Murtaza Hussein:

Through a network of nearly 800 military bases located in 70 countries around the globe, in addition to an array of trade deals and alliances, the U.S. has cemented its influence for decades across both Europe and Asia. American leaders helped impose a set of rules and norms that promoted free trade, democratic governance — in theory, if not always in practice — and a prohibition on changing borders militarily, using a mixture of force and suasion to sustain the systems that keep its hegemony intact. Meanwhile, although the U.S. generally eschewed direct colonialism, its promotion of global free trade helped “open a door through which America’s preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all the underdeveloped areas of the world,” wrote the revisionist historian William Appleman Williams in his more-than-half-century-old classic, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy”.

That strategy of “non-colonial imperial expansion,” as Williams called it, became the basis for U.S. foreign policy over the past century. For American elites, such a policy has provided remarkable benefits, even if the resulting largesse has not always trickled down to the rest of the country. Thanks to its status as the world’s only superpower, the U.S. today enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of having its dollar serve as the world’s reserve currency, while U.S. leaders dominate the agenda of international institutions promoting governance and trade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the successful creation of a global military alliance to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that same year, America’s imperial confidence reached a zenith; President George H.W. Bush publicly declared the start of a “new world order” under American leadership.

Chris Gilliard:

In his initial New Horizons column in EDUCAUSE Review, Mike Caulfield asked: “Can Higher Education Save the Web?”1 I was intrigued by this question since I often say to my students that the web is broken and that the ideal thing to do (although quite unrealistic) would be to tear it down and start from scratch.

I call the web “broken” because its primary architecture is based on what Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” a “form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.”2 Web2.0—the web of platforms, personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—is the only web most students know. That web exists by extracting individuals’ data through persistent surveillance, data mining, tracking, and browser fingerprinting3 and then seeking new and “innovative” ways to monetize that data. As platforms and advertisers seek to perfect these strategies, colleges and universities rush to mimic those strategies in order to improve retention.4

That said, I admit it might be useful to search for a more suitable term than “broken.” The web is not broken in this regard: a web based on surveillance, personalization, and monetization works perfectly well for particular constituencies, but it doesn’t work quite as well for persons of color, lower-income students, and people who have been walled off from information or opportunities because of the ways they are categorized according to opaque algorithms.

Karen Lien:

We’re interested in companies re-thinking the entire model of schooling, especially for pre-K and higher education. In the US, new models may rely on technology to personalize or otherwise improve the learning experience. We’re also interested in applications of technology that have the potential to deliver high quality educational experiences to every student in the world. An example:

The Rumie Initiative curates free online educational content, packages it into comprehensive offline curricula, and delivers it to educators working in refugee camps and other remote or under-resourced communities.

Annysa Johnson:

In the long term, Driver and board members said, the district may be forced to re-examine its generous employee benefits package and consolidate or close some schools.

MPS’ final $1.1 billion budget is expected to be finalized in November. The district already made a series of cuts in the spring aimed at closing what was then a $50 million budget gap. Those included cutting 96 teaching positions and 98 classroom assistant posts.

“Bennett said he continues to work closely with the district, noting he recently met with district lawyer Dylan Pauly to work out an agreement for the internal sharing and public posting of any Madison charter school applications that are submitted. Proposals are to be posted on the district’s website within two weeks of the submission date, and on his own office’s website within one week, Bennett said.”

“I’d have to have a proposal approved by the UW Board of Regents and to the (state) Department of Public Instruction by Feb. 1,” Bennett said, for a 2018 opening.

That means school proposers would have to have a completed proposal to him for review within a few months, which seems unlikely, Bennett said.

He declined to characterize in detail the ideas for any Madison proposals he’s seen so far before any official applications are in, but he said they “range from really focused content-area schools to innovative, project-based learning schools.”

“Those conversations are really rewarding,” Bennett said, lauding the opportunity he said his office has “to really grow quality (educational) choices for kids.”

Bennett said he has spent most of the time since his hiring developing a process for office operations and shepherding through the Legislature a drug-addiction recovery charter school favored by GOP lawmakers. The school, approved in July, could go anywhere in the state, with competitive proposals to create it, including a location, due by Dec. 2.

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

The Economist:

MANAGEMENT gurus have chewed over the topic endlessly: is a flair for entrepreneurship something that you are born with, or something that can be taught? In a break with those gurus’ traditions, a group of economists and researchers from the World Bank, the National University of Singapore and Leuphana University in Germany decided that rather than simply cook up a pet theory of their own, they would conduct a controlled experiment.

Moreover, instead of choosing subjects from the boardrooms of powerful corporations or among the latest crop of young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Francisco Campos and his fellow researchers chose to monitor 1,500 people running small businesses in Togo in West Africa. These are not the sorts of business owners who give TED talks or negotiate billion-dollar mergers. The typical firm had three employees and profits of 94,512 CFA francs ($173) a month. Only about a third kept books, and less than one in 20 had a written budget.

Jillian Kay Melchior:

Biology professor Bret Weinstein has settled his lawsuit against Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Weinstein became a pariah last spring when he criticized an officially sanctioned “Day of Absence” during which white people were asked to stay away from campus. He and his wife, anthropology professor Heather Heying, alleged that Evergreen “has permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment.” They claimed administrators failed to protect them from “repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.”

Last week the university announced it would pay $500,000 to settle the couple’s complaint. Evergreen said in a statement that the college “strongly rejects” the lawsuit’s allegations, denies the Day of Absence was discriminatory, and asserts: “The college took reasonable and appropriate steps to engage with protesters, de-escalate conflict, and keep the campus safe.”

Alan Borsuk:

A setting for greatness: I was part of a program a few days ago with 40 or so leaders of Milwaukee-area public school districts. One thing I said was that I didn’t see much bold action or big orders coming their way from Washington. And there wasn’t much big news in the state ESSA plan or the new state budget (special-education vouchers being one exception). I said if there’s going to be a rising tide of quality, it’s going to come from people such as them — from the local level.

And in some places, that is happening. Some particularly innovative and nationally recognized school leaders were in the room. You want names? This is not a full list, but I’d mention Menomonee Falls Superintendent Patricia Greco, Kettle Moraine Superintendent Patricia Deklotz and Brown Deer Superintendent Deb Kerr.

T Willard Fair:

Here’s what I need to say to them, to the people of this nation, to people of color — I am involved in the school choice movement because the future of my life and your life depends upon it. Starting the state’s first charter school was one of the most significant accomplishments of my life. Because of our willingness to look beyond traditional divisions and leave beyond our tendency to only work with those with whom we are comfortable, our children of color are closing the achievement gap. African-American students in charter schools are scoring 4% higher on reading tests than those in traditional public schools and Florida charter school students are more likely to attend college. Hispanic students do 12% better than their peers at traditional public schools. These are but two of the many indicators that point to increased success for students of color because their families were empowered to find schools that better met the needs of their children.

Jorie Koster-HaleAug:

Predicting future crime poses a particularly interesting data challenge because it has both geospatial and temporal dimensions and may be affected by many different types of features like weather, city infrastructure, population demographics, public events, government policy, etc.

In September 2016, the National Institute of Justice launched a Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge to predict crime hotspots in the city of Portland, Oregon. Our team (Maxime and I) made a submission to the challenge. Our goal was to use both geospatial and temporal data to understand underlying factors of crime and predict future hotspots. All of the data are open source, making the project fully reproducible. And in the end, we are very excited to have been announced as one of the winners of the challenge!

How did we do it? In a series of two blog posts, I will walk through our approach to the challenge, which was ultimately a combination of machine learning, time-series modeling, and geostatistics (a combination that was more effective at predicting future crime hotspots than any of these techniques by themselves). This first post will focus on the data we used, and the next post (coming soon) will delve into the analysis of that data.

Jack Mara, Lewis Davis and Stephen Schmidt

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade-offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus.

Tom Jackman

A device that tricks cellphones into sending it their location information and has been used quietly by police and federal agents for years, requires a search warrant before it is turned on, an appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday. It is the fourth such ruling by either a state appeals court or federal district court, and may end up deciding the issue unless the government takes the case to the U.S. Supreme Court or persuades the city’s highest court to reverse the ruling.

The case against Prince Jones in 2013 involved D.C. police use of a “StingRay” cell-site simulator, which enables law enforcement to pinpoint the location of a cellphone more precisely than a phone company can when triangulating a signal between cell towers or using a phone’s GPS function. Civil liberties advocates say the StingRay, by providing someone’s location to police without court approval, is a violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment right not to be unreasonably searched. The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed in a 2 to 1 ruling, echoing similar rulings in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and federal district courts in New York City and San Francisco.

Alex Emmons:

One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.”

The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To put that in further perspective: If the package becomes law, U.S. military spending would exceed the total spending of its next 10 rivals put together, going off of 2016 military spending estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

GeoGebra Augmented Reality by International GeoGebra Institute (IGI).

Robert McFadden

“We find when we bring average Americans together that they listen to one another, that they can contribute and that they can build, develop a vision of what they want our society to be like. And it’s really inspiring.”

In a speech at the Drucker Institute in Claremont, Calif., in late 2008, Mr. Yankelovich enumerated overwhelming national problems — the financial meltdown, the soaring debt, lost standing in the world, runaway health and education costs — and, typically, offered his vision of a way out of the mess. He called it “The New Pragmatism,” and insisted that it would soon spread across America.

“It’s going to occur,” he said, certitude rising in his New England accent, “through entrepreneurship and innovative thinking at all levels of society: individual, commercial, public, nonprofit, private, institutional, and all of these in interlocking, interacting ways.”

Amanda Ripley:

In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.

This is baffling on the most obvious levels. In the West, researchers have long believed that future prospects incentivize students to invest in school. The conventional wisdom is that girls do better in school as women acquire more legal and political rights in society. But many Middle Eastern women do not go on to have long professional careers after graduating; they spend much of their lives working at home as wives and mothers. Fewer than one in every five workers is female in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

This spring, I went to the Middle East to try to understand why girls are doing so much better in school, despite living in quintessentially patriarchal societies. Or, put another way, why boys are doing so badly.

Erika Christakis

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

Bruce Schneier:

The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It’s because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance.

Sarah Ruden:

It was the end of a semester at Harvard University, where I was a doctoral student, and I’d been called into a professor’s office. He was the faculty member overseeing the third-year undergraduate Latin course that I had just finished teaching and grading. One of my students was seated in the office when I arrived, with a look of dignified outrage on his face, having already made his case against me. The offense?

I’d given him an A-minus.

That he apparently felt welcome to petition against that grade might tell you everything you need to know about how Harvard coddles certain students.

True, giving an A-minus to a classics major, a potential “friend of the department” (read: likely future donor), didn’t always go over well. But the same professor who was now entertaining that undergrad’s grievance had, that year, briefed us teaching assistants on the tough new guidelines for combating grade inflation, counseling us to be judicious, to think through what a Harvard “A” meant before awarding one. Hence, it had seemed reasonably safe to assign that grade.

Sam Koppelman:

But if an 18-year-old student losing his ability to breathe and walk on his own is not a national news story, if we refuse to ask ourselves how we let this happen, then we are all complicit.

We are complicit in the deaths that take place on the football field, including those that occur at the high school level every year. We are complicit in the head injuries that keep student-athletes out of class. And we are complicit in the long-term health impacts — from post-concussion syndrome to degenerative brain diseases like CTE to depression and even suicide — thousands of football players face across the country.

Derek Bok:

Many colleges provide a formidable array of courses, majors and extracurricular opportunities, but firsthand accounts indicate that many undergraduates do not feel that the material conveyed in their readings and lectures has much relevance to their lives. Such sentiments suggest either that the courses do not in fact contribute much to the ultimate goals that colleges claim to value or that instructors are not taking sufficient care to explain the larger aims of their courses and why they should matter.

Other studies suggest that many instructors do not teach their courses in ways best calculated to achieve the ends that faculties themselves consider important. For example, one investigator studied samples of the examinations given at elite liberal arts colleges and research universities. Although 99 percent of professors consider critical thinking an “essential” or “very important” goal of a college education, fewer than 20 percent of the exam questions actually tested for this skill.

Now that most faculties have defined the learning objectives of their college and its various departments and programs, it should be possible to review recent examinations to determine whether individual professors, programs and departments are actually designing their courses to achieve those goals. College administrators could also modify their student evaluation forms to ask students whether they believe the stated goals were emphasized in the courses they took.

In addition, the average time students devote to studying varies widely among different colleges, and many campuses could require more of their students. Those lacking evidence about the study habits of their undergraduates could inform themselves through confidential surveys that faculties could review and consider steps to encourage greater student effort and improve learning

Paul Mozur,Mark Scott and Mike Isaac

On a muggy, late spring evening, Tuan Pham awoke to the police storming his house in Hanoi, Vietnam.

They marched him to a police station and made their demand: Hand over your Facebook password. Mr. Tuan, a computer engineer, had recently written a poem on the social network called “Mother’s Lullaby,” which criticized how the communist country was run.

One line read, “One century has passed, we are still poor and hungry, do you ask why?”

Mr. Tuan’s arrest came just weeks after Facebook offered a major olive branch to Vietnam’s government. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, met with a top Vietnamese official in April and pledged to remove information from the social network that violated the country’s laws.

While Facebook said its policies in Vietnam have not changed, and it has a consistent process for governments to report illegal content, the Vietnamese government was specific. The social network, they have said, had agreed to help create a new communications channel with the government to prioritize Hanoi’s requests and remove what the regime considered inaccurate posts about senior leaders.

Bill McMorris

Public school teachers are three times more likely to miss large chunks of school days than their peers at charter schools, which could hurt student learning, according to a new report.

An analysis by Thomas P. Fordham Institute senior research and policy associate David Griffith found that more than 28 percent of public school teachers miss at least 11 workdays a year.

Hawaii led the country in absenteeism with 79 percent of public school teachers taking off at least 10 days. Educators’ truancy rates are far higher than those in other industries. An average teacher will take eight personal or sick days each year compared to the nationwide average of three-and-a-half, according to the report, titled, “Teacher Absenteeism in Charter and Traditional Public Schools.”

“The percentage of teachers in traditional public schools who take more than ten sick and personal days is almost four times higher than the percentage of employees in other industries who take at least ten sick days—despite the fact that teachers have significantly fewer work days than employees in other industries,” the report says.

High absentee rates are unique among public school teachers. About 10 percent of charter school teachers are chronically absent from work—closer to the national average of 7.7 percent of workers with access to paid sick leave.

Educate to Career:

Workforce preparedness, maximizing earnings and employability are the primary reasons for a person to attend college. The ETC College Rankings Index quantifies and compares each college’s record for improving the labor market outcomes for students.

The ETC College Rankings Index is the only system that rates colleges by the Economic Value Added delivered to their graduates. Our patent pending methodologies analyze the labor market outcomes of graduates from 1250 four year colleges.

The ETC Index also makes available fee based data ($10 per school) which enables detailed analysis by college and major:

The average net cost – of every college. This is not the list price- this is the annual tuition that in state students actually paid. This information alone can save you $ thousands per year.

Jobs and salaries – for each college and major, we provide a list of the jobs that recent graduates actually landed, with starting salaries.

Loan default and grad rates – enhance your planning and analysis.

Franklin Foer:

All the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves and form their own opinions.

We can’t entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even in the US, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organise themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait.

In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.

Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or maybe just a little bit naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. These weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyberterrorists. Zuckerberg’s hacker heroes were disrespectful of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys, unbound by conventional thinking. In the labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 60s and 70s, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing, such marvels as the first video games and word processors. With their free time, they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own cleverness – installing a living cow on the roof of a Cambridge dorm; launching a weather balloon, which miraculously emerged from beneath the turf, emblazoned with “MIT”, in the middle of a Harvard-Yale football game.

The hackers’ archenemies were the bureaucrats who ran universities, corporations and governments. Bureaucrats talked about making the world more efficient, just like the hackers. But they were really small-minded paper-pushers who fiercely guarded the information they held, even when that information yearned to be shared. When hackers clearly engineered better ways of doing things – a box that enabled free long-distance calls, an instruction that might improve an operating system – the bureaucrats stood in their way, wagging an unbending finger. The hackers took aesthetic and comic pleasure in outwitting the men in suits.

When Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2002, the heyday of the hackers had long passed. They were older guys now, the stuff of good tales, some stuck in twilight struggles against The Man. But Zuckerberg wanted to hack, too, and with that old-time indifference to norms. In high school he picked the lock that prevented outsiders from fiddling with AOL’s code and added his own improvements to its instant messaging program. As a college sophomore he hatched a site called Facemash – with the high-minded purpose of determining the hottest kid on campus. Zuckerberg asked users to compare images of two students and then determine the better-looking of the two. The winner of each pairing advanced to the next round of his hormonal tournament. To cobble this site together, Zuckerberg needed photos. He purloined those from the servers of the various Harvard houses. “One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog as he put the finishing touches on his creation, “and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well.”

Amanda Ripley:

In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.

This is baffling on the most obvious levels. In the West, researchers have long believed that future prospects incentivize students to invest in school. The conventional wisdom is that girls do better in school as women acquire more legal and political rights in society. But many Middle Eastern women do not go on to have long professional careers after graduating; they spend much of their lives working at home as wives and mothers. Fewer than one in every five workers is female in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

This spring, I went to the Middle East to try to understand why girls are doing so much better in school, despite living in quintessentially patriarchal societies. Or, put another way, why boys are doing so badly.

Pumpkin Person

In this post, I summarize all that I have learned about the actual test scores of different income levels. In particular, I compare actual psychometric data of seven U.S. economic classes: (1) the homeless, (2) welfare recipients, (3) median Americans, (4) self-made millionaires (5) self-made decamillionaires, (6) self-made billionaires, and (7) self-made decabillionaires, and largely confirm my repeated assertion that average IQ increases by 8-10 points for every ten-fold increase in income, though there may be a few major exceptions to this overall trend. Also, by analyzing the slope of the standardized regression line predicting IQ from income, I find evidence that the true correlation between IQ and income (at least in America) is much higher than the 0.23 reported in a 2006 meta-analysis and even higher than the 0.4 correlation asserted by Arthur Jensen, and may even approach 0.5.

I also find tentative but shocking evidence that the IQ gap between the richest and poorest Americans may exceed an astonishing 70 points!

In this analysis I am limiting myself entirely to test score data so IQ estimates based on ethnic composition or educational achievements of various economic classes are only occasionally mentioned to buttress the actual psychometric results. In several cases, the data is somewhat anecdotal, and speculative statistical inferences are sometimes made.

Former Madison School Board candidate Ali Muldrow, speaking yesterday on WORT-FM’s A Public Affair (MP3 audio) – via a kind reader.

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

They are all rich white kids and they will do just fine – NOT!

Ali Muldrow notes and links: SIS and duckduckgo.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

Matt Barnum:

With its recent adoption of a tax credit scholarship program, Illinois became the 18th state to adopt an innocuously named — but highly controversial — policy that critics have described as a “backdoor voucher.”

In some sense, the description is apt. But by injecting a middle layer into the government’s support of private school tuition, tax credits help avoid some of the legal and political obstacles that have dogged efforts by advocates, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, to promote school choice through vouchers.

Andrew O’Hehir:

Moskowitz is a powerful and unrepentant example of the oft-derided species “neoliberal,” signifying a belief in market-driven solutions, public-private partnerships and some degree of government downsizing and deregulation. (Most of her New York political battles have involved attempts to limit or shackle the immensely powerful teachers’ unions.) A longtime ally of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and supporter of Hillary Clinton — but also one who has praised President Donald Trump for his support of charter schools — Moskowitz is arguably one of the last and best of the uncloseted neoliberals. Whether or not you agree with her educational philosophy and her tactics, the case she makes is clear and strong.

No parent, as Moskowitz said in our conversation, can base their decisions on long-term questions of educational policy. They want the best possible education for their kids in the best possible schools, and Moskowitz believes she has cracked the code for doing that in some of New York’s most underprivileged neighborhoods. As I can testify (as the dad of two middle-school kids), any parent who hears Moskowitz talk about the central role poetry plays in the curriculum of Success Academy is likely to swoon a little. She insists that all children need recess every day, no matter how cold or hot it is outside or how the school day is going. She believes in art and drama and music, not as optional activities but regular classes. Her schools are rigorous but do not teach toward standardized tests, she says; her students are challenged but never abused. (To be clear, some of these claims would be contested by Moskowitz’s critics.)

Walter Williams:

That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question.

This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.

The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure.

Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households.

But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery?

In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families.

Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.

Is that supposed to be a delayed response to the legacy of slavery?

The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.

Beth Hawkins:

The other day my older son told me a revealing story about his final days as a student in Minneapolis Public Schools:

One day last spring, one of his teachers informed the class that if they wanted to take the state science exams, they were welcome to go down to the office and schedule a time. This was the International Baccalaureate section of a hard science course, a dozen kids who presumably would make Southwest High School and its teachers look shiny and successful. And who were all, at the time, prepping for a solid month of IB testing — something the school brags about in its marketing efforts.

As he talked, I looked up the recently released results of the assessments. At his school 43 kids, or a little more than a tenth of the class, took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in math. Sixty-one 10th-graders took the reading test. Results involving fewer than 10 students are not reported publicly for privacy reasons; too few 11th graders to count took the math test.

So consider for a moment: Only 104 of about 1,400 kids who were supposed to take the test did.

And what have we heard about it from the higher-ups? Zip.

This is the third year running in which district and state leaders have done nothing when confronted with abundant evidence that teachers are putting up roadblocks to the collection of data. Honestly, when fewer than 10 kids take the math test, how many people had to turn a blind eye — or collude — all the way up to the highest levels of the education system?

Thomas Ricks

Veterans are about 20 percent more likely than nonveterans to kill themselves, according to a Veterans Affairs press release issued on Friday afternoon at the close of business. (Traditionally, that’s when Washington public affairs types put out bad news they don’t wish to discuss. Mainly they hope to see it tucked into Saturday newspapers that no one reads.)

Also, the suicide rate for female veterans is 250 percent that for female non-vets.

The document itself states that the study is quite significant. “This report is unprecedented in its comprehensive analysis of suicide rates among all U.S. Veterans,” it reads.

Timothy Volker:

The Free Software Foundation Europe and a broad group of organisations including Creative Commons are supporting the Public Money, Public Code campaign. The initiative calls for the adoption of policies that require that software paid for by the public be made broadly available as Free and Open Source Software. Nearly 40 organisations and over 6200 individuals have already supported this action by signing the open letter. You can sign it too.

We know that publicly funded educational materials and scientific research should be made available under open licenses for maximum access and reuse by everyone.

The same goes for the digital infrastructure of publicly-funded software. Unfortunately, governments around the world tend to procure mostly proprietary software, and the restrictive licenses that come with it limits our rights as citizens to use (and improve) these tools funded through the public purse and developed for the public good.

Make your voice heard today. The campaign organiser will deliver the signatures to European representatives who are debating software freedom in public administration.

Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter .

Many Americans are disgusted and concerned about the dysfunction and abysmal results from Washington, D.C., and so are we. However, this paper is not about adding to the depressing national dialog about politics, but about how to change the system by taking action that will work.
Too many people—including many pundits, political scientists, and politicians themselves—are laboring under a misimpression that our political problems are inevitable, or the result of a weakening of the parties, or due to the parties’ ideological incoherence, or because of an increasingly polarized American public. Those who focus on these reasons are looking in the wrong places. The result is that despite all the commentary and attention on politics in recent years, there is still no accepted strategy to reform the system and things keep getting worse.

We need a new approach. Our political problems are not due to a single cause, but rather to a failure of the nature of the political competition that has been created. This is a systems problem.

We are not political scientists, political insiders, or political experts. Instead, we bring
a new
analytical lens to understanding the performance of our political system: the lens of industry competition. This type of analysis has been used for decades to understand competition in other industries, and sheds new light on the failure of politics because politics in America has become, over the last several decades, a major industry that works like other industries.

We use this lens to put forth an investment thesis for political reform and innovation. What would be required to actually change the political outcomes we are experiencing? What would it take to better align the political system with the public interest and make progress on the nation’s problems? And, which of the many political reform and innovation ideas that have been proposed would actually alter the trajectory of the system?

Politics in America is not a hopeless problem, though it is easy to feel this way given what we experience and read about every day. There are promising reforms already gaining traction including important elements of the strategy we propose. It is up to us as citizens to recapture our democracy—it will not be self-correcting. We invite you to personally engage by investing both your time and resources—and by mobilizing those around you—in what we believe is the greatest challenge facing America today.

Gerry Smith:

For two years, Northwestern University student Ben Pope and his friends have gathered in dorms, connected their laptops to TVs and computer monitors, and streamed multiple sports events at once.

While they were watching, so was Comcast Corp., using data from the online video service it markets on about 100 campuses to gain insights into young audiences who have so far eluded conventional pay-TV providers.

BEENA RAGHAVENDRAN AND MARYJO WEBSTER:

Once it was the biggest school district in the state. Now Minneapolis Public Schools is the biggest loser in Minnesota’s robust school-choice environment, surrendering more kids to charter schools and other public school options than any other district.

And unlike most other school districts in the state, most of the defections in Minneapolis are occurring among black families. The 9,000 departing black students make up more than half of the districtwide total, according to a Star Tribune analysis of state enrollment data.

Families cite a variety of reasons for leaving the city’s school system, ranging from safety concerns to a belief that academics elsewhere are better than in Minneapolis, which has struggled for years to close the more than 50-percentage-point gap between white and black student achievement.

Minneapolis schools officials say they’re confident they can reverse the trend and boost academic achievement so high that families will once again choose the city’s schools.

But some parents can’t wait for promised change. Jessica Rogers, a south Minneapolis mom who used to work for the district’s nonprofit arm, sent her son to a Robbinsdale-run elementary school and has picked Minnehaha Academy for middle school.

“He needs nurturing,” Rogers said. “That’s not going to happen at Minneapolis Public Schools.”

Related:

Open enrollment leavers.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

They are all rich white kids and they will do just fine – NOT!

Madison now spends nearly $20,000 per student….

John Freeman:

With each passing year, it struck me as a diminishment for literary culture to peer into the future of writing but immediately restrict its keyhole to a nationality—or a genre. What happens if you take these restrictions off, and start reading across generations?

In that spirit The Future of New Writing issue of Freeman’s was born, and for the past two years, sometimes haphazardly or by luck, but with increasing direction, I have gathered names (see below), called in texts, bought and borrowed books, and read with the goal of trying to find out who were the best emerging writers.

Passing what I liked or thought I liked on to Allison Malecha, we read the work of over 100 writers, and relied upon the advice of hundreds of writers and critics, translators, bookstore owners, festival directors, publishers and academics.

Inga Kiderra:

An international team of researchers reports that when children are praised for being smart not only are they quicker to give up in the face of obstacles they are also more likely to be dishonest and cheat. Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told “You are so smart” vs “You did very well this time.”

The study, published in Psychological Science, is co-authored by Gail Heyman of the University of California San Diego, Kang Lee of the University of Toronto, and Lulu Chen and Li Zhao of Hangzhou Normal University in China.

The research builds on well-known work by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, author of “Mindset,” who has shown that praising a child’s innate ability instead of the child’s effort or a specific behavior has the unintended consequence of reducing their motivation to learn and their ability to deal with setbacks.

The present study shows there’s also a moral dimension to different kinds of praise and that it affects children at younger ages than previously known. Even the kindergarten and preschool set seem to be sensitive to subtle differences in praise.

“It’s common and natural to tell children how smart they are,” said co-author Gail Heyman, a development psychologist at UC San Diego. “Even when parents and educators know that it harms kids’ achievement motivation, it’s still easy to do. What our study shows is that the harm can go beyond motivation and extend to the moral domain. It makes a child more willing to cheat in order to do well.”

Quote Investigator:

Dear Quote Investigator: The famous management guru Peter Drucker apparently made a provocative prediction about education:

Universities won’t survive.
Is this quotation accurate? Would you please help me to find a citation?

Quote Investigator: In 1997 “Forbes” published an interview with Peter F. Drucker under the title “Seeing things as they really are” by Robert Lenzner and Stephen S. Johnson. The interviewers flew to Claremont, California and spent ten hours speaking with Drucker about the future. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI: 1

Education. Now there’s a subject that interests everyone today. President Clinton says we should pump more money into the present educational establishment. Drucker says the current setup is doomed, at least so far as higher education is concerned.

“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

During the interview Drucker expressed concern about the escalating cost of education:

Max Roser:

A recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%. Very few people think that the world is getting better.

What is the evidence that we need to consider when answering this question? The question is about how the world has changed and so we must take a historical perspective. And the question is about the world as a whole and the answer must therefore consider everybody. The answer must consider the history of global living conditions – a history of everyone.

I. Poverty

To see where we are coming from we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked during our life time it is easy to make the mistake of thinking of the world as relatively static – the rich, healthy and educated parts of the world here and the poor, uneducated, sick regions there – and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and that it always will be like that.

Take a longer perspective and it becomes very clear that the world is not static at all. The countries that are rich today were very poor just very recently and were in fact worse off than the poor countries today.

Anna Wilde Mathews:

The average cost of health coverage offered by employers pushed toward $19,000 for a family plan this year, while the share of firms providing insurance to workers continued to edge lower, according to a major survey.

Annual premiums rose 3% to $18,764 for an employer plan in 2017, from $18,142 last year, the same rate of increase as in 2016, according to an annual poll of employers performed by the nonprofit Kaiser Family…

Courage to Teach: SIS | duckduckgo.

Charles Russell::

Over 200 University of California, Berkeley professors and faculty are calling for the shutdown of classes and activities during “free speech week,” an event scheduled Sept. 24 to 27 that features some “alt-right” speakers.

In an open letter to Berkeley community and campus members, the group called for the boycott of classes and for the closing of all buildings, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Therefore, as faculty committed to the safety of our students and our campus, we are calling for a complete boycott of all classes and campus activities while these Alt-Right events are taking place at the very center of UC Berkeley’s campus,” the letter said.

The faculty believes the university should not ask students and staff to choose between “risking their physical and mental safety,” and coming to campus for class or work.

“As faculty we cannot ask students and staff to choose between risking their physical and mental safety in order to attend class or come to work in an environment of harassment, intimidation, violence, and militarized policing,” the letter said.

Gaston Dorren:

h, for the days of fact-free linguistics! The pre-scientific era might have produced a lot of codswallop and hogwash, but how entertaining it is to look back upon. Scholars erred in ways that few modern linguists ever would. Today, their field of study is a respectable social science, exacting in its methods, broad in its scope and generous in its harvest. Without phoneticians, computers wouldn’t be able to process spoken English. Without sociolinguists, prejudice against dialects and non-Western languages would still be rife – or rather, rifer still. Forensic linguists help to solve crimes, clinical linguists treat people with language impairments, historical linguists shed light on language change and even on prehistoric culture and migration – the list goes on and on. As in other disciplines, pertinent questions and rigorous methods to answer them have been at the root of success.

When natural philosophy began to slowly develop into physics and other natural sciences, learned speculation in the human domain did not immediately follow suit. But it too gradually developed into what we now call the social sciences, and the study of language was one of the earliest adopters of the new methods. Its practitioners would pore over ancient texts written in long-dead languages and long-forgotten scripts, and compare them ever more systematically. This led to a breakthrough in the late 18th century, when there emerged new ideas about the historical origins of modern languages. Most of these ideas have stood the test of time.

Ilya Somin:

A closer look at the First Amendment question reveals that 48% recalled that the Amendment protects the right to freedom of speech. The other rights protected by the Amendment (freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to petition the government, and freedom of assembly) are far less well-known. For example, only 15% remembered the right to freedom of religion.

These survey results do not come as a surprise to experts on political knowledge. They are largely consistent with previous data going back several decades, showing widespread ignorance on a wide range of legal and political matters, including the Constitution. As Cilliza points out, the Annenberg results paint an even bleaker picture than earlier polls. For example, surveys typically find that some 35-40% of Americans can name the three branches of government. The Annenberg figure of 26% is unusually low. But even if it is an aberration, the results from previous surveys are nothing to write home about.

Anthony Lonetree and MaryJo Webster:

Heaser always considered herself an advocate for St. Paul’s public schools, but the East Side mother of three faced a dilemma a few years ago when her son approached middle-school age.

Stick with a St. Paul public school, or join the tens of thousands of Minnesota students who leave their home districts every year?

Today, Heaser’s seventh-grade son attends John Glenn Middle School in Maplewood, where he has the opportunity to take advanced math and language arts classes lacking in their St. Paul neighborhood schools.

“It has been a great fit so far,” Heaser said.

Minnesota students have had the right to attend school in other districts since 1990, but the number of elementary and high school students exercising that option is surging. Last year, about 132,000 Minnesota students enrolled in schools outside their home district, four times the number making that choice in 2000, a Star Tribune analysis shows.

School choice options — open enrollment and charter schools — have proved especially popular with nonwhite or minority students, according to the Star Tribune’s analysis of the racial breakdown of students who opt out of their home district. While white students represent 60 percent of all students who open enroll, a higher share of nonwhite students make that choice.

Because state education funding follows the pupil, the student exodus from their home district to other cities and charter schools is magnifying budget pressures in districts that lose more students than they gain. It’s also transforming the racial diversity of schools across the Twin Cities.

Open enrollment means some districts, like Columbia Heights and Brooklyn Center, have become revolving doors, losing nearly as many students as they take in from other districts. It means some districts, like Minnetonka, are able to fill classroom seats that would otherwise be empty, while others like Burnsville-Eagan-Savage and Osseo now struggle to attract students who live in the district.

Locally, open enrollment has found more studnts leaving the Madison School District.

Greg Brown:

The number of male teachers is in rapid decline and experts warn they will disappear from primary schools unless there is government action to encourage them back into the profession.

Research from Macquarie University shows male teachers dropped from 28.5 per cent of primary school teachers in 1977 to just 18 per cent today.

Lucia Moses:

It’s been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it’s used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games, producing stories like this one and tweets like this:

David Leonhardt:

“It is safer to have a whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance.”

That quotation comes from Thomas Jefferson, and he believed it so deeply that he devoted much of his public life to creating the University of Virginia. It became one of the country’s greatest public universities. On Friday, U.Va, as it’s known, named a new president, James Ryan, the highly regarded dean of Harvard’s education school.

Ryan’s appointment is a good time to point out that, in a fundamental way, the University of Virginia is failing to live up to Jefferson’s ideals. It has for years been one of the least economically diverse colleges in the country — of any kind, public or private.

Lisa Speckhard Pasque

“Americans are still the greatest innovators in the world; we are the worst implementers,” she said.

But Wisconsin needs to keep working for better education systems, she said. African-American students make up a minority of students in Wisconsin, but their success affects us all, she said.

“It’s sometimes hard to get a largely white state to pay attention to the needs of small minority,” she said. “We have to develop a perspective that lets us see what I like to call ‘the least of these’ as our kids.

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Matthew DeFour:

While schools are ramping up their focus on employment, fewer employers are offering training. Over the past two decades the percentage of American companies that train their employees has dropped from 35 percent to 20 percent, according to Ed Gordon, a Chicago-based economist and author of “Future Jobs: Solving the Employment and Skills Crisis.”

“We’re seeing the same problem across every major business sector,” Gordon said. “The number of well-trained individuals who have all the skills — there aren’t enough of them. The reason is the education system that was the best in the world really hasn’t changed a whole lot in terms of what it’s producing in terms of educated people. But the job market has changed dramatically.”

Madison’s Pathways
The Madison School District’s Personalized Pathways program may be going even further than many districts in emphasizing career readiness. This fall it is altering the high school experience for hundreds of freshmen by focusing classes on health services topics.

Online training has exploded…

John Banville::

For those of us elders who went to school under the old dispensation, nothing was more surely calculated to make us detest the essay form than that stout textbook of English prose forced on us as part of the general memory test that in those days passed for education.

The piece from that ponderous compendium everyone remembers is Charles Lamb’s A Dissertation upon Roast Pig – children are always interested in food – but how many years had to pass before it dawned on us that the likes of William Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson were surpassingly fine writers?

Danny Heitman:

In 1960, a new book promised to point Americans toward enough literature to last them for decades. In The Lifetime Reading Plan, author Clifton Fadiman surveyed roughly 100 celebrated literary works from antiquity to the modern age, providing brief essays on everything from Homer to Herman Melville to Aldous Huxley in hopes that readers would engage with them on their own.

Nearly six decades after its debut—and almost two decades after Fadiman’s death—his Reading Plan remains in print, now in its fourth edition. It’s the most visible legacy of a man who, in his heyday, used print, radio, and television to explain literature to the vast middle of moderately educated Americans, becoming a national celebrity along the way.

Fadiman’s resumé defies easy summary. He helped establish the Book-of-the-Month Club and served on its board for more than a half century. He was also a force in shaping Encyclopedia Britannica, served as book editor of the New Yorker, and moderated a game show, carried on radio and later TV, called Information, Please, in which an erudite panel of commentators fielded questions from audience members, who would win a set of the Britannica if they stumped the experts. Additionally, Fadiman worked in book publishing, as a magazine columnist, anthologist, and familiar essayist, his musings gathered in charming collections such as Party of One, Any Number Can Play, and Enter, Conversing. With typical self-deprecation, Fadiman called himself an “odd job man” in describing his Olympian output.

Steve LeVine:

In 1986, Geoffrey Hinton co-authored a paper that, four decades later, is central to the explosion of artificial intelligence. But Hinton says his breakthrough method should be dispensed with, and a new path to AI found.

Speaking with Axios on the sidelines of an AI conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a Google researcher, said he is now “deeply suspicious” of back-propagation, the workhorse method that underlies most of the advances we are seeing in the AI field today, including the capacity to sort through photos and talk to Siri. “My view is throw it all away and start again,” he said.
Keep reading 158 words

The bottom line: Other scientists at the conference said back-propagation still has a core role in AI’s future. But Hinton said that, to push materially ahead, entirely new methods will probably have to be invented. “Max Planck said, ‘Science progresses one funeral at a time.’ The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.”

Robert Parry:

What is stunning about the lede story in last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers no real evidence to support its provocative claim that—as the headline states —“To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook, Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.”

In the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s “newspaper of record.”

In this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities, but he ties none of them to the Russian government. Acting like he has minimal familiarity with the Internet—yes, a lot of people do use fake identities—Shane builds his case on the assumption that accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin.

Hangovercure:

Erica Rascon, a professor from the University of Essex has conducted a study which showed that strict mothers have successful children, and that successful people had highly demanding mothers. The research analyzed surveys of more than 15 000 children aged 13-14 between 2004 and 2010. According to Rascon, “the measure of the expectations in this study reflects a combination of aspirations and beliefs about the likelihood of access to higher education declared by the majority of parents, in most cases the mother.”

The children whose mothers had high expectations are much more confident and secure. The results of the study showed that daughters who had persistent and nagging mothers have 4% lower chances of getting pregnant prematurely. Children who had persistent mothers were also more likely to finish college and get a nice job. It may sound unrealistic, but demanding and strict mothers do have more successful children.

“In many cases we have success doing what they believe to be most convenient for us, even against our parents. “But no matter how much we esmeremos to avoid our parents, any recommendations form influence, albeit subtly in the decisions we make, but we believe t

Chris Rickert:

Like the rest of the board, both also voted to approve the 304-page employee handbook that replaced union contracts beginning in summer 2016.

District legal counsel Dylan Pauly pointed to two board policies that include provisions related to managing conflicts of interest among board members.

One says board members should “avoid conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts of interest,” including those set forth in a state law that prohibits “any official action substantially affecting a matter in which the official, a member of his or her immediate family, or an organization with which the official is associated has a substantial financial interest.”

In such cases the board member should refrain from participating in discussions about or voting on such matters in work groups and regular board meetings, and can even choose to leave the room, according to the policy.

Pauly told me Tuesday that she was “not going to address any specific issue or question regarding conflicts of interest for any particular board member.” (She wouldn’t say if it’s district taxpayers, the media or this particular member of the media who can’t get an opinion on the behavior of taxpayer-paid, publicly elected board members from the taxpayer-paid lawyer for the school district.)

But two years ago she pointed to a 1997 opinion from the old state Ethics Board as reason why board members with close personal relations employed by the school district can vote, in some capacity, on policies that affect those close personal relations.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Preparatory IB Charter School and the more recent Montessori pseudo Charter School.

This, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,0000 per student and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

An emphasis on adult employment, and what’s different this time.

Terence Jeffrey:

The federal government collected record total tax revenues through the first eleven months of fiscal 2017 (Oct. 1, 2016 through the end of August), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Through August, the federal government collected approximately $2,966,172,000,000 in total tax revenues.

That was $8,450,680,000 more (in constant 2017 dollars) than the previous record of $2,957,721,320,000 in total tax revenues (in 2017 dollars) that the federal government collected in the first eleven months of fiscal 2016.

At the same time that the federal government was collecting a record $2,966,172,000,000 in tax revenues, it was spending $3,639,882,000,000—and, thus, running a deficit of $673,711,000,000.

Alan Borsuk:

So how is MPS doing? Maybe the best and broadest answer I’d give is: Somewhat better, probably better than a lot of people think, but there is still a mountain to climb and reasons to worry.

That’s not much different from the answer MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver gives. As she starts her fourth year at the top of the system, I asked her what shape things are in.

“Big-picture wise, we have definitely made some progress,” Driver said. “We’ve been willing to make some tough decisions around our infrastructure and how we are organized, how we are prioritizing things to get things done. But it’s clear we have a long way to go.”

Driver is an energetic booster for MPS. She can rattle off initiatives and changes that are encouraging — expansion of successful programs, new offerings, some improvements in ACT scores, attendance and suspension rates. The large majority of MPS schools now have policies for kids to wear uniforms and many schools started in mid-August, instead of in September.

Terence Jeffrey:

T he three richest counties in the United States with populations of 65,000 or more, when measured by their 2016 median household incomes, were all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to data released today by the Census Bureau.

Eight of the 20 wealthiest counties with populations of 65,000 or more were also suburbs of Washington, D.C.–as were 10 of the top 25.

Loudoun County, Va., with a median household income of $134,464, was nation’s wealthiest county, according to the Census Bureau.

Loudoun was also the wealthiest county in 2015. But from 2015 to 2016 its median household income increased by $8,564–rising from $125,900 to 134,464.

Howard County, Md., with a median household income of $120,941, was the nations’ second wealthiest county. Fairfax County, Va., with a median household income of $115,717, was the third wealthiest.

Jonathan Easley::

CNN reported on Wednesday that Rice told House investigators that in December — after Trump had won the election and before his inauguration — she authorized the unmasking of the identities of his advisers Michael Flynn, Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner in an intelligence report, revealing them internally.

Rice said she did so because the three were meeting with United Arab Emirates (UAE) crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, who had apparently not informed the Obama administration that he was traveling to New York City. Nahyan was not required to do so, but Rice said it would have been standard diplomatic procedure at the time.

Rice says she ordered the unmasking to find out why Nahyan had come to the U.S. and that the revelation he was meeting with Bannon, Flynn and Kushner was incidental to that effort.

The New York meeting preceded an effort by the UAE to assist in setting up a back-channel line of communication between Trump’s team and Russia.

Related: Trump Administration Says It’s Classified If They Can Let The NSA Spy On Americans.

Marshall Project

In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Jones, now 45, became a published scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by videoconference to historians’ conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly. With no internet access and a prison library that skewed toward romance novels, she led a team of inmates that poured through reams of photocopied documents from the state archives to produce the Indiana Historical Society’s best research project last year. As prisoner No. 970554, Jones also wrote several dance compositions and historical plays, one of which is slated to open at an Indianapolis theater in December.N.Y.U. was one of several top schools that recruited her for their doctoral programs. She was also among 18 selected from more than 300 applicants to Harvard University’s history program. But in a rare override of a department’s authority to choose its graduate students, Harvard’s top brass overturned Jones’s admission after some professors raised concerns that she downplayed her crime during the application process.

Eurodyce:

The school calendar contains national data on the length of the school year, the start and the end dates of each school year, the timing and length of school holidays and the number of school days. It covers both primary and general secondary education and key points are illustrated by comparative figures. The information is available for 37 countries.

Some variations in the number of the school days across Europe

The number of school days varies between 162 days in France (except in upper secondary education) and 200 days in Denmark and Italy. In around half the countries, it is between 170 and 180 days; in 15 countries, the number varies between 181 and 190 days. In general, the number of school days is the same in primary and secondary education but there are a few exceptions: in Belgium, France (upper secondary education) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republica Srpska), the number of schools days is higher in secondary education than in primary.
The opposite (fewer school days in secondary education than in primary education) is observed in Ireland, Greece, Cyprus and the Netherlands.

Andrew Johnson:

Most recently, the dean’s office of Utah Valley University, a public institution located in the north-central part of Utah, distributed a guidance letter to all faculty encouraging them to report to the school’s Behavior Assessment Team any students who use “inappropriate language,” are “argumentative,” or who speak “loudly.”

The letter, titled “Recognizing and Responding to Students of Concern,” was provided to The College Fix by a professor at Utah Valley. The document instructs faculty on the various types of behaviors that merit concern, including stalking, angry outbursts and bullying, as well as the signs that a student may harm himself or others.

The guidance letter gave professors advice on how to respond to a wide range of student behaviors. Professors are instructed to use techniques ranging from “supportive gestures” to calling 911, depending on the severity of the situation.

Inspector General: Chicago Board of Education:

From the 2012–13 school year through the 2015–16 school year, 342 students were kept on the rolls improperly after their release from jail a total of 352 times

On average, those students were listed falsely as being enrolled at the school for 42 days following their release from jail In 54 instances those students were kept on the rolls for more than 100 days after their release.

The school also falsified attendance. During the 2015–16 school year alone, 45 students were reported falsely as being present for the full school day a total of 351 times after they were already released from the jail

The attendance of students still in the jail was inflated as well.

The school frequently awarded students credits when the students had not received enough classroom instruction to qualify for them.

One teacher told the OIG the school was a “credit mill.

Zhuang Pinghui:

One afternoon in early September, Lucy Zhou decided to skip her usual Saturday lectures. Instead, the 34-year-old new media executive put on a traditional Chinese dress, let down her long hair and applied some light make-up: she was going to a group date in northern Beijing.

When she arrived, Zhou was asked to join other guests in a circle and was partnered with the man sitting next to her. After a brief conversation, their host invited each guest to introduce their partner to the 70-odd participants.

As some details were omitted and others played up, one thing that never went unmentioned was where these single people, mostly in their early 30s and some in their late 20s, received their education.

Like Zhou and the others at this matchmaking event, an increasing number of young people in China are prioritising an elite academic background over other considerations such as salary and looks when looking for a partner. Relationship experts said those with the most prestigious educations were more likely to find a match within their peer group.

The participants at the matchmaking event Zhou attended had graduated from top universities, either in China or in the United States or Britain, and many were postgraduates.

Kevin Hartnett:

In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The advance touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers.

The problem was first identified over a century ago. At the time, mathematicians knew that “the real numbers are bigger than the natural numbers, but not how much bigger. Is it the next biggest size, or is there a size in between?” said Maryanthe Malliaris of the University of Chicago, co-author of the new work along with Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University.

In their new work, Malliaris and Shelah resolve a related 70-year-old question about whether one infinity (call it p) is smaller than another infinity (call it t). They proved the two are in fact equal, much to the surprise of mathematicians.

Marty Swant:

The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will “sabotage” the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari.
 
 Six trade groups—the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A’s and two others—say they’re “deeply concerned” with Apple’s plans to release a version of the internet browser that overrides and replaces user cookie preferences with a set of Apple-controlled standards. The feature, which is called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention,” limits how advertisers and websites can track users across the internet by putting in place a 24-hour limit on ad retargeting.
 
 In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet,” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.”
 
 “Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Adweek this morning. “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.”

Lisa Pickoff-White and Erika Aguilar

More Californians live in poverty than in any other state, according to a measure used by the U.S. Census Bureau that takes into account the cost of living and government assistance programs.

About 20 percent of Californians lived below the Census’ “supplemental” poverty measure from 2014 to 2016, according to data released by the Bureau on Tuesday.

The supplemental poverty measure factors in the government programs for low-income families and individuals, as well as housing costs, which are not included in the official poverty measure.

Locally, Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student (far more than most), despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Matthew Watkins:

Rice University in Houston is by far the best college in Texas — and the 14th-best school in the nation — according to U.S. News and World Reports’ latest college rankings.

No other Texas universities broke the top 50 of the magazine’s influential rankings.

But five jockeyed for position in spots 50 to 80, including the University of Texas at Austin (second in Texas, 56th overall) and Dallas’ Southern Methodist University (61st overall).

Texas A&M University ranks fourth in the state this year, climbing from 74th in the nation last year to 69th this year. A&M surpassed Baylor University, which fell four spots this year to 75th overall. Texas Christian University climbed from 82nd to 78th in the country this year, and now ranks fifth in Texas.

Chicago Tribune:

But be wary, Governor. You’ll have trouble convincing some special interests, including legislators from university towns, that a campus isn’t first and foremost a cash cow for the local economy. Illinois can’t continue to prop up so many schools that have duplicate administrators, duplicate overhead and duplicate curriculums. Too many campuses are competing for scarce resources to do what other universities are doing better.

Whenever you encounter pushback, keep repeating: “Nine university boards to oversee 12 schools.”

The idea isn’t to weaken already-faltering universities, but to strengthen and rationalize the statewide system. By making schools accountable to centralized oversight. By streamlining procurement and consolidating other business operations. By sending a larger chunk of cash into classrooms and labs, and a smaller chunk into overhead and administration.

Fix this system now, lawmakers, and give individual schools the missions that will let them shine. Or watch more students flee.

Ellen McCarthy:

Sandra Boynton lives on a farm in rural Connecticut. She works out of a converted barn, surrounded by pigs in overalls, frogs wearing cowboy hats, a clutch of bemused chickens and a few skeptical sock puppets.

Standing there, you get the feeling that at any moment they might all come alive and break into a high-stepping song-and-dance. Which they probably will. Because this is Boynton’s world, and in Boynton’s world, animals do whatever she wants. And what she wants them to do, mostly, is make her smile.

It’s nice that along the way the charming creatures have sold tens of millions of children’s books and hundreds of millions of greeting cards, recorded six albums, nabbed a Grammy nomination and co-starred in a music video with B.B. King. They’re not slackers, these furry and feathered friends. They always do their job — they make Boynton smile. And then they go out into the world and do the same for untold multitudes of kids.

JM Olejarz:

College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They’re asked it so often—and by so many people—that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is “What are you planning to do with your degree?” But it might as well be “What are the humanities good for?”

According to three new books, the answer is “Quite a lot.” From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.

In The Fuzzy and the Techie, venture capitalist Scott Hartley takes aim at the “false dichotomy” between the humanities and computer science. Some tech industry leaders have proclaimed that studying anything besides the STEM fields is a mistake if you want a job in the digital economy. Here’s a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: “Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.”

Colleen Flaherty:

Lucas Reilly:

Nobody aboard could see what had happened. It was midnight, and the HMS Saunders-Hill—a merchant vessel anchored along a sleepy bend of the River Thames—shuddered violently. Crewmen clambered from their beds and grasped at tilting walls. Cries filled the briny air. In the darkness, it was difficult to make sense of what had happened.

James Holman, one of the passengers who had rushed to the deck, expected to find the Saunders-Hill wrecked to splinters. Instead he felt the boat—the whole boat—lurch from its anchorage and drift into the middle of the Thames.

The anchor chain had snapped. An errant coal ship, Holman would learn, had collided with the Saunders-Hill, sending the schooner’s rigging—the cat’s cradle of ropes, cables, and chains strung from the masts—bobbing in the current.

The good news was that the heaving ship remained afloat. Holman, a former sailor in the Royal Navy, clutched a railing and inched his way toward the helm to assist the captain.

We hope that our commitments set forth here will inspire you to make a similar commitment to do the job you were each elected to do. We look forward to seeing you commit to a focus on ensuring that ALL Nashville children have the ability to attend great public schools. We look forward to the day when a public school family knows that they can make the best choice for their children without receiving the worst treatment from our elected officials.

Thank you.

1,012 Proud Nashville Public Charter School Parents

Locally, a majority of the Madison School rejected the proposed Preparatory Academy IB Charter School and more recently a non independent Montessori Proposal.

Despite spending nearly $20k per student annually, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

 
 Nancy Scola:

Simpson’s group has long criticized the country’s biggest tech companies, saying they abuse consumers on everything from privacy to pricing. But across Washington, liberals and conservatives are beginning to find common ground in the view that the industry’s power over American life has grown too vast and unchecked — and the new dynamic is upending traditional ideological alignments.
 
 Tech’s new critics include Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has begun sounding the alarm that Google has grown into “the most powerful company in the history of the world.”
 
 Carlson recently aired an interview with Matt Stoller, a member of an antitrust team that lost its jobs at the left-leaning think tank New America after praising a $2.7 billion fine that the European Commission levied against Google this summer for stifling competition. The New York Times reported that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, a New America funder, had complained about the statement posted by Stoller’s team — a turn of events that Carlson described as a sign of Google’s “terrifying” power.
 
 Stoller, a former aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), later praised Carlson as “one of the few on TV willing to talk about it.”

Wilson Rothman:

Parents, it’s OK—essential, even—to spy on your children’s internet use.

Children are getting smartphones, tablets and iPods at earlier ages, but that doesn’t mean they’re laying low in “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.” Just peek at your child’s browsing history; sometimes elementary schoolers google like teenagers.

Jon Marcus:

Behind the deceptive quiet of a small college campus in the summer, things are buzzing at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Faculty at the 175-year-old liberal-arts school, which has about 1,700 undergraduates, are preparing new majors in high-demand fields including data analytics and computational neuroscience. Admissions officers are back from scouting out prospective students in China, India and Pakistan. Recruiters have been on the road closer to home, too, in Cleveland and Chicago. In the athletics department, work is under way to add two sports and a marching band.

More money has been put into financial aid, the process of transferring to the college is being streamlined, and the ink is still wet on contracts with Carnegie-Mellon University and a medical school to speed Ohio Wesleyan students more quickly to graduate degrees. The number of internships is being expanded, along with short-term study-abroad opportunities. The university is considering freezing, lowering or slowing the rate of increase of its tuition and fees, which are now $44,690.

the74million.org

A new book by the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Osborne, is a story of transformation.

It is a bracing survey of the most dramatic improvements taking place in urban public education today, in cities as diverse as New Orleans, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis.
Read excerpts from Osborne’s new book.
Explore the cities on the forefront of innovation.

Meet some of the creators and changemakers leading the revolution.
Think about what the future of public education can hold for students.
Join us on this journey as we continue to share more stories of America’s changemakers in the coming months.

Retraction Watch

What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message.

Benjamin Jones

Christine Rosen:

So when Lynn issued a press release on June 27, 2017, congratulating the European commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, for fining Google $2.7 billion, it could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone at New America. “Google’s market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today,” Lynn wrote, and he called on U.S. regulators “to build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon.”

Yet it was a surprise to New America’s most-prominent donor, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Google and Schmidt have given more than $21 million to New America in recent years, and Schmidt chaired the think tank’s board for eight years. So displeased was he by Lynn’s praise for the EU decision that, according to one of the current co-chairs of the board, Jonathan Soros, he asked to be removed as chairman emeritus. Days later, Lynn and his team of 10 full-time employees were out.

When a New York Times story about the ouster appeared online on August 30, Anne-Marie Slaughter immediately tweeted, “This story is false.” This was followed by another tweet a few hours later saying, “Let me be clearer in an era of fake news; facts are largely right but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” She would later delete her first tweet.

Coming on the heels of the August firing of engineer James Damore for challenging what he described as an ideologically liberal “echo chamber” at the company, this episode has seen Google do the hardest thing possible in Washington—it’s brought left and right together to question the company’s power and generated a wave of anti-monopoly fervor.

The controversy also revives perennial questions about how think tanks operate: How do institutions that take tens of millions of dollars from corporations and wealthy individuals maintain their integrity? Can policymakers and the public trust the research that emerges? And in an age that demands transparency, in which missteps and scandals are instantly magnified thanks to social media, how can research institutions pursue both relevance and rectitude?

For two years, I received financial support—$50,000 a year—from New America to study and write about technology. After my fellowship ended in 2014, I was invited to continue my relationship with the foundation as an unpaid Future Tense fellow, part of a team that sponsored debates, panels, and book events on technology-related subjects in conjunction with Arizona State University and Slate. Everyone I know at New America is hardworking and intellectually curious.

Thomas Frank:

Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are covering up offensive sculptures and censoring offensive speakers. Readers will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our radicalized professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they will cry.

But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different aspect of life on the American campus that doesn’t fit into the tidy narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look instead into the actual conditions under which the work of higher education is done. Let us talk labor.

In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington decided that graduate students who teach classes at private universities can be considered employees of those universities, eligible to form unions and bargain collectively with their employers. It was the end point of a decades-long process in which the Board has oscillated between ruling in favor of grad student unions and then against them.

In the aftermath of the NLRB decision, graduate student teachers at Columbia and Yale universities, both schools in the Ivy League, held elections and voted to form unions. More organizing elections are scheduled for the next few weeks at a number of other private universities, and as the school year gets under way grad students should rightfully be negotiating new contracts throughout the United States.

But here’s the catch: thanks to the election of Donald Trump last November, the NLRB will soon be under the sway of his extremely anti-union Republican party.

Once Trump’s members are seated on the Labor Board, there is every likelihood they will revisit the matter of graduate student teachers and reverse themselves on the question, which would in turn permit university administrations to refuse to negotiate and even to blow off the results of these elections.

Denver Business Journal

Embracing innovation and taking calculated risks are two core values that successful companies encourage every day. Whether they are in Tokyo, Silicon Valley, London, Bangalore or Denver, companies that embrace the unknown and challenge conventional wisdom position themselves for a greatness traditional companies that play it safe will never experience.

We are fortunate to live in a state whose citizens embody this philosophy. Whether it is established financial services firms who see opportunity in the state’s highly educated workforce or entrepreneurs seeking high-quality partners to help them achieve their vision, Colorado has a spirit of innovation and opportunity that fosters a positive business environment

Wisconsin Reading Coalition (PDF), via a kind email:

As we reported recently, districts in Wisconsin, with the cooperation of DPI, have been making extensive use of emergency licenses to hire individuals who are not fully-licensed teachers. Click here to see how many emergency licenses were issued in your district in 2016-17 for elementary teachers, special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists. You may be surprised at how high the numbers are. These are fields where state statute requires the individual to pass the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test to obtain a full initial license, and the emergency licenses provide an end-run around that requirement.

These individuals did not need to pass the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test, which would be required for full initial licensure *districts include individuals that are listed only once, but worked in multiple locations or positions

Information provided by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

New Online Certificate Program
Now there is an even more misguided opportunity for districts to hire unprepared teachers. The budget bill, set for an Assembly vote this Wednesday, followed by a vote in the Senate, requires DPI to issue an initial license to anyone who has completed the American Board online training program. That program, for career switchers with bachelor’s degrees, can be completed in less than one year and includes no student teaching (substitute or para-professional experience is accepted). We have no objection to alternate teacher preparation programs IF they actually prepare individuals to Wisconsin standards. In the area of reading, the way to determine that is for the American Board graduates to take the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (FORT). If they cannot pass, they should not be granted anything more than an emergency license, which is what is available to individuals who complete Wisconsin-based traditional and alternate educator preparation programs but cannot pass the FORT. Wisconsin should not accept American Board’s own internal assessments as evidence that American Board certificate holders are prepared to teach reading to beginning and struggling students.

Action Requested
Please contact your legislators and tell them you do not want to weaken Wisconsin’s control over teacher quality by issuing initial licenses to American Board certificate holders who have not, at a minimum, passed the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test. Ask them to remove this provision from the budget bill. Find your legislators and contact information here.
​
How Should Wisconsin Address Its Teacher Shortages?
As pointed out in a recent fact sheet from the National Council on Teacher Quality, teacher shortages are particular to certain fields and geographic areas, and solutions must focus on finding and addressing the reasons for those shortages. This requires gathering and carefully analyzing the relevant data, including the quality of teacher preparation at various institutions, the pay scale in the hiring districts, and the working conditions in the district.

Related: WISCONSIN ELEMENTARY TEACHER CONTENT KNOWLEDGE EXAM RESULTS (FIRST TIME TAKERS).

Am emphasis on adult employment.

John Horrigan:

The Eager and Willing – 22% of U.S. adults
 
 At one end of the information-engagement spectrum is a group we call the Eager and Willing. Compared with all the other groups on this spectrum, they exhibit the highest levels of interest in news and trust in key information sources, as well as strong interest in learning when it comes to their own digital skills and literacy. They are not necessarily confident of their digital abilities, but they are anxious to learn. One striking thing about this group is its demographic profile: More than half the members of this group are minorities: 31% are Hispanic; 21% are black and 38% are white, while the remainder are in other racial and ethnic groups.
 
 The Confident – 16% of adults
 
 Alongside the Eager and Willing are the Confident, who are made up of the one-in-six Americans and combine a strong interest in information, high levels of trust in information sources, and self-assurance that they can navigate the information landscape on their own. Few feel they need to update their digital skills and they are very self-reliant as they handle information flows. This group is disproportionately white, quite well educated and fairly comfortable economically. And one-third of the Confident (31%) are between the ages of 18 and 29, the highest share in this age range of any group.
 
 The Cautious and Curious – 13% of adults

Nicole Smicek:

The platform – an infrastructure that connects two or more groups and enables them to interact – is crucial to these companies’ power. None of them focuses on making things in the way that traditional companies once did. Instead, Facebook connects users, advertisers, and developers; Uber, riders and drivers; Amazon, buyers and sellers.

Reaching a critical mass of users is what makes these businesses successful: the more users, the more useful to users – and the more entrenched – they become. Ello’s rapid downfall occurred because it never reached the critical mass of users required to prompt an exodus from Facebook – whose dominance means that even if you’re frustrated by its advertising and tracking of your data, it’s still likely to be your first choice because that’s where everyone is, and that’s the point of a social network. Likewise with Uber: it makes sense for riders and drivers to use the app that connects them with the biggest number of people, regardless of the sexism of Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive, or the ugly ways in which it controls drivers, or the failures of the company to report serious sexual assaults by its drivers.

Sue Shellenbarger:

Many students will plunge into marathon study sessions this fall, rereading textbooks and highlighting their notes late into the night. The more effort the better, right?

Not so, new research shows. Students who excel at both classroom and standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT aren’t necessarily those who study longest. Instead, they study smart—planning ahead, quizzing themselves on the material and actively seeking out help when they don’t understand it.

Carl Wilke, a Tacoma, Wash., father of six children ages 4 to 22, sees the studying challenges that students face almost every school day. He coaches his children to pick out the main points in their notes rather than highlight everything, and to look for headings and words in bold type to find the big ideas in their textbooks.

Several months ago, his 18-year-old daughter Eileen tried to study for an advanced-placement exam. Eileen says she struggled with a practice test and realized that she didn’t know how to study. She asked her mother, Catherine, for help. Ms. Wilke sat with Eileen for two hours while Eileen used an answer guide for the test to explain why her answers were wrong on questions she’d missed, then discuss the correct ones. As they worked together, Eileen says, “I was teaching her while simultaneously teaching myself” the material—a study technique that enabled her to ace the test.

The Economist

Many students have said privately that the campus has become a place where they are afraid to express dissenting opinions. Students who disagree with the protesters’ views, on social media, have been denounced as racists by activist leaders. A newly accepted international student was mocked when she asked her future classmates if there were any libertarian groups on campus. White students have complained that they have been told by other students that they are unjustified in speaking about race and identity in class. When one student voiced a dissenting opinion on social media, his classmate threatened to get him fired from his job at the college bookstore. “It’s an environment with limited representation of opinion, and it can be hostile to students who hold other views,” says Yuta Kato, a sophomore.

Yet at Reed College this term there are also signs of a counter-revolution. A professor of Muslim studies refused to lecture in front of protesters and taught his class of 150 students outside, under a tree. Some freshmen have shouted down protesters. One (black) student told them: “This is a classroom. This is not the place. Right now we are trying to learn. We are freshmen students.” The rest of his speech was drowned out by applause.

Mike Antonucci:

LC Sheehan:

The term “McDonaldization” was coined by sociology professor George Ritzer in 1993. He meant for it to describe “the industrial process of rationalization that [was] expanding beyond industry into the cultural and educational spheres.”

Ritzer’s term caught on and in 2002, Dennis Hayes and Robin Wynyard applied it to higher education in a book they edited entitled The McDonaldization of Higher Education.

The book describes the attempt by education bureaucrats to improve higher education through the same processes of rationalization applied to industry, to make the university more efficient at delivering its “product” (degrees) to its “customers” (students).

For Hayes and Wynward, the effects of McDonaldization were negative. The point of a degree prior to McDonaldization was to signal that one had acquired a certain amount of knowledge, but after it, degrees lost their connection to education in a meaningful sense. The point of the McDonaldized degree is just to have the credential needed as an increasingly dubious means to a good job.

Alan Krueger

Emily Yoffe:

Kwadwo “Kojo” Bonsu, 23, was on track to graduate in the spring of 2016 with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bonsu, who was born in Maryland, is the son of Ghanaian immigrants. He chose UMass because it gave him the opportunity to pursue his two passions, science and music. He told me he hoped to get a doctorate in polymer science or chemical engineering. At UMass he was a member of the National Society of Black Engineers. He also joined a fraternity (he was the only black member), played guitar in a campus jazz band, and tutored jazz guitarists at a local high school.

Chris Rickert:

I’d like to believe that the “us” in that statement refers not just to the adults who run and work in the schools, but the children who attend them.

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

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School, and recently, the proposed Montessori Charter.

Unaccountable.

Amy Dockser Marcus:

After Luke Rosen’s 3-year-old daughter, Susannah, was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition, he wanted to do what many parents increasingly have done—help accelerate the search for a treatment.

Mr. Rosen, an actor who doesn’t have a science background, quickly learned many of the steps he would need to build a research program to help Susannah and others with KIF1A-related disorder, a neurodegenerative condition that causes some children to lose the ability to walk and speak. Among the steps: set up a foundation; find…

James Altucher:

I failed.

I dropped off my kid at college the other day. I didn’t want her to go to college.

In 2005 or 2006 I wrote a column in The Financial Times that nobody should go to college anymore. I then wrote a book, “40 Alternatives to College”.

For a long time that book was the #1 seller on Amazon in the category of…”College”.

A lot of people were upset at me about this. Everyone had an argument why college was a good thing and that kids should go.

Then people said to me, “Well you went to college so now you are trying to keep people beneath you by not having them go to college.”

And one person threatened to kill me. When I tracked him down it turned out he was a senior at Brown University. HIgher education.

And other people who had spent a lot of money on college stopped returning my calls because I was calling into question the decisions they had made for themselves their entire life.

Alan Borsuk:

Natasha Singer