The Progressive Dystopia Of NEw York City Schools

Rod Dreher:

You have to read this long Atlantic piece by George Packer, in which he describes the disillusioning of him and his wife — good urban liberals — by the militant wokeness that overtook the New York City public schools that their children attended (and that their son still attends). The piece begins with Packer recounting the insane competition among the rich and connected to get their kids into private schools. The Packers ultimately opted out of that, and searched for a good progressive public school for their son (and later, their daughter).

They found an ethnically diverse one that satisfied them, though it was not without its challenges. All seemed relatively well. Until five years ago:

Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

College, Calculus, and the Problem With the SAT

Vera Tutunik:

Depending on the circumstances they were born into, students might see these tasks as steps toward claiming a birthright or as giant obstacles that stand between them and a future of economic security. The former are helped along by tutors, consultants, and nagging parents; the latter scrape up money for test-taking fees and get what help they can from overworked school counselors. In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.

Over six years, Tough visited big universities and small liberal arts colleges and community colleges, speaking with more than a hundred students. He writes movingly about students who are trying to navigate the confounding, expensive, and intimidating process of getting into and staying in college. Tough has written several books about education. This new book has some pretty depressing moments—especially about the current state of standardized testing. But he also finds plenty to be hopeful about.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos questions how K-12 funding was spent given test score decline

Molly Beck:

Less than half of Wisconsin students again this year are considered to be proficient in reading and math — a trend Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Thursday called “disturbing.”

The percentage of students in public and private voucher schools scoring well in reading and math on state tests dropped slightly during the 2018-19 school year, from 41% in both areas to 40% in math and 39% in reading.

“These test scores are a cause for concern for parents, educators and taxpayers,” Vos said, in a statement on the annual release of state test scores by the state Department of Public Instruction. “While standardized tests don’t reflect everything that’s happening in the classroom, these scores reveal a disturbing decline.”

Vos also questioned how recent increases in K-12 funding have been spent given students’ scores on state tests, which were crafted by an agency run by Gov. Tony Evers until January when he left his position as state superintendent.

“Wisconsin students deserve an excellent education no matter where they attend school,” he said. “With the repeated increases in funding for K-12 education, taxpayers deserve to know why we’re not seeing better results.”

Vos rejected a state budget proposal this year from Evers that included $1.4 billion in new funding for public and private voucher schools and changed the state funding formula to provide more money to schools with students who live in poverty — a characteristic of students who generally score poorly on state tests.

The Republican-backed budget ultimately included an increase in funding — $500 million in additional funds for schools. Evers then used his broad veto authority to add about $65 million more for schools.

Related: 2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

2012: Wisconsin Act 166.

2015: Foundations of Reading Teacher Exam Results 2017 update.

2019: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

2019: A bill is circulating in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature that would permanently exempt special education teachers from having to pass the Foundations of Reading Test (FORT).

The Garden of College Excellence Is Growing Weeds

Peter Schuck:

Anthony Kronman, my long-time Yale Law School colleague and perhaps the most eloquent individual I know personally, has written a brave, high-minded, argumentative, and largely persuasive book about the values and choices that should animate our greatest colleges and universities but no longer do. His book, The Assault on American Excellence, is also quixotic in the manner of King Canute who ordered the sea to retreat, knowing that as a mere mortal, he would fail. Unlike Canute, Kronman utterly believes what he says, yet the stars, alas, are aligned against him.

This book could not be more timely. The cascade of campus contretemps over academic values and due process in recent years seems relentless. A partial list would include student protests over right-wing speakers on campus and demands for trigger warnings and other protections from unwelcome (i.e., conservative) provocations by faculty, administrators, and other sources; curricular disputes; admissions and financial aid policies; regulation of students’ sexual relations; demands for an army of diversity specialists; and other offenses against political correctness creatively ginned up by hypersensitive, politically “woke” members of the community. When the pending lawsuit by Asian-descent students to Harvard’s ethnic admission program is decided, the war will surely intensify.

These specific disputes are manifestations of competing conceptions of the academy’s role in American life today – a larger challenge that Kronman passionately engages. Its framing argument is easily stated. (It is also obsessively repeated, an authorial tic redeemed by his graceful writing and his subject’s vital importance). Two norms clash on today’s campuses. The first is what he calls the “aristocratic” spirit – a provocative label that will surely invite misunderstanding, even caricature: “Many people,” he notes, “have an allergy to the word ‘aristocracy.’ To them, it implies unearned privilege and exploitative domination. In the original sense, though, the word simply means the rule of the best.” Kronman is clear that higher education is an inherently aristocratic activity which should be organized, conducted, and defended as such. His “best” are the faculty who profess and execute aristocratic ideals. Only they possess the hard-won knowledge and authority to frame the compelling intellectual questions to be debated in the classroom and to judge whether the debaters have enacted those ideals.

CS 61A course enrollment reaches an all-time high at 2,000 students

Leon Chen:

UC Berkeley’s introductory computer science course hit the class maximum of 2,000 enrolled students this semester, seeing an increase from the previous maximum enrollment of 1,961 during the fall 2018 semester.

As of print, 1,949 students are enrolled in CS 61A, according to BerkeleyTime. The professor of CS 61A, John DeNero, said in an email that that despite the large class size, 25 waitlisted students may still join the course.

“It’s exciting to see so many students interested in learning about computer science,” DeNero said in the email. “Teaching a very large class involves planning, technology, and help from the university.”

DeNero added that there are 57 undergraduate student instructors, or UGSIs, for the class this semester. Besides CS 61A, four other courses in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department, or EECS, have over 1,000 students. CS 61A was held in Zellerbach Hall for the first two weeks of the semester to accommodate the large class size.

Elite Failure Has Brought Americans to the Edge of an Existential Crisis

Derek Thompson:

The ends of Millennials and Gen Z are similarly traditional. The WSJ/NBC poll found that, for all their institutional skepticism, this group was more likely than Gen Xers to value “community involvement” and more likely than all older groups to prize “tolerance for others.” This is not the picture of a generation that has fallen into hopelessness, but rather a group that is focused on building solidarity with other victims of economic and social injustice. Younger generations have been the force behind equality movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, #AbolishICE, and Medicare for All, not only because they’re liberal, and not only because they have the technological savvy to organize online, but also because their experience in this economy makes them exquisitely sensitive to institutional abuses of power, and doubly eager to correct it. What Americans young and old are abandoning is not so much the promise of family, faith, and national pride as the trust that America’s existing institutions can be relied on to provide for them.

The authors of the paper on working-class men note that, even as their subjects have suffered a shock, and even as they’re nostalgic for the lives of their fathers and grandfathers—the stable wages, the dependable pensions—there is a thin silver lining in the freedom to move beyond failed traditions. Those old manufacturing jobs were routine drudgery, those old churches failed their congregants, and traditional marriages subjugated the female half of the arrangement. “These men are showing signs of moving beyond such strictures,” the authors write. “Many will likely falter. Yet they are laying claim to a measure of autonomy and generativity in these spheres that were less often available in prior generations. We must consider both the unmaking and remaking aspects of their stories.”

And there is the brutal truth: Many will likely falter. They already are. Rising anxiety, suicide, and deaths of despair speak to a profound national disorder. But eventually, this stage of history may be recalled as a purgatory, a holding station between two eras: one of ostensibly strong, and quietly vulnerable, traditions that ultimately failed us, and something else, between the unmaking and the remaking.

St. Marcus is proud to be a top 2 school serving low-income, African American students in Wisconsin! (We’ll catch up, @MilwCollegePrep. ?)

An interview with St. Marcus’s Henry Tyson.

I Was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t the Hard Part.

Anthony Abraham Jack:

Now, as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I teach a course I’ve titled C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) — borrowing the title of that still-relevant Wu-Tang Clan track — in which we examine how poverty shapes the ways in which many students make it to and through college. Admission alone, as it turns out, is not the great equalizer. Just walking through the campus gates unavoidably heightens these students’ awareness and experience of the deep inequalities around them.

I’ve spent half my life in Miami and the other half in Massachusetts. One 20-minute phone call with an Amherst football coach when I was a high school senior, and a college brochure that arrived two days later, brought this dual citizenship into existence. I can still hear my brother asking, “What is an Amherst?” We didn’t have internet at home, so we had to wait to get to the school computer lab before we could look up the unfamiliar name. We learned that the “H” was as silent as my brother was when he found out a United States president — Calvin Coolidge — was an alumnus, and so was the eminent black physician Dr. Charles Drew. Now maybe his baby brother could be one, too.

The path from Miami to Massachusetts was not one that everyone around me could see. I attended George Washington Carver Middle School, which had an International Baccalaureate program, in my neighborhood, Coconut Grove. But the summer before I started at Carver, I took some summer school electives at Ponce de Leon Middle School, our zoned school, where my mom worked as a security guard and which she helped to desegregate in the ’60s. Before the starting bell one day, an assistant principal from Carver saw me goofing around with some friends from around the way. She strode over and said to me, “You don’t have the potential to be a Carverite.”

That assistant principal saw black, boisterous boys and deemed us, and me, less than. She didn’t see my drive to succeed. My family didn’t have much, but since my days in Head Start, I was always a top performer in every subject. During one rough patch, I stayed home from school for a few days when we couldn’t afford all the supplies needed to carry out my science-fair experiment on bulb voltage and battery life. I developed my hypotheses and outlined my proposed methods without the materials and had everything ready to go when we were able to afford the supplies. I missed the ribbon but got the A. So on that summer morning when the assistant principal admonished me, anger welled up inside me, but I couldn’t let it show. That would have just played into her preconceived notion of who — or rather, what — I was. I had to prove her wrong. I had to prove myself right.

But even as I write these words, I’m aware that this is exactly the kind of story that poor, black and Latinx students are conditioned to write for college application essays. In everyday life, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, we “wear the mask that grins and lies” that “hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,” but when we write these all-important essays we are pushed — by teachers, counselors and anyone who gives advice — to tug the heartstrings of upper-middle-class white admissions officers. “Make them cry,” we hear. And so we pimp out our trauma for a shot at a future we want but can’t fully imagine.

Related: Former Madison K-12 Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s Harvard lecturer position.

Ratings systems have returned to haunt the gig economy

Andrew Hill:

This shift is mere common sense. Any review system is prone to what experts call the “idiosyncratic rater effect”, which is a polite way of saying that bias and discrimination can pollute the outcomes. That applies in particular to “rank-and-yank” assessments, but also to poorly presented feedback. As Marcus Buckingham, a consultant, and Cisco’s Ashley Goodall wrote in Harvard Business Review earlier this year: “Because your feedback to others is always more you than them, it leads to systematic error, which is magnified when ratings are considered in aggregate.”

Having tested such methods to soul-destroying destruction in some of the biggest organisations in the world, it is not merely perverse but positively dangerous to disinter their flaws so they can haunt the gig economy.

Discrimination has been one of the first ghosts to re-emerge. Researchers who looked at Uber, concluded that while its rating system was outwardly neutral, it could be a vehicle for, say, racial bias. Academics feel the ratings effect personally. The authors of another paper about Uber pointed out that their own students’ evaluations were “relevant for the renewal of teaching contracts, promotions or future applications”, and are also suspected of bias. Their study suggested solutions could include giving Uber drivers the opportunity to challenge a bad rating, or appointing a third party who could audit reviews for potential bias.

Uber does let drivers rate users, who can themselves be kicked off the app if their bad behaviour pushes their rating below par. This leads to the mutually assured insincerity of high ratings on both sides (the flaw in Airbnb’s review system identified in the Boston study) and leaves neither customer nor provider much the wiser.

The grim alternative is not much better, though, and I will bear it in mind before I next submit a low mark. It is that everyone slips back into a swamp of personal performance ratings, where customers are cast in the role of rankers-and-yankers, remotely and unwittingly ruling on the fate of individuals just like them.

Public Flagship Universities Fail on Financial Equity

Madeline St. Amour:

Only the relatively wealthiest students can afford to attend most public flagship institutions, according to a new report released last week by the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The report found that only six of 50 state flagships meet an affordability benchmark for low-income students (see graphic, below).

Mamie Voight, vice president of policy research at IHEP and a co-author of the report, said public institutions funded by taxpayers should better serve low-income students, a demographic that’s growing in overall college enrollments. Flagship universities often have high graduation rates and good post-college outcomes for students, Voight said, making them a good vehicle for social mobility.

But flagships “are not following through on that promise,” she said, because they aren’t providing affordable, accessible education for low- and middle-income students. This results in some students taking out large loans, working long hours while attending school and facing difficulty covering basic needs such as food, all of which can lead to poorer outcomes for the students. Other students may opt for a less expensive college with fewer supports, or forgo college altogether.

The report created five profiles of students using nationally representative data. They include three dependent students who are low-income, middle-income and high-income; and two independent students, one with dependents and one without dependents.
To determine what each student could afford to pay, the report used the “Rule of 10” benchmark from the Lumina Foundation, which says that a family should be able to pay college costs by setting aside 10 percent of discretionary income for 10 years, with the student working 10 hours per week while enrolled.

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?.

Campus police said he should’ve been ‘smarter’ than to exercise his First Amendment rights. Now he’s suing.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

Late yesterday, with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Brown sued Jones County Junior College over policies that deny students their First Amendment rights on campus.

The public Mississippi institution twice stopped Brown from exercising his free speech rights when he tried to recruit fellow students for a campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty.

In April, Brown and two other individuals held up a sign designed to poll students on the legalization of recreational marijuana. But Jones College administrators quickly summoned campus police because the group hadn’t filled out the proper paperwork — which requires administrative approval and a minimum three-day waiting period before “gathering for any purpose” anywhere on campus.

The Secret to Success Academy’s Top-Notch Test Scores

Dale Russakoff:

HOW THE OTHER HALF LEARNS
Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice
By Robert Pondiscio

Every fall, astonishing news emerges from Success Academy, the largest and most controversial charter school network in New York City. With considerable fanfare, the network announces that its predominantly low-income and minority students have once again defied their demographics, earning consistently impressive scores on the state’s standardized tests. Not only do they dramatically outperform children across the city, erasing the achievement gap between white and black, rich and poor, they even beat the privileged kids in suburban Scarsdale and Chappaqua.

Divining the secret to Success’ success has been an obsession for years in media and education circles. That is partly because its founder and leader is the former New York City Council member Eva Moskowitz, whose hardball politics and support of punitive consequences for noncompliant students and parents have stirred public backlash. In 2016, the New York Times reporter Kate Taylor posted a hidden-camera recording of a Success teacher ripping up a first grader’s incorrect math work, then ordering her off the classroom rug. (The teacher was briefly suspended.)

The speed reading fallacy: the case for slow reading

Ness Labs:

About 2 million books get published every year in the world. The indexed web contains at least 5.75 billion pages. So much to read, so little time. In a world obsessed with speed and productivity at all costs, it’s no surprise that someone came up with a solution. It’s called speed reading, and its promise is to help anyone read at speeds of above 1000 words per minute—much higher than the 200-400 words per minute achieved by the average college-level reader. Sounds fantastic. The problem? It’s completely bogus.

Many speed reading programs sell the dream of being able to read much faster with full comprehension. The first one, called Reading Dynamics, was launched by Evelyn Wood in 1959. A researcher and schoolteacher, Wood created and marketed a system said to increase a reader’s speed by a factor of three to ten times or more, while preserving—and even improving—comprehension. The business was a success: it eventually had 150 outlets in the United States, 30 in Canada, and many others worldwide. Today, many apps are built on the same promise.

State special education monitoring errors could impact federal consent decree over New Orleans schools

Marta Jewson:

Court-appointed monitors overseeing special education services in New Orleans have been reviewing the wrong schools. The problem may force the extension of a four-year-old federal consent decree negotiated to settle a 2010 lawsuit that charged that the city’s charter schools were admitting too few special-needs students and failing to provide proper services to the ones they did enroll.

A June case record in the long-running federal class-action lawsuit identified “potential errors” with the monitoring process. And this week, a state Department of Education spokeswoman confirmed what those errors were.

The issue calls into question the past two years of supervision, during which state Department of Education employees and federally appointed monitors have recorded progress in improving their oversight of special education services. Over that period, the defendants in the suit — the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Department of Education — were found to have achieved “substantial compliance” with the consent decree. They are now nearing a point at which federal Judge Jay Zainey — who is presiding over the case — could lift the decree, ending court and monitor supervision.

American Phrase Book

alumni.mit.edu:

Introduction

Many people moving to the U.S assume that they pretty much know English. After all, they have studied the language and watched many hours of American TV.

Upon arrival it is therefore often to their surprise how many seemingly simple phrases actually turn out to mean something completely different in the US American variant of the English language. Interpreting these phrases literally, results in misunderstandings that can at times lead to severe complications.

This phrase book is aimed to help newcomers to the U.S understand what some popular local idioms really mean.

More generally, the immigrant should keep in mind a golden rule: US natives will usually phrase everything in a manner that creates the least social friction in any given interaction. In most cases this results in shying away from a negative description or opinion. Almost as often, it even means not saying anything definite, and instead just stating possibilities and options

A Very Dangerous Place for a Child Is College

Louis M. Profeta:

Most loved the candor, the openness, the willingness of a seasoned ER doctor to answer uncomfortable questions about drugs and alcohol, sexual assault, and hazing, and a whole host of semi-taboo topics. But it was the questions when the “adults” were out of the room that made me say to myself, “Holy shit … so many of these ‘kids’ have absolutely no business being in college.”

“What about whippets, what if I just snorted one xanax, can you really soak a tampon in alcohol and get drunk, is cough syrup OK to mix with vodka, is ecstasy and molly the same thing, can’t you just strap a backpack to them to keep them from rolling over so they don’t choke on their own vomit, what about phenergan, what’s in skittles (not the candy), how many milligrams of THC can you eat and not die, are they starting to add stuff to coke (not the cola) that makes you more hyped, how much does it cost to go to an ER, will you call my parents if I go, how can you tell if your roommate is suicidal, what if you know your roommate is using heroin … should I tell their parents, how do I tell if the ‘bars’ I bought online are not fentanyl, I got raped last year … should I tell someone now, I think my roommate is going to probably kill herself…who do I tell?”

As I’ve traveled the country, these are just some of the questions and emails I have gotten from your college students. I try to approach them with openness and honesty, as a doctor and a father who almost lost a child to cancer, and I tell them that I want them to live a long life and experience the joy of holding their own child in their arms one day. I tell them they can always email me and I’ll find them help if they need it. Occasionally, they do. Most of the time it’s a parent who drops me a note and says something like, “Thank you, my kid called me tonight after your talk and apologized for every stupid thing they ever did.”

Community effort creates new playground at Lowell Elementary

Pamela Cotant:

Living across from Lowell Elementary School, Kim Neuschel looked out at a vast expanse of asphalt and pondered the potential of the playground and other outdoor space.

She was struck by how much of the students’ engagement in their outdoor environment was asphalt, which covered a good portion of playground along with pea gravel. The mini-forest — a green space in the middle of the C-shaped school building — couldn’t be used during recess because of a fence. And while a group of parents earlier had created a garden in the front yard, it was underutilized because there was no fence to separate it from busy Atwood Avenue.

“To me, fundamentally, it was the question of how do our kids access the outdoors and what does that outdoor space say to them,” said Neuschel, whose son, Finnegan Neuschel-Dornan, attended the school.

Private Tutoring Firm Opens First Center Overseas Amid Sluggish China Demand

Su Huixian and Tang Ziyi:

One of China’s largest private tutoring companies has made a foray into the U.S. as it looks to tap into rising demand from the surging number of Chinese students studying abroad.

The New York-listed TAL Education Group will open its first tutoring center in Silicon Valley, the company announced (link in Chinese) last week on social media. Run by its education agency Think Academy, called Xueersi in Chinese, the company will start an online math class in mid-October targeting elementary school students. It also plans to open offline classes next year at the new center.

In China, students are required to take a standardized test to apply to university. This exam score-focused assessment system has led to a domestic boom in private tutoring centers, as parents fight to improve their children’s chances of getting into an elite school.

Wisconsin Academic Result commentary: writer fails to mention thousands of DPI eLementary Reading teacher mulligans

Logan Wroge:

For example, white students in fifth grade dropped 4.6 percentage points in English/language arts proficiency compared to a 1.6 percentage-point decrease for black students in fifth grade.

In the eighth grade, the percentage of African American students scoring proficient or advanced in English/language arts rose 2 percentage points to 12.1%, while the percentage of white students in that group dropped 1.1 percentage points. But the proficiency difference is still separated by a 30-point gap.

Tomev said DPI is still going over the numbers to better understand the decline in proficiency from the previous year.

“Of course, we believe our students desire nothing less than our full support,” she said. “They’re entering the classroom with more challenges than ever before. For the system to work, we need to keep funding it, and we have to make adjustments so we’re not losing students along the way.”

As in previous years, Madison students trailed the average statewide testing proficiency. In grades 3 to 8, 34.8% of Madison students tested proficient or advanced in English on the Forward Exam and 38.2% in math.

Since the Forward Exam was first used in 2015-16, math proficiency has increased about 3 percentage points for Madison students, but English results have remained relatively stagnant.

The district prefers to track growth and progress through another exam — the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP — which it administers several times a year, said Andrew Statz, the district’s chief accountability officer, since results come in quicker than for the Forward Exam and can be better used by teachers to make adjustments and plan for upcoming school years.

The MAP results show a higher percentage of elementary and middle school students are proficient in reading and math and show larger long-term gains.

Statz said that’s likely because the Forward Exam uses a higher threshold in determining proficiency as opposed to the MAP standards. But the district has kept the same MAP standards since 2013 in order to be able to accurately measure change over time, he said.

The district continues to hit higher composite ACT scores than the state as a whole with the average score for Madison juniors being 20.5 out of 36.

The performance on the ACT, though, varies among students at the district’s four comprehensive high schools, with West High leading the group with an average score of 23, followed by Memorial at 21.9, East at 18.9, and La Follette at 18.4.

A few notes from Scott Girard.

the majority of ALL 11th-grade students in Madison read and write below basic proficiency. Translated: they are functionally illiterate.

The Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading, based on Massachusetts’ best in the States MTEL requirement)

The Secret of a Charter School’s Success? Parents

Robert Pondisco:

Collectively, charter schools educate 3.2 million children in 7,000 schools in 43 states and the District of Columbia. None are more polarizing than New York City’s network of about 50 Success Academy schools, which serve 17,000 students—94% of whom are from minority backgrounds—under their visionary and lightning-rod leader, Eva Moskowitz. Most are less than a decade old, and all of them are exceptionally high performing. In a city where less than 40% of black and Hispanic children test at proficiency for reading or math, 90% of Success Academy’s students of color passed the most recent state reading test. Virtually all of them—over 98%—did so in math.

Test results should not be the sole measure of school quality, but they’re how we often keep score. By that standard, there’s no such thing as a bad Success Academy school. Its very “worst” campus saw 85% of its students pass last year’s reading test, and in math the worst was 92%—a level of quality and consistency unmatched by any other large charter school network in the U.S.

N ew Orleans program aims to create more pathways to classrooms for black teachers, especially men

Katy Reckdahl:

Two years ago, Nathaniel Albert walked into a first grade classroom at Andrew H. Wilson Charter School in New Orleans and quietly made connections with children. Soon, he became an indispensable part of their school day.

“When he wasn’t there, the students would ask, ‘Where were you?’ ” said teacher Kierston James, 40, who oversaw Albert, a fellow with the Brothers Empowered to Teach (BE2T) Initiative. The program recruits college-age people of color, particularly African American men, and pays them stipends to work in schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

At Wilson, as at many New Orleans public schools, most students are black — and it was Albert’s personal mission to reach them. “Even with the ones that were shy, Nathaniel would always push up his chair: ‘What you reading? What can you tell me about it?’ And on the playground, he’d go play with them,” James said.

The Rise of the Comfort College At American universities, personal grievances are what everyone’s talking about

Dteven Gerrard:

Last year, in the fall of 2018, I tried to stand up for campus free speech.

A small group of faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts, where I teach philosophy, had circulated a petition to have our institution sign a national pledge of allegiance to principles of free expression that originated at the University of Chicago. Over 50 colleges and universities, including Princeton and the Citadel, had already adopted the mainstream liberal principles, protecting both speakers and protesters.

I was cautiously optimistic. Like many liberal arts colleges, Williams had gone through a free-speech crisis — and survived. In 2016, our then-president canceled a talk from a conservative writer (the first presidential cancellation since 1865, when Ralph Waldo Emerson was barred from speaking on campus); he also ordered that a mural of the school’s founder be temporarily boarded over because of objections to its depiction of Native Americans.

What College Admissions Offices Really Want

Paul Tough:

In the fall of 2014, Angel Pérez was hired to oversee enrollment at Trinity College, a small liberal-arts school that occupies a picturesque 100-acre hillside campus overlooking Hartford. Trinity is in many ways a typical private northeastern college. It was founded by a group of Episcopalians in the early 19th century, and its student body has been dominated ever since by white, wealthy graduates of New England prep schools. Its architecture is Gothic, its squash teams are nationally ranked and despite its small size (about 2,200 undergraduates), it manages to support five separate student a cappella groups. Two of Trinity’s most famous graduates are George Will and Tucker Carlson, meaning that the college has pretty much cornered the market on conservative TV personalities known for wearing bow ties.

Pérez grew up in very different circumstances, born in Puerto Rico in 1976 to a teenage mother and a father who delivered milk door to door. When Pérez was 5, his family moved to New York to find better opportunities, but they landed instead in a public housing development in the South Bronx during the worst years of the borough’s disintegration. Pérez’s memories of childhood are mostly of a pervasive fear, both at home and on the streets. His father drank too much and was sometimes violent with Pérez’s mother, and Pérez, a pale, nerdy kid who loved books, was easy prey for the gangs that controlled his neighborhood. Twice he was attacked on the street and beaten so badly that he ended up in the hospital.

In high school, Pérez joined every club, pursued summer internships, ran for student government — anything to stay out of the apartment, anything to improve his chances for a better future. A guidance counselor persuaded him to apply to Skidmore College, a selective private institution in upstate New York that Pérez had never heard of. He took the SAT just once, and he scored poorly. But miraculously, someone in Skidmore’s admissions office decided to ignore his lousy test score in favor of his excellent grades and admit him with full financial aid. It was a decision that changed Pérez’s life.

Pérez got his first job in admissions straight out of college, motivated by the opportunity to do for young people what that admissions officer did for him: spot hidden potential in students with unconventional academic records and transform young lives. He rose through the profession, working first at Skidmore and then at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, earning a master’s degree and a Ph.D. along the way.

Schools Pushed for Tech in Every Classroom. Now Parents Are Pushing Back.

Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs:

When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that has become coveted around the country. Teaching apps and digital courses took the place of flashcards and notebooks.

Despite the investment, academic results have mostly slipped in the district of about 115,000 students.

Over the last decade, American schools embraced technology, spending millions of dollars on devices and apps, believing its disruptive power would help many children learn faster, stay in school and be more prepared for a competitive economy. Now many parents and teachers are starting to wonder if all the disruption was a good idea.

Why it has become fashionable not to have children.

Frank Furedi:

Until recently, babies were seen as a blessing. Now, far too many people argue that not having a baby is a blessing. Ultimately, the reason for this loss of faith in the human spirit is neither economic nor environmental. Rather, the main driver of this anti-natal movement is the difficulty that sections of society have in giving meaning to life today. Recovering our confidence in the human spirit and in age-old human virtues is the best antidote to the turn against giving birth.

Civics: Open Records and the Wisconsin Governor’s Office

Libby Sobic and CJ Szafir:

The Wisconsin Attorney General’s office issues a best practices guide for open records requests for all government entities. Democrat Attorney General Kaul, along with his predecessor Republican Attorney General Schimel, recommends 10 business days as a generally reasonable timeline for

Neither the administrations of Schimel nor former Governor Scott Walker were prefect. Walker received backlash for supporting a provision that would have made it easier for Wisconsin legislators to withhold records from the publiciv and Attorney General Schimel instituted an office policy that

But Governor Walker issued two executive orders that required state agencies to use best practices when responding to open records requests from the public. In 2016, Walker’s executive order1 required state agencies to implement several new practices to improve customer service for open records requests, including:

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones—and Taking Their Jobs With Them

Ben Eisen:

Additionally, workers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing.

Ms. Swift said she and her family were effectively living paycheck to paycheck in the Los Angeles area. But living in Boise is 35% less expensive than living in Los Angeles, according to personal-finance website Bankrate.com. She and her husband, who have two children, bought a house in the Boise area after renting in L.A. It is twice as big as their old place, but the monthly payments are half as much as their L.A. rent. There was also enough room for her mother to move in.

“We all love it,” she said. “We have a much higher quality of life here.”

Some regions see remote work as a promising way to lure people who otherwise wouldn’t consider the move. Vermont and the Shoals area of Alabama, among others, have introduced giveaways to draw telecommuters in the last few years. A program in Tulsa, Okla., hands some arriving remote workers $10,000 in cash. “You’re looking for something new,” says the website for the program, which is sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re looking for great people to join the Tulsa community.”

38 Madison high school students named semifinalists for National Merit Scholarship

Logan Wroge:

Thirty-eight Madison high school seniors have been named semifinalists for the 2020 National Merit Scholarships.

The students join about 16,000 other high school seniors across the country that were named Wednesday as semifinalists for the prestigious scholarship. About 90% of semifinalists are named finalists, and around half of the finalists go on to receive a scholarship.

The program, now in its 65th year, will award about $31 million in scholarships this spring.

Much more on National Merit scholars, here.

Mr Logan’s article does not include “cut-off scores”.

However, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Much ado about nothing: City of Madison education comMittee; ReAding?

Scott Girard:

Bidar said it would be a challenge to become a decision-making body, given that any initiatives would require approval by three different legislative bodies, but there’s still value in the committee.

“Once we have clarity and agreement around what we want to be, it’s sharing the information with the rest of our colleagues,” she said. The committee provides a connection for elected officials who don’t regularly have an opportunity to interact, she added.

If nothing else, Bidar said the group understands why its work is important.

“The one thing that you would see is that all of us are very focused and understand the importance of our schools as an integral part of our community,” she said. “The focus is how do we support youth and families.”

“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” .

Student Debt Is Transforming the American Family

Hua Hsu:

Since 2012, Zaloom has spent a lot of time with families like Kimberly’s. They all fall into America’s middle class—an amorphous category, defined more by sensibility or aspirational identity than by a strict income threshold. (Households with an annual income of anywhere from forty thousand dollars to a quarter of a million dollars view themselves as middle class.) In “Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost” (Princeton), Zaloom considers how the challenge of paying for college has become one of the organizing forces of middle-class family life. She and her team conducted interviews with a hundred and sixty families across the country, all of whom make too much to qualify for Pell Grants (reserved for households that earn below fifty thousand dollars) but too little to pay for tuition outright. These families are committed to providing their children with an “open future,” in which passions can be pursued. They have done all the things you’re supposed to, like investing and saving, and not racking up too much debt. Some parents are almost neurotically responsible, passing down a sense of penny-pinching thrift as though it were an heirloom; others prize idealism, encouraging their children to follow their dreams. What actually unites them, from a military family in Florida to a dual-Ph.D. household in Michigan, is that the children are part of a generation where debt—the financial and psychological state of being indebted—will shadow them for much of their adult lives.

A great deal has changed since Kimberly’s parents attended college. From the late nineteen-eighties to the present, college tuition has increased at a rate four times that of inflation, and eight times that of household income. It has been estimated that forty-five million people in the United States hold educational debt totalling roughly $1.5 trillion—more than what Americans owe on their credit cards or auto loans. Some fear that the student-debt “bubble” will be the next to burst. Wide-scale student-debt forgiveness no longer seems radical. Meanwhile, skeptics question the very purpose of college and its degree system. Maybe what pundits dismiss as the impulsive rage of young college students is actually an expression of powerlessness, as they anticipate a future defined by indebtedness.

The language you speak changes how informative you can be

Olivia Goldhill:

Not only does the language you speak differ in its tone, syntax, and speed, it also changes the way you convey information.

Linguistic researchers studied 17 languages from around the world to track differences in “information rate”—how quickly a spoken language gets its point across—and ranked them accordingly. The study, published in Science this week, found that despite their many differences, languages have fairly similar rates of imparting information, though they achieve this rate in different ways.

The 17 languages studied contain a huge variety of speaking styles: Some have contrasting tones while others do not; Japanese and Spanish have 25 phonemes (distinct units of sound) compared to 40 in English and Thai; and there are a few hundred distinct syllables in Japanese, versus almost 7,000 English. There are also significant differences in the information density of each language, meaning the amount of information contained per syllable. However, the authors found that information density tends to be balanced out by speech rate (how quickly the language is spoken), meaning that, overall, humans get the some amount of information across in roughly the same amount of time.

“Prosperity Breeds Idiots”

Francis X. Maier:

At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that “prosperity breeds idiots.”

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency—and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. In his foreword to The Socialist Phenomenon—an extraordinary book by his friend Igor Shafarevich—Solzhenitsyn noted “the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism,” and stressed that

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”.

UMN women-only STEM awards come under fire

Jasmine Snow:

The University of Minnesota and other universities across the country are under fire with claims of discrimination against men in STEM programs.

The Chicago Office for Civil Rights under the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into the University last month for possible Title IX violations against men. The investigation comes after complaints were filed by University alumnus and University of Michigan-Flint professor Mark Perry.

The complaints are in regards to three female-only faculty awards — the Mullen/Spector/Truax Women’s Leadership Award, the Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Award and the Sara Evans Faculty Woman Scholar/Leader Award — that he claims are illegal under Title IX.

But some members of the University’s College of Science and Engineering say women’s awards and programs help promote diversity within the college.

Katharina Fransen, a senior majoring in chemical engineering and the treasurer of the University’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, said the issue might not be as simple as Perry makes it out to be.

Hong Kong Protests: The most striking illustrations from the movement so far

Digital Arts:

The Umbrella Movement may be known for its distinctive umbrella symbolism, but this year’s ongoing protests in Hong Kong against the controversial extradition bill has thrown up a whole host of striking illustrations online that show the message goes beyond the realm of logos and placards.

Pictured here is a tribute to the children now protesting as term begins in the state; as with most of the images in this gallery, the artist remains nameless.

Scroll on mobile or click to the right on desktop to see more art of the Umbrella Movement. If any artists are wanting to be credited please let us know via Twitter.

How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

Ronan Farrow:

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

The financial entanglement revealed in the documents goes well beyond what has been described in public statements by M.I.T. and by Ito. The University has said that it received eight hundred thousand dollars from Epstein’s foundations, in the course of twenty years, and has apologized for accepting that amount. In a statement last month, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote, “with hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts. No apology can undo that.” Reif pledged to donate the funds to a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, Ito disclosed that he had separately received $1.2 million from Epstein for investment funds under his control, in addition to five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that he acknowledged Epstein had donated to the lab. A spokesperson for M.I.T. said that the university “is looking at the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts to the institute.”

What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves

Hanna Fry:

The dangers of making individual predictions from our collective characteristics were aptly demonstrated in a deal struck by the French lawyer André-François Raffray in 1965. He agreed to pay a ninety-year-old woman twenty-five hundred francs every month until her death, whereupon he would take possession of her apartment in Arles.

At the time, the average life expectancy of French women was 74.5 years, and Raffray, then forty-seven, no doubt thought he’d negotiated himself an auspicious contract. Unluckily for him, as Bill Bryson recounts in his new book, “The Body,” the woman was Jeanne Calment, who went on to become the oldest person on record. She survived for thirty-two years after their deal was signed, outliving Raffray, who died at seventy-seven. By then, he had paid more than twice the market value for an apartment he would never live in.

Raffray learned the hard way that people are not well represented by the average. As the mathematician Ian Stewart points out in “Do Dice Play God?” (Basic), the average person has one breast and one testicle. In large groups, the natural variability among human beings cancels out, the random zig being countered by the random zag; but that variability means that we can’t speak with certainty about the individual—a fact with wide-ranging consequences.

Every day, millions of people, David Spiegelhalter included, swallow a small white statin pill to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. If you are one of those people, and go on to live a long and happy life without ever suffering a heart attack, you have no way of knowing whether your daily statin was responsible or whether you were never going to have a heart attack in the first place. Of a thousand people who take statins for five years, the drugs will help only eighteen to avoid a major heart attack or stroke. And if you do find yourself having a heart attack you’ll never know whether it was delayed by taking the statin. “All I can ever know,” Spiegelhalter writes, “is that on average it benefits a large group of people like me.”

That’s the rule with preventive drugs: for most individuals, most of those drugs won’t do anything. The fact that they produce a collective benefit makes them worth taking. But it’s a pharmaceutical form of Pascal’s wager: you may as well act as though God were real (and believe that the drugs will work for you), because the consequences otherwise outweigh the inconvenience.

There is so much that, on an individual level, we don’t know: why some people can smoke and avoid lung cancer; why one identical twin will remain healthy while the other develops a disease like A.L.S.; why some otherwise similar children flourish at school while others flounder. Despite the grand promises of Big Data, uncertainty remains so abundant that specific human lives remain boundlessly unpredictable. Perhaps the most successful prediction engine of the Big Data era, at least in financial terms, is the Amazon recommendation algorithm. It’s a gigantic statistical machine worth a huge sum to the company. Also, it’s wrong most of the time. “There is nothing of chance or doubt in the course before my son,” Dickens’s Mr. Dombey says, already imagining the business career that young Paul will enjoy. “His way in life was clear and prepared, and marked out before he existed.” Paul, alas, dies at age six.

Doorbell-camera firm Ring has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance reach

Drew Harwell:

The doorbell-camera company Ring has quietly forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 police forces across the United States, granting them access to homeowners’ camera footage and a powerful role in what the company calls America’s “new neighborhood watch.”

The partnerships let police automatically request the video recorded by homeowners’ cameras within a specific time and area, helping officers see footage from the company’s millions of Internet-connected cameras installed nationwide, the company said. Officers don’t receive ongoing or live-video access, and homeowners can decline the requests, which Ring sends via email thanking them for “making your neighborhood a safer place.”

The SAT Changes Its Answer

Wall Street Journal:

The educational establishment rarely reverses itself when it makes a mistake in the name of combating inequality. So the College Board deserves credit for its decision, announced Tuesday, to scrap plans for an “adversity score” to accompany students’ SAT results. The metric would have increased cynicism about the inscrutable college-admissions game.

The SAT unveiled the adversity score in May as it faced a crisis of legitimacy. Pundits have increasingly attacked the test as a measure of privilege rather than merit, and a growing number of schools have gone “test-optional.” Never mind that privileged students have as much of an advantage on grades and extracurricular activities as they do on tests.

How Long Must American Kids Emit ‘Primal Screams’ About Family Chaos Before We Hear Them?

Joy Pullmann:

The plain truth is that private choices about sex have public consequences. There is no such thing as “what happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom.” Innocent and helpless human beings are created inside those bedrooms whether their parents desire that or not, and these children are more likely to become wards of the state in some capacity if their biological parents are not married to each other and stay that way. (Not incidentally, this is one reason all functioning societies have put guardrails on sexual activities.)

Mary Eberstadt’s latest book, “Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics,” presents a fresh view of some of these major public consequences of private sexual choices. It presents in book form her argument that first arrived in a 2017 essay for the recently defunct Weekly Standard. It also extends her 2014 book, “How The West Lost God.”

Thus anyone familiar with Eberstadt’s work over the years now reading “Primal Screams” will be broadly familiar with her argument before reading. Yet it is characteristically interesting and well-sourced, and worth one’s time.

Eberstadt uses a particularly interesting frame for discussing the psychological effects of the West’s family disintegration crisis that helps lift it from readers’ individual experiences and biases to develop empathy for the broader problem. That is presenting new research of the effects of family separation on animal welfare. She points out the pain and suffering family separation inflicts on animals, even ones we’ve falsely thought of as individualistic animals, like “lone wolves.”

Young Chinese Spend Like Americans—and Take on Worrisome Debt

Stella Yifan Xie, Shan Li and Julie Wernau:

Western economists have long said that China needed a base of American-style consumers to bring the country sustained economic growth. Now China has one: Its young people.

While previous generations were frugal savers—a product of their years growing up in a turbulent economy with a weak social safety net—the more than 330 million people born in China between 1990 and 2009 behave much more like Americans, spending avidly on gadgets, entertainment and travel.

The freewheeling consumption is helping China diversify its economy at a crucial time. Beijing has relied on exports and infrastructure-building to drive growth for decades, but recent signs point to a slowdown amid tariffs from the Trump administration. The new spending patterns have benefited Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Tencent Holdings Ltd. and other tech companies, whose rapid growth has helped energize China’s economy.

Yet all this consumption has a downside. Household debt levels have risen rapidly over the past several years, with many young Chinese borrowing money for their purchases.

High levels of corporate and government debt are already longstanding concerns for Beijing. As household debt climbs, some economists worry the country’s debt burdens overall could become unmanageable and weigh on China’s growth.

Loneliness Is a Big Problem

John Maxwell:

Lately, I’ve been having an alarming amount of conversations arise about the burdens of loneliness, alienation, rootlessness, and a lack of belonging that many of my peers feel, especially in the Bay Area. I feel it too. Everyone has a gazillion friends and events to attend. But there’s a palpable lack of social fabric. I worry that this atomization is becoming a world-wide phenomenon – that we might be some of the first generations without the sort of community that it’s in human nature to rely on.

And that the result is a worsening epidemic of mental illness…
Without the framework of a uniting religion, ethnicity, or purpose, it’s hard to get people to truly commit to a given community. Especially when it’s so easy to swipe left and opt for things that offer the fleeting feeling of community without being the real thing: the parties, the once-a-month lecture series, the Facebook threads, the workshops, the New Age ceremonies. We often use these as “community porn” – they’re easier than the real thing and they satisfy enough of the craving. But they don’t make you whole.

The MIT-Epstein debacle shows ‘the prostitution of intellectual activity’. Time for a radical agenda: close the Media Lab, disband Ted Talks and refuse tech billionaires money

Evgeny Morozov:

One of Brockman’s persistent laments was that all the billionaire techies in his circle barely read any of the books published by his clients. Not surprisingly, his famed literary dinners – held during the Ted Conference, they allowed Epstein (who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer) to mingle with scientists and fellow billionaires – were mostly empty of serious content.

As Brockman himself put it after one such dinner in 2004, “last year we tried ‘The Science Dinner’. Everyone yawned. So this year, it’s back to the money-sex-power thing with ‘The Billionaires’ Dinner’.” Was “the money-sex-power thing” that very potent “new mode of intellectual discourse” promised by the “third culture”? If so, we’d rather pass.

In attendance at one such dinner, in 1999, was a young Japanese American by the name of Joi Ito; also present were Richard Saul Wurman, the original founder of the Ted Conference, Jeff Bezos, and, among all the other billionaires, Jeffrey Epstein. A godson of Timothy Leary and a college drop-out, Ito would eventually lead the Media Lab, interview Obama, write a popular technology book (another Brockman client), and join 20 different boards, including those of such prestigious institutions as the New York Times, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation.

MMSD changing curriculum to brain-based letter sound approach as Wisconsin readers fall behind

Amanda Quintan:

She took on the responsibility of paying for a tutor and removing her children from MMSD. After a year of working with Priscilla Gresens at the Arnold Reading Clinic, the Perez kids are reading at grade level.

“After years of interventions to not have any results, and then a year of one hour a week of tutoring to have such excellent results, to me it’s kind of mind boggling. Like what’s going on in that time during school?” Kowieski said.

Kowieski said her kids are not alone in this struggle, and she knows many other parents don’t have the resources to get help.

Madison taxpayers have, for years spent far more than most K-12 school districts. Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Excluded and Exaggerated Data Hides the Real State of Our Students

Krista Kaput:

In fact, the report completely excludes details about the ongoing disparities in AP access and success. For the Class of 2018, 19% of black, 14% of Native American, and 18% of Latinx students participated in AP courses, as compared to 34% of white students. We should also note that 38% of Asian students took AP courses, but the disparity among Asian communities requires the state to further disaggregate the data to show a better picture of how our education system is serving all students.

If we are going to address these gaps, we need to face them. That doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate our wins, but it does our students a huge disservice to obscure the facts.

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” .

The Top-Ranked College Is…

Melissa Korn and Douglas Belkin:

Go west for a diverse school. Look to the Northeast for a rich one most likely to land you a great job. For great bang for your buck, consider the City University of New York.

These are some of the conclusions of this year’s Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, which reveal a rich array of options for students whether they’re most focused on the academic environment, extracurricular engagement, career opportunities or return on investment.

Four Ivy League schools rank among the top five. Harvard University stands atop the overall list, followed by its Cambridge neighbor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania are next, with the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University tied for fifth.

We Interviewed 100 Philly-Area Teachers About What It Takes to Raise Happy, Successful Kids

Brian Howard:

On the Expectations We Place on Kids
“Most parents believe their children are smarter than they actually are. On the plus side, children will often rise to the occasion. Conversely, some parents believe their children can skip certain parts of the curriculum, creating major gaps.” — A teacher at a Montgomery County public elementary school.

On Standardized Tests
“I am a huge fan of the new term ‘educational apartheid,’ and that’s how these standardized tests are used. It’s proving that the kids who have access, ability, resources and support can do well on these tests, and the kids who don’t have that, can’t.” — Sheila Myer

“They provide minimal to no useful feedback to classroom teachers.” — A kindergarten teacher at a West Philadelphia charter school

“We need to make sure all parents and kids know that anyone can opt out. Opt out if you wish to not put that stress on your student. Opt out; it’s okay!” — A middle-school teacher in the suburbs

“I know the grading in our school is incredibly inflated — everyone gets A’s. How do we differentiate? That’s where standardized testing comes in. But the pressure it puts on kids is extraordinary. It’s unfair to kids who don’t test well and will never be able to show how smart they are.” — A high-school teacher at a private single-sex school

“The stakes are too high for just a few weeks of testing. It is concerning that the written portions of the test are graded by non-educators with just a bachelor’s degree who get temp jobs by answering ads online.” — David Hensel

“I hate it. I hate it so much. It takes away from what you’re actually trying to do. I have to prepare my students for what’s going to be on that test. That leaves little room for my struggling students or for my high-achieving students. It keeps us all in second gear.” — Hector Wangia

Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi :

Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

Classroom Frequency: Student Voices From Wisconsin

Maureen McCollum:

“Classroom Frequency” is co-hosted by MG21 teacher, Ian Lowe. “I feel like this project encapsulates so much of what I love about teaching and particularly teaching at a project-based school like ours,” said Lowe. “I love seeing the ways in which students can use their creative expression to make their mark in the world and to make a difference. In the past, that might have meant building a Little Free Library outside of our school or writing a play that will show up in the Young Playwrights Festival. This project has allowed students to tell their stories and to have their stories shared on the radio. That has just been incredible to see and I love the courage that I see from students.”

Radio can be incredibly empowering and provides a space for a wide range of interests and stories. It’s been an incredible honor to work with each of the talented and inspiring students at MG21.

DMVs Are Selling Your Data to Private Investigators

Joseph Cox:

Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country are taking drivers’ personal information and selling it to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit, Motherboard has learned. DMVs sell the data for an array of approved purposes, such as to insurance or tow companies, but some of them have sold to more nefarious businesses as well. Multiple states have made tens of millions of dollars a year selling data.

Motherboard has obtained hundreds of pages of documents from DMVs through public records requests that lay out the practice. Members of the public may not be aware that when they provide their name, address, and in some cases other personal information to the DMV for the purposes of getting a driver’s license or registering a vehicle, the DMV often then turns around and offers that information for sale.

Many of the private investigators that DMVs have sold data to explicitly advertise that they will surveil spouses to see if they’re cheating.

The Benefits of Optimism Are Real

Emily Esfahani Smith:

Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is not only an important predictor of resilience—how quickly people recover from adversity—but it is the most important predictor of it. People who are resilient tend to be more positive and optimistic compared to less-resilient folks; they are better able to regulate their emotions; and they are able to maintain their optimism through the most trying circumstances.

This is what Dr. Dennis Charney, the dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found when he examined approximately 750 Vietnam war veterans who were held as prisoners of war for six to eight years. Tortured and kept in solitary confinement, these 750 men were remarkably resilient. Unlike many fellow veterans, they did not develop depression or posttraumatic stress disorder after their release, even though they endured extreme stress. What was their secret? After extensive interviews and tests, Charney found ten characteristics that set them apart. The top one was optimism. The second was altruism. Humor and having a meaning in life—or something to live for—were also important.

Civics: HERE’S HOW MUCH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CHARGES TO BE ON EACH HOUSE COMMITTEE

Ryan Grim
And Aida Chavez
:

HOUSE DEMOCRATS ARE woefully behind on dues owed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to an internal party document provided to The Intercept. The rank-and-file’s lagging participation in the party’s money chase is being made up for, however, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prolific buckraking. By the end of June, she had raised the DCCC more than $43,000,000.

Otherwise, only 11 party members had paid their dues in full, according to the document, a July draft of the “Member Dues Report” for the 2019-2020 election cycle. The delinquency doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t pay at some point during the cycle (though some certainly won’t), but the DCCC, naturally, would prefer to have the money as early as possible, for budgeting and planning purposes. Members, meanwhile, prefer to hold on to their campaign cash as a signal of strength, to deter potential opponents considering a bid.

Party members are doing no better in the DCCC’s points system, a complex, lesser-known ranking that rewards a variety of activities Democrats can do to hold the majority.

The “DCCC Points Program,” as it is dubbed in an internal document, rewards members for their involvement in recruitment efforts and kicks them points if they raise money for the party’s House campaign arm, vulnerable incumbents, and candidates vying to flip swing districts. Pelosi is sitting atop the leaderboard with 279 points, while most members have none or just a few.

Power is accumulated in the House by raising and dispersing money to colleagues, a dynamic pioneered by Pelosi’s quasi-mentor, the late Rep. Phil Burton, who once held Pelosi’s seat; it’s now a bipartisan practice. This has been formalized with the DCCC’s decades-old practice of asking members to pay “dues” to the party committee in charge of reelection efforts and reallocating that money to contested races. Democrats in leadership positions, or who chair so-called money committees, are required to pay higher dues than back benchers. Members are also given a target amount of money they are expected to raise directly for the DCCC, which is separate from their dues payment.

The Problem With Believing What We’re Told

Gary Marcus and Annie Duke:

The good news is that there’s increasing evidence that the needed critical-thinking skills can be taught. In a study published in November in the journal SSRN, Patricia Moravec of Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business and others looked at whether they could improve people’s ability to spot fake news. When first asked to assess the believability of true and false headlines posted on social media, the 68 participants—a mix of Democrats, Republicans and independents—were more likely to believe stories that confirmed their own prior views. But a simple intervention had an effect: asking participants to rate the truthfulness of the headlines. That tiny bit of critical reflection mattered, and it even extended to other articles that the participants hadn’t been asked to rate. The results suggest that just asking yourself, “Is what I just learned true?” could be a valuable habit.

Similar research has shown that just prompting people to consider why their beliefs might not be true leads them to think more accurately. Even young children can learn to be more critical in their assessments of what’s truthful, through curricula such as Philosophy for Children and other programs that emphasize the value of careful questioning and interactive dialogue. Ask students to ponder Plato, and they just might grow up to be more thoughtful and reflective citizens.

Rather than holding our collective breath waiting for social media companies to magically resolve the problem with yet-to-be invented algorithms for filtering out fake news, we need to promote information literacy. Nudging people into critical reflection is becoming ever more important, as malicious actors find more potent ways to use technology and social media to leverage the frailties of the human mind. We can start by recognizing our own cognitive weaknesses and taking responsibility for overcoming them.

Reading is job 1. Unfortunately, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Andrew Luck and the NFL’s Looming Crisis of Race and Class

Dave Zirin:

Then there is the palpable fear in the offices of the National Football League about what the retirement of Luck represents and the attendant public relations hit. Behind the pageantry, the war planes flying overhead, and the tailgating keg stands, this is a game largely played by black people from poor backgrounds for a largely white affluent fan base in the stands. Seventy percent of the league is black, and top tickets cost hundreds of dollars. A player like Andrew Luck masks that reality. He graduated from Stanford. He comes from an affluent family. He is white. He played football because he wanted to, not because he had to. And he chose to walk away. He decided that he didn’t need this anymore: that the game he loved—not to mention the fans he loved—didn’t love him back.

Luck also highlights the fact that the more we know about head injuries, concussions, and the toll that the game takes on the human body—“the only workplace with a 100 percent injury rate” as the union is fond of saying—the more middle-class parents are keeping their kids from the sport. As the San Francisco Chronicle observed last year in a devastating exposé, “The number of high school boys playing tackle football has been in slow but steady decline for nearly a decade. The trend has coincided with heightened concern about the frequency and lasting impact of head injuries on young athletes—with former NFL stars among those questioning whether they’d let their sons play football, and some states weighing whether to establish minimum age limits for the sport.”

The piece shows how the sport has declined dramatically in the last decade in onetime hotbeds like Ohio and Michigan, with the overall number of players dipping nationally by 75,000 at a time when high school sports on the whole have expanded. The numbers of young people playing also dropped, Forbes reported, as affluent white families are much more likely to focus their male children on lacrosse: fewer concussions and a greater social cachet for parents who want a future Wall Street raider rather than an Oakland Raider.

Losing players like Andrew Luck promises a future when the mask is ripped clean off the NFL and the sport is plainly poor black players playing for wealthy white fans living vicariously through fantasy football and a violence that they don’t have to personally endure.

As for Luck, when he cried through his press conference, one couldn’t help but think he wasn’t crying only over losing his team, and the harsh reaction of fans, so quick to show him that their bond was only as strong as his next touchdown pass. Andrew Luck was crying for a sport that over a generation has changed culturally, even if the violence is the same. A league that once depended on a community’s coming together to collectively cheer a team now demands poverty to produce players and disposable wealth among fans whose identity revolves around the violent collisions they consume as voyeurs. It’s a sport that’s sustainable only on the ugliest possible terms: the denial of the humanity of players and the acceptance of that denial by the league and the fans themselves.

Madison has 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”.

MORE HONEST LATIN MOTTOES FOR YOUR OVERRATED UNIVERSITY

Dani Bostick:

Largitione ac donis
“Through bribes and gifts”

Multi matriculantur, pauci gradum suscipiunt
“Many matriculate, few graduate”

In reliquum tempus aere distrahi
“Torn asunder by debt for the rest of your life”

Pro scientia inutili
“For useless knowledge”

Quo plus cerevisiae, eo minus memoriae
“The more beer, the fewer the memories”

Dormire totum diem in cubiculo
“Sleeping all day in the dorms”

The Sidewalk Wars

Essays by joe berridge, michael bryant, ann cavoukian, jan de silva, dan doctoroff, cory doctorow, richard florida, ken greenberg, alexander josephson, jennifer keesmaat, bruce kuwabara, mohamed lachemi, kwame mckenzie, gord perks, robert prichard, yung wu, bianca wylie and shoshana zuboff :

Google has big plans to build a Jetsonian smart city on the waterfront, and Torontonians have strong opinions about it: is it the solution to all our problems or the end of the world as we know it? We asked 18 super-smart people to tell us what they think

CPS offers to stop using private nurses at schools, union says plan has ‘loopholes’

Nader Issa:

The CPS proposal — made in late July — would put an end, starting with this school year, to contracts that outsource jobs such as counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, case managers, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists. Though privatization isn’t widely used for those positions, those jobs would be filled only by full-time union employees.

CPS would have more time to end contracted nursing work in particular but would commit to phasing out privatization of nurses by the end of the 2023-24 school year, CPS officials said.

Nursing positions are the ones most commonly outsourced, and the CTU, parents and students have taken issue in the past with the privatization of nursing jobs. CPS has said those positions have needed to be outsourced because it’s difficult to find qualified candidates for full-time jobs.

Why Parents in the College-Admissions Scandal May Get Light Sentences

Jennifer Levitz and Melissa Korn:

Mr. Vandemoer admitted to taking bribes from Mr. Singer for Stanford’s sailing program in exchange for flagging some teens as recruited athletes, even though they weren’t competitive sailors, and giving them a boost in the admissions process.

Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel for a sentence of 13 months in prison.

But the probation department found no economic loss, since Mr. Vandemoer turned over his ill-gotten gains to Stanford. Stanford also told the court in a letter it hadn’t experienced financial loss.

Judge Zobel sentenced Mr. Vandemoer to one day in prison, which he already served, and two years of supervised release, including six months home confinement.

Mr. Lelling said in a statement after that sentencing that his office “will continue to seek meaningful penalties in these cases.”

Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields

Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp :

Women remain strongly underrepresented in math-related fields. This phenomenon is problematic because it contributes to gender inequalities in the labor market and can reflect a loss of talent. The current state of the art is that students’ abilities are not able to explain gender differences in educational and career choices. Relying on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, we show that female students who are good at math are much more likely than male students to be even better in reading. As a consequence, the difference between 15-y-old students’ math and reading abilities, which is likely to be determined by earlier socialization processes, can explain up to 80% of the gender gap in intentions to pursue math-studies and careers.

Civics: Judge Rules Terrorism Watchlist Violates Constitutional Rights

Charlie Savage:

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a federal government database that compiles people deemed to be “known or suspected terrorists” violates the rights of American citizens who are on the watchlist, calling into question the constitutionality of a major tool the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security use for screening potential terrorism suspects.

Being on the watchlist can restrict people from traveling or entering the country, subject them to greater scrutiny at airports and by the police, and deny them government benefits and contracts. In a 32-page opinion, Judge Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the standard for inclusion in the database was too vague.

“The court concludes that the risk of erroneous deprivation of plaintiffs’ travel-related and reputational liberty interests is high, and the currently existing procedural safeguards are not sufficient to address that risk,” Judge Trenga wrote.

Reading is essential to an educated citizenry.

‘Father Is Surgeon,’ ‘1 Mil Pledge’: The Role of Money in USC Admissions

Jennifer Levitz and Melissa Korn:

Emails among athletics, admissions and fundraising officials at the University of Southern California show the school explicitly weighed how much money applicants’ families could donate when determining whether to admit students.

The messages were filed Tuesday in a Boston federal court by a lawyer for two parents accused in the nationwide college-admissions cheating scandal. He claims USC wasn’t a victim of any scheme, but rather based admission decisions in part on expectations of donations from well-heeled families.

There is a long-held assumption that money influences college admissions, but the 18 previously undisclosed documents, obtained during the discovery process in the case, appear to make the direct connection in stark terms.

They include intricate spreadsheets color-coded by university officials to track “special-interest applicants”—applicants flagged for their connections to USC officials, trustees, donors or other VIPs—with direct references to past and prospective dollar amounts of gifts from their families.

Also included are email exchanges about specific candidates whose qualifications were portrayed as questionable by admissions and other officials but whose family ties and bank funds won out.

“VIP” students were described in spreadsheets with references like “given 2 million already,” “1 mil pledge,” “Previously donated $25k to Heritage Hall” and “father is surgeon,” the filings show.

The Most Promising Careers of the Next Decade

Soo Oh:

Tech, management and health-care roles are among the most promising careers of the next decade, according to a Wall Street Journal ranking of new employment-projection data released by the Labor Department. Factory jobs and other manual-labor occupations continue to have the least promising futures.

In ranking the new occupational data, the Journal assessed current median wages with projected annual openings. The average of those attributes contributed to their final ranking.

Many of America’s fastest-growing jobs, such as personal-care aides and fast-food workers, pay the lowest wages in the nation, while the highest-compensated professions, like doctors and lawyers, have few openings a year. Registered nurses and software developers hit the sweet spot, pairing relatively high wages with robust demand—making them among the most promising careers in our analysis.

Search our interactive below for more than 800 jobs with information on their rankings, median pay, projected employment changes and growth rates, and typical education needed.

What an ‘Adversity Score’ Misses

Wall Street Journal:

Getting Adversity Backward

Rather than lend students a cushion on their SATs, adversity should fuel them to excel. That’s what universities really want to see. From their essays to their interviews and even their grade-point averages, high school students have the space to make their case in full. It’s on them to articulate it.

Colleges are apt to listen—even if an applicant’s grades and test scores aren’t perfect. Admissions departments want to see more than that. They, along with future employers, want character. The value of a strong determination to overcome adversity is unquantifiable, but it can be used to succeed in college and beyond.

If a student’s goal is not only to earn a degree but also to build a good life, she will learn early on that adversity is not something that sets you back, but something to use to propel you forward.

The Google Syndrome: The company should become a generic term for today’s acute political mania.

Daniel Henninger:

It may be time to take the big G out of Google. The company called Google has turned itself into a generic metaphor for our politicized times. In addition to being the name of a U.S. technology company, “google” should become a lowercase word for a psychological syndrome—such as attention-deficit disorder, paranoia or dissociative identity disorder. A person with google disorder would be diagnosed as being in the grip of an uncontrollable political mania.

During the company’s early years, in keeping with what it called its culture of “openness” and the notion that employees should “bring their whole selves to work,” Google allowed thousands of internal message boards to proliferate. This must have seemed like a good idea at the time since Google employees are supersmart and presumably full of interesting, innovative thoughts.

Over time, the conversations on these text-based message boards turned toxic—as they do on message boards everywhere—with participants carving each other up in paroxysms of resentment and retribution. As the Journal reported last year, Google basically turned into a political nut house.

Google employees quickly sorted themselves into subsets with names such as Googlers for Animals, Black Googler Network, Activists at Google, Militia at Google, and Sex Positive at Google.

A few weeks ago, in attempt to do something about this epidemic outbreak of google syndrome, Google released a statement called “Community Guidelines,” a set of directives that are supposed to explain to the company’s more than 100,000 employees—known as Googlers—how they should talk to each other.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Credit Cards & Privacy

Geoffrey Fowler:

I recently used my credit card to buy a banana. Then I tried to figure out how my credit card let companies buy me.

You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.

Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them.

Schools Pushed for Tech in Every Classroom. Now Parents Are Pushing Back.

Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs:

The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education.

Across the country—in Boston, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Austin, Texas—parents are demanding proof technology works as an educational tool, and insisting on limits. They’re pushing schools to offer low- or screen-free classrooms, picketing board meetings to protest all the online classes and demanding more information about what data is collected on students.

In April, a report from the National Education Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found the rapid adoption of the mostly proprietary technology in education to be rife with “questionable educational assumptions . . . self-interested advocacy by the technology industry, serious threats to student privacy and a lack of research support.”

Proponents say schools must have technology. “We are moving into a time of exponential change,” says Keith Krueger, CEO of Consortium for School Networking, an association for school tech officers that also includes tech companies. “Schools are not at the leading edge of technology but technology is reaching a tipping point in the way learning happens.” He says, “Schools need to determine how to equip [students] to be smart digital citizens.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Next Recession and Pension Funds

Joshua Konstantinos:

In order to meet the returns required for future pension costs, public pension funds have thus been pushed into equities and other riskier assets. In 1992 just over half their allocation was still in fixed income. As of 2012, only 25% of public pension fund assets were allocated in fixed-income assets or cash – with the remaining 75% in equities and other higher yield alternatives. According to a recent report from the PEW charitable trust:
In a bid to boost investment returns, public pension plans in the past several decades have shifted funds away from fixed-income investments such as government and high-quality corporate bonds. During the 1980s and 1990s, plans significantly increased their reliance on stocks, also known as equities. And during the past decade, funds have increasingly turned to alternative investments such as private equity, hedge funds, real estate, and commodities to achieve their target investment returns.
The report goes on to say that because of this shift towards riskier assets “Public pension systems may be more vulnerable to an economic downturn than they have ever been.” And this was from six years ago, when interest rates were much higher. Today the famously conservative central bank of Germany is talking about negative interest mortgages.
Accounting for Risk in Public Pension Funds
There is one other key reason that public pension funds have transitioned into riskier assets.
States have passed laws exempting state government pension plans from the standards that private pension plans are held to. These public pension plans are permitted to use generous assumptions about risk that are not permitted in the private sector. So, while public pensions have moved into objectively riskier assets, they haven’t been forced to account for that risk.
According to a 2018 report, if public sector pension plans were held to the same standards as the private sector, even with their own extremely optimistic estimates, only Wisconsin’s would be considered stable. To quote the report:
However, the Pension Protection Act does not apply to public sector DB pension plans. Using the states’ own estimates of their liabilities and assets, 32 states are at risk of default by private sector standards. If the Pension Protection Act were applied to the public sector and states had to use a similar discount rate as the private sector, about 4.5 percent, only Wisconsin’s pension system has enough assets to be considered stable.
And this is not a controversial point – an overwhelming majoring of leading economists agree that the government accounting standards used by U.S. state and local governments understate their pension liabilities and the true cost of future pensions. A recent estimation from 2018 calculates that “Unfunded liabilities of state-administered pension plans, using a proper, risk-free discount rate, now total over $5.96 trillion. The average state pension plan is funded at a mere 35 percent.”

A neuroscientist’s studies show that altruism isn’t always attractive.

Sigal Samuel:

Picture this: You’ve worked hard all year. You’re burned out. Every atom in your brain and body is crying out for a relaxing vacation. Luckily, you and your partner have managed to save up $3,000. You propose a trip to Hawaii — those blue waves are calling your name!

Just one problem: Your partner refuses, arguing that you both should donate the money to charity instead. Think how many malaria-preventing bednets $3,000 could buy for kids in developing countries!

You might find yourself thinking: Why does my partner seem to care more about strangers halfway around the world than about me?

A philosopher would tell you that your partner may be a utilitarian or consequentialist, someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences and that everyone equally deserves to benefit from the good, not just those closest to us. By contrast, your response suggests you’re a deontologist, someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have special duties toward special people, like our partners, so we should prioritize our partner’s needs over a stranger’s.

Jennifer Cheatham’s Harvard Lecturer Position

Harvard Graduate School of Education:

Jennifer Cheatham, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’10, will be joining the HGSE faculty as a senior lecturer on education and director of the Public Education Leadership Program (PELP). She was previously superintendent of the Madison (Wisconsin) Metropolitan School District, a post she had held since 2013. Prior to that role, she had worked in various capacities in public education, including as classroom teacher, instructional coach, and director of curriculum and instruction. She has a strong commitment to research-based practice and strategy across multiple domains, including data-driven instruction, creating strong school partnerships, serving high-risk populations, and policy implementation. She will begin at HGSE on October 1, 2019.

Public Education Leadership Project:

To improve the management and leadership competencies of public school leaders in order to drive greater educational outcomes. To truly serve all students and meet the demands of the new accountability environment, leaders at all levels of a school district must work to ensure that all students have rich learning opportunities and achieve at high levels throughout a system of schools.

Related:

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

2013: What will be different, this time? Jennifer Cheatham’s Madison Rotary Club talk.

2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience: contrasting local cheerleading and academic results.

2019: Why Can’t Madison’s students read?

Commentary on Teacher Supply

Judith Siers-Poisson:

An education expert explains why he thinks that teachers leaving the profession is at the heart of the current teacher shortages. And he offers advice on how to retain experienced educators, while making it a more attractive career to young people.

Tim Slekar notes and links. Additional Wisconsin Public Radio appearances: February, 2019.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Mr. Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge tests [Foundations of Reading]. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

This test – our only teacher content knowledge requirement – is based on Massachusetts’ very successful MTEL standards.

Soaring Student Debt Opens Door to Relief Scams

Jean Eaglesham, Michael Tobin and Coulter Jones:

A record $89.2 billion of student loans was in default at the end of June, New York Federal Reserve data show. Of the $1.48 trillion outstanding, 11%, or $160 billion, was at least 90 days behind on repayments—and the true rate is likely double that, because only half the loans are currently in repayment.

“We’ll do the work for you,” Financial Preparation Services says on its website. “No more drowning in a sea of confusing paperwork and processing!” Its fee: $1,195 for document preparation, then $40 a month for almost 20 years—a total of $10,555—according to a 2018 client agreement reviewed by the Journal.

Regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, share oversight of such companies. One issue they face is the sheer number of small firms offering these services, many using several names.

“This is a relatively target-rich environment,” Michelle Grajales, an FTC attorney, said in an interview. “There are unfortunately a lot of companies that still appear to violate the law.” Ms. Grajales didn’t comment on Financial Preparation Services specifically.

Huawei Boosted Research Spending at Berkeley Before Sanctions, Documents Show

Matt Drange:

Huawei sharply increased its spending on research projects at the University of California, Berkeley last year and this year, immediately before the university cut ties with the Chinese telecom manufacturer amid U.S. government sanctions, according to documents obtained by The Information.

The documents show that Berkeley accepted nearly $1.5 million through four grants during February and March of this year. That is a fifth of the more than $7 million in funding Huawei has given Berkeley since it started funding research projects in 2013. Berkeley announced in January that it would stop taking money from Huawei for new research projects, but that it would continue taking money under existing grants. Officials stopped accepting those as well in May, however, after the Commerce Department sanctioned

How the assault on American excellence at Yale–and all universities–threatens our democracy

Anthony Kronman:

The Pierson master who gave up his title could not possibly have thought that he might be confused with the owner of a Mississippi plantation. What really disturbed him, and his students, was not race but rank. It was the aristocratic implication, however slight, that men and women can be distinguished according to their success not in this or that particular endeavor—the study of computer science, for example, or Greek philosophy—but in the all-inclusive work of being human. This idea has been accepted by many cultures of the most varied sorts. It has been joined with other beliefs, some pernicious and others benign. But at the most basic level, it runs against the grain of America’s democratic civilization. It seems—it is—antidemocratic. Any institution that embraces the idea of aristocracy, even in the most modest and qualified terms, therefore puts itself at odds with our civilization as a whole.

Yet even—indeed especially—in our democracy it is essential to preserve a few islands of aristocratic spirit, both for their own sake, because of the rarity and beauty of what they protect, and for the good of the larger democratic culture as well. That is because a democracy is strengthened by the habit of independent-mindedness that, at their very best, these institutions value and promote. None play a more important role in this regard than our colleges and universities. An attack on the idea of aristocracy within them harms not only the few who live and work in the privileged space they afford, but all who, in Edward Gibbon’s phrase, “enjoy and abuse” the democratic privileges that belong to everyone outside their walls.

Alexis de Tocqueville developed this line of thought with a clarity that has never been matched. I take my point of departure from his classic account.

‘Virtue Signalling’ May Annoy Us. But Civilization Would Be Impossible Without It

Geoffrey Miller:

Ever since grad school, I’ve been fascinated by moral hypocrisy as a hallmark of virtue signaling. People say they believe passionately in issue X, but they don’t bother to do anything real to support X. That kind of behavior seemed highly diagnostic of hypocritical signaling, and hypocritical signaling is bad, because hypocrisy is always bad. Case closed.

Or was it? My understanding of virtue signaling got a lot more complicated when I learned more about signaling theory. In grad school I’d studied sexual selection through mate choice, and the “sexual ornaments” and “fitness indicators” that evolve to signal a potential mate’s good genes, good health and good brains. Fitness signaling is central to animal behavior. But there’s a lot more to signaling than sexual ornaments.

In 1996, I started work as a researcher at the Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, in the economics department at University College London. It was an evolutionary game-theory center, led by Ken Binmore. I had a crash course in game theory, including signaling theory. I learned about Thorstein Veblen’s view of conspicuous consumption as wealth signaling, and Michael Spence’s view of educational credentials as intelligence signaling, and Amotz Zahavi’s view of animal displays as fitness signaling. I got the intellectual tools to think in a more nuanced way about virtue signaling.

There’s virtue signaling, and then there’s virtue signaling. This book is about both kinds.

On the one hand, there’s what economists call “cheap talk”: signals that are cheap, quick and easy to fake, and that aren’t accurate cues of underlying traits or values. When partisans on social media talk about political virtue signaling by the other side, they’re usually referring to this sort of cheap talk. Virtue signaling as cheap talk includes bumper stickers, yard signs, social media posts and dating app profiles. The main pressure that keeps cheap talk honest is social: the costs of stigma and ostracism by people who don’t agree with your signal. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat doesn’t cost much money, but it can cost you friendships.

On the other hand, there’s virtue signaling that’s costly, long-term, and hard to fake, and that can serve as a reliable indicator of underlying traits and values. This can include volunteering for months on political campaigns, making large, verifiable donations to causes, or giving up a lucrative medical practice to work for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti or New Guinea. The key to reliable virtue signals is that you simply couldn’t stand to exhibit them, over the long term, if you didn’t genuinely care about the cause.

Google, YouTube To Pay $170 Million Penalty Over Collecting Kids’ Personal Info

Avie Schneider:

The companies allegedly collected information of children viewing videos on YouTube by tracking users of channels that are directed at kids. YouTube allegedly failed to notify parents or get their consent, violating laws that protect children’s privacy, according to a complaint filed against the companies by the FTC and the New York attorney general.

YouTube earned millions of dollars by then using this information to target ads to the children, according to the complaint.

“YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in a statement. “Yet when it came to complying with (the children privacy law), the company refused to acknowledge that portions of its platform were clearly directed to kids. There’s no excuse for YouTube’s violations of the law.”

According to the complaint, YouTube marketed itself as a top destination for kids in presentations to the makers of popular children’s products and brands.

For example, Google and YouTube told Mattel, maker of Barbie and Monster High toys, that “YouTube is today’s leader in reaching children age 6-11 against top TV channels” and told Hasbro, which makes My Little Pony and Play-Doh, that YouTube is the “#1 website regularly visited by kids.”

Two Madisons: The Education and Opportunity Gap in Wisconsin’s Fastest Growing City

Will Flanders:

At Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), there exist two distinct school systems.

Despite its economic growth, low-income families in Madison are more likely to stay poor for their entire lives.

While 60% of white students at MMSD are proficient or higher on the Forward exam, only 9.8% of African Americans are proficient. This achievement gap is worse than Milwaukee Public Schools.

While Hispanic proficiency is higher than that for African Americans, large gaps remain.

21% of African Americans and 18% of Hispanic students in MMSD do not graduate from high school within five years compared to just 6% of white students.

African American and low-income students are more likely to be in schools with significantly higher numbers of police calls.

Due to caps and restrictions, school choice is very limited in Madison. Unless your family has money. More than 4,300 children attend 31 private schools in Madison, primarily outside of the voucher program.

Related: Police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.

Madison taxpayers recently funded expansion of our least diverse schools.

“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”.

I am currently the reading interventionist teacher at 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.

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most K-12 school districts, now between 18 and 20k per student, depending on the district documents one reviews.

College- and Career-Ready Student Outcomes Data Explorer

achieve:

Though all states collect data on student outcomes, the measures they track differ from state to state—differences like which students are included in each indicator, which assessments are used, whether data on student subgroups are reported, and how indicators are constructed. Furthermore, the data states report are often found across a number of websites, and some states publicly report more information than others. Each of these factors makes it hard to know how well-prepared students are for their next steps after high school.

The College- and Career-Ready Student Outcomes Data Explorer brings the available data together in one place, with a range of indicators that measure students’ progress towards and demonstration of college and career readiness (read more about how the data is collected here and see where it is collected from here). This Data Explorer shows states’ college and career readiness data by subgroup where available, and provides insight into how different measures are constructed and which students are being counted for these indicators of achievement.

The High School Course Beijing Accuses of Radicalizing Hong Kong

Tiffany May and Amy Qin:

HONG KONG — They are sitting in orderly rows, wearing neatly pressed uniforms. But in this class, as they debate the merits of democracy and civil rights, Hong Kong high school students are prompting Beijing to worry that they are increasingly out of control.

The mandatory civics course known here as liberal studies has been a hallmark of the curriculum in Hong Kong for years, and students and teachers say the point is to make better citizens who are more engaged with society.

But mainland Chinese officials and pro-Beijing supporters say the prominence of the city’s youth at recent mass protests is the clearest sign yet that this tradition of academic freedom has gone too far, giving rise to a generation of rebels.

“The liberal studies curriculum is a failure,” Tung Chee-hwa, a former leader of Hong Kong, said in July. “It is one of the reasons behind the youth’s problems today.”

Americans Have Shifted Dramatically on What Values Matter Most

Chad Day:

The values that Americans say define the national character are changing, as younger generations rate patriotism, religion and having children as less important to them than did young people two decades ago, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds.

The poll is the latest sign of difficulties the 2020 presidential candidates will likely face in crafting a unifying message for a country divided over personal principles and views of an increasingly diverse society.

When the Journal/NBC News survey asked Americans 21 years ago to say which values were most important to them, strong majorities picked the principles of hard work, patriotism, commitment to religion and the goal of having children.

All Those Adages of Geniuses Are a Big Scam

Joe Queenan:

But then, alas, I found out that Ben Franklin may never have said any of these things. Or if he did, he may have lifted them from somebody else. No matter. Whoever said them is wrong. Way off base. Which is true of most famous maxims. It does not take one to know one; you don’t need to be an idiot to identify an idiot. You can fight City Hall; people do it all the time. If you lead a horse to water, it will drink it. So will a dog.

So if somebody tells you that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the exact same thing and always expect a different result, reply: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” I think it was the 19th-century American educator Thomas H. Palmer who said that. But it could have been Albert Einstein.

‘Father is Surgeon,’ ‘1 mil pledge’: The Role of Money in USC Admissions

Jennifer Levitz and Melissa Korn:

Emails among athletics, admissions and fundraising officials at the University of Southern California show the school explicitly weighed how much money applicants’ families could donate when determining whether to admit students.

The messages were filed Tuesday in a Boston federal court by a lawyer for two parents accused in the nationwide college-admissions cheating scandal. He claims USC wasn’t a victim of any scheme, but rather based admission decisions in part on expectations of donations from well-heeled families.

There is a long-held assumption that money influences college admissions, but the 18 previously undisclosed documents, obtained during the discovery process in the case, appear to make the direct connection in stark terms.

Helsinki Central Library Oodi chosen as the best new public library in the world

oodihelsinki:

The annually presented Public Library of the Year award is presented to a public library that is either newly built or set up in premises not previously used for library purposes. This year, a total of 16 libraries from all over the world applied to be considered for this award. The other libraries that made it to the final were Green Square Library and Plaza in Australia, Bibliotheek LocHal in the Netherlands and Tūranga – Christchurch Central Library in New Zealand. The award’s sponsor, IT company Systematic, awarded USD 5,000 to Oodi.

‘Oodi was designed together with customers for a long period of time. We received more than 2,000 ideas from customers to serve as the basis of the architectural competition. ALA Architects designed an amazing and unique building that takes all the elements most desired by customers into account. The customers immediately made Oodi their own, which is our greatest success. The Public Library of the Year award tells us that the world has also taken notice of this,’ rejoices Director of Oodi Anna-Maria Soininvaara.

Do Citizens Have A Right To See The Algorithms Used By Publicly-Funded Software?

Gkyn Moody:

In 2009, the Spanish government brought in a law requiring electricity bill subsidies for some five million poor households in the country. The so-called Bono Social de Electricidad, or BOSCO, was not popular with energy companies, which fought against it in the courts. Following a 2016 ruling, the Spanish authorities introduced new, more restrictive regulations for BOSCO, and potential beneficiaries had to re-register by 31 December 2018. In the end, around 1.5 million households were approved, almost a million fewer than the 2.4 million who had benefited from the previous scheme, and a long way from the estimated 4.5 million who fulfilled the criteria to receive the bonus.

The process of applying for the subsidy was complicated, so a non-profit organization monitoring public authorities, Civio, worked with the National Commission on Markets and Competition to produce an easy-to-use Web page that allowed people to check their eligibility for BOSCO. Because of discrepancies between what the Civio service predicted, and what the Spanish government actually decided, Civio asked to see the source code for the algorithm that was being used to determine eligibility. The idea was to find out how the official algorithm worked so that the Web site could be tweaked to give the same results. As Civio wrote in a blog post, that didn’t go so well:

“An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs,”

David Brooks on:

Professor Warren also supported proposals to help families afford day care, but she opposed the approach that candidate Warren now advocates. Back then, she called taxpayer-funded day care a liberal “sacred cow”: “Any subsidy that benefits working parents without providing a similar benefit to single-income families pushes the stay-at-home mother and her family further down the economic ladder.”

Professor Warren supported ways to help make universities more affordable, but she opposed the sort of government subsidy proposals that candidate Warren now supports. “Are state governments supposed to write a blank check for higher education, allowing universities to increase costs with abandon?” she asked. “The more-taxes approach suffers from the same problem the more-debt approach engenders. It gives colleges more money to spend without any attempt to control their spiraling costs.”

“The Two-Income Trap” is filled with interesting and heterodox proposals. Warren supported many progressive policy ideas and many conservative ones. She wanted to eliminate the tax on savings. She opposed more government regulations on housing, because such regulations reduce the incentive to build more housing.

In that book, she harshly criticized many Republicans. She also criticized the women’s movement for being naïve about economics, and she criticized Hillary Clinton for flip-flopping on important issues for the sake of political expediency.

There are two core tensions that make the book so fascinating. Warren and Tyagi are both working women and feminists. And yet they provide case after case in which stay-at-home moms provide an important safety net for their families. Warren and Tyagi want Americans to have children, but they provide case after case in which childbearing strains family finances and leads to bankruptcy and misery.

In 2016 Warren and Tyagi wrote a new introduction to their book. It’s hard to believe this introduction was written by the same people. The 2003 book is intellectually unpredictable and alive. The new introduction is paint-by-numbers progressive boilerplate. The original book described a complex world in which people navigate trade-offs and unintended consequences often happen. The new introduction describes a comic book world, in which everything bad can be blamed on greedy bankers.

This is the problem with politics in a dogmatic age. Everything conforms to rigid ideology. Independent, evidence-based thinking? That goes out the window.

“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” .

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The American Working Class Dilemma

Joel Kotkin:

Unlike workers with steady pay and benefits, those in the precariat — many of them young, lacking good prospects and often socialistically minded — have little to protect. Whether they work for McDonald’s or Uber, they lack health insurance, company backing for further education or any influence on corporate decision-making. A policy agenda of “Medicare for all”, cancelled student debts and forcing companies to put workers could have considerable appeal to such voters.

Which party wins the working class in 2020?

Appealing to the precariat, however, also poses a challenge to the democratic establishment, many of whom, including several top Obama aides, work at firms such as Uber and Lyft . Some of these notional progressives consider what they call the “sharing” economy as “democratizing capitalism” by returning control of the working day to the individual. Yet for most gig workers there’s not very much democratic or satisfying.

The new working class activism also may move to drive the party further, even disastrously, to the left. Some labor activists such as Chicago’s teacher union leaders recently traveled to Venezuela’s disastrous leftist regime, and expressed their admiration and solidarity. This is not a good role model to sell to the electorate.

How to become a great impostor

Tim Holmes:

Unlike other icons who have appeared on the front of Life magazine, Ferdinand Waldo Demara was not famed as an astronaut, actor, hero or politician. In fact, his 23-year career was rather varied. He was, among other things, a doctor, professor, prison warden and monk. Demara was not some kind of genius either – he actually left school without any qualifications. Rather, he was “The Great Impostor”, a charming rogue who tricked his way to notoriety.

My research speciality is crimes by deception and Demara is a man who I find particularly interesting. For, unlike other notorious con-artists, imposters and fraudsters, he did not steal and defraud for the money alone. Demara’s goal was to attain prestige and status. As his biographer Robert Crichton noted in 1959, “Since his aim was to do good, anything he did to do it was justified. With Demara the end always justifies the means.”

Though we know what he did, and his motivations, there is still one big question that has been left unanswered – why did people believe him? While we don’t have accounts from everyone who encountered Demara, my investigation into his techniques has uncovered some of the secrets of how he managed to keep his high level cons going for so long.

The Next Recession (Whenever it Comes) Will Be About Sovereign Debt

Joshua Konstantinos:

What made the recession in 2008 the Great Recession was the failure of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to prevent Lehman Brothers from collapsing. Allowing the collapse of an institution that was too big to fail is what started the deflationary spiral that almost brought down the entire global economy. Although there is always the risk of another similar misstep in any recession, it would be surprising if any central banker allowed the abrupt collapse of a major bank for another half-century or so. However, while it’s unlikely that the next recession will see another Lehman Brothers, the next recession will likely be worse than 2008 – but for a different reason.

The Massive Accumulation of Debt Since 2008
The nations of the world prevented the total collapse of the global economy in 2008 by bailing out their financial systems. However, this was accomplished at an enormous cost. Countries took on massive amounts of debt and this combined with the plummet in tax revenues strained national budgets.
According to the IMF “Leverage in the system has increased some 50%-60% since the financial crisis a decade ago, with debt now worth some 230% of economic output globally” This immense pile of debt – particularly the debt held by governments known as sovereign debt – poses a terrible risk to the world.

Europe is Mired in Debt
In Europe, the massive debt accumulation morphed the 2008 financial crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. Immediately after Lehman’s collapse, yields on government bonds began to rise in some countries as the risk rose that these nations would be unable to service their debt in the recessionary environment. By 2010, the Southern European nations of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (referred to in financial circles at the time as the PIIGS) were in a full-blown sovereign debt crisis which saw the value of their bonds plummet and their costs to borrow soar.

Ring (Amazon) asks police not to tell public how its law enforcement backend works

Kate Cox:

Amazon’s Ring line of consumer home surveillance products enjoys an extensive partnership with local police departments all over the country. Cops receive free product, extensive coaching, and pre-approved marketing lines, and Amazon gets access to your 911 data and gets to spread its network of security cameras all over the nation. According to a trio of new reports, though, the benefits to police go even further than was previously known—as long as they don’t use the word “surveillance,” that is.

Gizmodo on Monday published an email exchange between the chief of police in one New Jersey town and Ring showing that Ring edited out certain key terms of a draft press release before the town published it, as the company frequently does.

The town of Ewing, New Jersey, in March said it would be using Ring’s Neighbors app. Neighbors does not require a Ring device to use; consumers who don’t have footage to share can still view certain categories of crime reports in their area and contribute reports of their own, sort of like a Nextdoor on steroids.

FURTHER READING
Amazon writes scripts for cops to sling Ring home cameras, report says
Law enforcement has access to a companion portal that allows police to see an approximate map of active Ring cameras in a given area and request footage from them in the course of an investigation. The town also launched a subsidy program, giving up to 200 residents a $100 discount on the purchase of Ring security products. Members of the police department also received $50 discount vouchers for their own use.

Loose rules let Texas districts boost ratings by claiming military enlistments

Javob Carpenter:

In Hearne ISD, a rural school district home to about 800 pupils northwest of College Station, students have scored poorly on the state’s standardized tests for years, and 2019 was no exception.

In the past, Hearne’s abysmal test scores resulted in “improvement required” or failing grades from the state, prompting a gradual increase in state oversight of the rural district. This year, however, Hearne received a B rating under Texas’ A-through-F accountability system, one of the largest improvements in the state.

Measles: Four European nations lose eradication status

BBC:

Measles has returned to four European nations previously seen as free of the illness, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The disease is no longer considered eradicated in Albania, the Czech Republic, Greece and the UK.

“We are backsliding, we are on the wrong track,” said Kate O’Brien of the WHO’s Immunization Department.

Measles is a highly contagious and potentially fatal illness that causes coughing, rashes and fever.

The disease can be prevented through two doses of the MMR vaccine, which is available for

Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

Jim Mattis:

In late November 2016, I was enjoying Thanksgiving break in my hometown on the Columbia River in Washington state when I received an unexpected call from Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Would I meet with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss the job of secretary of defense?

I had taken no part in the election campaign and had never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, so to say that I was surprised is an understatement. Further, I knew that, absent a congressional waiver, federal law prohibited a former military officer from serving as secretary of defense within seven years of departing military service. Given that no waiver had been authorized since Gen. George Marshall was made secretary in 1950, and I’d been out for only 3½ years, I doubted I was a viable candidate. Nonetheless, I felt I should go to Bedminster, N.J., for the interview.

I had time on the cross-country flight to ponder how to encapsulate my view of America’s role in the world. On my flight out of Denver, the flight attendant’s standard safety briefing caught my attention: If cabin pressure is lost, masks will fall…Put your own mask on first, then help others around you. In that moment, those familiar words seemed like a metaphor: To preserve our leadership role, we needed to get our own country’s act together first, especially if we were to help others.

The next day, I was driven to the Trump National Golf Club and, entering a side door, waited about 20 minutes before I was ushered into a modest conference room. I was introduced to the president-elect, the vice president-elect, the incoming White House chief of staff and a handful of others. We talked about the state of our military, where our views aligned and where they differed. Mr. Trump led the wide-ranging, 40-minute discussion, and the tone was amiable.

PARENTS FACE A GROWING BARRAGE OF FEES AS STUDENTS HEAD BACK TO SCHOOL

Tawnell D. Hobbs:

The cost of a free public education is on the rise, as a growing number of districts across the U.S. are charging students for registration, textbooks, the use of libraries and more.

Some students in the Benton-Carroll-Salem Local School District in Ohio this school year pay a $10 student-activity fee, $34 for chemicals and supplies for chemistry and $3 for an alert system with mass calling capabilities. Anatomy and physiology students pay $35 to help cover the cost of cat cadavers and other course materials. High-school students this year also face a new $25 fee for school-provided laptops.

“These are necessary items that are going to help their children succeed and thrive in the classroom,” said Guy Parmigian, the district’s superintendent. Students who don’t pay can have their diploma withheld, he said.

The Math That Takes Newton into the Quantum World

John Baez:

In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane, mentally drawing a grid on it, as we now do with graph paper, and calling the coordinates x and y. We can write down an equation like x2+ y2 = 1, and there will be a curve consisting of points whose coordinates obey this equation. In this example, we get a circle!

It was a revolutionary idea at the time, because it let us systematically convert questions about geometry into questions about equations, which we can solve if we’re good enough at algebra. Some mathematicians spend their whole lives on this majestic subject. But I never really liked it much until recently—now that I’ve connected it to my interest in quantum physics.

Ideological Diversity, Hostility, and Discrimination in Philosophy

Uwe Peters, Nathan Honeycutt, Andreas De Block, and Lee Jussim:

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left- leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline.

K-12 tax & SpendinG Climate: Bond Markets Don’t Bend. They Snap.

Pounts & Figures:

If you live in a place like I do that consistently taps the bond market for funding to cover deficit spending without any reform of that spending beware. By reform, I mean cutting spending because usually governments don’t find new revenue. Governments think they can tap the bond market for money with no end in sight. Like it’s a spigot they just turn on, or a money tree in the backyard they go and pick cash off of.
They are making a poor assumption. Corporate and Muni bond markets are not at all like US Treasury markets except for maybe the jargon used to trade them. US Treasury markets are very very liquid. Other bond markets not so much. The bid ask spread in the Treasury market can be as tight as 1/64th. That spread will have billions of dollars on each side of it waiting to be taken out. In short term interest rate markets like Eurodollars, they trade trillions a day in notional value with spreads as little as $6.25 wide.
Contrast that with corporate bonds or municipal bonds. Those spreads are miles wide and often it takes a couple of days to get a quote depending on how popular the bond is. I owned some water bonds from a county in Illinois and it wasn’t a snap to get out of them. If it would have been a US Treasury, I would have pushed a button on my phone.

Collecting data on Taxpayer supported Madison K-12 students 24×7 Reading?

Logan Wroge:

But the move to 24-hour monitoring was not without concern.

Last week, the Madison School Board weighed the benefits of potentially preventing bullying and suicide with protecting student privacy and how the collected data could be used.

Ultimately, the board approved on a 5-1 vote spending $114,408 over the next two years to expand the district’s use of the software. Board member Nicki Vander Meulen was the sole opponent, but others voiced some misgivings before signing off.

Vander Meulen, who is an attorney, said some of her issues with the product relate to the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, adding she is concerned information flagged by the software could be used in criminal cases.

“It also worries me on the privacy issue. We want our teens to trust us, we want them to talk to us,” said Vander Meulen, who added she thought the money might be better spent on school counselors.

Board president Gloria Reyes said the software would not be monitoring student’s personal devices, but rather district-owned devices provided to students.

She said the software is worth it if it could prevent a suicide attempt or flag school safety threats.

The chromebooks are supplied by Google, a behemoth built on personal data mining.

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”

Federal fraud indictment: KU professor secretly worked for Chinese university

Mara Rose Williams:

A University of Kansas associate professor on Wednesday was indicted on federal charges alleging he concealed he worked for a Chinese university while doing U.S. government-funded research.

Feng “Franklin” Tao, 47, of Lawrence, who taught chemical engineering and chemistry at KU’s Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, is charged with one count of wire fraud and three counts of program fraud.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000 on the wire fraud count, and up to 10 years and a fine up to $250,000 on each of the program fraud counts

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: CBO expects deficit to grow more than projected, warns that tariff hikes could harm growth

Kevin Breuninger & Ylan Mui:

Federal deficits are expected to swell to higher levels over the next decade than previously expected, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Wednesday.

The CBO also said that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are projected to shrink gross domestic product by 2020, and warned that further tariff hikes could stifle economic growth.

The U.S. budget deficit is expected to hit $960 billion in 2019, and average a whopping $1.2 trillion per year between 2020 and 2029, according to the CBO’s look ahead at the U.S. budget and economic outlook over the next decade.

The new deficit projection for 2019 rose $63 billion from the last report, which came out in May. The CBO says this is mainly because of the massive new budget deal, which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by Trump in early August.

The Provocations of Camille Paglia

Emily Eshfahania:

The word “person” captures a concept so fundamental to Westerners that it can be jarring to discover that it once had a different meaning. Etymologically, “person” comes from the Latin word persona, which means “mask.” To be a person is to wear a mask, act out a role—what people today might call being fake.

But to Camille Paglia, the dissident social critic, a mask does not conceal a person’s true nature; it helps reveal it. This is why Halloween was her favorite holiday as a child. It was “a fantastic opportunity,” she told an interviewer recently, “to enact one’s repressed and forbidden self—which in my case was male.” When she was five, she dressed up as Robin Hood; at seven, she was a Roman soldier; at eight, Napoleon; at nine, Hamlet. “These masks,” Paglia told me in Philadelphia recently, “are parts of myself.”

Paglia, 72, grew up in the 1950s, when girls played house, not Hamlet. It was an unforgiving time to be different. As a fifth-grader, Paglia shoved a boy in order to be first in line; her teacher made her look up “aggressive” in the dictionary after school, an exercise that left her in tears. But at Halloween, she could defy conventions. Eventually, she would explain not only her personality but also the development of Western civilization through sexual masks. “I show how much of Western life, art, and thought,” she writes in Sexual Personae, her 735-page history of Western culture, “is ruled by personality, which the book traces through recurrent types of personae (‘masks’).”