Maureen Dowd:

Chakrabarti sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.

“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.

“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”

math.mit.edu.

Sarah Kramer:

To that end, Tom does everything necessary to make sure the people that Harris Funeral Homes serves feel welcome. He sweeps the floors, plants flowers, shovels snow, and changes lightbulbs. Many times he will be the one to open the door and greet you with a smile as you walk into the funeral home.

Tom also follows up with each customer, calling to ask how they are doing and if he can help them in any way. And he really means it. At one point, a widow confided in Tom that she had no way to get to the grocery store. Tom promptly sent one of his employees to buy her groceries.

Tom is also continually looking for ways to improve the business and provide the best service possible. This includes everything from the smallest details, such as leaving a rose when a body is removed, to offering a grief counseling program for those who need it. Harris Funeral Homes also hosts an angel tree service every Christmas to honor those who died in the past year – which many families attend.

This level of service is what sets Harris Funeral Homes apart.

In 2011, Harris Funeral Homes was recognized by Preferred Funeral Directors International with the Parker Award for exemplary service. And in 2016, the Harris location in Livonia, Michigan was recognized as the best hometown funeral home in the local newspaper.

The Wisconsin DPI has waived thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Jun Wu:

I come from a “tiger” family. You know the Asian family that worshipped “science” and not god. The one where “grades” is paramount. The one that demands “success” above all. The one that supposedly endowed me with extra genetic gifts that I must live up to.

The idea of the Silicon Valley parent is not new to me. In fact, I was on the verge of becoming one myself as it used to be the only way I knew how to parent.

As an adult, I didn’t really know the definition of anxiety. I didn’t know intrinsically what it felt like. One day, when someone finally described the feeling to me: racing heart, shortness of breath, a pit in my stomach, I realized that I’ve always just lived with this feeling from a very young age. I learned to cope by suppressing this feeling.

As a little girl, I knew fear, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, and anger well. Those emotions are more familiar to me than happiness. Those emotions are the ones that I have clung to all my life. Those emotions are familiar. I seek these emotions with a vengeance when I have a negative mindset. It is when I hurt myself with my masochistic tendencies.

Jordan Shapiro:

Przybylski and Weinstein’s study—based on data collected from a representative sample of 19,957 parents who reported on their children’s levels of attachment, resilience (or bouncing back quickly from adversity), curiosity, and positive affect—found that young people who engaged in less than the AAP’s recommended limits showed “slightly higher levels of resilience but lower levels of positive affect compared to those who did not.” These differences became insignificant once the authors considered contextual factors like ethnicity, household income, and caregiver’s education level. Surprisingly, they also found “extremely small positive effects” that correlated with digital engagement at a level much higher (“up to 7/hr for both television and computer-based media”) than what’s commonly considered healthy.

That’s not all: A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech use mattered little to kids’ well-being. The authors, Amy Orben and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the impact of social media on teens and tweens, was based on weak correlations and insufficiently comprehensive methods, and therefore drew false conclusions. When they analyzed the same data, they found that “the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with technology use, and wearing glasses was more negatively associated with well-being.” To put a number on it: Digital tech use explains about 0.4 percent of the variation in well-being, the researchers write. “Taking the broader context of the data into account suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change.”

These results don’t suggest we should stop thinking about how to best raise kids to thrive in a connected world. Instead, it suggests we find a different, more useful way of discussing screen media. People usually talk about kids and technology from a medical perspective. We ask: Is it healthy or unhealthy? Even psychologists tend to use a diagnostic approach: Does social media exposure lead to anxiety or depression? Narcissism? Loneliness? Feelings of isolation?

Caroline Haskins:

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren’t suspected of a crime.

Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir. But few people outside the company and its customers know how its software works or what its specific capabilities and user interfaces are.

Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a “fusion center,” a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir.

Fusion centers have become a target of civil liberties groups in part because they collect and aggregate data from so many different public and private entities. The US Department of Justice’s Fusion Center Guidelines list the following as collection targets:

Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas and Sonia Hausen:

From the end of World War II until 2013, the most popular way heterosexual Americans met their romantic partners was through the intermediation of friends. One’s close friends and family have, probably since the beginning of time, been the essential network foci that enable connections to other people, i.e. the friends of one’s friends (Feld 1981). More distant ties have the potential to create a bridge to a new, previously unknown network of people and information (Granovetter 1973). Friends, the close and the not‐so‐close, have been historically a crucial source of connections to others. The rise of the Internet has allowed individuals in the dating market to disintermediate their friends, i.e. to meet romantic partners without the personal intermediation of their friends and family.

Rosenfeld and Thomas (2012) with data from 2009 showed that the percentage of heterosexual couples1 who met online had risen from 0% for couples who met before 1995 to about 22% for couples who met in 2009. In the 2009 data, Rosenfeld and Thomas showed that meeting online had grown but was still significantly behind friends as the most prevalent way heterosexual couples met. Furthermore, the 2009 data appeared to show that the rate of meeting online had plateaued for heterosexuals at around 22%. In this paper we present new data from a nationally representative 2017 survey showing that meeting online has continued to grow for heterosexual couples, and meeting through friends has continued its sharp decline. As a result of the continued rise of meeting online and the decline of meeting through friends, online has become the most popular way heterosexual couples in the U.S. meet.

It was not inevitable that the percentage of heterosexual couples who met online would have continued to grow beyond the previously documented 2005‐2009 plateau. Unlike gays and lesbians, heterosexuals can assume that most people they meet are heterosexuals also. Heterosexuals, because they constitute the large majority of adults, are usually in thick dating markets, where several potential partners are identifiable. The theorized advantage of face‐to‐face contact (Turkle 2015) could have limited the growth of online dating.

The traditional system of dating, mediated by friends and family, has long been theorized to be optimal for mate selection. The family system is historically predicated, in part, on catalyzing and promoting the most socially acceptable mating outcomes for the younger generation (Rosenfeld 2007). Meeting through friends and family provided guarantees that any potential partner had been personally vetted and vouched for by trusted alters. Classic work by Bott (1957) found that social closure had benefits in terms of relationship quality and duration.

Talis Shelbourne:

FLEYA, which originated from New Haven, Conn., has three goals: improving the perception of law enforcement, providing a hands-on experience and illustrating the importance of agency cooperation.

The Milwaukee FBI division’s previous special-agent-in-charge, Justin Tolomeo, brought FLEYA to the city last year in a partnership with Marquette University. Once the program came to Milwaukee, Marquette Police Lt. Jill Weisensel wanted it to be “bigger and better.”

That meant creating the integrated case scenario, where students solve a crime from beginning to end.

On Monday, the students went through a presentation on handwriting analysis, received a 911 call and learned the case was an abduction from witnesses.

On Tuesday, students used a black light to see bodily fluids and a Hemastix to test potential blood evidence.

From Wednesday to Friday, Lee and the other students will attend briefings, go through a use-of-force simulator, tour the Milwaukee Police Department’s Academy on Teutonia Avenue and process evidence from the car.

Students go through a rigorous application process, which includes a GPA requirement, essay submission and panel interview with Marquette University and FBI personnel; at the end of the process, 15 male and 15 female students are chosen to participate.

Lee, who will be a junior at Sheboygan High School next year, said he hopes attending FLEYA will add to his existing law enforcement experience from the Sheboygan Police Explorers.

Emily Hamer:

Last spring, the city’s zoning department issued Edgewood notices of two ordinance violations for hosting games, including a girl’s soccer game. The notices came after zoning administrator Matt Tucker said the school’s master plan prohibits the school from hosting competitions on the field.

Elliott said the school has been continually holding football, soccer, ultimate Frisbee and other competitions on the field since 1927. But during Thursday’s five-hour board meeting, which drew some 170 people, neighbors complained that the number of games played on the field has increased tenfold since the field was upgraded in 2015.

The games have also drawn increased scrutiny after the school in 2017 proposed further upgrades to the facility — including increased seating, lights, a sound system and permanent bathrooms — that would have allowed the school’s varsity football team to play there.

Residents of the surrounding Dudgeon-Monroe neighborhood organized against the changes, arguing they would create traffic, noise and environmental problems. School officials subsequently scaled back plans and haven’t made any further improvements.

Thursday’s decision hinged on wording in the school’s 2014 master plan that describes the intended use of the field as being for athletic practices and gym classes — without mentioning competitions.

More: Grand theft auto vs. girls’ soccer.

Baxter Holmes:

“AND, AGAIN, I understand I shouldn’t use a broad brush to criticize the entire AAU system, because parts of it are excellent. But also parts of it are very broken, especially [as it] relates to injuries in the league. What we’re seeing is a rash of injuries among young players.”

NBA commissioner Adam Silver is standing before a lectern prior to Game 1 of the 2017 NBA Finals between the Warriors and Cavaliers. He’s upholding a Finals tradition for the commissioner to field questions on issues facing the league. The seventh question, at first, sounds boilerplate: It focuses on the NBA’s newly branded G League and whether Silver believes it might become a pipeline for NBA hopefuls to skip college. Silver says it’s an issue the league is looking into. But then he takes a detour and begins addressing something else: youth basketball and injuries — almost as if he has something he wants to get off his chest. “What our orthopedics are telling us,” Silver says, “is they’re seeing wear-and-tear issues in young players that they didn’t used to see until players were much older.”

What Silver could not have known was just how steeply injuries — and especially injuries to young players — would impact the NBA the very next season. In 2017-18, the number of NBA games lost to injury or illness surpassed the 5,000 mark for the first time since the league stopped using the injured reserve list prior to the 2005-06 campaign, per certified athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, who has cataloged the careers of more than 1,100 players since that point and is considered the most authoritative public resource for tracking injuries in the NBA. This past season, in 2018-19, the league topped the 5,000 mark again.

In 2017-18, players who had been named to multiple All-Star teams missed an average of 14.63 games due to injury, the second-highest such figure that Stotts had recorded. That figure jumped this past season to 17.02.

Rod Dreher:

The district is so poor that when the priest, who was born just after the Second World War, had to study by candlelight, because there was no electricity. Pawel’s group met Father Jerzy’s brother, who still lives there, and is now an elderly man reluctant to receive pilgrims.

“The village is very ordinary – there’s nothing spiritual there,” said Pawel. “In the home where Father Jerzy lived, there’s one room that has been set apart as a kind of museum, but all the items there are under a thick veil of dust. By the wall is a small table, covered with a kind of plastic sheet. There was a small piece of paper with handwriting on it, written by Father Jerzy’s brother. It said, Every day near the table we were praying with our mother. There was a photo of that mother as an old, tired woman. On the other side of that piece of paper was a reliquary with Father Jerzy’s relics.”

“And that’s the answer,” Pawel concluded, speaking of both stories. “The whole strength of that man, and what we need today for our identity.”

What he meant was that Father Jerzy became a figure of enormous historical significance for the Polish nation and the Catholic Church – and indeed will soon be canonized – but it all started there in a dull village in the middle of nowhere, with a faithful family that prayed every day together.

Pawel said that when he leads tour groups of students through the museum, in the room devoted to Father Jerzy’s youth, he emphasizes that the future saint and national hero was a hard-working student, but did not achieve high marks.

“When he was studying at seminary, he barely passed his exams. He was trying to learn a lot, but he simply wasn’t an intellectual,” said the researcher. “Students start to be interested in the man because he was like many of them. Intellect is not what it’s all about.”

Logan Wroge:

Zirbel-Donisch said the plan is to have the condoms paid for by outside-partner organizations.

While most four-year University of Wisconsin System colleges offer free condoms, doing so in Wisconsin high schools remains relatively rare.

The state Department of Public Instruction estimated in 2016 that 6.9% of high schools in the state provided free condoms, based on a weighted survey of high school principals.

The decision for the pilot comes after an increase in sexually transmitted infections among youths nationwide, statewide and at West High School.

Rates of sexually transmitted infections in Wisconsin for people between ages 15 and 19 peaked in 2011 and then tapered off before rising each year between 2014 and 2017, according to data from the state Department of Health Services. Nationwide, rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis infections among that age group also climbed during the same time frame.

According to information Public Health Madison & Dane County provided the school district, the number of instances of sexually transmitted infections at West High School increased from about 40 in 2015 to more than 90 in 2017.

The district said 60% of West High respondents to the 2018 Dane County Youth Assessment survey — which tracks middle school and high school student behaviors and risks every few years — reported having voluntary sexual intercourse at least once compared with 35% of students from all Dane County high schools.

Out of 305 sexually active West High students who responded to the survey, 21% reported never using a condom as a way to prevent a sexually transmitted infection and 28% said they sometimes use one.

Countywide, 15% of high school students who are sexually active said they never use a condom to prevent a sexually transmitted infection and 29% sometimes use one.

March, 2019 Madison West’s ESSA Accountability Report.

Transcript (via a machine learning app – apologies for errors):

I am currently the reading interventionist teacher at (Madison) West High School.

I’ve been there for 4 years. Previous to that I’ve been in the school district as a regular ed teacher for about 20 years. I started in the early 90s.

I have (a) question I want to ask you guys. What district-wide systems are in place as we use our map data to monitor the reading student achievement?

Student by student, not school by school but also school by school and provide support for the school the teachers and the students that need it.

And especially to help students who score in the bottom percentiles who will need an intervention which is significantly different than differentiation.

I was (a) TAG coordinator (talent and gifted coordinator) for 4 years at Hamilton and I have extensive background with the talent and gifted and differentiation training.

( and teaching of teachers). Now I’m in interventionist and they are significantly different we need interventions to serve the lowest scoring kids that we have.

Here’s my data from this year and this is why I’m here:

Of the 65 students plus or minus it kind of changes this year 24 of them are regular ed students.

Another way to say they don’t have an IEP so there is no excuse for that reading intervention in (that group).

12 of those 24 have been enrolled in Madison School since Pre-K kindergarten or kindergarden. 12 students have been in Madison Schools.

They have High attendance. They have been in the same (you know) feeder school they have not had high mobility. There is no excuse for 12 of my students to be reading at the first second or third grade level and that’s where they’re at and I’m angry and I’m not the only one that’s angry.

The teachers are angry because we are being held accountable for things that we didn’t do at the high school level. Of those 24 students, 21 of them have been enrolled in Madison for four or more years.

Of those 24 students one is Caucasian the rest of them identify as some other ethnic group.

I am tired of the district playing what I called whack-a-mole, (in) another words a problem happens at Cherokee boom we bop it down and we we fix it temporarily and then something at Sherman or something at Toki or something at Faulk and we bop it down and its quiet for awhile but it has not been fixed on a system-wide level and that’s what has to change.

Thank you very much.

– Via a kind reader.

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

Max Roser:

The average person in the world is 4.4-times richer than in 1950. But beyond the global average, how did incomes change in countries around the world? And why should we care about the growth of incomes? These are the two questions I answer in this post.

The two charts in this post show the level of GDP per capita for countries around the world between 1950 and 2016.

Related: Recent taxpayer supported Madison K-12 tax and spending history.

Martin Landi:

Google has admitted it gives workers access to some audio recordings from its Google Home smart speakers.

The technology giant said it uses language experts around the world to study a small number of audio “snippets” from users.

Google said this work helps with developing voice recognition and other technology in its Google Assistant artificial intelligence system, which is used in its Google Home smart speakers and Android smartphones.

The assistant understands and responds to voice commands given to it, answering queries about the news and weather as well as being able to control other internet-connected devices around the home.

In a statement, the company said a small number of anonymous recordings were transcribed by its experts, and revealed that an investigation had been launched after some Dutch audio data had been leaked.

“We partner with language experts around the world to improve speech technology by transcribing a small set of queries – this work is critical to developing technology that powers products like the Google Assistant,” Google said.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google services, including Madison.

Bianca Banova:

The fragility of our modern industrialized world hangs over our heads like Damocles’ sword, threatening to wake us up from the tranquility of our self-induced illusion of stability. Behind this facade, there are unprecedented tectonic processes taking place — economic, cultural, political, social, and technological transitions the like of which the world has never seen.

The most crucial institution that ought to prepare future generations for these transitions is the least reformed one: the educational institution.

Politicians always incorporate education in their campaign talking points, not with the intentions of doing anything meaningful with it once they get into office, but to make themselves appear more electable. Their views on education begin and end with one thing: money. More funding, better infrastructure, higher teacher salaries, etc., as if the only problem with today’s education is a monetary one. As the old Jewish proverb postulates — a problem that can be solved with money is not a problem, but an expense. If the problem with education were a monetary one, we would have solved it a long time ago, but it’s not.

Mark Bonamo:

Over the past decade, the state agency responsible for building schools in 31 former Abbott districts has spent more than $263 million to build five schools in Newark at a cost that far exceeded the limits set by the Legislature.

The Educational Facilities Construction and Financing Act, which was enacted in 2000, set a limit of $143 per square foot, which was to include the costs of construction, site development, land acquisition and professional service fees.

But the New Jersey Schools Development Authority (SDA) has spent an average $424 per square foot to build the five schools in Newark, nearly three times the limit set by the Legislature.

Nan Xiao:

C is a system programming language which is old but with “bad” fame: undefined behavior, notorious memory related bugs, etc. Especially with Go and Rust having gone viral right now, C seems already forgotten by people. Nevertheless, IMHO, C is still a thing which is worth for you spending some time on it.

Whether you are are a C novice or a C veteran，I highly recommend you read Modern C if you haven’t read it before. Then you will find C also evolves stealthily and is not as primitive as you think. E.g., C11 has defined standard thread APIs like C++ has done, which makes C more like a “modern” language, not an outdated thing. You may get a new perspective of C from this book.

Regardless if you are a systems language programmer, DevOps, performance engineer or wear other hats, the more you know about the Operating System, the more you can do your job better. Take all prevailing Unix-like Operating Systems as an example, from kernel to command line tools, they are almost implemented in C. To study related source code can make you delve into Operating System internal deeper. E.g., I knew there is a taskset command which can bind specified process of a dedicated CPU, but I wanted to know the magic behind it, so I went through its code. Then I learned 2 things:
a) There is a “/proc/%pid/task” folder which records thread information of process;
b) taskset actually calls sched_setaffinity and sched_getaffinity APIs to attain its goal.

George Mitchell:

White opposition to forced busing scared Milwaukee’s leaders, who created a very different plan in response to a federal court order to desegregate the schools. The plan launched in 1976 allowed white students to chose integration at magnet schools with specialized programs, while putting the burden of forced busing on black students, as research by Lois Quinn and the Metropolitan Integration Research Center documented a few years later. In the early 1980s Howard Fuller began building opposition to the disruptive and disproportionate burden placed on black families and children with the supposedly “peaceful” desegregation plan implemented in Milwaukee. His later doctoral thesis at Marquette University helped blow a hole in sanitized and misleading reporting by the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel, which supported the busing program. Maps that I included in a study expanding on Quinn’ research showed students from individual neighborhood schools were being bused to as many as 100 separate schools across the city.

Subsequent research by James Kenneth Nelsen, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, offered a clear description of how the system worked:

There was no room in the [Black] school[s] — [they were] usually overcrowded to begin with…Black students had to move to accommodate whites. Some African American parents complained about waiting lists to get into what had been their neighborhood schools… Now that their schools had more desirable programs [for white students], they could no longer attend them.

It was not until the late 1990s that David Bennett, a deputy to former MPS Superintendent Lee McMurrin admitted that the forced busing plan he and McMurrin developed was built around “white benefit,” namely, the goal of reducing “white flight.” Bennett’s stunning confirmation produced exactly one story in the local press, at which point the editors and the rest of Milwaukee’s establishment “moved on.”

While the Boston and Milwaukee busing plans were designed very differently, it’s clear neither worked. So when Kamala Harris visits Milwaukee and Wisconsin, will the Journal Sentinel — or anyone in the media — step up and ask her to reconcile her rose-colored vision of busing with the reality of its experience in Wisconsin?

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Stephen Snyder:

Translation is a kind of traffic, in nearly every sense of the word. There’s the most obvious sense, in that translations cross borders of time, place, and culture, moving from one language into another.

But traffic’s other meaning—that is, the buying and selling of goods—also applies. Translators themselves can be said to traffic in words, sounds, images, and more; whether what is trafficked is tangible or intangible, it’s implied that what is bought, sold, and bartered is in any case commodified. When we think about traffic we also inevitably think about congestion, about impediments to smooth circulation—of vehicles, of course, but also, by extension, of ideas and things. While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication. As a translator of contemporary Japanese fiction, I’ve seen both the flow and the congestion, and have witnessed at close range the unintended consequences—and our lack of control as translators—when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders.

For the past decade or so I’ve been working on what is essentially an ethnography of the publishing industry, primarily in Tokyo and New York, and the way the intersection—and often the collision—of aesthetic and economic considerations influences what gets translated, how it is translated, and how it is marketed and consumed in another literary context. That is, ultimately, how the traffic of translation is subject to the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry, and how these concerns shape a canon of literature in translation that may bear little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture, but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived in the national imagination of the target culture.

Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick:

Thus, I actively participated when MMSD crafted the Behavior Education Plan (BEP). Indeed, I was the person who suggested that it should carry that name instead of simply MMSD’s Discipline policy, because moving away from zero tolerance also requires MMSD to actively engage in teaching children with challenging behaviors how to behave properly. When the BEP was adopted, I advised the school board that in order to succeed, it would need: 1) adequate training for staff; 2) adequate staff support; and 3) and an ombudsman program to assist students and their parents caught up in the disciplinary process. Unfortunately, to date MMSD has not provided these three critical elements of support, which is why the implementation of the BEP continues to be challenging. I was heartened to see the recommendation for an ombudsman program from the Black Excellence Coalition. Improving the BEPby implementing these recommendations is another issue that I bring special expertise if chosen to fill the empty seat on the board.

Systems change requires analyzing data to quantify the problems I encounter while representing my clients. My data analysis reveals that MMSD has failed to make significant improvements in eliminating the racial disparities our students of color and those with disabilities experience academically, in discipline, and from seclusion and restraint. To eliminate these disparities, MMSD must establish achievable short and long-term goals to improve graduation rates, academic performance and reduce negative disciplinary encounters. It must analyze the data district-wide and on a school-by-school basis in order to learn how to replicate school building success throughout the district and to hold those accountable who are unable or unwilling to make improvements in these critical areas.

Finally, my experience as Chair of the Goose Lake Watershed District has made me fully aware of Open Records and Open Meetings laws, Robert’s Rules of Order and the importance of public input to governmental bodies. This experience will serve me well if I am chosen to serve on the MMSD school board.

More, here

David French:

Here’s perhaps the most astounding fact: The officer fired when the boy was only 18 inches away. What an astonishingly reckless and unreasonable use of a firearm. So the boy’s family sued. They lost. The reason? An unjust doctrine called “qualified immunity.”

Here’s the essential legal background. Since 1871, federal law has allowed citizens to sue public officials for violations of their constitutional rights. The relevant statutory language is clear and unambiguous (emphasis added):

Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.

Since 1982, however — and thanks to the Supreme Court — the phrase “shall be liable” has been reinterpreted to essentially mean, “may occasionally, in extreme circumstances, be liable.” The court held that public officials could be immune from suit for damages when their “conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Again, this language is not in the statute. Moreover, the definition of a “clearly established” right is extraordinarily restrictive. In its practical application, a plaintiff cannot be sure to prevail unless he or she can cite a remarkably similar case, with nearly identical facts, decided by a court of controlling jurisdiction

John Horgan:

For years I have ranted about the flaws of medicine, especially when it comes to mental illness and cancer. But my complaints are mild compared to those of Jacob Stegenga, a philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge.

In Medical Nihilism, published by Oxford University Press, Stegenga presents a devastating critique of medicine. Most treatments, he argues, do not work very well, and many do more harm than good. Therefore we should “have little confidence in medical interventions” and resort to them much more sparingly. This is what Stegenga means by medical nihilism. I learned about Medical Nihilism from economist Russ Roberts, who recently interviewed Stegenga on the popular podcast EconTalk.

Skepticism toward medicine, sometimes called “therapeutic nihilism,” was once widespread, even among physicians, Stegenga notes. In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes, dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote that “if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.”

Scott Bellile:

The state superintendent – first Evers, until he was elected governor in 2018, then his successor, Carolyn Stanford Taylor – and the DPI argued the governor’s approval on scopes is unnecessary because no state officer can act as the state superintendent’s superior with regard to the supervision of public instruction.

In last week’s majority opinion, the Supreme Court wrote rulemaking is a legislative power that is delegated to the state superintendent, so the Legislature may limit or take that power away from the superintendent as it chooses.

“We conclude that the gubernatorial approval requirement for rulemaking is constitutional as applied to the (state superintendent) and DPI,” the majority opinion states.

Siding with WILL were the court’s conservative justices: Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler, Rebecca Bradley and Daniel Kelly.

Dissenting were two liberal justices, Rebecca Dallet and Ann Bradley. The court’s third liberal justice, Shirley Abrahamson, withdrew from participation.

Notes and links on the Wisconsin DPI’s mulligans: waiving thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements.

Robert Robb:

The governing board recently released a short study hailing the fact that the gains of Arizona students on the NAEP test were roughly double the national average from 2005 to 2017. That was true for math in the fourth and eighth grades, and for reading in the same grades.

Now that the trend has been validated, and praised, by a national, mainstream educational organization, maybe it will finally become of some interest here in Arizona.

The question, of course, is why are Arizona students showing so much more improvement than students in other states?

Kyso:

Globally, health expenditure as a percentage of GDP has increased in recent years, so evaluating the health care systems used in different countries is an important tool for identifying best practices and improving inefficient health care systems.

Total health expenditure is the sum of public and private health expenditures as a ratio of total population. It covers the provision of health services (preventive and curative), family planning activities, nutrition activities, and emergency aid designated for health but does not include provision of water and sanitation. Data are in international dollars converted using 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) rates.

Jeffie Lam:

Veteran liberal studies teacher Kwan Chin-ki felt the subject helped raise awareness of societal issues among students but there was not a direct link to young Hongkongers’ participation in politics.

Meanwhile, presidents of three universities called on different parties to resolve the rift through constructive dialogue.
HKU president and vice-chancellor Professor Zhang Xiang said he was disheartened by the violence and condemned the “destructive acts”.
Polytechnic University Professor Teng Jinguang said: “While we are fully aware of the sentiments in our society, we are very concerned about the wellness and well-being of our students.”

City University’s president Professor Way Kuo called on the government to communicate sincerely with different sectors “to avoid the continued outbursts of impatience and dissatisfaction in our society”.

waow:

If we get this property and we will get it we will start the groundwork for a Christian school,” said Wade Reimer of Shepherd’s Watch.

However, there is confusion over who owns the building.

The confusion over the ownership led to a lawsuit between the Village of Mattoon, Town of Hutchins and The Antigo School District.

“The Antigo School District says they own the building and refuses to sell it unless there is a promise made to not use it for a school,” said Anthony LoCoco a deputy counsel on the case.

“They don’t want the competition of a private school because some children from Mattoon would go to a local elementary school and they would lose funds,” said LoCoco.

LoCoco said the vacant building is costing taxpayers up to $40,000 a year.

The small town is just hopeful the rust on the unused swings disappear and the school playgrounds fill back up with the sound of laughter.

There is a hearing for the lawsuit on July 26th in Shawano County.

News 9 reached out to Antigo School District and they refused to comment pending the litigation.

Related: An emphasis on adult employment.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Some observers said the unique vacancy is a chance for a newcomer to serve.

“I would really love to see another black mother on the School Board,” said Sabrina Madison, the founder of the Progress Center for Black Women. “Especially a mom who has been advocating for her kid recently around some of these issues around race and equity.”

Though Madison said she hasn’t had any conversations with people who have said they’ll apply, she has been strategically and privately reaching out to parents of students in MMSD to encourage them to consider it.

Whoever is appointed by the board would serve until an election is held in April 2020 to select someone to finish the last year of Burke’s term, which ends in April 2021.

Notes and links: David Blaska, Kaleem Caire and Ed Hughes. Interestingly, Mr. Hughes was unopposed in his first three school board elections. Mr. Hughes voted against the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Yet, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results:

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Our most recent Superintendent – 2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience

MIT:

Factoring integers into prime factors has a reputation as an extraordinarily difficult problem. If you read some popular accounts, you get the impression that humanity has worked hard on this problem for centuries, if not millennia, and that the chances of an efficient algorithm are negligible. If true, that would be great, because some important cryptosystems rely on the difficulty of factoring. Unfortunately, it’s mostly hype based on wishful thinking. Enough people have tried to find efficient factoring algorithms that we can be confident the problem isn’t easy, but there’s no reason to think it’s impossible.

The first thing to realize is that until the advent of public key cryptography in the 1970’s, few people cared about factoring. Some people were interested in it for its intrinsic beauty, but nobody thought it was good for anything, and it certainly wasn’t the notorious unsolved problem it is today. If anything, it was mildly obscure.

Even today, how many researchers have ever seriously tried to find an efficient factoring algorithm? I don’t know, since most people who fail don’t announce their attempts (and who knows how much classified work there has been), but it’s not hard to estimate. Let’s say a serious attempt consists of several months of work by an expert, someone who knows enough number theory to read the literature on this problem. Then the number of people who have seriously tried must be on the order of magnitude of 100. It would be ridiculous to say “100 smart people tried and failed to solve this problem, so it’s clearly impossible,” but that’s what most claims regarding the difficulty of factoring amount to.

Andrew Gillen:

I like the notion behind this effort—ensuring that colleges don’t get rich by saddling their students with disastrous financial burdens—but policymakers should also make sure to implement some complimentary policy changes to increase fairness and avoid unintended collateral damage.

Colleges Aren’t Yet in the Game

Skin-in-the-game requires accompanying changes to our financial aid system. Most proposals would have colleges pay a set percentage of any loan that defaults. But under the current system, colleges aren’t yet in the game because they are not a direct party to the loan. Once a college has admitted a student (and keep in mind that many colleges are open admissions, meaning virtually anyone can enroll), they have no say in whether or how much a student borrows.

Dustin Volz:

The documents obtained by the ACLU suggest a similar situation, where a telecommunications firm, whose name is redacted, furnished call-data records the NSA hadn’t requested and weren’t approved by orders of the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The company told the NSA it began delivering those records on Oct. 3, 2018, until that Oct. 12, when the agency asked it investigate the “anomaly.”

The ACLU said the documents also suggest an individual may have been targeted for surveillance as a result of the first overcollection episode, which led to the deletion of the program’s entire database in June 2018. The documents reveal that violation involved “targeting requests” that were approved by the surveillance court.

The revelation of another compliance issue is the latest hurdle for the once-secret surveillance program that began under the George W. Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As initially designed, the program sought to collect the metadata of all domestic calls in the U.S. to hunt for links among potential associates of terrorism suspects.

Jessica Stevens (Glassdoor):

The biggest driver of the pivot to a remote workforce that’s currently underway in our market is that remote employees simply produce better results than their traditional counterparts. While many critics of remote working used to assert that letting employees work from home would drain them of their productive spirit, the past few years have produced conclusive evidence that employees who spend a bulk of their working hours outside of the office are vastly happier and more productive.

Recent research from Gallup, for instance, notes that those workers who spend about three to four days of the week working offsite are substantially more engaged in their jobs than traditional counterparts who are stuck behind desks all day. The logic behind this productivity boost is actually quite easy to understand; by giving workers more control over their personal lives and permitting them to schedule their work-life balance accordingly, companies are making them happier and more fulfilled as they enable Average Joes to become workplace superstars.

Lisa Miller:

On an unseasonably chilly morning in May, three dozen or so plaintiff-parents, most of them from the Green Meadow Waldorf School, showed up at the Rockland County Courthouse, looking, in their draped layers and comfortable shoes, like any PTA from Park Slope or Berkeley. They were virtually vibrating with expectation and stress. For four long months, on behalf of their kids, they had been on the phone, sending off bullet-point emails, arranging meetings, coordinating calendars, and taking time off work, in an endless battle that had so far cost them hours of lost income and created child-care hassles — and made them into national pariahs besides. Today’s proceedings, they hoped, would result in a decision that might enable them to move on with their lives.

When legal arguments began, small smiles appeared on the parents’ faces. The opposition’s lawyer came off as clumsy, like an oversize actor fumbling his lines. Their lawyer, on the other hand, exuded a smooth confidence bordering on arrogance, an attitude that seemed to swell as he approached the lectern. Michael Sussman, 65 years old and educated at Harvard Law, is the most prominent civil-rights crusader in the Hudson Valley, having made his mark at 30, while working for the NAACP, when he helped to desegregate the Yonkers public schools. Now Sussman, who happened to have sent his own seven children and stepchildren to Waldorf schools, was defending his clients against the intrusion of local politicians into their personal decisions and private lives.

Ted Galen Carpenter:

Trump administration officials were enthusiastic when Ecuador decided to expel Julian Assange from its embassy in London, where he had received sanctuary for nearly seven years. British authorities promptly jailed him for jumping bail on sexual assault charges in Sweden, and U.S. officials began plans to have Assange extradited to face espionage charges in this country. He just turned 48 in prison on July 3.

Last month, the Department of Justice added 17 counts to the one-count indictment that it had filed years earlier. His current imprisonment in Britain and the probability of a lengthy extradition battle have delayed the prospect of a high-profile trial in the United States, but that outcome remains Washington’s goal. The United States reportedly submitted a formal extradition request on June 6.

The issues at stake go far beyond whether Assange is an admirable (or even a reasonably likeable) person. He symbolizes a crucial fight over freedom of the press and the ability of journalists to expose government misconduct without fear of criminal prosecution. Unfortunately, a disturbing number of “establishment” journalists in the United States seem willing—indeed, eager—to throw him to the government wolves.

Transcript of a meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

“Given that Mary will not be attending any future meetings, I do feel a sense of urgency in getting this filled,” Reyes said. “I don’t want to move forward through some of the important discussions and decisions we’ll have to make … so i think it is going to be imperative that we move through the process pretty rapidly. We can still do a really transparent process and move quickly through it.”

Under board policy, a vacant seat must be filled by appointment within 60 days of a resignation.

Public notice will be posted in the Wisconsin State Journal from July 12 to July 19. Applicants’ submissions will be publicly available on July 19 before the board votes to appoint a new member on July 22.

“I feel like this timeline is really tight,” board member Cris Carusi said, noting the quick turnaround between applications being due and a vote on the candidate three days later. “This feels way too compressed to make a good decision and I would argue for stretching it out even another week.”

Though there was no vote on the timeline, Reyes said that if the board feels it needs more time to review applications it could explore that option later in the month.

Anyone 18 years or older who resides in the Madison School District can apply to be considered by submitting a letter of interest to the district detailing what qualities they can bring to the School Board, a statement on three issues the district faces and how the prospective board member would address them.

Several elections are on the horizon for the seat over the next two years. Though Burke’s term would have lasted until 2021, whoever is appointed would have to decide by late December if they will run in the April 2020 election to finish out the last year of Burke’s term. Terms on the Madison School Board are three years, but whoever is appointed to Seat 2 must run to complete the one-year term before being able to run for a full three years.

Logan Wroge:

Board member Kate Toews said it “would be very beneficial” having an applicant with experience in referendums or hiring a superintendent.

The last time the School Board appointed someone to fill a vacancy was in 1997 when Nancy Mistele resigned because she was moving out of the School District. Sixteen people applied to replace her.

David Blaska, a former Dane County Board member who lost his School Board race this year to Ali Muldrow, said Monday that he will apply to fill the empty seat after saying Friday he would not.

The conservative blogger said he has “no hope of being named.”

“Still, one must fight the good fight,” he said.

Of the other two candidates who ran in the April election and lost, TJ Mertz said he is not interested in applying and Kaleem Caire said Friday he had not had enough time to make a decision. An attempt to reach Caire Monday night was not successful.

Related:

Mary Burke

2013 – 2019: What will be different, this time?

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results

Michael Cummins:

aybe kids are disrespecting their teachers because adults have taught them to. If, as Muldrow asserted during her campaign, the “theme” in Madison education is “how do we blame black children, how do we hurt black children, how do we get rid of black children, how do we not listen to black children,” then it makes perfect sense for black children to behave disrespectfully. You don’t sit and politely listen to someone who wants to hurt you because of your race.
Thing is, sitting and listening is an important part of learning. And far from being the enemy, MMSD teachers are essential to the long-term success of Madison’s children of color. While we can’t see into the minds of individual teachers, equity efforts occupy a prominent place in the district’s latest Strategic Framework, and are amply supported by plans, programs and money. And, unlike their students, MMSD teachers are subject to zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, especially when it comes to anything touching on race.
Verbalizing a racial slur, for instance, will get a teacher yanked from the classroom immediately, regardless of the context. To believe that MMSD tolerates racism in its classrooms, let alone promotes it, requires a narrow set of blinders.

Those who do believe that racism runs riot in MMSD have every right to share that viewpoint with the school board. If you have attended or seen video of a school board meeting lately, you know that that viewpoint is often expressed during public comment. It’s also expressed at inappropriate times, in the form of over-the-top, chaotic theatrics that intimidate those who disagree into silence. Lately, kids have been helping to throw meetings into chaos, having learned that intimidation is a legitimate means to an end.
All this serves to keep MMSD teachers and staff walking on eggshells. And if you think that a timid faculty is good for black students, think again. At a March 2018 board meeting, MMSD Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham discussed a 2012 study on the “failure to warn.” The study’s authors found that white teachers are sometimes reluctant to constructively criticize black students when academic or behavioral problems first emerge, for fear of being labeled racist. This cheats black students out of the opportunity to correct problems before they rise to punishable levels.

Of course grown-ups should encourage kids, through their words and deeds, to stand against injustice. But the style that many Madison equity activists have adopted is causing more injustice than it’s preventing. If we allow our teachers to be disempowered, and their classrooms thrown into chaos, then we have broken our promise to offer every child a sound basic education.

Notes and links

website:

The Ramanujan Machine is a novel way to do mathematics by harnessing your computer power to make new discoveries. The Ramanujan Machine already discovered dozens of new conjectures.

Ian Miles Cheongon:

Obama’s own efforts to not ask the question was limited to the 2010 Census. From 2009 to 2016, the former president’s Census Bureau had no problem asking anyone if they were Americans on all eight of his annual ACSs (American Community Survey), which targeted smaller demographics key to the success of the Democrats in the eight years of his administration.

The ACS even asked the question in both English as well as Spanish.

In the decades prior, administrations from Bush, to Clinton, going all the way back to 1820, had questions on citizenship, nationality, or nativity. The process originated with Thomas Jefferson.

Fleming Smith:

Since you spent so much time in this fictional world, how did you feel when you heard about parents acting the same way in the admissions scandal?

One of my initial worries was, oh no; I wanted people to think that the stuff the parents were doing in “The Gifted School” was so crazy and outrageous it couldn’t possibly be plausible. I wanted the novel to have a real satirical edge, so a little bit of me worries that the admissions scandal blunts that a bit.

What do you think people will learn from the admissions scandal and the ideas you’ve explored in your book?

If you think of the college admissions scandal as one of the great cultural parables of our time, I think it can teach us a lot. The novel hopefully will inspire people to look at themselves, at the culture of elitism and privilege, in somewhat more critical ways.

Maybe the novel will be read as a parable in its own way for thinking about issues of economic status and privilege and privilege-hoarding as they affect the lives of many different people in different communities.

Bryan Caplin:

History textbooks are full of populist complaints about business: the evils of Standard Oil, the horrors of New York tenements, the human body parts in Chicago meatpacking plants. To be honest, I haven’t taken these complaints seriously since high school. In the absence of abundant evidence to the contrary, I say the backstory behind these populist complaints is just neurotic activists searching for dark linings in the silver clouds of business progress. When business offers new energy, new housing, new food, the wise are grateful to see the world improve, not outraged to see a world that falls short of perfection.

Still, I periodically wonder if my nonchalance is unjustified. Populists rub me the wrong way, but how do I know they didn’t have a point? After all, I have near-zero first-hand knowledge of what life was like in the heyday of Standard Oil, New York tenements, or Chicago meat-packing. What would I have thought if I was there?

If we’re talking about the year 1900, I’m afraid we’ll never really know. Yet what I’ve seen with my own eyes during the last fifteen years has done much to cement my out-of-sample confidence.

During this time, I’ve seen the tech industry dramatically improve human life all over the world.

Xinhua:

The Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council Monday published a new guideline for advancing education reform and improving the quality of compulsory education.

The guideline aims to develop an education system that will foster citizens with an all-round moral, intellectual, physical and aesthetic grounding, in addition to a hard-working spirit, according to the document.

Efforts will be made in fostering comprehensive quality with firm faith, patriotism, integrity, broad knowledge and striving spirit, it said.

Moral education and all-round development of students will be priorities and the efforts must cover every student in every school, it added.

According to the guideline, compulsory education should emphasize the effectiveness of moral education with efforts on cultivating ideals and faith, core socialist values, China’s fine traditional culture and mental health.

Dave Zirin:

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say. I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

J Shrager:

Probably mostly true, the joke implies that it’s a bad thing to know only one language. More specifically, it’s poking fun at the fact that most Americans only speak English. But is it such a bad thing to only know English? According to this Wikipedia list of most commonly spoken languages, the most spoken “primary” language (“mother tongue” or “L1 Rank”) is, predictably, Mandarin, followed by Spanish, and then English. So, you’re at least in the top 3 just out of the gate!

But just looking at the number of speakers of their Mother Tongue (L1) is misleading, because when someone does learn a second language, it is almost always English! So instead of looking at the most common “first languages” (L1), you look at the most common languages including second languages , that is, the languages by total number of speakers (L1+L2+…), you get a very different, and somewhat surprising, list (the rightmost column in the WP table, and the main sorting rank of the table). By this measure, English is the most commonly spoken language, with 1.12 Billion speakers (at this writing), followed closely by Mandarin (1.11B), and then by Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and French. The reason that most people learn English as a second language, if it isn’t their Mother Tongue, is that English is the de facto language of Business, Engineering, Science, and, most influentially, The Internet. Indeed, by the time you get to French, there are fewer speakers of French word-wide than the population of the US! So, really, there are only five global languages: English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic. So if you were going to learn a second natural language, you’d do best to learn one of those.

Qian Zhecheng:

These days, Xu Li doesn’t worry whenever her elderly father takes off on one of his frequent solo trips to Europe. Although the native of provincial capital Hefei speaks little English and has Chinese so heavily infused by his city’s local patois that other Chinese cannot always understand him, Xu trusts that, in case of an emergency, he can communicate using the dialect transcription and translation app on his phone. After all, she helped develop the program.

Xu is a researcher at iFlytek, a Chinese tech firm known for its AI-powered iFlytek Voice Input keyboard app. The app’s voice-to-text function lets users transcribe vocal recordings and dictate written messages. But to win over consumers and succeed in the Chinese market, it needs to do more than just be able to recognize and translate spoken Standard Mandarin, the country’s only official national language — it has to be able to understand and process dialect, too.

That’s where Xu comes in. Despite decades of concerted government effort, tens of millions of Chinese, including Xu’s father, still speak little-to-no Standard Mandarin, instead communicating in one or more of the country’s thousands of distinct regional and local vernaculars. It’s Xu’s job to increase the accuracy of iFlytek’s input method — and the software’s potential scope — by using deep learning techniques to teach the program these dialects.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Unlike most findings in the sleepy field of occupational therapy, her findings, which were published last year in the Journal of Hand Therapy, touched off a media firestorm, as the revelation seemed to encapsulate any number of smoldering fears in one handy conflagration: The loss of human potential in the face of automation, of our increasing time spent on smartphones and other devices, the erosion of our masculine norms,2 of the fragility and general shiftlessness of millennials. Even taking into account the cautionary statistical notes—that the sample sizes of the 1980s studies were not huge, that Fain’s study was mostly college students—the idea of a loss in human strength, expressed through a statistical measure hardly anyone had previously heard of, seemed to hint at some latter-day version of degeneration.

That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength. In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength.3 Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”

Quinn Norton:

Fighting charges can take years of life, millions of dollars, and a rare resiliency in the face of an adversarial system designed to destroy you. Prosecutors and DAs use the threat of piling on additional charges and harsh mandatory minimums to force people to give in.

As a result, around 96% of defendants accept plea bargains. They go to prison without ever being proven guilty in a court of law. For the disproportionately poor and often black and latino arrestees, the constitutional right to a fair trial is a mocking fiction. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in 2012, “it is insufficient simply to point to the guarantee of a fair trial… If there is no trial, there can be no fair trial.”

Even the government admits that up to 8% of those pleading are likely to be completely innocent. That’s at least 176,000 souls trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Given the common practice of misapplying charges to edge cases of the law, and the harshness of sentences even in situations where no one got hurt, the number of lost souls ripped from their lives and fed into this terrible machine are undoubtedly much higher.

Tom Gantert:

A Republican state representative has introduced a bill that would make it illegal in Michigan for social media companies such as Google or Facebook to “censor, ban, shadow-ban” or use other means to exercise viewpoint discrimination against users on the basis of the person’s political opinions.

State Rep. John Reilly of Oakland Township introduced House Bill 4801 on June 26. A press release from the Michigan House Republican caucus cited a Project Veritas undercover sting that secretly recorded a Google executive, Jen Gennai, saying that her company is focused on “never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”

The bill has been referred to the House Communications and Technology Committee, chaired by Rep. Michele Hoitenga, R-Manton.

“This isn’t a question of property rights. This is a question of fraud,” Reilly said in the press release. “In this modern era, social media networks are the new public square. Banning – and worse, secretly banning while deceiving the user into believing their content is being shared equally – excludes individuals from public life.”

Reilly continued: “Social media companies cannot eat their cake and have it too. They cannot enjoy the privileges of being a platform, such as immunity from liability for users’ content, while also enjoying the privileges of being a publisher to control what everyone may or may not say on their network.”

Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, said in an email that there is a distinction between a government entity and a private enterprise.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 organizations use Google and Facebook services, including Madison.

Alex Gillis:

A scholar for forty years, Franco has followed the rise of junk publishers for about a decade. He has seen them go from anomalous blights on academics’ credentials to widespread additions on scholarly resumés, nearly indistinguishable from legitimate work. Now, he says, “there’s never been a worse time to be a scientist.” Typically, when a scholar completes work they want to see published, they submit a paper to a reputable journal. If the paper is accepted, it undergoes a rigorous editing process—including peer review, in which experts in the field evaluate the work and provide feedback. Once the paper is published, it can be cited by others and inspire further research or media attention. The process can take years. Traditionally, five publishers have dominated this $25 billion industry: Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), and Sage. But, before the turn of the century, a new model of online publishing, “open access,” began opening doors for countless academics—and for thousands of scams in the process.

The new online model created an opportunity for profits: the more papers publishers accepted, the more money they generated from authors who paid to be included—$150 to $2,000 per paper, if not more, and often with the support of government grants. Researchers also saw substantial benefits: the more studies they posted, the more positions, promotions, job security, and grant money they received from universities and agencies. Junk publishers—companies that masquerade as real publishers but accept almost every submission and skip quality editing—elbowed their way in.

Logan Wroge:

In 2012, the School Board hired consultant Ray and Associates, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for $31,000 to assist in the search process to replace former Superintendent Dan Nerad.

But questions around a finalist’s background left some board members at the time saying they were not fully aware of controversial issues. That finalist withdrew shortly before a scheduled visit to the district, clearing the way for Cheatham’s hiring.

To fill the superintendent role on an interim basis, the School Board last month chose Jane Belmore, a former Madison assistant superintendent, who will start Aug. 1.

Cheatham will leave for a teaching position at Harvard University at the end of August.

Notes and links on recent Madison Superintendent searches.

2013: What will be different, this time?

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Briana Reilly:

Mary Burke announced Friday she’s stepping down from her position on the Madison School Board after seven years.

Burke, who was first elected to the board in 2012, said in a statement her departure comes as her “personal and professional commitments do not allow me the time and energy needed to fulfill my term.”

“I have faith that the Board will hire a great new superintendent, pass a transformative referendum and continue towards fulfilling our mission of every student graduating college, career and community ready,” she said in a statement.

Logan Wroge:

The School Board will discuss filling the vacant seat when it meets Monday night. Board policy calls for a vacant seat to be filled by appointment within 60 days of a resignation.

According to the policy, interested candidates will need to file a statement of interest of no more than 700 words with the district, including:

Much more on Mary Burke and Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 school District

Ms Burke initially supported the later aborted (by a majority of the School Board) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

John Otis:

At a primary school in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, the students’ parents play an outsize role.

Gasoline shortages have collapsed public transportation, making it hard for teachers to get to work. Others skip class to scrounge for food and medicine, both of which are in short supply in Venezuela. Due to low salaries, some teachers have quit.

That’s why Karen Benini, the mother of a sixth-grader, often steps in to substitute even though she lacks a teacher’s certificate.

“I’m not a teacher. I never studied to be a teacher. I’m a graphic designer,” says Benini, 41, who volunteers two to three days per week.

Amid Venezuela’s catastrophic economic meltdown, education experts say that it’s getting much harder for children to get a good grasp of history, geography and their ABCs.

School staff are resigning in droves. Legions of students and teachers are among the 4 million Venezuelans who have fled the country in recent years. Those still going to school in the country often find that classes have been canceled due to power outages, water shortages and other breakdowns.

Jill LePore:

The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong’s boots, caked into dust. There’s no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don’t blow away and they don’t wash away and there’s no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they’re so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they’ll last for tens of millions of years.

China Heritage:

Gong Renren (龔刃韌, 1954-), the author of the following essay, is a professor (retired) in the Law School of Peking University (see here for details) and the head of the Institute for Human Rights 人權研究院.

On 21 June 2019, Professor Gong published an essay that is nothing less than an indictment of China’s academic culture, an accusation of mediocrity and a critique of a cowed and compliant intelligentsia. In his analysis of the ever-deepening crisis in the Chinese humanities and social sciences, Gong contrasts the failures of today with the achievements of the country’s universities during the turbulent and war-torn decades of the Republic of China.

The following essay is thus an elegy for the long-lost world of pre-1949 Chinese academia, a warning about the bedevilled state of the country’s universities under a reinvigorated Party ideology and a caution about the global blight of metrics- and ranking-driven, industrial-scale for-profit education. In particular, the author skewers the Chinese academy for having barely sloughed off the Maoist past only to become a laboratory for a dual experiment: one in which the culture of neo-liberal metrics in line with the concocted laws of the global educational marketplace is combined with stifling ideological controls that serve the policy shifts of a monolithic party-state.

The author also deftly encapsulates the dilemma of Global China. The People’s Republic has the economic and intellectual heft to contribute to the betterment not only of its own people but to humanity as a whole. Over recent decades, mature policy makers have developed ways for the country to engage creatively with the world, but resurgent Party dominance also demands every greater, and absurd, levels of fealty to its inward-looking dogmas. As a result, higher education is a battleground on which China’s best angels and worst spirits tussle. There may be no clear winners, yet, for many, the struggle itself is of great significance.

Theodore Dalrymple:

In February 2017, an 18-year-old Cambridge University law student, Ronald Coyne, was filmed on the streets of Cambridge at night burning a £20 note in front of a 31-year-old homeless man, Ryan Davies, who had asked him politely for spare change. According to Davies, Coyne said, “I’ll give you some change. I’ve changed it into fire.” Coyne then continued down the street as if he had done nothing worthy of note. A member of the university’s Conservative club, he was drunk at the time—though not dead drunk, for he was more swaggering than staggering—and dressed in white tie and tails.

The video of the encounter went viral; a picture of the young man, looking very pleased with himself, appeared in most British newspapers. Public condemnation swelled. Before long, 23,000 people signed a petition calling for his expulsion from the university.

In a drop of rain, said the eminent British historian Sir Lewis Namier, can be seen the colors of the sun: and in this episode, brief and simple as it appeared, all the social, political, and philosophical conflicts of modern British society, and perhaps of Western society in general, can be seen.

No decent person could witness, or read of, Coyne’s conduct without revulsion. But expressing a universally shared disgust is not enough; it is necessary to go deeper and analyze the reasons for it. Why did the incident—relatively harmless, compared with the examples of violence and savage acts that fill the British tabloids daily—provoke such outrage?

At the moment of his gesture, Coyne exhibited a disturbing coldheartedness. It strikes fear in our hearts that men should be so effortlessly capable of such cruelty. If a young man—intelligent, educated, privileged, and with everything to look forward to in life—can behave like this, of what else might he, and others like him, not be capable? We cannot console ourselves that his action was mere thoughtlessness, a momentary lapse, like someone with much on his mind who passes through a swinging door without thinking of who might be behind him. Coyne’s gesture was not only malign; its malignity was its whole point. He took pleasure in the pain he knew it would cause, in the extra humiliation inflicted upon a man already in a humiliating position. His was an archetypically malicious action.

Coyne’s mother, who did not condone her son’s conduct, claimed that it was completely uncharacteristic. He had always been a quiet, studious boy rather than a roustabout, she said, and indeed, while still at school, he had worked as a volunteer for a homeless charity. Even if this were all true, however, it would not be entirely reassuring, for it would mean that a decent, even a good, person could suddenly transform into a bad one and perform a callous act. But at least such a reflection would warn us that we must constantly be on guard against ourselves.

Philip Jeffery:

One friday afternoon in November 1948, T. S. Eliot opened a new chapter in American culture policy. Eliot, just two weeks removed from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, spoke at the invitation of the Library of Congress on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance as a poet. He derided Poe as immature and sloppy — his kindest comment was that Poe was at heart a “displaced European” — but found it significant that the French symbolist poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all drew extensively on Poe. Poe’s careless style-over-substance approach, Eliot explained, looked to the French symbolists like an avant-garde forebear of la poésie pure — the point at which subject matter would cease to matter, while poetic technique, theory, and the artistic process in itself would be all-important. Valéry in particular held up the individual artist and his artistic process as the ideal central concern of any artistic “content.” Eliot lamented this development, but nonetheless saw it as the legitimate and historically inevitable development of Western poetry. To reject la poésie pure “would be a lapse from what is in any case a highly civilized attitude to a barbarous one.”

Charlie Warzel:

The home page for Gaggle, a software program that scans student activity across digital platforms like email, computer files and online assignments, features a staggering, if unprovable, statistic. “This past academic year, Gaggle helped districts save 542 students from carrying out an act of suicide,” it reads.

Calculating figures like suicide prevention is a murky science at best (Gaggle emailed to say that the number was “actually 722 students saved”), but that hasn’t stopped digital student monitoring systems like Gaggle, which has roughly five million users, from growing in popularity. In the wake of mass shootings like Parkland, school districts are facing pressure to find new ways to deter violence, and many of them force administrators to make a choice between student safety and privacy.

Their decisions are ushering in a K-12 surveillance state. This spring, Western New York’s Lockport City School District started testing facial recognition technology with “the capacity to go back and create a map of the movements and associations of any student or teacher.” There have been gunfire-detecting microphones installed in New Mexico schools and playgrounds that require iris scans. A recent ProPublica report explored the deployment of unreliable “aggression detector” cameras in places like Queens, New York. The increase is most likely linked to the number of security and surveillance technology vendors courting school district budgets.

Susan Edelman:

At the Science School for Exploration and Discovery, MS 224 in the Bronx, an impressive 94 percent of students in grades 6-8 passed their math classes in the 2017-18 school year.

But how much math they actually mastered is questionable.

Only 2 percent of those same Mott Haven students — nearly all Hispanic and black from poor or low-income families — passed the state math exams, which measure skills that kids should have at each grade level, according to city data reviewed by The Post.

At Harbor Heights middle school in Washington Heights, an awesome 100 percent of kids — all Hispanic — passed their state English Language Arts classes.

But only 7 percent of those kids passed the ELA exams, the data show.

Some education advocates politely call it “grade inflation.”

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Michael Sheridan:

However, in the course of researching a book on Hong Kong, I have found that Mrs Thatcher, for one, had less cause for remorse than she may have thought. Indeed she may have set an example. About a year after watching Chris Patten and the Prince of Wales sail away in a storm on the royal yacht Britannia, I was browsing one afternoon in the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Beijing when a snappy new title caught my eye.

Mao Zedong on Diplomacy, published in 1998, contains official papers and transcripts from the “liberation” of China to late in Mao’s life. A light-hearted read it is not, until the last pages, in which the chairman greets an unctuous Edward Heath, then leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, for a chat about world affairs on May 25, 1974.

‘I cast my vote for you!’ declares Mao, ignoring an aide who asks if he is not afraid of offending Harold Wilson, the sitting Labour prime minister. Mao was on record as preferring conservatives, De Gaulle and Nixon among them, to liberals and socialists. No doubt he found something to admire in pragmatism tempered by ruthlessness.

He trusted Heath to send a message to the British government about Hong Kong. ‘We won’t discuss it at present,’ said Mao, ‘This will be the business of the younger generation.’ Heath was back eight years later. This time he met Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, and inquired again about the colony. ‘How could we face our ancestors and the Chinese people if we did not take it back?’ said Deng, according to a memoir by a senior Chinese official. It landed in Mrs Thatcher’s in-tray just after the Falklands War. Britain’s lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997 and the Foreign Office pressed her to make a deal.

She did so, but it troubled her for the rest of her life to see millions of British subjects handed over to a Communist dictatorship. Yet her resolve may have got them a better future than Deng ever intended to grant.

We knew that her meeting with Deng in September 1982 was grim. ‘A tiny man who radiated power,’ says a British official who advised her. Deng dismissed the 19th-Century treaties granting Hong Kong Island and part of the Kowloon peninsula to Britain in perpetuity. She was shocked. Deng said he could take Hong Kong in an afternoon. He chain-smoked and spat. But I did not know that when Mrs Thatcher steadied and held her ground, the Chinese leader had private cause for doubt. Memoirs by Chinese officials and Communist Party histories – all laudatory of their own wisdom, of course – show that her firmness changed Deng’s political calculations.

The People’s Liberation Army had a plan for invading Hong Kong, on the shelf since the Cultural Revolution. But Deng knew the PLA had come off badly in a brawl with Vietnam. Plus, China had no friends. Deng still feared the USSR. He had to do economic reform, so he needed the United States. Perhaps, the Chinese leader thought, this difficult woman might actually make a fight of it. One never knew.

Stephen Wolfram:

So what was the hearing really about? For me, it was in large measure an early example of reaction to the realization that, yes, AIs are starting to run the world. Billions of people are being fed content that is basically selected for them by AIs, and there are mounting concerns about this, as reported almost every day in the media.

Are the AIs cleverly hacking us humans to get us to behave in a certain way? What kind of biases do the AIs have, relative to what the world is like, or what we think the world should be like? What are the AIs optimizing for, anyway? And when are there actually “humans behind the curtain”, controlling in detail what the AIs are doing?

It doesn’t help that in some sense the AIs are getting much more free rein than they might because the people who use them aren’t really their customers. I have to say that back when the internet was young, I personally never thought it would work this way, but in today’s world many of the most successful businesses on the internet—including Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter—make their revenue not from their users, but instead from advertisers who are going through them to reach their users.

All these business also have in common that they are fundamentally what one can call “automated content selection businesses”: they work by getting large amounts of content that they didn’t themselves generate, then using what amounts to AI to automatically select what content to deliver or to suggest to any particular user at any given time—based on data that they’ve captured about that user. Part of what’s happening is presumably optimized to give a good experience to their users (whatever that might mean), but part of it is also optimized to get revenue from the actual customers, i.e. advertisers. And there’s also an increasing suspicion that somehow the AI is biased in what it’s doing—maybe because someone explicitly made it be, or because it somehow evolved that way.

Time:

The month of July is a time for Americans to look back at the country’s past—specifically to that indelible moment in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain. But, while the nearly 250 years since then have been chock full of major milestones, not every moment that shaped the country gets the credit it deserves.

With that in mind, TIME asked 15 experts to each nominate an unsung moment from American history. These are events that, though not necessarily widely known today, either changed the national story in some important way or embodied a significant current. And if you don’t know about them yet, these historians will explain why they think you should.

Luc Sante:

Last Witnesses was the second book by Svetlana Alexievich, originally published in 1985, the same year as her first, The Unwomanly Face of War. Both of them, like the three major works that followed—Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013)—could be briefly and superficially described as oral histories. They indeed consist of testimony, recorded and transcribed, by witnesses to major events and periods in the history of the former Soviet Union.

Oral history is an important research tool, but it has not often been treated as literature. Although it obviously harks back to the oldest means of transmission, its publishing history is for the most part recent. Many of these published accounts consist of lengthy, unstructured, often repetitive monologues; they seldom make for good reading. In her books, Alexievich transforms the genre, turning it into literature through her editing and orchestration. That word is not idly chosen; there is a distinctly musical flow to the way she groups speakers and subjects. In Voices from Chernobyl, among multipage individual stories, she composes “choruses” of single-paragraph accounts by multiple people who underwent similar experiences. In Secondhand Time she assembles two chapters, both called “Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations,” that replicate the experience of ambient talk and circulating notions; the speakers are distinguished from one another only by punctuation and sometimes speak only one line.

John Naughton:

We Have Been Harmonised is the most accessible and best informed account we have had to date of China’s transition from what scholars such as Rebecca MacKinnon used to call “networked authoritarianism” to what is now a form of networked totalitarianism. The difference is not merely semantic. An authoritarian regime is relatively limited in its objectives: there may be elections, but they are generally carefully managed; individual freedoms are subordinate to the state; there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law in any meaningful sense.
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Totalitarianism, in contrast, prohibits opposition parties, restricts opposition to the state and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. As the historian Robert Conquest put it, a totalitarian state recognises no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and seeks to extend that authority to whatever lengths it can.

Which pretty well matches Strittmatter’s portrayal of contemporary China under Xi Jinping, its new “leader for life”, who is increasingly looking like Mao 2.0 right down to his Little Red App as the contemporary version of his predecessor’s Little Red Book. Mercifully, though, he does not seem to have Mao’s enthusiasm for sacrificing millions of people on the altar of socialist rectitude. But, as Strittmatter tells it, under Xi’s leadership the Communist party of China (CCP) has been closely following the totalitarian playbook as described by Hannah Arendt and other observers of the phenomenon.

Clifford Humphrey:

What is two plus two? Well, as it turns out, it depends.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” This statement was the “thoughtcrime” of Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Though not yet a thoughtcrime in the real world, this statement is increasingly suspect.

Politics is the conversation a whole people has about what is good and bad, and just and unjust regarding their common life and common nature as human beings.

That conversation, of course, is only possible if language is possible, if words mean discernible things and are communicable. The famous story of the Tower of Babel, in which God mixed up the languages of men and forced them to scatter, is an apt analogy for the breakdown of politics following the breakdown of language.

Language itself, though, is only possible if reason is possible. The law of noncontradiction holds that two plus two can’t be four and not-four at the same time. The whole potential for politics depends on that law, because by it people can use their reason to arrive at and assent to a conclusion, and by it, people can deliberate together and consent to government.

If one denies the law of noncontradiction, however, all that remains is the tyrannical rule of force, one party foisting its will on the rest. A tyrant, after all, doesn’t bother asking for the opinion of his slaves.

Eric Litke:

Voucher schools are an ongoing point of contention in Wisconsin’s divided government, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers even promising to tighten or end the decades-old program.

The system, which uses taxpayer money to send low-income students to private schools, has been tweaked and debated but ultimately expanded under Republican control in recent years.

In recent comments, one Democratic lawmaker claimed it has grown into a program with a 10-figure tax impact.

“The only thing voucher schools have done for low-income kids is increase their parents’ property taxes. That’s it,” said state Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, during a May 23, 2019, session of the Joint Committee on Finance, the Legislature’s budget-writing body.

She went on to say: “They have failed to increase academic performance of low-income kids or graduation rates of low-income kids, but they’ve increased property taxes. You know how much by? Since 2011, and this is from the (Legislative) Fiscal Bureau — $1 billion.”

We’ll leave the performance arguments for another day and focus on the price tag.

Has the voucher program, also known as school choice, really raised property taxes by $1 billion?

Understanding vouchers

Though the voucher program is often referred to as a single entity, it is actually four different programs.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is the first and largest, launched in 1990. The Racine Parental Choice Program started in 2011, the statewide Wisconsin Parental Choice Program in 2013 and the statewide Special Needs Scholarship Program in 2016.

The programs allow parents to send their children to private schools with a taxpayer-funded voucher. Families must meet certain income limits (though those don’t apply for the special needs program) to qualify for vouchers and must reapply every year.

The programs had a combined enrollment of about 40,000 students in 2018-19, with about 75% of those in Milwaukee.

The state could fund the voucher program by simply paying the vouchers from the state’s general fund — the Racine and statewide programs used to work like this — but instead it is now done through a complex exchange of funds.

The mechanics vary between programs, but generally it works like this:

When a student enrolls in a voucher school, the state pays the amount of that voucher — roughly $8,000 per student — to the school and reduces the state aid to the public school district where the student lives by the same amount.

The state then increases the amount the district can levy in property taxes by the same amount to make up for the lost voucher funds.

The system helps restore district funding levels since losing a smattering of students at different levels doesn’t typically result in lower costs for the district. That is, a district can’t get rid of a grade-level classroom or drop a teacher who teaches a particular subject just because two students in one grade and one in another move to a voucher school.

The district isn’t required to raise taxes; it could make up the money by cutting elsewhere.

But since 2011, the period cited by Taylor, there was just one year where Racine or Milwaukee didn’t increase the property-tax levy to that maximum, according to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Dan Rossmiller, government relations director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, also noted districts are motivated to levy to this maximum since this is a “use it or lose it” system. Districts that don’t tax to that full amount in a given year can’t return to that levy amount in the future.

The state is in the process of changing this system for Milwaukee.

Taxpayers support traditional K-12 school districts with many taxes, including property, sales, income (state and federal) and fees. Voucher schools make do with much less, per student.

Erica Meltzer:

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference on the science of reading held by John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT. It was, if nothing else, an eye-opening experience—not always in good ways, but certainly in ways that laid bare the problems involved in implementing broad changes to how reading is taught in the United States.
At the reception after the conference, I happened to be introduced to Nancy Duggan, one of the founders of the Massachusetts chapter of Decoding Dyslexia, an organization that advocates for screening and support for dyslexic students. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned one of the stranger reading problems I’d seen among my students—namely, that they had trouble making their eyes follow a line of text from left to right. Instead, their gaze seemed to dart randomly around the page. “Oh,” Nancy said promptly, “that’s the three-cueing system. Kids are supposed to look at just the beginning of the word and then look at the pictures for context clues.”
I was vaguely familiar with the term, but I had never made the connection between it and the reading difficulties I had witnessed in teenagers. I also confess that I did not know that children were actually taught to read in quite this bizarre a manner, or that the three-cueing system had anything to do with it.
Of course I knew that students were encouraged to look at the pictures or at other parts of the text for clues, but I had somehow always imagined that they were instructed to do these things if they could not figure out what a word meant—naively, I assumed that the initial focus was still on all the letters in the word, and that students were taught to look elsewhere afterward. It literally did not occur to me that children could be told to look at just the first letter or two in a word, and then be directed to immediately look somewhere else, before they had even demonstrated any difficulty making the connection between the letters and the word as a whole. That was too far outside the realm of my experience. It was just too illogical. And, quite frankly, too dumb. Who in their right mind would teach someone to read that way?

Bryan Anderson:

Data from the Berkeley Unified School District shows the school had 15 black students in 1963 — a year before Harris was born. They represented 3% of the total elementary school student body, while other schools in the district had a black population as high as 97%.

A fierce advocate of integration, Neil Sullivan moved to California 1964 to take over as superintendent. In the subsequent years, a task force reported to him to address the de facto segregation in the community.

In 1967, Sullivan’s team drafted a plan for all elementary schools to have black representation between 35% and 45%. By that time, the district had already desegregated its secondary schools — grades 7 to 12.

Black representation had grown slightly in the early-1960s. By 1967, the district considered its schools to be “partially desegregated,” but still “making progress toward racial integration,” according to documents obtained by The Sacramento Bee. The records show one in ten students at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in 1967 were black.

“These schools shall be totally desegregated in September, 1968, and we might make history on that day,” Sullivan said in a May 1967 education board meeting.

BBC:

Meredith’s mother was suspicious about vaccines and would never let her have them as a child. For a while it didn’t seem to matter, but eventually Meredith (not her real name) starting coming down with some frightening illnesses.

It started when I accidentally stood on a nail. Some time afterwards my jaw and shoulder started to seize up and paramedics rushed me to the closest hospital in an ambulance.

It was a teaching hospital in Brisbane and I remember vividly that the doctor left the room saying quietly, “Oh my God!”

He brought in all the medical students to take a look at me. It was tetanus – also known as lockjaw. They hadn’t had a patient diagnosed with tetanus in over 30 years.

I was determined and said: “I’m not going to die at 36 because of tetanus.”

Despite the pain, I felt angry towards my mother, because she deliberately didn’t get me vaccinated. The doctors took white blood cells from someone who had already had tetanus – cells that had proved that they were “seasoned fighters” – and injected them into me to help my white blood cells recognise the illness and fight it.

With this treatment, eventually I got better. But I was still angry, because this is something that could’ve been completely prevented.

Jessica McCrory Calarco:

The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success.

But a new study has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores.

Bill Murphy, Jr.:

My poor daughter. She’s happy and healthy, and has loving parents and a stable home.

But, she also has a dad who scours scholarly articles to find the modern consensus on best practices in raising kids.

I hope we’re not treating her like a guinea pig. But I do think we’re careful to make small adjustments in the ways we try to raise her, having pored over some of the most useful and interesting strategies out there.

I think the five daily habits I’ll describe below are among the most compelling.

1. Stay on top of them.
It can be exhausting, and sometimes you think your words are going in one ear and out the other. But British researchers found that parents who articulate high expectations are more likely to have kids who grow up to be successful — and avoid some key pitfalls. ‘

Specifically, a study of 15,000 British girls over 10 years, from ages 13-14 to 23-24, found that those whose parents who consistently displayed high expectations for their children were:

Andy Ngo:

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination.
This trend of student hate-crime hoaxes has continued. In May 2017, St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass “anti-racism” protests that caused classes to be cancelled. Samantha Wells, a black student activist, was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. In September of that year, five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
In November 2018, students at Goucher College in Maryland demanded social-justice training and safe spaces after “I’m gonna kill all [n—s]” was discovered written in a dorm bathroom. Fynn Arthur, a black student, was responsible for the hoax. That same month, thousands of students at Drake University protested after racist notes turned up on campus. Kissie Ram, an Indian-American student, pled guilty for targeting herself and others in the hoax. And in May of this year, a student at the University of La Verne allegedly had a bag placed over her head while she was groped and had her head slammed into a dormitory stair railing. The student declined medical assistance, however. An outspoken activist in the campus “decolonize” movement, she reported other unsubstantiated hate crimes earlier this year, making one wonder if these incidents were hoaxes.
And there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators.
At Oberlin College, in particular, this problem precedes the Trump era. In 2013, students at the elite liberal arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration cancelled all classes for the day. The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes.
With their preoccupation with identity, privilege, and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that participants in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards victimhood by manufacturing it?

Bob Dohr:

Revenue is decreasing because of declining student enrollment and the resultant decreased state aid, according to the district. Expenses are mounting because of rising educational costs, insurance costs, utility costs and bus fuel.

The district has taken several measures to try to balance the budget, including cutting teaching and other staffing positions, changing employee insurance to cut costs and eliminating district-sponsored post-employment benefits for all employees hired after 2001, according to the district.

Other expense reductions have included consolidating bus routes, reducing utility costs through energy-efficiency projects, canceling summer school, refinancing long-term debt and delaying spending on maintenance.

The district will be open for the 2019-20 school year. But district officials have said they don’t have enough money to operate beyond that.

Philip Marsden:

The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool of evidence the past 800,000 years. Even this, he admits, narrows the study because it leaves out non-human thinkers — we know that animals dream. But to compensate, he allows his dog Beau a couple of walk-on appearances.

It’s a compelling thesis, and one that the author takes on with gusto: behind the whole monumental enterprise of human endeavor lies ‘the power of seeing what is not there’. We imagine things, then we strive to create them in the real world:

‘A human can hear a note and compose a symphony, survey a landscape and envision a city, endure frustration and conceive perfection, look at his chains and fancy himself free.’

Valerie Bauerlein:

This Raleigh, N.C., suburb was declared the best place to live in America by a national magazine in 2015, around the time Lindsay and Terry Mahaffey were drawn by its schools, affordable housing and quaint downtown.

The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.

Many other families had the same idea. Apex, nicknamed the Millennial Mayberry, is the fastest-growing suburb in the U.S., according to Realtor.com, and the town is struggling to keep pace with all the newcomers.

When Mr. and Mrs. Mahaffey took their eldest daughter for the first day of kindergarten, school officials told them they didn’t have a seat. Too many kids, they said. On weekends, the family thinks twice about going downtown—not enough parking. And the horse farm next door was sold for a subdivision.

WILL:

The Wisconsin institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter to the Appleton Area School District on June 18 explaining why a school board member was well within his rights to discuss his Christian faith at a graduation ceremony in early June. In addition, WILL warned the school board against taking any action that would serve to violate the First Amendment rights of speakers based on their viewpoint.

The Background: Rev. Alvin Dupree, a member of the Appleton Area School District school board, invoked his Christian faith in remarks at a June 6 graduation ceremony at Appleton North High School. In response, a group of students and the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) expressed outrage and asked the Appleton school board to prevent Dupree from speaking at future district-sponsored events. Additionally, FFRF encouraged the school board to adopt a policy for graduation remarks that require review and approval.

Paul Caron:

The tax applies to any private college or university that has at least 500 full-time tuition-paying students (more than half of whom are located in the U.S.) and that has assets other than those used in its charitable activities worth at least $500,000 per student. An estimated 40 or fewer institutions are affected.

For affected institutions, the guidance clarifies how to determine net investment income, including how to include the net investment income of related organizations and how to determine an institution’s basis in property.

These proposed regulations incorporate the interim guidance provided in Notice 2018-55, that for property held by an institution at the end of 2017, generally allows the educational institution to use the property’s fair market value at the end of 2017 as its basis for figuring the tax on any resulting gain.

Related: . Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

James Fishman:

This paper argues that the legislation as enacted is politically motivated and fatally flawed. The “assets per student” ratio that triggers the tax is both over and under-inclusive, and irrelevant and arbitrary as a guide to excessive endowment accumulation. The legislation serves to exempt multi-billion dollar endowments of many universities yet ensnare smaller colleges that may have more limited resources, but the endowment to student ration exceeds $500,000.

The growing income inequality in American society is reflected in the inequality of access to elite schools with billion dollar endowments. While large endowment schools have increased financial aid, the percentage of students from lower income families has remained the same. A student whose parents come from the top one percent of income distribution is 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than one from the bottom income quintile. Among “Ivy League Plus” colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Chicago, Stanford, MIT and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of income distribution (14.5%) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5%).

Recommended is that the investment income tax be triggered for all billion dollar endowment institutions when the endowment earns $75 million in net investment income ($150 million for public school billion dollar endowments). The endowment per student ratio should be jettisoned. Schools could offset the net income investment tax on a one dollar to one dollar basis by increasing financial assistance to the student body. If the school increases the admission of students from underrepresented constituencies, the tax offset would be two dollars for each dollar spent in expanding the number of such students.

Marvin Joseph:

Books are a portal to our personal histories. Pick up a worn copy of a childhood favorite and you might be transported to the warmth of a parent’s arms or a beanbag chair in a first-grade classroom or a library in your hometown. Avid readers could build autobiographies around their favorite books and come to the realization that what they have read is almost as meaningful as when they read it. A high schooler poring over “To Kill a Mockingbird” for a summer reading assignment encounters a different book than someone who reads it decades later, closer in age and outlook to Atticus than Scout.

In light of that reality, we took a stab at picking the best book for every age. There’s no definitive way to do this, of course. What moves one reader may not resonate with another, regardless of their birth year. So think of this list as a starting point, plus an invitation to look back at your own literary chronology: What spoke to you during a certain time in your life — and why? Feel free to submit your nominations here.

Here are our picks for worthwhile books to read during each year of life, from 1 to 100, along with some of the age-appropriate wisdom they impart.

Nicole Allen:

Stymied when it came to prosecuting crime, Harris turned her attention to trying to prevent it. One of her first targets was an unlikely demographic: elementary school kids and their parents. “We went to the school district,” says Silard, Harris’s then–policy chief, “and they looked back at the records and found that all of these folks, well before dropping out of high school, had been chronically truant.” And not just in high school — the data showed that these students had missed large portions of elementary school.

Here was a problem that felt more solvable than convincing gang members to testify against one another. Harris decided to try to stop young people from joining gangs and committing crimes in the first place. She and Silard considered their options. Their initial conversations with the San Francisco school district were not productive. “My opinion, frankly, is that for some people within the education systems, not having to deal with some of these kids is not something they’re sad about,” says Silard, who now runs the Rosenberg Foundation, a racial- and economic-justice organization based in San Francisco. “They’re not necessarily taking big efforts to keep these kids in school.”
At the time, California law contained a civil infraction, akin to a traffic ticket, for parents whose kids missed a certain number of days of school, with a maximum fine of $100 and no jail time. Some counties also charged these parents with a criminal misdemeanor for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” which carried a fine of up to $2,500 and as much as a year in jail. Harris decided to threaten to enforce these penalties to get foot-dragging parents to pay attention — and to prosecute if they didn’t.
She announced the policy at a meeting in the DA’s office, remembers Keith Choy, who was working as the district’s stay-in-school coordinator. The room was filled with school principals and administrators, school-board members, and representatives from the police and health departments, Choy says. As Harris describes the meeting in her first book, Smart on Crime, the audience “erupted” when she announced her plan — half “sneered and were visibly upset,” while “the other half clapped and cheered out loud.”

“People were pushing back,” Choy confirms. “The big concern was, How can you jail parents and kids for truancy in San Francisco? Nobody ever said it out loud like that. But it was like, Hey, we’re The City. We don’t do that.”

Harris, however, remained committed to the plan. “The idea was not to be punitive,” Silard explains, “but to connect parents to the kind of support they needed to get their kids to school.”

Under the program, parents received a letter on DA letterhead at the beginning of the school year informing them that truancy was a crime and listing the number for a city hotline if they needed help getting their kids to school. Parents were notified when their children had more than 20 unexcused absences. School administrators pulled them into a series of meetings at which they were offered various forms of assistance: busing, child care for other kids, transfers to more-convenient schools. At some of these meetings, an assistant DA would sit in the room, symbolizing the potential for legal consequences. “It was a carrot-and-a-stick meeting,” explains Choy.
In concert with Donna Hitchens, a longtime San Francisco judge who had overhauled the county’s family court, Harris and her team set up a special truancy court for families who did not respond to earlier interventions. Before Hitchens called each case, a social worker would meet with the parents, almost none of whom could afford lawyers. An assistant DA was always present, and hanging over every proceeding was the fact that the city could always attempt to remove the child from the family. Hitchens says that most parents were concerned and embarrassed. “They really wanted their children to be in school,” she says.

CRISTOPHER TREMOGLIE:

College tuition has exploded well beyond the rate of inflation: Since 1978, college tuition has increased more than four times — a staggering 1375 percent — the rate of inflation. It’s risen eight times faster than wages since the 1980s, according to Forbes.

“The reason people keep paying huge amounts for college is because it is assumed – and somewhat correctly, yet with lots of exceptions — that a college degree is needed to advance career-wise beyond mere economic subsistence,” Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, told National Review. Statistically, college graduates still earn over 1.5 times more than those with just a high school diploma.

American society has been sold on the idea that obtaining a college degree is the key to success. “Universities are seen through rose-colored glasses,” Dr. Jenna A. Robinson, president of the Martin Center, told National Review. And the government’s backing of student loans has allowed more students to be financially viable to attend college. Children go to high school, get accepted to college, get the dream job after graduation and buy the house with the white picket fence; the process is almost formulaic. “Conventional wisdom has been pushing college-for-all for a very long time,” Robinson said. “The minute a kid hits first grade he or she is pushed toward college,” Schalin said.

Michael Lind:

Desch, a professor of international relations at Notre Dame and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, explains that “from the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a tension between the two objectives of the evolving research university system. Science and practical application were in tension generally, but the social sciences experienced it particularly acutely.” In relating the history of debates about the interaction between the making and the study of foreign policy, Desch narrates the larger story of American political science, whose birth as an independent scholarly discipline can be dated to the founding of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1904. Desch observes that a majority of the early members of the APSA were not academics and that its early presidents like Frank Goodnow and Woodrow Wilson were progressives committed to using social science to promote social reform. But public-spirited scholars like Charles Beard, president of the APSA in 1926, were already losing out by the 1920s to the likes of University of Chicago’s William Fielding Ogburn, who opined that the scholar had “to give up social action and dedicated [himself] to science.”

Matthew Ladner:

Among the report’s highlights:

The great majority of students are not learning on, or even near, grade level.

With rare exception, teachers are demoralized and feel unsupported.

Most parents feel shut out of their children’s education.

Principals find it very difficult to demonstrate leadership.

Many school buildings are deteriorating across the city, and some are even dangerous to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing.

You can view local television coverage of the “devastating” report here and here.

Meanwhile, the Digest of Education Statistics shows that Rhode Island spent a total of $16,496 per pupil in the 2014-15 school year compared to Florida’s per-pupil expenditure of $9,962.

The John Hopkins researchers visited multiple Providence classrooms and found reading classes where no one was reading and French classes where no one was speaking French. They did, however, observe kindergarten students punching each other in the face, students staring at their phones during class, and students communicating over Facetime during class. One can only shudder to think what might be going on when university researchers aren’t touring the school.

Madison spends far more, between $18 and $20K/student, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Tom Vander Ark:

Does college still matter? The Department of Education makes the case that college is more valuable than ever: Degree holders earn $1 million more that workers without postsecondary education and the innovation economy is likely to require a more educated workforce. But averages and projections hide the rapid loss of faith in higher education as the escalator to the middle class.

Frustrated with increasing costs and underemployed grads living in their parent’s basement, less than half of American adults have confidence in higher education, a big decline in the last three years according to Gallup.

With this rapid loss of faith in higher ed, expensive nonselective colleges are in trouble. A dozen trends have conspired to create the beginning of the end of college as we know it.

BBC:

People are being urged to stop using social media for up to 48 hours later this week in an effort to pressure the networks into restoring control of personal data to users.

The call to strike has been issued by Dr Larry Sanger – a co-founder of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.

In his call to action, Dr Sanger said the strike – from 4 to 5 July – would show the “massive demand” for change.

However, some people have questioned how much impact the strike will have.

Those taking part will avoid social networks on those two days to show they have a “serious grievance” against the services.

Sarah Krouse and Patience Haggin:

AT&T Inc. mines customers’ web-surfing habits as part of a broader advertising operation that taps into viewing data from television set-top boxes and location data from mobile phones, according to its privacy policy. Google Fiber gathers broadband-usage data on its customers.

Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. CHTR +1.34% say they have so far shied away from the practice, out of fear of alienating customers. Verizon Communications Inc. doesn’t use Fios internet-usage or cable-viewing data for targeted advertising, a spokeswoman said. Cable operator Altice USA Inc. says it has also stopped short of doing so, but retains flexibility to pursue the strategy if it chooses to later.

Sarah Allison:

The basic question of authorship attribution—who wrote what—is a question we’re increasingly able to answer, using computers that employ stylistic analysis. But this process also creates new questions about the role of the author: not about whether it’s the author or reader who makes meaning from a text, but what it means to write something at all.

In some naive algorithmic approaches that know nothing of the author—or, indeed, of history, ideology, or critical traditions—authorship emerges powerfully from the sea of texts as a set of shared patterns. That is, an artificial intelligence, or AI, successfully “recognizes” an author not as a person, but instead as the likeness of features that characterize a body of work. In order to find patterns across texts, the algorithmic “reader” uses a collection of textual traits—like frequently used words or punctuation—to draw conclusions about who wrote what.

Here’s how it works. In a relatively coherent set of texts by a single author, a writer’s idiosyncratic linguistic choices leave a mark analogous to a fingerprint. In order to recognize that fingerprint, you need a reasonably large, reasonably similar set of texts to compare with the one you’re curious about, and the one you’re curious about should be long enough to exhibit the fingerprint patterns.1 Methods that use style to discover who authored an anonymous piece of writing—or to validate who really wrote it—rely on text alone to draw probable conclusions.2

Logan Wroge:

The plan suggests that within the next two years, the district begin to identify potential buyers for the building and search for a new location that “meets our operational and instructional support needs, has sufficient parking, is near public transportation, and is somewhat centrally located.”

The building — renamed in 1990 for longtime board member and state Rep. Ruth Bachhuber Doyle, mother of former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle — holds offices for the district’s administrative team, human resources, finance, research, and curriculum and instruction departments, among other employees. It is also where the Madison School Board usually meets for monthly meetings.

According to the facilities plan, the district has concerns with the building’s safety, ventilation, and heating and cooling system.

Ald. Mike Verveer, who represents the area, said he would be disappointed if the district eventually moved its administrative offices out of Downtown, but said he recognizes “that they do hold valuable property there.”

Given the location, Verveer said he thinks potentially interested purchasers could be the university, a developer looking to build student-oriented housing or the city of Madison for park space since the neighborhood is largely deprived of open land.

Diane Ravitch, via Will Fitzhugh:

Since 1987, The Concord Review (TCR) has sought and published more than 1,300 history research papers by high school students from 41 countries in 121 quarterly issues. TCR.org.

Over the course of these many years, Will Fitzhugh, the founder of TCR, has been turned down by every foundation while seeking funding for this worthy endeavor. In their drive for innovation, the nation’s philanthropies did not find merit in the idea of acknowledging the dedication of students who conduct primary historical research and who are recognized by having their work published.

In different years,, three sisters from Cincinnati, Ohio, won the journal’s highest honor: the Emerson Prize.

The girls attended Summit Country Day School.

Fitzhugh wants high school students to read history, not textbooks, but actual history. He wants them to do research and write in-depth history essays. He publishes the best of them in TCR.

Many IB papers have been published in The Concord Review, a quarterly collection of [history] research by high school students. AP papers have appeared in the Young Researcher and the Whitman Journal of Psychology. The Review publishes only 5 percent of submissions, but AP Research pieces will be in the running.

Jay Matthews, via Will Fitzhugh:

America’s 22,000 high schools rarely require or even encourage students to write long research papers. That’s why nonfiction writing is one of the weakest parts of our education system.

But change is coming. The vanguard to immerse teenagers in research has been the International Baccalaureate program. High school seniors have been writing 4,000-word IB papers for more than 40 years. Other than IB, only private schools usually require lengthy research projects.

Now, the much larger Advanced Placement program, run by the College Board, has joined in. Its Capstone AP Seminar and AP Research courses began in 2014 and 2015. The seminar course on analyzing complex issues is for 10th- or 11th-graders. The research course for 11th- or 12th-graders ends with a 5,000-word paper, plus a 15- to 20-minute presentation and oral defense.

This year, 29,793 U.S. students, 90 percent of them in public schools, completed IB papers, called extended essays. That is six times the number of IB papers submitted 20 years ago, and nearly double the number of AP papers done this year.

Rushi Sheth, executive director of the AP Capstone diploma program, estimated that the number of AP Research papers will grow from 16,000 this year to 30,000 in 2022. Sheth is a former investment banking analyst who switched to teaching algebra to eighth-graders from low-income families in Denver and then joined AP to expand access to college-level coursework.

Many IB students have told me the extended essay was their most satisfying experience in high school. That success has inspired AP to upgrade its approach to nonfiction writing.

“English teachers want to teach writing well,” said Allison Malloy, an AP Capstone teacher at Carmel High School, near Indianapolis, “but they unfortunately do not always have the time to do so, while also trying to teach the entirety of curriculum.”

IB requires all students to take a theory of knowledge course that, among other things, teaches the analytical skills covered in AP Seminar. Gerardo Gonzalez, a teacher at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, explained how the AP program works at his public magnet school, where half of the students are from low-income families. “The process of writing is often far more difficult for our students than we recognize,” he said. “There are skills that need to be taught, retaught and then re-re-taught.”

Other than those working on school newspapers, American teenagers rarely interview anyone about anything. Checking the legitimacy of sources is also a big leap from surfing the Web.

Gonzalez said students new to research are able “to develop a sense of confidence that allows them to believe that they belong in the college environment.” He said one Lane Tech student interviewed 25 principals, superintendents and school council representatives about art funding reductions in Illinois for a 5,000-word AP paper.

The IB and AP research programs are designed to involve teachers outside those classes who have special expertise. IB students have two years to complete their extended essay on their own time, with guidance from a school adviser. AP students complete their paper in a year with help from their research course teacher and other experts.

Topics vary. IB extended essays have been written on language and reality in the Mimamsa school of Indian philosophy and the effects of sugar-free chewing gum on the pH of saliva in the mouth after a meal. AP Research topics have included 3-D printing applications for amputees and alternative therapies for opioid addiction.

Many IB papers have been published in The Concord Review, a quarterly collection of research by high school students. AP papers have appeared in the Young Researcher and the Whitman Journal of Psychology. The Review publishes only 5 percent of submissions, but AP Research pieces will be in the running.

Knowledgeable teachers say they like both programs. Daniel Coast at George Mason High School in Falls Church, Va., is one of the most experienced IB coordinators in the country. He also has twins, a daughter and a son, who will be taking the AP Capstone courses at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., over the next two years.

“The skills needed to successfully meet the requirements of the research papers at Capstone and the IB extended essay seem to be identical,” he said.

I have a perhaps unrealistic hope that research papers will someday be required of everyone going to college. But in the next few years, there will be more U.S. high school students stretching their nonfiction abilities than before. That’s a good start.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Almost half of the schools in the Madison School District need to provide additional support to certain groups of students, according to accountability reports compiled by the state earlier this year.

At schools that were identified in the reports, black students and students with disabilities were most commonly found to have poor outcomes compared to their peers — a trend mirrored by schools across the state. The reports were released publicly for the first time in March as part of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

and

Why are Madison’s Students Struggling to Read?

Yet, taxpayers spend far more than most K-12 school districts, between $18-20k per student depending on the documents one reviews.

John Thornhill:

We are already in danger of creating “industrial” school systems, the authors note, in which teachers are reduced to near-automatons, implementing a prescriptive model of education and ticking boxes. “Those trained only to reheat pre-cooked hamburgers are unlikely to become master chefs,” in the words of Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills. The solution, if there is one, is to devolve more autonomy to motivated teachers working in collaborative schools.

Instead, there is a danger that educational technology, or edtech, may only worsen the industrialisation of the system as governments resort to new ways of measuring student output and teacher productivity. Big claims have long been made for technological tools, such as massive open online courses, or Moocs, as a more efficient way of bringing education to the masses — even if their completion rates are poor.

The demands on our education systems are certain to explode in the coming decade, particularly in the developing world. A recent Citi GPS report forecasts the number of secondary and tertiary students in China, India and Brazil will grow by 56m over the next 15 years (about 2.5 times the current US student population). Total global spending on education will double from $5.1tn in 2015 to $10tn by 2030.

Education goes well beyond the classroom as employers demand more technical skills and workers retrain throughout their careers. In this context, it makes little sense to cram all formal education into the first 21 years of life.

Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University and author of Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, says that universities will increasingly have to offer their students life-long learning plans: “At present, our education system is not affordable, adaptable or scalable,” he says. “Education needs to be continuous, which means we have to rethink how we dispense access to it.”

Technology is surely part of the answer. It can increase the productivity of existing institutions by personalising learning. It can also broaden access. Some of the most interesting new models of education are being pioneered in India and China, where a lack of traditional institutions has encouraged innovation.

Wall Street Journal:

The Oberlin jury said, in effect, enough is enough. College administrators cannot continue to have it both ways. No matter what the Oberlin faculty and students imagined about their experiences inside Gibson’s Bakery, the Gibsons were not engaged in racial profiling. They manifestly were protecting their business from shoplifters.

Inside and outside academia, a lot of people in recent years have been accused of violating someone’s idea of their lived experience, often with “hurtful speech.” Leading, in turn, to being suspended from their jobs or ostracized by people they considered colleagues.

Agreed. One shouldn’t need a multimillion-dollar liability judgment against a college to define recognizable boundaries of common sense. But given the intensity of political animosities these days, maybe that’s what it takes.

Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao:

Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior’s performance on this April afternoon didn’t disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren’t enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.
A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D’Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: “StressedVoice detected.”
“There we go,” D’Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. “There’s my coughs.”
The students were helping ProPublica test an aggression detector that’s used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S. Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that makes the software for the device, plans to open an office this year in Chicago, where its chief executive will be based.

Josh Mitchell and Michelle Hackman:

But when Upjohn looked at how many students from the 2006 through 2012 high-school classes earned a bachelor’s degree within six years of their graduation, it found the rate for white students, 46%, was triple the rate for black students.

And among high-school graduates from mid/high-income households—defined as those not eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches—the percentage of students earning some kind of college credential jumped to 56% from 43%, a contrast to the nearly unchanged figure for black students. The institute’s Mr. Hershbein said this is where the other layers of the onion—the societal problems preventing students from being prepared for college—are revealed.

About 55% of children in Kalamazoo come from single-parent households, U.S. Education Department figures show. In recent years, as many as 7% of the city’s public-school students were homeless, twice the national average, also based on Education Department data. The teen pregnancy rate in Kalamazoo County is nearly 50% higher than the national rate, according to state and federal data.

Mr. Hershbein said such problems undermine students’ ability to persist in college even with tuition costs covered. Some drop out to take care of family members. Others weren’t academically prepared for college and are overwhelmed when they get there, he said.

Mr. Hershbein said his research tells a more encouraging story. College graduation rates among minorities have indeed been flat in Kalamazoo. But they fell in other Michigan cities with similar demographics in the most recent recession and early in the expansion, he said.