Users are complaining that the phone number Facebook hassled them to use to secure their account with two-factor authentication has also been associated with their user profile — which anyone can use to “look up” their profile.
Worse, Facebook doesn’t give you an option to opt-out.
Last year, Facebook was forced to admit that after months of pestering its users to switch on two-factor by signing up their phone number, it was also using those phone numbers to target users with ads. But some users are finding out just now that Facebook’s default setting allows everyone — with or without an account — to look up a user profile based off the same phone number previously added to their account.
The recent hubbub began today after a tweet by Jeremy Burge blew up, criticizing Facebook’s collection and use of phone numbers, which he likened to “a unique ID that is used to link your identity across every platform on the internet.”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Historical Illiteracy Exhibit [large number]
So, a group of eager anti-slavery activists attacked yet another Confederate statue, trying to melt it or (it was made of stone) heat and then crack it, bringing down another hated symbol of oppression and racism…
Pro-tip for protestors: Not everyone named Lee was related to Robert E.
Someone with more gall than sense tried to destroy the statue of Gen. William C. Lee, a WWII paratrooper. You know, the guys who jumped from airplanes to fight the original NAZIs and real Fascists? Yeaaaahhhhh.
I Was 35 When I Discovered I’m on the Autism Spectrum
“Do you hate crowds, especially at supermarkets and restaurants?”
I avoided eye contact, which I knew I wasn’t supposed to do. “Yes.”
If Dr. P. noticed, she was too busy looking at the questionnaire to let on. “Do you tend to repeat heard words, parts of words, or TV commercials?”
I immediately flashed back to middle school, randomly repeating such phrases from TV as, “I don’t think so, Tim,” from Home Improvement. I was tempted to respond that way this time. Instead, I just replied with another, “Yes.”
“Do you have trouble sustaining conversations?”
“Yes.”
“Is your voice often louder than the situation requires?”
Denver Public Schools begins cutting 150 central office positions to pay for teacher raises
Denver Public Schools began the process this week of cutting more than 150 administrative positions from its central office, which will free up $17 million for raises for teachers and other district employees, as well as additional money for special education services.
The Denver district has far more administrators than others in Colorado, and Superintendent Susana Cordova has said repeatedly that the district needs to have fewer initiatives and focus on doing a smaller number of things well.
“We have too many priorities, too many people working on those priorities, and not enough impact coming out of that,” Cordova told union negotiators at a bargaining session before the teachers strike. “I am 100 percent committed to right-sizing what the central office looks like.”
Over the course of negotiations before and during the strike, Cordova committed to even larger cuts than she originally laid out in order to put more money into teacher compensation. She also eliminated bonuses for many administrators.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Politics, Deficits and Money Printing
There is widespread frustration with the performance of the economy. Traditional policy approaches are not delivering hoped-for results. A relatively unpopular president is loathed to an unusual extent by a frustrated opposition party that lost the previous presidential election while running a pillar of its establishment. And altered economic conditions have led to the development of new economic ideas that reflect a significant break with previous orthodoxy.
And now, these new ideas are being oversimplified and exaggerated by fringe economists who hold them out as offering the proverbial free lunch: the ability of the government to spend more without imposing any burden on anyone.
During the late 1970s, this was the story of supply-side, Laffer-curve economics. It began with the valid idea that taxes had important incentive effects and that, in conceivable circumstances, tax cuts could raise revenue. It grew into the ludicrous idea that tax cuts would always pay for themselves, and this view was then adopted by a frustrated extreme wing of a major political party.
Madison’s K-12 spending notes, links, history and charts.
Civics: The First Amendment and Yale Law School
NALSA (Native American Law Students Association) said ADF employees were not welcome on their “ancestral lands.” The Yale Law Women, Yale Law Student Alliance for Reproductive Justice, and the Women of Color Collective joined, as did the American Constitution Society, the Yale Law Democrats, and the First Generation Professionals.
In addition to the boycott, some students said people who supported ADF’s position should no longer be admitted to the law school. One student emailed a list of the Federalist Society board members (publicly available information) so students would know whom to “thank” for this event.
The event took place two days later. Around 30 people attended. The boycotters decorated the front door with rainbow posters, but mostly stuck to protests and support groups in other rooms. The one disruption occurred near the end of the event, when three students walked in, rifled through empty pizza boxes, and left with a couple leftovers. On their way out, one of the protestors blew us a kiss and gave us the middle finger.
The Plot Against Low-Income Students
Robert Shireman was exiled from the Obama Administration after getting caught playing footsie with a short-seller betting against for-profit colleges. We lost track of him, but he was recently spotted in Albany canoodling with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to kill for-profit colleges in the state.
Readers may recall that Mr. Shireman executed the government takeover and expansion of student loans in the early Obama years. He then inspired the 2011 Obama gainful-employment rule that was tossed by federal courts. He left the Education Department after news reports chronicled how he had conferred with outside groups and short-seller Steven Eisman. He has continued to drive his ideological war on for-profits from the liberal Century Foundation.
The periodic table is 150 years old this week
“LA république n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes.” With that curt dismissal a court in revolutionary France cut short the life of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, argued by some to be the greatest chemist of all. Lavoisier’s sin was tax farming. He had been a member of the firm that collected the monarchy’s various imposts and then, having taken its cut, passed what remained on to the royal treasury. That he and many of his fellow farmers met their ends beneath a guillotine’s blade is no surprise. What had distinguished Lavoisier from his fellows, though, was what he chose to spend his income on. For much of it went to create the best-equipped chemistry laboratory in Europe.
Nothing comes of nothing. Where the story of the periodic table of the elements really starts is debatable. But Lavoisier’s laboratory is as good a place as any to begin, for it was Lavoisier who published the first putatively comprehensive list of chemical elements—substances incapable of being broken down by chemical reactions into other substances—and it was Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne who pioneered the technique of measuring quantitatively what went into and came out of a chemical reaction, as a way of getting to the heart of what such a reaction really is.
The Trump Administration’s Bold New School-Choice Plan
While most of the K–12 educational-funding and -policy decisions are appropriately housed in the states, an innovative new policy idea would allow the federal government to play a constructive role in expanding educational opportunity in America. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has unveiled a proposal for Education Freedom Scholarships, with corresponding legislation introduced by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Bradley Byrne. The plan would invest $5 billion annually in America’s students by allowing individuals and businesses to make contributions to in-state, non-profit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) that provide scholarships to students. Contributors would receive a non‐refundable, dollar‐for‐dollar federal tax credit in return for their donations. No contributor would be allowed a total tax benefit greater than the amount of their contribution, and not a single dollar would be taken away from public schools and the students who attend them.
The plan mandates that scholarships must be used for an individual student’s elementary or secondary education, or for their career and technical education. Importantly, the plan’s implementation — including governance of SGOs, education providers, and education expenses as well as student-eligibility decisions — would be left to each state that chooses to participate. The plan would require states to distribute at least 90 percent of the funds as scholarships. Other than that, everything else about the program would be left up to each state.
To be clear, this legislation would not create a new federal program. No state or SGO would be forced to participate, and no family would be forced to accept a scholarship. The legislation respects federalism, the autonomy of parents and education providers, and the appropriate role of the states in K–12 education. It leverages the tax code in an innovative way to facilitate greater educational opportunity, and ultimately greater economic benefit for millions of students.
Why is this legislation needed? Our nation’s K–12 system is denying too many children access to a high-quality education; access to such an education is a moral and economic imperative; and school choice is overwhelmingly supported by voters and it works.
“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”
Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take
Let’s imagine a seventh grader. He’s a quiet kid, polite, with a few friends. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill twelve-year-old. We’ll call him Brian. Brian’s halfway through seventh grade and for the first time, he’s starting to wonder where he falls in the social hierarchy at school. He’s thinking about his clothes a little bit, his shoes too. He’s conscious of how others perceive him, but he’s not that conscious of it.
He goes home each day and from the hours of 3 p.m. to 7 a.m., he has a break from the social pressures of middle school. Most evenings, he doesn’t have a care in the world. The year is 2008.
Brian has a cell phone, but it’s off most of the time. After all, it doesn’t do much. If friends want to get in touch, they call the house. The only time large groups of seventh graders come together is at school dances. If Brian feels uncomfortable with that, he can skip the dance. He can talk to teachers about day-to-day problems. Teachers have pretty good control over what happens at school.
Oakland teacher union preparing for ‘indefinite strike’
Three days before a scheduled strike, the president of the Oakland Unified teacher union gave no indication educators and the district were any closer to a deal that would avoid picket lines at schools.
Keith Brown, president of the Oakland Education Association, on Monday said the union representing 3,000 members is prepared for an “indefinite strike” beginning Thursday. The union called for a strike on Saturday, after two years of failed negotiations.
“We hope this is a short strike and that the district listens to the community, to teachers and students,” Brown said before a meeting with district teachers at a West Oakland church.
Oakland Unified spokesman John Sasaki did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday, a federal holiday in which schools and the district office were closed. Sasaki earlier said the union has not responded to the district’s request to resume negotiations. In response, Brown said the union has negotiated since 2017 and is waiting for the district to send a suitable proposal to avoid a strike.
Oakland Unified officials are working to staff classrooms with “emergency temporary teachers” and considering consolidating classes, changing school schedules and bringing administrators into classrooms to teach.
What does Google know about me?
Did you know that unlike searching on DuckDuckGo, when you search on Google, they keep your search history forever? That means they know every search you’ve ever done on Google. That alone is pretty scary, but it’s just the shallow end of the very deep pool of data that they try to collect on people.
What most people don’t realize is that even if you don’t use any Google products directly, they’re still trying to track as much as they can about you. Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they’re also trying to track most everywhere you go on the internet, trying to slurp up your browsing history!
Most people also don’t know that Google runs most of the ads you see across the internet and in apps – you know those ones that follow you around everywhere? Yup, that’s Google, too. They aren’t really a search company anymore – they’re a tracking company. They are tracking as much as they can for these annoying and intrusive ads, including recording every time you see them, where you saw them, if you clicked on them, etc.
But even that’s not all…
Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws
Carole Cadwalladr and Duncan Campbell:
The Davos meetings are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Facebook’s global efforts to win influence. The documents reveals how in Canada and Malaysia it used the promise of siting a new data centre with the prospect of job creation to win legislative guarantees. When the Canadians hesitated over granting the concession Facebook wanted, the memo notes: “Sheryl took a firm approach and outlined that a decision on the data center was imminent. She emphasized that if we could not get comfort from the Canadian government on the jurisdiction issue, we had other options.” The minister supplied the agreement Facebook required by the end of the day, it notes.
Naming Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 schools
OK, so some of these were easy. Who is John F. Kennedy Elementary School named for? Why is it called West High? Which watery vista does Lake View Elementary, located maybe a mile off Lake Mendota, refer to?
Trick question. Could be Lake Mendota, or the lake or lagoon in Warner Park.
And it gets trickier than that. Wright Middle School, for example, is not named for the Wright family you might first think of, and for those not dual-language immersed, what does “nuestro mundo” mean? Plus, who in the world was Increase Allen Lapham, anyway?
Scroll on for answers to those questions and many more regarding the origin of the names for each of the 32 elementary schools, 12 middle schools and 4 main high schools in the Madison School District.
Can Chapel Hill Take a Joke With a Point?
A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alleges that the institution took down her parody website that lampooned officials’ handling of race relations and only restored it after a lawyer and civil rights group intervened.
The website, called UNC Anti-Racist Jeopardy, modeled off the game show, asked questions about the university’s history and ties to racism and police and administrators’ interactions with activists. For instance, in the category “violence against students,” the game asks what was deployed against students at a dance party in August. Answer: pepper spray.
The accusations of censorship come at a particularly strained time for the University of North Carolina System’s flagship. UNC has been embroiled in a debate on the Silent Sam Confederate monument. And the website — which officials considered “personal work” and not appropriate for the university’s service — was shut down despite many other instances where students’ blogs were allowed to remain up. The student, Annie Simpson, said administrators likely flagged her creation because of her campus activism, partially around the Silent Sam statue.
What to do about the monument, which protesters tore down in August, seemingly spurred the exit of Carol L. Folt, former UNC chancellor. Folt announced her resignation simultaneously with the decision to remove the remnants of Silent Sam from the center of campus, a controversial move that many students celebrated but that did not erase the lingering tensions between them and politicians who liked the idea of a Confederate statue on campus.
Joanne Peters Denny, UNC spokeswoman, declined to provide additional comment.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Everywhere — In Chicago It’s Almost Gone
Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare.
The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here.
“It raises a lot of questions as to what kind of city it will be,” said Janet Smith, co-director of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which compiled the maps that document Chicago’s shrinking middle class — and an increasingly polarized city — over the past five decades.
Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.
UIC’s maps show that fully half of the city was middle income in 1970, including large swaths on every side of town. Today, just 16 percent of the city’s 797 census tracts are considered middle income. Those middle income areas are confined mostly to the corners of the city, and to thin strips between areas of wealth and poverty.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news, stories and insider events.
“We have two cities,” said Smith, who notes other cities are headed in a similar direction. “We have the rich and we have the poor.”
Why Connecticut parents are challenging racial quotas in our kids’ schools
It’s been 65 years since the Supreme Court ruled in the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. That landmark ruling, the outcome of 13 courageous black parents’ challenge to an unjust public education system, was a milestone in the civil rights struggle.
But if you thought the battle to end discrimination against black and Hispanic kids in public schools was won, guess again: Communities are still being fractured by race in Connecticut, where children are routinely denied educational opportunities based on their skin color.
The irony is that this time the discrimination is not the result of blatant racism. The law intended to correct education injustice against marginalized kids is actually blocking their access to safe quality schools and educational opportunities by implementing a rigid quota system that actually perpetuates discrimination.
The painful reality is Connecticut’s education system is failing black and Hispanic children who need access to quality opportunities. It’s a classic case of unintended consequences.
A UC Berkeley student is taking legal action against the UC Board of Regents in order to reverse a “groundless” suspension she received from the campus after she was found more likely than not to have violated Title IX policy.
On Feb. 27, a case was filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda against the UC regents by a student facing two years of suspension, along with other sanctions, effective until May 2020.
The investigation into the plaintiff began after a former partner of the student filed a complaint against her. A second partner was interviewed, and after his testimony, the university opened another investigation of the petitioner.
According to the lawsuit, Ben Fils, a case manager and conduct coordinator with the Center for Student Conduct, determined that in both cases, there was a “preponderance of evidence” that the petitioner had violated the university’s Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment, or SVSH, Policy against stalking and sexual harassment, along with some provisions in the UC Code of Conduct related to harassment.
Fils also determined that in the original complainant’s case, the petitioner was found more likely than not to have violated a no-contact directive, although the lawsuit argues that the accused did not know of the directive at the time of the violation. At that time, Fils imposed sanctions against the petitioner.
Civics: China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of ‘social credit’ system
China blocked 23 million “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets last year as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens.
According to the National Public Credit Information Centre’s 2018 report, 17.5 million people were banned from buying flights and 5.5 million barred from purchasing high-speed train tickets because of social credit offences. The report released last week said: “Once discredited, limited everywhere”.
The social credit system aims to incentivise “trustworthy” behaviour through penalties as well as rewards. According to a government document about the system dating from 2014, the aim is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Social credit offences range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information and taking drugs. More minor violations include using expired tickets, smoking on a train or not walking a dog on a leash.
Local governments and agencies have been piloting aspects of the system, which will eventually give every Chinese citizen a personalised score. Critics saidauthorities in China were using technology and big data to create an Orwellian state of mass surveillance and control.
2004-2019 Wisconsin K-12 Spending: Property Tax & Redistributed Taxpayer funds
Tap for a larger version.
Raw data [Excel Numbers] via Sara Hynek.
Note that taxpayer supported K-12 school districts receive funds from a variety of sources, including federal taxpayer funds along with local fees.
Madison plans to spend $518,955,288 during the 2018-2019 school year. That’s about $20,000 per student (26,917, which includes 4k), which is far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 schools, nearly 3X voucher organizations, for example. Much more on spending comparisons, here.
“The most politically intolerant people seem to be white, urban, highly educated, older and highly partisan themselves, according to the @PredictWise model”
Amanda Ripley Rekha Tenjarla Angela Y. He:
In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.
We see this dynamic in the heat map. In some parts of the country, including swaths of North Carolina and upstate New York, people still seem to give their fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt, even when they disagree. In other places, including much of Massachusetts and Florida, people appear to have far less tolerance for political difference. They may be quicker to assume the worst about their political counterparts, on average. (For an in-depth portrait of one of the more politically tolerant counties in America, see our accompanying story on Watertown, New York.)
To do this assessment, PredictWise first partnered with Pollfish to run a nationwide poll of 2,000 adults to capture people’s feelings about the other party. The survey asked how people would feel if a close family member married a Republican or a Democrat; how well they think the terms selfish, compassionate, or patriotic describe Democrats versus Republicans; and other questions designed to capture sentiments about political differences.
Based on the survey results, Tobias Konitzer, the co-founder of PredictWise, investigated which demographic characteristics seemed to correlate with partisan prejudice. He found, for example, that age, race, urbanicity, partisan loyalty, and education did coincide with more prejudice (but gender did not). In this way, he created a kind of profile of contemporary partisan prejudice.
“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”
Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?
If the decline of the humanities already keeps you up at night, a new article, published by the American Historical Association, won’t help much.
Since the Great Recession of 2008, writes Benjamin M. Schmidt in Perspectives on History, undergraduate majors have been shifting away from the humanities. And of all the disciplines, history has fared the worst, even as college and university enrollments have grown.
China Infiltrating U.S. Education System in Propaganda Coup
The Chinese government has infiltrated nearly every sector of the U.S. education system via a package of programs and monetary schemes that seek to indoctrinate American children and bring the Communist government’s propaganda into the classroom, according to a new report by a Senate investigatory body.
The wide-ranging report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has found that China has spent nearly $200 million on educational entities known as Confucius Institutes. These programs have been instated in U.S. schools across the country with the mission of indoctrinating students and painting a sympathetic portrait of the Chinese Communist government, according to the report.
The institutes are shrouded in mystery and have been the cause of much consternation on Capitol Hill and elsewhere as information about their reach and power in the United States becomes clearer.
While the programs appear on their surface to be mundane—mainly focusing on language and cultural issues—the Senate committee found that these institutes constitute a threat to the United States. The Chinese government, the committee found, “is attempting to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat.”
Civics: “I do have a very serious problem as a lawyer with the wholesale charging of people without an investigation”
From the start, lawyers and others pointed out that it was very unlikely indeed that all the arrested had committed any crimes at all, and that the initial $1 million bond for all of them charged with a blanket crime of “engaging in organized criminal activity” seemed unreasonably punitive. The police strove in the aftermath to keep a detailed account of what actually happened from reaching the public eye, or that of defense attorneys.
As the years under which those people had criminal charges hanging over their heads went by—with all the problems that come with that on top of the missed work and rent and family responsibilities that bedeviled them from their initial time in custody under that absurd bond—dozens of the arrested went unindicted as grand juries expired, and last year charges began to be dropped against many of the defendants, with not a single successful prosecution having happened yet nearly four years after the mass arrests.
Many of the bikers who had charges eventually dropped have filed civil rights suits against local police and district attorneys over the absurd arrests and incredibly long times to get any of them to trial.
This week the whole case continued its painfully slow unraveling, as three more bikers, the last still facing that first set of indictments, saw their cases dismissed. A team of special prosecutors eventually assigned to the case declared that the initial mass arrests seemed, in the words of one of them, Brian Roberts, “simply a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality….I can’t imagine what (former McLennan County DA) Abel Reyna was thinking other than this was a big case and it was somehow going to be beneficial for him or his office,” the Waco Tribune reports.
Civics: Algorithmic Justice Could Clear 250,000 Convictions in California
The partnership between Government lawyers and techies started back in May 2018 and initially has been focused on clearing marijuana convictions under the local Proposition 64 initiative.
So far they have reviewed 43 years of eligible convictions, proactively dismissing and sealing 3,038 marijuana misdemeanours and reviewing, and recalling and re-sentencing up to 4,940 other felony marijuana convictions which were sentenced prior to Proposition 64’s passage in November 2016.
How it works:
The system determines eligibility for record clearance under state law, automatically fills out the required forms and generates a completed motion in PDF format. SFDA will then proceeds to file the completed motion with the court.
The pilot ‘seamlessly’ clears criminal records under Prop. 64 for all individuals, with no action required on the part of the individual and with minimal staff time and resources from the SFDA’s office.
The Failure of the French Elite
One of Emmanuel Macron’s most endearing qualities is his unshakable faith in his own power to convince anyone of the truth of his beliefs. Last November, the youngest-ever president of France tried to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 armistice by touring small French towns situated on the former front line to talk about world peace. It did not go well. The ordinary citizens he encountered were less interested in the history of the Great War than in voicing their anger at his economic policies—especially a recently announced increase in gas taxes—and seemed only to get angrier the more he assured them that things would improve. A week later, some 300,000 people, mobilized over the internet, donned yellow safety vests and began to set up barricades on thoroughfares across France. It was the first step in what has turned out to be a roiling, monthslong political crisis.
Mr. Macron’s rise has been astonishing. Unknown to the general public until 2014 and never before elected to political office, he smashed his rivals to win the presidency in May 2017. His party, founded just a year earlier, swept the June 2017 legislative elections, granting him a solid majority and wrecking the center-left Socialists and center-right Republicans (the country’s two traditional governing parties).
Mr. Macron seemed to represent—to coin a phrase—hope and change: change from the generally mediocre political class that has governed France for 30 years, hope that France might embrace market-based reform and provide a model for combating the populist wave sweeping the West.
Today, the hope is on life support, and the change has yet to be seen. France’s economy seems as stubbornly stuck in neutral as ever, with unemployment around 9% (and youth unemployment at 21%), government spending at 56% of GDP and debt rising. Mr. Macron has had the second-fastest drop in popularity of any French President.
What happened?
More than 7m Americans are behind on their car loans
The number of borrowers in the US who are seriously behind on their car loans rose to the highest level on record in 2018, raising concern about the deterioration of consumer credit despite strength in the broader economy.
More than 7m Americans are now 90 days behind and considered “seriously delinquent” on car loan payments, over 1m higher than the previous peak in 2010, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The rising number of borrowers falling behind on loan payments has been driven by those with the lowest credit scores. Close to 8.2 per cent of so-called subprime borrowers — those with credit scores below 620 — became seriously delinquent last year, the highest level since 2010.
Hard work and discipline help girls outperform boys in class, but that advantage disappears in the work force. Is school the problem?
From elementary school through college, girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades. Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies.
What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class — their hyper-conscientiousness about schoolwork — also hold them back in the work force?
When investigating what deters professional advancement for women, the journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found that a shortage of competence is less likely to be an obstacle than a shortage of confidence. When it comes to work-related confidence, they found men are far ahead. “Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” they wrote. “Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect.”
As a psychologist who works with teenagers, I hear this concern often from the parents of many of my patients. They routinely remark that their sons do just enough to keep the adults off their backs, while their daughters relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error. The girls don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and rewritten their notes with color-coded precision.
Most Americans Reject Race-based College Admissions
A large majority of Americans—73 percent—say that neither race nor ethnicity should be factors in deciding which students are granted admission to colleges and universities. Only 7 percent think race and ethnicity should be major factors, and 19 percent favor allowing them to be light factors. The survey was conducted by Pew Research Center in January and February of this year.
Every major racial or ethnic grouping rejects admission by race or ethnicity, but the largest such rejection come from white Americans—78 percent, compared with 65 percent Hispanics, 62 percent blacks, and 59 percent Asians, surveying only Asians who speak English.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier
The graph below shows the relationship between what a country spends on health per person and life expectancy in that country between 1970 and 2015 for a number of rich countries.
The US stands out as an outlier: it spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer, but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less.
If we look at the time trend for each country, we first notice that all countries have followed an upward trajectory—the population lives increasingly long lives as health expenditure increases. But again, the US stands out by following a much flatter trajectory: gains in life expectancy from additional health spending in the U.S. are much smaller than in the other high-income countries, particularly since the mid-1980s.
Madison spent 25% of it’s 2014-2015 budget on benefits…
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Redistributed Texas School Funds
Texas public schools struggle to keep up with rapid enrollment growth. Local taxpayers have seen their bills climb. The Texas Permanent School Fund, created 165 years ago to help in just this kind of crisis, stands today at $44 billion. But when the numbers are adjusted for inflation, it is sending less money to schools than it did decades ago. The Houston Chronicle spent a year investigating how this happened.
Politics aside, finding (and keeping) good teachers is at the heart of what schools need
There are other items in Evers’ proposal that certainly appeal to teachers. Here’s one that has gotten little attention: “The Governor recommends requiring that teachers are provided the greater of 45 minutes or a single class period for preparation time each day.”
Where did that come from? It was an idea pushed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers union. Is it a bad idea? Many teachers complain that they don’t have enough time to prepare and collaborate. Experts on the practices in some of the nations around the world getting the best education results (Finland, Singapore and so on) say that giving teachers time to prepare pays off in big ways.
Does more teacher prep time belong in the state budget? That’s debatable, and the future of the idea when it hits reality in the Legislature seems doubtful. But it’s there. Maybe a lot more money for local schools would lead some districts to implement it locally — who knows?
Or how about more spending on low-income students? It is much-too-vividly clear that succeeding with low-income kids takes more than with kids from higher-income homes. Evers’ proposal is to create a “poverty factor” in which low-income children would be counted for 20% more than other children when it came to calculating aid.
This could bring districts such as Milwaukee a lot of money. Might that help teachers succeed in situations where few kids now reach proficiency? But the idea seems almost certain to be a tough sell in the Legislature.
Or providing more money for 4-year-old kindergarten? There are elected officials in both parties in Madison who say money spent on early education is money well spent.
Currently, basic public support for full-day 4-year-old kindergarten is 0.5 or 0.6 of what is paid for kids in any other grade. Evers would raise that to the same as any other grade, starting in the 2020-’21 school year. Would additional money mean teachers could have more resources or staff to help get better results with young kids?
Civics: Everyone Who’s Never Read A History Book Shocked As Socialist Turns Into Authoritarian At First Whiff Of Power
“Wow, a socialist who was elected on her promises to work ‘for the people’ is suddenly telling everyone she’s in charge and they have to listen to her? That’s really weird,” said one man in Portland who dropped his world history class in high school. “I would have thought socialists never suddenly transform into power-hungry maniacs as soon as they get their first high from telling people what to do.”
“It’s just, I’ve never heard of that happening in the past, say, 100 years or so,” he added before he had to return to his Starbucks shift, wrapping his work apron around his hammer and sickle T-shirt.
Another thing shared in common by those who were surprised by this development is never having read Animal Farm by George Orwell, sources confirmed at publishing time.
More, here.
Homeless shelter in school a costly failure so far ($700/person per night)
Jill Tucker and Trisha Thadani:
Instead, only five families have used the facility at 23rd and Valencia streets in the Mission, with an average occupancy of less than two people per night, said Jeff Kositsky, director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
The facility is completely empty several nights each month, Kositsky said, although shelter workers are on-site seven nights a week and through holidays, whether anyone shows up or not. City officials and school leaders have proposed increasing the usage by allowing families from other schools to use the shelter.
On a cold, rainy evening earlier this week, a family of five showed up at the shelter just after 7 p.m. and got settled near the cots set up under the basketball hoops. The gym was warm and smelled of the ribs, salad and potatoes being served for dinner. A shower area was available in the back.
The three young children scampered into an adjacent classroom, where each grabbed a thick foam pad that they dragged onto the cots before hopping on their makeshift beds.
Staff at the shelter said they were expecting two more families that evening — the shelter is available from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. — but there was no sign of them by 7:30 p.m.
Teachers are striking over pay as pensions and health-care costs are eating up budgets
“I LIKE CATS, unicorns and peace, but I love my teacher!” declares one sign, with two rainbows, held by a young pupil at Crocker Highlands Elementary School in Oakland on a weekday morning. She should have been at school, but instead she joined her mother and thousands of Oakland’s teachers outside City Hall. Oakland’s teachers are asking for higher salaries, support staff and more. Teachers in nearby Sacramento may be next to put down chalk and pick up placards.
Such strikes have become a national phenomenon. Teachers in Los Angeles, Denver and West Virginia have gone on strike this year, after action in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oklahoma in 2018. Last year around 375,000 teachers and staff went on strike. They accounted for about three-quarters of the total number of American workers who downed tools. As a result, 2018 saw the highest number of workers involved in strikes since 1986.
The complaints differ by school district, but one common refrain on picket lines is that teachers are not paid enough for their hard work. The wage gap between teachers and similarly educated workers has certainly widened since the mid-1990s. In many states teachers are paid less than other public-sector employees, such as prison guards and police officers.
When she attends an elite private college on scholarship, Alison Stine discovers that education isn’t quite the equalizer she expected it to be.
I had never seen so many tennis courts in my life. I had never heard of rugby or lacrosse. I mispronounced genre in class because I had only ever read the word. I didn’t know girls my age owned pearls. I felt equally stunned by black dresses and those pearls at the dining hall on display Sunday nights, something many in sororities wore. I didn’t own pearls, or a nice black dress. I was born in Indiana, where our neighbors grew popcorn. I was raised in rural Ohio. My public high school was small, flanked by fields. The last day of senior year, a student drove up in his family’s tractor. It had taken him hours to get there, puttering along back roads. I was the first person in my family to attend an elite private college, partially on multiple scholarships, and partially, I think, on my parents’ sheer will to get me out.
I wasn’t the first person in my family to go to college — I was the second generation, after my parents — and on teachers’ and guidance counselors’ advice, I had applied to several schools, including state universities. But the private colleges were the ones that seemed to really want someone like me. They courted me. They offered me money, and I couldn’t say no to that. I couldn’t afford to.
I would soon learn that private colleges in this country have a social class problem. Each year, as spring break approaches, I think back on my time in school with particular sharpness, remembering other students going to warm islands or ski resorts. Unlike me, my classmates definitely knew how to ski. They parked their Land Rovers and BMWs on campus, and they landed coveted unpaid internships in the summer — something only rich kids can afford to do.
All of these trappings of wealth were new to me in 1996. But it appeared I was going to get an education in class privilege as well as liberal arts.
Red culture’ lessons launched in Jiangxi schools, kindergartens included
Schools in East China’s Jiangxi Province, from kindergartens to universities, launched lessons about red culture this past semester, to spread revolutionary culture and socialist core values to students. The red culture lesson contains a six-series textbook aimed at students in kindergarten, primary school, junior and senior high school as well as university, which is the first systematic relevant textbook in China to promote red culture, Jiangxi Daily reported on Tuesday. According to the report, the textbook was written by the National Center for Education Development Research administrated by the Ministry of Education and the education departments of Jiangxi Province.
Questioning the substance of “We know Best” and credentialism
An elite pedigree — the type of pedigree favored by headhunters and corporate boards — is not predictive of superior management. One of the central rationales for Jensen’s campaign (increasing CEO pay by tying it to share price performance) appears, in retrospect, to have little empirical support. These credentials, however, are significantly overrepresented in the CEO biography database. The elite credentials thus benefit the individual, but there is little evidence that these credentials benefit shareholders.
It’s unclear precisely why the evidence suggests that highly credentialed CEOs from our most elite MBA programs and their funnel careers, like banking and consulting, appear to add no measurable value to shareholders. However, we found wisdom in a saying of the oldest living CEO, a 100-year-old billionaire from Singapore who still goes to work every day to mentor his son in leading the firm. His son, Teo Siong Seng, said, “My father taught me one thing: In Chinese, it’s ‘yi de fu ren’ — that means you want people to obey you not because of your authority, not because of your power, or because you are fierce, but more because of your integrity, your quality, that people actually respect you and listen to you.”
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”
Gene editing: how agritech is fighting to shape the food we eat
Emiko Terazono and Clive Cookson:
A brightly lit lab two hours north-east of London might be an odd place to find people trying to save the world’s most popular banana. But examining a Petri dish — the contents of which might contribute to that fight — are plant biologists devoted to just such a cause.
The humble fruit is under attack from a pernicious strain of Panama fungus disease which is destroying plantations around the world, threatening to devastate crops and cripple a $36bn a year industry on which some developing economies depend. Impervious to chemical treatments the fungus has, over the past three decades spread to China, south-east Asia, Australia and the Middle East. Tropical plant specialists say it is only a matter of time before it reaches Latin America, devastating the farms which provide three-quarters of the world’s banana exports.
Now scientists believe they might be able to stop the fungus in its tracks using gene editing, which shuts down specific genes or tweaks them to work differently. Advocates of gene editing view it as not just a way to combat fungal diseases but a vital contribution to producing safer crops with higher yields to feed a growing global population. According to UN estimates, the number of people on earth will grow by almost 2bn to a projected 9.8bn by 2050.
The Crime of Parenting While Poor
One morning in May, on the fifth floor of an office building in the St. George neighborhood of Staten Island, New York, five mothers and seven small children sat in a circle, singing a song to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” One by one, in Spanish and English, they made their way around the room, repeating each phrase sung by a gregarious developmental pediatrician: “Where is mom? There she is. How are you today, friend? Play with us.”
The room was sunny, with views of New York Harbor and the soaring spans of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The walls were painted a reassuring pastel yellow, and it was decorated with plush, child-size armchairs and padded floor mats. Behind a toddler-scaled wooden table, baskets woven from rainbow-dyed yarn overflowed with soft toys. Once they finished singing, the children were let loose to explore, alongside their mothers and several clinicians, who sat on the floor beside them, speaking little but encouraging everyone to play.
The CRISPR-baby scandal: what’s next for human gene-editing
In the three months since He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls with edited genomes, the questions facing the scientific community have grown knottier.
By engineering mutations into human embryos, which were then used to produce babies, He leapt capriciously into an era in which science could rewrite the gene pool of future generations by altering the human germ line. He also flouted established norms for safety and human protections along the way.
There is still no definitive evidence that the biophysicist actually succeeded in modifying the girls’ genes — or those of a third child expected to be born later this year. But the experiments have attracted so much attention that the incident could alter research for years to come.
Chinese authorities are still investigating He, and US universities are asking questions of some of the scientists he consulted. Meanwhile, calls for an international moratorium on related experiments, which could affect basic research, have motivated some scientists to bolster arguments in favour of genome editing.
Some are concerned about how the public scrutiny will affect the future of the field, whether or not researchers aim to alter the germ line. “The negative focus is, of course, not good,” says Fredrik Lanner, a stem-cell scientist at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, who has been editing genes in human embryos to study how cells regulate themselves.
The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich to Excel in Elite Jobs
Over the past five years, the sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman have uncovered a striking, consistent pattern in data about England’s workforce: Not only are people born into working-class families far less likely than those born wealthy to get an elite job—but they also, on average, earn 16 percent less in the same fields of work.
Laurison and Friedman dug further into the data, but statistical analyses could only get them so far. So they immersed themselves in the cultures of modern workplaces, speaking with workers—around 175 in all—in four prestigious professional settings: a TV-broadcasting company, a multinational accounting firm, an architecture firm, and the world of self-employed actors.
Civics: Target confirming an offensive cyber operation
For the first time in the “history of cyber conflicts” (call it like that) we have seen the media of one country signaling an offensive cyberattack on a target located in another country, and the media of the targeted country confirm that the operation has happened. This is without a precedence, and will have consequences.
China’s About-Face on Education
Earlier in January, China’s National Textbook Committee asked schools for scrutiny of all Constitution-related textbooks in use, according to a notice published on January 7 on the website of Jiangxi Provincial Education Bureau. That notice, which had been removed from the internet by February, is still cached here.
And as Zhang’s book vanished, one clear winner emerged in the arena of constitutional law that illustrates what is at stake for legal education in China. Several colleges, including Jiangsu Normal University, demanded teachers use instead a textbook called Constitutional Law (宪法学), published in 2011 as part of the “Marxism Theory Studies and Construction Project” (马克思主义理论研究和建设工程), an initiative launched back in 2004 — the same year Zhang’s book was first published — by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party during the tenure of Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao (胡锦涛). The ostensible goal of the project was the “prosperous development of philosophy and social sciences” (繁荣发展哲学社会科学) in China through the application of Marxism.
The results — for the field of constitutional law at any rate — were not exactly inspiring. A search for Constitutional Law on China’s most popular and trafficked book-rating website, Douban, shows the book earning a lackluster rating of 2.5 out of a possible score of 10, while various editions of Zhang Qianfan’s Introduction to Constitutional Law uniformly receive ratings of between 9.1 to 9.8.
Rather than wrestle a girl in the state championship, this high schooler forfeited
To Brendan Johnston, it was a simple choice. The 18-year-old senior wrestler from The Classical Academy in Colorado had never competed against a girl and, faced with the option to do so and potentially move one round closer to his goal of winning a state title, he instead decided to forfeit.
For one of the two would-be female opponents Johnston refused to face in the Colorado state wrestling championships last weekend, it was a frustrating outcome. She said she understood and respected his decision but questioned why any wrestler, of any gender, would decide to forfeit in the state tournament after making it so far. Johnston cited personal and religious beliefs for not wanting to wrestle a girl.
“My whole thing is that I’m not a girl wrestler; I’m just a wrestler,” said Jaslynn Gallegos, a senior at Skyview High. “So it kind of doesn’t hurt my feelings, but I do kind of take it to heart.”
In a situation that got national attention, Johnston’s refusal to wrestle a female competitor disappointed and frustrated many at a time when girls’ participation in the sport continues to rise across the country. While incidents such as these are rare, it’s a scenario that is being confronted more frequently with the growth of women’s wrestling.
D.C. orders halt to a private school’s construction amid questions about permits
Educational entrepreneur Chris Whittle, the school’s chairman and chief executive, said the $187 million project has all the approvals required under federal law and does not need a building permit from the city. The building is on land the federal government owns and oversees under a 1968 law related to development of foreign embassies.
“We are completely in compliance in every way with our project and our construction,” Whittle said Wednesday evening. “We’re preparing a document for all parties that demonstrates that. And we’re confident that everyone will shortly agree.”
Among the evidence he cited for his position, Whittle pointed to a September 2017 letter from the State Department that affirms planned uses of the building.
Asked about that letter, a State Department official wrote in an email Wednesday: “The Department’s position is this renovation project is subject to the laws of the District of Columbia. The Department refers you to the District of Columbia government for a determination of whether this project requires a District building permit.”
Much more on Chris Whittle, here.
About 11,000 Washington high-school graduates didn’t fill out the paperwork that would have unlocked financial aid to go to college tuition-free in 2017, a new study shows.
The promise of free college makes a snappy campaign pledge, as many candidates have discovered. But you might be surprised to learn that thousands of Washington students already have the opportunity to go to college for free — and don’t bother to take it.
In 2017, about 11,000 students who graduated from Washington high schools could have gone to college tuition-free. Because they didn’t fill out a federal financial-aid form, they essentially rejected that offer and left about $50 million in federal financial aid on the table, according to a new state study.
That money could have been used to pay for a technical or two-year degree at a community college, a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college, or even tuition at a few private career colleges. Yet about 46 percent of students who likely qualified for one specific state program, the College Bound Scholarship, didn’t fill out the necessary Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — and thus lost out on that money.
Civics: California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it
Robert Lewis and Jason Palodino:
Their crimes ranged from shoplifting to embezzlement to murder. Some of them molested kids and downloaded child pornography. Others beat their wives, girlfriends or children.
The one thing they had in common: a badge.
Thousands of California law enforcement officers have been convicted of a crime in the past decade, according to records released by a public agency that sets standards for officers in the Golden State.
The revelations are alarming, but the state’s top cop says Californians don’t have a right to see them. In fact, Attorney General Xavier Becerra warned two Berkeley-based reporters that simply possessing this never-before-publicly-released list of convicted cops is a violation of the law.
The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training — known as POST — provided the information last month in response to routine Public Records Act requests from reporters for the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and its production arm, Investigative Studios.
A new study shows that Latinx and black students leave STEM majors at far higher rates than their white peers.
College administrators have long debated how to attract minority students — black and Latinx men and women — to science and technology fields.
It turns out these students already have an interest in those fields, at least according to a new study. But black and Latinx students enrolled in STEM programs are either switching majors or dropping out of college at higher rates than their white peers, the study concludes.
The study was published this month in the journal Educational Researcher. The authors are Catherine Riegle-Crumb, associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s department of curriculum and instruction, her colleague Yasmiyn Irizarry, an assistant professor of African and African diaspora studies, and Barbara King, assistant professor of teaching and learning at Florida International University.
Using federal data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers looked at more than 5,600 students, black, Latinx and white, who attended college for the first time in the 2003-04 academic year. They included students who started at four-year institutions and those who began at two-year colleges and transferred to four-year institutions.
The researchers found that there was little difference at the beginning of the students’ studies. About 19 percent of the white students declared as a STEM major, compared to 20 percent of Latinx students and 18 percent of black students.
Yet: “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”.
Bernie and Burlington College
But now Mr. Sanders is no longer the solo socialist. He lost to Hillary Clinton but shifted the Democratic Party left. The Democratic field is full of women and minorities now running on his Medicare for All proposal, which would eliminate private health insurance, and the Green New Deal. Mr. Sanders may discover at 77 years old that it’s a disadvantage to be white and male among Democrats.
Mr. Sanders has already had to apologize to women who worked for his campaign in 2016 and say they were harassed by male staffers. He can also expect more scrutiny for the dealings of his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, who has been his congressional chief of staff and remains among his most trusted advisers. Her tenure as president of Burlington College in Vermont deserves more attention in particular.
Mrs. Sanders left the school in 2011 with a $200,795 severance. In 2016 the college closed because of what it called the “crushing weight of debt” incurred on Mrs. Sanders’s watch. The college had purchased 32 acres of property from the Roman Catholic diocese for $10 million in 2010, though it began the year with less than $1.8 million in net assets.
To finance the purchase, the college took out a $6.7 million tax-exempt loan from People’s United Bank and a $3.65 million subordinate loan from the diocese. It soon fell behind on repayments. The diocese eventually lost between $1.6 million and $2 million in principal and interest, according to a request for investigation sent to the U.S. Attorney from Catholic parishioners in 2016.
Adult Employment: Bay Area teachers hold sickout to support striking Oakland teachers
The Albany Teachers Association is currently in negotiations with its district. Their contract expires in the fall. They feel the real battle though is with the state and plan on addressing school funding with Governor Gavin Newsom.
“Because the districts can do what they can do, but the state has a lot more power, and they need to put the money behind the lip service for our students in California,” said DeHart.
Related: an emphasis on adult employment.
Civics: Limiting Your Digital Footprints in a Surveillance State
What are your most important tech tools for reporting in Shanghai, especially with a government known for surveillance?
In China, evading the watchful eyes of the government sometimes feels like an exercise in futility. The place is wired with about 200 million surveillance cameras, Beijing controls the telecom companies, and every internet company has to hand over data when the police want it. They also know where journalists live because we register our address with police. In Shanghai, the police regularly come to my apartment; once they demanded to come inside.
That said, China is big, and the government less than competent. Sometimes the police who come to my door have no idea I’m a journalist. Usually the higher-ups who deal with my visa don’t know about the house visits. The lack of coordination means one of the best things to do is to try to slip through the cracks. Basically, protect yourself but also leave an innocent trace.
Nashville School discipline policies spark ‘chaos’
When NewsChannel 5 Investigates gathered a group of teachers over the weekend for a Teacher Town Hall, they didn’t hold back.
We asked them to describe what they experience every day.
“Chaos,” one teacher responded.
“Total chaos,” another agreed
High school teacher Laura Leonard concurred.
“Just chaos,” she said. “I mean, there’s just no accountability for the students.”
More than any other issue, these veteran Metro Schools educators said that student discipline — or the lack of it — has become a huge concern under Dr. Shawn Joseph, as the schools director tries to dramatically reduce the number of students being suspended.
Elementary school guidance counselor Constance Wade recounted the stories that teachers tell.
“Students are in school and they are disruptive and they are running through the halls and they are using profanity and hurting other students,” she said.
While the teachers acknowledged that Joseph’s push to keep children in school — especially children of color — is a good idea, that hasn’t stopped students from taking advantage of those good intentions.
China’s censors are purging the internet of millennial angst
Despairing over the price of apartments or avocado toast isn’t just for millennials in the US. In China, millennial angst has helped form an entire sub-culture of dejected 20-somethings with a knack for cynical, self-deprecating humor. But the country’s censors aren’t finding it funny.
WeChat announced on Saturday that it’s banned more than 40,000 public accounts since the start of this year – and it’s only February. Among them were the usual suspects: vulgar and harmful content, scams, and frauds. China is known for its tough stance towards undesirable content, so that’s nothing new. But there’s also a new target: the so-called “sang” culture.
It loosely translates to funeral or mourning, but it can also mean hopeless or dispirited. Too lazy to pick up dirty laundry from the floor? You’re sang. Spending 12 hours a day in an office for a salary that barely covers rent? Also sang. And if you outright refuse to participate in China’s frantic social competition, it’s definitely sang.
Much like the rest of the world, the trend started appearing just as the job market for millennials in China started worsening. Fueled by pop culture anti-heroes like Netflix’s BoJack Horseman and Chinese sitcom character Ge You, the trend found its home on social platforms like WeChat and Weibo. It’s even spawned musical numbers like So Far, the Sofa is So Far.
Madison school superintendent vows to address racial issues
“One of the problems with liberals is they separate themselves intellectually from other spaces they see as more racist. And … when you hold up a mirror to show them their own racism, they have a hard time seeing it,” said John Diamond, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of education who studies the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity.
“It makes the work harder in a lot of ways when people believe they have already arrived or are enlightened.”
How I was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting
It seems that the plan is to reduce University course selection to just one subject:
Victim Group Studies.Mary Frances Williams is a courageous person. Reading about her experience tells us much about the modern Academy. Here is a long quote about the heart of the matter, but I recommend reading the whole thing to understand why Williams felt any need to make these common sense points.
I only wanted to make four very brief points, but I felt compelled to state at the beginning that we could not abandon the ancient languages because then we would have nothing left of our field—of all the egregiously shocking things I had just heard, that seemed to be the one that most cried out to be challenged. I then attempted to say the following:
1) It is important to stand up for Classics as a discipline, and promote it as the political, literary, historical, philosophical, rhetorical, and artistic foundation of Western Civilization, and the basis of European history, tradition, culture, and religion. It gave us the concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy, which we should teach and promote. We should not apologize for our field;
2) It is important to go back to teaching undergraduates about the great classical authors—Cicero, the Athenian dramatists, Homer, Demosthenes, the Greek and Roman historians, Plato, and Aristotle—in English translation in introductory courses;
3) One way of promoting Classics is to offer more survey courses that cover many subject areas (epic, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, philosophy, history, political theory, and art history), or to concentrate on one area such as in Freshmen seminars, or through western civilization classes;
4) It should help with securing funding from administrators to argue that such survey courses are highly cost-effective: a student could learn a tremendous amount even if such a survey were the only Classics course taken. On the other hand, a seminar that concentrated on the close reading of a few texts would prove beneficial for all students.
Unfortunately, I was interrupted in the middle of my first point by Sarah Bond, who forcefully insisted: “We are not Western Civilization!”
“worried that a more rigorous curriculum could hurt high school graduation rates”
Boston high school graduates who completed the state college-preparation curriculum, called MassCore, had far better odds of earning a post-secondary degree than those who did not, according to the report by the Boston Opportunity Agenda, a partnership between local schools and nonprofits.
Specifically, 66 percent of those who completed MassCore earned post-secondary degrees in six years. If they also took at least one Advanced Placement course, college completion rates rose to 79 percent.
“From a data perspective, it’s clear that MassCore is a strong avenue of opportunity for success in college, and it doesn’t seem wise to deprive kids of that,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education who coauthored the report with Vaughan Byrnes.
Yet less than a third of Boston high school graduates complete MassCore. By contrast, 100 percent of graduates at many other high schools statewide complete the course of study.
Interim Superintendent Laura Perille, calling the findings “incredibly useful,” said she plans to announce on Friday some formal steps to overhaul high schools that could lead to the first changes to the system’s graduation requirements in more than a decade. The announcement will be made at School Department headquarters in Roxbury where the report will be officially unveiled.
“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”
Commentary on Wisconsin Governor Ever’s Proposed Budget, including K-12 Changes
The Democratic governor included the funding formula revision in his executive budget released Thursday. As state superintendent during four previous budgets, Evers sought to shake up the formula to deliver more funding to high poverty and rural school districts, but former Gov. Scott Walker did not advance the proposal. After narrowly beating Walker in the November election, Evers was able to ensure its inclusion.
Other major proposals in the two-year education spending package largely reflect what Evers requested last fall as head of the state Department of Public Instruction.
He is seeking to reinstate a defunct commitment for the state to fund two-thirds of public school costs, add $606 million for special education, direct $64 million more toward mental health services and programs, and create $20 million in grants for after-school programs.
Additionally, Evers is looking to suspend the expansion of independent charter schools, freeze enrollment in the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide voucher programs, and phase out the voucher program for students with disabilities.
Prior to the governor’s Thursday evening budget address, Democratic lawmakers and state education advocates lauded the proposals.
Madison spends around $20,000 per student, far more than most. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
The CRISPR-baby scandal: what’s next for human gene-editing
In the three months since He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls with edited genomes, the questions facing the scientific community have grown knottier.
By engineering mutations into human embryos, which were then used to produce babies, He leapt capriciously into an era in which science could rewrite the gene pool of future generations by altering the human germ line. He also flouted established norms for safety and human protections along the way.
There is still no definitive evidence that the biophysicist actually succeeded in modifying the girls’ genes — or those of a third child expected to be born later this year. But the experiments have attracted so much attention that the incident could alter research for years to come.
Chinese authorities are still investigating He, and US universities are asking questions of some of the scientists he consulted. Meanwhile, calls for an international moratorium on related experiments, which could affect basic research, have motivated some scientists to bolster arguments in favour of genome editing.
Some are concerned about how the public scrutiny will affect the future of the field, whether or not researchers aim to alter the germ line. “The negative focus is, of course, not good,” says Fredrik Lanner, a stem-cell scientist at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, who has been editing genes in human embryos to study how cells regulate themselves.
But others predict that the He affair might propel human gene editing forwards. Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist specializing in human trials of gene therapies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, argues that definitive action in the wake of the scandal could expedite global cooperation on the science and its oversight. “That would stimulate, not hinder, meaningful advance in this area,” he says.
Raising the Bar on Teacher Prep
NCTQ:
Our nation's schools employ 3 million teachers and rely on 27,000 programs in 2,000 separate institutions for training those teachers. Since 2006, NCTQ has reviewed programs, made recommendations, and highlighted the best we've seen of key elements for undergraduate and graduate programs for elementary, secondary and special education.
Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing efforts to weaken the Foundations of Reading Test for elementary teachers.
Removal of classic Chinese literature segment depicting failed uprising from textbook is “an academic adjustment”: editor in chief
Students read new version of Chinese textbooks at Kangzhuang Center Primary School in Handan, North China’s Hebei Province. Photo: VCG
The removal of classic Chinese writing that depicts an uprising movement in the late Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC) from middle school textbook is “a purely academic adjustment,” a chief editor of the textbook said on Monday.
Wen Rumin, the editor in chief for the textbook, told the media that such content adjustment is nothing but for academic purpose, and there is no need for further explanation, as there is not any background or context taken into consideration for such decision.
Wen added that the new textbook has yet to be published.
Hereditary Houses of Chen She, a fragment of the some 2,000-year-old Sima Qian’s classic Records of the Grand Historian, better known as Shiji, has been removed from the national unified middle school textbook on Chinese language and literature for unknown reasons, netizens on Chinese twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo exposed recently, Chengdu-based Red Star news reported on Monday.
The national unified Chinese language and literature textbook in question refers to the one complied by the Ministry of Education, and published by People’s Education Press, the report said.
Could you pass a teacher licensing test?
1. Which of the following is true of qualitative measures of text complexity?
A. They describe statistical measurements of a text.
B. They rely on computer algorithms to describe text.
C. They involve attributes that can be measured only by human readers.
D. They account for the different motivational levels readers bring to texts.
“The correct answer is C. The qualitative attributes are subjective and can only be evalauted by a human reader (i.e. “predictability of text”). A and B are incorrect because they refer to quantitative attributes of text complexity, while D focuses on matching the reader to text and task.”
2. The only prime factors of a certain number are 2, 3, and 7. Which of the following could be the number?
A. 18 X 28
B. 20 X 21
C. 22 X 63
D. 24 X 35
“The correct answer is A. The question requires an understanding of how to find factors and multiples of numbers. The prime factorization of 18 is 2 X 32 and the prime factorization of 28 is 22 X 7. So the prime factorization of 18 X 28 is 23 X 32 X 7.”
Related: The DPI, lead by Mr. Evers, granted thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirement exemptions.
Meet the homework guns for hire helping international students cheat at their university degrees
In Hong Kong, 24-year-old entrepreneur “Jay” was brainstorming ideas to make some money.
On the other side of the world in Britain, his friend and former Hong Kong schoolmate “Nick” was at university in central England struggling to get his homework done.
In a moment a deal was struck. Nick paid Jay HK$500 (US$64) to do his statistics homework and Jay earned Nick top marks.
But Jay’s talents didn’t stop at maths problems – soon he was writing essays for other students in Britain. Nick helped to find clients for Jay, and as the orders for assignments grew, Jay began to loop in a few other friends as writers for their expanding business.
In the less than three years since that first transaction, Nick and Jay have developed a thriving sideline, completing more than 90 essays for around 40 students from over six universities in Britain.
Civics and Technology: Huawei Trolls U.S. on Spy Claims With a Jab at Snowden
Ping even went on the offensive, pointing to a U.S. federal law that compels U.S. tech companies to provide law enforcement officials with requested data stored on servers — even if they’re located on foreign soil.
“Prism, prism on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?” Ping asked, drawing laughter and scattered applause. “It is a very important question and if you don’t answer that, you can go and ask Edward Snowden.”
Snowden, a former National Security Agency subcontractor, leaked documents revealing the NSA’s use of U.S.-made telecom equipment for spying.
In an opinion piece published in the Financial Times on Wednesday, Ping said the fusillade against Huawei is a direct result of Washington’s realization that the U.S. has fallen behind in developing 5G technology and has little to do with security.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Contrary to media hype, tech firms and millennials not flocking to “superstar” cities.| City Journal
When Amazon decided to locate its second headquarters in New York, it cited the supposed advantages of the city’s talent base. Now that progressive politicians have chased Amazon out of town, the tech booster chorus has been working overtime to prove that Gotham, and other big, dense, expensive cities, are destined to become “tech towns” anyway, because of their young, motivated labor pools. That argument may sound great to New York Times readers or on local talk shows, but it is increasingly untrue.
In fact, as a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to metros with dense big cities, but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–2017 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.
By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a metro area that many planners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials net last year, while other big gainers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. Last year, according to a Texas realtors report, a net 22,000 Californians moved to the Lone Star State.
International Math Competition Defeat Prompts Soul Searching in China
Chinese high school students generally outperform their western peers at math — at least, that’s what many in the country believe.
That assumption was shattered Monday, when China placed a mediocre sixth at the 2019 Romanian Master of Mathematics (RMM), a major math competition for pre-university students. The U.S. won the championship for best team, while the highest individual prize went to an Israeli candidate.
Math competitions like the RMM are serious business in China, where participation can give students a leg up in university admissions.
China’s defeat on Monday prompted social media users to ask if recent Ministry of Education curbs on math competitions were misguided.
Since the ministry requested that universities limit preferential admissions for math competition participants, interest in the subject has fallen, one Weibo user said, in a comment that received 2,200 likes.“Chinese parents still take a utilitarian approach toward education.”
Others said the government should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and encourage participation from truly talented students.
Related: Connected math
Madison schools superintendent pens open letter following Whitehorse incident, calls for action
In an open letter to the community released Thursday morning, Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham acknowledged that the district “cannot be silent” on issues of racial justice.
The letter comes eight days after media reports surfaced regarding an alleged assault at Whitehorse Middle School. In that incident, which is still being investigated by the Madison Police Department, a white staff member allegedly pushed an 11-year-old girl and pulled her braids out. Rob Mueller-Owens, the staff member facing accusations in the Whitehorse incident, is a positive behavior support coach. He is currently on administrative leave and will not return to Whitehorse, according to MMSD.
Cheatham said in her letter that the incident at Whitehorse was “especially horrific” and said there was failure on part of the district regardless of what comes out of the police investigation.
February 28, 2019
Dear Madison Community,
I have talked with enough people in Madison to know that racism is a problem in our community and has been for a long time. We are not immune to it. It is at times intentional and unintentional. It is everywhere, every day. It is within us and surrounds us. Any school district is a microcosm of the society we live in.
The polarization in our country today puts a tremendous amount of pressure on young people and the people who work in schools to somehow get it right, while the rest of society gets it wrong.
But as a school district that exists to protect children and cultivate the beauty and full worth of every single child, we must be held to the highest possible standard.
The series of racial slur incidents that have occurred this school year and caused harm to Black students, their families, and our community are indefensible. They run counter to our core values and our commitment to serving youth and families.
The most recent incident at Whitehorse Middle School was especially horrific. No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part. We will review every fact to understand what happened so that we can take aggressive action.
If we are serious about our vision — that every school is a thriving school — we have to disrupt racism in all of its forms. We cannot be silent. We cannot perpetuate it. We must examine everything. In no way can we, as a community of educators, accommodate or make excuses for actions that hurt the very students we have dedicated our lives to help.
As the superintendent of this school district, as a leader for racial justice, as a mother, I know I’ve been charged with making changes that will disrupt this pattern, and even more, uplift the students we serve. I embrace that charge and will continue to do so.
For those who are demanding meaningful change, I want you to know that there are many inside this institution who are already actively engaged in making it, including our staff of color and white coconspirators. It is through their unwavering commitment and continual push for change that we have a clearer path forward, more momentum, and cause to move faster. There are a number of critical actions currently underway. Those include:
A new system for staff, students, and families to report incidents of racism or discrimination that will launch this spring
A full review of investigation and critical response protocols to ensure they are culturally responsive, grounded in restoration, and more transparent Revision and consistent application of the MMSD equity tool to ensure current and future HR policy and practice, as well as Board policy recommendations, are developed through a racial equity lens
A refresh of the School Improvement Planning process to ensure that race, rigor and relationships are central to school based decision making
A new required professional development series for all staff on racial identity, implicit bias, and racial inequity in the United States, along with a refined support and accountability system to monitor progress
We are also committed to working alongside our community and will hold several facilitated community meetings in the next two months dedicated to building trust and ensuring our collective actions support the students and families we serve.
Last fall, we reaffirmed, more strongly than ever before, our belief in the inherent brilliance, creativity and excellence of Black youth, families, and staff. We know that requires an equal commitment to confront the practices, policies, and people that stand in the way of Black Excellence shining through.
I promise this community that we are going to work hard to get it right. I know we will continue to be challenged. More issues will likely surface. And we will be relentless in our efforts. This is the work we signed up for. Most important, we will listen and learn in a way that models the best instincts of this community that we love.
In partnership,
/s/
Jennifer Cheatham
Superintendent
Related: Graduation rates and non reading in the Madison School District:
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at East, especially if you are black or Hispanic. But when 70 percent of your minority students earn diplomas and fewer than 20 percent of them are able to read at grade level, what does that high school diploma mean?
East ninth-graders who don’t know how to read might not want to go to school (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might be chronically absent. They might not want to go to class (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might engage in disruptive activities elsewhere. And they might not be able to keep up (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might fail.
Rather than focus so heavily on attendance, behavior, and socioemotional learning, as described in the article, teachers and administrators should prioritize teaching students how to read. Students who know how to read are more likely to come to school, go to class, work hard, and have a meaningful and rewarding post-high school life.
But nothing about holding parents and students responsible for their actions. Nothing about requiring children to obey their teacher. Nothing about parents’ responsibility to read to their children and instruct them to be good citizens. Nothing about maintaining civility at school board meetings.
What is more, Cheatham appears to have thrown that vice principal at Whitehorse middle school under the bus. Perhaps the superintendent is in a position to know the whole story. Perhaps she is yielding to the strongest voices.
“No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part.”
In would be interesting to know exactly what was that failure?
Top Chinese officials plagiarised doctoral dissertations
Several senior Chinese officials have apparently copied portions of their university thesis from other authors without citation, an FT analysis has found, highlighting how an “academic arms race” among the political elite may be fuelling plagiarism.
China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed of the 25 most senior Communist party officials, boasts seven doctoral graduates including Xi Jinping, the president, who obtained a law doctorate from Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2002.
But the doctoral dissertation by Chen Quanguo, a politburo member and head of the Communist party in the northwestern Xinjiang region, features dozens of paragraphs identical to earlier works that are not cited.
Civics: Jihadi brides and the meaning of citizenship
There’s at least one for every country. They have names like Shamima, Mathilde and Hoda. Some are barely adults; others are now nearing middle-age. Some are repenting their sins; others remain defiant.
These are the western women lured to Syria and Iraq to marry Isis fighters. Just a few years ago, they were the cause of much soul searching in western societies and a fair amount of tension within Muslim minorities. With the Isis caliphate now collapsing, and the captured women demanding to return home with their children, a new debate is raging. This time, it is over the responsibility of states towards them and the rights and obligations attached to citizenship.
From London, to Paris and Washington, governments are trying to wash their hands of the women. Some are turning a blind eye to their existence, while others seek to strip the dual nationals among them of their citizenship (international law prohibits revoking citizenship only if it renders the person stateless). In the US, the authorities have argued that Hoda Muthana from Alabama should have never been given her American citizenship in the first place.
In effect, governments are shifting responsibility for their nationals on to other actors far less equipped to deal with them. In the UK, the case of Shamima Begum, the 19-year-old of Bangladeshi heritage, has been much publicised. The Home Office says her citizenship will be revoked, arguing that she has an alternative nationality, though Bangladesh insists it will not grant it. For now at least, she will remain in a internment camp in Syria. Her case, which is likely to play out in the courts, has raised an important question: are citizenship rights for dual nationals more conditional than those of single nationals?
“We Know Best”, Redux
Two recent bills proposed by state legislators in Illinois and Iowa reveal a disturbing perspective on parental rights that’s becoming more prevalent in our country: the belief that parents cannot be trusted to care for their children.
The Swiftly-Defeated Illinois Bill
In Illinois, a little over a week ago, Democratic state Rep. Monica Bristow introduced House Bill 3560. That bill sought to amend the school code to require the Child Protective Service unit of the Department of Children and Family Services to investigate the home of a child being homeschooled “to ensure there is no suspected child abuse or neglect in the home.” The proposed law would have applied to every child being homeschooled, even when there was no reason to suspect neglect or abuse.
The response of homeschooling families was swift. “We live in such a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ culture,” Amy Kwilinski, an Illinois homeschooling mom of six (including four with special needs) told The Federalist. “It seems like our culture is headed toward a mistrust of homeschooling, which might send us dangerously toward a German-like ban,” Kwilinski added, noting that she plans to contact all of her elected officials.
Other homeschooling parents apparently felt similarly, because within days of Bristow’s bill being referred to the Rules Committee, the sponsor filed a motion to table the bill. In less than a week, HB 3560 was dead.
Former Madison School Board member Ed Hughes:
“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public 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”
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wage Stagnation: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Median wages tracked productivity until 1973, then stopped. Productivity kept growing, but wages remained stagnant.
This is called “wage decoupling”. Sometimes people talk about wages decoupling from GDP, or from GDP per capita, but it all works out pretty much the same way. Increasing growth no longer produces increasing wages for ordinary workers.
Is this true? If so, why?
Locally, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district spends far more than most, now around $20,000 per student.
Researcher: School boundaries and segregation are linked
He said each instance where schools are rezoned can be an opportunity to address segregation. He said very few districts draw bad boundaries that exacerbate racial segregation.
He said many studies show that the achievement gap between black and white students is closed when schools are desegregated and the gap widens when they are segregated. The achievement gap has been a persistent issue in Columbia Public Schools.
“School districts desegregate when it seems to be badly needed,” Monarrez said. “Desegregation involves more travel. This is sort of the price of desegregating the school.”
He said it’s a trade-off that districts can consider.
“The only way to desegregate schools is to make people travel farther,” he said. Monarrez said districts seem to think about these issues when they’re drawing boundaries.
Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.
Civics: Outrage culture is out of control
It was 9:30 at night when my husband slid his iPad across the bed to me. On it was an email an ex-employee had sent to current and former staff of his coffee-roasting company in Portland, Ore. The ex-employee explained that a new YouTube series I was hosting, #MeNeither Show, in which another journalist and I discussed, among other topics, some excesses of the #MeToo movement, was “vile, dangerous and extremely misguided.”
She considered the show hostile to assault survivors, and felt it her duty to alert several newspapers that my opinions posed a potential threat to my husband’s female employees and the community at large.
I told my husband it would blow over. After all, there was no suggestion in the email that he’d ever been inappropriate; only that my views were dangerous. And I hadn’t worked in the business in anything but a supportive capacity for two years.
Independent Students Slam China-Backed Intimidation on Overseas Campuses
An independent group of overseas Chinese students has hit out at Communist Party-backed student groups on overseas campuses, following reports that they threatened and harassed Uyghur and Tibetan activists campaigning against Beijing’s human rights violations.
The Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars in USA (IFCSS) said it was “deeply concerned” about reports that have emerged from universities in the United States, Canada, France, Ireland, and the Netherlands of the coordinated targeting of activists campaigning against China’s treatment of ethnic minorities.
It said that “apparently organized pro-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) students harassed, abused and threatened Uyghur and Tibetan students, concerned scholars and activists,” in incidents at McMaster University and the University of Toronto in Canada, and Duke University in the U.S.
Similar reports have also emerged from students at the University of Strasbourg in France and University College Dublin and from activists in the Netherlands, it said.
Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation
If somebody wanted to fundamentally transform society to its roots, where would he or she start?
The most logical starting point would be education. And if there were one part of the educational system that would produce this transformation most broadly, effectively, and efficiently, it would most likely be at our schools of education that train teachers for the K-12 classroom. That’s where ideas from the rest of academia are inserted into the curriculum for elementary and high school students, and where politically unsophisticated young people are turned into classroom teachers. Control the schools of education, and the education system will eventually be yours to forward your political agenda.
Remarkably, that is just what has happened in this country. Over 100 years ago, when our education schools were just starting up or growing from two-year normal schools to university status, Progressive educators set out to transform the nation into one that was based on social science theories, collectivism, and central planning.
How successful were they? Several years ago, I started an investigation into how politicized education schools have become. Today, the Martin Center is releasing the results of that investigation in a new report, titled “The Politicization of University Schools of Education.”
Oscar-Nominated Minding the Gap Director Bing Liu on America’s Masculinity Crisis
For all the conversation lately about portraits of masculinity in the Midwest (or lack thereof), one of the most quietly stirring comes from Bing Liu’s Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap. Centering around a love of skateboarding, the documentary initially follows three skaters living in Rockford, Illinois — Keire Johnson, Zack Mulligan, and the filmmaker himself — before revealing what these lost boys had in common: a life marked by domestic violence. Slowly, the narrative digs into deeper grooves, and we see Zack become abusive to his girlfriend Nina, and Liu discussing his own childhood abuse at the hands of his stepfather in a raw discussion with his mother. Liu filmed most of the footage over a five-year span between 2012 and 2017, but he also draws from a well of archival footage that captures the inexorable loss of childhood. In a conversation over coffee in New York, we discussed the curious intimacy of interviews, how the violence he experienced was racialized, and his Oscar nomination.
How does it feel to be interviewed, as opposed to being the interviewer?
It’s been an opportunity to reflect, and it’s almost part of the journey, because I get to understand and explore the meaning of the film and dissect it as if I were just a critic deconstructing the film.
UW officials address sweeping changes affecting Wisconsin campuses, say layoffs avoided at Stevens Point
A proposal at UW-Stevens Point to cut majors in the humanities as part of a restructuring that could also lead to faculty layoffs grabbed national headlines.
But Cross said Wednesday that Stevens Point had pared back the restructuring and was able to avoid laying off tenured faculty.
“Never in the history of the United States, have we needed the humanities more than we do today,” Cross said.
Is It in Facebook’s Interest to Protect the Privacy of Users?
Facebook’s business model is about trust, not about collecting data and monetizing it, and if it could just communicate that concept more clearly, everything would be better.
That’s the message Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, tried to get across to a crowded auditorium at Stanford University earlier this month. Sherman was speaking at a session of a Stanford Continuing Studies course titled “The Ethics of Technological Innovation.” The panel of Stanford faculty and staff members, along with representatives from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reviewed a wide range of privacy issues in an increasingly connected world. But the discussion kept coming back to Facebook, and whether anyone really believes the social media company is out to protect users and their privacy.
All panelists agreed that privacy is an important right. Sherman was quick to point out, however, that privacy is not a simple on-off switch. “People are on Facebook because they want to share information about themselves,” he said. “A lot of privacy is being able to choose what you are sharing and with whom, [and] knowing who has information about you and how they are using it.” Facebook’s goal is to make privacy “right for what each person wants,” he added.
Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers
MEASUREMENTS PERVADE life and society. Infants are weighed the moment they blink into the world. Pupils are graded. Schools are judged on their students’ performance, universities on graduates’ job prospects. Companies monitor the productivity of employees while CEOs watch the share price. Countries tabulate their GDP, credit-rating agencies assess their economies, investors eye bond yields. The modern world relies on such data. It would cease to function without them.
North Carolina proposes lowering ‘F’ grade to just 39 percent
Student grades would be unaffected by the changing scale system, but would allow underperforming schools to continue operating.
Related: Yet: “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”.
“If we don’t reach our benchmarks in five years, they can shut us down”. There is no public school in Madison that has closed because only 7 to 9% of black children have been reading at grade level for the last 20 to 30 years”.
2009: 1 year summary of Madison’s “standards based report cards”.
Resisting taxpayer oversight and the open records law at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
A WILL spokesman said on Tuesday that the organization had received the documents and its attorneys are currently reviewing them.
“It is deeply disappointing it has taken DPI months to comply with our request,” said WILL deputy counsel Tom Kamenick in a statement. “The public has a right to know how DPI is spending their money and whether any laws are being violated. Hopefully next time, DPI will do a better job at promptly responding to open records requests to avoid litigation.”
In response to the lawsuit and the judge’s ruling, DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said earlier this month that the records WILL had requested required redaction and staff time to prepare. McCarthy said the agency was following the open records law and would continue to do so.
According to the lawsuit, WILL first requested three sets of ESSA-related records in August 2018, then sent a follow-up email the following month. A DPI employee said the request was in progress on Sept. 21, 2018.
Kamenick followed up again on Nov. 12, and the request was partially fulfilled the following day. Portions of the request were denied for being “insufficiently specific” and “unreasonably burdensome,” and WILL send a narrowed request the following month, which DPI acknowledged on Dec. 13.
Yet: “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 secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor. The NDAs are also meant to prevent contractors from sharing Facebook users’ personal information with the outside world, at a time of intense scrutiny over data privacy issues.
But the secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions, moderators told me. They are pressured not to discuss the emotional toll that their job takes on them, even with loved ones, leading to increased feelings of isolation and anxiety. To protect them from potential retaliation, both from their employers and from Facebook users, I agreed to use pseudonyms for everyone named in this story except Cognizant’s vice president of operations for business process services, Bob Duncan, and Facebook’s director of global partner vendor management, Mark Davidson.
How should we read Thucydides?
On August 11, 1777, John Adams, then a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in session in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to his ten-year-old son, John Quincy. In light of the ongoing War of Independence and with a mind to other wars and “Councils and Negotiations” that the future might hold for the boy, Adams urged him “to turn your Thoughts early to such Studies, as will afford you the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be allotted you to act on the Stage of Life.” He gave one recommendation in particular: “There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides.” For Adams, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War contained within it insight of every possible “usefull” sort: “You will find it full of Instruction to the Orator, the Statesman, the General, as well as to the Historian and the Philosopher.”
For centuries, Thucydides has been made to wear each of those very hats. Politicians and military personnel, historians, political scientists, and classicists have all laid claim, often in radically different ways, to his work and wisdom. Today, the History enjoys a status—in university curricula, among political theorists, and in military and policy communities—as a foundational source for theorizations of democracy, international relations, war, and human and state behavior. Thucydides himself might not be disappointed to know this, for toward the beginning of his History he announces that he has composed his work with future ages in mind:
Transgender runners finish 1-2 in Connecticut Women’s track event
She recently finished second in the 55-meter dash at the state open indoor track championships. The winner, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High, is also transgender and set a girls state indoor record of 6.95 seconds. Yearwood finished in 7.01 seconds and the third-place competitor, who is not transgender, finished in 7.23 seconds.
Miller and Yearwood also topped the 100-meter state outdoor championships last year, and Miller won the 300 indoors this season.
Critics say their gender identity amounts to an unfair advantage, expressing a familiar argument in a complex debate for transgender athletes as they break barriers across sports around the world from high school to the pros.
“I have learned a lot about myself and about other people through this transition. I always try to focus most on all of the positive encouragement that I have received from family, friends and supporters,” Yearwood said. “I use the negativity to fuel myself to run faster.”
Connecticut is one of 17 states that allow transgender high school athletes to compete without restrictions, according to Transathlete.com, which tracks state policies in high school sports across the country. Seven states have restrictions that make it difficult for transgender athletes to compete while in school, like requiring athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate, or allowing them to participate only after going through sex-reassignment procedures or hormone therapies.
The other states either have no policy or handle the issue on a case-by-case basis.
Civics: Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein Delivers Remarks at the Center for Strategic & International Studies Event on Defending Rule of Law Norms
Good afternoon. I am grateful to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for hosting this discussion about the rule of law.
A prosperous and safe society needs to vest people with the power to govern – the ability to set enforceable rules, punish violations, and act on behalf of the people. The question is how the governing power shall be exercised. One of our nation’s founders, John Adams, advocated “a government of laws, not of men.” The goal is for the people who exercise government power to act in accordance with neutral principles and fair processes, while respecting individual rights.
The idea dates at least to the fourth century BC, when Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”
Last year, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation explaining that “we govern ourselves in accordance with the rule of law rather [than] … the whims of an elite few or the dictates of collective will. Through law, we have ensured liberty.”
As the President recognized, law provides the framework for freedom. At its best, law reflects moral choices; principled decisions that promote society’s best interests and protect citizens’ fundamental rights.
John MacArthur Maguire described law as a system of “wise restraints that make men free.” The restraints preserve liberty because they are prescribed in advance, and they apply to everyone, without regard to rank or status.
China tries to stop academics from taking its constitution literally
A year before Xi Jinping became China’s leader, a 47-year-old professor at Peking University, Zhang Qianfan, delivered a talk to mark the 100th anniversary of the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty, in 1911, charting the history of efforts since then to instil respect for constitutional principles. Students unable to find seats in the packed lecture theatre stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the walls. They grinned and clapped when he started by saying: “I have written down my true feelings…They may sound fierce. Forgive me if they cause offence.”
The thin, bespectacled academic held his audience spellbound. Those who, unable to find space in the room, had crowded by the doorway, were still there when he finished, almost two hours later. That was fortunate, because his final point was the most powerful in a lecture packed with indictments of China’s failure to implement the guarantees of its constitution, including freedom of speech, of assembly and of association. Mr Zhang wrapped up by listing 12 places where authoritarian rule had (at least briefly) crumbled, from the Soviet Union to Taiwan to countries that had recently experienced the Arab spring. “What [their] people can do,” he said, “the Chinese”—and here he paused briefly while the audience began to laugh and clap—“people can certainly do.” Wild applause ensued. Someone cried, “Good!”
The telling
frayed leather wallet. A broken watch. Some coins. A ballpoint pen missing a screw. For 11-year-old Maddy Reid, this was all that remained of her soft-spoken accountant father … an assortment of 59-year-old George Reid’s meagre belongings emptied onto the kitchen table. ‘It’s gruesome, I know, but I think they still had his blood on them.’
And then there was the music; those hauntingly familiar tunes. ‘For years growing up, there were songs that immediately made me think of him,’ said Maddy, now a 49-year-old artist living in Cornwall. ‘Like, this is going to sound ridiculous, but you know that old song Big John? It’s such an old one, a Western. Dad grew up in Belfast but he was born in Georgia, and he seemed to have an American influence in his musical taste.’
On 25 March 1980, Maddy and her brother, Philip, 14, had just got home from school when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There, were two policemen, solemn-looking, hats removed, asking to speak with their mother. ‘You just think, what’s going on? What’s this about?’ said Maddy. ‘Mum goes into another room with them. They leave, she comes back into the kitchen, sits down at the table and – I’ll never forget this – she has that clear plastic bag with my dad’s stuff in it. “Right,” she tells us. “Your father’s dead. He’s killed himself. He jumped in front of a train. Here’s what he had on him.”’
Is the Campus Free-Speech Crisis Overblown?
The Real Snowflakes
“Is it as crazy as it looks?” As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, that’s one of the first questions my parents’ friends ask. No, I tell them, it’s not that bad. There is a loud minority that gets disproportionate attention in the news. But most of us on campus enjoy the free exchange of ideas.
It’s true, there’s a liberal bias. Conservatives sometimes hold back their opinions in the classroom for fear of opprobrium. There’s an irony here: The same students who mock “snowflakes” asking for safe spaces are often the ones complaining they’re uncomfortable voicing their beliefs in the classroom. The social pressure is real enough; but if safe spaces aren’t necessary, speak up. The professor isn’t going to fail you. Well, not most of them, anyway.
—Patrick Laird, University of California at Berkeley, business and political science
Madison school board’s chickens are roosting
Tony Gallli, dean of the Madison’s broadcast journalists at WKOW-TV27, asked our favorite candidate for Madison School Board Seat #4:
Any concerns over using a live feed into the MMSD auditorium Monday evening to satisfy the Open Meetings requirement, as the school board met in a room closed to the public?
Blaska answered: “None whatsoever. They did what they had to do. But they have also reaped the bitter fruit of their policy of bowing and scraping.”
The disruption of Monday’s Board of Education meeting is of a piece with the disruption in our classrooms. The same sense of victim entitlement. Rules allowing everyone gets to speak for three minutes? Just another sign of white supremacy. Shout down those with whom you disagree. Good behavior, optional. The school board does the same run-and-hide practiced by that former principal at Sherman middle school. When the kids act up, go to your office and close the door.
Much more on the 2019 Madison School Board election, here.
Madison School Board moves to closed room after middle school incident sparks outrage
Throughout the public comment period, board members faced accusations of racism and white supremacy for not doing enough to improve the school environment for students of color.
Brandi Grayson, co-founder of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, said black children act out in school because they are “dehumanized every day, all day.”
“Because it’s under your watch, you are accountable,” Grayson said of the Whitehorse incident.
Several people connected the Feb. 13 incident at the East Side middle school to the contentious issue of school-based police officers at Madison’s four comprehensive high schools, saying both are based on systems of institutional racism.
“We demand that you dismantle school policing systems,” said Zon Moua, a staff member of social justice organization Freedom Inc. “We demand that you divest from law enforcement and school militarization.”
Madison School Board Takes Cover:
… Blaska was speaking heresy to the apostles of the Cult of Victimhood who have indicted an entire school district, its elected school board and its teaching staff of racism most foul here in liberal-progressive-socialist Madison….
Blaska agreed with the idea of accountability and ran with it when it was his three minutes to address the school board. He further suggested that parents and students should also be held accountable. This drew loud opprobrium from the masses behind me, to the effect that such a sentiment evinced white supremacism.
Blaska should have stated that teachers can teach all they want but children will not learn unless they are so disposed. The fact (insofar as we know the facts) is that the 11-year-old ignored and/or resisted the classroom teacher’s instruction. Now, is it so very antediluvian to suggest that a student ought to obey a teacher’s command? Or should the teacher respond, “Well, if you really don’t want to, never mind”?
Related: 2019 Madison School Board election.
Gangs and school violence forum.
Yet: “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”.
China’s social credit system shows its teeth, banning millions from taking flights, trains
Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates.
The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost “trustworthiness” in Chinese society and is an extension of China’s social credit system, which is expected to give each of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score.
The social credit system assigns both positive and negative scores for individual or corporate behaviour in an attempt to pressure citizens into behaving.
Electronic Contracts and the Illusion of Consent
Yet electronic contracting and the illusion of consent-by-clicking are a sham.
I was excited to see the editorial board of the New York Times publish “How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent” on February 2, 2019. They dispelled the illusion and asked the obvious question: “If no one reads the terms and conditions, how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the internet?” If only they’d provided answers.
I’ll give some below, but first, let me explain where the Times got sidetracked.
In diagnosing the “con,” the editors emphasize privacy. It’s all about the data. Contracts and the illusion of consent by clicking enable surveillance and complex, hidden and varied data flows. The editors argue for “strong privacy protections,” which makes good sense.
Privacy is a necessary thing to talk about, but it’s just a copse of trees. The forest is humanity. As Evan Selinger and I argue in our book Re-Engineering Humanity, especially the chapter titled “Engineering Humans with Contracts,” the more fundamental concern is how the click-to-contract human-computer interface nudges humans to behave automatically, without thinking, like simple machines. Much more is surrendered than hidden data flows. The click-to-contract script is dehumanizing.
U.S. Is a Rich Country With Symptoms of a Developing Nation
The other day I was late to dinner, but it wasn’t my fault. Traffic was backed up throughout the city of San Francisco, because chunks of concrete had started falling from the upper deck of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a particularly unusual occurrence — in 2016, the Bay Bridge was shut after concrete chunks began to fall from the walls of a tunnel. Nor are such issues limited to bridges — the $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center was closed in late 2018 when cracks were discovered in the beams.
These little examples are the kind of incidents that one might expect to see in a developing country where things are built cheaply or badly. But California has ruinously high construction costs; Governor Gavin Newsom recently canceled most of the state’s high-speed rail plan after the price tag ballooned from $45 billion to $75 billion. And these problems aren’t limited to California; across the country, construction costs for both the public and private sectors have swelled as productivity has stagnated or fallen. It costs much more to build each mile of train in the U.S. than in heavily unionized France. No one seems to be able to put their finger on the reason — instead, the U.S. simply seems riddled with corruption, inefficient bidding, high land-acquisition costs, overstaffing, regulatory barriers, poor maintenance, excessive reliance on consultants and other problems. These seemingly minor inefficiencies add up to a country that has forgotten how to build. Unsurprisingly, much of the country’s infrastructure remains in a state of disrepair.
At this fast food drive through, the person taking your order might not be a person at all
The drive through window is often considered the most harrowing assignment inside a fast-food restaurant.
A nonstop whirlwind of multitasking, the gig involves organizing multiple orders, communicating with the kitchen, counting money and negotiating with an endless stream of customers who range from polite and coherent to angry and inebriated — all for a minimum wage reward.
If that juggling act wasn’t hard enough, a giant timer hangs in many drive through kitchens, adding urgency to each task, former workers say.
Though the drive through gantlet has broken many a fast food worker, the newest employee at Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard in Denver will not be feeling the heat anytime soon. That’s because she’s an artificially intelligent voice assistant — emotion-free and immune to stress — with the ability to operate a drive through window without fatigue, bathroom breaks or compensation.
Is the World Getting Better or Worse?
2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of what I think of as the last great revolution—the chaos of 1968, when the Vietnam War began to turn, student protests erupted, and the Prague Spring came to a crushing end. Today, North America is facing not one but two revolutions: a revolution of possibility and a revolution of negation.
This may not feel like a particularly revolutionary time. But, if we look closely, we can see current economic, social, and political forces pulling us in two directions. One direction will accelerate us forward, the other backwards. We will decide our fate by the revolution we embrace.
The revolution of possibility is driven by education, science, innovation, and design. It is a cluster of scientific and technological revolutions, all feeding one another. It is about access to wealth, health, and personal freedom.
The revolution of negation is driven by superstition and fear. It is a different sort of cluster—of ignorance, despair, greed, racism, and hatred. It is about shutting other people out and protecting only ourselves. In one version of events, we act collectively; in the other, we hoard our wealth and act alone.
PISA Is a Unique Resource for Testing Educational Attainment of 15-Year-Olds in 78 Countries. Adding 40 More Would Be a Mistake
In a recent commentary in Ed Week, I discussed two emerging problems in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). I identified OECD’s insufficient attention to research and development (driven in part by its pursuit of “innovative” topics) and the too-short three-year testing cycle (which is outdated by new assessment technologies). Here I want to focus on yet another emerging problem: OECD’s global ambitions for PISA.
OECD serves as a forum in which the governments of 36 advanced democracies with market-based economies plus the European Union work together to address common problems and identify best practices. Since 1961, it has been a source of market-friendly, evidence-based research and policy advice.
As OECD has expanded its membership from its original 20 countries, the number of nations administering PISA has grown even faster, from 32 in the year 2000 to 78 last year (including some Chinese provinces and other subnational entities). With that growth, the composition of the countries participating in PISA has changed dramatically. Member nations represented almost 90 percent of PISA participants in 2000 but less than half in 2018. By 2030, OECD wants to add some 40 more countries to PISA, further diluting the representation of its members.
PISA is a unique international resource, so it is not surprising that many countries want to participate in the assessment, something encouraged by OECD’s secretariat. But the logistical challenge of the undertaking is already formidable. In 2018, PISA assessed nearly 1 million 15-year-olds across the globe, accommodating 131 languages in communities ranging from rural impoverished to urban affluent. Adding 40 more countries will amplify these challenges.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Three New Governors Face Three Old Pension Disasters
Illinois, among other things, wants to issue $2 billion of debt and inject the proceeds directly into its pensions, on top of its annual payment:
The potential borrowing is part of a broader plan by the new governor to tackle Illinois’s $134 billion debt to its pension funds, one that also includes raising taxes and potentially handing government assets like office buildings over to the retirement system. [Deputy governor Dan] Hynes said last week that the $2 billion would supplement Illinois’s annual contribution — not be used to cover it — in a wager that the investment earnings will reduce what the state owes.
Pritzker’s approach, if enacted as proposed, would mark a break from how previous governors used pension bonds to cover their annual payments or hold down such contributions. That practice drove Illinois deeper into the hole as it failed to set aside enough money each year to ensure that the state will be able to pay for all the benefits that have been promised to employees.
Connecticut, which last year took the unprecedented step of bailing out its capital, Hartford, is considering a plan to shift a quarter of its teachers’ pension costs to municipalities 1 :
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Favorite Literature Books
I am often asked by journalists for a list of my “favorite books” –I don’t know what “favorite” means for a journalist. I treat books as friends; you miss them when you don’t see them for a while. Perhaps the best test of one’s appreciation for a novel is whether one craves it at times, enough to reread it. Rereading a novel is far more enjoyable than reading it for the first time. Many I have read more than twice, some (like Il deserto dei tartari, un taxi mauve, Paulina 1881,…), more than five times.
Up to the age of 25, you read wholesale & in a mercenary way, to “acquire” a possession, to build a “literary culture”, & do not tend to re-read except when necessary. After 25, you lose your hang-up and start re-reading –and it is precisely what you re-read that reveals your literary soul, what you like.
As with friendship: you do not judge friends, you do not mix business & friendship; I even physically separate literature from more functional books (different libraries; I feel I am corrupting literature by having scientific or the philistinic “nonfiction” in the same area).
Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet
The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively.
Now scientists have doubled this number of life’s building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.
In a study published on 22 February in Science1, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life.
“It’s a real landmark,” says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly “magic” or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. “That’s a conceptual breakthrough,” he adds.
Normally, as a pair of DNA strands twist around each other in a double helix, the chemicals on each strand pair up: A bonds to T, and C bonds with G.
For a long time, scientists have tried to add more pairs of these chemicals, also known as bases, to this genetic code. For example, Benner first created ‘unnatural’ bases in the 1980s. Other groups have followed, with Romesberg’s lab making headlines in 2014 after inserting a pair of unnatural bases into a living cell.
Gene-edited Chinese babies may have enhanced brains, scientists say
Controversial Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who shocked the world with claims he helped create the first gene-edited babies, may have unintentionally enhanced the brains of the children whose genes he altered, according to scientists.
He, who was found to have “seriously violated” Chinese laws in the pursuit of his work, likely changed the cognitive functions of twin girls when he used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to disable the CCR5 gene that allows HIV to infect human cells, the MIT Technology Review reported.
Neurobiologist Alcino J. Silva, from the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-authored a 2016 study that found CCR5 was linked to deficits in learning and memory, said the gene editing likely affected the babies’ brains, though the exact effect was impossible to predict.
“The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” Silva was quoted as saying.