Andrew Curry:

Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University, was used to getting A’s. For as long as she could remember, she found academics a breeze. She excelled in math and science in particular, but “I never thought there was a subject I couldn’t do,” she says matter-of-factly.

So when she started engineering school, she was surprised to struggle in a course most of her counterparts considered easy: Engineering graphics. It’s a first-year course that sounds a bit like a glorified drawing class to a non-engineer.

The hardest part is orthogonal projection, a fundamental engineering task. Given a top, front, and side view of an object, engineers must be able to mentally synthesize two-dimensional representations into a three-dimensional object. It’s easy—if you’re good at what psychologists call mental rotation.

Sorby wasn’t. To her surprise and confusion, she found herself overwhelmed. “It was the first time I wasn’t able to do something in a classroom,” she says. “I didn’t realize I had poor spatial skills.”

Adam Rogers:

Anurag Acharya’s problem was that the Google search bar is very smart, but also kind of dumb. As a Googler working on search 13 years ago, Acharya wanted to make search results encompass scholarly journal articles. A laudable goal, because unlike the open web, most of the raw output of scientific research was invisible—hidden behind paywalls. People might not even know it existed. “I grew up in India, and most of the time you didn’t even know if something existed. If you knew it existed, you could try to get it,” Acharya says. “‘How do I get access?’ is a second problem. If I don’t know about it, I won’t even try.”

Acharya and a colleague named Alex Verstak decided that their corner of search would break with Google tradition and look behind paywalls—showing citations and abstracts even if it couldn’t cough up an actual PDF. “It was useful even if you did not have university access. That was a deliberate decision we made,” Acharya says.

Then they hit that dumbness problem. The search bar doesn’t know what flavor of information you’re looking for. You type in “cancer;” do you want results that tell you your symptoms aren’t cancer (please), or do you want the Journal of the American Medical Association? The search bar doesn’t know.

openculture.org:

Do you want to speak more languages? Sure, as Sally Struthers used to say so often, we all do. But the requirements of attaining proficiency in any foreign tongue, no doubt unlike those correspondence courses pitched by that All in the Family star turned daytime TV icon, can seem frustratingly demanding and unclear. But thanks to the research efforts of the Foreign Service Institute, the center of foreign-language training for the United States government for the past 70 years, you can get a sense of how much time it takes, as a native or native-level English speaker, to master any of a host of languages spoken all across the world.

Tech History:

We have now recounted, in succession, each of the first three attempts to build a digital, electronic computer: The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) conceived by John Atanasoff, the British Colossus projected headed by Tommy Flowers, and the ENIAC built at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School. All three projects were effectively independent creations. Though John Mauchly, the motive force behind ENIAC, knew of Atansoff’s work, the design of the ENIAC owed nothing to the ABC. If there was any single seminal electronic computing device, it was the humble Wynn-Williams counter, the first device to use vacuum tubes for digital storage, which helped set Atanasoff, Flowers, and Mauchly alike onto the path to electronic computing.

Only one of these three machines, however, played a role in what was to come next. The ABC never did useful work, and was largely forgotten by the few who ever knew of it. The two war machines both proved themselves able to outperform any other computer in raw speed, but the Colossus remained a secret even after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Only ENIAC became public knowledge, and so became the standard bearer for electronic computing as a whole. Now anyone who wished to build a computing engine from vacuum tubes could point to the Moore School’s triumph to justify themselves. The ingrained skepticism from the engineering establishment that greeted all such projects prior to 1945 had now vanished; the skeptics either changed their tune or held their tongue.

Jerry Fodor:

Sometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. It requires, to be sure, a degree of hyperbole to wonder this. Academics like me, who eke out their sustenance by writing and teaching the stuff, still browse in the journals; it’s mainly the laity that seems to have lost interest. And it’s mostly Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I can tell, ‘Continental’ philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore. The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they don’t) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and yards. I’m huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties.

Vesia Hawkins:

The Associated Press’ story blaming charter schools for re-segregating schools has the ed reform community in a tizzy. Thought-leaders, policymakers, and advocates have lit up Twitter, and rightfully so, crying foul about a story that supports the tragically irresponsible claim made by the NAACP and AFT (American Federation of Teachers union) last summer.

I get it. People are afraid. As more charters experience success, the greater the potential for the closure of traditional public schools, thus, job loss. So the strategy to label charter schools agents of segregation is a pretty desperate attempt to save jobs, maintain control of marginalized families, and protect the business of masking shit as free and appropriate education.

Orin Starn:

Duke Blue Devil fans have pleasurably watched rival UNC’s cheating scandal..

But we should not be so smug. Our cloistered university has its very own sports scandal. Every year, Duke athletes collectively miss classes by the thousands. Their absences are curiously registered as “short term illnesses,” but team travel is the real reason. Planes, buses and a private jet – only for Coach K’s hoopster royalty – transport Duke players to games nationwide. “Unrivalled Ambition,” the Athletic Department’s strategic plan is hubristically entitled. We must have top sports teams, because, well, we are Duke. All about excellence.

But sports excellence comes at a price. It’s a full-time job being a Division I athlete, about 40 hours a week according to an NCAA study. A college athlete’s life? Practice. Games. Travel. Playing from behind on schoolwork.

Martin Wolf:

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This transformation of the economy demands a rethink of public policy. Here are five challenges. First, frameworks for protection of intellectual property are more important. But this definitely does not mean these protections must be still friendlier to the owners of such property. Intellectual property monopolies may indeed be necessary, but, like all monopolies, they can be costly. Second, since synergies are so important, policymakers need to consider how to encourage them, including via policies on telecommunications and urban development. Third, financing intangibles is hard. For traditional collateral-backed bank lending, it is almost impossible. The financial system will need to change. Fourth, the difficulty of appropriating gains from investment in intangibles might create chronic under-investment in a market economy. Government will have to play an important role in sharing the risks. Finally, governments must also consider how to tackle the inequalities created by intangibles, one of which (insufficiently emphasised in this book) is the rise of super-dominant companies.

Messrs Haskel and Westlake have mapped the economics of a challenging new economy. It is a world in which many of the old rules do badly. We need to reimagine policy, carefully.

How effective is your school district?

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student while Anne Arundel County school District spends about $14,500, or 27% less.

Despite spending far more than most, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

:

Tech companies ship all kinds of products to public schools: laptops, online writing programs, learn-to-code lessons and more.

Now Oracle, the business software services giant, is trying the opposite tack: bringing a public charter school to the company.

At its lush campus with a man-made lake here, Oracle is putting the finishing touches on a $43 million building that will house Design Tech High School, an existing charter school with 550 students. The sleek new school building has a two-story workshop space, called the Design Realization Garage, where students can create product prototypes. It has nooks in the hallways to foster student collaboration.

And when the school moves here in early January, Oracle employees will be available to mentor students in skills like business plan development and user-experience design.

US National Center for Education Statistics::

The Progress In International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 is the fourth administration of this international comparison since the initial administration in 2001. PIRLS is used to compare over time the reading skills of 4th-grade students and is designed to align broadly with reading curricula in the participating countries. The results, therefore, suggest the degree to which students have learned the reading concepts and skills likely to have been taught in school. In 2016, there were 58 education systems (including countries and other education systems) that participated at grade 4.

The focus of the report is on the performance of U.S. students relative to their peers in other education systems in 2016, and on changes in reading achievement since 2001. For a number of participating education systems, changes in achievement can be documented over the last 15 years, from 2001 to 2016.

In addition to framing the reading literacy of U.S. students within an international context, the report shows how the reading literacy of U.S. 4th-graders varies by student background characteristics and contextual factors that may be associated with reading proficiency. Following the presentation of results, a technical appendix describes the study design, data collection, and analysis procedures that guided the administration of PIRLS 2016 in the United States and in the other participating education systems.

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

Let Grow:

From the Policy Studies Institute work on “children’s independent mobility” in Britain comes this:

1971:

*Approximately half of children’s journeys were made on foot

*80% of 7- and 8-year-old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult

.

1990:

• 30% of children under ten years old are allowed to travel
alone to places (other than school) within walking distance

• 9% of 7- and 8-year-old children got to school
unaccompanied by an adult, whilst levels of car ownership and use were fairly similar

Why don’t we see this for what it is? A heist! We have STOLEN children’s freedom! They are transported from locked space to locked space like prisoners. And we are expected to be their jailers.

David Leonhardt:

Much of human progress depends on innovation. It depends on people coming up with a breakthrough idea to improve life. Think about penicillin or cancer treatments, electricity or the silicon chip.

For this reason, societies have a big interest in making sure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to become scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs. It’s not only a matter of fairness. Denying opportunities to talented people can end up hurting everyone.

Nafeez Ahmed:

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.

US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client confidentiality.

What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.

There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.

Jacob Carpenter:

L eaders of KIPP Houston and BBVA Compass on Monday celebrated a $1.8 million naming-rights agreement that will help fund the charter network’s newest campus.

Under the deal, which has been in the works for more than a year, the campus of KIPP Nexus on Houston’s northwest side will be called BBVA Compass Opportunity Campus. The agreement marks the first time a KIPP network has sold naming rights to a campus, continuing a slow-moving trend of schools selling naming rights to facilities as a way to generate revenue.

David Scobey:

But the punitive policy is self-defeating. Far from strengthening repayment and retention, it erodes students’ capacity to persist, to graduate, to transfer or to re-enroll — and to repay what they owe. Most of those who stop out must soon add loan payments to the stressors that led to their unpaid balances in the first place. About one in six late payers have their accounts referred to collection agencies, which typically add fees of up to 30 percent.

A bursar’s hold, in short, is less likely to serve as the opening of a negotiation than as the closing of a door. It blocks the student’s access to past and future credits and the college’s access to revenues. “Strictly enforcing unpaid balances,” conclude the researchers at EAB, “is a lose-lose proposition for institutions and students.”

Beneath these impacts on revenues and retention lies a more basic problem. The punitive policy misrecognizes students, leading institutions to ignore much of what they know or could easily discover about those who owe money. Four-fifths stop out in good academic standing. Most have completed and paid for credits in previous semesters. And what they owe averages 10 to 20 percent of their unsettled bill.

Warren Treadgold:

Not so long ago, leftists on campus insisted that there was no discrimination against conservatives in academic hiring. They claimed professors were hired on the basis of merit (and “diversity”), and few if any meritorious (or “diverse”) conservatives wanted to be professors anyway. The left now has a new and better argument for not hiring or tolerating conservative professors, formulated by a former conservative—the University of Pennsylvania’s Damon Linker. Writing in the Week in August 2017, Linker claims that conservatives are not hired as professors in the humanities because they cannot produce “scholarship,” which “in our time is defined as an effort to make progress in knowledge.” Such progress requires addressing “the concerns of the present.” Specifically, Linker wrote that scholarship is needed “on such topics as ‘Class in Shakespeare,’ ‘Race in Shakespeare,’ ‘Gender in Shakespeare,’ ‘Transgender in Shakespeare,’” and so on. The problem, according to Linker, is that conservatives prefer to write on themes like “Love in Shakespeare” or “God in Shakespeare,” and “centuries of people have written and thought about” such things.

Anand Avati*, Kenneth Jung, Stephanie Harman, Lance Downing, Andrew Ng, Nigam Shah:

We build a program using Deep Learning to automatically identify hospitalized patients having palliative needs

While 80% of Americans prefer to spend their final days in their home, only 20% actually do. More than 60% of deaths in the US happen in an accute care hospital, most of the patients receiving aggressive care in their final days. We build a program using Deep Learning to identify hospitalized patients with a high risk of death in the next 3-12 months by only inspecting their Electronic Health Record data. Such patients are automatically brought to the attention of the Palliative Care team with notifications. This helps the Palliative Care team to be engaged early enough to ensure patients have their Goals of Care recorded, and provide their services while it is still meaningful.

Jacob Hamburger:

Allan Bloom was an elitist. He saw himself as a champion of excellence in an age of vulgarity. While a professor at the University of Chicago between 1979 and 1992, he sought to immerse his students in only the most classic works of philosophy and literature. Someone looking to define the “Western canon” could do worse than to dig up his course syllabi. In his personal style, he embodied high culture nearly to the point of caricature. His friend Saul Bellow captured him in the novel Ravelstein as a man who wore expensive European suits, lived in a Hyde Park apartment lavishly decorated with French art, and bragged of listening to Mozart on a state-of-the-art stereo system. A lifelong Francophile, he made regular jaunts to Paris over the course of four decades. Yet Bloom insisted that for all his erudition, he was merely a product of America’s democratic promise. Well into his fifties, he often spoke of himself as a simple “Midwestern boy,” the Indiana-born son of Jewish immigrants who received the best gift a meritocratic democracy could offer: a great education. Bloom thought of himself as proof that, thanks to its universities, anyone can make it in America.

So when thirty years ago Bloom addressed a group of Harvard students and faculty as “fellow elitists,” he was not being entirely ironic. The quip came in response to controversies surrounding his 1987 best seller The Closing of the American Mind, which defended an idiosyncratic vision of higher education in the United States. Bloom saw the liberal education traditionally offered at exclusive colleges and universities as the fulfillment of democratic ideals, but condemned his fellow professors for having abandoned this crucial responsibility. Closing received an onslaught of criticism for its “elitism,” particularly from fellow academics such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, who also observed correctly that his book was at times rambling, historically sloppy and philosophically one-sided. Bloom in turn accused his critics of projecting their own intellectual privilege onto him. “‘Elite’ is not a word I care for very much,” Bloom explained. “It is imprecise and smacks of sociological abstraction.” But no matter how elites are defined—whether in terms of wealth, prestige or knowledge—it is clear that “bad conscience accompanies the democrat who finds himself part of an elite.” Bloom pushed back against this bad conscience by suggesting that academic elitism was in fact healthy for American democracy.

Like Tocqueville, whom he admired and cited incessantly, Bloom aimed to explore the ways in which the democratic principles of liberty and equality shape American society. Unlike the French aristocrat, however, Bloom based his observations on a far smaller sample: college students “materially and spiritually free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they are privileged to have—in short, the kind of young persons who populate the twenty or thirty best universities.” Bloom believed these students represented the best of a democratic society, mainly because they enjoyed an unparalleled form of liberty. One of the fundamental guarantees of democratic society is the freedom of self-determination, or the “pursuit of happiness.” Bloom saw the proper exercise of this freedom as something that a philosophical education can help teach—the pursuit of happiness, after all, presumably involves attempting to know what happiness is. An education in the humanities, like Chicago’s Core curriculum, allowed undergraduates to devote four years to literature and philosophy. Under the guidance of wise teachers and classic texts, they learned to challenge their most deeply held beliefs according to the highest standard of reason. This philosophical overhaul of the self, what Bloom referred to as “liberal education,” amounted to no less than the perfection of democratic autonomy. Not only, then, could elite college students choose a rewarding professional career after graduation, but more importantly, they had been given the most “authentic liberation” a democracy can provide.

David Dagan:

Sitting in a classroom one day in September, a police officer studied a passage from James Baldwin’s 1966 essay on policing in Harlem, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” and read a few lines out loud: “Some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been white … but these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them.”

An instructor, standing in the back of the room, pressed the cop for his reaction: “Tell me, does that give you any basis for our understanding of any modern circumstance?”

It was humanities hour at the city police department’s in-service training facility, and Detective Ed Gillespie was presiding, a gun on his hip and literature on his lips. Officer training is front and center in the national conversation about police reform, with advocates and progressive police departments alike promoting lessons on de-escalation, implicit bias, and the like. Gillespie thinks cops need something else, too: the humanities. In his classes, he teaches them Plato, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, and Baldwin.

Bécquer Seguín :

In Poet in Spain, a new volume of translations of Federico García Lorca’s poetry by Sarah Arvio, we see a wide-ranging exhibition of Lorca’s curiosity about marginalized groups—from his fascination with 14th-century Persian poetry in The Tamarit Divan to his idealization of Andalusia’s Romani history in Gypsy Ballads. “I think that being from Granada inclines me toward a sympathetic understanding of persecuted peoples. Of gypsies, of blacks, of Jews, … of Moors, which we all carry inside,” he said in an interview in 1931.

Statements like these sometimes sit uncomfortably in the minds of contemporary readers for good reason. Lorca’s earnest interest in race as a subject can sometimes seem misguided, its simultaneous fixation on the essence, victimhood, and grandeur of other racial identities troubling. Such criticisms certainly have some truth to them. But it’s also true that Lorca’s poetry turned a sharp lens on Spain’s cultural diversity at a moment when Francisco Franco’s regime would soon push for ethnic and regional identities to be subsumed under a single idea of Spanishness. Whether revisiting Lorca’s views on race was Arvio’s main intention in composing this new volume, it’s hard to say. But her selection, deliberately or not, records the beginning, middle, and end of his poetic excavation of an alternative, multiethnic Spanish history.

Technology Review:

“The advent of the internet and the subsequent information explosion has made it increasingly challenging for journalists to produce news accurately and swiftly.” So begin the research and development team at the global news agency Reuters in a paper on the arXiv this week.

For Reuters, the problem has been made more acute by the emergence of fake news as an important factor in distorting the perception of events.

Nevertheless, news agencies such as the Associated Press have moved ahead with automated news writing services. These report standard announcements such as financial news and certain sports results by pasting the data into pre-written templates: “X reported profit of Y million in Q3, in results that beat Wall Street forecasts … ”

So there is significant pressure on other news agencies to automate news production. And today, Reuters outlines how it has almost entirely automated the identification of breaking news stories. Xiaomo Liu and pals at Reuters Research and Development and Alibaba say the new system performs well. Indeed, it has the potential to revolutionize the news business. But it also raises concerns about how such a system could be gamed by malicious actors.

Daniela Blei:

Like every graduate student, I once holed up in the library cramming for my doctoral oral exams. This ritual hazing starts with a long reading list. Come exam day, the scholar must prove mastery of a field, whether it’s Islamic art or German history. The student sits before a panel of professors, answering questions drawn from the book list.

To prepare for this initiation, I bought a lifetime supply of index cards. On each four-by-six rectangle, I distilled the major points of a book. My index cards—portable, visual, tactile, easily rearranged and reshuffled—got me through the exam.

Xinhua:

The top anti-graft body of the Communist Party of China (CPC) released 16 animated gifs on the eight-point frugality code to mark the fifth anniversary of the code’s release on Sunday. The CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) published the gifs on its website, featuring the content and the significance of the code.

and here they are-http://www.ccdi.gov.cn/yw/201712/t20171203_112964.html 八项规定表情包来啦！, on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the release of the “8 regulations”

Shawnta Barnes:

The compulsory school age dictates when children must attend school according to each state’s law. In Indiana, the compulsory school start age is seven. Dr. Jennifer McCormick, Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction, released her areas of focus for the next legislative session and lowering the compulsory age from seven to five is one of her priorities. I agree the age should be lowered, but I think we should aim for six instead five.

According to data pulled by Education Commission of the States and released in their November 2017 report, the most common school start age is six.

Juan Perez:

A persistent rodent problem and a string of failed health inspections at a South Side elementary school drove infuriated parents and community members to protest the building’s conditions on Thursday morning, leading to a brief confrontation outside the school.

“Our children should not even be in the building with mice,” Mollison Elementary School council member Yolanda Redman said, shortly after a group of adults was barred from entering the building. “This wouldn’t happen in any other community. It wouldn’t happen in Lincoln Park, it wouldn’t even happen in Hyde Park — and that’s right down the street.”

Bloomberg:

Apple has come under fire for cooperating with Chinese authorities in removing apps that give users there uncensored communications. In November, Apple complied with government orders to pull Microsoft Corp.’s Skype phone and video service from the Chinese version of its popular app store. Cook used an earnings call with investors to justify such moves, saying it obeyed the laws of the markets where it operates.

“Much has been said of the potential downsides of AI, but I don’t worry about machines thinking like humans. I worry about people thinking like machines,” he said. “We all have to work to infuse technology with humanity, with our values.”

Christopher Sims:

Three decades ago, a historian wrote six laws to explain society’s unease with the power and pervasiveness of technology. Though based on historical examples taken from the Cold War, the laws read as a cheat sheet for explaining our era of Facebook, Google, the iPhone and FOMO.

You’ve probably never heard of these principles or their author, Melvin Kranzberg, a professor of the history of technology at Georgia Institute of Technology who died in 1995.

What’s a bigger shame is that most of the innovators today, who are building the services and tools that have upended society, don’t know them, either.

Fortunately, the laws have been passed down by a small group of technologists who say they have profoundly impacted their thinking. The text should serve as a foundation—something like a Hippocratic oath—for all people who build things.

1. ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’

Michael Sacasas:

Dr. Melvin Kranzberg was a professor of the history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founding editor of Technology and Culture. In 1985, he delivered the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in which he explained what had already come to be known as Kranzberg’s Laws — “a series of truisms,” according to Kranzberg, “deriving from a longtime immersion in the study of the development of technology and its interactions with sociocultural change.”

I’ll list and summarize Kranzberg’s laws below, but first consider this argument by metaphor. Kranzberg begins his address by explaining the terms of the debate over technological determinism. He notes that it had become an “intellectual cliche” to speak of technology’s autonomy and to suppose that “the machines have become the masters of man.” This view, which he associated with Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner, yielded the philosophical doctrine of technological determinism, “namely, that technology is the prime factor in shaping our life-styles, values, institutions, and other elements of our society.”

American Institutes for Research (AIR):

Wisconsin annually differentiates across all public schools based on scores for the individual federally-required accountability measures (not annual summative ratings for all schools/all students based on all indicators). Schools for comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, and additional targeted support and improvement are identified using the following composite index (see also “School Improvement Categories”).

WI also proposes to maintain a “separate” state accountability system that incorporates additional accountability measures and generates an annual 1 to 5 star rating (see Appendix D of the Wisconsin ESSA State plan for additional details).

WI provides 3 composite index weighting schemes: schools in which English learners (ELs) make up at least 10% of the population, school in which ELs are less than 10% of the population but the minimum N size is met, and schools that do not meet the minimum EL N size.

Summary of State Accountability Snapshots.

Much more on the “Every Student Succeeds Act“.

Anil Dash:

By the time we realized that we’d gotten suckered into a neverending two-front battle against both the algorithms of the major tech companies and the destructive movements that wanted to exploit them, it was too late. We’d already set the precedent that independent publishers and tech creators would just keep chasing whatever algorithm Google (and later Facebook and Twitter) fed to us.
 
 Now, the challenge is to reform these systems so that we can hold the big platforms accountable for the impacts of their algorithms. We’ve got to encourage today’s newer creative communities in media and tech and culture to not constrain what they’re doing to conform to the dictates of an opaque, unknowable algorithm. We have to talk about the choices we made in those early days, even at risk of embarrassing ourselves by showing how naive we were about the influence these algorithms would have over culture.

Janet Cappiello:

A Temple University professor who conducted painstaking research into the modern struggle to pay for a college education in the United States has won the 2018 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor in Temple University’s College of Education, published her findings in her award-winning 2016 book, “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid and the Betrayal of the American Dream.”

In it, Goldrick-Rab finds that U.S. students have been left behind by soaring costs combined with a financial aid system that has not kept up with demand. The result is a generation that, during a time when a college education is ever more important, is unable to get ahead because of crushing debt and unfinished degrees.

Charles Day:

My two oldest nieces, Miriam and Sarah, are both 16. Later this year, they will start their respective searches for a place at college in earnest. Their experiences will be different, not just because Miriam is interested in science and Sarah is interested in teaching. Miriam lives in Conwy, an ancient town of 15 000 people in North Wales. Sarah lives in Olney, a Maryland suburb of 34 000 outside Washington, DC.
When it comes to undergraduates, the university systems of the UK and the US are significantly different. In the UK, students typically study just one subject for three years—physics, in my case. In the US, students spend less time studying a major; more on other subjects.

Amber Walker:

As some of Madison’s high school students balance classes, jobs and home responsibilities, two local organizations are lending a hand to ease their burden this holiday season.

The Madison chapter of 100 Black Men, in partnership with the United Way of Dane County, organized “Christmas for Children With Responsibilities.” The toy drive is for Madison high school students who are the primary caregivers for their younger siblings.

Now in its second year, the drive collects gift cards, new toys, books and games for kids ages 0-12. Care packages are assembled and discreetly distributed to the high school students to give to their younger siblings.

Much more on the 100 Black men, here.

Annysa Johnson

According to the report released Friday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Forum, Wisconsin still has fewer teachers than it did before Act 10, which curtailed collective bargaining for public school teachers and most other public employees. However, overall turnover has diminished, and the supply of new teachers is sufficient to fill those slots, the report says.

Still, the report noted a troubling trend: a rise in the number of teachers who leave the profession before retirement age, particularly in the first five years.

In Wisconsin and especially Milwaukee, the departure of teachers in their 20s, 30s and 40s is growing steadily and accounts for the largest share of teacher turnover, according to the study — a trend that over time could put a greater pressure on teacher demand than that already created by shortages in the teacher pipeline.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Colleen Flaherty:

What was once a challenge of quantity in American undergraduate education is increasingly a challenge of educational quality. In other words, getting as many students as possible to attend college means little if they’re not learning what they need to and — crucially — if they don’t graduate. That’s the recurring message of a new report, “The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America,” from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

More than a challenge, the report says, delivering on educational quality and completion is a must — not only for institutions but the country. The U.S. is more diverse and technology based than ever, and workers can expect to change careers multiple times, it says, perhaps eventually transitioning to jobs that don’t yet exist. College-educated Americans also enjoy a higher quality of life than their high school-educated peers across a variety of measures and are more able to pay off college debt.

Simply put, the report says, “The completion of a few college courses is not a sufficient education in the 21st century.”

Juan Perez Jr. and Jennifer Smith Richards :

Between classes, Theron Averett Jr. walks past rooms stacked with empty desks and an off-limits area where he’s heard there’s an empty swimming pool. “I’ve never seen it,” he says. He climbs a stairwell where a rainbow-colored mural carries a two-word message for Tilden High School’s students: “Dream Big.”

Averett was one of 250 students enrolled this year at the South Side campus, which Chicago Public Schools says has room for about 1,900 students.

Dwindling enrollment has cut Tilden’s budget. The school now offers only a small slate of classes. Tilden’s football team forfeited most of its season for a lack of players, leaving homecoming without a game to celebrate. Last year’s graduating class, on average, scored 14.5 on the ACT, far short of what’s considered college-ready.

In Chicago, where funding follows students, Tilden is one of more than a dozen shrinking neighborhood high schools that has been starved of resources, leaving students like Averett to prepare for their futures in largely empty buildings that can make dreaming big a daily struggle.

“Why should we go without because of our student body?” asked Averett, who dreams of attending college and pursuing a career in law enforcement. “I feel like it’s unfair. We should get the high school treatment too. But, you know, it is what it is.”

Paresh Dave, Heather Somerville:

Top executives at Uber Technologies Inc used the encrypted chat app Wickr to hold secret conversations, current and former workers testified in court this week, setting up what could be the first major legal test of the issues raised by the use of encrypted apps inside companies.

The revelations Tuesday and Wednesday about the extensive use of Wickr inside Uber upended the high-stakes legal showdown with Alphabet’s Inc (GOOGL.O) Waymo unit, which accuses the ride-hailing firm of stealing its self-driving car secrets.

Hannah Kuchler:

This holiday season, a seven-year-old called Ryan could be compiling your child’s Christmas list. By piling toys into a kid-sized hillock of consumerism, this YouTube sensation has attracted 9.7 million subscribers. “Ryan ToysReview”, started by his parents when Ryan was just three and a half, enjoys one of the largest followings on YouTube, on a par with popular influencers such as Zoella. Ryan now has his own Android app and has signed a deal with Pocket.Watch, a kid’s entertainment company, to create books and merchandise.

In his most famous video, which has almost 800 million views, his mum wakes Ryan from a red car-shaped bed, merchandise from the Disney movie Cars. She presents him with a Cars-branded egg the size of a pilates ball. Emerging from under a blanket with a Cars motif, he picks up an inflatable Cars-themed mallet and breaks the egg open to reveal toys. Behind the camera, his mother whoops and commentates.

Ryan ToysReview is one of a new youthful YouTube genre — others are EvanTubeHD and Hailey’s Magical Playhouse. Ryan himself makes the most of the memes that you only know if you have a small YouTube-watcher: the “surprise egg” with a grand reveal, the bad kid/bad baby joke, or the finger family, where he pretends his fingers are people. These memes help children to discover his channel. And once they have watched one surprise egg video, YouTube’s algorithm serves up more in the “Up Next” sidebar, where “surprise egg” has more than 10 million results.

The tech industry is under scrutiny for how its algorithms manipulate adults but little attention has been paid to how algorithms seduce children, who are far more susceptible than their parents. Children often lack the self-control or even the means to change the channel.

Jack Goldsmith, Adrian Vermeule:

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

The proposed tax and spending policies aimed at universities are surely related to the sharp recent drop in support by conservatives for colleges and universities. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, a figure that has grown significantly in the past two years. This development likely reflects four related trends.

First is the obvious progressive tilt in universities, especially elite universities. At Harvard, for example, undergraduate students overwhelmingly identify as progressive or liberal and the faculty overwhelmingly gives to the Democratic Party. Even Harvard Law School, which has a handful of conservative scholars and a new conservative dean, is on the left end of law school faculties, which are themselves more progressive than the legal profession.

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Patrick McKenzie :

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams (“because software is so easy there, amirite guys?”)

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn’t.

Nanette Asimov:

Leaked documents from a Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby, show that schools have increasingly turned to secretive offshore investments, which let them swell their endowments with blocker corporations, and avoid scrutiny. (Max Whittaker/The New York Times)
A student discovered in February that the files were accessible to all business school students and employees, and informed the school about the vulnerability. He also downloaded the information and spent months studying financial aid data from 2008 to 2015. The result was a 378-page statistical analysis that revealed the difference between the school’s claim of fairly awarded scholarships and what it had actually been doing.

“All fellowships are need-based,” claims the school’s website, which was updated on Wednesday. Before then, the site included an assurance that the business school “does not offer merit-based scholarships.”

But it does discriminate — often favoring female applicants, international students, and those with backgrounds in finance, says the report by Adam Allcock, a Stanford business school student from the United Kingdom who found and analyzed the data. The school “represents its financial aid system to students as ‘non-merit-based,’ while operating it as ‘merit-based’ by secretly rating students and manually deciding how much (scholarship money) they should receive,” Allcock wrote in the analysis obtained by The Chronicle. He asked that the report not be shared publicly because he has returned the data to the school, which has not disputed its findings.

Public Domain Review:

Pages from a remarkable book entitled Mira calligraphiae monumenta (The Model Book of Calligraphy), the result of a collaboration across many decades between a master scribe, the Croatian-born Georg Bocskay, and Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel. In the early 1560s, while secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, Bocksay produced his Model Book of Calligraphy, showing off the wonderful range of writing style in his repertoire. Some 30 years later (and 15 years after the death of Bocskay), Ferdinand’s grandson, who had inherited the book, commissioned Hoefnagel to add his delightful illustrations of flowers, fruits, and insects. It would prove to be, as The Getty, who now own the manuscript, comment, “one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination”. In addition to the amendments to Bocksay’s pages shown here, Hoefnagel also added an elaborately illustrated section on constructing the letters of the alphabet which we featured on the site a while back.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

The revival of America’s core cities is one of the most celebrated narratives of our time—yet, perhaps paradoxically, urban progress has also created a growing problem of increasing inequality and middle-class flight. Once exemplars of middle-class advancement, most major American cities are now typified by a “barbell economy,” divided between well-paid professionals and lower-paid service workers. As early as the 1970s, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income neighborhoods began to shrink more dramatically in inner cities than anywhere else—and the phenomenon has continued. Today, in virtually all U.S. metro areas, the inner cores are more unequal than their corresponding suburbs, observes geographer Daniel Herz.

Signs of this gap are visible. Homelessness has been on the rise in virtually all large cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, even as it declines elsewhere. Despite numerous exposés on the growth of suburban poverty, the poverty rate in core cities remains twice as high; according to the 2010 census, more than 80 percent of all urban-core population growth in the previous decade was among the poor. For all the talk about inner-city gentrification, concentrated urban poverty remains a persistent problem, with 75 percent of high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 still classified that way four decades later.

Rachel Cohen:

On a Monday night in late April, the D.C. Public Charter School Board convened for its monthly meeting with plans to vote on new charter school applications. One network, DC Preparatory Academy, submitted two requests for expansion: one to increase their student enrollment ceiling, and one to open a new elementary and middle school campus. Founded in 2003 and already operating five campuses, DC Prep is considered among the highest performing charter networks in the city. It was no surprise when the Charter Board’s staff recommended that the board vote in favor of the school’s proposals.

Yet around three hours into the meeting, when it finally came time to vote, board members started asking DC Prep leaders surprisingly tough questions. Board chairman Darren Woodruff noted that at DC Prep’s elementary campus in Anacostia, the out-of-school suspension rate stood at 6.9 percent, nearly double the charter sector’s average. And DC Prep’s Edgewood middle school campus, he said, had an out-of-school suspension rate of 27.9 percent, up from 18 percent the year before. For special education students, the suspension rate was dramatically higher—45 percent.

Woodruff was particularly troubled by the kindergarten suspensions. “I am struggling mightily to understand the logic behind suspending out-of-school 5-year-olds,” said Woodruff. “… I have been in education now for over 30 years and I can’t come up with an explanation that makes sense. I would love to hear anyone from your organization justify a 40 percent suspension rate for 5-year-olds who have disabilities. That’s the reason I will not vote for the expansion.”

Salim Furth:

Old Town Road traces a choppy, swerving path that marks the southern edge of Trumbull, Connecticut. It is shaded by maples and oaks that frame the sensible New England homes of an affluent suburb. Across the double yellow lines of Old Town Road are similar homes in the city of Bridgeport, one of the poorest places in Connecticut.

Last July, Trumbull’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved a zoning change to allow a 202-unit apartment complex to replace a vacant office building a few blocks away from Old Town Road. Key to getting approval was that the apartment building was designed with only one- and two-bedroom units; the developer estimates that only 16 school-age children will live among the 202 new units.1 For Trumbull’s residents, eager to maintain their school district’s third-in-the-state ranking,2 a larger influx of potentially poor students might have been a deal-breaker.

According to Zillow’s estimate, the three-bedroom house at 1230 Old Town Road could sell for $287,000. Across the street in Bridgeport, a very similar home at 1257 Old Town Road is worth only $214,000. The Zillow interface helpfully informs the prospective buyer that any children living at 1230 Old Town Road have the right to attend Frenchtown Elementary School, rated 9 out of 10 by GreatSchools. Children on the south side of the street attend the Cross School, which rates a 2,3 and is part of the worst municipal school district in the state, according to the state’s own ranking.4

Madison’s non diverse K-12 governance model rejected the proposed indepedent Madison Preparatory IB Charter School. This, despite spending more than most (now nearly $20,000 per studentf) and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Douglas Belkin,
Josh Mitchell and
Melissa Korn:

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives this week will propose sweeping legislation that aims to change where Americans go to college, how they pay for it, what they study and how their success — or failure — affects the institutions they attend.

The most dramatic element of the plan is a radical revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student-loan program. It would put caps on borrowing by parents and students and eliminate some loan-forgiveness programs for students. …

As part of its plan to slow the growth of federal student loans, graduate students and parents of undergraduates would face so-far-unspecified caps on how much they could borrow for tuition and living expenses—instead of borrowing whatever schools charge. The change could cut into enrollment and potentially siphon off billions of dollars a year from universities.

The bill would also end loan-forgiveness programs for public-service employees, who currently can make 10 years of payments and then have their remaining debt forgiven, tax-free.

It would preserve an option known as “income-driven repayment,” which ties borrowers’ monthly bills to their earnings, but would eliminate the ability of borrowers to have balances forgiven under them. Currently, borrowers can make payments of 10% or 15% of their discretionary incomes—as determined by a formula—and have remaining balances forgiven after 20 or 25 years. Under the bill, borrowers would pay 15% of discretionary incomes for as long as it took to cover the amount they would have paid under a 10-year standard repayment plan. Current participants in both programs would be grandfathered in.

Wisconsin Elections Commission:

School District Offices

ELIS-5 Ballot Access Checklist for School District Candidates

ETHCF-1 Campaign Registration Statement
EL-162SD Declaration of Candidacy and Memorandum Regarding Felony Convictions

EL-169 Nomination Paper for Nonpartisan Office

Unfortunately, Wisconsin charges (substantially) for voter data, unlike many other states.

Economist:

Except in France

Laura Waters:

The Civil Rights Project has a new academic paper out called “New Jersey’s Segregated Schools Trends and Paths Forward,” a follow-up to a report on the same subject supplemented by new data from 2010-2015. This release of this report has been dutifully covered by N.J. traditional media outlets (see the Star-Ledger, NJ Spotlight,, NJ Today) by reciting a few talking points: N.J. is more diverse than it used to be — there’s a “remarkable increase in the proportion of students attending multiracial schools over the past twenty-five years” — but we’re still the sixth most segregated school system in the nation; one-fourth of Black students attend schools where enrollment is 90 percent non-white; the Abbott rulings, which direct vast amounts of money towards 31 poor districts, (some no longer poor) erased funding inequities (um, not really) but did nothing to integrate schools;

Elephant Room:

For the majority of us including me and Yan, the persons in these photos are entirely different individuals with unique backgrounds and life trajectories. Besides the facts that they are all pretty and relatively young, what else? What’s the point of placing them together at the beginning of an article (Elephant Room is not a platform for showcasing pretty young Asian girls, in case you are new…) ?

Well oh well, Ladies and Gentlemen –

May we have the honor to introduce you Marriage-material Style 好嫁风, an emerging Chinese fashion and life style aims to educate, help and incubate young females to become – well guess what – marriage materials.

Aaron Mehta:

NATO’s nations need to work to incorporate cyber training into their overall military strategy as opposed to treating it as a specialty, according to a top Estonian military official.

“The knowledge of cyber must be spread out into a larger, conventional force,” Col. Kaupo Rosin, Estonia’s chief of military intelligence, told Defense News during a recent visit here.

Rosin raised his concern that within Estonia, the military academies are not teaching cyber in that context. That’s part of a broader trend that has stretched across NATO’s members in which cyber is seen as a specialty and not part of an integrated, core curriculum.

Stephanie Lee:

Cornell University has launched an investigation into the work of Brian Wansink, the food behavior and marketing expert who has come under fire for scientific misconduct allegations over the last year, BuzzFeed News has learned.

“An internal investigation by the University is underway, in compliance with our internal policies and any external regulations that may apply,” Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina said by email on Tuesday.

The school declined to share any more details, including exactly when the investigation began, how many papers are being reviewed, or whether the investigation involves the federal Office of Research Integrity.

Ann Althouse:

One of many reasons we left Seattle after my husband retired was for lower property taxes,” writes mockturtle in the comments to my post about the GOP tax bill, where I mention that Meade and I pay more than $17,000 in property taxes on our house in Madison.

We’re still here, so that means that so far with think it’s worth it, but the high property tax does bother us, and when we think about where else we might want to live, taxation is a factor. But I care a lot about living somewhere that is interesting to me, and I want a house where I can walk out the door and, right from that point, have many interesting walks.

One of the places I’d consider is the one mockturtle says she left: Seattle. Washington State has the benefit of no income tax, but obviously the revenue must be found in some other way.

Sure, there are lots of places with low taxes, but name one where I’d enjoy living. We have many things here that we love, and I would not move to a worse place. $17,000 is a lot, but only the last $X thousand is spent on things I’d carve off the budget if I were given the power to structure the whole thing. And if they tried to hand that power over to me, I wouldn’t even take it. That’s not my line of work and not my expertise or my joy in life.

Madison schools spend far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

James Manyika, Susan Lund, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Jonathan Woetzel, Parul Batra, Ryan Ko, and Saurabh Sanghvi :

The technology-driven world in which we live is a world filled with promise but also challenges. Cars that drive themselves, machines that read X-rays, and algorithms that respond to customer-service inquiries are all manifestations of powerful new forms of automation. Yet even as these technologies increase productivity and improve our lives, their use will substitute for some work activities humans currently perform—a development that has sparked much public concern.

Building on our January 2017 report on automation, McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation (PDF–5MB), assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation.

The results reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills and wages. Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.

John Nova Lomax:

The Texas map draws inspiration from as many cultures as any state in America. There’s Czech: Praha, Moravia, Dubina. And German: Breslau, New Baden, New Ulm, and New Braunfels, to name just a few. Scattered across the landscape are small towns with names coming from the Polish (Panna Maria), Swiss (New Bern), Norwegian (Oslo), Danish (Danevang) and Russian (Marfa, Odessa) pioneers who got there first. Plus, to visit most of the great European cities, you never have to leave the Lone Star state: We’ve got Paris, Rome, Athens, New London, Berlin, and Dublin (plus Edinburg if you’ve forgive the un-Scotsman-like spelling).

But aside from family names and others deriving from English and Native American sources (Comanche, Quanah, and anything with Caddo attached), Spanish is the most common wellspring of inspiration for our place names. Often as not, we Texans butcher it, whether we are referring to a town or a street or a river. (Although maybe not so often as those Californians do.)

Yes, we get a few right. We completely nail Laredo, Del Rio, Seguin, Comal (as in the county), and aside from some emphasis and flattened vowels, mostly do okay with El Paso, San Antonio, Bandera, and Concho (again, as in the county). Bosque County is sort of a typically Texan hybrid: locals pronounce it “boskie,” which is close to the Spanish “bose-kay,” but not all the way there, yet nevertheless much closer than “bosk” or “boss-cue,” to rhyme with barbecue.

Vivian Gornick:

Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is an impressive piece of social history that uses the events of Wilder’s life to track, socially and politically, the development of the American continent and its people. The frontier, by definition, has always been a place just beyond the point where land meets sky. In America that longing to move beyond the horizon, which is common to all cultures, became not only synonymous with an idea of the national character, but a vital ingredient in the American brand of democracy. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner ardently believed, in fact, that “that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism” attributed to the frontier was the major influence on American democracy’s development.

What the people in the covered wagons did not grasp was that to a large extent they were pawns in the hands of political and business interests—especially those of the railroads—that needed to see ground broken across the entire continent. The pioneers never understood the hucksterism behind the “go west, young man” rhetoric that urged them to go where none had gone before, with no hard knowledge of what actually lay before them. All the pioneers knew—in their fantasies, that is—was that just over the horizon lay adventure, opportunity, possible wealth, and certain freedom.

The first Homestead Act, passed in 1862, promised 160 acres of uninhabited land (forget the Native Americans who were actually there) to anyone who would clear and farm it for a good five years. And indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century 270 million acres of land—about 10 percent of the American continent—had been given away to 1.6 million people. What the Act did not say was that to reach this land one had to journey through hell; live for years like an animal; and then deal forever with the torments of wolves, blizzards, tornadoes, failed crops, swarms of locusts, isolation, and penetrating loneliness. The unpublicized reality was that more lives were broken on the frontier than prospered, more homesteads abandoned, more miners exploited and cheated, more ranchers killed as they defended their cattle. Nevertheless, the settlers kept coming and coming and coming. For the most part they were people like Wilder’s father, Charles Ingalls, a man who saw the trek west as a chance to reimagine himself every time his homesteading failed (which it did repeatedly) and the family was back in the covered wagon, heading out once more into the place where others were not.

Jim Stingl:

In life, Leonard Gigowski ran a corner grocery store. The bachelor loved ballroom dancing and pigeon racing.

In death, he found a way to help generations of students pay their tuition at St. Thomas More High School, his own alma mater back when it was called St. Francis Minor Seminary.

This quiet and frugal man left $13 million in a scholarship fund that covers up to half the tuition for needy students who don’t qualify for the private school choice program and its state aid payments.

“He lived a very simple life, nothing extravagant whatsoever in his lifestyle. For the most part, he saved his money and wanted to provide a legacy, which he did,” said Larry Haskin, Leonard’s lawyer and friend who helped him set up the Leonard Gigowski Catholic Education Foundation.

Tom Kamenick and Libby Sobic :

The ugly: Of the 20 largest school districts, eight (Eau Claire, Elmbrook, Janesville, Kenosha, Madison, Sheboygan, Wausau and Wauwatosa) would not fulfill our requests without payment. The fees ranged from $15 to, in Madison’s case, more than $1,000.

According to the Madison School District’s attorney, the district does not have a system for tracking open records requests, hence its extremely high fee in this case. While records custodians are allowed to charge for locating records, school districts that need so much time to locate records are apparently not doing a good job of tracking requests. It should not be so hard to find out how well any government entity complies with the law.

The takeaway: Walker’s executive order led to measurable improvements in the response time of state agencies. School districts and other local governments can use the same processes, including better training and tracking systems, to achieve similar improvements.

Appleton’s budget is $201,399,239 for 15,169 students, about $13,277 per student.

Green Bay plans to spend roughly $272,000,000 during the 2017-2018 school year for 21,000 students, about $12,952 per student.

Madison spends far more, nearly $20,000 per student.

wired:

Cartography is the new code. Increasingly, everything from your takeout delivery to your UberPool route is orchestrated not just by engineers but by cartographers. Between 2007 and 2015, the number of grads earning master’s degrees in cartography increased annually by more than 40 percent on average. And as advanced satellites, digital mapping tools, and open-source geographical software progress, the demand for cartographers is projected to grow nearly 30 percent by 2024.

Modern cartographers are as much data analysts as they are map producers. Flagship GIS systems by software companies like Esri have been democratized by an explosion of open-source alternatives like Carto and MapBox. “We are absolutely inundated with volumes of geospatial data,” says Mike Tischler, director of the US Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program, “but with no means to effectively use it all.”

Which is why, as tasks from house-hunting to solving public-health crises depend on sophisticated map integration, cartography grads are being snapped up by Silicon Valley. “Ten years ago someone with geospatial expertise may have been siloed from the engineering team,” says Grubhub CTO Maria Belousova. “Today a huge portion of our team works on spatial search and route optimization.” Data-savvy mappers are charting that digital frontier.

Stephen Hsu:

1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous — trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era.

2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers.

3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP.

4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. (“Civilizational decline,” as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.)

Jonathan Hafetz :

For nearly two months, the U.S. military has been detaining an American citizen at a secret jail in Iraq, denying him access to a lawyer and even refusing to release his name. The Trump administration is calling the citizen an “enemy combatant,” claiming he was fighting for ISIS in Syria, but it has not presented any evidence to back up its allegations.

We went to court asking a judge to protect the citizen’s constitutional rights, including the right not to be imprisoned without charge and the right to challenge his detention in court. The Trump administration has told the court that it doesn’t have to respect these essential due process rights.

The Pentagon and Justice Department ignored our initial request for access to the U.S. citizen so we could advise him of his rights and offer him the opportunity of legal representation. We then filed a habeas corpus petition on the citizen’s behalf in federal court in Washington, demanding that the government justify its detention of the unnamed American. All U.S. citizens have the right to habeas corpus no matter where the government holds them or what it accuses them of. And, as we know from the government’s practices in places like Guantánamo, when it tries to undercut this right it opens the door to abuses, including the arbitrary detention of innocent people.

Kate McGee:

Brian Butcher, a history teacher at Ballou High School, sat in the bleachers of the school’s brand new football field last June watching 164 seniors receive diplomas. It was a clear, warm night, and he was surrounded by screaming family and friends snapping photos and cheering.

It was a triumphant moment for the students. For the first time, every Ballou graduate applied and was accepted to college. The school is located in one of D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods; it has struggled academically for years and has had a chronically low graduation rate. In 2016, the school graduated only 57 percent of its seniors according to data from D.C. Public Schools (DCPS), slightly up from 51 percent the year before. For months after June’s commencement, the school received national media attention, including from NPR, celebrating its achievement.

But all the excitement and accomplishment couldn’t shake one question from Butcher’s mind:

How did all these students graduate from high school?

“You saw kids walking across the stage, who, they’re nice young people, but they don’t deserve to be walking across the stage,” Butcher said.

Butcher’s concerns were not unwarranted.

Jane Robbins:

The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (FEPA – S 2046), passed by the House as HR 4174, encourages all federal agencies to share the data they maintain on American citizens and to make that data available for “research” by outside interests. All this would be done according to rules set by each agency and without the knowledge or consent of the citizens whose data would be disclosed and scrutinized.

In most cases, citizens give data to a particular federal agency for a particular purpose. They don’t expect that data to be “re-purposed” without their knowledge – even to achieve a goal the government thinks is worthwhile. In a free society, the government is subordinate to the citizen. If it wants to use his data for something he didn’t agree to, it should first obtain his consent. FEPA operates according to the contrary principle – that government is entitled to do whatever it wants with a citizen’s data and shouldn’t be hindered by his objection.

It’s critical to understand exactly what kinds of data reside in various agencies and ponder the possible consequences of sharing that data as contemplated by FEPA. Consider the data housed in the U.S. Department of Education (USED) by virtue of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Take a deep breath:

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

Albert Shanker was a very good friend to The Concord Review almost from the very beginning in 1987. He wrote a number of letters, to the MacArthur Foundation and others, and he spent two of his New York Times columns on comments about the journal. In addition, at a national AFT convention, he scheduled a breakfast meeting for the AFT’s vice presidents, at which I was the only guest, invited to talk about The Concord Review. On that occasion, he told this story: When Jaime Escalante left Los Angeles for a new school in Sacramento, of course the local media took an interest in this nationally famous teacher. They interviewed students, and one ninth grade girl said he was a terrible teacher. “Tell us more!” said the media. And the girl said, “Well, I had a problem with algebra, and I went to Mr. Escalante. He kept me after school several days, and even kept me in on a Saturday morning.” “And what happened?” said the media. And she said: “Well, I finally got it, but he didn’t teach me anything. All he did was make me work!” This was a favorite story of Shanker’s and I heard him tell it again.

I am offering a new kind of professional development for secondary History and Social Studies teachers—one in which they will not be talked to or “taught” in the customary “professional development” way—but instead one in which they will work on serious History papers of their own. This is a new approach, but one which could increase the number of secondary students who will learn to do more of the academic expository writing which, by all reports, they now almost universally cannot do.

Will Fitzhugh
Founder, The Concord Review, Inc. [1987]
Varsity Academics® is our registered trademark.

===============

September 2017—A TCR Academy for Professional Development is offered to secondary History and Social Studies teachers to do the academic expository writing of History research papers themselves. This is new.

We seek $5,000 in Professional Development funds for each of 12 high school History and Social Studies teachers to attend the Pilot residential two-week TCR Academy where they will actually do a serious academic History research paper of their own from July 15 to July 27 in Boston in the Summer of 2018.

Dana Goldstein in The New York Times of August 2, 2017, reported that:
“Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress…The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves.”

Jay Mathews, Washington Post Columnist, reported on August 14, 2016, that: “Writing instruction in our schools is terrible. We need to fix it. A new study has found that U.S. schools emphasize the mechanics of writing instead of teaching students to engage with—and enjoy—such assignments…The results are distressing and show that the instruction students are getting—particularly in writing—is deeply inadequate.”

“Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh.”….Marc Tucker, National Council on Education and the Economy.

Many History teachers completed their college degrees and teacher preparation without ever having written a serious History research paper of their own. Part of the reason so few History term papers are assigned in American high schools is that teachers do not have either the experience or the confidence to provide students with the preparation in nonfiction reading and academic expository writing they need to write such papers.

Over the past four years, The Concord Review Summer Programs have provided academic expository writing instruction in preparing serious academic History research papers of their own for 79 students, from China, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and from nine American states.

We propose to offer this same experience in writing to a dozen high school History and Social Studies teachers who will work on their own 6,000-word History research paper, with endnotes and bibliography, on a topic of their choice for two weeks in the Summer of 2018. Teachers will be asked to choose a topic, prepare an outline, and find ten sources before the course. During the program they will receive instruction on academic writing and have plenty of opportunity to read for and write on their paper, with the guidance and personal attention of our staff. They can then finish their paper after the course. This is a change from programs which talk about History and writing.

The goal is to give them (in some cases to remind them of) the real pride and satisfaction that comes from their own serious study on and careful writing about an interesting Historical topic that they choose. This should both inspire and prepare them for assigning serious term papers to their own students when they return to their schools.

The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only academic journal in the world for the History research papers of secondary students, and has now published 1,252 essays in 114 issues, by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.

=================

“We have switched to courses that emphasize reading, research, and writing—you are an inspiration to all of us, keep up the good work.”

Paul Horton, History Teacher, University of Chicago Laboratory High School

“I very much like and support what you’re doing with The Concord Review. It’s original, important, and greatly needed, now more than ever, with the problem of historic illiteracy growing steadily worse among the high school generation nearly everywhere in the country.”

David McCullough, Historian

“Your visit to Singapore has stimulated a great deal of conversation about what our courses will look like next year as well as ways to better prepare our students for university/college. As a direct result of your visit, we are offering a semester course to high school students next year titled: “Writing a Research Paper.” Students will be expected to produce a major research paper at the end (c. 5,000 words).”

Richard Bisset, History Teacher, Singapore American School

“It’s hard for me to say adequately how much I admire and value what The Concord Review has accomplished. It has not only encouraged students to take the writing of history seriously, and significantly raised the level of quality of their historical analysis, but it has encouraged students to take their writing as seriously as their history. The Review is a jewel in the crown of American education.“

Stanley N. Katz, Director, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies,
Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

“As a physicist, I am accustomed to the many initiatives, such as math competitions and physics olympiads, instituted to recognize and promote interest and talent in the sciences among high school students. However, I have always felt that there was no equivalent mechanism to encourage and nurture students in the humanities, and to recognize their accomplishments. The Concord Review strikes me as a simple yet brilliant idea to help fill that gap, and as a very effective way to promote high standards and excellence in the humanities.”

Chiara R. Nappi, Theoretical Physicist, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study

“We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard ’round the world.”

Bill McGurn, Chief Editorial Writer, The Wall Street Journal

“The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation’s teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student [history] papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987…“

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

“The Concord Review offers young people a unique incentive to think and write carefully and well…The Concord Review inspires and honors historical literacy. It should be in every high school in the land.”

the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

“Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh. The Concord Review is a quarterly journal of history research done by high school students from all over the world [41 countries so far]. The quality of the thinking and writing in the papers that appear in The Concord Review is nothing short of remarkable.”

Marc Tucker, President, National Council on Education and the Economy

“We have been glad to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admissions decisions…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

William R. Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College

“I applaud you for your dedication to improving education, lifting genuine standards of accomplishment, and maintaining your high ideals for our youth. Almost alone, you have fought to improve the teaching of history, while encouraging young people to write thoughtfully and clearly about the meaning of the past. Your devotion to history, to good writing, to serious reading, and to the potential of young people should be an inspiration to us all. I wish you the best as you continue to promote sound ideas about education. The Concord Review provides a splendid forum for the best student work in history…It deserves the support of everyone in the country who cares about improving the study of history in the schools.”

Diane Ravitch, Research Professor, New York University, Author of Left Back,
The Language Police, Reign of Error, etc.

“May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your splendid journal, The Concord Review. That you are performing a valuable service to American education goes without saying. What I find most remarkable is that the journal is intrinsically worth reading as interesting historical writing and not merely as a celebration of young talent. The articles would delight any professor of history if submitted to an advanced undergraduate class, and the best are of graduate student quality. With each issue I feel better about the future of American education and of our profession.”

Eugene Genovese, late Founding President, The Historical Society

“I wanted to tell you how much I admire the energy, commitment, and vision that have led to The Concord Review. Many people talk about the need for new ways to encourage and engage students. You have actually created a new way to raise students’ standards and their expectations of themselves. Your project deserves study by teachers and students across the country. The Concord Review has done a great service not simply to the students whose essays it publishes but to the cause of American education as a whole. I hope it has a long and prosperous life.”

James Fallows, The Atlantic

“It remains the case that most high school students are never required to write a serious research paper. But now there are 30 years’ worth of Concord Reviews that open a window into an alternative universe. You want to see what high school kids can do? Spend some time with The Concord Review, and prepare to be inspired.”

Jeff Jacoby, Columnist, The Boston Globe

Stlvan Lane:

The fact that U.S. debt is about to soar past $20 trillion “is the type of thing that should keep people awake at night,” outgoing Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen said Wednesday in testimony to Congress.

“This should be a very significant concern,” Yellen told the Joint Economic Committee.

She said expenditures on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will grow more rapidly than tax revenues as the U.S. population ages.

Madison’s K-12 spending grows annually and now approaches $20,000 per student.

Toni Airakisinen:

A sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) recently argued in an extensive series of tweets that “the white-nuclear family” perpetuates racism.

Jessie Daniels, a self-described “expert on race,” began her tweetstorm this weekend by declaring that “what I’ve learned is that the white-nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy.”

Pleco:

We are truly honored to announce the release of our first ever paid e-book that’s not a dictionary, “Chinese History: A New Manual” 5th Edition by Endymion Wilkinson. It’s available right now to purchase for US$29.99 via the in-app “Add-ons” screen on our iOS and Android apps – you can also download a free demo version with the first chapter from there – and can also be bought directly from our online store.

Product Description

“The most valuable English-language reference book on China anywhere” (Professor Richard Smith, Rice University).

This massive work (at 1.6 million words the length of 12 monographs), won the Prix Stanislas Julien in 2014 and in 2016, Peking University Press published it in a three-volume Chinese language edition.

The manual provides the answers to all sorts of questions and problems in Chinese civilization and history from prehistory to recent times. Along the way it curates some 12,000 primary and secondary sources and also introduces the ancillary disciplines that Chinese historians require from archeology to translation strategies, from astronomy and astrology to numismatics, from historical linguistics to the latest techniques of learning the characters. The text is often witty and enlivened with more than 300 sidebars and tables covering topics from “The size of steppe armies” and “The speed of Chinese armies” to “Tomes in tombs” and “For whom the bell tolls.”

Celia Chen:

“Your money or your life!” may not be the smartest thing for balaclava-clad bank robbers to say any more

A start-up in China has figured out how to identify the unique characteristics of each person’s voice and cross-match it with existing “voice databases” to identify someone purely by what they say. SpeakIn, based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, is currently working with police departments on the mainland. Its database of “voices” comes from places including phone banking to IT help desk queries.

“A voiceprint is personal and is another example of biological ID,” Yi Pengyu, chief operating officer of SpeakIn, told the South China Morning Post. “The technology can be primarily applied to security systems as it can recognise and track criminals by seeking a match from a database of their voices. A bank robber can certainly hide his face by wearing balaclavas but he always has to speak when he asks for money.”

Jesse Opoien:

State Superintendent Tony Evers said Tuesday he is declining legal representation from the Wisconsin Department of Justice in a lawsuit brought by a conservative law firm. Attorney General Brad Schimel said he will not step aside.

Evers, a Democrat, is one of several candidates seeking to challenge Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. Both Walker and Schimel are Republicans.

The impasse could require the state Supreme Court to determine who represents Evers. The court has not yet agreed to hear the case in question in the first place.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

DSL:

PIRL, v., n. Also pirrl, pur(r)(e)l. [pɪrl, pʌrl]

I. v. 1. tr. (1) To twist, twine. twirl, coil, curl (Cld., Rxb. 1825 Jam.; Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; ne.Sc., Ags., Lth., Ayr., s.Sc. 1965), freq. of horse-hair or the like being twisted to make fishing-lines, or of the making of rug ends (Slk. 1965). Hence pirler, one who makes rug ends (Id.). Slk. 1832 Hogg Queer Book 183:

The bowselly hair upon his head Was pirled with his dark eebree. Ayr. 1833 Galt Poems 43:

Nae mutch had she, but a snood of beads Was purl’d in her hair. Edb. 1839 D. M. Moir Mansie Wauch xxvi.:
A bit daigh, half an ounce weight, pirled round wi’ the knuckles into a case. Slk. 1874 Border Treasury (31 Oct.) 169:
D’ye pirl yer ain lines an’ buss yer ain heuks?

Wang Dan:

I spent nearly seven years in a Chinese prison for being a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. I was freed in 1998, and the Chinese government let me leave the country. I chose to go to the United States, where I could freely speak my mind without fear of being thrown in prison.

I earned a doctorate in history in 2009 and took a teaching position in Taiwan. I taught contemporary Chinese history and led a weekly seminar — a “China salon” — of open discussions about Chinese society and politics. Many of the seminar topics, like the 1989 protest movement and political reform, were taboo in the mainland but safe for public discussion in Taiwan.

Aimee Green:

The state of Oregon has paid $750,000 to three English-speaking foster kids who were placed in the Gresham home of Spanish-speaking foster parents and forced to wear filthy clothes smelling of urine and sleep in a windowless basement.

Two of the three brothers also were sexually abused by another, older male foster child — and they were unable to tell that to their foster parents because their foster parents didn’t speak English, said Portland attorney David Paul, who represented the brothers.

Paul said the brothers’ isolation was made even worse because child-protection workers with the Oregon Department of Human Services failed to regularly check on the boys. Department rules require workers to have at least one face-to-face interaction with each foster child every 30 days. But Paul said one of the boys didn’t have any in-person visits with a DHS caseworker in the entire eight months he lived in the home in 2012 and 2013.

Phil Christman:

fter my Texas-born wife and I moved to Michigan—an eleven-hour drive in the snow, during which time itself seemed to widen and flatten with the terrain—I found myself pressed into service as an expert on the region where I was born and where I have spent most of my life. “What is the Midwest like?” she asked. “Midwestern history, Midwestern customs, Midwestern cuisine?” I struggled to answer with anything more than clichés: bad weather, hard work, humble people. I knew these were inadequate. Connecticut winters and Arizona summers are also “bad”; the vast majority of humans have worked hard, or been worked hard, for all of recorded history; and humility is one of those words, like authenticity or (lately) resistance, that serves mainly to advertise the absence of the thing named.

I soon learned that I was hardly the only Midwesterner left tongue-tied by the Midwest. Articulate neighbors, friends, colleagues, and students, asked to describe their hometowns, replied with truisms that, put together, were also paradoxes: “Oh, it’s in the middle of nowhere.” “It’s just like anywhere, you know.” “We do the same things people do everywhere.” No-places are as old as Thomas More’s Utopia, but a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace doesn’t really add up. Nor, at least in my experience, does one hear such language from people in other regions—from Southerners, Californians, Arubans, Yorkshiremen. Canadians live in a country that has been jokingly described as America’s Midwest writ larger—Canada and our Midwest share, among other things, manners, weather, topography, and a tendency among their inhabitants to downplay their own racism—yet they are hyperspecific in their language, assuming a knowledge of local landmarks that it never occurs to them non-Canadians may not possess. They assume that whatever their setting is, it is a setting, not, as Midwesterner-turned-expatriate Glenway Wescott once wrote of Wisconsin, “an abstract nowhere.”1

Jameel Jaffer and Alexander Abdo:

The case, Carpenter v United States, arises out of the government’s prosecution of Timothy Carpenter for a series of armed robberies carried out in south-eastern Michigan and north-western Ohio several years ago. In the course of its investigation of the crimes, the government ordered Carpenter’s cellphone provider to turn over data it had collected relating to Carpenter’s movements. In response, the provider produced 186 pages listing every call that Carpenter had made over a 127-day period, as well as coordinates indicating where Carpenter had been at the beginning and end of each of those calls.

Importantly, it turned over these records even though the government had not obtained a warrant based on probable cause. Carpenter asked the court to suppress the government’s evidence under the fourth amendment, which protects the right to privacy.

Many cellphone users have only a vague understanding of the extent to which providers monitor their movements, but these companies now track us much more closely than even the most committed human spies ever could. Cellphones function by connecting to antennas – “cell sites” or “cell towers” – that provide cellular service. Those cell sites, which are owned and operated by the cellular companies, are programmed to record which phones connect to them, and when. They also record the direction from which the connecting phone’s signal is received and, often, the distance of the phone from the cell site.

So-called “cell site location information” is becoming ever more precise, because the cellular network is becoming ever more dense. The analytical tools that can be brought to bear on this information are also becoming more sophisticated, meaning that investigators can draw reliable conclusions from smaller and smaller amounts of data. It’s precisely because the information is so rich, of course, that the government is interested in accessing it.

Julie Sedivy:

The surprising forces influencing the complexity of the language we speak and write.

Laura Moy:

Tomorrow morning, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in Carpenter v. United States, a case that asks whether the Constitution protects the cell phone location data that wireless providers collect from their customers. When a law enforcement agency wants access to 127 days’ worth of this data, does it have to show a judge that it has “probable cause” to believe the records will reveal evidence of a crime? Or does it only have to meet a somewhat lower standard — that it reasonably believes the records are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation”?

D eirdre Fernandes:

Jasmine Reyes’s college degree landed her a stable post-graduation job and opened up a wealth of learning opportunities, from an internship in Los Angeles to study abroad in the Netherlands.

But for Reyes, 23, that Emerson College degree came at a sapping financial and emotional cost: a near-constant worry each semester about being able to afford the tuition, guilt over her grandmother’s decision to apply early for Social Security to help pay for her education, and ultimately, the burden of $40,000 in student loans.

“There are a lot of people who think that because I’m African-American I got to go to college for free,” said Reyes, who graduated in 2016. “But I am in so much debt. I would still do it again. But it was extremely stressful.”

David Kantor:

The push to expand the KIPP network in San Francisco was at least momentarily halted last week after the city’s Board of Education turned down its proposal for a new elementary school in Bayview–Hunters Point, traditionally one of the city’s poorest and most heavily African-American areas.

In finding that KIPP was “demonstrably unlikely” to succeed, the board faulted provisions related to teacher training, safety, and discipline. It noted that KIPP’s other San Francisco schools have higher suspension rates than the district average.

The board did vote in favor of renewing the charter for KIPP San Francisco College Preparatory, one of the city’s highest-scoring high schools.

KIPP officials said they will file an appeal with the State Board of Education and still hope the proposed new school will open in the fall of 2018.

“I absolutely do not believe the findings were sufficient to deny our charter under California charter law,” said Beth Sutkus Thompson, chief executive of the KIPP Bay Area network, which includes 12 schools dotting the East Bay and San Francisco. She said the “financial situation of the district,” its efforts to slow attrition out of city schools, and the system’s “constantly shifting dynamics” make opening new charters difficult.

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

Paul Thurrott:

Microsoft quietly launched an interesting new app for the iOS recently. The company’s latest iOS app helps users learn and improve their Chinese speaking skills. It doesn’t have any fancy names, and it’s simply called Microsoft Learn Chinese.

Microsoft’s Learn Chinese app uses artificial intelligence and speech recognition in order to track the user’s performance. You start off by taking the beginner lessons, where the app will teach you basic things like how to say hello in Chinese, and then you will be quizzed on those lessons. Once that’s done, you will be able to test your progress by speaking to the AI-powered chatbot.

Ellie Dolgin:

Peter Kerpedjiev needed a crash course in genetics. A software engineer with some training in bioinformatics, he was pursuing a PhD and thought it would really help to know some fundamentals of biology. “If I wanted to have an intelligent conversation with someone, what genes do I need to know about?” he wondered.

Kerpedjiev went straight to the data. For years, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) has been systematically tagging almost every paper in its popular PubMed database that contains some information about what a gene does. Kerpedjiev extracted all the papers marked as describing the structure, function or location of a gene or the protein it encodes.

Sorting through the records, he compiled a list of the most studied genes of all time — a sort of ‘top hits’ of the human genome, and several other genomes besides.

Jen Gann:

Having to put this kind of pain into words is, to me, the hardest part of wrongful birth. To have to specify what would make me terminate a pregnancy, to imagine my life today without a toddler. There’s no escape from knowing that the opportunity for mercy quietly slipped by and that something as idiotic as a clerical error is responsible. But the most consuming, language-defying pain is just the other side of the most overwhelming joy. There are no words for the feeling of walking down the street with the person I love most, no words to describe why I wanted to have a child in the first place. After all this pain and humiliation and anger boiled down to records and money and who did what, the love I have for my son feels like the one thing that can’t be taken from me. It’s what I know more than anything in this world.

Beth Hawkins:

Cabrera first raised his doubts about the ability of the district and the AFT local to work together in response to an investigation published Nov. 16 by The 74, which obtained an email written by federation president Ross Moore. In it, Moore complained of the superintendent’s willingness to create in-district charter schools and decried two local philanthropies that are making grants both to open charter schools and for El Paso district teachers to obtain master’s degrees and other credentials.

The email detailed a number of proposals to wreak havoc within the district, including driving a wedge between Cabrera and school board members and sabotaging teacher-training programs under development at at least two universities, including for dual language instruction.

Some 26 percent of El Paso’s students are English language learners, and 12,000 students have opted into the district’s dual-language programs. The programs are seen as essential, regardless of students’ home languages, if El Paso is to preserve its status as the largest bilingual workforce in the hemisphere.

The teacher training is a centerpiece of the strategic plan adopted by the district, which finally seemed to have moved away from a cheating scandal that landed Cabrera’s predecessor in prison. Cabrera was hired in 2013 by state overseers to turn around the district, which struggles to overcome entrenched poverty.
Neither Moore nor Texas AFT officials copied on his email replied to requests for comment for this story. AFT President Randi Weingarten last week defended Moore for “standing up for kids and teachers and the great neighborhood public schools they need” when the initial story first broke.

Violet Blue:

A study by Princeton researchers came to light earlier this month, revealing that more than 400 of the world’s most popular websites use the equivalent of hacking tools to spy on you without your knowledge or consent.

So before you get all hopped up on eggnog and go hogwild doing your Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping, you might want to find out which sites are seriously spying on you.

Using “session replay scripts” from third-party companies, websites are recording your every act, from mouse moves to clicks, to keylogging what you type and extracting your personal info off the page. If you accidentally paste something into a text field from your clipboard, like an address or password you didn’t want to type out, the scripts can record, transmit and store that, too.

What these sites are doing with this information, and how much they anonymize or secure it, is a crapshoot.

Among top retail offenders recording your every move and mistake are Costco, Gap.com, Crate and Barrel, Old Navy, Toys R Us, Fandango, Adidas, Boots, Neiman Marcus, Nintendo, Nest, the Disney Store, and Petco.

Lauren Slagter:

Under the proposed three-year contract that would start in the 2017-18 school year, Bauman said teachers would advance a step on the salary schedule each year for the first two years – for the first time in the school district’s five-year history.

The proposed contract calls for re-opening salary negotiations in the 2019-20 school year.

The district also would increase its contribution to teachers’ health insurance. Currently, YCS pays $5,000 for an individual employee’s health insurance, $11,000 for a two-person plan and $13,000 for family coverage.

That leaves teachers with family coverage paying between $7,000 and $11,600 out of pocket each year for their health insurance, Bauman said, depending on which plan they select.

The proposed new contract would gradually increase the maximum amount the school district pays toward employee health insurance, saving those teachers with family coverage about $4,800 a year, Bauman said.

Teachers who do not receive health insurance through YCS would receive a $400 stipend.

In the 2017-18 school year, teachers would receive a $750 bonus and returning teachers would receive an additional one-time stipend of $600 due to the increase in the district’s student enrollment this fall.

Amber Walker:

A report released this fall by the Madison Metropolitan School District said nearly nine percent of students with disabilities were restrained or secluded by staff during the last school year.

The report showed that 334 of the 3,804 students with disabilities, or 8.8 percent, experienced restraint and/or seclusion during the 2016-2017 school year. That number is up from 5.6 percent in the 2015-2016 school year.

The number was disproportionately high at Landmark Elementary Alternative Program (LEAP) West, a program at Olson Elementary School for students with emotional-behavioral disabilities. LEAP West reported 737 incidents of restraint and/or seclusion among 10 students last school year.

Han Rights Watch:

The Chinese government should stop building big data policing platforms that aggregate and analyze massive amounts of citizens’ personal information, Human Rights Watch said today. This abusive “Police Cloud” system is designed to track and predict the activities of activists, dissidents, and ethnic minorities, including those authorities say have “extreme thoughts,” among other functions.

China has no enforceable protections for privacy rights against state surveillance.

“It is frightening that Chinese authorities are collecting and centralizing ever more information about hundreds of millions of ordinary people, identifying persons who deviate from what they determine to be ‘normal thought,’ and then surveilling them,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “Until China has meaningful privacy rights and an accountable police force, the government should immediately cease these efforts.”

Jillian Berman and Jay Zehngebot :

A combination of work, family support, and minimal debt once made a college degree obtainable. Now, this affordable college education is increasingly out of reach.

Taking into account tuition, room, board, and fees across 2,312 public and private colleges and universities in the U.S., the average price of an undergraduate degree1 increased $63,973, or roughly 261%, since 1987. (These numbers and the rest that follow have been adjusted for inflation)

Madison’s K-12 spending has grown significantly as well, now nearly $20,000 per student – despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Bobby Allyn:

The University of Pennsylvania has quietly agreed to pay a student accused of rape an undisclosed amount after he sued the school claiming Penn’s investigation into the incident violated his civil rights.

Although the specific terms of the agreement are not public, court records acknowledging the deal follow a rash of lawsuits nationwide filed by men on college campuses maintaining that punishment triggered by internal investigations into sexual misconduct have been biased against them.

According to the lawsuit filed last fall, the Penn student — identified only as John Doe — and a female student — also a Penn undergraduate and known as Jane Doe in the suit — met at a bar in June 2016 after they had completed their junior year. At the bar, flirting led to the young man walking the woman to his apartment about six blocks away.

The man asked if she wanted to come in for “some fun,” to which she responded that she was tired but agreed to join him “for just a few minutes,” according to court records.

Nick Bilton:

Many people imagine 19th-century antebellum America as a frontier fantasia: men with handlebar mustaches sitting in dusty saloons, kicking back moonshine whiskey, as a piano player picks out tunes in the background. In reality, though, life was a little more sordid: Americans spent their time after work in fully legal heroin dens; in 1885, opium and cocaine were even given to children to help with teething. “Cocaine Toothache Drops,” which were marketed as presenting an “instantaneous cure” were sold for 15 cents a box. Today, in the midst of our opioid crisis, we hear about this past and wonder unequivocally, what the hell were they thinking?

I often wonder the same thing when I think about social media and its current domination of our society. Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide? Indeed, some of the people who gave us these platforms are already beginning to wonder if this is the case. Last month, I wrote a piece detailing how some early Facebook employees now feel about the monster they have created. As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”

After the piece published, I expected to receive angry e-mails and text messages from current or former Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram employees. Instead, my inbox was flooded with former (and even current!) employees of these social networks, who confided that they felt the same way. Some even mentioned they had abandoned the platforms themselves. The people who reached out ranged in pay grade from engineers to C-suite executives. Some venture capitalists who once funded the companies, or their competitors, have told me that they no longer use them—or do so sparingly. After witnessing Trump’s use of social networks, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures wrote last month that he had deleted Facebook and Twitter from his phone. “This has really had a massive improvement on every day of my life in ways I can’t describe unless you try it yourself,” he wrote. This squares with the countless journalists who have told me they have deleted their accounts, removed the apps from their phone, or simply walked away from the world of social media.

Marta Jewson:

State rankings for most New Orleans schools are on a three-year slide, with 65 percent dropping from 2014 to 2017.

The drop in School Performance Scores from 2016 to 2017 caused hand-wringing among the city’s education leaders. The Lens’ analysis of state data shows it’s part of a worrisome trend.

“We have to acknowledge and confront the brutal facts of where we are,” said Orleans Parish school board member Ben Kleban. However, he said he has faith in the district’s commitment to improve.

Scores at some schools tumbled. Mahalia Jackson Elementary School dropped almost 30 points to a score of 50 on the state’s 150-point scale. That’s a D.

Sylvanie Williams College Prep fell about 22 points to 32.4, an F. It was the second-lowest elementary school score; the one with the lowest score, McDonogh 42, has been turned over to another charter operator.

More, here.

Sarah Karp and Becky Vevea :

Chicago Public Schools has lost 32,000 students over the last five years, nearly the same enrollment drop as in the 10-year period leading up to the closures of 50 elementary schools in 2013. Those missing students could fill 53 average-sized Chicago schools.

This massive enrollment decline comes as a self-imposed five-year moratorium on school closings lifts in 2018. Despite that, political observers and CPS insiders said they are not betting on Mayor Rahm Emanuel closing 50 more schools — at least not all at once.

They say if Emanuel opts to close more schools, they hope he does it more slowly and over time. In fact, that’s already underway, despite the moratorium. Since 2013, CPS has quietly shuttered more than a dozen schools, many of them charter schools.

The school system must announce by Dec. 1 any proposed closures for its more than 600 schools. Officials have already indicated they will recommend closing only a handful of schools for next year, the first without the moratorium.

Madison’s non diverse K-12 governance model has not addressed boundary or school diversity in decades.

Barry Adams:

There are no plastic trays, pans of lasagna, a salad bar or even crates filled with cartons of chocolate milk.

Most days, students in the Washington Island School District are on their own for lunch. If they want something hot, they bring a Thermos or use one of the eight microwave ovens in the school’s multipurpose room to heat up leftovers or other concoctions from home.

The closest the school comes to a lunch program is once every other Wednesday. That’s when the student council, as a fundraiser, makes a $4 meal that can include homemade spaghetti, pizza or hot dogs.

Jennifer C. Berkshire :

In a Facebook post this summer, hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took aim at the highest ranking Black woman in the New York legislator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “[H]ypocrites like Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses,” wrote Loeb, “do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.” The rant, which had the exquisite misfortune of appearing just days before the actual KKK took to the streets of Charlottesville to menace nonwhite people and their allies, struck a familiar Loeb theme. In a previous post he implored his peer to take up the fight against the teachers union: “the biggest single force standing in the way of quality education and an organization that has done more to perpetuate poverty and discrimination against people of color than the KKK.”

It would be easy to dismiss all this frothing as just Loeb being Loeb. This is, after all, the same crusader for justice who once lambasted a CEO for his imperial lifestyle, not an easy charge to level from a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse. But the NYC financier is not just any hedge fund billionaire. As the chair of the board of Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, he is a leading force within the nexus of big money and self-proclaimed school “reformers” within the Democratic party. While Loeb doesn’t limit his donations to Dems (as his profile on the married-but-looking dating site, Ashley Madison, indicated, he is not one to be tied down), he exerts the kind of outsized influence that $3.2 billion in net worth reliably commands these days.

Jeff Guo:

It’s become a fact of American life that girls are better than boys at school. They get better grades. They’re suspended less. For every generation since the boomers, women have been more likely than men to earn high school and college diplomas.

In fact, girls are pretty much the only reason the high school graduation rate went up in past 40 years, according to calculations by Harvard economist Richard Murnane. The male high school graduation rate has been stuck at 81 percent since the 1970s, while the female graduation rose from 81 percent to 87 percent.

Women have been so persistently superior it is perhaps time for a new stereotype about the sexes — girls as bookish mavens like Lisa Simpson; boys as goof-offs like Bart.

Pat Schneider:

The discouraging findings came from UW-Madison’s first survey of students on campus climate, the results of which were released Nov. 16.

The results “further illuminate the trust challenges facing not only our department but the department across the street and those across the nation,” Roman wrote in a blog posted Nov. 20.

Roman asserted her department’s commitment to serving all members of the campus community.

“I am deeply concerned about any reported community reluctance to reach out to police for assistance. I understand that there are many social and political obstacles in place that inhibit/prevent certain individuals or groups from officially reporting problems to police and that many of these are beyond the ability of the police alone to eliminate,” she said. Roman pledged to work to identify and eliminate barriers between police and the community to the extent possible.

Murtaza Hussain:

Decades before smartphones, the internet, and social media, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who worked on media theory, predicted a future world war fought using information. While World War I and World War II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” McLuhan said, a prophecy included in his 1970 book of reflections, “Culture Is Our Business.”

McLuhan’s prediction may have felt outlandish in his own era, but it seems very close to our present-day reality. Decades ago, the barriers to entry for broadcasting and publishing were so high that only established institutions could meaningfully engage in news dissemination. But over the past 10 to 15 years, ordinary individuals have been radically empowered with the ability to record, publish, and broadcast information to millions around the world, at minimal cost.

Wang Lianzhang:

Earlier this month, a high court in eastern China accepted a couple’s appeal against a fine they received for having a second child, Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper reported Tuesday. The case will test whether the two-child policy can apply retroactively for those who have unpaid family planning fines.

The couple had their first child, a girl, in 2008, and then a son in June 2012, when the one-child policy still applied. But no one mentioned a fine until May 2016 — five months after the two-child policy came into effect nationwide. Then, the local health and family planning commission in their hometown of Suining County, Jiangsu province, told them they owed 104,584 yuan ($15,800) for having a second child, who was by then 4 years old.

“Since the two-child policy is now being promoted across the country, why do we still have to pay the fine?” Tong Gang, the 34-year-old father, told Sixth Tone on Wednesday.

Daniel Oberhaus:

At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month (there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site). So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.

Of course, these “1 percenters” have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks. In the early days, when there were only a few hundred thousand people collaborating on Wikipedia, Matei said the content production was significantly more equitable. But as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia’s growth ever since.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood :

In a similar vein, it is important to remember that the misery of the Tambora period in Europe—years of famine, disease, and homelessness—was borne overwhelmingly by the poor, who left scant record of their sufferings. For most of those belonging to the middle and upper classes—including the Shelleys and their circle—the social and economic upheaval of those years presented only minor inconveniences. By contrast with the illiterate underclass, these affluent Europeans left voluminous accounts of their lives. To look at only their documentary record, therefore, can leave one with the misleading impression that the Tambora years were not exceptional in the history of the early nineteenth century. It is necessary to scrutinize what they wrote carefully for clues to the experience of the silent millions who suffered displacement, hunger, disease, and death at that time. From the bubble of privilege within which educated people such as the Shelleys and their friends composed their brilliant verse and letters, it is possible to catch gleams of this benighted other world through which they mostly passed oblivious.

In her account of the stormy night in Geneva when she first conceived her famous novel, Shelley imagines Frankenstein waking from a nightmare to find his hideous creation at his bedside, “looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (196). The description is reminiscent of numerous impressions of European beggars in this period. One English tourist, travelling from Rome to Naples in 1817, remarked on “the livid aspect of the miserable inhabitants of this region.” When asked how they lived, these “animated spectres” replied simply: “We die” (Matthews 192-3). From the beginning, then, Shelley’s imaginative conjuring of her famous Creature bears the mark of the famished and diseased European population by which she was surrounded in 1816-18. Like the hordes of hungry refugees spreading typhus across the continent during Shelley’s writing of the novel, the Creature in Frankenstein is a wanderer and a perceived menace to civilized society. In the novel, this murderous capability is attributed to the monster’s preternatural strength. But the terrifying atmosphere of his rampage, and his ability to strike at will across thousands of miles, seems more like the spread of a famine or contagion. In short, once the supernatural element of the monster’s creation is set aside, the experience of Mary Shelley’s creature most closely embodies the degradation and suffering of the homeless European poor in the Tambora period, while the violent disgust of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by most affluent Europeans toward the millions of Tambora’s climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season,” but “still more from the barbarity of man” (84).

Graham Cluley:

German parents are being told to destroy smartwatches they have bought for their children after the country’s telecoms regulator put a blanket ban in place to prevent sale of the devices, amid growing privacy concerns.
Jochen Homann, president of the Federal Network Agency, told BBC News that the so-called smartwatches, typically aimed at children between the ages of five and 12 years old, are classified as spying devices: