holding ecstasy tablets in his palm was found on the mobile of someone arrested in Bridgend.

It was sent to South Wales Police’s scientific support unit and helped to secure 11 convictions.

These are believed to be the first convictions in Wales from fingerprints taken from a photograph.

The unit’s Dave Thomas described its use as “groundbreaking” and said officers are now looking more closely at photographs on phones seized for potential evidence.

Paul Romer:

The Atlantic has a great article on new ways to share research results. Its three parts make three points:

A graphical user interface (GUI) can facilitate better technical writing.

Wolfram’s proprietary notebook showcased innovative technology, but decades after its introduction, still has few users.

Jupyter is a new open-source alternative that is well on the way to becoming a standard for exchanging research results.

Each is spot on. I had to learn the hard way why so many kept their distance from Mathematica.

Now, I’m much more productive with Jupyter. I’m experimenting with, and excited about, its potential as a way to write up research results.

Daniel Willingham:

What Should Teachers Know?

Is my experience representative? Are most teachers unaware of the latest findings from basic science—in particular, psychology—about how children think and learn? Research is limited, but a 2006 study by Arthur Levine indicated that teachers were, for the most part, confident about their knowledge: 81 percent said they understood “moderately well” or “very well” how students learn. But just 54 percent of school principals rated the understanding of their teachers that high. And a more recent study of 598 American educators by Kelly Macdonald and colleagues showed that both assessments may be too optimistic. A majority of the respondents held misconceptions about learning—erroneously believing, for example, that children have learning styles dominated by one of the senses, that short bouts of motor-coordination exercises can improve the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and that children are less attentive after consuming sugary drinks or snacks.

But perhaps when teachers say they “know how children learn,” they are not talking about learning from a scientific perspective but about craft knowledge. They take the question to mean, “Do you know how to ensure that children in your classroom learn?” which is not the same as understanding the theoretical principles of psychology. In fact, in a 2012 study of 500 new teachers by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), respondents said that their training was too theoretical and didn’t prepare them for teaching “in the real world.” Maybe they have a point. Perhaps teachers don’t need generalized theories and abstractions, but rather ready-to-go strategies—not information about how children learn, but the best way to teach fractions; not how children process negative emotion, but what to say to a 3rd grader who is dejected about his reading.

Related: National Council on Teacher Quality.

More, here.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

On this page, you can search WILL’s Performance Rankings for most Wisconsin schools. The Performance Ranking puts all schools on a level playing field to arrive at an estimate of the effect of that school on student outcomes. You can search for schools by grade level, sector, city, or the specific name of a school. Schools will be ordered based on their WILL Performance Ranking among the criteria you select. You do not have to select an option in every category to conduct the search..

Much more, here.

Wisconsin posts lowest ever NAEP reading score.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Apples to Apples

Stretch Targets.

WTAQ interviews Will Flanders.

Beckie Supiano:

Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus.

But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.

Two papers presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting in New York on Sunday support this idea.

The first finds that community-college students who take a remedial or introductory course with an adjunct instructor are less likely to take the next course in the sequence.

The second finds negative associations between the proportion of a four-year college’s faculty members who are part-time or off the tenure track and outcomes for STEM majors.

Laurel Rosenhall:

Cops have a lot of pull in the California Capitol, and over the decades, that’s added up to this startling reality: The Golden State now goes further than many states in terms of protecting police from public scrutiny.

It’s a stark contrast to the state’s “left coast” image. On abortion rights, gun control and climate change, California has embraced some of the most liberal policies in the nation.

But even with a statehouse controlled entirely by Democrats, California laws are friendlier to law enforcement—and less transparent to the public—than those in Wisconsin and Florida, states with Republican governors and legislatures.

David Rundle:

Is it time to compose an elegy for handwriting? Anne Trubek thinks so – indeed, hopes so. She deems the ability to form a cursive script “merely emblematic”, and dreams of a future in which the school curriculum will include it only for art classes. It will remain solely the domain of calligraphers such as Patricia Lovett, who is herself probably Britain’s best-known practitioner, teacher and advocate. Lovett’s latest book is a gorgeously presented survey of the work of masterly scribes from the third century AD to the twenty-first, culminating, appropriately (and with no false modesty), with her own work. Though Lovett would undoubtedly baulk at such a description, her volume constitutes, in Trubek’s logic, an alluring swansong of an “antiquated” skill.

If script is dying, it cannot complain that its day has been short. Its solitary reign may have been ended by the printing press, but it lived on as a citizen in the new republic of letters: official records, account books, botanical drawings, not to mention works for private circulation and personal epistles, continued to be produced by hand for centuries. Then came the typewriter, but even its keys could not strike the death knell of handwriting. Perhaps that machine’s close descendants, the keyboards of our computers and their avatars on our screens, are administering the coup de grâce. Perhaps.

Mercedes Leguizamon and Brandon Griggs:

Arizona students covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program can no longer receive breaks on college tuition, the state’s Supreme Court has ruled.
The decision means that tuition costs could almost triple for many of the more than 2,400 DACA recipients attending Arizona colleges and universities, according to university attendance and fee figures obtained by CNN. The higher costs could force some to drop out of school.

“This country has said go and do it the right way, go and get an education (so) you are able to move up … in society and help your community,” said Arizona State University senior Edder Diaz Martinez at a press conference after Monday’s ruling. “But the decision goes completely against that — it says we’re going to put education out of your reach and you’re not going to be able to move up.”

Martinez, who was brought to the US from Mexico when he was 5, told CNN affiliate KPHO that his tuition could double, and “there’s no way I could afford that.”

Jeremy Kun:

Every now and then I hear some ridiculous things about the equals symbol. Some large subset of programmers—perhaps related to functional programmers, perhaps not—seem to think that = should only and ever mean “equality in the mathematical sense.” The argument usually goes,

Functional programming gives us back that inalienable right to analyze things by using mathematics. Never again need we bear the burden of that foul mutant x = x+1! No novice programmer—nay, not even a mathematician!—could comprehend such flabbergastery. Tis a pinnacle of confusion!

It’s ironic that so much of the merits or detriment of the use of = is based on a veiled appeal to the purity of mathematics. Just as often software engineers turn the tables, and any similarity to mathematics is decried as elitist jibber jabber (Such an archaic and abstruse use of symbols! Oh no, big-O!).

Michael Nygard:

Once you begin to fear your technology, you will shortly have cause to fear it even more.

The Fear Cycle goes like this:

Small changes have unpredictable, scary, or costly results.
We begin to fear making changes.
We try to make every change as small and local as possible.
The code base accumulates warts, knobs, and special cases.
Fear intensifies.
Fear starts when an innocuous change goes badly. Maybe a production outage results, or maybe just an embarrassing bug. It may be a bug that gets upper management attention. Nothing instills fear like an executive committee meeting about your code defect!

Sarah Gonser:

On Sunday, Oct. 1, the first day the application became available online, Ben Lara sat down at the computer in his bedroom to apply for federal student financial aid.

Lara, 18, is a senior at Lowell High School, where almost half the 3,200 students are low-income. He is trim with close-cropped hair and a wide flash of a smile. Along with being a National Honor Society student, squeezing in five business electives into an already packed course load, he works 30 to 35 hours a week at his job sorting in-store advertisements at Target. His main goal: getting out of his hometown and into a top-tier college.

In many ways, the future of Lowell, once the largest textile manufacturing hub in the United States, is tied to the success of students like Ben Lara. Like many cities across America, Lowell is struggling to find its economic footing as millions of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and transportation disappear, subject to offshoring and automation.

Kirkus Review:

The middle class is endangered on all sides,” argues journalist Quart (Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels, 2014, etc.), executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit journalism group. In this highly thoughtful and compassionate account, she describes the forces that are making the traditional aspects of the “American Dream” out of reach for many Americans. “It’s not your fault….The problem is systemic,” she writes. She cites the rising costs of education, health care, rent, and day care as well as the negative effects of unstable work hours, declining unionism, the gig and freelance economy, the bias against mothers and older workers, automation, and the political shift to the right. In chapters highlighting the experiences of men and women (especially pregnant and single-parent), Quart demonstrates that the social system has left the middle class “stranded, stagnant, and impotent.” The biggest culprit is “growing income inequality.” Many people who “believed that their training or background would ensure that they would be properly, comfortably middle-class” are now “ ‘fronting’ as bourgeois while standing on a pile of debt.” The author delivers painful portraits of underemployed law school graduates, Uber-driving schoolteachers, and adjunct college professors—the “hyper-educated poor”—who earn less than $20,000 annually and shop exclusively at thrift shops. Often wracked by self-blame, isolated, and ashamed of their lack of money, those interviewed by Quart wonder how they are supposed to survive “doing what we love” in a society that undervalues caring and intellect and lacks subsidized day care and affordable housing. Some readers may balk at Quart’s concern over the “psychological burden” facing upper-middle-class denizens in overpriced cities, but she offers excellent discussions of co-parenting, the problems facing immigrants, and the perils of enrolling in for-profit schools.

Madison’s K-12 District spending has increased significantly over the past few years, and now approaches $20,000 per student.

Mark Penn:

Whether you are a Democrat who can’t stand Trump, a Hillary Clinton supporter who feels robbed by Comey, or a Trump supporter, any use of wiretapping and vast prosecutorial machinery against our political campaigns and sitting presidents always has to be viewed skeptically and should meet the highest standards of conduct and impartiality. The post-election actions of these former officials makes suspect their actions as officials.

It was, after all, Comey who went to the president during the transition seeking a one-on-one meeting to tell him about the inflammatory dossier, but who critically omitted telling the president that the dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. These facts, he knew, if revealed at that moment in January, would have ended further inquiry. This was no effort to inform the president and douse the fires of unverified and salacious information, but one to inflame the president and spread the stories everywhere.

Unlike a murder or a robbery that has a specific trail of facts that can be investigated, Russia collusion is an allegation that could never be disproved. The accusation allowed special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign, every aspect of the presidential transition, and even interview 27 White House aides.

David Baser:

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Congress. He answered more than 500 questions and promised that we would get back on the 40 or so questions he couldn’t answer at the time. We’re following up with Congress on these directly but we also wanted to take the opportunity to explain more about the information we get from other websites and apps, how we use the data they send to us, and the controls you have. I lead a team focused on privacy and data use, including GDPR compliance and the tools people can use to control and download their information.
 
 When does Facebook get data about people from other websites and apps?
 Many websites and apps use Facebook services to make their content and ads more engaging and relevant. These services include:
 
 Social plugins, such as our Like and Share buttons, which make other sites more social and help you share content on Facebook;
 
 Facebook Login, which lets you use your Facebook account to log into another website or app;
 
 Facebook Analytics, which helps websites and apps better understand how people use their services; and
 
 Facebook ads and measurement tools, which enable websites and apps to show ads from Facebook advertisers, to run their own ads on Facebook or elsewhere, and to understand the effectiveness of their ads.
 
 When you visit a site or app that uses our services, we receive information even if you’re logged out or don’t have a Facebook account. This is because other apps and sites don’t know who is using Facebook.

Jacques Bughin, Tanguy Catlin, Martin Hirt, and Paul Willmott:

Most digital strategies don’t reflect how digital is changing economic fundamentals, industry dynamics, or what it means to compete. Companies should watch out for five pitfalls.

The processing power of today’s smartphones are several thousand times greater than that of the computers that landed a man on the moon in 1969. These devices connect the majority of the human population, and they’re only ten years old.1

In that short period, smartphones have become intertwined with our lives in countless ways. Few of us get around without the help of ridesharing and navigation apps such as Lyft and Waze. On vacation, novel marine-transport apps enable us to hitch a ride from local boat owners to reach an island. While we’re away, we can also read our email, connect with friends back home, check to make sure we turned the heat down, make some changes to our investment portfolio, and buy travel insurance for the return trip. Maybe we’ll browse the Internet for personalized movie recommendations or for help choosing a birthday gift that we forgot to buy before leaving. We also can create and continually update a vacation photo gallery—and even make a few old-fashioned phone calls.

Digital rewards first movers and some superfast followers

In the past, when companies witnessed rising levels of uncertainty and volatility in their industry, a perfectly rational strategic response was to observe for a little while, letting others incur the costs of experimentation and then moving as the dust settled. Such an approach represented a bet on the company’s ability to “outexecute” competitors. In digital scrums, though, it is first movers and very fast followers that gain a huge advantage over their competitors. We found that the three-year revenue growth (of over 12 percent) for the fleetest was nearly twice that of companies playing it safe with average reactions to digital competition. Our research confirms this.

Incumbents moving boldly command a 20 percent share, on average, of digitizing markets. That compares with only 5 percent for digital natives on the prowl. Using another measure, we found that revved-up incumbents create as much risk to the revenues of traditional players as digital attackers do. And it’s often incumbents’ moves that push an industry to the tipping point. That’s when the ranks of slow movers get exposed to life-threatening competition.

Jacques Bughin, Tanguy Catlin, Martin Hirt, and Paul Willmott:

Most digital strategies don’t reflect how digital is changing economic fundamentals, industry dynamics, or what it means to compete. Companies should watch out for five pitfalls.

The processing power of today’s smartphones are several thousand times greater than that of the computers that landed a man on the moon in 1969. These devices connect the majority of the human population, and they’re only ten years old.1

In that short period, smartphones have become intertwined with our lives in countless ways. Few of us get around without the help of ridesharing and navigation apps such as Lyft and Waze. On vacation, novel marine-transport apps enable us to hitch a ride from local boat owners to reach an island. While we’re away, we can also read our email, connect with friends back home, check to make sure we turned the heat down, make some changes to our investment portfolio, and buy travel insurance for the return trip. Maybe we’ll browse the Internet for personalized movie recommendations or for help choosing a birthday gift that we forgot to buy before leaving. We also can create and continually update a vacation photo gallery—and even make a few old-fashioned phone calls.

Digital rewards first movers and some superfast followers

In the past, when companies witnessed rising levels of uncertainty and volatility in their industry, a perfectly rational strategic response was to observe for a little while, letting others incur the costs of experimentation and then moving as the dust settled. Such an approach represented a bet on the company’s ability to “outexecute” competitors. In digital scrums, though, it is first movers and very fast followers that gain a huge advantage over their competitors. We found that the three-year revenue growth (of over 12 percent) for the fleetest was nearly twice that of companies playing it safe with average reactions to digital competition. Our research confirms this.

Incumbents moving boldly command a 20 percent share, on average, of digitizing markets. That compares with only 5 percent for digital natives on the prowl. Using another measure, we found that revved-up incumbents create as much risk to the revenues of traditional players as digital attackers do. And it’s often incumbents’ moves that push an industry to the tipping point. That’s when the ranks of slow movers get exposed to life-threatening competition.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

You’d be mistaken to think Harvey, Illinois has a unique pension crisis. It may be the first, and its problems may be the most severe, but the reality is the mess is everywhere, from East St. Louis to Rockford and from Quincy to Danville. A review of Illinois Department of Insurance pension data shows that Harvey could be just the start of a flood of garnishments across the state (click here to see the list).

Harvey made the news last year when an Illinois court ordered the municipality to hike its property taxes to properly fund the Harvey firefighter pension fund, which is just 22 percent funded.

Now, the state has stepped in on behalf of Harvey’s police pension fund. The state comptroller has begun garnishing the city’s tax revenues to make up what the municipality failed to contribute. In response, the city has announced that 40 public safety employees will be laid off.

Under state law, pensions that don’t receive required funding may demand the Illinois Comptroller intercept their municipality’s tax revenues. More than 400 police and fire pension funds, or 63 percent of Illinois’ 651 total downstate public safety funds, received less funding than what was required from their cities in 2016 – the most recent year for which statewide data is available.

Two-thirds of Illinois’ 355 police pension funds failed to receive their full required contribution in 2016. And 60 percent of Illinois’ 296 firefighter pension funds suffered the same fate.

If those same numbers continue to hold true, all those cities face the risk of having their revenues intercepted by the comptroller.

“Unsustainable”; Madison spent 25% of its K-12 budget on benefits in 2014-2015. Spending has continued to grow since, now approaching $20,000 per student.

Eric Bennett:

Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians and art historians, creative writers and interdisciplinary scholars of race, class, and gender hold dear.

We are, after all, the ones to include diverse voices on the syllabus, use inclusive language in the classroom, teach stories of minority triumph, and, in our conference papers, articles, and monographs, lay bare the ideological mechanisms that move the cranks and offices of a neoliberal economy. Since the Reagan era our classrooms have mustered their might against thoughtless bigotry, taught critical thinking, framed the plight and extolled the humanity of the disadvantaged, and denounced all patriotism that curdles into chauvinism.

We’ve published books like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity — treatises that marshal humane nuance against prejudice, essentialism, propaganda, and demagogic charisma.

Paul Sperry:

Broward County, Fla., school officials portray as a great success their Obama administration-inspired program offering counseling to students who break the law, instead of having them arrested or expelled. They insist that it played no role in February’s school massacre by Nikolas Cruz. They also claim that in fact juvenile recidivism rates are down and school safety is up, thanks to the program.

The evidence tells a far different story.

Broward County juvenile justice division records, federal studies of Broward school district safety and the district’s own internal reporting show that years of “intensive” counseling didn’t just fail to reform repeat offender Cruz, who allegedly went on to shoot and kill 17 people at his high school. Records show such policies have failed to curtail other campus violence and its effects now on the rise in district schools — including fighting, weapons use, bullying and related suicides.

Meanwhile, murders, armed robberies and other violent felonies committed by children outside of schools have hit record levels, and some see a connection with what’s happening on school grounds. Since the relaxing of discipline, Broward youths have not only brazenly punched out their teachers, but terrorized Broward neighborhoods with drive-by shootings, gang rapes, home invasions and carjackings.

Paul Griffiths:

You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation, but you can’t see what to do about it. What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What kind of life permits doing what intellectuals do? How can you begin to have such a life? This is what you ask, and these are good, if grandiose, questions.

They’re also countercultural questions, at least in America. Here we tend toward contempt for intellectuals, when we think about them at all; our heroes are those who act rather than think, and especially those who find, or at least try for, wealth and fame. Most American parents would welcome their child’s declaration of an intellectual vocation with dismay at the penury, obscurity, and unhappiness likely to follow from heeding that call. And they’re unlikely to be wrong about the penury and the obscurity.

Still. The questions you ask are good ones because it’s clear enough that among the things we humans do is think, and we do it with a remarkable intensity and application and precision and range. We can, and some few of us do, formulate questions and try to answer them, even when neither questions nor answers have immediate or obvious practical application. We develop concepts and distinctions and thought experiments aimed at a deeper, fuller, and more precise understanding. And we argue with those who differ from us, sometimes, it’s true, out of the delight of battle and the urge for victory, but sometimes, too, because we find in argument a powerful device for clarifying a position and seeing how it might be improved.

Nikita Vladimirov:

When asked to comment on the slated national pro-life walkout on April 11, for instance, a Yale University official replied with a link to the “FAQ” section of the admissions website, which explains the school’s broader policy on peaceful protests.

“Civic engagement on issues of public concern is consistent with attributes the Office of Undergraduate Admissions seeks in the high school students it admits,” the policy reads.

“Yale considers each disciplinary action reported by a student or a student’s school in the context of the student’s full application, and students who are disciplined for missing school for any reason will certainly have an opportunity to explain the circumstances to the admissions committee,” it adds, stressing that “admission decisions will not be rescinded as a result of an absence to participate in peaceful civic engagement, regardless of the issue or cause.”

In a statement to Campus Reform, Mendlowitz did not indicate whether she will publish a separate public statement encouraging students to participate in the pro-life walkout, linking instead to the same “FAQ” section of the policy as the university official.

Plan Maestro:

Ready for some joyful leaps?

Charts, lots of charts. Chartstravaganza is here!

Jon Schwarz:

On Friday night, President Trump ordered the U.S. military to conduct a bombing attack against the government of Syria without congressional authorization. How can this be constitutional, given the fact that Article I, Section 8 of America’s founding document declares that “The Congress shall have Power … To declare War”?

The deeply bizarre and alarming answer is that Trump almost certainly does have some purported legal justification provided to him by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — but no one else, including Congress, can read it.

The Office of Legal Counsel is often called the Supreme Court of the executive branch, providing opinions on how the president and government agencies should interpret the law.

Nikhil Sonnad:

The story of Chinese characters begins with, of all things, turtle bellies.

The kings of the Shang Dynasty—which ruled from the 16th to the 11th centuries BC—had questions. Questions about what the king should do, like whether to “perform a ritual for Father Ding and offer to him thirty captives from the Qiang nomad tribe as well as five penned sheep,” according to one translation (pdf, p. 5). As with many ancient human-rights abusers, the king turned to his royal soothsayers to decide the lives of these captives.

The soothsayers etched these pressing questions directly onto the shoulder blades of oxen and the under-shells of turtles, which are also known as plastrons. They then poked the inscribed animal parts with hot metal rods until cracks formed. The shapes of the cracks served as omens, telling the king whether offering captives was a good idea or a very bad one. Often, the answers were etched directly onto the bones and shells, right next to the prophetic cracks.

Janelle Shane:

Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to solve it.

This often works really well – machine learning algorithms are widely used for facial recognition, language translation, financial modeling, image recognition, and ad delivery. If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably interacted with a machine learning algorithm.

But it doesn’t always work well. Sometimes the programmer will think the algorithm is doing really well, only to look closer and discover it’s solved an entirely different problem from the one the programmer intended. For example, I looked earlier at an image recognition algorithm that was supposed to recognize sheep but learned to recognize grass instead, and kept labeling empty green fields as containing sheep.

Alan Borsuk:

The roots of Hood’s story lie in the mountains of Puerto Rico, where, in the 1970s, Hood’s mother, Lydia Torres, saw an ad for bilingual teaching jobs in Milwaukee that paid considerably more than what her family was living on. The family moved to Milwaukee and Hood’s mother taught for MPS for three decades. Roberto Torres, Hood’s father, worked in a factory in Milwaukee and was a member of the 440th Airlift Wing of the Air Force Reserve, then based at Mitchell Field.

Hood was born in Milwaukee in 1980. She excelled in school, learning to read early and skipping first grade. She entered Morse Middle School’s gifted and talented program as a 10-year-old sixth-grader. Her family had high expectations and she saw herself as “an achiever personality.”

But she hit a roadblock. Her grades fell sharply. “I remember feeling very frustrated,” she said. She was insecure, depressed. “I was thinking, man, I thought I was smart. . . . It was super excruciating.”

She made it through middle school and ninth grade at Hamilton High. In the summer after ninth grade, she read a magazine story about a woman with attention deficit disorder who struggled in school. It sounded a lot like her own story. The result: Hood went on medication for ADD and her academic performance rose.

She entered Marquette University at 16. She struggled in college early on, and later saw that she was depressed. But she graduated in 4½ years.

Sean Captain:

The app follows the common structure of teaching ever more advanced skills, starting with basic words and phrases like “Je suis un garçon,” and working up to complex topics like business and religion. In the past, if a skill section had been too long or complex, people would have gotten frustrated and dropped off. The new design gets around the problem by offering five levels for each skill, designated by crown icons. Students have to complete only the first level to move on to new skills; but if they want more practice on, say, the Spanish passive voice, they can now get it.

I tried the system in German, which I know well, and French and Spanish, in which I’m abysmal. Skill Levels solves one of my biggest language-learning problems: I forget stuff. (Perhaps I’m not alone.) Instead of having to go back over old exercises to refresh, say, my knowledge of Spanish food names, I can try a new level in that category, with new exercises and funny phrases, that reenforce the material.

CHS News:

California voters may soon be asked to decide whether their state is too big and should broken into three, separate states. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who pushed for a six-state proposal, now has a three-state proposal called “CAL3,” according to CBS San Francisco.

Draper did not have enough signatures to get his six-state measure on the California ballot in 2016. For this new proposal, he needs 366,000 signatures. On Thursday, he announced that he has more than 600,000 signatures.

“I’m proud to announce we’ve collected more than enough signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot,” Draper said.

If the proposal passes, the Bay Area, along with counties north of Merced, would be considered as Northern California. Along the coast, from Monterey to Los Angeles, would be California and the counties to the east would be Southern California.

Tyler Durden:

The US is starting to admit that it has a spending problem.

According to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement, in March, the US collected $210.8BN in receipts – consisting of $88BN in individual income tax, $98BN in social security and payroll tax, $5BN in corporate tax and $20BN in other taxes and duties- a drop of 2.7% from the $216.6BN collected last March and a clear reversal from the recent increasing trend…

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most K-12 taxpayer supported Districts.

NIHR Dissemination Centre:

A school-based healthy lifestyle programme delivered to 6-7-year-old children and their parents made no difference to children’s weight, diet or activity levels. Around 1 in 4 remained overweight or obese.

The NIHR-funded year-long programme was delivered in 54 primary schools in one region of England. Teachers were trained to provide an additional 30 minutes of physical activity a day and deliver cookery workshops with parents each term. It also included activities with a local football club, Aston Villa.

Children in schools that took part were no less likely to be overweight or obese after 15 or 30 months, and their diet and exercise levels did not improve. Less than one in six schools managed to deliver the activity sessions as planned.

Natalie Wexler:

Cognitive scientists have known for decades that simply mastering comprehension skills doesn’t ensure a young student will be able to apply them to whatever texts they’re confronted with on standardized tests and in their studies later in life.

One of those cognitive scientists spoke on the Tuesday panel: Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills. That’s because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious.

But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text. If students arrive at high school without knowing who won the Civil War they’ll have a hard time understanding a textbook passage about Reconstruction.

Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge. Another panelist—Ian Rowe, who heads a network of charter schools serving low-income students in New York—provided a real-life example during his remarks. A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby.

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally reading, our lowest ranking to date

Wisconsin has just one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading. The Tony Evers lead DPI has been attempting. to weaken this lone requirement.

Compare Massachusett’s MTEL.

Stretch Targets.

Many links on UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s new book:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Keith Dysarz:

Nearly every state includes measures of college- and career-readiness in their accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the quality of classroom assignments can help gauge whether students are being prepared for success beyond high school.

What is Equity In Motion?

In this series, we look at how issues or equity are playing out in the daily activities of schools and educators. Specifically, do classroom assignments reflect the more rigorous standards for college- and career-readiness?

Math Forum audio and video.

Phred Dvorak and Yasufumi Saito
:

Silicon Valley, long the undisputed king of venture capital, is now sharing its throne with Asia.

A decade ago, nearly three-quarters of the world’s financing of innovative, tech-heavy startups and young companies took place in the U.S., with American investors plowing money into mostly U.S.-based venture firms.

Rick Barrett:

Entire communities are falling apart as small farms go under, said John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a Madison based advocacy group.

Grain mills, car dealerships and hardware stores suffer. The local tax base erodes. Churches and schools struggle or close.

“The multiplier effect on the rural economy is huge. It’s why you are seeing all these boarded-up small towns,” Peck said.

Wisconsin lost 500 dairy farms in 2017, and about 150 have quit milking cows so far this year, putting the total number of milk-cow herds at around 7,600 — down 20% from five years ago.

Mary Williams Walsh:

A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner.

Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.

It is $76,111.

Per month.

That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.

Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year.

The state is not the most profligate pension payer in America, but its spiraling costs are notable in part because Oregon enjoys a reputation for fiscal discipline. Its experience shows how faulty financial decisions by states can eventually swamp local communities.

Patrick Marley:

A group of teachers and parents sued, arguing the law didn’t apply to Evers because of the powers granted to him by the state constitution. A Dane County judge agreed with them in 2012 and the state Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2016.

In 2017, Walker signed a new, similar law. Evers did not follow that law in the way that he wrote new rules, saying he didn’t need to because of the past court rulings.

Soon afterward, a group of teachers and local school board members represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty asked the Supreme Court to take up anew whether Evers had to follow the law on writing state rules.

Under Friday’s ruling, the high court agreed to decide that case.

The 2016 decision was unusual in that two liberals — Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley — joined with conservatives Michael Gableman and David Prosser to rule on the side of Evers’ allies.

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally reading, our lowest ranking to date

Wisconsin has just one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading. The Tony Evers lead DPI has been attempting. to weaken this lone requirement.

Compare Massachusett’s MTEL.

Stretch Targets.

Many links on UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s new book:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Inez Feltscher Stepman:

Landers’ first conflict with her public school came when her 17-year-old son witnessed a high school classmate threaten a third student with a knife and reported it to the school authorities under promised anonymity. A week later, the knife-wielding student threatened her son for making the report, and Landers found the school’s response frustrating at every turn. She filed a separate report with the police, who told her that if it happened again, her son should step off campus and call 911.

“We don’t know what happens in the school,” she says the officers told her. Still, the school claimed it couldn’t remove the threatening student from her son’s bus route or classes.

“The other student has rights, too,” she says administrators told her.

Landers didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first of many times she would hear that phrase in place of disciplinary action against students who endangered her children with behavior went far beyond the normal playground spats most of us remember from our own childhoods.

Pew Trusts:

The dire financial condition of pension funds across the US has been a frequent topic here at The Sounding Line. At the core of the problem is a simple reality: pension funds have promised to pay out more in retirement benefits than they receive in funding. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trust shines light on the scope and causes of this underfunding problem.

Every year since at least 1999, US state and local pension funds have paid out more in benefits to retirees than they receive in contributions from current workers. The result has been increasingly negative cash flows.

The State Pension Funding Gap (2016).

Madison spent 25% of its budget on benefits in 2014-2015 “unsustainable”.

Cal Newport:

Where we’ve gotten in trouble, he notes, is when we “[deny] the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition and social intimacy” — leading us to believe that we can radically reshape humans through technology and reason alone into a better, more efficient existence.

Political scientist James Scott (the source of Pinker’s comments) calls this movement “High Modernism.” He’s not a fan.

Scott blames the technocratic hubris of High Modernism for some of the great social engineering disasters of the 20th century, from Stalin’s famine-inducing farm collectivization, to our own country’s failed mid-century urban renewal projects, which, to quote Pinker, too often “replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture.”

Technology has undoubtedly created massive benefits for humanity. But it can cause problems — shifting into High Modernism territory — when it ignores, or even tries to replace our complex humanity instead of working with it.

Amber Walker:

As the warmer, spring weather bought a much-needed reprieve to James Madison Memorial High School students this week, so did a fresh, fun option for school lunch.

This week, REAP Food Group and the Madison Metropolitan School District launched Uproot by Reap, a food truck that will serve healthy, locally sourced lunch options for Madison high school students. The truck will rotate between Madison’s four comprehensive high schools Tuesday through Friday, spending one day at each campus.

Students who qualify for free and reduced lunch are able to use their status for no-cost or discounted meals from the truck, just like in the school’s cafeteria.

Valarie Honeycutt Spears:

People who want to open public charter schools in Kentucky have written Republican House Speaker David Osborne and Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, urging them to reconsider a decision not to create a funding mechanism for public charter schools.

Time is running out because state legislators return to Frankfort Friday to begin the final two days of the 2018 session.

Since the 2017 General Assembly approved charter schools for the first time in Kentucky, people who want to open the schools have generally been quiet. But this week, Gus LaFontaine, director of a Richmond private school he wants to transition into a tuition-free public charter school, and people who want to open charter schools in Northern Kentucky and in Jefferson County wrote to lawmakers about their need for a funding mechanism. On Wednesday, they talked about their plans for charter schools in a public conference call led by Joel Adams, executive director of the Kentucky Public Charter Schools Association.

Dan Walters:

There was a bit of good news for California in the federal government’s latest round of academic test results: it’s one of seven states that registered four-point gains in reading comprehension among eighth-graders.

But that positive morsel in the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing of fourth- and eighth-graders released this week was more than offset by stagnation in other overall trends and, even more unfortunately, by continuation of what educators call the “achievement gap.”

That is the yawning differential of academic skills within socioeconomic and ethnic subgroups.

Take, for example, that increase in eighth grade reading, from a 2015 score of 259 on a 500-point scale to 263 in 2017.

That’s still below the designated “proficiency” level for the nation of 280 and while California’s average scores for white and Asian students reach that level, those for black and Latino students are about 30 points lower, a gap that is fundamentally unchanged over the last 10 years of NAEP testing. Not surprisingly, eighth grade “English-learners” in California fall 50 points behind students deemed to be proficient in English.

Wisconsin post lowest ever ranking on 2017 naep reading.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

stretchtargets.org

Hackernoon:

In fact, the opposite is happening. Because these are video format, they often get preferred treatment in Google’s search results, as it helps their search results seem more diverse when including video, images, and other non-link content.
 
 So in a time when countless news publications and blogs are barely scraping by, they now also have this growing obstacle deal with.
 
 And if you think it’s tough now, just wait a few more years before it gets out of hand as AI inevitably becomes smarter, faster, and more efficient.
 
 Thanks for reading.

Greg Piper:

Law prof leading recall against judge says Stanford can punish alumni with impunity

Think you’ve survived “the campus rape frenzy” just because you’ve graduated? Think again.

Stanford University started a Title IX inquiry into a graduate because his accuser was inspired by #MeToo and decided to right the alleged wrongs against her eight years after they took place.

And one of its law professors, best known for leading a recall attempt for a judge for giving a lenient ruling to a convicted rapist, divines its authority to punish alumni in an ambiguous administrative policy.

The Stanford Daily reports that 2014 graduate Ellery Dake sent letters in January to “seven former Stanford football players, six of whom she said verbally degraded her and one of whom allegedly raped her.”

Morgan Frank, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Lijun Sun and Iyad Rahwan:

In new research, Youn and colleagues seek to understand how machines will disrupt the economies of individual cities. By carefully analyzing the workforces of American metropolitan areas, the team calculated what portion of jobs in each area is likely to be automated in coming decades.

They found that, in general, small cities will have higher portions of their workforce replaced by machines than large cities. The reason: While cities of all sizes have many easily automated jobs (like card dealers, fisherman, cashiers, and accountants), large cities like Boston also have larger shares of managerial and knowledge professions (like lawyers, scientists, and software developers). Since these jobs require knowledge and skills that cannot easily be taught to a machine, they will offset the total impact of automation. In smaller cities, fewer of those offsetting jobs exist.

Based on this finding, Youn says small cities could see an exodus of workers, as well as exacerbated income inequality, since robots are likely to hollow out the middle class there. And large cities are not entirely immune. Las Vegas, for example, has two million people in its metropolitan area, but its economy relies heavily on an industry whose jobs are likely to be automated.

Ed Cara:

So-called parental control apps on smartphones might suck at actually protecting kids from iffy stuff on the internet, new preliminary research from the University of Central Florida suggests. And unsurprisingly, they also seem to drive a wedge between teens and parents.

Researchers first surveyed over 200 pairs of parents and teens (ages 13 to 17) online. About half of the parents said they at least sometimes used these apps, which can block certain websites, limit screen time, and track children’s online activity. They found that parents who relied on these apps were more likely to be stricter and authoritarian, meaning they’re often demanding and rarely willing to listen to their kids or meet them halfway. But, seemingly counterintuitively, the teens whose parents reported having these apps were also more likely to report being exposed to unwanted explicit content, online harassment, and problems with other kids.

“The takeaway here is that parents should not treat parental control apps as a magic bullet to keep their teens safe online,” senior author Pamela Wisniewski, an assistant professor of engineering and computer science at UCF, told Gizmodo via email.

Olga Khazan:

The thing is, they’re not. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the vark questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.

Sarah Karp:

Last year, two-thirds of all principal discretion seats at the city’s selective enrollment schools went to students from the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods while less than four percent went to students from the poorest areas, Chicago Public Schools data shows. Principals at the 11 test-in schools can admit 5 percent of their coveted freshmen seats through this process. That was 164 seats last year.

The disparity was most pronounced in four of the five most sought-after schools. At Lane, Northside, Payton, and Jones high schools last year, between 87 and 100 percent of the students admitted through principal discretion lived in the highest income areas. None came from the lowest income areas.

Nigel Biggar:

All this in reaction to my modest view that “empire” can mean a variety of things, is capable of good as well as evil, raises ethical questions worth thinking about, and requires sophisticated moral evaluation.

Incontinent abuse on Twitter is, sadly, so common as to be unremarkable. But this was remarkable, since its author is a senior academic at one of Britain’s most…

Mike Antonucci:

Unions keep details about the numbers and location of their fee-payers close to the vest, but I have those details for the California Teachers Association. For K-12 teachers and in almost all regions of the state, the number of fee-payers is small, ranging from 2 to 5 percent.

There are two key cities where the percentage is much higher — Los Angeles and San Diego. Fee-payers comprise about 11.8 percent of the United Teachers Los Angeles bargaining unit. For the San Diego Education Association it’s about 8.2 percent. For both of these locals, the loss of representation fees will have an immediate and significant impact on their budgets.

CTA is advising all local affiliates to construct contingency budgets for the 2018-19 school year, projecting various levels of membership loss, the worst-case scenario being a 40 percent drop.

I doubt that much of a loss will happen in a single year to any K-12 local, but it may be a different story for CTA’s higher education affiliates.

Steven Elbow:

Last month the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council did something unexpected. Members voted to award one of its Openness Awards — or Opees — to Gov. Scott Walker.

That’s the same guy who has fought the disclosure of political donors, whose administration directed cabinet secretaries to avoid creating publicly accessible records while conducting official business and two years ago tried to gut the state’s open records law.

But in 2016, Walker issued directives ordering state agencies to step up their responses to public records requests. As a result, said FOIC president Bill Lueders, state agencies have responded to records requests more promptly.

George Korda:

The “student-led” event – in which faculty and staff are invited to participate – is planned for April 20 at Oak Ridge High School. Here is a portion of the news, sent by a student, about the event:

“Inspired by the strong young people that have been victimized by acts of gun violence in their own schools and now fight against it, ORHS students are organizing a rally against gun violence. This event will be held on April 20th, the nineteenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, in solidarity with schools around the country that are also holding events on this day. This rally will include students discussing how gun violence has affected their lives: original student poetry readings, student art exhibits, student-led songs, and student speeches. Furthermore, there will be stations set up where students can register to vote and write letters to their elected officials.

“Although this event is primarily by and for the students of Oak Ridge High School, the organizers are working closely with the administration to ensure that this event is constructive, minimally disruptive, and inclusive to as many students, teachers, and staff as possible.”

Gail Heriot:

Well meaning employment regulation often backfires. When the law makes it risky for employers to hire, they may do less of it. The current employment situation for Millennials – with its curious emphasis on unpaid internships as a prelude to actual employment may be in part a response to the difficulties employers face in dismissing an employee who turns out to be unsuitable. Many Millennials find they need an extensive track record of successful work – even though it is unpaid – in order to land their first paying job. This was not true for previous generations.

Stephanie Stamm, Tripp Mickle and Jessica Kuronen:

The smartphones, Facebook accounts and other technology products deeply embedded in modern life help people get more things done every day. They also gather more information about us than we often realize.

But Facebook’s crisis over how it handles and protects user data has led some to ask: What data am I giving up?

Imagine “Sally” sets up a pizza-and-movie night with her friend “Kristen.” The Wall Street Journal reviewed privacy statements to assess just how much data could be unknowingly shared on top of the price of that pepperoni pie.

Sam Schechner and Natalia Drozdiak:

When European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager fined Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -2.20% Google €2.4 billion last June for abusing its dominance to clobber rivals, Josh Hawley in Missouri took notice.

Mr. Hawley, the state’s attorney general, launched his own antitrust investigation into the same allegations in November and has demanded a copy of all evidence Google has given the EU. Other state attorneys general are talking to Missouri about sharing information, according to people familiar with the discussions. “We are all watching the European proceedings,” says Mr. Hawley.

Ms. Vestager, a 49-year old Dane, has become the public face of Europe’s effort to rein in technology firms and the de facto global regulator for the U.S.’s tech giants. Her approach to companies such as Google and Apple Inc. is having a ripple effect around the globe, influencing regulatory action not only in the U.S. but in countries including Brazil, India and Russia.

Alan Borsuk:

Teachers and the teachers’ union. Don’t expect a happy workforce. The union has turned up the volume on its unhappiness and it remains a powerful force, even without the bargaining powers it had before Act 10, which dramatically curtailed collective bargaining for most public employees, including teachers. Beyond the union itself, it won’t be easy for MPS to attract and retain top teachers, given the renewed money crunch.

Principals. You can advocate all sorts of things as superintendent, but carrying them out depends a lot on the 150 or so principals running schools. I suspect if Driver were candid, she’d say that she worries about the quality of principals overall. And there is concern that a wave of retirements is coming. Good luck finding great principals.

Student achievement. Driver accomplished some things as superintendent, but the most important big picture point to me is that student achievement didn’t change much. A few indicators improved a bit. Overall, the situation continues to be deeply alarming. Year after year, one in five students in MPS (and in the private school voucher program) rates as proficient in reading. Fewer than that are proficient in math. Is it Driver’s fault that things haven’t improved much? Obviously, there’s lots of blame to share. But, ultimately the coach is judged by how the team does on the field. The team is chronically beleaguered.

Relationships. This was Driver’s biggest strength. She connected with all sorts of people — community leaders, philanthropists, business leaders, elected officials, leaders from elsewhere in Wisconsin. This translated into both tangible and intangible support for MPS. But relationships require a lot of tending, especially with so many competing interests. Driver will be a tough act to follow on this front.

Matthew Mitchell & Anne Philpot:

Over the past six decades, occupational licensing has expanded rapidly. In 1950, just 5 percent of all US workers needed a license to do their jobs. Today, one in four Americans must be licensed by a state to do his or her job. When federal licensing requirements are included, the number approaches 30 percent.

As we documented in a recent public interest comment filed with the Federal Trade Commission, a consensus among economists and policy experts on the left and the right has emerged in recent years. That consensus suggests that licensure in the United States is excessive, limits competition, raises consumer prices, has a disparate impact on certain communities, and has little or no effect on either quality or public safety.

Mats Burström:

Just when we thought we knew everything important about the age of sail and its impact on the world, along comes research that exposes our collective myopia when gazing at the past. Ships carried all sorts of things across the oceans, including commodities, disease, and ideas. But as archaeologist and author Mats Burström shows, ships also scattered bits of their homelands—quite literally—around the world.

Today, ships use water as ballast, in the process delivering microscopic organisms to international ports. But once upon a time, mariners relied on solids—bricks, stones, and gravel—to lend their ships stability. In four centuries of sailing, they left millions of tonnes of material around the globe from Canada to India.

Joel Kotkin:

The public so far still does not disdain the tech oligarchs as they do Wall Street or energy firm but they are clearly threatened, both politically and in their wallets. Their once seemingly unstoppable hold of the capital markets also has started to slip somewhat as investors begin to worry about a potential decline in social media as well as technical failures undermining the value of companies like Uber, Tesla and Snapchat.

Not that the oligarchs will change their ways without coercion. Mark Zuckerberg, amid the uproar, still seems determined to block privacy protections in California or elsewhere. Facebook’s arrogance has even incited tension between the tech overlords, with Apple’s Tim Cook assaulting Mark Zuckerberg for privacy violations. The fact that Cook did this in Beijing, world capital of advanced surveillance, makes the public spanking ever more bizarre.

John Tierney and John Stossel:

As Tierney points out, though, the Left’s opposition to important advances like genetically modified food and the study of human genetics (among others) has done much more damage than, say, conservative creationists, who have zero impact on scientific funding or decision-making.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The Wisconsin legislature has approved a Study Committee on Identification and Management of Dyslexia, with Rep. Bob Kulp as Chair and Sen. Patty Schachtner as Vice Chair.

SCOPE: The Study Committee is directed to review current screening, identification, school intervention, and treatment protocols for dyslexia in K-12 schools; to examine the effects of current state statutes and regulations on literacy outcomes for students with dyslexia; and to evaluate the effects of dyslexia on literacy outcomes in the state. The committee shall study recent research on evidence-based instructional techniques for students with dyslexia; determine the components and costs of successful dyslexia education practices and laws in other states; and identify institutional obstacles to academic attainment for these students. The committee shall consider legislation to implement screening for characteristics of dyslexia in early grades; to ensure that reading instruction and intervention practices incorporate relevant research findings from the University of Wisconsin; to improve the partnership between parents, educators, counselors, and others on early identification and effective interventions for dyslexic learners; and to enhance statewide access to updated resources and training on dyslexic education.

This is a timely development, as today’s release of the 2017 4th grade reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows Wisconsin students with disabilities have an average score of 177, while the national average for that group of students is 184. 10 points on the NAEP is approximately one grade level, so this is a substantial difference. Within Wisconsin, students with disabilities score 2% advanced, 9 percent proficient, 13% basic and 76% below basic.

Good reading instruction is good reading instruction, regardless of which students are receiving it. All students need to learn the same skills to become proficient readers, with some of them requiring more time and more explicit instruction to master skills. Since students with dyslexia receive much of their reading instruction and early intervention in the general education classroom, and 65% of ALL Wisconsin 4th graders perform at a basic or below basic level, we are hopeful that this study committee will make suggestions that will benefit ALL readers. Improvements in teacher preparation as well as professional development are of central importance to any meaningful change.

Congratulations to Decoding Dyslexia-Wisconsin for advocating successfully for this committee

Cladia Geib:

On a cool February day in 1917, storied inventor Alexander Graham Bell gave the graduating class of McKinley Manual Training School a rousing speech that would later sound a bit like prophecy.

“Now, it is very interesting and instructive to look back over the various changes that have occurred and trace the evolution of the present from the past,” Bell said, after recalling the incredible transformation wrought by electricity and automobiles alone. “By projecting these lines of advance into the future, you can forecast the future, to a certain extent, and recognize some of the fields of usefulness that are opening up for you.”

In 1876, Bell himself had patented the device known as the telephone, which used wires to transmit the sound of human speech. As this device spread, its capabilities allowed voices to cross enormous distances. In 1915, one such “wireless telephony” system had allowed a Virginia man to speak to another in Paris while a man in Honolulu listened in — a distance of 4,900 miles (about 7,886 kilometers), setting the record for the longest distance communication at that time.

Bell marveled at this achievement and the change it had already created, predicting that “this achievement surely foreshadows the time when we may be able to talk with a man in any part of the world by telephone and without wires.” At the time of Bell’s speech, the U.S. had an estimated 11.7 million working telephones; by the year 2000, that number had risen to nearly 103 million.

Extrapolating forward, Bell predicted a future in which this technology allowed people to pretty much anything remotely: “We shall probably be able to perform at a distance by wireless almost any mechanical operation that can be done at hand,” he said. And he wasn’t wrong.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The 2017 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been released, and the news is not good for Wisconsin. All the data is available in the NAEP Data Explorer at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing.

We will do a detailed analysis soon, but here are some important takeaways from the 4th grade reading test:

• Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, our lowest ranking to date
• The Wisconsin average score is 220 (down 4 points from two years ago, and 2 points lower than the national average)
• Our black students ranked 49th (3rd from last)
• Our white students ranked 41st (lower than white students in Alabama and Mississippi)
• Our black-white gap was tied for 5th largest in the country
• 65% of Wisconsin students were not proficient in reading: 34% were below basic, 31% basic, 27% proficient, and 8% advanced
• All of our racial sub-groups, as well as low SES students and students with disabilities performed below the national average for their particular sub-group

Charts from the Urban Institute:

Wisconsin ranks 22nd amongst the States in per student spending at $11,375.

Madison currently spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most school districts. Yet, we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

www.stretchtargets.org

Matthew Ladner on charters and the “lost decade”.

Michael Petrilli:

It’s easy for us armchair-quarterbacks of education to cast stones at teachers and principals who give diplomas to students who didn’t earn them. But a more constructive conversation would start with a mea culpa: We have made a complete hash of the policies governing high schools and what’s expected of young people seeking to graduate from them. Until we fix that, we should expect the cheating and gaming to continue.

Our first mistake was to set sky-high goals around graduation rates, while allowing local officials great discretion in defining what it takes for students to earn a diploma. If this mistake sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one we made when we set near-universal proficiency in reading and math as a national goal under No Child Left Behind, but let states define “proficiency” as they saw fit.

Both sides of this equation are off. As my colleague Brandon Wright pointed out recently, almost a third of students leaving eighth grade are achieving “below basic” in math and reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For low-income students, it’s 40 percent, and for African American students it’s more than half. Roughly speaking, these students are entering ninth grade achieving at or below a sixth-grade level.

Getting almost all of these students to meet high school graduation standards within four years, as federal and state policies expect, is utterly unrealistic—unless the standard for graduation is set at a ridiculously low level, or winked at while being applied. And because most states no longer have graduation or end-of-course exams in place to act as a check—a worrying policy drift in its own right, and one that’s gotten far too little attention—local officials and educators can and do engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Ive not seen clarification on the assertions contained in Karen Rivedal’s 11 March article.

Niv Elis:

The federal budget deficit hit $598 billion in the first half of the 2018 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, quickly outpacing the deficits of recent years.

At the same point in 2017, the deficit was $78 billion lower. That year, the entire deficit amounted to $666 billion, just 11% higher than the amount the U.S. government had to borrow in the first half of 2018.

The fast-increasing deficit expanded as government outlays grew 2.5 times faster than revenues. On the revenue side, which was up 2 percent over last year, the GOP tax reforms ate into individual tax revenue, and slashed corporate tax revenue by $22 billion, or 22 percent.

On the spending side, Social Security outlays increased $19 billion, or 4 percent, while interest payments on debt increased $18 billion, or 12 percent. Meanwhile, disaster relief efforts drove Homeland Security spending up $14 billion, a 56 percent increase. Defense spending also rose $12 billion — a 4 percent increase.

Rana Dasgupta:

What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.

But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).

Coursera:

For a lot of higher level courses in Machine Learning and Data Science, you find you need to freshen up on the basics in maths – stuff you may have studied before in school or university, but which was taught in another context, or not very intuitively, such that you struggle to relate it to how it’s used in Computer Science. This specialisation aims to bridge that gap, getting you up to speed in the underlying maths, building an intuitive understanding, and relating it to Machine Learning and Data Science.

In the first course on Linear Algebra we look at what linear algebra is and how it relates to data. Then we look through what vectors and matrices are and how to work with them.

Rachel Leingang:

Arizona colleges can’t give in-state tuition to young immigrants covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The court issued a brief decision order saying justices unanimously agreed with the Arizona Court of Appeals’ ruling that said existing federal and state laws don’t allow the Maricopa Community Colleges to grant in-state tuition rates for DACA recipients.

A full opinion further explaining the court’s ruling will be released by May 14, the order states.

The court released the order Monday to allow Maricopa Community Colleges students and the state to have as much time as possible to plan for those affected by the ruling.

More than 2,000 DACA recipients, commonly referred to as “dreamers,” currently attend community college or a state university in Arizona and pay in-state rates. The ruling will make DACA recipients pay much more to attend these schools, as out-of-state rates are about triple the cost of in-state tuition.

Ben Carlson:

Successful entrepreneurs must understand they’re the minority. Most businesses fail and most 18 year-olds don’t have what it takes to start, let alone run their own business. I certainly would have been lost at that age trying to make a go at it on my own.

I get what Ohanian is trying to say here. There are plenty of problems with the higher education system. It’s too expensive. Most students aren’t given enough guidance in terms of how their preferred area of study will lead to actual employment or how much that employment will pay. Student loans can also be a huge burden after school for many.

In many ways, much like personal finance, people are mostly on their own when it comes to figuring these things out, which is a shame.

And then there’s the fact that it’s a tad ridiculous that so many employers require a college degree to even be considered for a position in the first place. Unfortunately, just because the current system isn’t perfect doesn’t mean young people can avoid it all together.

Rowan Walrath:

Farmers’ advocacy groups called on Congress Monday to reauthorize, “with adequate funding,” a program that provides mental health services to distressed American farmers and their families.

“Despite the growing need,” notes a letter to House and Senate agricultural committees signed by 36 rural and farming organizations, the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) “has never received funding, leaving many producers without access to important behavioral health services.”

Doyen Oyeniyi:

WHO: Michael Brown, a senior at Mirabeau B. Lamar High School in Houston

WHAT: Brown was accepted into twenty top universities with full-ride scholarships

WHY IT’S SO GREAT: It’s harder than ever to get into the country’s most prestigious universities, so the already impressive feat of getting into an Ivy League institution is all the more admirable today. And finding a way to pay for higher education is a crucial part of any but the wealthiest students’ application strategy. Michael Brown, a senior at Lamar High School in Houston, has managed to accomplish that (and more)!

On March 28, Brown opened the last of twenty acceptance letters from top universities. Not only was he accepted into his long-time dream school, Stanford, but he was also granted admission into schools like Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, and Yale. He was also awarded a full ride to each school through a mix of scholarships and grants. And he earned an additional $260,000 in scholarships outside of his school applications. And—no, just kidding.

The Economist:

POLITICIANS love to talk about spending. To simplify, Democrats win leftist votes by calling it investment and promising more of it. Republicans secure conservative votes by calling it waste and pledging to make cuts. Talking candidly about how to collect the revenues that fund government is more ticklish, especially when the pain is likely to be broadly shared.

This may help to explain why a surprising number of American states are facing a revenue crisis, even as the broader economy enters its ninth year of recovery. With unemployment at a 17-year low and stockmarkets near all-time highs, one might expect state coffers to be overflowing. Yet many states find themselves struggling to collect enough revenue to balance their budgets—as most are legally obliged to do. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, 27 states saw their revenues fall below expectations last year. While states have been grappling with rising health-care and pension-fund costs for decades, many recent woes can be blamed on sluggish revenue growth. If things do not pick up soon, states will be unprepared when a new recession strikes.

Ian Johnson:

The Chinese government has banned online retailers from selling the Bible, moving in the wake of new rules to control the country’s burgeoning religious scene.

The measures to limit Bible sales were announced over the weekend and began taking effect this week. By Thursday, internet searches for the Bible came up empty on leading online Chinese retailers, such as JD.com, Taobao, and Amazon, although some retailers offered analyses of the Bible or illustrated storybooks.

The retailers did not respond to requests for comment, although Thursday is the start of a long holiday weekend in China.

The move aligns with a longstanding effort to limit the influence of Christianity in China. Among China’s major religions — which include Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and folk beliefs — Christianity is the only one whose major holy text cannot be sold through normal commercial channels. The Bible is printed in China but legally available only at church bookstores.

Urban Institute:

Often called the “nation’s report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics assessments are administered to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students in each state every two years. NAEP scores offer something rare in education policy: data that are standardized across states and across time. Policymakers and pundits seize upon these data as evidence to support their preferred policies. But comparing NAEP scores assumes that states serve the same students—and we know they don’t.

A better way to compare and talk about NAEP performance is to use adjusted NAEP scores that account for demographic differences across students in each state. These adjusted scores allow for students to be compared with their demographically similar peers using factors such as race, receipt of special education services, and status as an English language learner. These are factors we know can affect test results, yet they are not shown in NAEP scores. The interactive tool below brings those adjusted NAEP scores to life.

Via a kind activist.

Much more on NAEP, here.

PDF, via Bruce Mehlman:

Reform movements succeed when the methods, motivation & moment converge. We are reaching such a time.

Michael Petrilli:

As feared, the new results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that national trends are mostly flat. Coming on the heels of some modest declines in 2015, the 2017 scores amount to more bleak news. It’s now been almost a decade since we’ve seen strong growth in either reading or math, with the slight exception of eighth grade reading. There’s no way to sugarcoat these scores; they are extremely disappointing.

Much more on NAEP, here.

Related: Stretchtargets.org

2017 NAEP results.

Bob Davis:

The self-proclaimed RV capital of the world gives a glimpse of what the American economy looks like when operating at full tilt.

High-school students around here skip college for factory jobs that offer great pay and benefits. For-hire signs sprout like roadside weeds. And workers are so flush that car dealers can’t keep new pickups on the lot.

At the same time, the strains are showing. Employers can’t hang on to employees, and house prices are zooming. The worker shortage prompted a local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant to offer $150 signing bonuses. A McDonald’s failed to open for lunch last fall because managers couldn’t corral enough hands at $8 an hour to serve the lines waiting at the door.