Associated Press: A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it’s too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks … Continue reading Choose Life: Lab tests show risks of using CRISPR gene editing on embryos →

Sui-Lee Wee and Steven Lee Myers: The number of babies born in China last year fell to a nearly six-decade low, exacerbating a looming demographic crisis that is set to reshape the world’s most populous nation and threaten its economic vitality. About 14.6 million babies were born in China in 2019, according to the National … Continue reading Choose Life: China’s Birthrate Hits Historic Low, in Looming Crisis for Beijing →

Chris Baynes: An investigation into suspected sex-selective abortions has been launched by magistrates in a district of northern India after government data showed none of the 216 children born across 132 villages over three months were girls. Authorities in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand state, said the official birth rate was “alarming” and pointed towards widespread female foeticide, … Continue reading Choose Life: ‘No girls born’ for past three months in area of India covering 132 villages →

Rob Stein: A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned. For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, … Continue reading Choose Life: New U.S. Experiments Aim To Create Gene-Edited Human Embryos →

What’s on Weibo: A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial … Continue reading Choose Life: the ongoing battle – China’s Proposed ‘No Child Tax’ Stirs Controversy: “First Forced Abortions, Now Pressured Into Pregnancy” →

Harm Venhuizen “I continue to believe that having ‘we the people’ decide the profound moral issue of abortion is the only way to find a reasonable consensus that most people will accept,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “One of the benefits of a one-time, single-issue referendum would be the education and discussion that would … Continue reading Abortion, life and politics →

Yi-Fu Tuan: What is it then that I do? My answer is human geography; more precisely, a sub-field within human geography that might be called (albeit inelegantly) systematic humanistic geography. And what is that? I will try to provide an answer, drawing on my own experience and work. A good way to start is to … Continue reading “chooses, boldly if not wisely, to acknowledge a maverick” →

Zeina Amhaz: In the US, one in eight couples, or 6.7 million peoplestruggle to conceive. A quick Twitter search of “IVF” will return scores of women sharing heartbreaking stories of failed IVF rounds and crushing miscarriages, like Breanna. Each year, the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) increases 5-10%. Considering that our only real job, biologically, is … Continue reading Infertility: A Lifestyle Disease?
A deep dive on causes and treatment of infertility →

Kara Zupkus: An English professor at Iowa State University has threatened to dismiss students who voice opposition to abortion or the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization from her upcoming class this fall. She falsely claims students who resist leftist orthodoxy hold a viewpoint “that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same … Continue reading Civics: Iowa State Professor Threatens to “Dismiss” Pro-Life, Conservative Students From Her Class →

Ronald Bailey: The U.S. total fertility rate has dropped to below 1.73 births per woman, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. This record low edges out the previous U.S. fertility nadir of 1.74 births per woman back in 1976. U.S. rates appear to be following the downward trend seen … Continue reading U.S. Fertility Reaches All-Time Low as People Choose Things Other Than Children →

Hacker News: I’m at the end of my MSc. studies in CS. At the moment, I can choose to graduate in a month or two, or stay-on for another 9 months doing research in interactive theorem proving that will potentially lead to a PhD opportunity. I’m doing my MSc in a foreign country and I’m … Continue reading Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life? →

Ross Douthat: The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been … Continue reading New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism. →

Eric Fish: When 22-year-old Langou Lian looks back at her decision to study in the United States, one influence sticks out: Disney Channel movie High School Musical. “I hated Chinese education,” Lian says, the high-pressure, test-centred schooling in her native Sichuan province. High School Musical presented an alternative: a carefree atmosphere where even adolescent students … Continue reading How Chinese overseas students are learning harsh life lessons →

ABC: Carolina Williams of Brentwood, Tennessee received a letter from the prestigious school’s admission committee in March announcing the good news. More surprisingly, the letter highlighted one of the ten essays she had written for the application as a stand out. “It really tickled me that they specifically commented on that one because there were … Continue reading Teenager Gets Into Yale With Essay About Papa John’s Pizza, Then Chooses Auburn →

Radhika Nagpal:

As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can’t blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error.
So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a few times publicly on panels. Of course, I said all these things without any proof that they lead to success, but with every proof that they led me to enjoy the life I was living.
Most people I talked to seemed surprised. Several of my close friends challenged me to write this down, saying that that I owed it to them. They told me that such things were not done and were not standard. That may be true. But what is definitely true, is that we rarely talk about what we actually do behind the scenes to cope with life. Revealing that is the scariest thing of all.
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

Esther Cepeda:

In his revealing book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray spends hundreds of pages using statistics to illustrate the rising inequality that is increasingly putting the white working class on the path toward generational poverty.
Murray concludes by suggesting that the “new upper class” — which increasingly is cloistered in pockets of rich, highly educated super-neighborhoods — move into the communities of “regular” people.
“Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us,” writes Murray, who himself lives in what he describes as an increasingly troubled “blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland.”
He closes: “A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding — and more fun — to lead a textured life, and be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”
Murray’s invocation sprung to mind a few weeks ago as I was reading stay-at-home dad Andy Hinds’ “Why I Want to Choose the ‘Disadvantaged’ Local School (and Why I Might Not)” on The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog.
Hinds describes the gut-wrenching choice he has to make about whether to put his “mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls” into the good school where his neighbors’ kids go or into the troubled school only a five-minute walk from his home. His idealism makes him wonder if he and a group of caring, motivated parents could change a school with 100% poverty and a predominantly Hispanic student body. Ultimately, such participation could make a difference for the whole community.

Free through 3.31.2012 in epub, pdf and mobi format:

This is a book of passion, media literacy and social justice. Grounded in real-life examples, it points the way for all of us by raising important questions of how we can live on this planet as one human family.

Japan Times: The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday. The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number … Continue reading Japan’s 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million on falling births →

Ashley Ahn: Yun-Jeong Kim grew up imagining what her future family would look like — married with several kids, a nice home and a dog. But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford, she found herself somewhere she’d never imagined: 31 years old and living back at … Continue reading South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, a struggle with lessons for us all →

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s … Continue reading We need to consider ways to reverse or at least slow rapid depopulation →

Olivia McCormack Ryan Bomberger comes from a family of 15. He was adopted out of the foster-care system — along with 9 of his 12 siblings. Bomberger is staunchly antiabortion, in part because of the circumstances around his own conception, he said. “I am 100 percent antiabortion, 100 percent pro-life,” said Bomberger, a 51-year-old living … Continue reading Being adopted has shaped their views on abortion — in different ways →

Tanya Lewis: Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months … Continue reading The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom →

Joel Kotkin: Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case. This is among the biggest lessons from the … Continue reading Rising numbers of single people and plummeting birth rates are bad news for civilisation. →

Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros: Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength. Yet after births peaked in 2007, they never rebounded from the nearly two-year recession … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Covid-19 pandemic compounds years of birth-rate decline, puts America’s demographic health at risk →

Sabrina Tavernise: How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future. michael barbaroFrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. [music]A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina … Continue reading The birthrate in the United States has fallen by about 19 percent since its recent peak in 2007 →

Ann Althouse: There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for … Continue reading “It’s probably true that these children of Americans who are not getting born would probably be dull slackers compared to the plucky, effervescent immigrants.” →

Axios: As the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low, new technologies promise to radically change how we have babies. Why it matters: The demand for assisted reproductive technology like IVF is likely to grow as people delay the decision to have children. But newer advances in gene editing and diagnostic testing could open the … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low →

Izabella Kaminska: When you’re on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics? When you look at a mountain, do you think about how precisely it was formed? Do you always notice how the music you are listening to is structured? If the answer to all these is yes, you could be what Simon Baron-Cohen … Continue reading Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case for neurodiversity, arguing that autism confers advantages that we should value →

Associated Press: China is eliminating a trio of agencies responsible for enforcing family planning policies in a further sign the government may be planning to scrap long-standing limits on the number of children its citizens can have. The move was part of a reorganization of the National Health Commission announced Monday that creates a new … Continue reading China move points to possible end of birth limits →

Austin Bay: It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In … Continue reading On Point: The Population Threat to China’s Prosperity →

Mandy Zuo: A proposal to tax all working adults aged under 40 – with the money going to a “reproduction fund” to reward families who have more than one child – has caused uproar in China. The idea was the most controversial among a series of measures floated by two academics from prestigious Nanjing University … Continue reading Uproar over ‘wacky’ plan to start baby boom in China by taxing adults under 40 →

Bloomberg: China’s parliament struck “family planning” policies from the latest draft of a sweeping civil code slated for adoption in 2020, the clearest signal yet that the leadership is moving to end limits on the number of children families can have. A new draft of the Civil Code submitted Monday to the Standing Committee of … Continue reading China Signals End to Child Birth Limits by 2020 at Latest →

Natalie Stechyson It’s something her own children won’t experience. Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say. Worldwide, families … Continue reading Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood? →

James Pethokoukis But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo … Continue reading Fewer and faster: Global fertility isn’t just declining, it’s collapsing →

Evan Osnos: Even as the ruling class has become a preoccupation of the right, it remains a concern on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders had such an abundant audience for his latest book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” that his royalties nearly matched his salary for representing Vermont. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who entered Congress … Continue reading Civics: “American politics is full of élites assailing the élite, but behind the name-calling is a real and urgent problem” →

Michael Walsh: Social Security’s problems aren’t just its unrealistic economics, which posited starting from a hole and an ever-increasing work force paying taxes in order to support the generation ahead of it; the “trust fund” was always a polite fiction, which as you see is now being stealthily abandoned. But keeping Social Security solvent isn’t … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: declining parenthood and the tax base →

Robin Hanson: Re fertility decline, yes, as the main change in the last half century is the number of women who become moms, not the number of kids per mom, all we need is a larger fraction of women having kids. Yes, as that used to happen, it must still be feasible. Yes, a big … Continue reading Fertility →

Wall Street Journal: Happy to report: North Carolina on Friday became the tenth state to approve universal school choice. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper says he won’t veto the bill passed by the Legislature, no doubt because Republicans have enough votes to override. The choice provisions are in the state’s much-delayed budget, which includes Medicaid expansion … Continue reading School Choice in North Carolina →

Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier: This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its … Continue reading Embryo Selection →

Jessica Grose: The number of school-age children in America is declining. At least one reason is the fallingbirthrate after the Great Recession. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with. K-12 public school systems … Continue reading Notes on Declining Student Population →

Guillaume Blanc : According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth … Continue reading France’s baby bust →

Ryan Quinn: At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we clearly have a world-class faculty that exists and teaches students and creates leaders of the future,” Boliek said. “We, however, have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said … Continue reading Notes on a new UNC chapel hill school →

Ross Douthat “You can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in mating and marriage…””… and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be considered as part of the debate…. [Consider a] world clearly shadowed by the effects … Continue reading Considering all abortion costs →

Luana Maroja: For the past two days, more than 150 professors, scholars, and a few hangers-on, including yours truly, gathered at Stanford to talk about the state of academic freedom. If you read this newsletter and listen to our podcast, you know well that the need for such a conference—to say nothing of new universities—is … Continue reading Free Speech and Scientific Inquiry →

Kevin DeYoung True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet … Continue reading “The meek will inherit the earth, especially those humble enough to raise children” →

Based on current fertility rates and age structures, here are the largest declines in population expected by the UN from 2022 to 2100: 🇰🇷 South Korea –53% 🇺🇦 Ukraine –49% 🇨🇳 China –46% 🇨🇺 Cuba –42% 🇵🇱 Poland –42% 🇯🇵 Japan –41% 🇬🇷 Greece –39% 🇮🇹 Italy –38% 🇹🇭 Thailand –38% — Edouard Mathieu (@redouad) … Continue reading K-12 tax & spending climate: declining live birth rates →

Edward Luce: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article … Continue reading America’s indifference to its death crisis →

Isabelle Sarraf: The University of Maryland, College Park, has asked students to detail their favorite thing about…last Tuesday. That’s a tough one if your Google Calendar shows a lot of white space. One college-admissions consulting blog advises, “If you laid in bed all day Tuesday, but went for a beautiful hike on Wednesday, write about … Continue reading College Essay Prompts Get Absurd. ‘So Where Is Waldo, Really? →

Janice Goldwater: In a 2016 analysis as part of the five-year Turnaway Study… UCSF researchers… found that one week after being denied an abortion due to a late-term pregnancy just 14 percent of 171 study participants reported plans to place the baby for adoption or considered it as an option. Only nine percent of those … Continue reading Abortion, Adoption and Parenthood →

Toby Green: Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great … Continue reading Civics: The multi-billionaire says one thing, and funds another →

Reuters: China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly aging population, but the high cost of urban living has deterred couples from having more children. The 2021 rate of 7.52 births per 1,000 people was the lowest since 1949, … Continue reading China’s birth rate drops to record low in 2021 →

Rhythma Kaul and Anonna Dutt: India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, has declined from 2.2 to 2 while the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased from 54% to 67%, according data from the National Family Health Survey-5. The union health ministry released data for … Continue reading India’s fertility rate drops below 2.1, contraceptive prevalence up: NFHS →

Joel Kotkin: For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy. Margaret Mead once said, “no … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending climate: “the fading family” →

Daniel Gross: The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books … Continue reading An App Called Libby and the Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books →

Alexandra Olins: On March 11, 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was the first large school district in the country to close. First, we were told there would be no school during the closure because the district couldn’t distribute laptops to everyone — despite … Continue reading A parent’s account of how the relatively well-staffed education team at the Seattle Times failed to hold the school district accountable. →

Daphne Keller: There is a popular line of reasoning in platform regulation discussions today that says, basically, “Platforms aren’t responsible for what their users say, but they are responsible for what the platforms themselves choose to amplify.” This provides a seemingly simple hook for regulating algorithmic amplification—the results for searches on a search engine like … Continue reading Civics & the First Amendment: Amplification and Its Discontents, Why regulating the reach of online content is hard →

Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco: The birthrate has also dropped, and life expectancy has dipped in the past couple of years — a reversal that has been driven by factors such as drug overdoses, obesity, suicide and liver disease and that sharply accelerated last year during the pandemic. The extent to which the … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: 2020 Census shows U.S. population grew at slowest pace since the 1930s →

Jason Wordie:: Books, like everything else, have their own natural lifespans. Publishers of original material thought likely to be popular may choose to invest in a larger print run, which ensures more surviving copies. Conversely, marginal works might only merit a small initial outlay, with any reprint contingent on successful sales figures. These can be … Continue reading How anthologies help readers discover lost books →

Hi, I’m cap tines K-12 education reporter Scott Gerard. Today. Our cap times IDFs panel will discuss how will COVID-19 change K-12 education. I’m lucky to have three wonderful panelists with me to help answer that question. Marilee McKenzie is a teacher at Middleton’s Clark street community school, where she has worked since the school was in its planning stages.

She’s in her [00:03:00] 11th year of teaching. Dr. Gloria Ladson billings is a nationally recognized education expert who was a U w Madison faculty member for more than 26 years, including as a professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction, educational policy studies and educational leadership and policy analysis.

She is also the current president of the national Academy of education. Finally dr. Carlton Jenkins is the new superintendent of the Madison metropolitan school district. He started the districts top job in August, coming from the Robbinsdale school district in Minnesota, where he worked for the past five years, Jenkins began his career in the Madison area.

Having worked in Beloit and at Memorial high school in early 1990s before moving to various districts around the country. Thank you all so much for being here. Mary Lee, I’m going to start with you. You’ve been working with students directly throughout this pandemic. How has it gone? Both in the spring when changes were very sudden, and then this fall with a summer to reflect and [00:04:00] plan, it’s been interesting for sure.

Um, overall, I would say the it’s been hard. There has been nothing about this have been like, ah, It’s really, it makes my life easy. It’s been really challenging. And at the same time, the amount of growth and learning that we’ve been able to do as staff has been incredible. And I think about how teachers have moved from face-to-face to online to then planning for.

Jim Desmond: I’ve repeated this often over the last few months. We have lost sight of the goal. I think it’s reasonable for everyone to take a step back and ask “how did we end up here?” How did we go from “we need to flatten the curve for the month of April” to “we … Continue reading Government is Losing the Trust of the People →

Rahil Sheikh: Born in an Indian village with cerebral palsy, Kuli Kohli was lucky to survive. Neighbours told her parents they should throw her in the river, instead they brought her to the UK. As she grew up here, writing became her means of escape – and transformed her life in ways she never expected. … Continue reading They wanted to drown me at birth – now I’m a poet’ →

Steven Elbow: The coronavirus pandemic has a lot of people feeling boxed in. But for Michelle Possin it opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. Before the COVID-19 crisis, the 54-year-old recruiter for TASC, a Madison-based administrative services company, spent half her time at home and the other half in the office. But now … Continue reading K-12 Tax, Referendum and Spending Climate: Freed from the office, Madison telecommuters are snapping up rural homes →

The Economist: IN THE NORMAL run of things, late summer sees airports in the emerging world fill with nervous 18-year-olds, jetting off to begin a new life in the rich world’s universities. The annual trek of more than 5m students is a triumph of globalisation. Students see the world; universities get a fresh batch of … Continue reading Covid-19 will be painful for universities, but also bring change →

Annysa Johnson: The Milwaukee Public Schools board on Thursday approved a $90 million plan to start the school year online and gradually return to the classroom once the threat of coronavirus has subsided. Superintendent Keith Posley said the plan will remain fluid depending on how the pandemic unfolds over the coming months. “We know students want to go back … Continue reading Milwaukee Public Schools plan fall virtual classes →

Professor Okhwa Lee [Chungbuk National University in South Korea] Schools could not have face to face learning for nearly 6 weeks since March, which is the first month for the year and it is almost similar in most of countries in the world. Online learning substituted regular classroom activities. During that time, without students in … Continue reading Covid19 and education: Can Covid19 promote disruptive educational innovation? →

Jasmine Lane: Shallow successes allow us to pat ourselves on the back. But a high graduation rate is meaningless when our graduates enter the world without a fundamental grasp of the tools and knowledge necessary for full participation in life and citizenship. We can hope for a reimagining of schooling during this time, but nothing … Continue reading “our schools first started by killing their minds” →

Erin O’Donnell: RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number … Continue reading Anti-Homeschooling Rhetoric; “we know best” →

Logan Wroge: On March 31, Gutierrez sent a letter to Reyes letting her know he was rescinding his acceptance of the job and explaining what led to his decision. Most board members didn’t find out until a week later during a closed session Monday night, LeMonds said. Gutierrez’s decision was publicly announced after the closed session. Castro … Continue reading Madison’s taxpayer support K-12 School District Governance: “Most board members didn’t find out until a week later” →

Karen Swallow Prior : Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress. Not surprisingly, then, … Continue reading What Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Teaches Readers →

Nathaniel Peters: Kronman applies this vision of excellence to the controversies roiling American universities today: campus speech, diversity, and how we remember the past. He contrasts the university with an urban speakers’ corner. Debaters in a speakers’ corner and the public walking by compete as buyers and sellers in a marketplace of ideas. There is … Continue reading The Excellent or the Good? →

David Robson: Fifteen years ago, the people of Italy experienced a strange kind of mass hysteria known as “53 fever”. The madness centred on the country’s lottery. Players can choose between 11 different wheels, based in cities such as Bari, Naples or Venice. Once you have picked which wheels to play, you can then bet … Continue reading The simple maths error that can lead to bankruptcy →

Todd Richmond:  A group of parents filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging the Madison school district’s transgender policy is unconstitutional because it prohibits teachers and staff from informing parents that their children want to switch sexes.  Conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed the lawsuit on the parents’ behalf in Dane County Circuit … Continue reading Parents sue Madison schools over transgender policy →

Lisa Van Damme: Years ago, I accompanied an 8th-grade student I had homeschooled as she visited prospective high schools. At one school, the director of admissions welcomed us and then proceeded to assault my student with the information that entry to college had become highly competitive, and she must therefore chart the right course through … Continue reading We Don’t Talk About College →

Andrew Gillen: But the second tsunami bearing down on higher education will be even bigger — informed choice on the part of students and parents. For years we’ve asked students to make one of life’s most important decisions essentially blindfolded. We’ve told them a college degree is the surest path to success but have given … Continue reading Two Tsunamis are About to Hit Higher Education →

The ultimate nightmare scenario for teachers unions isn’t a case like Janus but large numbers of African-American parents rejecting them as legitimate and not viewing them as partners in a shared cause. And this is why the Warren affair is so important. — James Merriman (@JamesMerriman6) November 25, 2019 Item 10.11: $100,000 contract to WestEd … Continue reading Achievement, Teacher Unions and “an emphasis on adult employment” →

Will Flanders: First, it is important to note that spending on school choice represents a minuscule share of the state’s education spending. For fiscal year 18-19, Wisconsin spent $5,899,757,400 in aid to local school districts according to LFB. Spending on school choice was $192 million, or about three percent of that total. To make the … Continue reading SCHOOL CHOICE A BARGAIN FOR TAXPAYERS DESPITE SONDY POPE MEMO →

Keith Axline: Online privacy is important for everyone, not just tinfoil hat wearers. First, it’s more in line with what a user’s expectation is when they browse the internet. Not many people understand all the tracking that happens by default. Second, it’s more how we operate in real life. You don’t have someone following you … Continue reading A Few Simple Steps to Vastly Increase Your Privacy Online →

Kira Davis: For parents (and students) who might be out there right now fretting over college tuition and applications and aren’t rich Hollywood players , here are some college alternatives to consider. Free yourself from the “labels” of elite institutions. If they’re thinking of becoming a lawyer (but seriously, how many more of those do … Continue reading 8 Alternatives to College Financially Strapped Families Should Consider →

Katarzyna Szymielewicz: Your online profile is less a reflection of you than a caricature. Whether you like it or not, commercial and public actors tend to trust the string of 1s and 0s that represent you more than the story you tell them. When filing a credit application at a bank or being recruited for … Continue reading Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them →

Tom Gould: A petition to remove Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy John Finnis from teaching has attracted three hundred and fifty signatures in five days. Finnis has been accused of having “a long record of extremely discriminatory views against many groups of disadvantaged people”, including the LGBTQ community. Finnis co-teaches a series of … Continue reading Petition Launched To Remove Law Professor For “Discriminatory” Comments →

Nathan Robinson: There are so many bad opinions crammed into this single Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yale professor David Gelertner that I cannot hope to address them within the finite period of a human lifespan. Primarily, Gelertner argues that hatred of Donald Trump is hatred of America. Here is a large chunk of the … Continue reading “It’s Just Incredible What Some People Can Believe” →

Andrew Gelman: As a person who’s taught at a number of universities for quite a while, I have some opinions about this. I know that when I teach my SET scores better be excellent or else I will have some problems in my life. And so I put some effort into making my students like … Continue reading “a nifty little study looking at whether or not student evaluation of teaching (SET) has any correlation with student learning outcomes” →

Arthur Laffer and Steve Moore: The Illinois crisis is so severe that paying the promised pensions would require a 30-year property-tax increase that would cost the median Chicago homeowner $2,000 a year, according to a study from three economists at the Chicago Fed. Not a penny of that added tax money would pay for better … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: By limiting the power of public unions, Janus may help them (States) avert fiscal disaster. →

Peter Wood: What’s to be done about the large and growing number of Americans who cannot repay their student loans? There are two new developments. The New York Times reports, “Senators Marco Rubio and Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill on Thursday that would prevent states from suspending residents’ driver’s licenses and professional licenses over unpaid … Continue reading The $1.5 Trillion Student Loan Debacle Hits a Tipping Point →

Alan Borsuk: But look at other aspects of all this. Mental health for students, running the spectrum from more routine problems to the extremes of the Florida shooter, have been getting more attention recently than in previous years. The bad news is that the overall problem appears to have grown. The good news is that … Continue reading The image of Mrs. McMurray armed in her first-grade classroom is a little daunting; “Proud of Our Nation” →

FIRE: Every year, FIRE chooses the 10 worst colleges for free speech — and unfortunately, 2017 left us with plenty of options: Campuses were rocked by violent mob censorship, monitored by bias response teams, plagued by free speech zones, and beset by far too many disinvitation attempts. Although the number of colleges with the most … Continue reading The 10 worst colleges for free speech: 2018 →

Jacob Hamburger: Allan Bloom was an elitist. He saw himself as a champion of excellence in an age of vulgarity. While a professor at the University of Chicago between 1979 and 1992, he sought to immerse his students in only the most classic works of philosophy and literature. Someone looking to define the “Western canon” … Continue reading The Closing of the American Mind →

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email: Albert Shanker was a very good friend to The Concord Review almost from the very beginning in 1987. He wrote a number of letters, to the MacArthur Foundation and others, and he spent two of his New York Times columns on comments about the journal. In addition, at a … Continue reading History Teachers Wanted →

sSuzy Hansen: When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at … Continue reading Unlearning the myth of American innocence →

Bennett Murray: “Each person only has a life, but if I had the chance to choose again I would still choose my way.” They are the words of one of Vietnam’s most influential bloggers — known by her online pseudonym, Mother Mushroom — minutes before she was handed the shock sentence of a decade in … Continue reading Freedom Of Speech: Mother Mushroom: how Vietnam locked up its most famous blogger →

Bradford, Fuller & Stewart: Education reform is at a crossroads in this country. And it seems the issue of parent choice — who should have it, how much of it there should be, and for what schools — will determine the direction many reformers will take. While some may have difficulty defining where they stand … Continue reading Liberating Black Kids From Broken Schools — By Any Means Necessary →

Dan Katzir and Marcia Aaron: There is one reason that someone chooses to dedicate his or her life to education as a teacher, administrator or community advocate: a sincere, deeply held belief that making a difference in the lives of children is the best way to build equity and move our society forward. Every educator … Continue reading Mission Versus Organization: Instead of debating charters vs. public schools, focus on educating kids →

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:The great social psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan wrote that the principal problem with communication is that we think we express meaning to others, when in fact we evoke it. That is, what we say brings a response in the listener which involves their current thoughts at the time, their feelings, … Continue reading Students Last →

Alana Semuels: Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me … Continue reading A growing earnings gap between those with a college education and those without is creating economic and cultural rifts throughout the country. →