Commentary on Madison’s K-12 spending, curriculum, rhetoric and governance practices “Plenty of Resources (2013)”

Steven Elbow:

To make their point, the couple traced reading and math proficiency rates for the class of 2017 through the years, finding that the black and Hispanic cohorts saw little if any improvements between grades three to 11 and trailed white students by as many as 50 percentage points.

“Both of these things suggest to us that the district’s efforts to educate our minority students have failed (for whatever reason or reasons),” they wrote. “Nevertheless, we are finding ways to give these students high school diplomas. But what good is a high school diploma to a young person if they cannot read or do math?”

They’re calling for more resources, especially in younger grades, like reading specialists to oversee literacy programming, and reading specialists to run intervention programs in the middle and high schools.

“Further, we need to hold those people and other school staff accountable for improving literacy in their student body — i.e., for increasing the percentage of students (in every demographic group) in their school who are reading at grade level,” they wrote.

In the Isthmus article, Henriques and Frost also accused the district of whitewashing data.

“We have long been frustrated by the way the district selectively compiles, analyzes, and shares student data with the community,” they wrote, adding, “For too many district administrators and school board members over the 20+ years we have been paying attention, making the district look good has been more important than thoroughgoing honesty about how our students are doing.”

Cheatham bristled at the criticism, maintaining that the district publicly posts all data, both favorable and unfavorable, and that there’s nothing wrong with publicizing good results.

“We’ll never hide our progress,” she said, “and it’s important to recognize the progress we have made, which is substantial.”

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, now around $20k per student.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

More.

2006: They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!

2013: “Plenty of Resources“.

What’s different, this time?

2017: Adult employment.

2018: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

The Real Achievement of Federalism

Veronique de Rugy:

Federalism. Great word. Great concept. In theory, it is an important way to balance the powers between the national and state governments. In Federalist 45, James Madison described the role and scope of both levels of government this way:

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”

Take fiscal issues. Under a pure federalist system, states should set their own economic policies rather than follow directives from Washington. If states can differentiate themselves on the basis of taxes, spending, and regulation, each of us Americans has more leeway to decide which particular rules under which to live. If we’re dissatisfied with the policies of the state we live in, we can register our discontent by voting with our feet and moving to another state. This competition for residents – and the tax-dollars they pay – helps keep state officials in check, strengthening their incentives to keep taxes and other intrusions modest.

Campus Week: How did an elite, repressive minority policing speech and culture through political correctness come to browbeat the American democratic majority?

Wesley Yang:

The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose political correctness. A recent survey of 8,000 Americans reveals that people of all ages, races, and educational levels oppose it by lopsided margins. None of the demographic categories presumed to be aligned with it, or to fall within its protective embrace, actually support it. Three out of 4 black people, 2 out of 3 people with postgraduate degrees, and 78 percent of people under the age of 24 all regard political correctness as a problem. While 79 percent of white people oppose political correctness, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to be resistant to it.

The findings are as encouraging as they are distressing. They are encouraging because they affirm something that no one with a glancing familiarity with the character of the American public has had any cause to doubt. People long habituated to freedom of conscience and speech instinctively dislike attempts to place restrictions on them. A regime of policing speech and thought for adherence to an unprincipled, logically incoherent, and ever-changing array of progressive nostrums will always be unpopular everywhere, but especially so here.

The study demonstrates that the opponents of political correctness are not primarily the followers of Donald Trump. Nor are they in any significant sense the alt-right, a ragbag of at most a few thousand malcontents in a country of 350 million, who have been falsely magnified into a ludicrous simulacrum of a real social force. They are not predominantly the remnants of a dying white America brainwashed by Fox News. They are not a pitiable collection of angry white males—ruddy, be-Dockered, pale, stale, males left behind by the times—clinging to their dwindling privileges in an ever more vibrant and diverse America.

China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes. Here’s What They Think They’re Doing.

Darren Byler:

Often, the big brothers and sisters arrived dressed in hiking gear. They appeared in the villages in groups, their backpacks bulging, their luggage crammed with electric water-kettles, rice-cookers, and other useful gifts for their hosts. They were far from home and plainly a bit uncomfortable, reluctant to “rough it” such a long way from the comforts of the city. But these “relatives,” as they had been told to call themselves, were on a mission, so they held their heads up high when they entered the Uighur houses and announced they had come to stay.

The village children spotted the outsiders quickly. They heard their attempted greetings in the local language, saw the gleaming Chinese flags and round face of Mao Zedong pinned to their chests, and knew just how to respond. “I love China,” the children shouted urgently, “I love Xi Jinping.”

Over the past year, reports have found their way out of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China of a campaign of religious and cultural repression of the region’s Muslims, and of their detention and confinement in a growing network of razor-wire-ringed camps that China’s government at times has dubbed “transformation through education centers” and at others “counter-extremism training centers” and, recently, amid international criticism, “vocational training centers.” The government describes such efforts as a response to terrorism. Indeed, these camps can be seen as a logical, if grotesque, extension of the government’s decades-long endeavor to eradicate the perceived “terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism” of its ethnic minority Muslim population in Xinjiang. The region, and the country, have certainly experienced spasms of unplanned mass violence as well as cases of premeditated violence born of Uighur desperation over decades of discrimination and persecution; the government’s current set of policies to avoid future strife, however, appears to rest on the assumption that most Uighurs are extremists-in-waiting.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

BBC:

“My prettiest contribution to the culture” was how the novelist Kurt Vonnegut described his old master’s thesis in anthropology, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun”. The thesis sank without a trace, but Vonnegut continued throughout his life to promote the big idea behind it, which was: “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”.

In a 1995 lecture, Vonnegut chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.”

Tim Cook warns of ‘data-industrial complex’ in call for comprehensive US privacy laws 113

James Vincent:

Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for new digital privacy laws in the United States, warning that the collection of huge amounts of personal data by companies is harming society.

Speaking at a privacy conference in Brussels, Cook gave an impassioned and forceful speech. He reiterated familiar talking points like Apple’s commitment to privacy (and, by implication, its rivals lack of commitment) while spelling out public concerns in recent years regarding data collection, surveillance, and manipulation.

Cook said that modern technology has led to the creation of a “data-industrial complex” in which private and everyday information is “weaponized against us with military efficiency.” He added that this mechanism doesn’t just affect individuals, but whole societies.

“Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies,” said Cook. “Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false. This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy.” You can watch the full speech below:

Why China Technology-Transfer Threats Matter

Dr. Christopher Ashley Ford:

In this latter respect, for example, we review U.S. export licenses for nonproliferation concerns, we chair the four key interagency interdiction groups devoted to impeding progress in foreign threat programs and disrupting proliferation networks worldwide, and we coordinate U.S. relations with multilateral export control regimes. We also implement capacity-building programs with foreign partner states, and we undertake nonstop global counterproliferation diplomacy through which we build support for and share “best practices” in sanctions enforcement and interdiction.

As part of this effort, ISN is placing increasing emphasis upon raising awareness about, and putting up barriers to, the proliferation of sensitive technologies to the People’s Republic of China – technologies which Beijing has been using to build up its military capabilities in support of its ambitious “China Dream” of “national rejuvenation” to regain China’s position as a world leader in a range of fields, including military might. Beginning last July at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, we have been publicly drawing attention to the degree to which both licit and illicit transfers have been used to augment Chinese military power, as authorities in Beijing have – in a process known in Chinese strategic writings as “Military-Civilian Fusion” (MCF), and now personally overseen by Xi Jinping himself – systematically worked to routinize military application of know-how acquired abroad.

Suspicious packages spotlight vast postal surveillance system

Fast Company:

Stephen Curry slides the gadget onto his arm. Encased in a spandex sleeve, it goes up past the New Testament quote tattooed on his right wrist–“Love never fails,” in Hebrew–and lands on his forearm below the short sleeve of his gray linen shirt. Curry breaks into an approving grin. “I can see I’m going to wear this when the time is right,” he says of the accessory. He’s gotten into road cycling lately, and he exuberantly mimes the act of glancing at the device while chugging from a water bottle.

Dennis Miloseski and Howard Nuk smile, too. The Silicon Valley design veterans, who look the part with neatly trimmed beards and head-to-toe black wardrobes, have invited Curry to their San Francisco office on this July afternoon to solicit his opinion. Curry isn’t merely a one-man focus group; the Golden State Warriors point guard and two-time NBA MVP is an investor in Palm, the company they cofounded, and carries the title of creative strategy director. Besides capital, he’s providing them with advice and—as Palm’s public face—promotional value which might be worth millions in itself.

Hold on—Palm? The once-mighty, now-defunct maker of the pioneering 1990s personal digital assistants and, later, smartphones? Not exactly. This is a brand-new startup, which has borrowed the original company’s name and at least some of its ethos. Its debut product, the device Curry has affixed to himself, is itself known as the Palm. It resembles a smartphone, makes calls, and runs Android apps, but it’s remarkably diminutive—more like a few stacked credit cards than the Hershey bar–size handsets of today.

The peer review industry: implausible and outrageous

Tim Crane:

Suppose there was a wholly state-funded bakery, whose aim was to create world-class cakes and to encourage the development of excellent cake-baking. Everyone in the bakery – the master bakers, the managers, the kitchen assistants, the human resources consultants, the cleaners – is paid by the state. But the bakery is not allowed to give or sell the cakes directly to the public. Rather it is obliged to give, free of charge, all the best products to a number of “cake brokers”, each one specializing in a different kind of cake. These brokers are profit-making companies. To maintain baking standards, the brokers ask expert tasters from around the world to give their (unpaid) opinions on the quality of the cakes produced, ranking them and making recommendations about which should be released to the public. The brokers then put the best cakes in nice boxes and sell them back to state-funded “cake repositories” at a price they set themselves. Some cake repositories are free to use, but most of them give their cakes away only to their members, many of whom pay a fee of around £9,000 per year, or more. The cake brokers make a healthy profit and regularly raise their prices, knowing that no self-respecting cake repository would deprive its members of the best cakes in the world.

Educating for the future: The case of East Asia

Raja Bentaouet Kattan and May Bend:

The purpose of any education system is to equip learners with the ability to live a fulfilling and productive life. Currently, East Asia is home to seven of the top ten education systems in the world. Despite impressive achievements, these above-average performing systems are not resting on their accomplishments—they continue to deepen the quality of education, tying learning to new and emerging needs. Central to the region’s curriculum reform is a focus on teaching and measuring 21st century skills.

Among countries with the strongest education systems, attention is shifting from a uniform, teacher-centered, exam-oriented pedagogy towards diverse, student-centered learning pathways that aim to instill capabilities for lifelong learning. This shift represents an increased focus on 21st century skills under three categories: 1) Learning and Innovation, 2) Digital Literacies, and 3) Life and Career Skills.

In short, East Asia aspires for its students to know themselves, relate well with others and be worldly as well as think creatively and independently with a sea of ubiquitous knowledge at their fingertips.

Some 43% of College Grads Are Underemployed in First Job

Melissa Korn:

Students weighing their college options are increasingly focused on the return from that hefty investment, pursuing disciplines they think could lead to a steady and lucrative career.

But in terms of landing graduates jobs that actually require college degrees, some of those more vocationally geared majors—like fitness studies, criminal justice and business—can be worse choices than English or gender studies, according to a new report by labor analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies.

College graduates who studied homeland security and law enforcement had a 65% probability of being underemployed in their first job out of school, the report found. Those with degrees in psychology and biology stood chances of 54% and 51%, respectively, of working jobs that don’t require college degrees.

How I got my first developer job at age 40 after 10 months of hard work

Syk Houdeib:

When I first started thinking about becoming a developer, I would read articles like this one with a bit of skepticism. I kept on looking for something in the writer’s background that made them “special”. That made them suited for this job. Something that I didn’t have.

I have since come to understand that this is not how it works. There aren’t any “special” requirements to becoming a developer. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, because it isn’t. But the good news is that all the requirements are things that are in everyone’s reach. You have to be willing to work hard, learn a lot, and be consistent. You need to persist when things get tough. Talk yourself out of the moments of desperation when you feel like you are not cut out for this. That’s all it takes, and everyone can do these things with a bit of practice.

I started with no related background study. I had no money to spend on expensive courses, no time in my already busy day, and I was already almost middle aged. Everyone’s circumstances are different, but I learned that if you put your mind to it, you can do it.

No Nobel Prize for Literature? Thank Goodness.

Robert Messenger:

Did anyone even notice?

The Times Literary Supplement has a Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, named after the French writer who declined the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964. Sartre didn’t want institutional authority for his opinions and stances: “A writer who takes political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his,” he announced. “These means are the written word.” Sartre had informed the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the winner of the literary Nobel, that he wouldn’t accept the prize, but it went ahead anyway. Karl Ragnar Gierow, the academy’s secretary, replied: “The academy’s award is not guided by the possible winner’s wishes but only by the decision of the academy’s 18 members.”

Sartre was wrong about most things, but in this he was prescient. The Nobel Prize in literature gilds no one’s laurels. It is a club no one should want to belong to. Fifty-four years later, the Swedish Academy came to the same conclusion and voided the 2018 prize. This decision was made not out of intellectual modesty or chagrin at the long list of mediocrities it has chosen, but due to a #MeToo scandal involving the husband of one of the 18 academicians. Back-and-forth accusations, resignations, and counter-resignations left the academy without a quorum. The husband, Jean-Claude Arnault, was convicted of rape on October 1 and sentenced to two years in prison. It is not to excuse his terrible acts or belittle his victims to say that the academy’s decision to take a year off brings an appropriate curtain down on more than a century of foolishness, parochialism, and melodrama.

Middleton’s Planned 3,000 student high school…

Chris Rickert:

Middleton spokesman Perry Hibner said the high school has seen seven additions since it was first built in 1929, and the eighth would bring its capacity to 3,000 students — likely the largest high school in the state.

Despite that, principal Steve Plank said the additions would reduce crowding and create a “sense of calm and intimacy” for staff and students that can’t be achieved now when, for instance, students are having to wait in line to use the bathroom or sit on the floor to eat lunch because there’s not enough room in the cafeteria.

More, here.

Madison plans to spend about $518,955,288 during the 2018-2019 school year, far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 organizations.

The Nobel Committee Honors the Economics of Market Failure

John Cassidy:

At first glance, the research of the two scholars who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics has little in common. Bill Nordhaus, a longtime professor at Yale, was honored for creating, in the early nineteen-nineties, a mathematical model of how climate change affects the economy. Since Nordhaus developed his model, ones like it have been adopted by many interested parties, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has just published a report warning of dire consequences if current trends are allowed to continue. Paul Romer, formerly of Stanford and now at New York University, is a specialist in the forces driving long-term economic growth. The papers that earned him the award, which were published in 1986 and 1990, stressed the importance of knowledge and knowledge generation.

As far as I know, Nordhaus and Romer have never collaborated with each other, and neither of them is associated with any particular school beyond the broad category of neoclassical, mathematically intensive economics. Like most Ivy League economists, they are generally supportive of free-market capitalism. Indeed, they have both written about how the ongoing process of competitive innovation that is intrinsic to modern capitalism generates enormous material benefits, some of which aren’t captured fully in statistics like the gross domestic product.

Civics: An American Perspective on a Chinese Perspective on the Defense Department’s Cyber Strategy and ‘Defending Forward’

Robert Chesney:

Let’s start with the positives. It is perfectly fair game, for example, to point out that the Pentagon’s “defense forward” doctrine may increase escalation risk and to question whether that increased risk is worth the candle.

Lyu writes that “defending forward should be understood as something more proactive and potentially escalatory than active cyber defense,” adding that this appears to include activity below the threshold of armed conflict. All that is correct. As I argued in September, defense forward is best read to encompass

The genetics of university success

Emily Smith-Woolley, Ziada Ayorech, Philip S. Dale, Sophie von Stumm & Robert Plomin:

University success, which includes enrolment in and achievement at university, as well as quality of the university, have all been linked to later earnings, health and wellbeing. However, little is known about the causes and correlates of differences in university-level outcomes. Capitalizing on both quantitative and molecular genetic data, we perform the first genetically sensitive investigation of university success with a UK-representative sample of 3,000 genotyped individuals and 3,000 twin pairs. Twin analyses indicate substantial additive genetic influence on university entrance exam achievement (57%), university enrolment (51%), university quality (57%) and university achievement (46%). We find that environmental effects tend to be non-shared, although the shared environment is substantial for university enrolment. Furthermore, using multivariate twin analysis, we show moderate to high genetic correlations between university success variables (0.27–0.76). Analyses using DNA alone also support genetic influence on university success. Indeed, a genome-wide polygenic score, derived from a 2016 genome-wide association study of years of education, predicts up to 5% of the variance in each university success variable. These findings suggest young adults select and modify their educational experiences in part based on their genetic propensities and highlight the potential for DNA-based predictions of real-world outcomes, which will continue to increase in predictive power.

Protesters shut down Madison School Board meeting, delaying vote on budget

Logan Wroge:

Protesters opposed to stationing police officers in Madison high schools shut down the Madison School Board meeting Monday evening, causing the board to delay a vote on the school district’s proposed $415.6 million operating budget for the current school year.

A little more than an hour into public testimony, dozens of people advocating for the removal of armed, uniformed police officers, known as educational resource officers, or EROs, from the district’s four main high schools began chanting and yelling at board members, eventually taking a large banner to the stage where the board conducts its business.

Barely audible above the noise in the McDaniels Audition at the district’s Doyle Administration Building, the board ultimately took a vote to adjourn the meeting without getting the chance to discuss and make a decision on the budget, including a property tax levy. Under state statute, a school board must set the levy by Nov. 1.

Kelly Ruppel, the district’s chief financial officer, said there are emergency exceptions to having the budget passed by Nov. 1, which is Thursday. The school district will look into whether Monday’s disruption qualifies as an exception, she said.

Board member Nicki Vander Meulen said she voted against adjourning the meeting.

Madison plans to spend more than $518M during the 2018-2019 school year, far more than most taxpayer supported k-12 districts.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

Reformation @ 501; the view from America

The Baker Center’s 2018 Institutional Confidence Poll Key Finding #2:

How much confidence do you have in the following institutions?

Institutional Confidence, All Respondents

I reflected on this while listening to a Reformation service message. Martin Luther ignited The Reformation 501 years ago.

A salient passage, from the Verse app.

Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

A bit of interesting commentary on the survey and results, here.

Politics (and therefore civics):

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

At first optimistic talking points at Milwaukee Public Schools, then things got quiet

Alan Borsuk:

So I went to one of the sessions. It was at James Madison Academic Campus on Wednesday.

My definition of a conversation involves at least two people talking to each other. A “community conversation,” I would expect, would give people a chance to offer their thoughts and exchange ideas.

Not this one. I was there for an hour during which several MPS administrators presented the district’s goals and plans, including the month by month subjects of “professional development” sessions for teachers and the ways discipline policies have changed under a recent agreement with federal officials on how to reduce disparities by race in student discipline.

It was boring. It was bureaucratic. As the speakers acknowledged, people in the audience couldn’t read the text of slides shown on a screen in the front of the school auditorium. No one from the audience was allowed to speak (I admit I left before the scheduled opportunity for questions at the end).

As for the auditorium, it seats more than 1,000. At the high point of the “conversation,” there were about 25 present — a handful of students, parents and teachers, plus MPS administrators.

To be frank, if this is how improvement in school culture is going to be pursued, don’t expect much to change.

Columbia U. report finds ‘lacks of diversity,’ despite spending $185 million on ‘faculty diversity’

Celine Ryan:

“Overall women were also underrepresented as department chairs relative to their representation on the tenured faculty,” according to the report, which asserted a need that equity and diversity concerns be “embedded and interwoven” within the arts and sciences departments.

In order to increase “diverse” faculty hires, the report recommends that Columbia establish “incentives” for individual departments to “improve diversity, particularly at the tenure level.”

One issue addressed by the initiative was that women faculty were found to serve on more committees than their male counterparts. The report concedes that this is likely a result of a “laudable desire to have diverse committees,” but insists that actions must be taken so as not to “overburden” women faculty.

“The additional department-level burden for women and URM [underrepresented minorities] faculty in departments where they are underrepresented was also noted in terms of ‘invisible labor,’ such as the informal advising of students, where they are seen as role models,” according to the report. Recommendations for addressing these concerns include an established system to “recognize invisible labor, including formal and informal advising of students and low-level administrative tasks.”

PDF Report.

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected

Nellie Bowles:

The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.

“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”

For the last six months, at night in school libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about 150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get their kids off screens.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

Why China’s Student Leaders Are Turning Into Tiny Tyrants

Wang Yuewei:

One of a university’s primary responsibilities is to train the world’s next generation of leaders: our future literary, scientific, and political luminaries. But in China, there is a growing concern that our schools may be manufacturing a bunch of imperious, bullying bureaucrats instead.

Earlier this month, China’s student unions became the focus of a raft of unflattering headlines after screenshots of a group chat between members of a student organization at Chengdu Aeronautic Polytechnic, a college in southwestern China, leaked online. The screenshots, which quickly went viral, revealed the group’s student leaders in all their self-important and condescending glory: reprimanding new members for not showing enough respect and reminding them to “know their place.” The post inspired many netizens to share their own horror stories of power-crazed student leaders at universities.

Pretty soon, both the state-run Xinhua News Agency and the Communist Youth League weighed in with opinion pieces criticizing the senior students’ behavior and lamenting what they called the “bureaucratization” of university student groups — a term that in China conjures images not just of red tape, but of high-handed, bumptious officials who abuse their power over others whenever possible.

Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way? Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

Emily Hanford:

Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.

What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

The Cult of the Form

Nathan Robinson:

In the list of disturbing immigration stories coming out of the Trump Administration, this one is particularly striking. Helen, a five-year-old Honduran girl, got lost inside the immigration bureaucracy after DHS got her to sign a form waiving her right to a hearing. Reading it, though, something didn’t make sense to me. Why did they even bother having her sign the form? She’s five. I know that the Trump Administration is cruel, and is willing to punish families by taking their children away and cutting off all communication. But why the form? Is the form supposed to confer some legitimacy on this process? If they can convince little Helen to print her name, on a totally unintelligible legal document in a language she doesn’t speak, do they think that makes some kind of important difference? The DHS bureaucrat who “helped” Helen sign away her rights must have felt there was some significance in the form, that they needed the form in order to be able to do it. But why? Is there judge who would refuse to sanction the detention without the form, but would be okay with it if a five-year-old signed it?

Perhaps there is such a judge. Which shows you just how bizarre the Cult of the Form is.

To me, one of the most sinister rationalizations of evil is: Well, you signed on the dotted line. Libertarians use this a lot to explain why there’s nothing exploitative or objectionable about capitalism: If you can get someone to sign a contract agreeing to something, then they have no grounds to object to it. After all, they signed. If they didn’t want the consequences, they shouldn’t have signed. Since they did sign, tough shit.

Designer babies aren’t futuristic. They’re already here.

Laura Hercher:

My friends learned there was an alternative. They could undergo in vitro fertilization and have their embryos genetically tested while still in a laboratory dish. Using a technology called pre-implantation genetic testing, they could pick the embryos that had not inherited the DYT1 mutation.

It would be expensive—costs for IVF in the US average over $20,000 for each try, and testing can add $10,000 or more. And it would require an unpleasant two-week process of ovarian stimulation and egg harvesting. “It wasn’t the way I saw myself making a baby,” Olivia told me. But they wanted what the procedure could offer them: a guarantee that dystonia was eliminated for the next generation, and beyond.

Matthew and Olivia don’t think of themselves as having a “designer baby.” That term has negative associations, suggesting something trivial, discretionary, or unethical. They weren’t choosing eye color or trying to boost their kid’s SAT score. They were looking out for the health and well-­being of their future child, as parents should.

We risk creating a society where some groups, because of culture or geography or poverty, bear a greater burden of genetic disease.

Public opinion on the use of assisted reproductive technology consistently draws a distinction between preventing disease and picking traits. The Johns Hopkins Genetics and Public Policy Center, which contacted over 6,000 people through surveys and focus groups from 2002 to 2004, summed up its findings this way: “In general, Americans approve of using reproductive genetic tests to prevent fatal childhood disease, but do not approve of using the same tests to identify or select for traits like intelligence or strength.” The dystonia gene is in a gray zone—some people born with it live perfectly healthy lives—yet presumably few parents would criticize Matthew and Olivia’s choice to weed it out.

To unlock student potential in East Asia Pacific, be demanding and supportive of teachers

Michael Crawford:

Among the 29 countries and economies of the East Asia and Pacific region, one finds some of the world’s most successful education systems. Seven out of the top 10 highest average scorers on internationally comparable tests such as PISA and TIMSS are from the region, with Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (China) consistently among the best.

But, more significantly, one also finds that great performance is not limited to school systems in the region’s high-income countries. School systems in middle-income Vietnam and China (specifically the provinces of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Guangdong) score better than the average OECD country, despite having much lower GDP per capita. What is more, scores from both China and Vietnam show that poor students are not being left behind. Students from the second-lowest income quintile score better than the average OECD student, and even the very poorest test takers outscore students from some wealthy countries. As the graph below shows, however, other countries in the region have yet to achieve similar results.

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, while our state’s K-12 administrative organ aborted Wisconsin’s one attempt at elementary teacher content knowledge requirements: Foundations of Reading.

“38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent”

Nicholas Kristof:

The larger problem is that 38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. Over all, children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.

When family background already matters so much, do America’s best universities really want to put their thumb on the scales to help already privileged children — or allow their families to make a donation that buys a second thumb to press on the scales?

The student journalists of The Harvard Crimson editorialized: “Legacy preference is, in the simplest terms, wrong. It takes opportunities from those with less and turns them over to those who have more.”

Ivy Leagu subsidies, tax breaks and government payments. $41.59B ! fom 2010-2015.

“It’s Just Incredible What Some People Can Believe”

Nathan Robinson:

There are so many bad opinions crammed into this single Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yale professor David Gelertner that I cannot hope to address them within the finite period of a human lifespan. Primarily, Gelertner argues that hatred of Donald Trump is hatred of America. Here is a large chunk of the op-ed for you to read and enjoy with me:

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared. The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten. For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful. Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of… In truth they are dumb as sheep. Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is… He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones. [T]he Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

My God! Where does one start? I suppose it’s futile to insist that despite writing a book on what a loathsome person Donald Trump is, I do not, in fact, hate America. Or to point out that there are many people who dislike Trump and go to church. Or to show that there’s no such thing as having your “only ideology” be “getting the job done,” because everything depends on which job you choose to do. Or to note that there are many extremely valid reasons to be horrified by Trump, like his intentionally malicious immigration policies and his deadly and irresponsible rejection of climate science. Or to deconstruct this idea of the “average American,” who always seems to be a goddamn farmer. (Besides, there are countless farmers, machinists, and factory hands who also think the president is a cruel and stupid man.) Perhaps I might note that I like vulgarity and bluntness, mistrust intellectuals, and enjoy Simple Ideas That Work. (Though I do find “American Exceptionalism” to be a downright silly notion. The only respect in which America is exceptional is that it is exceptionally convinced of its own exceptionalism.)

Civics: Nothing to declare: Why U.S. border agency’s vast stop and search powers undermine press freedom

CPJ:

Secondary screenings of journalists crossing U.S. borders risk undermining press freedom as Custom and Border Protection agents search devices such as laptops or phones without warrant and question journalists about their reporting and contacts. As the government ramps up searches of electronic devices, rights groups mount legal challenges to fight invasive searches. A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Madison School Board proposal would reduce public speaking time limit in certain cases

Logan Wroge:

A proposed change to the Madison School Board’s policy governing public testimony would reduce the time limit individuals have at the podium when more than 20 people intend to speak.

Currently, speakers are given up to three minutes to speak at School Board meetings, work groups and committee meetings when a public hearing is noticed. The revised policy would still allow people three minutes, unless more than 20 people have registered to speak. In that case, each person would be granted two minutes.

Those requiring an interpreter are allowed six minutes to speak, so the proposal would grant them four minutes at the microphone if more than 20 people are registered.

Two Madison schools held an active shooter drill and students and staff didn’t know it was a drill

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Principals at O’Keeffe Middle and Marquette Elementary schools are facing criticism after a Code Red drill — a procedure designed to help students and staff prepare for threats such as a school shooting — was not conducted in accordance with Madison School District guidelines.

At both O’Keeffe and Marquette, teachers and students did not know a drill was taking place when it happened on Oct. 17, according to Liz Merfeld, the district’s communications coordinator.

Unannounced drills are counter to guidelines that say participants should be notified of a drill before it begins. As a result, some students and teachers thought it was an active threat situation.

Jodi Vander Molen, whose daughter is a third-grade student at Marquette, penned a letter to the principals of both schools, the School Board and Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham criticizing the drill. It was signed by 26 parents and community members.

“Creating a false sense of trauma in staff and students for the sake of ‘making it seem real’ or in order to have people ‘take it seriously’ is wholly counterproductive and extremely irresponsible from a basic trauma-informed perspective,” the letter stated.

“Stress Hormone” Cortisol Linked to Early Toll on Thinking Ability”

Karen Weintraub:

The stresses of everyday life may start taking a toll on the brain in relatively early middle age, new research shows. The study of more than 2,000 people, most of them in their 40s, found those with the highest levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol performed worse on tests of memory, organization, visual perception and attention.

Higher cortisol levels, measured in subjects’ blood, were also found to be associated with physical changes in the brain that are often seen as precursors to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, according to the study published Wednesday in Neurology.

The link between high cortisol levels and low performance was particularly strong for women, the study found. But it remains unclear whether women in midlife are under more stress than men or simply more likely to have their stress manifested in higher cortisol levels, says lead researcher Sudha Seshadri. A professor of neurology, she splits her time between Boston University and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where she is the founding director of the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases.

The Right Way to Protect America’s Innovation Advantage

Lorand Laskai & Samm Sacks:

As the U.S.-Chinese trade war rages on, a broader conflict is brewing between the two countries over which will secure the upper hand in technological innovation. In a speech at the Hudson Institute earlier this month, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence suggested that Beijing is combining unfair trade practices with aggressive influence campaigns, the systematic theft of foreign intellectual property, and heavy-handed support for domestic industries, all with the aim of developing a long-term technological and strategic advantage. Pence’s speech signaled that the endgame to the Trump administration’s China strategy is not a trade deal but rather the decoupling of the U.S. technology sector from its Chinese equivalent in order to preserve the United States’ technological edge.

The Trump administration is right to be concerned, but it is preparing for the wrong kind of technological competition with China. Despite loose talk of a new “tech cold war,” the United States and China are far more integrated than the administration appreciates. As the two leading tech economies, they make up an innovation ecosystem that requires cooperation when it comes to research, supply chains, talent, and investment in the latest technologies. Any attempt to separate the two technology sectors by force would prove counterproductive at best and devastating at worst. This simultaneously competitive and interdependent relationship warrants a completely different strategy—one that exploits the benefits of collaboration while strengthening the United States’ ability to compete.

Commentary on Wisconsin K-12 Governance and the November, 2018 Election

<a href=”https://madison.com/ct/news/local/education/democratic-legislators-look-to-make-big-changes-to-state-education/article_882a0ddd-3671-5769-b969-dd9d2bc795db.html”>Negassi Tesfamichael</a>:

<blockquote> Many local Democratic state legislators say much of the future of K-12 education in Wisconsin depends on the outcome of the Nov. 6 election, particularly the gubernatorial race between state superintendent Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Legislators spoke at a forum at Christ Presbyterian Church Wednesday night, stressing mainly to an older crowd that their signature education initiatives, including restoring collective bargaining rights for public schoolteachers and making significant changes to the state Legislature’s school funding formula, rest on the election outcome.

“As far as Republicans we can work with, we try to talk to Republicans every time we’re there and we’re not successful yet,” said state Rep. Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton. “November is coming.”

Wednesday’s event was sponsored by the group <a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Grandparents+for+Madison+Public+Schools”>Grandparents for Madison Public Schools</a>, <a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Madison+teachers+inc”>Madison Teachers Inc</a>. and the <a href=”https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wisconsin+public+education+network&t=brave&ia=web”>Wisconsin Public Education Network</a>

</blockquote>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; caret-color: rgb(43, 43, 43); color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”>Madison, despite<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span><a href=”https://mmsdbudget.wordpress.com/” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>spending far more than most,</a><a href=”https://mmsdbudget.wordpress.com/” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”><span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span></a>has tolerated<span class=”Apple-converted-space” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”> </span><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2013/03/31/reading_recover_3/” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>long term, disastrous reading results.</a></p>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; caret-color: rgb(43, 43, 43); color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”>Tony Evers,<span class=”Apple-converted-space” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”> </span><a href=”https://www.tonyevers.com/” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>currently runnng for Governor</a>, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction<span class=”Apple-converted-space” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”> </span><a href=”https://dpi.wi.gov/statesupt/about” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>since 2009</a>. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?</p>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; caret-color: rgb(43, 43, 43); color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”>The<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Foundations+of+reading” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>Wisconsin DPI has aborted our one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements: “Foundations of Reading”</a><span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span>for elementary teachers.<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Mtel” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>Massachusetts’ MTEL</a><span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span>substantially raised the teacher content knowledge bar, leading to their top public school rank.</p>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; caret-color: rgb(43, 43, 43); color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”>An<span class=”Apple-converted-space” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”> </span><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=An+emphasis+on+adult+employment” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>emphasis on adult employment</a>, also<span class=”Apple-converted-space” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”> </span><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2009/08/the_madison_sch_4.php” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>Zimman</a>.</p>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; caret-color: rgb(43, 43, 43); color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”><a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2018/06/01/i-didnt-have-one-phone-call-i-dont-have-one-email-about-this-naep-data/” style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 60, 117); text-decoration: underline”>Alan Borsuk</a>:</p>

<blockquote style=”border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 19px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; -webkit-hyphens: none; quotes: none; color: rgb(118, 118, 118); line-height: 1.2631578947; font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none”>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 19px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”>“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …</p>

<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 19px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline”>“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?</p>

</blockquote>

Racial Disparities in Student Debt and the Reproduction of the Fragile Black Middle Class

Jason N. Houle, Fenaba R. Addo:

A nascent literature recognizes that student loan debt is racialized and disproportionately affects youth of color, especially black youth. In this study, the authors expand on this research and ask whether black-white disparities in student debt persist, decline, or increase across the early adult life course, examine possible mechanisms for changes in racial disparities in student debt across early adulthood, and ask whether racial disparities in student debt contribute to black-white wealth inequality among a recent cohort of college-going young adults. The authors address these questions using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, multilevel growth curve models, and linear decomposition methods. There are three findings. First, black-white disparities in debt increase across the early adult life course, and previous research underestimated racial disparities in debt. Second, growth in this racial disparity is partially explained by differences in the social background, postsecondary experiences, and disparities in attained social and economic status of black and white young adults. As a result, the authors find that, compositionally, racial inequalities in student debt account for a substantial minority of the black-white wealth gap in early adulthood and that this contribution increases across the early adult life course. The authors conclude that debt trajectories are more informative than point-in-time estimates and that student debt may be a new mechanism of wealth inequality that creates fragility in the next generation of the black middle class.

Chinese Universities Give ‘Lazy’ Students Rude Awakening

Ding Jie, Wan Xiaotian and Tang Ziyi:

Last week, 18 students at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Central China’s Hubei province didn’t have enough credits to graduate. Instead, they received certificates from a less prestigious polytechnic program, comparable to a degree from a community college in the U.S.
The news went viral on social media in China, where it is rare to see university students struggle so much. The average rate of students who fail to finish their degree courses at top-ranked universities in China is around 5%, compared to 20% in Ivy League schools in the U.S., said Zhang Duanhong, associate professor in Tongji University’s Higher Education Research Institute.
The Chinese government has long promoted higher education, but it has loose restrictions on graduation. Ever since China’s Ministry of Education reformed the admissions system to encourage more enrollment in 1998, the number of undergraduates has surged from less than 7 million to 30 million.

Quantum computers will break the encryption that protects the internet

The Economist:

Factorising numbers into their constituent primes may sound esoteric, but the one-way nature of the problem—and of some other, closely related mathematical tasks—is the foundation on which much modern encryption rests. Such encryption has plenty of uses. It defends state secrets, and the corporate sort. It protects financial flows and medical records. And it makes the $2trn e-commerce industry possible. Without it, credit-card details, bank transfers, emails and the like would zip around the internet unprotected, for anyone so minded to see or steal.

Nobody, however, is certain that the foundation of all this is sound. Though mathematicians have found no quick way to solve the prime-factors problem, neither have they proved that there isn’t one. In theory, any of the world’s millions of professional or amateur mathematicians could have a stroke of inspiration tomorrow and publish a formula that unravels internet cryptography—and most internet commerce with it.

International Affairs: Survival Kit for Small and Medium-Sized Universities and Colleges

Alex Parnia:

The future looks very bleak for many small and medium-sized colleges and universities in the U.S. According to a report published in Inside Higher Education, the high school graduation rate is expected to drop over the next seven years, and the numbers are aggravated by up to 4.5 million fewer babies being born since the financial crisis of 2008.

U.S. colleges and universities can no longer meet their operational budgets and can finance expansion only by continuing to increase tuition, which is not sustainable. Furthermore, colleges and universities have poured millions of dollars into marketing and advertising in the past 15 years, which has fueled massive competition to attract domestic students; these initiatives have resulted in stiff competition for market share in different regions of the country. Adding insult to injury, Clayton Christensen, the Harvard guru on disruptive innovation, predicts that 50% of American colleges and universities will close within the next 10 years. Amid all the gloom and doom, though, there is one strategic opportunity for small to medium-sized universities: incorporating carefully designed international student recruitment into the overall recruitment plan for the next five to seven years.

Education Minister: Foreign students a threat to academic independence

Michael Koziol:

“But we are increasingly finding ourselves in a situation where any type of constructive criticism of these countries within universities is met with howls of outrage from student bodies that are funded by and affiliated with foreign governments.”

International students are coming to Australia in record numbers, making education the country’s third largest export. In Sydney, enrolments surged by 50 per cent more in the past two years than in the preceding decade, and income from the lucrative students accounts for a quarter of all university revenue in NSW.

Another technological tragedy

:

I had believed such a catastrophe was all but impossible. The natural gas industry has many troubles, including chronic leaks that release millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere, but I had thought that pressure regulation was a solved problem. Even if someone turned the wrong valve, failsafe mechanisms would protect the public. Evidently not. (I am not an expert on natural gas. While working on my book Infrastructure, I did some research on the industry and the technology, toured a pipeline terminal, and spent a day with a utility crew installing new gas mains in my own neighborhood. The pages of the book that discuss natural gas are online here.)

The hazards of gas service were already well known in the 19th century, when many cities built their first gas distribution systems. Gas in those days was not “natural” gas; it was a product manufactured by roasting coal, or sometimes the tarry residue of petroleum refining, in an atmosphere depleted of oxygen. The result was a mixture of gases, including methane and other hydrocarbons but also a significant amount of carbon monoxide. Because of the CO content, leaks could be deadly even if the gas didn’t catch fire.

Every city needed its own gasworks, because there were no long-distance pipelines. The output of the plant was accumulated in a gasholder, a gigantic tank that confined the gas at low pressure—less than one pound per square inch above atmospheric pressure (a unit of measure known as pounds per square inch gauge, or psig). The gas was gently wafted through pipes laid under the street to reach homes at a pressure of 1/4 or 1/2 psig. Overpressure accidents were unlikely because the entire system worked at the same modest pressure. As a matter of fact, the greater risk was underpressure. If the flow of gas was interrupted even briefly, thousands of pilot lights would go out; then, when the flow resumed, unburned toxic gas would seep into homes. Utility companies worked hard to ensure that would never happen.

At Trial, Harvard’s Asian Problem and a Preference for White Students from “Sparse Country”

Jeannie Suk Gersen:

Nearly a century ago, Harvard College moved away from admitting students based solely on measures of academic performance. In the nineteen-twenties, the concept of diversity in admissions arose in response to the fear of being overrun by Jewish students, who were considered strong on academic metrics but lacking in qualities of character and personality. As the proportion of Jews threatened to exceed a quarter of each class, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body. Other Harvard officials balked at such overt discrimination, believing it to be inconsistent with Harvard’s liberal tradition, and, instead, formulated a new, inclusive “policy of equal opportunity” that would lead to the same outcome as Lowell’s proposal. It introduced the consideration of qualitative factors such as personality and background, including “geographical diversity,” as part of the admissions process. Representing the diversity of the country meant recruiting and admitting more Midwestern and Southern students, who counterbalanced the droves of Jewish applicants from the Northeast. By the class of 1930, as a result of the new plan, Jewish students made up only ten per cent of Harvard’s undergraduates.

That Harvard plan developed into a holistic admissions process, which has, for decades, expanded the notion of diversity beyond geography. The aspiration to assemble a class that is diverse in myriad ways, and the practice of considering many factors alongside academic accomplishment, among them personal qualities and racial background, became influential at many institutions that saw themselves as responsible for socially engineering the American élite. The Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, hailed the Harvard admissions program as an exemplar of legally permissible affirmative action, in which race is one factor among many taken into consideration in college admissions. According to Harvard’s amicus brief, quoted extensively in Bakke, “the race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

The Party of the University

Rita Koganzon:

But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed.

Gray’s almost unswervingly positive accounts of the faculty and administrators at every institution, even those which slighted her in ways that would today inspire national protest campaigns, are especially striking. By contemporary standards, Gray has pretty good cause for resentment. She is a Jew (at least by the expansive Nazi definition) who fled Germany with her family in 1934, she was a female academic in the 1950s and ’60s, and she is a multiple winner of the “first woman” prize for holding major administrative positions at American universities. She should have a list of grievances long enough to constitute a book of its own, but there is hardly a trace of bitterness in her account, and indeed, a surprising gratitude instead, even toward institutions that were expressly hostile to her—like Harvard, where women were prohibited from entering the college library and made to enter department meetings through a side door. Gray did not protest any of this, but she ended up occupying buildings in a different and more consequential way, namely by governing many of these institutions and overseeing the reversal of discriminatory policies.

Early childhood education yields big benefits — just not the ones you think

Kelsey Piper:

There’s a bizarre-seeming paradox sitting at the heart of research into early childhood education. On the one hand, there’s a sizable body of research suggesting that kids who go through intensive education at the ages of 3 and 4 don’t really come out ahead in terms of academic abilities. By kindergarten much of their advantage has receded, and by second grade researchers typically can’t detect it at all.

On the other hand, there’s an equally substantive body of research suggesting that early childhood education produces a profound, lifelong advantage. Kids who enter intensive preschool programs are less likely to be arrested, more likely to graduate, and less likely to struggle with substance abuse as adults. One study with a followup when the students were in their mid-30s found that they were likelier to have eventually attended and completed college.

This is an area where research is fiercely debated — and really important. In 2017, the US spent $9 billion on Head Start, the flagship early childhood education program launched in the 1970s. If one set of studies is wrong, that has profound implications for how we should be spending that money instead.

Paul Volcker, at 91, Sees ‘a Hell of a Mess in Every Direction’; “our educational system has been perverted by money”

Adrew Ross Sorkin:

But things have changed. Today, he said, Washington is overrun by lobbyists and think tanks. Mr. Volcker, who started a nonprofit to improve education for public service, contends that our educational system has been perverted by money.

Schools like the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, he said, have failed to educate a new generation of civil servants. He said they no longer taught governing but policy — a shift that he contended allowed them to hold forums and discussions with generals and under secretaries.

“Rich guys,” he said, “like to go.” He called it “hobnobbing wholesale.”

“They can argue war and peace and poverty and everything else,” he said. “But when you go to a school of public policy, you’re not learning how to run the goddamn government. You’re learning how to debate political issues.”

China’s 1st private university inaugurated, borrows fundraising model from Harvard, Yale

Zhang Han:

China’s first private research university was officially inaugurated in Hangzhou on Saturday in a move that Chinese experts said would push forward national higher-education reform.

Five Nobel laureates including physicist Chen-Ning Yang and more than 70 representatives of domestic and overseas universities attended the founding ceremony of Westlake University in Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang Province.

Westlake has 68 research group leaders, 139 students under joint supervision at the top Chinese institutes of Fudan University and Zhejiang University and 159 key researchers, according to the school’s website.

Schools of natural science, engineering and life sciences are located on a campus that can hold 120 independent laboratories and 2,000 research fellows.

As U.S. fertility rates collapse, finger-pointing and blame follow

Ariana Eunjung Cha:

As 2017 drew to a close, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) urged Americans to have more children. To keep the country great, he said, we’re “going to need more people.”

“I did my part,” the father of three declared.

Ryan’s remarks drew some eye rolls at the time, but as new data about the country’s collapsing fertility rates has emerged, concern has deepened over what’s causing the changes, whether it constitutes a crisis that will fundamentally change the demographic trajectory of the country — and what should be done about it.

Women are now having fewer babies and at older ages than in the past three decades, a change that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported this year, and which was confirmed this week with the release of additional data that shows that the trend holds across races and for urban and rural areas.

Harvard Cites Weaker Teacher Recommendations for Asian-American Applicants

Melissa Korn and Nicole Hong:

Harvard’s admissions dean testified Tuesday that weaker teacher and guidance-counselor recommendations are one reason why Asian-American applicants as a group score lower than white applicants in the “personal rating” portion of the school’s admissions process.

The rating, which assesses an applicant’s personal qualities, has been a central focus for the plaintiffs in a trial that began Monday accusing Harvard of intentionally discriminating against Asian-Americans. Harvard’s own data show Asian-American applicants as a group score higher than white applicants in academics and extracurriculars, but lower in the personal rating.

William Fitzsimmons, who has been Harvard’s admissions dean since 1986, said in federal court Tuesday that the lower rating wasn’t due to Asian-American applicants having fewer attractive personal qualities than white applicants. He said one reason for the gap could be due to “somewhat stronger” teacher and guidance-counselor recommendations given to white applicants.

He said he didn’t know if Asian-American applicants had weaker recommendations than African-American or Hispanic applicants. The plaintiffs say Asian-Americans have the lowest personal scores of any racial group.

Art & Spirit in Mathematics: The Lessons of Japanese Temple Geometry (part I)

Newcomb Greenleaf:

Imagine for a moment being in a church where mathematics groups meet regularly to solve geometry problems and to pose new ones, to learn new tools for solving intractable ones, and to celebrate beauty that is intellectual, artistic, and spiritual. It may be hard for you to imagine, for mathematics plays such a different role in our culture. We have to enlarge our understanding of mathematics to admit such a possibility, which is one reason why it is so interesting to study Japanese Temple Geometry (JTG). JTG was a sophisticated mathematics whose development, from the 17th to the 19th century, was centered in Zen and Shinto temples, during the period when Japan had closed its borders to Western influence. As an ethnomathematician trained in mathematics, I have come to believe that mathematics is profoundly influenced by culture. Through this realization (and others), I have lost the dualist faith in the transcendental and absolute nature of mathematics into which I was socialized as a student.

The example of JTG might free us to look at mathematics with more than our logical minds, and see in it aesthetic dimensions of beauty, and spiritual dimensions of deep meaning. We’ll move from the general to the particular. Part I is a historical sketch of JTG with musings on what we can learn from its example. We’ll see how math can develop in other ways, and how such differences can even impact issues of war and peace. Part II takes a close look at three Temple Geometry problems, in an unusual context, meant to encourage you to approach them open to resonances beyond the disembodied intellect of the math classroom. Each problem is introduced through one or two slides from an art project that has occupied me over several years, now called: Japanese Temple Geometry on Beautiful Trees. The art slides are followed by presentations of the problem and of its solution. My hope is that the aesthetic-spiritual dimensions will not get lost if and when you dig into the math.

Chill and fear in classroom as students are recruited to report teachers with ‘radical’ opinions

Mimi Lau / Guo Rui:

Outspoken teachers are treading on thin ice as a battle over political ideology intensifies on mainland Chinese campuses where students are being mobilised to monitor and report “radical” political views.

In the past three months, several professors and schoolteachers have been sacked or disciplined for “out of line” opinions.

The firings have raised concerns among education experts over what they described as a worsening trend of “stifling classroom free speech” that could lead to a lack of critical thinking in education.

Liang Xin, a teacher for more than 10 years at a top secondary school in eastern China, is among the educators affected. Last year, the popular teacher was demoted to school janitor after one of his own students turned on him.

Extreme Botany: The Precarious Science of Endangered Rare Plants

Janet Marinelli:

To save plants that can no longer survive on their own, Steve Perlman has bushwhacked through remote valleys, dangled from helicopters, and teetered on the edge of towering sea cliffs. Watching a video of the self-described “extreme botanist” in actio­­n is not for the faint-hearted. “Each time I make this journey I’m aware that nature can turn on me,” Perlman says in the video as he battles ocean swells in a kayak to reach the few remaining members of a critically endangered species on a rugged, isolated stretch of Hawaiian coastline. “The ocean could suddenly rise up and dash me against the rocks like a piece of driftwood.”

When he arrives at his destination, Perlman starts hauling himself up an impossibly steep, razor-sharp cliff 3,000 feet above the sea without a rope, his fingers sending chunks of rock tumbling down to the waters below. Finally, he reaches the plants and painstakingly transfers pollen from the flowers of one to those of another to ensure that the species can perpetuate itself. At the end of the season, he will return to collect any seeds they were able to produce.

Among the plants for which Perlman, a rock-star botanist with the University of Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program, has repeatedly risked his life is Brighamia insignis, better known as cabbage-on-a-stick. One of the strangest-looking species in the Hawaiian flora, with a thick, swollen stem crowned by a rosette of fleshy leaves resembling a head of cabbage, it typically reaches 3 to 6 feet high but has been known to grow up to 16 feet tall. The plant once dotted seaside precipices on two Hawaiian islands, including the spectacular fluted cliffs of Kauai’s Nā Pali coast. But feral goats, rats, and invasive weeds brought to the islands by Polynesians and, later, Europeans decimated the species. What’s more, by the 1970s scientists had come to suspect that it had lost the large moth that they believe once fertilized its fragrant, creamy yellow, trumpet-shaped flowers. Without its pollinator, the plant was unable to produce seeds and its future in the wild was doomed. Had Perlman not come to the rescue, the plant would have faced almost certain extinction.

ACT Scores Show Drop in College Readiness, Especially in Math

Tawnell Hobbs:

A greater percentage of U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam aren’t ready for college-level coursework, with math readiness at a 14-year low.

ACT on Wednesday released its annual report, the Condition of College and Career Readiness, that shows only 40% of 2018 graduates taking the ACT met a benchmark indicating they could succeed in a first-year college algebra class. That is down from 41% last year and a high of 46% in 2012.

The percentage of students meeting college-ready benchmarks dropped slightly in all subjects tested—English, math, reading and science.

“Math specifically concerns me in a society that’s becoming more and more technological,” said ACT Chief Executive Marten Roorda. “The economy needs more students with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education, and good math skills are vital to the STEM orientation. There is a high risk for the U.S. economy coming to a slowdown or a standstill.”

The Real Cost of College Is Flattening as Schools Give More Scholarships

Douglas Belkin:

“The trends in college financing have changed in recent years,” Sandy Baum, co-author of the 2018 Trends in Higher Education report, said in a statement. Tuition rose rapidly during the four academic years between fall 2007 and spring 2011, “particularly at public colleges and universities,” Ms. Baum said. “Federal expenditures on student aid increased dramatically, helping a growing student population to finance their education. At the same time, students borrowed more and more.”

But since 2010-11, she said, “all of these trends have reversed.”

The average net cost of a year at a four-year public college or university, including tuition, fees, room and board, fell to $14,880 in 2018–19, down slightly from $14,910 in 2017–18 and just $90 more than in 2016-17. By comparison, between 2008-09 and 2015-16 the net cost increased 25%, or $2,840, in inflation adjusted dollars, according to the report.

The net price for four-year private schools was $27,290, up 0.5% from $27,160 last year. Those figures are based on 2018-19 tuition rates but prior-year financial-aid figures, and will be revised once financial-aid and tax data are released for the current school year.

Net costs are flattening or falling thanks to a rise in grants—student aid that doesn’t need to be repaid. Grants and tax benefits at private schools climbed to $21,220 on average this year, up from $13,860 in 2008 (adjusted to 2018 dollars). At public institutions they rose to $6,490 this year from $4,970 in 2008.

Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind

Brigit Katz:

Research has already suggested that opening a book may help improve brain function, reduce stress, and even make us more empathetic. Now, a team led by Joanna Sikora of the Australian National University is looking into the benefits of growing up around a book-filled environment; as Alison Flood of the Guardian reports, the researchers’ expansive new study suggests that homes with ample libraries can arm children with skills that persist into adulthood.

The study, published recently in Social Science Research, assessed data from 160,000 adults from 31 countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Turkey, Japan and Chile. Participants filled out surveys with the Programme for the International Assessment of Competencies, which measures proficiency in three categories: literacy, numeracy (using mathematical concepts in everyday life) and information communication technology, (using digital technology to communicate with other people, and to gather and analyze information).

Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how many books were in their house when they were 16 years old. The research team was interested in this question because home library size can be a good indicator of what the study authors term “book-oriented socialization.” Participants were able to select from a given range of books that included everything from “10 or less” to “more than 500.”

Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow

Antonia Noori Farzan:

Monday’s announcement that Sears would file for bankruptcy and close 142 stores came as little surprise to anyone who has followed the retail giant’s collapse in recent years. Still, the news inspired a wave of nostalgia for a company that sold an ideal of middle-class life to generations of Americans.

A lesser-known aspect of Sears’s 125-year history, however, is how the company revolutionized rural black Southerners’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century, subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.

“What most people don’t know is just how radical the catalogue was in the era of Jim Crow,” Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, wrote in a Twitter thread that was shared more than 7,000 times Monday in the wake of the news of Sears’s demise. By allowing African Americans in Southern states to avoid price gouging and condescending treatment at their local stores, he wrote, the catalogue “undermined white supremacy in the rural South.”

Law School Grads Reach a New Low on Mass. Bar Exam:

Greg Ryan:

early one in three aspiring lawyers who took the Massachusetts bar examination this summer failed the test, the highest failure rate in the Bay State this century.

Only 69.2 percent of test-takers passed the bar exam in July, according to statistics posted by the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners on Monday. The previous low for the July exam this century — 70.9 percent — occurred in 2016.

Facebook’s ex-security chief will start a new center to bring Washington and Silicon Valley together

Nick Statt:

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s ex-chief security officer, thinks his former home at the heart of Silicon Valley is ill equipped to address the world’s most pressing digital problems, namely security, user privacy, and the protection of democratic institutions. To address this, and perhaps help ease the tensions between Washington and the tech industry while pulling in more academic and research experts, Stamos is launching a new institute he’s calling the Stanford Internet Observatory.

The former exec, who left Facebook for the world of academia in August and has earned a reputation for being outspoken and frank about the issues facing the industry, plans to formally announce the institute later today with a speech at Stanford. News of Stamos’ plans was first reported earlier today by The Washington Post.

“There aren’t processes to thoughtfully think through these trade-offs,” Stamos told The Post in an interview ahead of his planned speech, which is set to take place later today at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. “You end up with these for-profit, very powerful organizations that are not democratically accountable, making decisions that are in their best and often short-term interest … without there being a much more open and democratic discussion of what these issues are.”

Civics and Privacy: Breaking US Encryption: The Australian Test Case

Justin Clarke:

A bill currently before the Australian Federal Parliament doesn’t seek to defeat encryption and enable Government to more easily spy on civilians. It just requests or compels ‘communications providers’ to do ‘acts or things’ to make spying easier.

How do you more easily access encrypted communications (largely provided by US companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook) without breaking encryption?

Apparently no-one knows, but hidden in plain sight is a clue.

The Australian Federal Government is attempting to rush through a bill – The Assistance and Access Bill 2018 – which seeks to empower law enforcement and national security agencies to request or compel ‘designated communications providers’ to do a range of ‘acts or things’ to provide technical assistance to these agencies.

Who are designated communications providers? Any global company providing communications services directly, or as part of the global supply chain, according to the Australian Human Rights Commision (AHRC) submission[1]:

School Districts Use Projected Tax Cuts To Hide Huge Referendum Tax Hikes

Bill Osmulski:

Homeowners in 148 school districts across Wisconsin will be getting an unexpected tax cut next year, but many of those districts would prefer to keep that a secret – and backfill those savings with new spending.
It will be decades before the savings justify the expense – which was considerable. Last year alone, districts collected an additional $92.3 million through the Energy Efficiency Exemption.

The reason for the tax cut is the termination of the Energy Efficiency Exemption (EEE). This loophole allowed school districts to raise taxes for supposed energy efficiency projects without going to referendum.

The energy savings on many of these projects is negligible. It will be decades before the savings justify the expense – which was considerable. Last year alone, districts collected an additional $92.3 million through the EEE. With the program eliminated, property taxes in those 148 school districts will automatically drop $92.3 million.

However, 21 of those districts see this as an opportunity to downplay the true tax impact of their referendums on next month’s ballot. For example, the Hartford J1 School District has a referendum for $5.5 million. According to the district’s website, “If the referendum is approved, there would be no impact on current school tax rates over the life of the 15-year borrowing term.”

Southern Door County Schools has a $6,270,000 building referendum that “would not increase your taxes over current levels.”

Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance McGill University University of Toronto McGill University

Dominique Morisano, Jacob B. Hirsh, Jordan B. Peterson, Robert O. Pihl and Bruce M. Shore :

Of students who enroll in 4-year universities, 25% never finish. Precipitating causes of early departure include poor academic progress and lack of clear goals and motivation. In the present study, we investigated whether an intensive, online, written, goal-setting program for struggling students would have positive effects on academic achievement. Students (N ? 85) experiencing academic difficulty were recruited to participate in a randomized, controlled intervention. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 intervention groups: Half completed the goal-setting program, and half completed a control task with intervention-quality face validity. After a 4-month period, students who completed the goal-setting intervention displayed significant improvements in academic performance compared with the control group. The goal-setting program thus appears to be a quick, effective, and inexpensive intervention for struggling undergraduate students.

“What is required is an articulate commitment by universities to open discourses and the environment of intellectual challenge that comes with it.”

Robert J. Zimmer:

Over the last several years, the debate over free speech on college and university campuses has become the dominant issue facing higher education. Reports of the implementation of university speech codes and trigger warning policies, commencement speaker “dis-invitations,” and protests, many of them violent, over the views expressed by faculty or invited speakers have ignited fierce controversy from both the right and the left.

Robert J. Zimmer, Ph.D., President of The University of Chicago, has emerged as a leading voice advocating for the freedom of speech and academic freedom on college and university campuses. In 2015, The University of Chicago released its “Report of the Committee on the Free of Expression” arguing that the “fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” This report, now known as “the Chicago Statement,” has been adopted by 35 colleges and universities.

In October 2017, The New York Times penned an op-ed praising Zimmer’s efforts and calling him “the most essential voice in American academia today.” Earlier this year, a Wall Street Journal op-ed dubbed The University of Chicago “the free-speech university.”

More, here.

The cheapest electrical engineering degree in the world?

Hacker News:

Are you just interested in the lowest up front cost in dollars? I went to the US Military Academy. Tuition, room and board are free, you get a small stipend each month and you have a guaranteed job at graduation. You pay for school with 5 years of service as an Army officer. I was a Mechanical Engineering major, but they have a decent EECS department also. The military academies have an interesting setup where they are officially an engineering school, and everyone, even the history or law majors have to take an “engineering track”. The engineering majors also have more humanities courses than their peers at most schools.

I’d be interested in a comparison of your earnings over those five years of service compared to the median income for the first five years after graduating from public/private/Top-10 schools. I still think you’d be getting the best deal overall but the community college + state school route may seem more competitive in terms of cost after factoring in the relatively low pay of O1-O3s.

Incarcerated Pennsylvanians now have to pay $150 to read. We should all be outraged.

Jodi Lincoln:

Every year, thousands of people in Pennsylvania prisons write directly to nonprofit organizations such as the one I co-chair with a request for reading material, which we then send to them at no cost. This free access to books has dramatically improved the lives of incarcerated individuals, offering immense emotional and mental relief as well as a key source of rehabilitation.

But as of last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has decided to make such rehabilitation much harder. Going forward, books and publications, including legal primers and prison newsletters, cannot be sent directly to incarcerated Pennsylvanians. Instead, if they want access to a book, they must first come up with $147 to purchase a tablet and then pay a private company for electronic versions of their reading material — but only if it’s available among the 8,500 titles offered to them through this new e-book system.

In case you forgot: Incarcerated people are paid less than $1 per hour, and the criminal-justice system disproportionately locks up low-income individuals. Adding insult to injury, most of the e-books available to them for purchase would be available free from Project Gutenberg. And nonpublic domain books in Pennsylvania’s e-book system are more expensive than on other e-book markets.

We Cannot Avoid the Ugly Tradeoffs of Bail Reform

Alex Tabarrok:

Many people think that “innocent until proven guilty” implies that everyone should be let loose on their own recognizance before trial. A moment’s thought reveals that this is idiotic. The white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people on June 17, 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His image was captured on security cameras and he was arrested the next day. Roof’s trial, however, didn’t start until more than a year later, December 7, 2016, and he wasn’t convicted of anything until December 15, 2016. Should Roof have been released before trial because he was “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course not. I stand second to none in demanding high standards before the state can deprive a person of their liberty but high standards do not demand binary divisions. Tradeoffs are everywhere and when the evidence against the accused is strong and the danger to the public is high, it’s not unreasonable to deprive the legally innocent of some liberty prior to trial. The tradeoffs are ugly, as they always are when trading off two sacred values, but the tradeoffs cannot be avoided.

The tech giants, the US and the Chinese spy chips that never were… or were they?

John Naughton:

On 4 October, Bloomberg Businessweek published a major story under the headline “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate US Companies”. It claimed that Chinese spies had inserted a covert electronic backdoor into the hardware of computer servers used by 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple (and possibly also servers used by national security agencies), by compromising America’s technology supply chain.

According to the Bloomberg story, the technology had been compromised during the manufacturing process in China. Undercover operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army had inserted tiny chips – about the size of a grain of rice – into motherboards during the manufacturing process.

The affected hardware then made its way into high-end video-compression servers assembled by a San Jose company called Supermicro and deployed by major US companies and government agencies. According to the report, investigators found that the hack eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors and Apple, which had originally ordered 30,000 Supermicro servers in 2015 but had cancelled the order after its own investigators had found malicious chips on the company’s motherboards.

Miseducation Is There Racial Inequality at Your School? School districts where White students are more likely to be in an Advanced Placement class or gifted and talented program, compared with Black students.

Lena V. Groeger, Annie Waldman and David Eads:

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts

In Madison, White students are 3.5 times as likely to be enrolled in at least one AP class as Black students.

2006: They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

A majority of the Madison School board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

The Pentagon’s Push to Program Soldiers’ Brains

Michael Joseph Gross:

His speech then took a turn: “Now, we’ve had a lot of interesting tools over the years, but fundamentally the way that we work with those tools is through our bodies.” Then a further turn: “Here’s a situation that I know all of you know very well—your frustration with your smartphones, right? This is another tool, right? And we are still communicating with these tools through our bodies.”

And then it made a leap: “I would claim to you that these tools are not so smart. And maybe one of the reasons why they’re not so smart is because they’re not connected to our brains. Maybe if we could hook those devices into our brains, they could have some idea of what our goals are, what our intent is, and what our frustration is.”

So began “Beyond Bionics,” a talk by Justin C. Sanchez, then an associate professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at the University of Miami, and a faculty member of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. He was speaking at a tedx conference in Florida in 2012. What lies beyond bionics? Sanchez described his work as trying to “understand the neural code,” which would involve putting “very fine microwire electrodes”—the diameter of a human hair—“into the brain.” When we do that, he said, we would be able to “listen in to the music of the brain” and “listen in to what somebody’s motor intent might be” and get a glimpse of “your goals and your rewards” and then “start to understand how the brain encodes behavior.”

Mathematics as thought

Mordechai Levy-Eichel:

There are almost too many examples of the power and pervasiveness of mathematical ideas. For instance, this essay was written on a computer. The software of the computer, its mind and spirit, if you will, is a compilation of code that is based on the ideas of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, and his article ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948). But perhaps this is both too obvious and too slight an example. The personal computer is hardly an essential part of human existence, even if most of us have structured our lives around it today. Let’s take something more basic and widespread, something most of us probably already apprehend, even if only dimly – like the idea of regression to the mean.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, regression to the mean is ‘the tendency for the values of any distributed variable to move towards the mean over repeated independent trials’. In other words, the more trials, the less random or mistaken the measure. For instance, say you’re in a race at school. You do surprisingly well and beat most of your classmates. All things being equal, the next time around, you’re actually not likely to do as well, relative to the other runners. Obviously, one’s actual rank depends on skill and talent – if you did well the first time, you probably are pretty fast – but each result also depends on luck as well as a host of other circumstances. Therefore, in order to mitigate against any selection effect, one has to run the experiment multiple times. In order to be able to see just where you actually place or rank, you have to be able to know the shape or form of the distribution of outcomes. The notion of regression to the mean informs how we think about a wide range of things, from the design of clinical trials, to gambling, to, well, the prosaic pep-talks we give ourselves after coming up short by saying: ‘OK, next time will be better.’ Actually, it probably will be.

Using International Students As Cash Cows Does No One Any Favours

New Matilda:

Recent revelations in the Sydney Morning Herald that a number of international students at universities across New South Wales are ‘functionally illiterate’ and have submitted assignments written by ‘ghost writers’ is not exactly striking news, at least not for many university academics and administrators.

Despite all the institutional talk about ‘world class education’, ‘excellence’, ‘quality assurance’ and so forth, educators who mark assignments and engage with students in tutorials and online forums, are acutely aware of literacy problems that beset both international and domestic students.

Many of these problems can – at least in the case of Australian students – be traced back to the education they receive at school. Research by the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2013 clearly indicates a drop in levels of academic performance among Australian school children when compared to their counterparts in many Asian countries.

The Secrets of Getting Into Harvard Were Once Closely Guarded. That’s About to Change

Nicole Hong and Melissa Korn:

This year, 42,749 students applied to Harvard College, and only 1,962 were admitted. How Harvard decides who makes the cut has long been a mystery.

That’s about to change. A trial beginning Monday in Boston federal court will examine how the elite institution uses race to shape its student body. It will force Harvard to spill details about its admissions practices.

The case has transfixed the world of higher education—both for the peek it provides into a process cloaked in secrecy, and the prospect that the court decision will upend the admissions practices of other colleges as well.

A lawsuit accuses Harvard University of illegally discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard than students of other races. Harvard denies the accusation, saying race is just one of a complex matrix of factors it considers before handing out its coveted acceptances.

Harvard uses what it calls a holistic approach to admissions, considering not only an applicant’s academic record and test scores but also activities, formative experiences and personal attributes. The model is widely used by other top colleges.

Student turnover slows academic growth, but many states aren’t tracking the churn

Erin Richards:

Meticulous reports flow in on enrollment, attendance, test scores, dropout rates and college-entrance exam results. You can track students by race and income at every school and pull up each teacher’s salary and experience.

But no one is widely tracking a key group of students whose actions, experts say, may be thwarting efforts to improve education: Kids who move around a lot.

Academics call it student mobility. Most people know it as turnover, churn or transience. One Milwaukee principal calls them kangaroo kids: Where will they bounce to next?

All refer to students switching schools for reasons other than moving naturally to the next grade in a new building. Most are poor, and their disruptive movements can harm their own academic progress as well as the growth of their peers who stay put in high-churn schools.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors 2018

Chris Edwards:

The U.S. economy is in its 10th year of economic expansion, and state government budgets are benefiting from a solid growth in tax revenues. State general fund revenues have grown 40 percent since 2010. Many of the nation’s governors have used the growing revenues to expand spending programs, whereas others have pursued reductions in taxes.

That is the backdrop to this year’s 14th biennial fiscal report card on the governors, which examines state budget actions since 2016. It uses statistical data to grade the governors on their taxing and spending records — governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades, whereas those who have increased taxes and spending the most receive the lowest grades.

Five governors were awarded an A on this report: Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Paul LePage of Maine, and Greg Abbott of Texas. Eight governors were awarded an F: Roy Cooper of North Carolina, John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Jim Justice of West Virginia, Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota, David Ige of Hawaii, Kate Brown of Oregon, and Jay Inslee of Washington.

The Campus Diversity Swarm

Marl Pulliam:

By the time a homeowner discovers a termite infestation, chances are that the destructive pests have already caused serious structural damage. So it is with “campus diversity officers,” a category of academic bureaucrat that didn’t even exist until fairly recently. Within a short period, diversity apparatchiks have taken root on most college campuses, and in many cases expanded into sprawling bureaucracies with multimillion-dollar budgets. Diversity departments have become a common campus amenity, like gourmet dorm food, climbing walls, and lazy rivers. Unlike lavish recreational facilities for students, which turn college campuses into an expensive Club U, administrative bureaucracies breed inertia. With size and resources come power, and, in keeping with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, a continual quest for aggrandizement.

It’s no wonder, then, that campus diversity officers have already formed a rent-seeking trade association, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), complete with annual conferences, self-serving “standards for professional practice,” a political agenda, and—since this is academia, after all—a pseudo-scholarly publication, the quarterly Journal of Diversity in Higher Education (priced at $681 per year for institutions). A typical article is entitled “The Influence of Campus Climate and Urbanization on Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum Faculty Intent to Leave.” Hundreds of universities, public and private, large and small, are members of NADOHE, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. NADOHE finances its activities with hefty membership dues for institutions ($1,250 per year), while offering individual and student memberships at lower cost.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: With corruption like this, it’s no wonder so many pension funds are insolvent

Simon Black:

Last week, the head of a New York state pension fund found herself a new job.

Vicki Fuller, the former head of New York’s $209 billion fund, now earns $275,000 per year working part time for a natural gas group called The Williams Companies– good work if you can get it.

It’s noteworthy that when Ms. Fuller ran her state pension fund, she invested $110 million of taxpayer money to buy bonds issued by none other than The Williams Companies.

Bear in mind that Moody’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded Williams’ financial outlook to “negative” because of the company’s high leverage and risk.

The fund that Ms. Fuller managed also voted in favor of huge, multi-million dollar pay packages for senior executives of The Williams Companies even though the stock price was dropping.

So… gee… maybe it’s just a crazy coincidence that Ms. Fuller left her job at the state pension fund and took an extremely lucrative part-time job THE SAME WEEK with The Williams Companies.

Small Colleges Can Save Towns in Middle America

Noah Smith:

In 2016, economist Lyman Stone of the U.S. Department of Agriculture wrote one of the most important blog posts in recent history. It was promptly overlooked by almost everyone. But Stone’s post — a deep dive into the economics of the small town of Pikeville, Kentucky — shows the way forward for the U.S. economy and American society.

Pikeville, with about 7,000 people, is located deep in Appalachia near the West Virginia border — the same kind of poor, dying coal-mining region described in books like J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.” But as Stone shows, Pikeville has been bucking this well-known trend, with an increasing population and a thriving downtown. Why? Because of the University of Pikeville. The University of Pikeville has fewer than 3,000 students, and it won’t show up on many elite college applicants’ top 10 lists alongside Stanford and Harvard. But since the turn of the decade, this tiny school has been expanding dramatically:

How China’s biggest social network fights fake news

Xinmei Shen:

Here’s how the mini program works: The front page shows a feed of articles that have been debunked recently, with a search box at the top where you can search for terms and see if there are any debunked articles related to it.

The second section (“Related to Me”) compiles all the fake news articles that you have either read or shared. The last section shows the number of articles debunked and who the fact checkers are.

WeChat says that it already has more than 800 third-party fact checkers, including 289 institutions in the China Food and Drug Administration system, 5 state-level media and 32 local “cyber affair” offices. Other organizations can also apply to join the fact checkers, provided that they send relevant qualification documents to Tencent and already have a verified public WeChat account.

The mini program will also send you a notification on WeChat if an article you’ve read has been debunked. It claims to have 19.7 million users as of the end of 2017, and that it has debunked more than a million articles so far — and punished around 180,000 public accounts.

Civics: Leaked Transcript of Private Meeting Contradicts Google’s Official Story on China

Ryan Gallagher:

It was Wednesday, July 18, and Gomes was addressing a team of Google employees who were working on a secretive project to develop a censored search engine for China, which would blacklist phrases like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.”

“You have taken on something extremely important to the company,” Gomes declared, according to a transcript of his comments obtained by The Intercept. “I have to admit it has been a difficult journey. But I do think a very important and worthwhile one. And I wish ourselves the best of luck in actually reaching our destination as soon as possible.”

Gomes joked about the unpredictability of President Donald Trump and groaned about the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, which has slowed down Google’s negotiations with Communist Party officials in Beijing, whose approval Google requires to launch the censored search engine.

Gomes, who joined Google in 1999 and is one of the key engineers behind the company’s search engine, said he hoped the censored Chinese version of the platform could be launched within six and nine months, but it could be sooner. “This is a world none of us have ever lived in before,” he said. “So I feel like we shouldn’t put too much definite into the timeline.”

It has been two months since The Intercept first revealed details about the censored search engine, code-named Dragonfly. Since then, the project has faced a wave of criticism from human rights groups, Google employees, U.S. senators, and even Vice President Mike Pence, who on Thursday last week called on Google to “immediately end development of the Dragonfly app that will strengthen the Communist Party’s censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.”

Many taxpayer supported school districts, including Madison, utilize Google services.

Your IQ Matters less Than you think

Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach:

People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn’t become associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. That happened in 1916. The original motive behind these tests was to get a diagnostic to select children at the lower ends of the intelligence scale who might need special education to keep up with the school curriculum. But then Terman got a brilliant idea: Why not study a large sample of children who score at the top end of the scale? Better yet, why not keep track of these children as they pass into adolescence and adulthood? Would these intellectually gifted children grow up to become genius adults?

Terman subjected hundreds of school kids to his newfangled IQ test. Obviously, he didn’t want a sample so large that it would be impractical to follow their intellectual development. Taking the top 2 percent of the population would clearly yield a group twice as large as the top 1 percent. Moreover, a less select group might be less prone to become geniuses. So why not catch the crème de la crème?

The Total Censorship Era: Chinese Journalists Reflect on Their Experiences

Sophie Beach:

On September 9, Hong Kong-based Initium Media published a lengthy article by freelancer Jiang Yannan which included several oral accounts from journalists and media employees working in various publications and websites in China. In their interviews, they discuss the current state of journalism in China and how the increasing restrictions on the media under Xi Jinping are impacting their day-to-day work. These accounts provide valuable firsthand details about dealing with propaganda directives, sensitive words on internet platforms, and other forms of censorship that they face as a matter of routine. One interviewee asks, “Right now, the scariest thing is that we don’t know where the ‘bottom line’ is. In the end, how low will it go?”

Capitalism is becoming less competitive

The Economist:

Competition in America: Where capitalism has become far less healthy

AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

Conrad Bastable:

So long as the debt is there to fund it, or the surplus wages there to support it, the show will go on. This is the struggle of the middle class in America today. It’s not the only struggle in the country, nor even close to the worst one. There’s nobody behind it, no grim cabal to blame. But it is a struggle, and one that seems to evade stats and articulation and empathy and sympathy and an escape. The only enemy is your failure to beat the median quickly enough and by enough standard deviations.

Success only begins when you build enough wealth to pay for:

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Why the novel matters in the age of anger

Elif Shafak:

I was an only child raised by a divorced, working, well-educated, secularist, Westernised mother and an uneducated, spiritual, Eastern grandmother. Born in France, I moved to Turkey with my mother when my parents’ marriage came to an end. Although I was small when I left Strasbourg, I often think about our little flat and remember it as a place full of French, Italian, Turkish, Algerian, Lebanese leftist students who passionately discussed the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, read poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky and collectively dreamt about the Revolution. From there I was zoomed to my Grandma’s neighbourhood in Ankara – a very patriarchal and very conservative-Muslim environment. Back then, in the late 1970s, there was increasing political violence and turmoil in Turkey. Every day a bomb exploded somewhere, people got killed on the streets, there were shootings on university campuses. But inside Grandma’s house what prevailed were superstitions, evil eye beads, coffee cup readings and the oral culture of the Middle East. In all my novels there has been a continuous interest in both: the world of stories, magic and mysticism inside the house, and the world of politics, conflict, inequality and discrimination outside the window.

How an Army propaganda writer became the country’s most controversial novelist.

Jiayang Fan:

Yan is routinely referred to as China’s most controversial novelist, thanks to his scandalous satires about the brutalities of its Communist past and the moral nullity of its market-driven transformation. In “Serve the People!” (2005), set during the Cultural Revolution, a commander’s wife and her young lover become aroused smashing statuettes of Mao and urinating on his books. Since 2016, almost all of Yan’s work—to date, seventeen novels, as well as short stories, novellas, and volumes of essays—has been subject to an unofficial ban. But his international reputation has grown. He won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014, has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, and is often mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel. Yan’s style is experimental and surreal, and he is credited with developing a strain of absurdism that he terms “mythorealism.” As he puts it, “The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert.”

Henan is ground zero for Yan’s mordant imagination, and in his fiction it becomes a world of remorseless venality—of corrupt local officials, amoral entrepreneurs, and peasants with get-rich-quick schemes that prey on desperation and run on an engine of betrayal. “Some of the most memorable events in history happened here, but, during my lifetime, it’s become one of the poorest places in the country,” he told me. “There is no dignity left, and because of that the people of Henan have felt a deep sense of loss and bitterness.”

Yan does not exempt himself from his critique; his books often feature an alter ego, also named Yan Lianke, a hack writer who periodically goes back home to gather material. In “The Day the Sun Died,” which will be published in the U.S. in December, he writes, “For Yan, this town and this village functioned the way that a bank did for a thief—offering him an inexhaustible warehouse full of goods.” Throughout our trip, I noticed him unobtrusively harvesting details for his next book: Who built this recreational center? Where does the funding come from? More often than not, people ended up telling him slightly more than they should.

The Lost Art of Staying Put

Lucy Ellmann:

Not all that long ago, air travel was a clear badge of elite cultural distinction, from the “jet set” to the Sinatra-mangling ad slogan, “Come Fly With Me.” Droit-de-seigneur sexual fantasies of stewardess life were memorialized in that elegantly titled sixties tell-all Coffee, Tea, or Me? People actually used to dress up to take a plane. But that’s all over. Now you need a bulletproof vest when dealing with the cabin crew.

Airlines seem to be competing for Jerk of the Year awards. When they’re not bumping people off, figuratively or literally, they’re frighteningly “reaching out” to the customers they abused, customers with “issues.” (The language is patronizing and predatory.) We’re all sorry United’s planes are so attractive to terrorists. The staff must be under constant strain. But so are the passengers, with whom these tin-pot dictators are increasingly strict, banning leggings on ten-year-olds and bodily removing people from the passenger manifests.

Delta recruited airport police to threaten a couple with jail and the confiscation of their children, all for refusing to give up seats they’d paid for on a flight from Hawaii to LA. An American Airlines flight attendant bullied a tired mother of twin babies over her stroller, and then readied himself to punch a passenger who rose to her defense. These companies seem very exacting about how their customers behave—while apparently giving staff (or airport-based security officials) full license to unleash their inner demons. In airplane disaster movies, the pilot’s always wrestling with the yoke, trying to get full throttle; now these exertions are directed towards throttling the yokels.

Then United killed Simon. Simon was one of the largest rabbits in the world, maybe even a pooka! (United has a high rate of animal deaths, so watch whose hold you’re stuffing your poor pet into.) Rabbits go quietly belly-up, and Spandex-clad girls just sob and slip back into obscurity, taking their improper contours with them. But the sight of the bloodied Dr. Dao being manhandled and dragged along the aisle, on his back, through an “overbooked” United Airlines Chicago to Louisville flight, evoked fascist tactics, and caused United’s CEO to perform some tricky maneuvers to steer the airline out of a self-generated PR nose-dive. It also led to some suggestions for new slogans: Fly the unfriendly skies . . . Red eye and black eye flights available . . . If we can’t seat you we’ll beat you . . . Board as a doctor, leave as a patient . . . United: putting the hospital back into hospitality. Dr. Dao’s plight resonated because it so perfectly encapsulates the now-customary degradation of human dignity, morale, and will-to-live otherwise known as air travel in the twenty-first century.

How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies

Frank Langfitt:

It used to be that the Communist Party focused on censoring free speech primarily inside of China. In recent years, though, China’s authoritarian government has tried to censor speech beyond its borders, inside liberal democracies, when speech contradicts the party’s line on highly sensitive political issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan. It’s part of the party’s grand strategy to change the way the world talks about China.

The Chinese government has been so effective at intimidating Western businesses on this front that sometimes companies do the party’s work for it. That’s what happened in London this summer at an obscure soccer tournament modeled on the World Cup. The teams were drawn from a hodgepodge of minority peoples, isolated territories and would-be nations, including Tibet.

Some potential corporate sponsors were queasy.

The Morality Wars

Wesley Morris:

The civilized dinner party is probably over — even when you’re dining with friends. Everything means too much now. Everything. Our politics, obviously. But our genders, our food, our television. Our television. Last month, I was in a six-way conversation about HBO that narrowed into two people hung up on “Insecure,” a sitcom co-created by and starring Issa Rae about two best friends — Issa and Molly — in Los Angeles. It just ended its third season on HBO, and I’d describe my ongoing viewership as “exasperated fealty.”

Relationships — sororal, heterosexual, professional — occupy a lot of the show. But its best mode is as a shrewd, satirical consideration of how race pollutes the workplace. Molly is an attorney, first at a corporate firm and then at a smaller, ritzy black outfit that, because it’s black, is more stressfully protocol-ridden. Issa works at a nonprofit that strives to do nice stuff for black and Latino school kids between fits of self-congratulation and casual racism.

White progressive parents and the conundrum of privilege

Margaret Hagerman:

Greg and Sarah live in a predominantly white neighborhood and send their children to a predominantly white private school. “I don’t want to believe we are hypocrites,” Greg tells me. “But if we say diversity is important to us, but then we didn’t stick around in the place that was diverse, maybe we are?” He looks at Sarah. “I dunno,” he continues, “I guess we made decisions based on other things that were more important. But what does that say about us then?”

For two years I conducted research with 30 affluent white parents and their kids in a Midwestern metropolitan area. Over and over I heard comments like Greg’s reflecting a deep ambivalence: As progressive parents, is their primary responsibility to advance societal values ­— fairness, equal opportunity and social justice — or to give their children all the advantages in life that their resources can provide?

More often than not, values lost out.

Parents I interviewed felt conflicted about using their social status to advocate for their kids to have the “best” math teacher, because they knew other kids would be stuck with the “bad” math teacher. They registered the unfairness in leveraging their exclusive social networks to get their teenagers coveted summer internships when they knew disadvantaged kids were the ones who truly needed such opportunities. They felt guilty when they protectively removed their children from explicitly racist and contentious situations because they understood that kids of color cannot escape racism whenever they please. Still, those were the choices they made.

How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies

Frank Langfitt:

It used to be that the Communist Party focused on censoring free speech primarily inside of China. In recent years, though, China’s authoritarian government has tried to censor speech beyond its borders, inside liberal democracies, when speech contradicts the party’s line on highly sensitive political issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan. It’s part of the party’s grand strategy to change the way the world talks about China.

The Chinese government has been so effective at intimidating Western businesses on this front that sometimes companies do the party’s work for it. That’s what happened in London this summer at an obscure soccer tournament modeled on the World Cup. The teams were drawn from a hodgepodge of minority peoples, isolated territories and would-be nations, including Tibet.

Some potential corporate sponsors were queasy.

“There were inquiries made as to whether we would consider removing Tibet from the competition,” said Paul Watson, commercial director for the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, which ran the tournament. Watson spoke with one potential sponsor who was apologetic but direct.

“Look, I took this to my boss,” Watson recalled the sponsor telling him. “It’s Tibet. Can you get them out of there? I’m really sorry. It’s a terrible thing to ask. We love what you do, but would you remove Tibet?”

Civics and History: Celebrating Wrong Italian? (Columbus vs. Cabot)

James C. Bennett:

The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.

Traditionally, the role played by the United States in this narrative is not one of a joint participant, but rather an antagonist. In the narrative of Hispanosphere nationalists, Latin America is Shakespeare’s Ariel, the graceful and sensitive artistic spirit. The United States, or “Gringolandia” as it is sometimes called, is Caliban, the powerful but ugly monster that dominates tragic Ariel.

Columbus Day in the United States carries an entirely different set of connotations. During the 19th century, Columbus was reinvented by Washington Irving and his successors as a sort of Yankee visionary entrepreneur before his time. His specific roots in time, space, and culture as a Genoese in the service of Spanish monarchs was downplayed; what was celebrated was his seeming prescience and capacity for self-reinvention.

In fact Columbus did have some such characteristics; entrepreneurism is often a leap into the unknown, and he was neither the first nor the last to set out to seek one thing and discover another, nor to venture on the basis of mistaken calculations and assumptions. There was, it is true, a certain Enron-like quality to his mileage calculations.

Subsequently, this useful narrative was seized upon and expanded by Catholic immigrant communities eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was not inconsistent with being American. Italian immigrant groups found Columbus a particularly appealing figure; here was an Italian Catholic already elevated to heroic status by the Americans they sought to join. Columbus Day became established as an American holiday, but for reasons and with symbolism quite different from those for which it is celebrated in Latin America..

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

I do not particularly sympathize with the demonization of Columbus Day by the politically correct, although I do not think the injustices suffered by our Siberian-American fellow immigrants should be glossed over. However, I think Columbus Day should be reconsidered as a U.S. holiday for a different reason. I am fundamentally in agreement with the Hispanosphere nationalists on one point: Columbus’s voyage was very specifically the initiation of the contact between Spain and Spanish America. Neither the settlement of Brazil nor of English-speaking North America were direct consequences of Columbus’s voyages, and would probably have happened had Columbus never returned with the news of his landing.

The Portuguese discovery of Brazil was, after all, the accidental by-product of their ongoing exploration of Africa. The English-speaking world, on the other hand, began its expansion into North America as a consequence of John Cabot’s voyage of 1497.

Here are the US metro areas with the best and worst job markets – and the Midwest is doing better than you think

John Schoen:

The conventional wisdom is that the jobs boom has been better for coastal areas than in Midwestern and farm states.

But a closer look at the data shows that’s not the case at all.

Of the 20 metro areas with the tightest job markets — where unemployment rates are roughly half the national average or less — only five are in coastal states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The lowest rate in the country, at just 1.7 percent, was in Ames, Iowa. Four other metros on the list are in Iowa, and three are in Idaho.

On the other hand, eight of the metro areas on the list of the 20 highest jobless rates are in California, where the overall jobless rate is 4.2 percent, a bit higher than the national rate. Yuma, Arizona, has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 22 percent.

The economic strength in the Midwest shows up in low jobless rates in dozens of other metro areas. That strength could be at risk, though, if Trump administration tariffs begin to weigh on exports, especially farm products.

‘Make them scared’ website posts uncorroborated sexual assault claims against male students

Daniel Payne:

Daniel Payne – Assistant Editor •October 5, 2018
Share this article: The College Fix on Facebook The College Fix on Twitter The College Fix on Youtube Share on Email

Site features dozens of unsubstantiated allegations; take them ‘with a grain of salt,’ moderators say

A website allegedly run by University of Washington students allows individuals to publicly accuse people of sexual assault with no evidence.

The website, titled “Make them scared UW,” was first registered in November of last year but reportedly launched in late September of this year by University of Washington students, the Daily UW campus newspaper reports.

It appears that the list of accused rapists and sexual assault perpetrators has grown substantially on the site in recent weeks in the wake of the rape claims made against U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Meanwhile, one student named on “Make them scared UW” told The College Fix that the allegation is false, that the University of Washington has dismissed the allegations against him as completely uncorroborated and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Who Prepares our History Teachers? Who should prepare our history teachers?

Diane Ravitch via Will Fitzhugh:

This is an exciting time for history education. States across the nation are strengthening their history curricula and expecting youngsters to learn more American and world history.

Even the vitriolic controversy over the national history standards serves to remind us that people care passionately about history. Not only is there a rekindled interest in history in the schools, but also, public history is bringing stories of the past to millions of people in museums, exhibitions, movies, and on television. The wonderful television programs created by Ken and Ric Burns have demonstrated that there is a large and avid public for history as a tale well told. There is now even a cable television station called the History Channel.

Yet all is not well with the teaching of history in the schools. The most authoritative source for student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress; American history was last tested in 1994. The results were bleak. NAEP results are reported by achievement levels, with the highest called “advanced,” then “proficient,” then “basic.” Those who fail to reach the basic level are described as “below basic.” In the 1994 assessment, 57% of high school seniors scored “below basic” in American history (in public schools, the proportion “below basic” was 59%). These seniors had taken a U.S. history course in either 11th or 12th grade; their scores were unaffected by whether they studied history in the same year as the test or not. The NAEP results in history were worse than in any other subject area.

There are many reasons for this poor performance in history, and together we could probably come up with a long list of culprits, including television, popular culture, after-school jobs, a general social disregard for history, and so on.

But important as all these are, I will focus today on the most important variable that is within the purview and direct control of public policy: the preparation of those who teach history.

It seems a truism that students will not learn much history unless their teachers know it. This gets to the core of our discussion. Who prepares our history teachers now? Who should prepare our history teachers?

It should be self-evident that those who teach history should themselves have studied history. If they don’t know it, how can they teach it? If they don’t enjoy learning about it themselves, how can they transmit a love for history to students? How is it possible to teach what you do not know?

The only authoritative national data on the preparation of teachers are gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education. Its “Schools and Staffing Survey” reports on whether teachers have earned a major or minor in the main academic field that they teach. The data refer to teachers in grades 7-12, where teachers usually teach specific subject matter like mathematics, science, and history.

NCES surveys assume that those persons who lack either a major or a minor in their main academic field are teaching out of field. In 1996, NCES reported that “over half of all public school students enrolled in history or world civilization classes in grades 7-12…were taught by teachers who did not have at least a minor in history.” This disturbing finding compels us to ask, what is the educational preparation of those now teaching history? In a few states, people can be licensed to teach social studies without ever having taken a single college course in history. Presumably these are exceptions; what is the rule?

Last July, the National Center for Education Statistics released a report called “America’s Teachers: Profile of a Profession, 1993-1994.” This report contains some startling statistics. It found that a substantial number—28% of the nation’s public school teachers—had neither a major nor a minor in the main academic subject they were teaching. That includes 39.5% of science teachers; 25% of English teachers; 34% of mathematics teachers; 13.4% of foreign language teachers; and 17% of social studies teachers. The figures are even worse in private schools.

Since I was particularly interested in the state of history teaching, I asked analysts at NCES to determine the proportion of social studies teachers who had a major or a minor in history, and the proportion of history teachers who had studied history.

Thanks to the generous assistance of Pat Forgione, U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics, Marty Orland, Kerry Gruber, Marilyn McMillen, and Steve Broughman of NCES, I learned the following:

Of those teachers who describe themselves as social studies teachers, that is, those who teach social studies in middle school or secondary school, only 18.5% have either a major or a minor in history. That is, 81.5% of social studies teachers did not study history in college either as a major or as a minor. In case you think you didn’t hear me correctly, let me say it again: 81.5% of social studies teachers did not study history in college either as a major or a minor. This figure helps to explain why history is no longer the center of the social studies, since so few social studies teachers have ever studied history.

Of those who teach one or more history courses, 55% do not have at least a minor in history. Of those who teach two or more history courses, 53% do not have a major or a minor in history; of those who teach one history course, 64% lack either a major or a minor in history.

Fifty-nine percent of students in middle school and 43% of students in high school study history with a teacher who did not earn at least a history minor in college.

Who did prepare our nation’s teachers of history and social studies? What did they study in college? Perhaps you assume that most social studies teachers earned their degrees in one of the social sciences, like sociology, psychology, economics, or political science, or in literature or the humanities. Wrong. Most social studies teachers received their undergraduate degree in education.

Among all those who identify themselves as social studies teachers, 71% took their undergraduate degree in education. When the 18.5% with history degrees are removed from the pool, 79% of the remaining social studies teachers have their undergraduate degree in education. What is the educational background of the social studies teachers who did not major or minor in history? About one out of seven (14%) gained an undergraduate degree in social studies education. However, about two-thirds (65%) have an education degree that is not related to any academic discipline, from such fields as special education, secondary education, bilingual education, curriculum and instruction, educational administration, counseling and guidance, or any one of a score of other pedagogical studies.

Of the social studies teachers who did not study history, a majority—53%—have not received an advanced degree; 42% have an advanced degree in education. Only 2% of these social studies teachers—the ones who lack at least a minor in history—have an advanced degree in any academic field. Put another way, of those social studies teachers who have received any advanced degree, 89% are in pedagogy, not history or the social sciences.

Now suppose we move from the universe of social studies teachers in the middle and upper grades to the more limited universe composed only of history teachers. As I said before, 55% of history teachers have neither a major nor minor in history. What did this 55% of history teachers study?

Nearly 77% have an undergraduate degree in education, 11% have an undergraduate degree in a social science other than history, and 5% earned their degree in some other academic subject.

But perhaps, one hopes, these history teachers who did not study history in college took a master’s degree in history, economics, sociology, political science, or one of the other social sciences. Wrong again. Fifty-three percent do not have a master’s degree, and of the 47% in this group who earned a master’s degree, 40% gained it in education, and only 3% in any academic field.

One can see a strong contrast between the preparation of those history teachers who studied history in college and those who did not. Those who earned at least a minor in history have a far stronger academic preparation, both as undergraduates and at the graduate level. Among those who have at least a minor in history in college, 22% have an undergraduate degree in education, 72% in history or one of the social sciences, and 4% in other academic subjects. Among this same group, 30% earned master’s degrees in education, 21% in history or another social science, and 1% in other academic fields.

From these numbers, it becomes clear that those who earned at least a minor in history as undergraduates are far likelier to earn a master’s degree in history or one of the social sciences than those who do not have at least a minor in history.

A picture begins to emerge of the social studies profession, in relation to history. The vast majority of social studies teachers—81.5%—as well as 55% of history teachers—did not major or minor in history, nor did they earn a graduate degree in history.

The typical social studies teacher has an undergraduate degree in education and, if she or he has a master’s degree, it too is in education.

At this point, it seems important to ask: How can teachers teach what they have not studied? How can students learn challenging subject matter from teachers who have not chosen to study what they are teaching? How can teachers create engaging, innovative and even playful ways to present ideas that they have not mastered themselves? How can teachers whose own knowledge of history is fragmentary help students debate and think critically about controversial issues?

This portrait of the social studies profession must be seen in a context in which states are expecting students to study not only U.S. History but increasingly more difficult courses in world history. How are students going to learn world history from someone who has never studied world history? How many universities even offer a course called “world history?” How many teachers in the United States are qualified to teach the rigorous content in the history standards prepared by the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA? The teacher who must teach a course that includes unfamiliar material will rely on the textbook as a primary source of information and is unlikely to raise questions or pose issues or develop activities that give the spark of life to the words in the textbook.

What I wonder is: Why do state officials grant teaching credentials to people to teach a subject that they have not studied? Why is teacher certification based on completion of education courses rather than on mastery of what is to be taught? Why not require future teachers of history to have a major or at least a strong minor in history?

In what other profession would public officials be so haphazard, so indifferent to professional preparation? Imagine going to a hospital and finding that the credentialing system permits scrub nurses to perform surgery. Or boarding an airliner and finding that ticket clerks have been certified to fly the planes. In education, placing teachers into out-of-field positions has become the usual, the acceptable and the normal.

In my view, it is professional malpractice when state officials do not require teachers to demonstrate—either by appropriate credentials or examination—that they know what they are supposed to teach. I say this not only about history teachers, but about teachers of every other core academic subject. Why should American students learn science, mathematics, or history from people who did not study those fields? Is it unreasonable to expect teachers to have studied what they will teach? There may be the exceptional instance where a gifted teacher really knows and loves history but chose not to study it in college or graduate school, but I suspect that those exceptions are rare indeed.

Who should prepare history teachers?

Ideally, future teachers should know their subject and know how to teach it. History teachers should study history in college. They should certainly have at least a minor and preferably a major in history, including American and world history courses. With states expanding the requirements in world history, it becomes essential for future teachers to study the history of Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and India. Imagine taking on the challenge of history teaching today without so much as a minor in history.

In addition, future history teachers should include the study of social sciences and literature as part of their preparation to teach. They should learn pedagogical methods, either in appropriate courses or in an apprenticeship setting with mentors. Their graduate studies should concentrate on history, the humanities and social sciences.

There are very possibly areas of fruitful collaboration between schools of education and colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Together, they should be able to work out a good balance between the knowledge and skills that good history teachers need to be effective in the classroom. That is, if they are willing to work together, as they have not in the past.

Of one thing I am quite sure: schools of education are not the appropriate place to prepare history teachers. One reason is simply the status quo. Schools of education are currently preparing most future teachers of social studies and of history, and they are not learning history. This is not an indictment of schools of education: They don’t teach history, so why should they be blamed if their students do not learn what the ed schools do not teach?

But there is another reason to urge that schools of education are not the right place to prepare history teachers. If we go back to the origins of the social studies, we will find that the field was created as an escape from the teaching of history. The founder of the social studies was Thomas Jesse Jones. He was probably the first person to teach a course called “the social studies” at Hampton Institute, an industrial and trade school for African-Americans and Indians in Virginia. Jones believed that history was useless to poor minorities; it was not history study that they needed, but the right sort of skills and attitudes to fit them into the existing social order.

Jones was a staff member at the U.S. Bureau of Education, where he produced a large federal report on “Negro Education” in 1916. In that report, Jones expressed disapproval of academic schooling for Negro children. He believed that what they needed was vocational and industrial training. He urged instruction in planting, sewing, cooking, and woodworking. Their parents and community leaders wanted them to get collegiate type schooling, but Jones insisted they were wrong. He thought that they had a mistaken suspicion “that the white people are urging a caste education which confines them to industrial pursuits.”

Jones was a former social worker, and he thought that education should adjust youngsters to their society and their prospects; the study of history didn’t do that. Many other progressive educators agreed with Jones that history was not only useless but elitist. What, after all, was the good of learning about ancient civilizations? How did knowledge of obscure worlds make anyone a better citizen? How did it prepare youngsters for labor in the factories and fields? Social studies, on the other hand, could teach youngsters the right attitudes and adjust them to the industrial order. Social studies was socially efficient; history was not. History was far too individualistic, and its results were not predictable. Students might even learn to think for themselves. This was not socially efficient. Better, thought Thomas Jesse Jones and likeminded educators, to teach only the history that connected to children’s immediate interests and better to concentrate on current events and existing social institutions because ordinary boys and girls could not possibly be interested in remote civilizations or faraway places. The trouble with history, it seemed, was that it frequently didn’t have a social purpose at all; too often, it was geared toward satisfying the student’s imagination or curiosity, which was a socially useless goal.

Jones was in the mainstream of progressive education; industrial and vocational education was in vogue. It was no surprise when Thomas Jesse Jones—father of the social studies—was named the chair of the committee appointed by the National Education Association to reorganize a new field in the high school curriculum. His committee’s report, released in 1916, established the social studies. The Committee on Social Studies proclaimed that “good citizenship” would be the goal of social studies.

Henceforth, the study of history would be subject to what the Committee called:

The test of good citizenship. The old chronicler who recorded the deeds of kings and warriors and neglected the labors of the common man is dead. The great palaces and cathedrals and pyramids are often but the empty shells of a parasitic growth on the working group. The elaborate descriptions of these old tombs are but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals compared to the record of the joy and sorrows, the hopes and disappointments of the masses, who are infinitely more important than any arrangement of wood and stone and iron. In this spirit recent history is more important than that of ancient times; the history of our own country than that of foreign lands; the record of our own institutions and activities than that of strangers; the labors and plans of the multitudes than the pleasures and dreams of the few.

The Committee on Social Studies stressed that social efficiency was “the keynote of modern education,” and “instruction in all subjects should contribute to this end.” In the future, social studies would be devoted to teaching students to have the right attitudes and to enable them to adjust to the “present social environment and conditions.”

These modern, progressive views were hailed in the nation’s schools of education. There was a consensus among pedagogical leaders of the day that history was only for the tiny minority who planned to go to college. The great majority of youngsters who came from working families, it was agreed, did not need to study history.

In light of these views, implanted in schools of education in their early years, it becomes understandable why history education is seldom found in our nation’s schools of education. There are professors who teach the history of education, but the programs that prepare teachers of American history and world history have been rare. Schools of education teach science education, math education, and social studies education, but not history education. Unfortunately, history continues to be treated as an elitist subject, because the anti-historical attitudes forged in the nineteen-teens persisted long after they lost any validity.

So now we must rely on the movies and television to teach history. Periodically there will be a hit show like Braveheart or Glory or Roots or The Civil War, and we know that for many youngsters it will be their best chance to learn history just for the fun of it. We just have to hope that the dramatic liberties that the filmmakers take are not too farfetched.

We should do better. We know that history is exciting, interesting, engaging, fascinating. We know that kids can get turned on to the history of ancient Egypt, modern China, the Aztecs, or a zillion other times and places and peoples. But we also suspect that, without teachers who themselves know and love history, the excitement doesn’t happen, indeed can’t happen.

I cannot conclude without pointing to the curriculum in the early grades, where the social studies has had an especially deleterious effect. We do not need historians teaching first, second and third grade. But we should have teachers in the early grades who understand the value of biographies, myths, legends, and history stories. Sadly, due to the power of the current social studies curriculum, little kids are compelled to learn abstract or trivial ideas about families and communities. Not only does this bore kids and teachers, but it gives youngsters a sense of insignificance. Why not introduce them to the lives of men and women who created, invented, struggled, discovered, and broke new ground? What the social studies now teaches is that the world is shaped by social and economic trends that are beyond anyone’s control; what history teaches is that one persistent, determined man or woman can change the world.

If we are to maintain the movement for history education, we must insist that states establish a strong history curriculum across the grades and that they require future teachers of history to have at least a minor in history.

Given the current state of the field, given the fact that 81.5% of current social studies teachers and 55% of current history teachers do not have even a minor in history, this will be an uphill battle. But it is the most important battle in the struggle to restore and improve history education.

Will Fitzhugh at the Concord Review.

“Students who are flourishing are not the ones typically transferring schools.”

Erin Richards:

Test scores tell another story. Less than 5 percent of students are proficient in English and math on the state exam. The vast majority score “below basic,” the lowest category, in both subjects.

Despite devoted teachers, a spirit of achievement, extra money and five years of attention from Milwaukee’s best minds in business and education as part of an unprecedented turnaround effort, Carver’s students are stuck academically.

The school’s biggest obstacle turned out to be something nobody was even tracking: Student turnover.

More than a third of Carver’s students — 38 percent — were brand new to the school last year. Just a few students from the elementary grades stay through middle school each year, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of the social and academic consequences of chronic school-switching.

Improving urban education has no silver bullet. Low performance is too interrelated with poverty and toxic stress and the generational trauma many children carry into schools. But new data suggests that student turnover is a massive indicator of academic struggle and stagnation. Test scores drop because of it. Graduation rates fall because of it. Teachers don’t know what to do about it. Principals can’t recognize their own students as a result of it.

And until now, nobody knew the extent of it.
Angela Peterson / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Third grade teacher Symona Gregory works with Kamariana Brown, 8, in preparation for a math test in May 2018. Gregory is a fourth-year teacher at Carver Academy and a former City Year staff member. She was named teacher of the year at the school in 2017-’18.

Enrollment and test-score data analyzed by the Journal Sentinel revealed the quiet churn of more than 22,000 Milwaukee students across all types of schools last year — a phenomenon that’s ravaging the city’s prospects for educational improvement.

Howard Zinn’s Anti-Textbook

Sam Wineburg:

History, for Zinn, is looked at from “the bottom up”: a view “of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army.” Decades before we thought in such terms, Zinn provided a history for the 99 percent. Many teachers view A People’s History as an anti-textbook, a corrective to the narratives of progress dispensed by the state. This is undoubtedly true on a topical level. When learning about the Spanish-American War, students don’t read about Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. Instead, they follow the plight of foot soldiers sweltering in the Cuban tropics, clutching their stomachs, not from Spanish bullets but from food poisoning caused by rancid meat sold to the army by Armour & Company. Such stories acquaint students with a history too often hidden and too quickly brushed aside by traditional textbooks.