Emily Loeb:

More than six decades after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, increasing numbers of black children in the U.S. attend what researchers call “apartheid schools” where students of color comprise more than 99 percent of the population.

Such schools educate one-third of black students in New York City and half of the black students in Chicago; nationwide, according to a report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, they educated more than 15 percent of African-American kids and 14 percent of Latinos in 2012. Even in places where racial segregation isn’t quite so absolute, the physical divide between white kids and kids of color in public schools—and charter schools—keeps growing.

Ashe Schow:

Last Wednesday, a group of college presidents and those who handle campus sexual assault accusations met in Washington, D.C., for a briefing.

The first of the two panels put on by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities included four college presidents. The second panel included Title IX coordinators and others who work with accusers and the accused.

The second panel, which featured Jeanne Lord and Jen Luettel Schweer of Georgetown University, Candi Smiley of Howard University, Fatima Taylor of the University of Maryland, and Tammi Slovinsky of Virginia Commonwealth University, wasn’t completely hopeless as far as due process rights are concerned. Still, the bad of the panel far outweighed the good.

The context of the briefing

The meeting was held to discuss the implementation of 2011 guidance from the Obama administration that required colleges to adjudicate sexual assault accusations. The new guidance has led to a slew of hiring, as colleges need people to investigate, punish and provide resources for accusers.

In the years following 2011, students accused of sexual assault have seen their due process rights eviscerated and their presumption of innocence ignored. Meanwhile, the definition of sexual assault has been expanded to include pretty much anything.

Stephen Foley:

More than three-quarters of US universities saw their endowments shrink in the most recent financial year, as their investment portfolios lost money and spending outpaced new donations.

The figures, in a survey of more than 800 of the largest institutions published on Tuesday, suggest a looming funding crunch across US higher education as long-term investment returns sink further below target.

The average endowment shrank 2.9 per cent, according to the study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (Nacubo) and Commonfund, amid increased spending on student financial aid and other contributions to universities’ operating budgets.

The average 10-year investment return has fallen to 5 per cent, below the 7.4 per cent target that universities say allows them to cover their spending obligations plus inflation and other costs.

Tony Evers (PDF):

1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction?

I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher.

I taught and became a principal in Tomah, was an administrator in Oakfield and Verona, led CESA 6, and have twice been elected State Superintendent. I’ve been an educator all across Wisconsin, and no matter where I worked, I put kids first. Always.

But I have to tell you, I worry for the future. Years of relentless attacks on educators and public schools have left a generation of young people disinterested in teaching. The words and actions of leaders matter.

We have to restore respect to the teaching profession.

For teachers in the field, endless requirements and policies from Washington, Madison, and district offices are drowning our best educators in paperwork and well-intended “policy solutions” you never asked for.

I know we need to lighten the load.

As your State Superintendent, I have always tried to find common ground, while holding firm to the values we share.

I worked with Gov. Doyle to increase funding for schools and with Gov. Walker around reading and school report cards. But when Walker wanted to use school report cards to expand vouchers and take over low performing schools, we pushed back together-and we won.
When Walker proposed Act 10, I fought back. From the halls of the Capitol to rallies outside, my union thug wife and I stood with the people of Wisconsin.

I champion mental health in schools, fight for school funding reform, and work to restore
respect to the teaching profession.

But I am not a fool. The world has changed.

In my previous elections, we faced weak opponents we outspent. I won 62% of the vote and all but the three counties voted Evers last time.

But last November, Diane Hendricks and Besty DeVos dropped $5 million into the “Reform America PAC” at the last minute and took out Russ Feingold. Devos is likely to be Education Secretary and Henricks has the ear of the President.

And these people are coming for us.

They’ve recruited a field of conservative candidates vying for their support.

The folks at the conservative Wisconsin Institution for Law & Liberty are doing everything they can to undermine the independent authority of the elected state superintendent. These folks have powerful friends and allies through the state and federal government.

But we ore going to win.

We hired great a campaign team in Wisconsin. We’re raising more money than ever, and we
will need to raise more. We’re mobilizing voters and activating social media.

While Wisconsin went for Mr. Trump, those voters overwhelmingly passed 80% of the referenda questions. They love their public schools. That is what we need to connect with to win.

But I need your help. You’ve stood with me before, and I need your help again. I need you to do more than you’ve ever done before. This is the last office they don’t hold, and it is the first electoral battle in the new world. We cannot afford to lose.

2. Do you believe that public schools are sufficiently funded? If no, describe your plan to provide sufficient funds?

No.

My current state budget request restates our Fair Funding proposal. Under my proposal, all students will receive a minimum amount of aid. To provide an extra lift for some students, the general aid formula will weight students living in poverty.

Additionally, the per-pupil categorical aid will be weighted to account for foster kids, English learners and students that come from impoverished families.

Furthermore, changes to the summer school aid formula will incentivize all schools, but
especially those districts that have students who need extra time to achieve at higher levels to engage in fun, summer learning activities.

The people of Wisconsin are on record that they want to keep their schools strong. An
astounding 88% of the districts (600,000 voters) approved revenue limit exemptions just this last November. Ultimately, I come down on the side of local control and support the eventual elimination of revenue limits. In my budget proposal, I requested a reasonable increase in revenue limits. In the future, these increases should be tied to the cost of living.

3. Madison schools have experienced increasing attrition over the past five years and increasing difficulty in attracting highly qualified candidates in a growing number of certification areas. What factors do you have as the causes of this shortage? What measures will you take to promote the attraction and retention of highly qualified teachers and other school employees?

There are several main factors impacting these issues. The first is the negative rhetoric that occurs all too often around the teaching profession. The second is that Wisconsin educators’ pay has taken a significant hit in recent years -an actual decrease of over 2 percent over the past few years (and changes to benefits and retirement have further eroded take home pay). Our current high school students pick up on this, and increasingly they are not look at teaching as a viable career path, and in Wisconsin, our teacher preparation programs are reporting record lows.

We need to continue to highlight the excellent work our teachers do each and every day and bring back teacher voice in to what goes on in the classroom. I am currently working with a small group of Wisconsin educators, including several from Madison, on a project we are calling “Every Teacher a Leader,” an effort to highlight and promote instances of excellent teacher voice and leadership. Let’s highlight the leadership and critical decision-making our educators use every day in their roles. The cultures of our schools must be strong and support teachers as they work with our students. I continue to advocate for additional resources in our schools to address the most pressing needs of our students and to provide resources for teacher to do their jobs.

4. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s large, urban school districts?

I have championed several initiatives to support large, urban school districts, including
expanding access to:

Small class sizes and classroom support staff to help teachers effectively manage behavioral issues;

Restorative justice and harm reduction strategies that reduce the disproportionate impact of discipline on student of color;

Fun summer learning opportunities for students to accelerate learning or recover credits (increased funding, streamlined report requirements);

Community schools, wrap around services and out-of-school time programs that because schools are the center of our communities;

Culturally-responsive curriculum and profession development that helps educators meet the needs of diverse students;

Mental health services and staff integrated with schools to meet students’ needs.

I also support school finance policies that recognize that many students in poverty, English learners, foster youth, and students with special needs require additional resources to succeed.

Finally, I strongly support a universal accountability system for schools enrolling
publicly-funded students. All schools should have to meet the same high bar.

5. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s rural school districts?

In addition to the proposing the Fair Funding changes, my budget:

Fully-funds the sparsity categorical aid and expands it to more rural schools;

Expands the high cost transportation programs; and

Provides funds for rural educator recruitment and retention.

6. How do you feel about the present Educator Effectiveness (teacher) evaluation system? What changes would you like to see to that system?

I support the Educator Effectiveness (EE) system. It was created with input from teachers, administrators as well as school board members and legislators. I believe we have administered the EE program with great care, listening to stakeholders from across that state.

That said, I believe changes need to be made. Recently, I have recommended that results from the state achievement test (Forward Exam) not be a required element in the evaluation process.

We must also continually message that the EE system was created to support professionals through a learning centered continuous improvement process. Evaluation systems implemented in isolation as an accountability or compliance exercise, will not improve educator practice or student outcomes.

7. What is your plan to work with Milwaukee Public Schools to assure that all students receive a quality public education?

While achievement gaps persist across the state, our city of the first class presents unique challenges and requires a multi-pronged approach. Milwaukee is ground zero for our state’s efforts to accomplish major reductions in achievement gaps.

I have worked closely with Dr. Darienne Driver, MTEA and Milwaukee community leaders to support improvement efforts. We are working hand-in-hand to provide more learning time when needed, expand access to summer school, establish community schools, and create a best-in-state educator workforce.

We must continue to have honest conversations about our challenges and provide the resources and support for improvement. Divisive legislative solutions from Washington and Madison have not worked. We need more support for our students and schools, not less.

8. Do you believe the position of State Superintendent of Public Instruction should continue to be an elected position as currently provided in the State Constitution?

Absolutely yes.

The creators of our constitution got it right. Public education was so important they made the State Superintendent independently elected and answerable directly to the people. However, Governors and special interests always try to usurp this authority. The Supreme Court has consistently held up the independent power of the State Superintendent-mostly recently in the Coyne case advanced by MTI. Undeterred by their loss, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is currently working to circumvent the authority of the State Superintendent over the federal ESSA law. Rest assured we are fighting back and must again prevail.

9. Describe your position on the voucher program?

Powerful special interests and the majorities in Washington and Madison have spent years cutting revenue, growing bonding, and expanding entitlement programs like school vouchers. The result: historic cuts to education followed a slow trickle of financial support for public school amidst the statewide expansion of vouchers.

My friend former Sen. Dale Schultz often said, “We can’t afford the school system we have,
how can we afford two-a public and private one?”

It is a good question. A recent Fiscal Bureau reports indicate that over 200 districts (almost half) would have received more state aid without the changes in voucher funding that shifted cost to loca I districts.

When we move past the ideological battles, we’re left with tough choices about priorities and responsibilities. Bottom line: we have a constitutional obligation to provide an education for every kid in this state, from Winter to West Salem.

Our friends and neighbors are stepping up to pass referenda at historic rates to keep the lights on in rural schools. It is an admirable, but unsustainable effort that leaves too many kids behind. Expanding vouchers while underfunding rural schools exacerbates the problem.

That said, we all know the current majorities and proposed U.S Education Secretary support voucher expansion, so here are some key principles for moving forward:

1. The state should adequately fund our public school system before expanding vouchers;

2. The state, rather than local school districts, should pay the full cost of the voucher program;

3. Accountability should apply equally to all publicly-funded schools, including voucher schools;

Finally, we should talk more about the great things Wisconsin schools are doing and less about vouchers. They suck the air out of the room and allowing them to dominate the
conversation is unhelpful.

Around 96 percent of publicly-funded students go to a school governed by a local school board. Regardless of whether legislators support or oppose vouchers, they need to support our public schools. That’s where our focus needs to be and what I will champion.

10. Describe your position on independent charter schools.

In general, charter schools work best when authorized by a locally-elected school board that understands their community’s needs, and is accountable to them.

As both State Superintendent and a member of the Board of Regents, I am concerned the new UW System chartering authority could become controversial and disruptive. New schools are best created locally, not from a distant tower overlooking the city.

11. Wisconsin teacher licensing has the reputation as being one of the most rigorous and respected systems in the country. Recently, proposals were made that would allow any individual with a bachelor’s degree or work experience in trades to obtain a teaching license. Do you support these proposals? Why or why not?

I do not support any proposal that would ignore pedagogical skills as a key component of any preparation program. Content knowledge is not enough. A prospective teacher must know “how” to teach as well as “what’ to teach.

12. Teachers report a significant increase in mandated meetings and “professional development” sessions that are often unrelated or not embedded to the reality of their daily work with children. What will you do as State Superintendent to provide teachers with the time needed to prepare lessons, collaborate with colleagues, evaluate student work, and reflect on their practices?

When I travel the state and talk to educators, I hear this sentiment a lot, but it’s quickly followed by an important caveat: When educators believe that the meeting, the professional development opportunity, the extra responsibility, or the new idea will truly make a difference for kids they serve, they become the first and best champion of it–always.

We absolutely must find ways to lighten the load for our teachers so that the work we do out of the classroom is meaningful, manageable and powerful for kids. My Every Teacher a Leader Initiative focuses on highlighting cultures that support teacher leadership, and this often means that a principal or a superintendent has created systems that value and honor the expertise teachers bring to an initiative. They involve teachers early in decisions rather than convening them after a decision is made to implement it.

I just heard from an educator in a school district that is receiving national attention for its dramatic academic improvement over the past five years. When asked what the recipe for success was, she said the superintendent convened a team of veteran educators on his first day, listened to what they needed, worked long and hard to meet those needs, andkept them involved the whole way. That’s it.

13. Do you support restoring the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment?

Yes.

I have been a champion for collective bargain and workers’ rights my entire career. I signed the recall petition over Act 10 – and I haven’t changed my mind about it.

14. Are you interested in receiving MTI Voters endorsement? If so, why?

MTI has been a great partner of mine over the years. I would be honored to continue that collaboration going forward. Additionally, I have five grand-kids Madison Public Schools, and I want to them to continue to be proud of the strong relationship I have with Madison educators.

15. Are you interested in receiving financial support for your campaign from MTl-Voters?

Yes, my opponents will be seeking funding from organizations that have very deep pockets and MTI full financial support is more important than ever.

16. Is there anything else you’d like MTI members to know about your candidacy and why you are seeking election to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction?

I hope our work together, mutual commitment, and shared values continue for another four years.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

The 2017 candidates for Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent are Tony Evers [tonyforwisconsin@gmail.com;], Lowell Holtz and John Humphries [johnhumphriesncsp@gmail.com].

League of Women Voters questions.

Seat 6: Cris Carusi, Ali Muldrow and Kate Toews

Seat 7: Matt Andrzejewski, Ed Hughes and Nicki Vander Meulen

I’ve added links to the SIS home page as well. Please email updates, corrections and additions to zellmer@gmail.com Thank you.

The Economist:

READING John F. Kennedy’s application to Harvard College is a study in mediocrity. The former president graduated from high school with middling marks and penned just five sentences to explain why he belonged at Harvard. The only bit that expressed a clear thought was also the most telling: “To be a ‘Harvard man’ is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.” America’s premier universities, long the gatekeepers for the elite, have changed greatly since their days as glorified finishing schools for scions. But perhaps not as much as thought.

New data on American universities and their role in economic mobility—culled from 30m tax returns—published by Raj Chetty, an economist at Stanford University, and colleagues show that some colleges do a better job of boosting poor students up the income ladder than others. Previously, the best data available showed only average earnings by college. For the first time, the entire earnings distribution of a college’s graduates—and how that relates to parental income—is now known.

Dennis P. Saccuzzo & Nancy E. Johnson:

Considerable concern is being expressed concerning the effects on diversity and access to the profession due to proposed changes in ABA accreditation standards and changes in the format and scoring of the bar, such as those in California. According to Lawrence P. Nolan, President of the State Bar of Michigan, for example, ABA’s proposed amendments to the current accreditation standards will “adversely impact efforts to diversify the profession.”

Indeed, 90 law school Deans have asked the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to slow down and think about its proposal to tighten accreditation requirements on bar pass rates. Again, the effects on diversity and access to the profession are among the main concerns. Access not only includes women and minorities, but also non-traditional students such as those who have no family members who ever graduated from college. An important justification for lower tier law schools is that they increase access to the profession.

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (PDF):

Across the country, more than 300 new charter public schools opened in the fall of 2016. Charter schools are public schools that have exibility to meet students’ unique needs, while being held accountable for advancing student achievement. Every year, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (National Alliance) collects data on the number of charter schools that opened and closed in each state that has operating charter schools. This information
is used to determine the current number of charter schools in each state, as well as to estimate total charter school enrollment at the state and national levels.

In 2016-17, there are more than 6,900 charter schools, enrolling an estimated 3.1 million students. Over the past 10 years, enrollment in charter schools has nearly tripled—from 1.2 million students in 2006-07 to an estimated 3.1 million in 2016-17. Between 2015-16 and 2016-17, estimated charter school enrollment increased by over 200,000 students. The estimated 7 percent growth in charter school enrollment between fall 2015 and fall 2016 demonstrates continued parental demand for high-quality educational options.

Free Range Kids

Imagine if this had happened to any other group: If we kept restricting the rights of women, or minorities — it would be seen as a terrifying, intolerable assault on their freedom.

But because it is done in the name of “safety,” and because we get so used to the restrictions that they begin to seem like common sense — and maybe not quite strict enough — the right of children to any kind of unsupervised, unstructured, independent life keeps washing away. How much freedom has this family lost?

Jeff Jacoby:

A report issued this month by American Transparency, a nonpartisan watchdog that compiles data on public expenditures, chronicles the explosive — and expensive — trend toward militarizing federal agencies, most of which have no military responsibilities. Between 2006 and 2014, the report shows, 67 federal bureaus, departments, offices, and services spent at least $1.48 billion on ammunition and materiel one might expect to find in the hands of SWAT teams, Special Forces soldiers — or terrorists.

The largest share of that spending has gone to traditional law enforcement agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the US Secret Service. But the arms race has metastasized to federal agencies with strictly regulatory or administrative functions. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, now spends more than $1 million annually on firearms, ammunition, and military gear, double what it was spending a decade ago. Since 2006, the Department of Veterans Affairs — which has been sharply criticized for episodes of fatal incompetence in patient care — has poured nearly $11.7 million into guns and ammo. Even the Smithsonian Institution and the Social Security Administration have each devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to weaponry.

The Economist:

FOR a glimpse of the Soviet Union’s influence on English education, head to a sixth-form college in Lambeth, a 20-minute stroll from Parliament. There, in a former 1930s bath-house sunk low amid housing estates, sits King’s College London Mathematics School (KCLMS). Inside, pupils can spend their free time solving mathematical problems on whiteboards mounted in pods. On a recent visit the common room was quiet; the only pupils huddled in a corner playing Salem, “a strategic card game of deception”. Desks were set up for chess. The mood was more low-cost Oxbridge college than inner-London state school.

That is by design. The school is modelled on the Kolmogorov Physics and Mathematics School in Moscow, which from the mid-1960s took Russia’s smartest 15-year-olds and exposed them to the best maths teaching in the country. Michael Gove, Britain’s education secretary from 2010 to 2014, imported the idea, pushing universities to start specialist maths colleges. The aim was to make it possible for any child to have an “Eton-level education” in maths or physics, recalls Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Mr Gove.

Andie Judson:

Most teachers start their day off with attendance, but a local teacher has found his own unique way to connect with students before they enter Room 219.

Barry White Junior teaches fifth-grade literacy at Ashley Park PreK-8 School.
The Title I school encourages teachers to find creative ways to engage with students. But before Mr. White incorporates “vocabulary shootout” and shoe-tapping songs into his curriculum, he tries to connect with each of his students.

The Economist:

WHEN politicians in the rich world speak of job losses and stagnant incomes brought about by immigration and foreign competition, they usually have blue-collar work in mind—car manufacturing, steelmaking and the like. But even the cognitive 1% can be adversely affected by foreign competition.

In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Human Resources, George Borjas of Harvard University, and Kirk Doran and Ying Shen of the University of Notre Dame, study the effects of globalisation on a select group of particularly brainy Westerners: professors of mathematics. Distinguishing between cause and effect is always hard in the social sciences. One approach researchers use is to search for a “natural experiment”, and that is exactly what Drs Borjas, Doran and Shen found when they examined what happened to the productivity of American mathematicians after China’s liberalisation in 1978.

Stephan Buryani:

One morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations – which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor – just a few rounding errors – but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. “At first I was a bit frightened,” he said. “I felt a bit exposed.”

Dean Baker.

via a kind email:

Milwaukee Public Schools is hosting our 1st Annual Business Symposium on February 23, 2017 at ManpowerGroup 100 Manpower Place, Milwaukee, WI 53212. Contractors and vendors interested in doing business with the district are encouraged to attend the event which includes a series of workshops focused on diversification and economic and workforce development.

Sessions include: 1) Doing Business with the District, 2) Leveraging Certifications for Historically Underutilized Businesses, 3) MPS Strategic Partners, 4) Effective Capacity Building Resources and closes with businesses matched to department contract sponsors.

Space is limited. Please reserve your seat by completing and submitting the registration form and agenda to Renee Stanley at stanlerl@milwaukee.k12.wi.us.

Details and registration information are available here.

Graham Vyse:

Black History Month began Wednesday, and this year’s theme is “The Crisis in Black Education.” According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the group that founded BHM—this crisis “has grown significantly in urban neighborhoods where public schools lack resources, endure overcrowding, exhibit a racial achievement gap, and confront policies that fail to deliver substantive opportunities.”

President Barack Obama championed these publicly funded but independently run schools, whose promise is that freedom from traditional bureaucratic regulation will allow educators to innovate, thus improving student outcomes. Unlike vouchers—essentially publicly funded passes for select students to attend private school, which Democrats typically oppose—charters are a public form of “school choice” that enjoys bipartisan support. In particular, supporters see them as a lifeline to poor and minority families; most are located in urban and other low-income areas across the country.

But the charter movement was dealt a devastating blow last year when both the NAACP and the Black Lives Matter–aligned Movement for Black Lives called for a moratorium on these schools. With its resolution, the NAACP listed four conditions under which the nation’s oldest civil rights group would support further charter proliferation:

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School several years ago.

Bill McMorris:

The two Republicans who broke ranks with their party and announced they would vote against education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos have received thousands of dollars from the nation’s largest teachers union.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) have each benefited from contributions from the National Education Association. Collins received $2,000 from the union in 2002 and 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Murkowski, meanwhile, has received $23,500.

The NEA represents 3 million members, making it the wealthiest and most influential union in the country. The NEA, along with other labor groups like the American Federation of Teachers, has waged a fierce campaign against DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist and school choice activist.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

The Economist:

TEACHERS for maths, science and for special and bilingual education have long been hard to find and keep. Filling empty slots in rural and in low-achieving urban districts is not easy either. This is not new, but districts, states and colleges are devising new ways to tackle the problem. Some are allowing unqualified teachers into the classroom. A survey last year of 211 California school districts found that 22% allowed teachers to teach subjects outside their expertise. Others are paying maths and science teachers more, which is anathema to unions, who want to treat all teachers the same. To avoid their wrath, a few states plan to use separate grants to pay bonus salaries, bypassing school districts altogether.

Some districts, such as the Cherokee County School District in South Carolina, pay teachers a $10,000 signing bonus to work in rural areas. Math for America, a privately funded programme in New York city, gives teachers up to an extra $15,000 a year for four years. New York city’s public schools lose 9% of maths and science teachers each year. Math for America’s attrition rate is less than 4%. It provides 20% of the city’s public school maths teachers and are in half of its high schools.

Jim Guszcza, Harvey Lewis, Peter Evans- Greenwood:

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced a number of “springs” and “winters” in its roughly 60-year history, it is safe to expect the current AI spring to be both lasting and fertile. Applications that seemed like science fiction a decade ago are becoming science fact at a pace that has surprised even many experts.

The stage for the current AI revival was set in 2011 with the televised triumph of the IBM Watson computer system over former Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. This watershed moment has been followed rapid-fire by a sequence of striking breakthroughs, many involving the machine learning technique known as deep learning. Computer algorithms now beat humans at games of skill, master video games with no prior instruction, 3D-print original paintings in the style of Rembrandt, grade student papers, cook meals, vacuum floors, and drive cars.1

Charles Cole III::

I attended more than 10 schools before the fifth grade and I had an attitude problem in each and every classroom.

I was born in Chicago to young, drug-addicted parents that had a penchant for moving and staying in and out of jail. I moved from Chicago to Paducah, Kentucky to stay with my grandmother and then back to Chicago and then back to Paducah, you get the point: I moved a lot. Which also meant I transferred schools a lot. I was always the new kid trying to catch up on coursework, make new friends, all the while knowing that I wouldn’t be at that school for long.

When my grandmother passed, my father rounded me and my siblings up, and we moved to Oakland, where my father’s sister lived. At the time, my mother was in jail, so the rest of us hopped on a Greyhound and took the three-and-a-half day bus ride to the Bay. My mother eventually joined us.

Despite the move to Oakland, my parents would continue to struggle with drugs, and as a result we lived in several shelters.

Victor Davis Hanson

After the election, Democrats could not explain the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton, who would be, they thought, the shoo-in winner in November. Over the next three months until Inauguration Day, progressives floated a variety of explanations for the Trump win—none of them, though, mentioned that the Clinton campaign had proven uninspired, tactically inept, and never voiced a message designed to appeal to the working classes.

When a particular exegesis of defeat failed to catch on, it was mostly dropped—and then replaced by a new narrative. We were told that the Electoral College wrongly nullified the popular vote—and that electors had a duty to renege on their obligations to vote for their respective state’s presidential winner.

Then followed the narrative of Trump’s racist dog-whistle appeals to the white working classes. When it was reported that Barack Obama had received a greater percentage of the white votes than did either John Kerry in 2004 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, the complaint of white chauvinism too faded.

Then came the allegation that FBI Director James Comey had given the election to Trump by reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails just days before Election Day. That fable too evaporated when it was acknowledged that Comey had earlier intervened to declare Clinton without culpability and would so again before November 8.

John Robb:

Trump is rolling back neoliberalism and everything connected to it.

To understand what this means, here’s a narrative of Trump’s insurgency. It explains what he is doing and what he is likely to do. It starts with the rise of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an ideology of extreme free market capitalism that was popularized by Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet. By the end of the cold war in the 90’s, it became the default economic ideology of the United States when both the Republicans and the Democrats adopted it. Neoliberalism improved the world. Unfettered access to US markets (the most valuable in the world) led to twenty plus years of rapid economic globalization that lifted billions of people out of poverty and made many countries rich. However, neoliberalism came at a cost to the US. Worse, it destroyed the only engine of prosperity and political stability in the US, the US middle class. It did this through:

Janne Hukkinen:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS luring science into dangerous waters. To make scientific publishing more efficient, commercial publishers now rely more and more on editorial software systems. These are beginning to transform peer review from interaction between humans into interaction between humans and AI. We should think twice before allowing autonomous AI systems to decide what research warrants publication.

Sarah Favot:

orty-two percent of last year’s graduating class from the Los Angeles Unified School District retook a class they had previously failed or needed some other kind of credit recovery in order to graduate, district officials said Thursday.

Superintendent Michelle King announced in August that the preliminary graduation rate was a record 75 percent, but the district had not calculated how many students needed to take credit recovery courses to get across the graduation stage.

The Economist:

IN AN old factory building in lower Manhattan a fintech startup is seeking answers to a question that has tormented teachers and students for decades: what is the value of a given course, teacher or institution? Climb Credit, with just two dozen employees, provides student loans. The programmes it finances bring returns far higher than can be expected from even highly rated universities.

Climb does not claim to nurture billionaires, nor to care much about any of the intangible benefits of education. Rather, it focuses on sharp, quantifiable increases in earnings. The average size of its loans is $10,000 and it normally finances programmes of less than a year. The subjects range from coding to web design, from underwater welding to programming robots for carmakers (which has the highest rate of return). Some students have scant formal education; others advanced degrees. The rate of return they get is calculated as the uplift in earnings after the course of study, minus its cost (which includes that of servicing the loan, and takes account of the absence of earnings during the course).

NBER:

Online coursework has been heralded as potentially transformative for higher education, but little is known about whether it increases the number of people pursuing education or simply substitutes for existing options. In Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education? (NBER Working Paper No. 22754), Joshua Goodman, Julia Melkers, and Amanda Pallais provide the first evidence that online education can expand access to students who would not otherwise have enrolled in an educational program. They study the earliest educational model to combine the inexpensive nature of online education with a degree program from a highly-ranked institution.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, via Gary Bennett:

The University interprets its responsibility to authorize charter schools as a part of a larger attempt to improve education for children and in this instance, the education of children in the City. Charter schools must have programs that provide quality education to urban students and address the critical issues of today’s urban education environment. The academic achievement of children who are viewed as at-risk should be the central focus of the charter school application. Substantive outcomes must be given priority over process experiences if academic achievement is to serve as the central focus.

Being granted a charter to operate a school requires thought and planning as well as a committed organization that can sustain the development and operational requirements of a charter school. Potential applicants must be able to commit eighteen to twenty-four months of planning time before a charter school can become a reality.

The University and SOE consider the following principles to be essential to the development of charter schools authorized by the University. These principles are as follows:

Draft Wisconsin Recovery School Bill (PDF):

This bill authorizes the director of the Office of Educational Opportunity in the University of Wisconsin System to contract with a person to operate, as a four-year pilot project, one recovery charter school for no more than 15 high school pupils in recovery from substance use disorder or dependency. Under the bill, the operator must provide an academic curriculum that satisfies the requirement for graduation from high school as well as therapeutic programming and support for pupils attending the charter school. The bill requires a pupil who wishes to attend the recovery charter school to apply and to agree to all of the following: 1) that the pupil has begun treatment in a substance use disorder or dependency program; 2) that the pupil has maintained sobriety for at 30 days prior to attending the charter school; and 3) that the pupil will submit to a drug screening assessment and, if appropriate, a drug test prior to being admitted. The operator of the charter school may not admit a pupil who tests positive for the presence of a drug in his or her system. In addition, a pupil who enrolls in the school must receive counseling from substance use disorder or dependency counselors while enrolled in the charter school.

The contract between the operator of the recovery charter school and OEO must contain a requirement that, as a condition of continuing enrollment, an applicant for enrollment in the recovery charter school submit claims for coverage of certain services provided by the recovery charter school to his or her health care plan for which the applicant is covered for mental health services. The bill also requires the director of OEO to, following the fourth year of the operation of the charter school, submit a written report to the Department of Health Services regarding the operation and effectiveness of the charter school.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School several years ago.

Related: An emphasis on adult employment.

Thomas Arnett:

As scientific understanding and artificial intelligence leap forward, many professions—such as law, accounting, animation, and medicine—are changing in dramatic ways. Increasingly, these advances allow non-experts and machines to perform tasks that were previously in the sole domain of experts, thus turning expert-quality work into a commodity. With new technologies displacing workers across many fields, what will be the likely impact on the teaching profession? Will machines replace teachers?

Despite the hype and fear, machines are unlikely to replace teachers anytime soon. Rather, they are poised to help overcome several structural barriers that make it difficult to ensure that an effective teacher reaches every student.

Glenn Greenwald & Betsy Reed:

IN THE WAKE of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI assumes an importance and influence it has not wielded since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. That is what makes today’s batch of stories from The Intercept, The FBI’s Secret Rules, based on a trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents, so critical: It shines a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry out a domestic war on terror, at the beginning of an era highly likely to be marked by vociferous protest and reactionary state repression.

In order to understand how the FBI makes decisions about matters such as infiltrating religious or political organizations, civil liberties advocates have sued the government for access to crucial FBI manuals — but thanks to a federal judiciary highly subservient to government interests, those attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Because their disclosure is squarely in the public interest, The Intercept is publishing this series of reports along with annotated versions of the documents we obtained.

Trump values loyalty to himself above all other traits, so it is surely not lost on him that few entities were as devoted to his victory, or played as critical a role in helping to achieve it, as the FBI. One of the more unusual aspects of the 2016 election, perhaps the one that will prove to be most consequential, was the covert political war waged between the CIA and FBI. While the top echelon of the CIA community was vehemently pro-Clinton, certain factions within the FBI were aggressively supportive of Trump. Hillary Clinton herself blames James Comey and his election-week letter for her defeat. Elements within the powerful New York field office were furious that Comey refused to indict Clinton, and embittered agents reportedly shoveled anti-Clinton leaks to Rudy Giuliani. The FBI’s 35,000 employees across the country are therefore likely to be protected and empowered. Trump’s decision to retain Comey — while jettisoning all other top government officials — suggests that this has already begun to happen.

Marta Jewson:

Two charter organizations are vying to take over New Orleans’ last two traditional public high schools. One is a new charter network organized by the schools’ principals; the other is an experienced charter group in the city.

The principals of Eleanor McMain Secondary School and McDonogh 35 Senior High School are part of the ExCEED Network, which wants to convert those schools to charters along with the other three traditional schools run by the Orleans Parish School District.

InspireNOLA Charter Schools, which runs three schools, wants to create another like its Edna Karr High School, which has an A rating from the state.

McMain and McDonogh 35 have long histories, and InspireNOLA wants to preserve those traditions, said InspireNOLA CEO Jamar McKneely.

Lindy Laban:

Myka Meier speaks three languages: Continental European, British and American.

In other words, Meier, an etiquette expert who trained under a former member of the royal household of Queen Elizabeth II, is fluent in manners. Take the potentially awkward air kiss: In America, she explained, it’s one air kiss on one cheek. The British plant two air kisses using both cheeks, and on the Continent it’s three air kisses alternating between both cheeks.

“But no lip-smacking noises ever,” Meier stressed.

The Economist:

AT THE Gatina branch of Bridge International Academies, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Nicholas Oluoch Ochieng has one eye on his class of five-year-olds and the other on his tablet. On the device is a lesson script. Every line is written 7,000 miles away, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There an American team analyses 250,000 test scores every ten days from Bridge’s 405 Kenyan schools, and then uses the data to tweak those parts of a lesson where pupils find themselves stumped. Teachers, if they are instructing the same grade level, give identical lessons, and timetables are standardised, too. So when Mr Ochieng’s pupils read from their books, the same words should be reverberating off the walls of each Bridge nursery.

That chorus should soon grow louder. Founded in 2008, Bridge has grown into one of the world’s largest groups of for-profit schools—and the largest targeting poor pupils. It has 100,000 pupils spread across Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda and India. Bridge says it aims to teach 10m children—the size of Britain’s pupil population—within the next decade.

Jon Kelvey:

A bunion, you may have the misfortune to know, is a bony growth that forms at the base of your big toe. When that bump begins to irritate the rest of your foot, it has to go.

Wincing would be the correct reaction here. On the pain scale, a bunionectomy doesn’t compare to having a limb sawn off; nor is it particularly medically risky. But since it “involves shaving off extra bone and cutting the big toe in half and pinning it back together,” says David Soergel, chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company Trevena Inc, “it’s actually a very painful surgery.” That wince-worthy quality makes it the perfect surgery on which to test cutting-edge new pain relievers—such as Oliceridine, Trevena’s newest and most promising opioid compound.

Carrie Pitt:

This mandatory orientation event was designed to help us appreciate our diversity as a student body during the first week of classes. But what did it really accomplish? In compressing us into isolated communities based on our race, religion or gender, the minister belittled every other piece of our identities. He faced a crowd of singular young adults and essentially told them that their heritage outweighed their humanity. The message was clear: know your kind and stick to it. Don’t risk offending people from other backgrounds by trying to understand their worldviews.

More, here.

Andy Ngo:

In arguably one of the most progressive cities in the nation, plans by the anti-fascist activism group Antifa to shut down a pro-free speech event at Portland State University were abruptly halted.

With that, “The New Campus Thought Police” took place Friday evening with only a minor demonstration outside, a few hecklers inside, and possibly some changed hearts and minds.

More than 300 people, mostly students, attended the “fireside chat” at Portland State, featuring host of “The Rubin Report” Dave Rubin, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, and Portland State philosophy professor Peter Boghossian. The event was co-organized by the Center for Inquiry, Portland and Freethinkers of PSU.

Marta Jewson:

And although the district says it wants to see evidence that teachers and parents support the conversion to a charter, they will not be given an opportunity to vote on the matter.

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ neighborhood-based schools gradually have been replaced by charters that are open to any child in the city.

Charter schools are publicly funded, but they’re run by private, nonprofit groups. They’re overseen by boards that must meet and make decisions in public, but the board members are not elected.

John Robb:

There’s a war for the future being waged online. It’s being fought across the world’s online social networks, and the outcomes of these online battles increasingly dictate the outcome of what happens later in the real world.

One of the most successful tactics used in this war is the manipulation of language in order to confuse, scare, nullify or outrage targeted audiences with the objective of making money, aggregating political power, and disrupting opponents.

While this manipulation has ALWAYs been true of human conflict, it’s being done on a scale and to a degree that we’ve never seen before due social networking, globalization, and social/media fragmentation.

Alana Semuels:

Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me at the local Walmart, where she was shopping for groceries. Working in fast food, she’d frequently encounter drug users as they pulled up to the drive-in window, needles alongside babies in the backseat of their cars. Like 80 percent of people in rural America, Gabbert doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

Dark, 33, lives in the increasingly metropolitan city of Indianapolis, where he runs a creative consultancy doing videos and marketing work for a variety of clients. Dark, who is a college graduate, works when he chooses, often from his downtown home or from the coffee shops and bars springing up around downtown Indianapolis. He loves to travel—he recently returned from Iceland—and goes out to meet friends almost every night of the week. The same night Ashley Gabbert was prepping for her night shift by dropping her 11-year-old daughter off with her mother, Dark was cooking a venison stew for a meat-and-bourbon potluck dinner thrown by a friend. “I’ve built my life around flexibility,” he told me.

RWieruch

As a software engineer you will come to a point where writing matters. Perhaps you want to leave your fellow developers a note, you have to write an e-mail to a customer or you have to sum up the recent meeting notes. In my case, it went even further because I have my own website where I write about software development and where I started to write my first ebook. It was about time for me to dive into the topic of writing.

The article is a summary of my lessons learned from On Writing Well by William Zinsser. I am no expert in this field, even less as a non native speaker, but by providing a summary I hope to help other developers to improve their writing skills. Apart from that it helps me to memorize my lessons learned.

Daniel T. Rogers:

Post-truth” carries a catchy, advertising-agency ring. And that may be exactly what is wrong with it and with our times. We do not live in an era stripped of truths. We live, to the contrary, in a political-cultural moment saturated with competing claims on truth, each insisting on its veracity. We have contrived to construct an open marketplace of truths, and it is not a happy state.

If there can be said to be an era in recent American history when the essence of truth was under critical scrutiny, it was the generation after 1960. In both popular and academic culture, that was when the belief that truth lay in a sphere of certainty independent of truth’s inquirers began to fragment. Social scientists learned to grow much more self-critical about their methods. Anthropologists realized that they could not write themselves out of their ethnographies. Historians learned that archives contained fictions as well as facts. Paradigms, in Thomas Kuhn’s phrase, shaped the very worlds of assumption in which natural scientists worked. None of truth’s seekers, it was increasingly realized, could wholly escape the perspectives and experiences they carried with them. What seemed “natural” was, as often as not, not natural at all but a product of culture and unspoken assumption.

Jenna Robinson:

Testifying before the U.S. Senate in 2013, University of Wisconsin professor Sara Goldrick-Rab described college campuses as “glorified summer camps.” She said administrators were “engaging in an arms race to have the most impressive bells and whistles.”

That depiction may at first seem hyperbolic, but even a cursory glance at many of today’s college campuses reveals that the “arms race” described by Goldrick-Rab is real. Lush new dormitories, recreation facilities, student activity centers, libraries, and lecture halls now dot the collegiate landscape, embodying the idea that students must be appeased with upper-middle class comforts if universities are to vie for their tuition dollars.

In this competition, however, there are no real “winners,” except perhaps for construction companies and architects being paid to make every amenity bigger, better, and more impressive than the next. Recruiters can use stylish buildings and new playspaces to lure prospective students, but unwary taxpayers, parents, and student borrowers pay the price.

Emphasizing amenities over education also does a disservice to the faculty and students more interested in academic pursuits. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found, perhaps not surprisingly, that demand for high-quality academics is limited to only the best and brightest students, while wealthy students with low academic aptitude have the strongest demand for recreational amenities. In such an environment, university leaders likely feel financial pressure to cater more to the lowest common denominator.

Doug Erickson:

Board member Mary Burke said it was critically important to her that the student body of the new charter school reflect the demographics of the overall district in terms of racial diversity and the percentages of students with special needs. The school’s founders and its supporters convinced her through their testimonials and their diligent work that this will be the case, she said.

“I think there’s a true commitment,” Burke said. She noted that the parents who came to the board asking for the public Montessori option reflected that diversity.

More than 20 supporters spoke Monday, one telling the board the IMA proposal is “a gift you don’t want to turn down.”

Prior to voting against the proposal, Mertz said he was concerned that too many unresolved issues were being left to the administration to negotiate when they should be dealt with by the board. After the meeting, he added that he thought the overall proposal has too many weaknesses.

Independent charter schools have been rejected by a majority of the Madison School. They include the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School and the Studio School.

This, despite our long term, disastrous reafing results.

NBC:

Oral arguments are set to begin Thursday for the lawsuit of a Minnesota woman who is suing her transgender teen daughter along with a variety of local school and health agencies.

Anmarie Calgaro’s lawsuit alleges that healthcare providers treated her 17-year-old as an emancipated minor without her consent when the teen began receiving transgender medical and mental health services.

While the lawsuit centers largely on the state’s lack of a clearly defined legal process for emancipation, Calgaro’s unnamed teen daughter earlier told Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid attorneys that her mother had “made it known to him [sic] that she no longer wishes to have any contact with him,” according to cou

Glenn Greenwald:

IN 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September 2011 drone strike. While that assassination created widespread debate – the once-again-beloved ACLU sued Obama to restrain him from the assassination on the ground of due process and then, when that suit was dismissed, sued Obama again after the killing was carried out – another killing carried out shortly thereafter was perhaps even more significant yet generated relatively little attention.

Two weeks after the killing of Awlaki, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. The U.S. eventually claimed that the boy was not their target but merely “collateral damage.” Abdulrahman’s grief-stricken grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, urged the Washington Post “to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman,” which explained: “Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies His Facebook page shows a typical kid.”

The fourth amendment.

Kieryn Darkwater:

I was working the polls on election day, handing people ballots and explaining how to fill them out properly. I made it my mission to come up with interesting uses for the removable tabs and entertain people for the 30 seconds that I had their captive attention. When 7 pm hit, people came in looking grim. “Did you hear about the polls?” they’d ask. “No,” I said, “but don’t tell me, I need to get through the next hour.” I guarded my polling location from news of what was happening because we still had to close – I still had to close – and needed to be able to focus without dealing with the sheer terror of reality.

I checked Twitter as I got in my Lyft back home. Shock bombarded and horror filled me as I scrolled through my timeline. I hoped the panic would vanish once the CA votes were counted. It didn’t. Slowly the new reality set in – the one where I wake up horrified and lose more of my basic human rights every day. The one where I wake up and am reminded that I was prepared for this, I saw this coming, I know what’s happening.

Nancy Campbell:

Towards the end of her life, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her pianist friends Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale from Ouro Preto, Brazil. She was planning an unusual seminar series at Harvard: the subject was to be “Just letters – as an art form or something”. She asked their advice, explaining, “I’m hoping to select a nicely incongruous assortment of people – Mrs. Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc.”. The seminar series must have had its origins in Bishop’s own experience of the post – in particular her exchanges with friends and fellow poets during the many years she lived abroad. Yet, writing to Gold and Fizdale, she describes letters as “the dying ‘form of communication’”.

Bill Novak:

Parents who plan to send their students to a public school other than where they live can start signing up for open enrollment on Feb. 6.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced on Thursday the application period for open enrollment in the 2017-18 school year will run from Feb. 6 to April 28.

The open enrollment era in Wisconsin began in 1998-99, and has grown in popularity every year since.

Much more on open enrollment here.

Martin Paul Whitely And Suzanne Robinson

New research has found the youngest children in West Australian primary school classes are twice as likely as their oldest classmates to receive medication for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Published in the Medical Journal of Australia, the research analysed data for 311,384 WA schoolchildren, of whom 5,937 received at least one government subsidised ADHD prescription in 2013. The proportion of boys receiving medication (2.9%) was much higher than that of girls (0.8%).

Among children aged 6–10 years, those born in June (the last month of the recommended school-year intake) were about twice as likely (boys 1.93 times, girls 2.11 times) to have received ADHD medication as those born in the first intake month (the previous July).

For children aged 11–15 years, the effect was smaller, but still significant. Similar patterns were found when comparing children born in the first three months (July, August September) and the last three months (April, May, June) of the WA school year intake.

Alex Shashkevich:

Millions of people have taken free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which have been touted as democratizing access to educational opportunities around the world. But whether learners are likely to succeed in a MOOC largely depends on where they live, according to new Stanford-led research.

Kurt Hickman

Stanford researchers show in a new study how affirmation activities help students persevere in online courses despite low development in their home countries.

A study, published in the Jan. 20 issue of Science, found that people in less-developed countries are completing MOOCs at a lower rate than those in the more developed parts of the world.

But, the researchers found, brief psychological interventions that affirm class takers’ sense that they belong can help close the global achievement gap.

“MOOCs have expanded access to education but this doesn’t guarantee equal opportunities for people around the world,” said René Kizilcec, the lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication. “Providing access to the Internet and courseware is not enough. People need to feel welcome in online-learning environments to reach their potential.”

As Stanford University economic researcher Barbara Biasi explains in a new study (which is awaiting peer review), Act 10 created a marketplace for teachers in which public-school districts can compete for better employees. For instance, a district can pay more to recruit and retain “high-value added” teachers—that is, those who most improve student learning. Districts can also cap salaries of low-performing teachers, which might encourage them to quit or leave for other districts.

The 2011 Wisconsin law, known as Act 10, limited collective bargaining to base wages while letting school districts negotiate pay with individual teachers based on criteria other than years on the job and education level. Some districts like Green Bay have used the law to reward teacher performance while others such as Racine have adhered to seniority-based salary schedules.

Prior research on Washington, D.C.’s teacher-tenure reforms and merit pay has found that financial incentives improved the performance of highly rated teachers while dismissal threats led to attrition among ineffective ones. Student achievement has risen as a result. Act 10 provides an opportunity to evaluate how changes in contract negotiations affect teaching quality.

As Stanford University economic researcher Barbara Biasi explains in a new study (which is awaiting peer review), Act 10 created a marketplace for teachers in which public-school districts can compete for better employees. For instance, a district can pay more to recruit and retain “high-value added” teachers—that is, those who most improve student learning. Districts can also cap salaries of low-performing teachers, which might encourage them to quit or leave for other districts.

Ms. Biasi analyzed how the demand for and supply of teachers changed across districts with individual-salary negotiations from those that kept uniform pay schedules. She found that the share of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts, and vice versa, roughly doubled between 2012 and 2014 from the five years prior to the law’s enactment.

She also found changes in salary structure. For instance, salaries in Green Bay increased about 13% for teachers with five to six years of experience but a mere 4% for those who had worked 29 or 30 years. Salaries among teachers with the same seniority also diverged more. In Racine the opposite occurred. Green Bay was able to pay better teachers more without regard to the lock-step pay scales traditionally dictated by unions.

Ms. Biasi found that better teachers gravitate to districts where they can negotiate their own pay while lousy teachers tend to migrate toward those where salary scales are regimented. The study found “a 34 percent increase in the quality of teachers moving from salary schedule to individual-salary districts, and a 17 percent decrease in the quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts.”

“These sorting patterns,” Ms. Biasi concludes, “lead to a small increase in average quality of the teaching workforce in individual-salary districts.” Student math achievement rose significantly in individual-salary districts relative to salary-schedule districts due in part to improvements in the teacher workforce.

Much more on ACT 10, here.

Oconomowoc raised teacher salaries and increased high school teaching time.

Boluwaji Ogunyemi, via a kind reader:

From my first steps onto campus, I was determined to make my Nigerian parents proud and to seize the opportunities they had left their native country for. I had graduated high school in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s most eastern province, at the top of my class and as student body vice president. Being the single black student in a school of 600 had been immaterial to me. I had not developed a sense of black identity because, simply, I did not have to.

So here I was at the University of Western Ontario, the sole black on a dormitory floor made up mostly of white students from Toronto and a few ethnic minorities. It was, for most of us, the first time we were living away from home, and we spent time asking honest and sometimes naïve questions about one another, including ones about religion and race. It proved to be a safe, collegial space to check our biases. Or so I thought.

A few months in, we received an email notification that our exam grades were available. One by one, the pre-meds among us logged onto the reporting system to access our scores and, following the lead of one floor mate, shared them aloud. Each of us had already fallen prey to the paranoia that even a single mediocre grade would compromise our chances of medical school acceptance.

2006/1999: Acting White.

Emily Deruy:

When states raise the number of math classes they require students to take in high school, black students complete more math coursework—and boost their earnings as a result. That’s the topline takeaway from new research by Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

To understand the results, it’s helpful to have a little background. During the 1980s, a now-famous report called “A Nation at Risk” by Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education opened this way:

Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Gabriel Weinberg:

At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and in service of that vision, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted search engine.

We are proud to say that at the end of last year, we surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016! We are growing faster than ever with our first 14M day on Jan 10, 2017.

People are actively seeking out ways to reduce their digital footprint online. For example, a Pew Research study reported “40% think that their search engine provider shouldn’t retain information about their activity.”

Moglen’s Snowden and the future is worth reading.

Fionnuala McHugh:

Jock Struthers is sitting in a small hospital on the out­skirts of Phnom Penh recalling the first time he saw a woman with a brain protrusion that almost obliterated her face.

“It was here, in Cambodia, in Banteay Meanchey province, near the Thai border. I saw her driving a motorbike, then she went into a little shop. It looked like a tumour. You see so many horrendous things … but this was a young girl.”

Struthers, who’s from New Zealand, was then working with NZAID – the country’s Agency for International Development – talking to pig farmers. He did nothing “and it always worried me”.

Doug Erickson:

The Madison School Board is poised to vote Monday on whether to create its first public Montessori charter school, a decision that appears to hinge on the level of risk board members are willing to accept.

The district’s charter review committee says it cannot recommend approval of the proposal from Isthmus Montessori Academy because the plan falls short in key areas. But the board could decide the shortcomings are fixable and not major enough to derail the effort.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has raised another possibility. If board members want to go forward with the proposal, she is recommending that implementation be delayed until the 2018-19 school year. That would provide more time to address remaining issues.

Melissa Droessler, a co-founder of the Montessori school, said delaying implementation by a year would be disappointing but not a deal-breaker, as long as the district kept negotiating in good faith.

Isthmus Montessori Academy (IMA), 1402 Pankratz St., is a private, nonprofit school founded in 2012 that wants to become part of the district. It is attempting to do that through the district’s charter application process, which was revised last year to be more rigorous.

Under the new process, if an applicant receives a “fails to meet expectations” rating in even one of 15 areas, the district’s charter review committee will not recommend it. The IMA proposal fails to meet the district’s expectations in four areas, including in its approach to budgeting, staffing and measuring academic growth.

However, School Board President James Howard questioned the rubric used by the district to evaluate applications, saying it “seems to be subjective” and that perhaps the threshold is too high.

Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Lucy Kellaway:

When handing out my annual guff awards last week I wrote something I’d now like to retract. I said clear language in business was perfectly possible if you tried hard enough.

I now find it’s not as simple as that. Last autumn, I co-founded a social enterprise designed to get people like me to retrain as teachers. Teach Last, I wanted to call it, which I thought both clear and comic. No, no, no, was the response from practically everyone. Teach Last, they insisted, sounded as if the crematorium was the next stop, and so I backed down, and settled on the least worst alternative, Now Teach.

Erin Richards:

The ACT exam that Wisconsin uses to assess high school students for accountability purposes is not fully compliant with federal law, the U.S. Department of Education has told the state.

Based on a peer review of Wisconsin’s assessment system, the ACT only partially meets the federal government’s requirements for reading, language arts and mathematics assessments, and the state will have to provide “substantial additional information” to become compliant, according to a letter from the DOE to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction this month.

If Wisconsin doesn’t address the matter, the DOE could place a condition on the state’s federal grant dollars, the letter says.

The news comes as Wisconsin has recently shifted to using the ACT High School Assessments to accomplish two important tasks: Get more students taking the ACT college-entrance exam to increase the numbers of students considering college; and use the results of the widely known exam, which is administered to all Wisconsin juniors, to measure high-school achievement under federal law.

Ed Hughes is a candidate for Seat 7. His opponents in the 21 February 2017 primary are Matt Andrzejewski and Nicki Vander Meulen.

I am thankful that we have, once again after a rather long drought, competitive school board races.

Ed’s website and email address: edhughes9@gmail.com.

Brook Larmer:

s the daughter of a senior colonel in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Ren Futong has lived all 17 years of her life in a high-walled military compound in northern Beijing. No foreigners are allowed inside the gates; the vast encampment, with its own bank, grocery store and laundromat, is patrolled by armed guards and goose-stepping soldiers.

Growing up in this enclave, Ren – also known as Monica, the English name she has adopted – imbibed the lessons of conformity and obedience, loyalty and patriotism, in their purest form. At her school, independent thought that deviated from the reams of right answers the students needed to memorise for the next exam was suppressed. The purpose of it all, Monica told me, was “to make everybody the same”.

Imogen West-Knights

In the auditorium of Beijing Bayi School, on a cold morning thick with smog, props are broken, lines unlearnt and the mechanical curtain has blown a fuse. In four hours, my cast of 22 Chinese 14-year-olds, who have never acted before, will perform Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to an audience of 1,500 — in English. All their education has told them that drama is an irrelevance. As I race around the theatre, trying to track down an absent Grandpa Joe and a missing Golden Ticket I ask myself, not for the first time: what am I doing here?

Chinese education has increasingly been hailed as “superior” to the way we teach in the west in recent years. Its success in global tests for 15-year-olds reinforced this sense of a world tilting to the east: in the 2012 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment tests (Pisa), Shanghai, representing China, came first in science, reading and mathematics. Fretful western governments took note, amid mounting concern that China’s educational success would inevitably pave the way for economic and cultural dominance. Or, as the former UK government minister Michael Gove baldly stated when he was secretary of state for education, the UK can either “start working as hard as the Chinese, or we’ll all soon be working for the Chinese”.

For many, the solution is simple: whatever they are doing, we need to do it too. In July last year, it was announced that 8,000 primary schools in the UK would be given funding to adopt the “mastery” maths teaching technique, the method used in China, in which students are always taught, unstreamed, as a whole class, with stronger students helping weaker ones to keep up. A BBC documentary, Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, followed an academy in Hampshire as it turned over some of its students to a cohort of Chinese teachers, to see if they could boost results. This autumn, the first dual language English-Chinese private prep school is to open in London.

Grace Tatter:

A third of Tennessee students are receiving diplomas without meeting the state’s requirements, according to a new report by the State Department of Education.

During this week’s State Board of Education meeting, department leaders vowed to address the lapse.

“This couldn’t happen again,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said Thursday. “We’ve got some pretty drastic measures that we’re taking.”

Catherine Wormald:

Despite two Senate inquiries in 1988 and 2001, it has taken 15 years and a state parliamentary review for the Victorian government to decide to build a specialist high school for students who are gifted, specifically targeting those from rural and regional Victoria.

Research at both the national and international level has long advocated that students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require:

tailored learning strategies

education supported by a challenging curriculum

teachers trained in gifted education

more exposure to students of similar ability

opportunities for acceleration

John Simons:

Political changes in the U.S. and United Kingdom may be spurring some graduate business-school students to look elsewhere for their degrees.

More than a third (37%) of 760 prospective M.B.A. candidates who are non-U.S. citizens say they are less likely to pursue a graduate business degree in the U.S. because of the outcome of last year’s presidential election, according to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council.

Though no policy changes have yet been implemented, as a candidate, Donald Trump frequently proposed tougher immigration policies, including the construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He also expressed support for a registry of all Muslims living in the U.S.

Matt Andrzejewski is a candidate for Seat 7.

Matt’s website and email address: mattandrzejewski@gmail.com

His opponents in the 21 February 2017 primary are Ed Hughes and Nicki Vander Meulen.

Glenn Greenwald:

Making this worse still is the central role the U.S. Government played in the horrors from which many of these now-banned people are fleeing. The suggestion that Trump protected the countries with which he does business is preposterous. The reality is that his highly selective list reflects long-standing U.S. policy: indeed, Obama restricted visa rights for these same seven countries, and the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo have received special U.S. protection for decades, long before Trump.

Beyond U.S. support for the world’s worst regimes, what primarily shapes Trump’s list is U.S. aggression: six of the seven predominantly Muslim countries on Trump’s list were ones bombed by Obama, while the seventh (Sudan) was punished with heavy sanctions. Thus, Trump is banning immigrants from the very countries that the U.S. Government – under both Republicans and Democrats – has played a key role in destabilizing and destroying, as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, with surprising candor, noted this week:

—-

It is critical to recognize and fight against the unique elements of Trump’s extremism, but also to acknowledge that a substantial portion of it has roots in political and cultural developments that long precede him. Immigration horror stories – including families being torn apart – are nothing new. As ABC News noted last August, “the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.”

Thomas Ricks

Each of us will have a different view of where the right balance lies, and what I’d like future reality to be and what I suspect will be the case, will no doubt be different. But my guess is that the next decade or more will show a constant tension between the security provided by the rise in collection and analytical capacity and our desire for some level of privacy. I see it likely for most citizens to gradually accept more and more encroachments to the personal privacy our grandparents, and even our parents, considered sacred and secure, than for us to accept the inconvenience or security risks associated.

More, here.

James Wigderson:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate John Humphries has unveiled a plan that would allow parents whose children attend the lowest-performing schools to decide what kind of changes they want to make.

“We’ve created a proposal system where we identify the lowest performing 5 percent of low-income schools,” Humphries told a group of voters Thursday at Coffee Makes You Black, a coffee shop on Milwaukee’s North side. “We accept proposals for those schools based on something called an RFP [request for proposal] process, that will have some quality standards put right into [it] so that we know that students will be getting high-quality curriculum from skilled staff members.”

David Thompson:

High-ranking associates of two rival outfits had been summoned to peace talks in a long-running turf war.

The man who arranged the sit-down was the head of a third party, whose members contracted for the two outfits’ services. They were the ones most suffering from the long-running conflict.

The members were stressed from having to make decisions about which outfit to use based as often on pressure as preference. The situation was costing them peace of mind, money – and worse.

Scott Aaronson:

This time, it’s taken just five days, since the hostile takeover of the US by its worst elements, for edicts from above to have actually hurt my life and (much more directly) the lives of my students, friends, and colleagues.

Today, we learned that Trump is suspending the issuance of US visas to people from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Iran (but strangely not Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Wahhabist terrorism). This suspension might last just 30 days, but might also continue indefinitely—particularly if, as seems likely, the Iranian government thumbs its nose at whatever Trump demands that it do to get the suspension rescinded.

So the upshot is that, until further notice, science departments at American universities can no longer recruit PhD students from Iran—a country that, along with China, India, and a few others, has long been the source of some of our best talent. This will directly affect this year’s recruiting season, which is just now getting underway. (If Canada and Australia have any brains, they’ll snatch these students, and make the loss America’s.)

Stephanie Cohen:

At the start of 2017, the Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates self-importantly announced he was taking a year-long sabbatical from Twitter to focus on that old-fashioned long-form genre: the book. He’s not the only one taking a Twitter hiatus; lots of celebrities and writers have taken temporary breaks from the social media platform. But the compulsion—or addiction—to tweet is often too powerful to resist for very long.

To be sure, one can appreciate the cleverness of those who can stir the pot—or get a good laugh—with merely a few characters. Succinctness has its power. President Donald Trump sees Twitter as the most direct way to communicate with the American public—his words, no middle man, no third-hand interpretation, no tortured ambiguity. But the short 140-character bolts of verbal zing and the resulting dopamine bursts that he must get from the tidal wave of re-tweets has none of the depth, richness, and evidence of argument that were once the hallmark of leadership.

Leonid Bugaev:

I didn’t even know that I have been raising my 5-years old son according to the contemporary philosophy of slow parenting. I don’t mean that the time is getting frozen in our family. On the contrary: as a modern nomads we’ve moving a lot and and having many events. Slow parenting for me is not to be in a hurry; everything has its time. I believe that kid should go through all the levels of adulthood and make it in his very own tempo.
The title of a best-seller book about early childhood development by Japanese author Masaru Ibuka “Kindergarten Is Too Late” translated to Russian in even more categorical tone — ”It’s Too Late Under Three Years”. And is very up to date. Go faster and faster: you must educate your kid all the skills, display his talents and make him an adult as quick as possible. But are you sure that all these stuff is necessary for a natural and happy childhood and then adulthood?

Michela Del Vicarioa, Alessandro Bessib, Fabiana Zolloa, Fabio Petronic, Antonio Scalaa,d, Guido Caldarellia,d, H. Eugene Stanleye, and
Walter Quattrociocchia,

The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

Neil Buckley and Evon Huber:

Since Ewa Korulska launched Startowa middle school as director in 2007 she has wanted it to be a model for Polish education.

Now the school in a Warsaw suburb could be swept away as planned educational reforms bring cultural battles between Poland’s conservative government and its critics to the nation’s schools.

Middle schools such as Startowa, which teach 13- to 16-year-olds, would be abolished, but Ms Korulska and many education professionals have deeper concerns. They say the planned changes, including less time devoted to science and less compulsory schooling, will leave children ill-prepared for jobs and modern life.

Hannah Kuchler:

Coursera, the online education platform, is targeting veterans in the US, youth in Pakistan and would-be financiers in Kazakhstan with the launch of a service where governments pay on behalf of users.

Agencies from seven national governments have signed up to provide online training, aiming to close the skills gap and encourage people into employment in a cheaper way than conventional education.

By paying a couple of hundred dollars a year per student, the governments can provide free courses to the unemployed or underemployed in everything from machine learning in Mongolia to Excel spreadsheets in Egypt.

Rick Levin, chief executive of Coursera and former president of Yale University, said the Silicon Valley start-up began by addressing the skills gap individually and was moving to working with employers and governments.

Molly Beck:

A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Act 10 has been an “undisputed victory for Wisconsin taxpayers.”

“Wisconsin’s declining union membership since the passage of right-to-work legislation only reflects that workers now have the ability to make their own decision about the costs and benefits of union membership,” said spokeswoman Myranda Tanck. “Senator Fitzgerald maintains that the heart of this issue is a simple matter of individual freedom.”

Nationally, according to Thursday’s BLS report, about 14.6 million workers were members of unions in 2016 — down by 240,000 members, or 0.4 percent, from 2015. By comparison, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, or 17.7 million workers, in 1983.

UW-Madison economist Steven Deller said the level of union membership nationally has been declining for years — a trend that is likely to continue with large-scale, labor-intensive manufacturing being replaced with smaller-scale technology that requires more capital but less manual labor. Large-scale manufacturing companies tend to be unionized and their replacements are more likely not to be.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Act 10.

An emphasis on adult employment.

WEAC: $1.57 million for four senators.

K-12 Tax & Spending growth.

Madison schools 18k per student budget, up from about 15k in 2010.

Lachlan Markay:

Left-wing advocacy group Media Matters for America has been quietly working with social media giant Facebook to combat what the group describes as “propaganda” and “fake news,” internal documents reveal.

Media Matters told current and prospective donors at a retreat in Florida over the weekend that it has been in discussions with Facebook leadership about their policies on inaccurate and partisan news stories on the website that many liberals blame for political losses last year.

“We’ve been engaging with Facebook leadership behind the scenes to share our expertise and offer input on developing meaningful solutions,” the group said in a briefing book obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at the conference

2005, Madison Schools’ Fake News.

exurbe:

To give an example within the realm of intellectual history, teleological intellectual histories very often create the false impression that the only figures involved in a period’s intellectual world were heroes and villains, i.e. thinkers we venerate today, or their nasty bad backwards-looking enemies. This makes it seem as if the time period in question was already just previewing the big debates we have today. Such histories don’t know what to do with thinkers whose ideas were orthogonal to such debates, and if one characterizes the Renaissance as “Faith!” vs. “Reason!” and Marsilio Ficino comes along and says “Let’s use Platonic Reason to heal the soul!” a Whig history doesn’t know what to do with that, and reads it as a “dead end” or “detour.” Only heroes or villains fit the narrative, so Ficino must either become one or the other, or be left out. Teleological intellectual histories also tend to give the false impression that the figures we think are important now were always considered important, and if you bring up the fact that Aristotle was hardly read at all in antiquity and only revived in the Middle Ages, or that the most widely owned author in the Enlightenment was the now-obscure fideist encyclopedist Pierre Bayle, the narrative has to scramble to adopt.

Teleological history is also prone to “presentism” <= a bad thing, but a very useful term! Presentism is when one’s reading of history is distorted by one’s modern perspective, often through projecting modern values onto past events, and especially past people. An essay about the Magna Carta which projects Enlightenment values onto its Medieval authors would be presentist. So are histories of the Renaissance which want to portray it as a battle between Reason and religion, or say that only Florence and/or Venice had the real Renaissance because they were republics, and only the democratic spirit of republics could foster fruitful, modern, forward-thinking people. Presentism is also rearing its head when, in the opening episodes of the new Medici: Masters of Florence TV series, Cosimo de Medici talks about bankers as the masterminds of society, and describes himself as a job-creator, not the conceptual space banking was in in 1420. Presentism is sometimes conscious, but often unconscious, so mindful historians will pause whenever we see something that feels revolutionary, or progressive, or proto-modern, or too comfortable, to check for other readings, and make triple sure we have real evidence. Sometimes things in the past really were more modern than what surrounded them. I spent many dissertation years assembling vast grids of data which eventually painstakingly proved that Machaivelli’s interest in radical Epicurean materialism was exceptional for his day, and more similar to the interests of peers seventy years in his future than his own generation — that Machiavelli was exceptional and forward-thinking may be the least surprising conclusion a Renaissance historian can come to, but we have to prove such things very, very meticulously, to avoid spawning yet another distorted biography which says that Galileo was fundamentally an oppressed Bill Nye. Hint: Galileo was not Bill Nye; he was Galileo.

Kim Soffen:

In his eight years as president, Barack Obama saw the nation through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a major restructuring of the health insurance industry and a renaissance of civil rights movements. He saw political parties continue to polarize, tensions with Russia heighten and opioid abuse become an epidemic.

In preparing to face the challenges of the presidency, Obama laid out dozens of promises during his two campaigns. Now that he has moved out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can evaluate: How have the results stacked up?

Joanne Jacobs:

ews coverage about Betsy DeVos has been lousy, writes Alexander Russo in The Grade, now on the Kappan site.

Instead of giving readers a full, helpful understanding of the nominee and her background, national outlets including Politico, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and (especially) the New York Times have cherry-picked storylines that put DeVos in a negative light and written about DeVos’s ideas and efforts using fraught, charged language.

DeVos has been depicted as “Darth Vader meets Cruella de Vil,” writes Russo.
If she was so persuasive and powerful, wouldn’t Michigan have a voucher program in place? Wouldn’t Detroit Public Schools have been dissolved by now? Wouldn’t her husband be governor? Wouldn’t her preferred candidate have won the Republican nomination for president? Wouldn’t she have given a more commanding performance during her Senate hearing?

Russo mocks the idea that DeVos, who’s focused her attention on her home town of Grand Rapids, is responsible for Detroit Public Schools.

Mark Seidenberg:

THE LATE NORA Ephron famously felt badly about her neck, but that’s minor compared to how people feel about their reading. We think everyone else reads faster than we do, that we should be able to speed up, and that it would be a huge advantage if we could. You could read as much as a book critic for the New York Times. You could finish Infinite Jest. You could read all of Wikipedia. So, how fast can people read?

Reading speed is obviously going to depend on factors such as readers’ skills and goals and whether they are reading Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics or TMZ.com. But let’s just do some cold, hard calculations based on facts about the properties of eyes and texts.

About 7 to 8 letters are read clearly on each fixation.
Fixation durations average around 200 to 250 milliseconds (4 to 5 per second).
Words in most texts are about five letters long on average. 4 fixations per second = 240 fixations per minute
240 fixations × 7 letters per fixation = 1,680 letters per minute
1,680 letters/6 (five letters per word plus a space) = 280 words per minute

Robin Lake, Sarah Yatsko, Sean Gill, Alice Opalka

Animosity between school districts and charter schools has been the norm since the nation’s first charter school opened in 1992, but that is now starting to change. In at least 35 urban school districts with significant numbers of charter schools, efforts are under way to jointly improve instruction, align policies, address inequities, or garner efficiencies. About a dozen of these districts are using cooperation, also commonly referred to as district-charter collaboration, to drive decisions and address systemic challenges, including tracking school performance, student enrollment, and school closure. Cooperation in some cities has yielded real, tangible improvements for students and families, for example around more transparent discipline data and streamlined enrollment systems, while in other cities progress has stalled or even gone backwards.

Based on six years of research, our work has surfaced some fundamentals about the promises and challenges of cross-sector cooperation to date.

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

It was always going to be the case that America would eventually want/have to renegotiate its relationship with the world and the many great powers whose rise we encouraged and accommodated. Eight years ago I published an entire book (Great Powers) that laid out a host of accommodations, deals, renegotiations, compromises, etc. that we’d have to pursue to re-rationalize our relationship with the world and globalization itself – the most obvious being we’d have to get along with, and forge new, more realistic and equitable relationships with New Core powers like China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and so on. As I have maintained for a couple of decades now, globalization comes with rules – but not a ruler.

President Obama did a lot of good things while in office, most notably symmetricizing the war on terror (our SOF/drones against their badasses). But he also engaged in the ill-conceived and poorly executed “Asian pivot,” created a serious great-power leadership vacuum in SW Asia (into which strode Russia and Iran), and abandoned all pretense of responsible nation-building (logically adhering to the pottery barn rule – yes, but doing it by sharing both the burden and the decision-making with all those far-more-local-and-incentivized New Core powers named above). By doing these things, Obama encouraged the “G-Zero” atmosphere that President Trump now exploits to complete his very dark take on the state of America and the world – a take that allows him to regurgitate the “America First” vision of pre-superpower America.

Frank Harrell:

The field of machine learning arose somewhat independently of the field of statistics. As a result, machine learning experts tend not to emphasize probabilistic thinking. Probabilistic thinking and understanding uncertainty and variation are hallmarks of statistics. By the way, one of the best books about probabilistic thinking is Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t. In the medical field, a classic paper is David Spiegelhalter’s Probabilistic Prediction in Patient Management and Clinical Trials.

By not thinking probabilistically, machine learning advocates frequently utilize classifiers instead of using risk prediction models. The situation has gotten acute: many machine learning experts actually label logistic regression as a classification method (it is not). It is important to think about what classification really implies. Classification is in effect a decision. Optimum decisions require making full use of available data, developing predictions, and applying a loss/utility/cost function to make a decision that, for example, minimizes expected loss or maximizes expected utility. Different end users have different utility functions. In risk assessment this leads to their having different risk thresholds for action. Classification assumes that every user has the same utility function and that the utility function implied by the classification system is that utility function.

Lucy Kellaway:

Every January for the past decade I have handed out awards for horrible use of language in business. Usually the task amuses me. This year I have found the sheer weight of euphemism, grammatical infelicity, disingenuity and downright ugliness so lowering I have decided to start the 2016 Golden Flannel Awards with something more uplifting: a prize for clarity.

I am calling this the Wan Long prize, after the Chinese meat magnate who once uttered the clearest sentence ever spoken by a CEO: “What I do is kill pigs and sell meat.” Mr Wan will surely approve of my winner, a BNSF railway executive who told a conference: “We move stuff from one place to another.”

This elegant, informative and borderline beautiful sentence is a reminder that despite the horrific nature of the entries below, clarity remains attainable.

Mitch Henck Show (audio, starts at about 30
minutes).

Kate Toews interview.

Internet health report:

The Internet is an ecosystem. A living entity that billions of people depend on for knowledge, livelihood, self-expression, love…. The health of this system relies on – and influences – everyone it touches. Signs of poor health in any part impacts the whole. We’re all connected.
 How healthy is our Internet? How might we understand and diagnose it? We believe this is a timely and necessary conversation, and we hope you’ll join in.
 Our individual actions shape the health of the Internet ecosystem. Only by recognizing where the system is healthy can we take positive steps to make it stronger. Only by understanding where it’s at risk can we avoid actions that weaken it.

Becky Vevea:

The move is designed to make applying to a vast number of high school options easier on families. Now, students must fill out separate applications for each type of school they are interested in, such as selective enrollment or military schools. All incoming freshmen, not just savvy families applying to specialty schools, will use the system, district officials told WBEZ.

“They’ll go to the web page, one portal, and rank order their preferences one to 20,” said Janice Jackson, the chief education officer for Chicago Public Schools. “This entire program is about equity and access.”

Jinju Jang:

I hated maths.

Mathematics was frustrating. When I was young it seemed to be pointless to spend too much time on solving mathematical problems whilst you have so many other things to do!
Actually, I can create beautiful concepts if I know more about maths!

When I was a university student, I took an interactive art class where they taught me how to be a creative artist by writing code with Processing. From one of the examples, I found gorgeous art created by Marius Watz (he is my idol since then).

Scott Shackford:

These are critiques that come also entirely from those who are embedded within the entrenched public education system and who have a stake in maintaining and expanding the status quo. Some senators seem aghast at the idea that DeVos was unfamiliar with all sorts of federal laws about how local schools are required to behave in order to receive federal funding.

But this just puts DeVos on the same footing as everybody outside the education system who have to interact with it and feel little control. While there are indeed parents who are familiar with these federal regulations because they have kids with special needs, this approach on DeVos feels very much like an attempt to keep the Department of Education under the control of insiders.

Simons Chiose:

This year’s surge in the number of Americans applying to Canadian universities is not a clear sign that today’s students are dodging Donald Trump the way their grandparents dodged Vietnam, university admission experts say.

At many Canadian universities, applications from U.S. students for the 2017-18 academic year are up between 20 per cent and 80 per cent compared to last year, an informal survey conducted by The Globe and Mail shows. Even smaller schools such as Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., say they have seen applications from the United States increase by more than 60 per cent.

The interest comes after several years of renewed recruiting efforts in the United States. While the results of the U.S election may have stoked this year’s numbers, those recruitment campaigns combined with the drop in the Canadian dollar are likely to have played a large role, universities say.

economist intelligence unit:

According to the 2016 Democracy Index almost one-half of the world’s countries can be considered to be democracies of some sort, but the number of “full democracies” has declined from 20 in 2015 to 19 in 2016. The US has been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” because of a further erosion of trust in government and elected officials there.

The “democratic recession” worsened in 2016, when no region experienced an improvement in its average score and almost twice as many countries (72) recorded a decline in their total score as recorded an improvement (38). Eastern Europe experienced the most severe regression. The 2016 Democracy Index report, Revenge of the “deplorables”, examines the deep roots of today’s crisis of democracy in the developed world, and looks at how democracy fared in every region.

Kristen Graham:

“This is a critical issue of our time – in our society, but also in our students’ lives,” said Charlie McGeehan, an English and history teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, an activist group within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. “It’s important for us to dive in.”

That’s not a universal sentiment.

Christopher Paslay, an English teacher at Swenson Arts and Technology High School, said he’s unequivocally for equal rights and justice for all of his students, regardless of race.

But he takes issue with the Black Lives Matter movement and thinks it has no place in Philadelphia classrooms.

Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has promised to restore trust and accountability in government. How about auditing the Education Department? During its final days the Obama Administration slipped the news that its College Scorecard repayment rates were inflated, and on closer inspection the mistake doesn’t look innocent or innocuous.

Massimo Mazzotti:

Algorithms are changing the worlds we inhabit — and they’re changing us. They pop up in op-eds on weighty topics like the future of labor in an increasingly automated world. Writing about how new trading algorithms are taking over Wall Street, a dismayed journalist wonders “which office jobs are next?” — which of us, in other words, will be consigned to the dustbin of irrelevancy? The solution, others gamely counter, may be more algorithms: “How do you find a job? Ask the algorithm.” Algorithms promise to bring reliability and objectivity to otherwise uncertain procedures. In 2007, a famous billboard for ASK.com happily capitalized on this promise: it announced to San Franciscans that “the algorithm constantly finds Jesus.” Since then, most of us have adjusted our expectations. Algorithms, we have realized, can be carriers of shady interests and vehicles of corporate guile. And so, as a new batch of commentators urge, we must “make algorithms accountable.”

Matthew DeFour:

Tax filers making more than $100,000 a year are claiming two-thirds of a private school tuition tax cut enacted four years ago, according to data from the Department of Revenue.

The tax cut is costing the state about $12 million a year, far less than the $30 million projected when it was slipped into the 2013-15 state budget. The $18 million adjustment to the estimate was already factored into the state’s financial bottom line in 2016, DOR spokesman Casey Langan said, so it’s not an amount that can be tapped for new spending in the 2017-19 budget.

Families sending students to private school can reduce their adjusted gross income by up to $10,000 for high school tuition and up to $4,000 for elementary school tuition. The private school tuition exclusion, similar to an exclusion for a retirement account contribution, reduces a tax filer’s income before deductions and credits are applied, so the actual amount in tax savings is a few hundred dollars per tax filer. Unlike a tax deduction, filers don’t have to itemize to benefit from it.

Zhuang Pinghui:

China’s relaxation of its one-child policy led to the highest number of births for 17 years in 2016 with a further increase in the number of newborns tipped for this year, the country’s health authority said.

More than 18.46 million babies were born in mainland hospitals in 2016 – 11.5 per cent more than 2015 – which was the record total since 2000, Yang Wenzhuang, a division director at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told reporters at a briefing on Sunday.

China’s National Statistics Bureau previously reported that 17.86 million babies were born in 2016 based on a 1/1,000 sample survey. Both ways of calculating births are considered legitimate.

But these numbers are still below previous estimates. China’s family planning agency had estimated that allowing every Chinese couple to have two babies could push annual new births up to 20 million.

Last October, Madison Superintendent Jen Cheatham signed a resolution agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights regarding OCR’s compliance review of access to advanced coursework by Hispanic and African-American students in the District. The resolution agreement was presented at the December 5, 2016 Instruction Workgroup meeting (agenda item 6.1):
http://www.boarddocs.com/wi/mmsd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=AFL2QH731563

The description of the resolution agreement by Dylan Pauly & Jen Cheatham starts around 2 (h) 16 (m)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaW0YclXc8c&feature=em-share_video_user

The OCR resolution agreement was included on the agenda (item 9.3) of the December 12, 2016 full board meeting as part of the Instruction Workgroup “report out” without discussion.

When OCR does a compliance review, it issues a resolution letter to the subject institution which describes OCR’s review and OCR’s findings. The resolution agreement (signed by the institution) then sets forth what the institution agrees to do to address the issues in the resolution letter.

Adele Rapport (PDF), via a kind reader:

According to the Superintendent, the District did not have a unified cuniculum prior to the 2013-201 4 school year. The Distiict recently reported to OCR that it is implementing “a multi-year, multi-phased plan to engage in course alignment. The end result will be courses that share a common course plan, common titles and course descriptions in the high school course guides, syllabi using common templates and common end-of-course summative assessments.” As summarized below. the District’s cum~nt approach to AL services is the product of several programs and initiatives as well as a recently concJuded audit by WDPI.

In 2008 The District received a $5.3 million Smaller Learning Communities grant from the Department. With these funds the District began, in its words, “to rethink and reconceptualize the high school experience.” As a result of this process, the Distri<.:t in October 2010 announced the "Dual Pathways Plan," with goals that included aligning the curriculum among all four high schools: closing the achievement gap between white students and students of color: and remedying what the District concedes was unequal access for students to advanced courses. The District proposed we meet these goals by implementing two different pathways for high school students: a "preparatory pathway" and an "accelerated pathway". In March, 2011, The WDPI concluded an investigation of the District's TAG program by determining that the District had failed to comply with four State of Wisconsin requirements for TAG programs: (1) establish a TAG plan and hire a TAG coordinator: (2) identify TAG students in multiple domain areas, including intellectual, academic, creative. leadership and the arts: (3) provide access to TAG programming without cost and allow parents to participate in identification and programming. The District subsequently adopted and implemented a corrective action plan to address findings of WDPI's audit. On February 6, 2015, WDPI concluded monitoring the implementation of the District's corrective action plan, finding the District in compliance with all relevant statutory requirements for TAG programs in Wisconsin. Also in 2011, in response to unfavorable feedback from parents and community members regarding the Dual Pathways proposal, the District modified the proposal and enacted a more modest series of reforms focusing on curriculum alignment. The District began to scale back its use of prerequisites for advanced high school courses, implementing a system of "recommended skills and experiences." The District also increased its advanced course offerings for the ninth and tenth grade, and expanded its assessment of elementary and middle school students for advanced kaming opportunities by broadening its reliance on qualitative factors like teacher recommendations. ...... The District offers honors ond AP courses to provide enriched academic opportunities for students. The District does not offer an International Baccalaureate program. Students can take honors courses at the middle school level, and both honors and AP courses at the high school level. None of the high schools offers weighted grades or credits for honors or AP courses. The District's offoring of honors and AP courses varies among schools, and neither the alternative high school (Shabazz City High School) nor the non-traditional high school (Innovative and Alternative Education) which focuses on expeliential learning, offers such courses. The District offored 13 different AP courses in multiple sections during the 2013-14 school year and 24 different AP courses during the 2015-16 school year. Recognizing that its AP course offerings vary across its four high schools, the District recently completed a three-year plan for course vetting and course alignment that includes AP coursework. Pursuant to this plan, the District plans to standardize across all four high schools AP courses that do not have prerequisites. In addition, the Dist1ict's Director of CuITiculum and Instruction said the District has the goal to have a standard set of AP courses across all four high schools: the schools will not necessarily offer all of the same courses, but the AP courses each offers will be drawn from the same set of AP courses. The District will gauge student interest in AP courses in deciding where to offer the courses. However, the District will ensure that core AP courses such as Physics and English will be offered at all four high schools. The AL Direclor noted that a first step in offering higher level math courses at all high schools is to ensure that Algebra 1 is the same at all school. The Director of Curriculum and Management confirmed that the District is realigning the math curriculum. ...... The magnitude of the racial disparity in AP enrollment is worse for math and science AP courses. There were only 18 math and 17 science AP enrollments by African-American students, a rate of 1.2 math and 1.1 science AP enrollments per 100 African-American students. There were only 44 math and 38 science AP enrollments by Hispanic students, a rate of 3.9 math and 3.3 science AP enrollments per 100 Hispanic students. By comparison, there were 526.5 math and 368 science AP enrollments by white students, a rate of 14.9 math and 10.4 science AP enrollments per 100 white students. Thus, in the 2013-14 school year, enrollments by white students in AP math and AP science courses were 12.4 and 9.5 times greater respectively, than enrollments by African-American students, and 3.8 and 3.2 times greater, respectively, than enrollmentw by Hispanic students. ...... Further the data provided by the District show that there was underepresentation of African American and Hispanic students in AP courses at each high school in the District. During the 2013-2014 school year, the disparity between African-American students' participation and all other students' participation was statistically significant in 12 of 15 AP courses offered at East High School, 5 of 13 courses at LaFollette High School, 13 of 17 courses at Memorial High School and 9 of 14 courses at West High School. The disparity between Hispanic student enrollment and all other students' enrollment was statistically significant in 2 of 15 AP courses offered at East High SchooL 0 of 13 courses at LaFollette High School. 6 of 17 courses at Memorial High School and 8 of 14 courses at West High School. In addition. African-American students underrepresentation in AP math ws statistically significant in all 12 of the AP math offerings that were offered at every District high school (in the three courses of Calculus AB, Calculus BC and Statistics) and Hispanic students underrepresentation in AP math was statistically significant in 3 of the same 12 AP math offerings. As for participation in AP science, African-American students' underrepresentation was statistically significant in 8 of 12 offerings of AP science (in the three courses of Physics C, Chemistry, Biology and Environmental Science), and Hispanic students' underrepresentation was statistically significant in 3 of the same 12 AP science offerings.

Related:

TAG Complaint

Small Learning Communities English 10

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Reading Recovery

Math Forum Math Task Force

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

Madison’s Long Term, Disastrous Reading Results.

“The existing K-12 school system (including most charters and private schools) has been transformed into a knowledge-free zone…Surveys conducted by NAEP and other testing agencies reveal an astonishing lack of historical and civic knowledge…Fifty-two percent chose Germany, Japan, or Italy as “U.S. Allies” in World War II.”

Sol Stern, via Will Fitzhugh:

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education has set off a new round in America’s long-running education wars. Teachers’ unions and progressive activists are warning of impending disaster—that DeVos and other “billionaire privatizers” are out to dismantle America’s public schools, the pillars of our democracy. Pro-choice education reformers, on the other hand, are cheering the DeVos appointment, and see great opportunities ahead for their movement. DeVos is one of the nation’s most tenacious advocates for (and generous funders of) the market approach to education. She likes charter schools, but is a true believer in vouchers—the policy of giving parents of children stuck in failing public schools tax dollars to pay tuition at the private schools of their choice. Even more encouraging, DeVos will presumably have the backing of a president who pledged on the campaign trail to use $20 billion in federal education funds to boost voucher programs in the states.

Unfortunately, hyperbole seems to be trumping reality (pun not intended) in this latest dust-up over the schools. Both sides ought to consider a ceasefire in order to begin focusing on the major cause of bad schooling in America: a half-century of discredited instructional practices in the classroom.

Let’s dispose of a couple of canards. First, the Trump administration isn’t about to privatize the public schools—far from it. During the campaign, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that includes provisions severely limiting the federal role in K-12 education. These restrictions make it exceedingly difficult for the new administration to launch any sort of national school-choice program or to do away with Common Core. For better or worse, the future of all such reforms will remain exactly where they began—in the states.

Second, neither side in the debate has been entirely candid on the issue of charters and vouchers. We’ve already had several decades of robust school-choice experiments in the states and localities, many of which have been thoroughly evaluated. The results provide little confirmation for either side’s argument on how best to improve the schools. Charters seem to have produced significant gains for students in some school districts, including New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and New York. On the other hand, the largest study of charter school effects nationally (conducted by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes) found that only 17 percent of all charters had higher academic gains than similar public schools, while 37 percent had worse performance. Forty-six percent of charters performed no better or worse than public schools in the same district.

The grade for voucher programs is also an Incomplete. The country’s largest voucher experiment was launched in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 26 years ago. Today, more than 28,000 students are enrolled in the program, one-in-four of all the city’s students. Most minority parents are happy with their voucher schools—not a small point in its favor—but there has been no Milwaukee academic miracle. In fact, the city’s black children have recorded some of the worst test scores of any urban district in the country, as measured by National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Josh Ye:

A Chinese university is investigating complaints that one its professors blogged in lurid detail how male professors screened women students who hoped to take their courses according to their appearance.

Qiao Mu, an outspoken journalism professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University who was famously sidelined for his advocacy for free speech, has again attracted controversy after writing on his Weibo account on Friday that many male professors judged women interviewees based on their appearance.