Mark Lilla:

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

Joel Kotkin

Given its almost lock-step media backing, support from oligarchs everywhere, and Trump’s self-destructive lack of self-control, the Democratic establishment will likely prevail at the election. And it will use this as a perfect opportunity to turn more Americans into effective wards of the state. It will finance its agenda at the cost of the middle class while the hedge funders, tech oligarchs and real-estate speculators continue to feed at the trough.
However, the forces stirred up and tapped by Trump will not go away anytime soon, even if he loses. What the rebellion now needs, more than anything, is a messenger like Ronald Reagan in 1980, who appealed to earlier resentments but with a fierce sense of discipline and decorum. Some day, the swagger, arrogance and manipulation of the united ruling classes may have to confront a messenger who, unlike Trump, can make a more convincing case against them. Those who laugh today at Trump and his ‘stupid’ supporters may not be so jocular that day.

Jeff Guo:

For those who doubt that racial resentment lingers in this nation, Asian Americans are a favorite talking point. The argument goes something like this: If “white privilege” is so oppressive — if the United States is so hostile toward its minorities — why do census figures show that Asian Americans out-earn everyone?

In a 2014 editorial, conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly pointed out that Asian household incomes were 20 percent higher than white household incomes on average. “So, do we have Asian privilege in America?” he asked. Of course not, he said. The real reason that Asians are “succeeding far more than African-Americans and even more than white Americans” is that “their families are intact and education is paramount,” he said.

Molly Beck:

John Matthews, former longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., called Evers a “hero” and said he deserves to be re-elected. He said Wisconsin “residents know of his advocacy for their children.”

“That said, I do worry that the far right and the corporations which want to privatize our public schools and make them for-profit private schools will spend millions in an attempt to defeat him,” Matthews said.

A spokeswoman for WEAC did not respond to a request for comment.

Pro-voucher group American Federation for Children’s political arm spent heavily on behalf of Republican candidates in legislative races this year.

An AFC official said the group has not made any decisions about the superintendent’s race, including whom to support and whether to spend money.

Evers declined to comment on the campaign.

“I have been focused on my budget and focused on several other issues that are important to the state and I haven’t paid attention to what any potential opponents are saying,” he said.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

James Astill:

Yet my children’s experience of school in America is in some ways as indifferent as their swimming classes are good, for the country’s elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff. According to the OECD’s latest international education rankings, American children are rated average at reading, below average at science, and poor at maths, at which they rank 27th out of 34 developed countries. At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at maths that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up.

This is not for lack of investment. America spends more on educating its children than all but a handful of rich countries. Nor is it due to high levels of inequality: the proportion of American children coming from under-privileged backgrounds is about par for the OECD. A better reason, in my snapshot experience of American schooling, is a frustrating lack of intellectual ambition for children to match the sporting ambition that is so excellently drummed into them in our local swimming pool and elsewhere.

My children’s elementary school, I should say, is one of America’s better ones, and in many ways terrific. It is orderly, friendly, well-provisioned and packed with the sparky offspring of high-achieving Washington, DC, commuters. Its teachers are diligent, approachable and exude the same relentless positivity as the swimming instructors. We feel fortunate to have them. Yet the contrast with the decent London state school from which we moved our eldest children is, in some ways, dispiriting.

After two years of school in England, our six-year-old was so far ahead of his American peers that he had to be bumped up a year, where he was also ahead. This was partly because American children start regular school at five, a year later than most British children; but it was also for more substantive reasons.

Related: Connected Math, Discovery Math and the Math Forum (audio and video).

Reading requires attention as well. (MTEL)

Locally, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results despite spending more than most, now around $18k per student.

And, National Council on teacher quality links are worth a look.

Charles Sahm:

Too often, folks like me in the “education reform” camp look solely to charter schools for examples of “what works” in education. But if one peruses the website SchoolGrades.org – a site launched by the Manhattan Institute (where I work) that uses a common benchmark to assess all public elementary and middle schools across the U.S. – one will find many good old-fashioned district schools among America’s best.

For example, P.S. 172, the Beacon School of Excellence, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn: 86 percent of its 600 pre-K-5th grade students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; yet according to SchoolGrades.org, it’s one of the top 10 schools in New York state.

By David Shepardson, Malathi Nayak and Julia Love

Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google faces a tougher regulatory landscape as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration looks poised to reverse Obama administration policies that often favored the internet giant in the company’s battles with telecoms and cable heavyweights, analysts say.

Google had close ties with outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, and its employees donated much more to defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton than to the Republican Trump.

In the most concrete sign yet that the tech policy balance may be tipping in favor of telecom firms ahead of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday halted action on contentious regulatory reform measures opposed by companies such as AT&T Inc (T.N) and CenturyLink Inc.(CTL.N)

Times-Dispatch

Anyone even casually familiar with Thomas Jefferson knows well the contradictions he lived and the numerous ways he fell short not only of 21st-century ideals but of his own — just like every other human being who has ever lived. Jefferson was a slaveholder and a bigot and a genius and one of the greatest figures in American history.

In response to the letter, Sullivan sensibly explained that quoting Jefferson “does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time, such as slavery and the exclusion of women and people of color from the university.” The point is blindingly obvious, and the necessity of its repetition does not speak well of the capacity for nuance of the letter’s signatories — some of whom, we suspect, at some point have approvingly cited other historical figures who also have feet of clay.

Ron French:

Dual enrollment is suffering growing pains. The popular program allows high schoolers to take college courses free, with the incentive that they will apply to a degree program. But opportunities still vary widely between counties, and credits earned come with strings attached at many Michigan universities.

There is no state office assuring that dual-enrollment courses align with requirements at the state’s universities. And because Michigan’s 15 public universities are autonomous, their policies on accepting dual-enrollment credits vary.

Dual enrollment has benefited thousands of Michigan students by giving them an early taste of college and, in many cases, allowed them to earn credits without paying tuition. But frustrations remain for students and families, who often find out later that the credits either aren’t accepted at the university they enroll in, or are counted only as general credits rather than applying toward a major.

Miranda Spivack:

For more than three decades, Nick Maravell and his family farmed on a 20-acre plot in suburban Maryland, tucked between the Potomac River and megamansions in Potomac, a tony suburb that is home to powerful lobbyists, government contractors and other wealthy families.

Nick’s Organic Farm, a relaxed place where customers would stop by to pick up some vegetables or simply drop in for a chat, was a tenant on land owned by the county public school system. But one day in 2011, Maravell got some bad news. Montgomery County’s top elected official and his aides had been negotiating in secret to get the school board to kick out Maravell’s farm and rent the site to a private soccer club.

“It caught everybody by surprise,” said Curt Uhre, a neighbor.

Residents who cherished the farm quickly rallied to Maravell’s side. Worried about traffic and the potential loss of open space, they began researching the county’s proposal to convert the farm to soccer fields.

During the legal fight, they also began learning about Maryland’s open records law. Used frequently by journalists and business interests, the state’s public records law allowed them to seek government documents — memos, officials’ calendars and other items — that might offer clues to how the deal was done or hints about who had been speaking with whom, when the plans were hatched and why.

Matthew Reade & Ross Steinberg

The Claremont Independent has learned that a concerned individual has lodged a complaint with the IRS in response to Pomona College’s promotion and funding of an anti-Trump rally.

As the Independent reported this week, Pomona College’s Draper Center for Community Partnerships may have run afoul of federal non-profit regulations by reimbursing transportation costs to and from a rally against Donald Trump in Los Angeles on November 9th. Draper Center staff also promoted the event on Facebook and organized bus transportation for students who wished to attend.

As a 501(c)(3) educational institution, Pomona College is prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity with tax-exempt dollars. If an investigation is launched, it could lead to the revocation of Pomona College’s tax-exempt status, among other possible sanctions.

John Markoff

An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University.
 
 The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like #Clinton.
 
 Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions, said Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report. If you were looking for a real debate of the issues, you weren’t going to find it with a chatbot.

Related: Fake web traffic.

Stephen Rohde

THE EXPANSION of worldwide means of communications has been unprecedented. On October 29, 1969, the very first message was sent from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute. A December 1969 map of what would eventually become the internet showed a total of four computers. In August 1981, there were just 213 internet hosts.

The first-ever website was created in 1991.
As of 2015, there are approximately three billion internet users. There are about two billion smartphones across the world, which is projected to reach four billion by 2020. It is estimated that it would take about six million years to watch all the videos crossing global networks in a single month. Were each Facebook user counted as an inhabitant, Facebook would have a larger population than China.

Philip Ball

Science has been peculiarly resistant to self-examination. During the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, for instance, scientists disdained sociological studies of their culture. Yet there is now a growing trend for scientists to use the quantitative methods of data analysis and theoretical modelling to try to work out how, and how well, science works — often with depressing conclusions. Why are these kinds of studies being produced, and what is their value?

Take a study published on 10 November1 by psychologists Andrew Higginson of the University of Exeter and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, UK. It considers how scientists can maximize their ‘fitness’, or career success, in a simplified ecosystem that allows them to invest varying amounts of time and effort into exploratory studies. The study finds that in an ecosystem that rewards a constant stream of high-profile claims, researchers will rationally opt for corner-cutting strategies, such as small sample sizes. These save on the effort required for each study, but they raise the danger that new findings will not prove robust or repeatable.

Danielle Dreilinger:

Louisiana’s overall school performance score dipped this year. The state released the annual capstone results Thursday (Nov. 17). Louisiana as a whole fell from a B to a C, losing about 6 points on a 150-point scale — not a good direction in a state that’s already well behind the nation.

Not only do these scores matter for community pride and the desirability of a neighborhood among parents, but they determine whether charter schools stay open — which affects almost all of New Orleans — and whether traditional schools are subject to state intervention.

Colleen Flaherty:

Oberlin College has dismissed Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition, following an investigation into anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements she made on social media — including her assertion that ISIS is really an arm of Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies and that Israel was behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

The college initially affirmed Karega’s right to academic freedom when her inflammatory statements surfaced earlier this year, but placed her on leave in August, pending an investigation into her conduct. Beyond concerns about anti-Semitism, which fit into larger complaints about escalating anti-Jewish rhetoric on campus, Karega’s case has raised questions about whether academic freedom covers statements that have no basis in fact.

Oberlin’s Board of Trustees ultimately voted to dismiss Karega for “failing to meet the academic standards that Oberlin requires of its faculty and failing to demonstrate intellectual honesty,” the college said in a statement released late Tuesday. The vote followed “extensive consideration and a comprehensive review of recommendations from multiple faculty committees,” and from President Marvin Krislov.

Doug Erickson:

All 16 Dane County school districts earned three or more stars on the state’s 2015-16 report cards, meaning they met or exceeded expectations for educating children.

The top county score went to Waunakee, the only one of the 16 to earn all five stars. That placed it in the top category: “significantly exceeds expectations.” Only 53 other districts in the state out of 424 earned that highest honor.

This is the first year the report cards used a five-star rating system. The stars correspond to one of five categories: “fails to meet expectations,” “meets few expectations,” “meets expectations,” “exceeds expectations” and “significantly exceeds expectations.”

The Madison School District earned three stars. Its score, the lowest of the 16 county districts, placed it in the middle of the “meets expectations” category.

The report cards were released Thursday by the state Department of Public Instruction. In addition to each district getting a score, individual schools were rated.

Kurt Wagner:

A traditional college education is expensive. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner also thinks it might be overvalued.

“Historically here, there’s been a tremendous amount of weight that’s been given to four-year university degrees and not nearly enough weight in my opinion is given to vocational training facilities and vocational training certifications,” Weiner said Tuesday at Recode’s Code Enterpriseconference in San Francisco.

Weiner was discussing the ever-widening educational gap between two-year vocational programs and traditional four-year degrees. Quite frankly, he believes that specific skills, not diplomas, need to be valued more in today’s workforce.

Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott:

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

Joanne Jacobs

Unions targeted charters because they’re so good, he concludes. “The better the charter, the bigger the threat.”

Educators fought to defend the premise that schools can’t make a difference for kids in poverty, writes Whitmire.

When a charter operator such as Brooke Charter Schools, which serves a poor and minority student population, turns its students into scholars who rival the white and Asian students attending amply funded public schools in the suburbs along the Route 128 corridor, the question has to be asked: If Brooke can do it, why not others?
The Massachusetts Teachers Association started its anti-charter campaign seven months before the election, focusing on funding rather than school quality, Whitmire writes. Neither unions nor superintendents “can afford to lose the poverty argument. That risks losing everything.”

Eduwonk’s Andrew Rotherham asks how much the unions spent in Massachusetts to “protect jobs and keep poor black kids bottled up in crappy schools?” What if they’d spent that money “in, oh I don’t know, Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania on politics there?”

Sue Shellenbarger:

Moving back in with your parents in your 20s is one thing. But what about when you’re over 40?

More people in their 40s and beyond are moving in with their aging parents because of a financial or health setback. “This is kind of a hidden group,” says Steven Wallace, associate director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. They expect to be well-established in a career by midlife and thinking ahead toward retirement; then lightning strikes, in the form of a job loss, injury or illness.

Living with Mom and Dad at midlife comes with a heavy stigma and may force painful adjustments in family roles. Deborah Graves moved in with her 87-year-old mother, Jacqueline Graves, in Flossmoor, Ill., last year after a layoff from her 20-year job as a clinical laboratory technician and an unsuccessful job search. Now, she is juggling new demands on her time, including college courses in medical coding, a 20-hour workweek in a department store and driving her mother to medical appointments. She cooks one or two meals a day for her mother—a task “I wish I didn’t have to do,” says Ms. Graves, 58 years old.

Muhammad Ikram, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Suranga Seneviratne, Mohamed Ali Kaafar and Vern Paxson:

Millions of users worldwide resort to mobile VPN clients to either circumvent censorship or to access geo-blocked con- tent, and more generally for privacy and security purposes. In practice, however, users have little if any guarantees about the corresponding security and privacy settings, and perhaps no practical knowledge about the entities accessing their mo- bile traffic.

In this paper we provide a first comprehensive analysis of 283 Android apps that use the Android VPN permission, which we extracted from a corpus of more than 1.4 million apps on the Google Play store. We perform a number of passive and active measurements designed to investigate a wide range of security and privacy features and to study the behavior of each VPN-based app. Our analysis includes in- vestigation of possible malware presence, third-party library embedding, and traffic manipulation, as well as gauging user perception of the security and privacy of such apps. Our ex- periments reveal several instances of VPN apps that expose users to serious privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as use of insecure VPN tunneling protocols, as well as IPv6 and DNS traffic leakage. We also report on a number of apps actively performing TLS interception. Of particular con- cern are instances of apps that inject JavaScript programs for tracking, advertising, and for redirecting e-commerce traffic to external partners.

Valerie Strauss

If you listen to the school reform debate these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that public schools across the board are failing students and that schools that are struggling can only improve if they fire all of their staff, become a charter school or let the state take them over. It’s just not so.

This is clear in a project called the Schools of Opportunity, launched a few years ago by educators who sought to highlight public high schools that actively seek to close opportunity gaps through 11 research-proven practices and not standardized test scores (which are more a measure of socioeconomic status than anything else).

The project assesses how well schools provide health and psychological support for students, judicious and fair discipline policies, high-quality teacher mentoring programs, outreach to the community, effective student and faculty support systems, and broad and enriched curriculum. Schools submit applications explaining why they believe their school should be recognized

Molly Beck:

Over all, Evers is seeking about a $707 million increase in spending including a $525 million increase in general school aid and other changes that would comprise a funding formula overhaul. The request seeks a 2.7 percent increase in overall spending in the 2017-18 school year and a 5.4 percent increase in the 2018-19 school year.

The request marks the fourth time Evers has asked the Legislature to change the state’s funding formula.

Part of the overhaul would eliminate a special funding stream to pay for students living in high poverty and factor more money into the main funding formula for the same purpose.

The budget also asks for increases in state-imposed revenue caps and would set a minimum amount of money the state sends to schools, regardless of how wealthy the district is. Each district would receive a minimum of $3,000 per student under the request.

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Tim Mak

For nearly eight years, President Obama massively expanded his authority on national security issues: on the prosecution of whistleblowers, secret surveillance courts, wars without congressional authorization, and drone campaigns without public oversight. During this time the left, with the exception of some civil liberties groups, remained largely silent.

But now this entire apparatus is being handed over to Donald Trump, a president with a penchant for authoritarianism, who will no doubt point to Obama as precedent to justify the continuation, and perhaps broadening, of these national security excesses.

Track
Changes

This is a big question that often gets asked about technology giants. It’s important to understand that “media” here is not just “thing that delivers news and entertainment” but rather “corporation with primary mission of providing a revenue-driving platform that can deliver information and advertising to an audience.”

To technology companies, being a “media company” is basically a death sentence. Look at Google: It’s an advertising company dependent on people publishing web pages on the Internet, but actually look over here at Alphabet, at these self-driving cars and immense opportunities. Media companies have unions and ombudswomen and declining growth. Technology companies fund trips to Mars. So, as Nick Carr wrote in September:

Caleb Taylor

They’re coddling students. They’re overreacting to a Presidential election result that displeases them. And some, I assume, are good people. I’m talking, of course, about the administrators at the UALR Bowen School of Law. Are you a budding legal scholar distraught over the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump? Well, Bowen School of Law has on-campus counseling available for that.

Bowen Dean Michael Schwartz notified students today that “this election season was the most upsetting, most painful, most disturbing election season of my lifetime” and that “extra on-campus counseling services” would be available for those who “feel upset.”

newsbusters:

The Media Research Center (MRC) announces the findings of a new post-election poll on what actual voters thought about the media’s influence on the 2016 presidential race. The MRC/YouGov poll was conducted on November 9 and 10

Kate Bellows:

Several groups on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.

In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”

Some professors from the Psychology Department — and other academic departments — did not agree with the use of this quote. Their letter to Sullivan argued that in light of Jefferson’s owning of slaves and other racist beliefs, she should refrain from quoting Jefferson in email communications.

“We would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it,” the letter read. “For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotations in these e-mails undermines the message of unity, equality and civility that you are attempting to convey.”

Glenn Reynolds

One of the more amusing bits of fallout from last week’s election has been the safe-space response of many colleges and universities to the election of the “wrong” candidate. But on closer examination, this response isn’t really amusing. In fact, it’s downright mean.

Trump’s substantial victory, when most progressives expected a Hillary landslide, came as a shock to many. That shock seems to have been multiplied in academe, where few people seem to know any Trump supporters — or, at least, any Trump supporters who’ll admit to it.

The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food and play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough [sic], positive card-making, Legos and bubbles with your fellow law students.” (Embarrassed by the attention, UM Law scrubbed the announcement from its website, perhaps concerned that people would wonder if its graduates would require Legos and bubbles in the event of stressful litigation.)

Matt Apuzzo & Michael Schmidt

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data service and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours.
 
 Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.
 
 International customers and users of disposable or prepaid phones are the people most affected by the software. But the scope is unclear. The Chinese company that wrote the software, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, says its code runs on more than 700 million phones, cars and other smart devices. One American phone manufacturer, BLU Products, said that 120,000 of its phones had been affected and that it had updated the software to eliminate the feature.

Walter Dellinger:

First and foremost, he will have been chosen by the constitutional rules currently in place. This alone is a source of legitimacy. Moreover, we simply do not and cannot know who would have won a national popular-vote contest had one been held. In such a case, both candidates would have run fundamentally different campaigns, emphasizing different issues and appearing frequently in states like California, New York, and Texas. Who can know how people in those states would have responded had they been as informed by exposure to the candidates and their ads as citizens in Wisconsin and Ohio? One cannot persuasively impeach the electoral vote with a national popular-vote number that was wholly irrelevant to the campaign that was actually run. The hypothetical question of who would have won a national popular-vote contest if one had been held is thus completely unanswerable. (One note: It seems odd to hear commentators from England, Canada, or other parliamentary countries criticize the electoral-vote system when, in their own countries, it sometimes happens that one party receives more total votes nationally for its parliamentary candidates, yet the other party with fewer total votes elects more members and thus chooses the nation’s prime minister.)

and: via a kind reader.

Clay Routledge, via a kind reader email:

Administrators at the University of Florida recently notified students that a 24-hour counseling hotline is available to anyone who feels offended by Halloween costumes. Other colleges, in an attempt to pre-empt the psychological threat of offensive costumes, have created and distributed Halloween costume guidelines to help students make appropriate choices if they decide to dress up.

The University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, for example, encouraged students to attend a special seminar titled “Is Your Halloween Costume Racist?” while Tufts University went a step further, sending a letter to students in fraternities and sororities indicating they could face investigation (by university police) and punishment for making the wrong costume choice.

Of course, this issue is not about Halloween. More and more colleges are creating “bias response teams” that students can contact if they feel they have been victimized by microaggressions. There is an increasing demand for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students not from physical danger, but from ideas, course material, and viewpoints they may find offensive. Conservative speakers are being banned from campus because students claim to find them threatening. Professors are being investigated for not being sufficiently politically correct in class, failing to predict what material might trigger students, or refusing to use gender neutral pronouns that are not even part of the English language.

John Thompson

Although probably not one of the main reasons for the 2016 Democratic defeat, education reform could have cost Clinton electoral votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Because it is the policy that I most fully understand, I will describe education reform as a metaphor for how “the Billionaires Boys Club” and the Obama administration pushed technocratic policies that helped open the door for Trump’s victory.

First, then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan staffed his agency with Gates Foundation wonks and imposed a set of Gov. Scott Walker-lite, anti-union, anti-teacher corporate school reforms. Second, the Democratic Party remained on the sidelines during the campaigns to resist Right to Work and recall Walker and Koch-funded legislators. As they should be, deep-pocket donors and the Ten Percent, are always quick to open their wallets in support of liberal social issues, however, they seemed oblivious to the need to support blue collar workers and teachers.

Nick Anderson:

On election night, some emailed an economics professor, Steven Berry, to ask if he could postpone a midterm exam scheduled the next morning. He agreed to make the exam optional — with additional stakes put onto the final exam for anyone who wanted to skip the midterm. Most ended up taking the test Wednesday.

University officials said academic work must go on. They said they would not issue exemptions, known as “dean’s excuses,” granting students a temporary reprieve from testing requirements because of postelection trauma.

“Dean’s excuses are not designed to respond to reactions, howsoever deeply felt or unsettling, to an event such as a national election,” the dean of academic affairs, Mark Schenker, told the Yale Daily News. Instead, Schenker said, students who need help could turn to the university’s mental health and counseling services.

Some found solace in other ways.

Evan Osnos:

“What has gone awry in American politics is not purely that we’ve got issues with the mechanics of democracy,” he said. “Over the past two generations, the idea of education being about teaching people how to engage in public affairs has been lost. At one point, the core curriculum at the college level was focused on: How do you get ready to be an active citizen in America? How do we make democracy endure? Today, education is almost exclusively thought of in terms of career preparation. That’s what we’ve lost.

Pamela Cotant:

Kaleb Villalba, a fifth-grader at St. James Catholic School, who was dressed in a red dress shirt and a red, white and blue tie, said it was important to give thanks to veterans for “giving everyone else liberty.”

He was one of the fourth- through eighth-grade students from the Madison school — many dressed in red, white and blue — who sang songs and gave cards to veterans at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Friday in honor of Veterans Day. The cards were made by the school’s elementary students with help from their buddies who presented them.

In addition, students and the veterans observed a moment of silence for fallen soldiers.

Frank Bayer, who lives outside of Cross Plains and served in Vietnam for 14 months, said he was touched when a handful of kids gave him cards.

Trisha Powell Crain

Test scores are up in small ways across grade levels in Alabama. State Superintendent Michael Sentance on Thursday pointed to schools and districts showing high levels of growth, praising educators for the “hard things” they do to improve achievement.

But it’s clear Sentance believes Alabama’s students can achieve at much higher levels, telling board members “as the Chicago Cubs demonstrated, even if you’re at the bottom, you can eventually reach the top.”

Board member Mary Scott Hunter quickly replied, “But we’re not going to wait a hundred years,” referring to the time it took for the Cubs to win the World Series.

Bruce Vielmetti:

A state lawmaker said Saturday he would introduce a bill to allow licensed gun owners to carry weapons on the grounds of private schools, and he expects to advance similar bills aimed at public K-12 schools and college campuses.

State Rep. Jesse Kremer (R-Kewaskum) said the state’s concealed carry law, which restricts permit holders from taking their weapons on school grounds, needs to be adjusted to match the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, which includes an exception for those with CCW licenses. He said the effort is targeting private schools first because “it’s an easier lift” politically.

Kremer also believes schools should be permitted to let licensed, trained teachers and other staff keep guns in schools as a means to stop deadly mass shootings like those at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech University and Sandy Hook Elementary.

Caleb Crain

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

Mark Walker, Patrick Anderson and John Hult

The practice isn’t new, according to attorneys, but it’s been brought to light in a recent case in Pierre, S.D. An attorney for a man charged with felony drug ingestion is asking a judge to throw out evidence from an involuntary urine sample, saying it violated his client’s constitutional rights.
Dirk Landon Sparks was arrested March 14 after a report of a domestic disturbance. While in custody, officers with the Pierre Police Department observed Sparks fidgeting and his mood changing rapidly. A judge signed off on a search warrant for police to obtain blood or urine.

After Sparks refused to cooperate, police transported him to Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, where he was strapped to a bed while a catheter was forced into his penis so that officers could obtain a urine sample.

Steven Brill

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.
 
Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.
 
Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like
that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.

Shelby du Lac

Ziegler, a Madison native now attending UWGB as a business major with a focus in social work, said she originally wanted to go to Arizona State University, but the high cost of out-of-state tuition made her look elsewhere. By comparison, Jones said the average cost for a Wisconsin resident to attend UWGB is just $8,000 per semester.

“My cousins introduced me to UWGB and when I visited campus I fell in love with it,” Ziegler said. She added the combination of a tight-knit campus and small classes that guaranteed a personalized education calmed any nerves she had about starting college.
Jones said the university is known for providing that sort of smooth transition for those right out of high school.

New Yorker:

We ducked into a room stuffed with rusted bed frames and dirty plastic barrels, where in a corner a thin young man was propped on a bed without sheets. He watched us weakly. A young woman in a pink T-shirt stood beside him, rigid with surprise. The medical student gently asked if they would answer my questions. The young man nodded. His name was Nestor. He was twenty-one. This was his wife, Grace. Three weeks earlier, he had been ambushed on his motorbike and shot three times, in the chest and the left arm. “They were going to shoot me again, but one of the malandros”—bad guys—“said I was already dead. They took my motorbike.” Nestor spoke slowly, his voice uninflected. His skin was waxy. The wounds to his arm and chest were uncovered, half healed, dark with dried blood. There was a saline drip in his right arm and, at the foot of his bed, an improvised contraption, made from twine and an old one-litre plastic bottle, whose purpose I couldn’t figure out.

Did the hospital provide the saline?

No. Grace brought it. She also brought food, water, and, when she could find them, bandages, pain medication, antibiotics. These things were available only on the black market, at high prices, and Grace’s job, in a warehouse, paid less than a dollar a day.

“The hospital doesn’t even give water,” the medical student said. He was watching the hallway. He studied Nestor briefly. “The lungs fill with liquid after someone is shot in the thorax,” he told me. “We usually take the bullet out if we can. But, either way, the wounds need to be drained.”

Saul Klein.

Howard Blume

Two incumbents are running again for their seats, and a third is open. The primary election takes place in March, after which the top two finishers in each district face off in the May general election.

Among the incumbents is Monica Garcia, who represents District 2, which encompasses downtown Los Angeles and surrounding neighborhoods. She’s the longest-serving board member, having joined the seven-member body in 2006. Garcia is expected to have the support of the philanthropists, but she has also been endorsed in the past by employee unions that typically back incumbents.

slehar:

Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of which find a single unified formalism under Clifford Algebra. It is a unifying language for mathematics, and a revealing language for physics.

Joan Williams:

He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.

Amy Ellis Nutt:

“Multiple drugs overload the system in ways we can’t predict,” said Rene Muller, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins. “Everyone metabolizes drugs differently, which also affects how they interact with each other.”

Four years ago, Charlotte Sieber met Jennifer Roeder, who told of her own travails trying to come off psychiatric medications when they failed to help her feel less depressed.

“It was the first time she heard that maybe the drugs were hurting, not helping,” Roeder said.

Sieber began to slowly wean herself off her many medications, tapering the drugs one at a time, according to family and friends, though she often had to stop to let her body and mind recover.

“It’s really hard to withdraw from antidepressants,” said New York psychiatrist and pharmacology expert Julie Holland. In some cases, “people feel like cold water is running down their spine. They can feel their brain sloshing around, or electric zaps in their head.”

By July 2015, Sieber had successfully discontinued all but one of her psychiatric medications.

“One of her worst [side effects] was sleep. She could not sleep,” said Pati Wolfe, who often joined Sieber in the struggle to withdraw from drugs. “This went on for months and months. Maybe a couple of hours a night was all she would get.”

It was so bad that Sieber had to move out of the bedroom she shared with her husband so he could get some sleep. Heart palpitations, obsessive worrying and anxiety clouded her nights. She lost weight and sometimes told friends it was too hard to talk to them.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Instructing Students with SLD/Dyslexia: What Every Educator Needs to Know
Keynote Address by Dr. Margie Gillis to the Special Education Resource Center of Connecticut’s 2016 Back to School Meeting
Access the video
Access the PowerPoint slides, Assessing and Instructing Students with SLD/Dyslexia, that accompany this presentation
​
Teaching Reading: The Number One Job of Every Educator
Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 5:00 PM CDT
Reading Horizons hosts Donell Pons, M.Ed., MAT
Free
Information and registration
Orton-Gillingham Online Training and Practicum

Offered by Mayerson Academy
Register now for January – May, 2017
$1399

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

It has become common knowledge that Wisconsin students do not perform well in 4th grade reading, and that efforts to improve performance over the past two decades have been largely ineffective. On the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the only means we have to compare Wisconsin apples-to-apples to other jurisdictions, only 37% of our 4th graders performed at a proficient level or better in 2015, and our statewide score was statistically the same as it was in 1992. Because performance in other jurisdictions has improved over that time, our national ranking has dropped from 3rd in 1994 to 31st in 2013 and 25th in 2015. More details here.

Last week, DPI released scores on the first administration of the state Forward exam from the spring of 2016. The data is recorded in searchable form at http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp On this exam, with its Wisconsin-developed content and proficiency criteria, approximately 43.7% of 4th graders reached the proficient level in English Language Arts. That is less than half of our state’s 4th graders performing proficiently. Forward exam results cannot be accurately compared to either the 2015 Badger exam, or the earlier WKCE.

There is a tendency to believe that the problem is confined to a few low-performing districts that bring down the state average. While there is definitely a performance gap between high-poverty and affluent districts, even higher-performing districts leave 30 to 40% of their students below the proficiency cut-off. For example, In the Greater Milwaukee area, MPS has 15.5% of its 4th graders scoring proficient, while the levels are 51% in Shorewood, 62.4% in Whitefish Bay, 64.9% in Elmbrook, 65.1% in Wauwatosa, and 70.8% in Mequon. In the Madison area, MMSD has 34.5% of its students at a proficient level, while Verona has 43.8% and Middleton/Cross Plains has 60.3%. There is plenty of room for improvement in all areas of the state.

We can also sort scores to pull out performance levels for different non-geographical sub-groups of students. Statewide, we see the usual gaps between different racial groups. 51% of white students are at the proficient level, as opposed to 39.7% of Asians, 23% of Hispanics, 22.3% of Native Americans, and 12.6% of blacks. 56.2% of non-economically disadvantaged students are proficient, versus 23.8% of economically disadvantaged students. Proficiency rates are 47.8 for students with no disabilities and 14.2% for those with disabilities (not including students with severe cognitive disabilities, who take a different assessment). Girls post 47.7% proficient, while boys are at 39.9%.

To find comparative scores for subgroups of students in your district, go to http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp, and under “WSAS” in the top drop-down menu bar, select “Forward” and “Forward Single Year.” Then enter the district or school, the type of student, the test type, test subject, and grade tested. You can also use the dashboard to compare different schools and districts.

See the official DPI new release, as well as commentary in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin State Journal.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Micah Lee

Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated.

The best approach varies from situation to situation, but here are some first steps that activists and other concerned citizens should take.

Joseph Menn, Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball

Obama administration officials briefed key congressional staffers last week about a secret court order to Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) that prompted it to search all users’ incoming emails for a still undisclosed digital signature, but they remain reluctant to discuss the unusual case with a broader audience.

Executive branch officials spoke to staff for members of the Senate and House of Representatives committees overseeing intelligence operations and the judiciary, according to people briefed on the events, which followed Reuters’ disclosure of the massive search.

But attempts by other members of Congress and civil society groups to learn more about the Yahoo order are unlikely to meet with success anytime soon, because its details remain a sensitive national security matter, U.S. officials told Reuters. Release of any declassified version of the order is unlikely in the foreseeable future, the officials said.

Jane Foster:

As a scientist, I often find myself chatting with friends and neighbors about the latest advances in neuroscience. In the past few years I have found more and more people asking about microbiota—the microorganisms that typically inhabit a bodily organ. In the last 10 years, I’ve been one of many neuroscientists advancing new ideas about how microbiota in the gut affects brain function. The media has taken notice as well. Recent stories on the gut-brain axis—among the most exciting new frontiers in neuroscience—include “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs” in the New York Times Magazine and “Gut Microbes Contribute to Mysterious Malnutrition” in National Geographic. In 2012, the editors of Science thought the research important enough to devote a special issue to the topic.

Why is the issue so fascinating? For one thing, it’s heightened consciousness of how diet and nutrition impact our health. For another, it’s sheer numbers. Our brains contain billions of neurons, but we less often talk about the fact that trillions of “good” bacteria are alive and well in our intestinal tracts. Remarkably, these naturally occurring, ever-present commensal bacteria may be instrumental in how our brain develops, how we behave, react to stress, and respond to treatment for depression and anxiety.

Patrick Thornton:

We must start asking all Americans to be their better selves. We must all understand that America is a melting pot and that none of us has a more authentic American experience.

If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to black people. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and criminals. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called for a complete ban on Muslim immigration.

Cathy Kraemer’s book: The Politics of Resentment.

Peggy Noonan

Those who come to this space know why I think what happened, happened. The unprotected people of America, who have to live with Washington’s policies, rebelled against the protected, who make and defend those policies and who care little if at all about the unprotected. That broke bonds of loyalty and allegiance. Tuesday was in effect an uprising of the unprotected. It was part of the push-back against detached elites that is sweeping the West and was seen most recently in the Brexit vote.

But so much depends upon the immediate moment. Mr. Trump must move surely now. When you add up the votes of Mrs. Clinton, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson and others, you get roughly 52%. Between 47% and 48% voted for Mr. Trump. It was an enormous achievement but a close-run thing, and precarious.

Kate Lewis:

How field trips and walking to school are simple first steps in teaching children the lifelong skill of independence.

Last week, my two-year-old son took a ‘secret’ field trip. His yochien (preschool) packed up all of their child class students, took them on a bus, and would not tell us where.

When we learned about the plan, the other American parents and I looked at each other in excited disbelief. “This would never happen in America,” we whispered, conscious of the mountains of forms and waivers that would have been deemed necessary back home for such a trip. Yet we weren’t horrified or worried. We were delighted.

John Wagner

While the Clinton campaign’s reliance on analytics became well known, the particulars of Ada’s work were kept under tight wraps, according to aides. The algorithm operated on a separate computer server than the rest of the Clinton operation as a security precaution, and only a few senior aides were able to access it.

According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.

The use of analytics by campaigns was hardly unprecedented. But Clinton aides were convinced their work, which was far more sophisticated than anything employed by President Obama or GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, gave them a big strategic advantage over Trump.

So where did Ada go wrong?

Somewhat related: Connected Math.

Joshua Benton

It’s been said that we get the media we deserve: that the journalism we see is a reflection of business structures and audience decisions, not the result of an elite’s decisions to shape public opinion. There’s a lot of truth to that. But the information we produce and consume is generated by human beings, not systems, and those human beings have just gotten the shock of their professional lives. If we’re going to build a better environment for news, we need to think about these issues in a much bigger context than one election night. And it’ll take everyone — journalists, readers, tech companies, and more — to make it happen.

A general lack if substantive local reporting has, in my view, been part of the decline.

Will Rahn

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

Lots of legacy media issues, including a general lack of substabtive local government reporting.

David Pierson:

The company may have other reasons for not wanting to get closely involved in curating content.

Facebook got rid of its human news curators this year after they were accused by conservative groups of favoring established media sources for its trending news feature. That job now rests on an algorithm.

If Facebook wants more eyeballs — and it’s in the business of getting as many as possible — it’s incentivized to give its users the news they want rather than the news that’s real (perhaps one of the reasons why daily newspaper circulation has declined all but one year in the last decade). That’s merely widening the echo chamber inside communities that dismiss traditional media as biased and elitist.

Joshua Green & Sasha Issenberg:

His hyperbole and crassness drew broad condemnation from the media and political elite, who interpreted his anger as an acknowledgment that he was about to lose. But rather than alienate his gathering army, Trump’s antipathy fed their resolve.
He had an unwitting ally. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message,” says Steve Bannon, his campaign chief executive officer. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”

Trump’s analysts had detected this upsurge in the electorate even before FBI Director James Comey delivered his Oct. 28 letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. But the news of the investigation accelerated the shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump.

Inside his campaign, Trump’s analysts became convinced that even their own models didn’t sufficiently account for the strength of these voters. “In the last week before the election, we undertook a big exercise to reweight all of our polling, because we thought that who [pollsters] were sampling from was the wrong idea of who the electorate was going to turn out to be this cycle,” says Matt Oczkowski, the head of product at London firm Cambridge Analytica and team leader on Trump’s campaign. “If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing.”

Pradeep Mutalik:

There is only one person who correctly forecast the U.S. presidential election of 2016. His name is not Nate Silver or Sam Wang or Nate Cohn. It is Donald Trump. Trump made a mockery of the predictions of all the erudite analytical election forecast modelers. Uttering the battle cry of “Brexit Plus,” he confidently grabbed the thin sliver of a chance that the models gave him by winning the Sun Belt states of Florida and North Carolina and then, in a near-miraculous example of threading the needle, flipping not just one but three of the ordinarily blue Rust Belt states that formed Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to red.

Like everyone else, I am stunned. In my pre-election Abstractions post below, I commented that the “science of election modeling still has a long way to go,” but I must admit that the distance is far beyond what I had imagined. It seems pointless now to try to dissect the statewide predictions of the various models as I had promised to do — none of them were even remotely in the ballpark. It is unclear how long it will take before election forecasting is trusted again.

Jonathan Moules:

Mark Davis is a New York company director with that most American of qualifications, an MBA. When Mr Davis was in his mid-thirties, his then employer British Telecom paid for him to return to the classroom to do the two-year, full-time course at Baruch College in Manhattan.

A decade later, having switched from a job in a large corporate to helping run a tech start-up called Full Stack Academy, Mr Davis wonders why he took so much time out of his career to study leadership and management theory.

“I can read a balance sheet, which is valuable,” he says. “But it is not something that I needed to spend two years of my life doing.”

Business degrees continue to be one of the most sought-after educational credentials with 11.7m applications to business schools each year. This number comes from a combination of average application numbers to schools, as measured by the Graduate Management Admission Council, the owner and administrator of the GMAT admission exam, and the approximately 16,000 schools offering degrees, as recorded by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the global accreditation body.

But despite being the flagship business qualification, the future of the MBA is under threat from a proliferation of rival courses, opportunities to study online and rising tuition costs. The result is that many of the schools providing the degree worry over what lies ahead.

Universities are concerned, too, given that business schools can be the cash cows of higher education. And it raises the question of where and how many of tomorrow’s business leaders will learn how to manage.

Reuters:

Voters in San Francisco, California passed a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages on Tuesday, unofficial results showed, as the push by local governments to target soda to stem obesity and diabetes gathered speed.

San Francisco Bay Area neighbor Albany, California passed a similar measure, preliminary figures showed and measures in Oakland, California and Boulder, Colorado, were on track to pass as well, with votes still being counted early on Wednesday.

The levies on sugar-sweetened beverages arrive a month after the World Health Organization recommended that governments introduce these types of taxes in a bid to battle obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases.

Ilya Somin

If your only reason to become informed about politics is to make better choices at the ballot box, that turns out not to be much of an incentive at all. The odds that your vote will decide the outcome are infinitesimally small. From the standpoint of the ordinary voter, it makes sense to pay little attention to political issues, and instead devote most of your time and effort to other matters.

As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts it, “[t]he single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh…., before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll…. For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.” This year, the fog is even more irritating – and much scarier – than usual. But it does not seem to have caused voters to become better-informed. Such behavior is perfectly rational. The ignorance of any one voter makes almost no difference. But individually rational ignorance can cause great harm when many millions of voters behave the same way.

In addition to making little effort to seek out information, most voters also do a poor job of evaluating what information they do know. Instead of acting as truth seekers, they instead function as “political fans” cheering on Team Red or Team Blue, overvaluing any information that confirms their preexisting views while ignoring or downplaying anything that cuts the other way.

This kind of bias is exacerbated by the intense partisanship and polarization that has descended upon American politics in recent years. Partisans like to claim that the other side’s voters are influenced by ignorance, and they are often right to think so. But rarely consider the possibility that the same may be true of their own party’s supporters.

By some measures, partisan hatred is now more widespread than racial and ethnic prejudice, and certainly more socially acceptable. Even if voters somehow become significantly better informed than they are, they may not get much value out of their knowledge unless we can figure out how to curb the “tribal” partisan hatred that has engulfed our politics.

Related: Perils of Eroded Civic Knowledge.

Olivia Becker:

Public opinion has been split but leans toward the “no” side on Question 2, according to recent polls. TV ads, fliers, and phone calls coming from both sides of the fight, have been relentless leading into Election Day. If the initiative passes, it will signal a prominent nod of support for the growing charter movement nationally, which has picked up steam in the past decade as an alternative education policy solution.

Charter schools are a controversial issue, especially in Massachusetts, where education policy is not taken lightly. The schools are free and open to any student via a lottery system, but they must meet certain performance standards to stay operational over the course of five-year charters. And they’re still publicly funded: Whenever a student leaves their home public school to go to a charter school, the average cost per student in that district goes with them. So in other words, if 5 percent of a district’s students attend charter schools, 5 percent of that district’s public education funding is siphoned off with it.

Emmmett Rensin

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

Lila Reynolds

The Global Strategy Task Force published their final report on Friday, giving feedback and suggestions to the University about how to become one of the “World’s Premier Universities” by 2020, including plans to establish three new locations by 2020 and increasing global marketing.

Nearly 18 months ago, a group of 12 Northwestern faculty and administrators convened to reimagine how the university engages globally. Last Friday, following research and input from 300 faculty, students, staff and alumni from around the University as well as many others from peer institutions, the task force released their final report, which gives nine major recommendations regarding Northwestern’s global vision.

Sally Blount, the dean of Kellogg and one of the force’s co-chairs, said she is optimistic that the university is putting more emphasis on global funding and adding new locations.

Heat Street:

But some wiped their tears, and pulled themselves together enough to ask their professors to cancel their exams because they were so upset by the results.

And one Yale economics professor heard the cry, and decided to protect his snowflake charges by making the test optional.

He wrote to them saying: “I am getting many heartfelt notes from students who are in shock over the election returns” and “fear, rightly or wrongly for their families” and are “requesting that the exam be postponed.”

Brian Kamanzi:

It is not the first time South Africa has seen student mobilisation. Fees protests, campus shutdowns and mass political violence and repression have been held at historically black universities and colleges for a long time.

What makes the 2015-16 period distinct is that for the first time our student movement spread on to historically white universities, which opened doors to all South Africans after the fall of apartheid in 1994, but continued to retain their colonial foundations.

With this expansion returned the demand for decolonisation of education, echoed in the 2015 #RhodesMustFall campaign at the University of Cape Town, along with long-standing calls for free education and the end to outsourcing practices for campus workers.

Camille Bromley

vetlana Alexievich is someone who often answers a question with a story about other people. She has no lack of these stories, having spent more than three decades interviewing citizens of the U.S.S.R. and ex-Soviet states about their daily lived experience. In her books, each of which revolves around a central event—the Soviet-Afghan War in Zinky Boys; the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe in Voices from Chernobyl; the end of communism in Secondhand Time—history is presented as a chorus of voices, carefully arranged monologues distilled from thousands of interviews conducted over several years (in the case of Secondhand Time, from 1991 to 2012). Alexievich is continually surprised by her characters—by their willingness to talk, by their fortitude, by the depths of their love, by the immensity of their suffering. Her outlook is no less bleak for the vast range of humanity she has been witness to; evil, she says with conviction, is always present in our lives. I spoke with her via an interpreter about her acts of witness.

ZuzooVn.

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Thomas Sowell:

It is especially painful for me, as an economist, to see that two small cities in northern California — San Mateo and Burlingame — have rent control proposals on the ballot this election year.

There are various other campaigns, in other places around the country, for and against minimum wage laws, which likewise make me wonder if the economics profession has failed to educate the public in the most elementary economic lessons.

Neither rent control nor minimum wage laws — nor price control laws in general — are new. Price control laws go back as far as ancient Egypt and Babylon, and they have been imposed at one time or other on every inhabited continent.

History alone should be able to tell us what the actual consequences of such laws have been, since they have been around for thousands of years. Anyone who has taken a course in Economics 1 should understand why those consequences have been so different from what their advocates expected. It is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, advocates of a rent control law are saying things like “this will prevent some landlords from gouging tenants and making a ton of money off the housing crisis.”

The reason there is a housing crisis in the first place is that existing laws in much of California prevent enough housing from being built to supply the apartments and homes that people want. If landlords were all sweethearts, and never raised rents, that would still not get one new building built.

Rising rents are a symptom of the problem. The actual cause of the problem is a refusal of many California officials to allow enough housing to be built for all the people who want to rent an apartment.

Supply and demand is one of the first things taught in introductory economics textbooks. Why it should be a mystery to people living in an upscale community — people who have probably graduated from an expensive college — is the real puzzle. Supply and demand is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge.

Ana Júlia Pires Ribeiro:

In the last two weeks, students have occupied 1,177 high schools, 82 technical high schools, and 96 university campuses in Brazil. The majority of the occupations has been in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, which is known for its conservative politics. Students are fighting against three attacks by the illegitimate government of President Michel Temer, who overthrew the democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff in an institutional coup in August: 1) drastic reforms to the high-school curriculum through a presidential decree with no debate or discussion; 2) a constitutional amendment, PEC 241, which will freeze spending on social programs for twenty years; 3) and efforts by right-wing legislators to force through laws known as Schools Without Parties, which aim to severely limit political discussion in the classroom.

Kelly Lyle Hernandez:

Elizabeth Hinton’s richly researched new book barrels toward one chilling conclusion: beginning as early as the Johnson administration, federal authorities—regardless of political affiliation—systematically constructed a criminal justice regime that targets, criminalizes, polices, and imprisons staggering numbers of young black men, especially in urban areas.

Some readers might wonder whether the history of mass incarceration could really be so unyielding; historians rarely write with so much conviction about change over time anymore. But Hinton’s documentation is thorough and compelling. As the chapters unfold, she makes clear that, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, the federal government slowly built a trap, creating the conditions for the mass incarceration of black youth with which are now so familiar.

Timothy Bella:

As the streetlights flickered along Meadowbrook Drive in Beaumont, Texas, earlier this week, the children running around the yard in front of one of the homes are growing restless. The Hot-N-Ready pizzas from Little Caesars just aren’t cutting it anymore and Wolverine, the Winter Soldier and the Pink Power Ranger are ready to start trick-or-treating. Among the throng are eight boys wearing football jerseys.

These aren’t costumes, though. The boys are members of the Beaumont Bulls, and while you wouldn’t know the names on the back of their uniforms, this is perhaps the most talked-about youth football team in the country.

Monica Dean, the team mom hosting the gathering, recognizes the moment that’s unfolding.

Lenore Skenazy

I guess if kids want to read, they’ve got their phones.

So a local mom wrote to me:

A program my son used to go to as dropoff now requires a parent to be with him. And definitely, in our town, the library is mostly for the preschool set. Don’t they realize that after a certain point, not only do we not need to supervise their every activity but maybe we don’t even want to? Why should I give up two hours on a Saturday, sitting in the library waiting, so my son can use a 3D printing program? Isn’t it okay for us to have separate interests?

Apparently not. Here is the entire policy. Note that unreasonable safety concerns are once again undermining kid independence, as well as parents’ ability to decide for themselves what age their children are capable of doing something on their own. This is how we get parents arrested for letting their kids play outside, or waiting a few minutes in the car. It’s the bulletproof excuse that hijacks freedom.

Jonathan Winslow

An Orange senior and his granddaughter have grown closer than ever thanks to an unexpected partnership developing a new app – with grandpa handling all of the programming.

Luis Guerra, 70, and Alexandra Garcia, 27, have been working for more than a year on “KliqueShare,” an app meant to streamline renting and sharing items, especially in college communities. The app, available on the iOS App Store, lets you keep track of things you’ve shared, make requests for items you need and list items that you’re willing to rent out or sell.

Julian Sancton

Riva-Melissa Tez doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techno-utopian. For one thing, she makes eye contact. For another, she’s a woman in an overwhelmingly male sector. At 27, she is a cofounder of Permutation Ventures, an investment fund and incubator for companies hoping to harness artificial intelligence (when it arrives) for humanity’s betterment. Her atypical path to San Francisco’s futurist culture began in London, where she was born and where she spent four years in a homeless shelter. After studying philosophy at University College London (and cofounding a Notting Hill toy store), Tez moved to Berlin, where she was drawn to the transhumanist community, whose conception of the future seemed cribbed from science fiction: immortality, merging of machine and man, human engineering, etc. Tez—who has lectured on such topics at Stanford and Oxford—here explains why she expects nothing less, for herself and her fellow man, than super-health, super-longevity, and super-happiness.

Tell it to us straight: Are the robots going to take over? Are we engineering our own doom? You have systems right now that could potentially take down markets and start wars. There are huge risks. We just have to make sure people are thinking about using things like machine intelligence to improve the human condition. AI doesn’t have inherent goals, so the thing that poses the most risk is still the humans programming it.

How certain are you that we’ll ever achieve artificial intelligence? I’m probably more skeptical than most people in the field. Right now, we’re just building things that mimic certain aspects of learning, but we haven’t defined an overall principle of intelligence. In the early 20th century we wanted to build planes, so we looked at birds. We built flapping machines. We didn’t have a principle of flight, but then we worked out thermodynamics and the mechanics of lift, and we managed to build planes that work. The same thing is happening right now in AI.

Eliza Ronald’s-Hannon & Liz McCormack:

Barack Obama will go down in history as having sold more Treasuries and at lower rates than any U.S. president. He’s also leaving a debt burden that threatens to hamstring his successor.

Obama’s administration benefited from some unprecedented advantages that helped it grapple with the longest recession since the 1930s. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates at historically low levels, partly by becoming the single biggest holder of Treasuries. The U.S. could also rely on insatiable demand from international investors, led by China deploying its hoard of reserves. Global buyers added $3 trillion of Treasuries, doubling ownership to a record.

Now those tailwinds are turning around. The Fed is telegraphing more hikes at a time when interest costs on the nation’s bonds are already the highest in five years. The government’s marketable debt has more than doubled under Obama’s stewardship, to a record of almost $14 trillion. And the deficit is expanding again, after narrowing for four straight years, just as overseas holdings of Treasuries are shrinking the fastest since 2013.

Monica Disare

It’s 5 p.m. and the open house for prospective students at Pace High School in Chinatown is just getting underway. As students arrive, they are handed a clipboard with a survey.

They scribble away for the first 20 minutes or so, explaining the struggles they have overcome and which components of Pace they like. They indicate whether Pace is their top-choice school, if academic success is important to them, and whether they want to go to college.

Sharan Narang, Greg Diamos, Shubho Sengupta & Erich Elsen @ Baidu Research:

Recent advances in multiple elds such as speech recognition (Graves & Jaitly, 2014; Amodei et al., 2015), language modeling (Jozefowicz et al., 2016) and machine translation (Wu et al., 2016) can be at least partially attributed to larger training datasets, larger models and more compute that allows larger models to be trained on larger datasets.

For example, the deep neural network used for acoustic modeling in Hannun et al. (2014) had 11 million parameters which grew to approximately 67 million for bidirectional RNNs and further to 116 million for the latest forward only GRU models in Amodei et al. (2015). And in language modeling the size of the non-embedding parameters (mostly in the recurrent layers) have exploded even as various ways of hand engineering sparsity into the embeddings have been explored in Jozefowicz et al. (2016) and Chen et al. (2015a).

These large models face two signi cant challenges in deployment. Mobile phones and embedded devices have limited memory and storage and in some cases network bandwidth is also a concern. In addition, the evaluation of these models requires a signi cant amount of computation. Even if those cases when the networks can be evaluated fast enough, it will have a signicant impact on battery life in mobile phones (Han et al., 2015).

Jeff Beckham:

Phil Danaher doesn’t remember who said it, but it was one of the first lessons he learned as a young coach: write down your goals. You may not look at them every day, but writing them down helps you carry them around in your mind.

So, more than 40 years ago, he scratched a few dreams down on a sheet of spiral notebook paper. Be a good husband and father. See his kids get college scholarships. Become a head coach by his mid-twenties and move up to a big school in his mid-thirties. One goal, however, was so audacious that it never crossed his mind to include it: win more football games than any Texas high school coach in history.

Danaher has now done just that. On Thursday, his Corpus Christi Calallen High School Wildcats defeated the Corpus Christi Flour Bluff Hornets, 31-7. It was the 427th victory of Danaher’s 43-year career, pushing him just past coach G.A. Moore, who won 426 games with Celina and Pilot Point high schools.

Rebecca Jeschke:

Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.

In this case, a teenager known in court documents as Ricardo P. admitted to two cases of burglary. One condition of his parole was that he submit his phone to search at any time, whether by his probation officers or any peace officer, even though his phone use had nothing to do with the commission of the crimes.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you cannot treat personal electronic devices so cavalierly. In 2014, the court in Riley v. California recognized that government searches of cellphones implicate personal privacy in ways that few things do, and rejected the government’s claims that cellphones can be searched without a warrant. After all, cell phones contain the sum of all of our lives, including our religious views, our sexual orientations, our health conditions, or physical movements throughout the day, and more. And the privacy implications go far further than the individual juvenile on parole. Everyone the child talks to also has personal information that is exposed to law enforcement. An on-demand search without any probable cause is like letting the government have a long-running wiretap—unprecedented for a probation condition for a juvenile.

Jonathan Kozol:

IT’S NOT EASY to compete with buckets of money pouring into Massachusetts to convince the public to lift the cap on charter schools but, as a former teacher who has worked for more than 50 years with children in the nation’s schools, here’s my entry into the debate.

1. Some charter schools do an excellent job with the students they enroll. Many come up with better test scores than do their public counterparts. It does not mitigate the victories these schools may have achieved to state the clear and simple fact that, on average nationwide, charter schools are not running circles around the public schools that serve the vast majority of children. Some do better. Some do worse. Some have been consistent disappointments. The pattern here in Massachusetts may, for now, appear to be a rare exception to the norm, but as charter schools proliferate, their record seems to be increasingly uneven.

2. Partisans for Question 2 have not been eager to let the public know where their money’s coming from. But we know enough about some major sources of their funds to set off alarm bells for anyone whose political allegiances are even faintly liberal. The primary source of funding is a controversial group of New York hedge-fund billionaires that goes under the misleading name of Families for Excellent Schools and which, in turn, receives substantial sums of money from the Walton family billionaires in Arkansas. In addition, nearly $2 million more has come into the state in individual donations from two members of that family.

Related: America’s Most Influential—and Wrongest—School Reformer:

School reformer Jonathan Kozol likes to present himself as a prophet without honor in his own country, a heroic explorer of America’s slums whose painful discoveries about the institutional racism that stunts poor children go unheard and unappreciated. Pure nonsense, of course; the capitalist society Kozol so disdains has rewarded him richly, turning him into a cultural icon. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations have showered him with grants; colleges and ed schools nationwide have made his books required reading. When his Savage Inequalities appeared, Publishers Weekly—unprecedentedly—dropped five pages of paid advertising to run excerpts, printing on its cover a plea to the president to pour billions into the nation’s inner-city schools.

Far from having no influence, Kozol’s best-selling books have defined today’s education-policy orthodoxy. They have convinced many Americans that inner-city minority children are languishing academically only because their schools are segregated and starved for resources by a heartless society, and that therefore teachers should turn their classrooms into agencies for social change. The education establishment has converted these wrongheaded and damaging ideas into action—with disastrous consequences for the very disadvantaged children that Kozol claims to champion. Kozol’s mistaken but hugely influential diagnosis leads education advocates to keep proposing still more of the wrong cure, while the real causes of school failure—the monopoly public education system, the teachers’ unions, and the ed schools—go on wreaking their damage unimpeded, and inner-city schools keep on failing.

Kozol made his mark on educational policy with his very first book, Death at an Early Age, which set the stage for the nation’s catastrophic experiment with court-ordered busing. Written when Kozol was barely 27, Death at an Early Age recounts the author’s six-month teaching stint in one of Boston’s allegedly segregated public schools. Instantly acclaimed as a classic of urban poverty literature, the book provided authentic, personal witness to the notion that de facto segregation in Northern schools was as evil and deep-rooted as de jure segregation in the South, and only radical surgery could root it out.

Matt Soniak

In 1946, a group of Russian children from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation (sort of a Soviet scouting group) presented a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

The gift, a gesture of friendship to the USSR’s World War II ally, was hung in the ambassador’s official residence at Spaso House in Moscow. It stayed there on a wall in the study for seven years until, through accident and a ruse, the State Department discovered that the seal was more than a mere decoration.

It was a bug.

The Soviets had built a listening device—dubbed “The Thing” by the U.S. intelligence community—into the replica seal and had been eavesdropping on Harriman and his successors the whole time it was in the house. “It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics,” wrote George Kennan, the ambassador at the time the device was found. “I have the impression that with its discovery the whole art of intergovernmental eavesdropping was raised to a new technological level.”

Matt O’Brien:

To paraphrase noted economic expert Obi-Wan Kenobi, many of the truths we cling to about currencies really do depend greatly on our own point-of-view.

Take Venezuela. The good news is that, if you look at it over a long enough timeline, its currency hasn’t changed much the past month. The bad news, though, is that’s because it’s gone from being almost worthless to almost entirely worthless. And the worse news is that it’s actually lost over a third of its value during this stretch.

Now, there’s never been a country that should have been so rich been so poor as Venezuela. Indeed, it has the world’s largest oil reserves, but has still managed to have the world’s worst-performing economy. The International Monetary Fund estimates that its gross domestic product will end up shrinking 10 percent this year, and its inflation rate will reach 720 percent. Nor is this expected to get any better any time soon. Inflation is supposed to get up to 2,200 percent next year, and 3,000 percent the one after that.

Ron Elving

Here’s a little information that Americans have usually been able to ignore.

It’s about the Electoral College, a uniquely American institution that’s been with us from the beginning and that’s occasionally given us fits.

Typically, the Electoral College meets and does its thing a month or so after the election and few people even notice or care. Once in a while, though, people do notice and do care – a lot.

Will 2016 be one of those years?

KanyKrit Vongkiatkajorn:

Mother Jones: You followed these students for six years. What stood out to you?

Sara Goldrick-Rab: A lot of people talk about student loans with regard to how things are after you finish college, such as the challenges of repaying debt. But they don’t talk about the fact that people are so worried about debt even while they’re still in college. Watching people go without enough food to eat because they’re afraid to take out a loan, or decide to not go abroad or not hang out with friends because they’re so worried about what will happen—that to me says that we’ve changed what college is.

MJ: How so?

SGR: Well, it’s always been the case that you go to college and you get a fair bit of choice in deciding where you’re going to go, what you’re going to study and how you want to set that up. And the thing that distinguishes one choice from another is your ability—how intelligent you are and how hard you want to work. Increasingly, that’s not true. What distinguishes you and your choices is your income.

MJ: You say in the book that it’s sort of a failure of the American dream.

SGR: Well, it’s a betrayal. We tell people that the way to get ahead in life is through education, but then we only give them educational options that are unaffordable and end up shoving them backward. Imagine going to college and ending up with debt and no degree. That’s a betrayal.

Larry Sand

As the ugliest presidential campaign in almost a century comes to a merciful end, we get a glimpse into the inner workings of the biggest union in the country: the National Education Association.

Courtesy of WikiLeaks, we have learned that manipulation by NEA bosses helped to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be the union’s choice for Democratic presidential nominee.

On June 13, 2015, four days after Clinton announced her candidacy, her director of labor outreach Nikki Budzinski sent a memo to other campaign officials that discussed possible strategies for the upcoming NEA Representative Assembly, scheduled for the following month in Orlando.

Budzinski’s apprehensions were understandable. NEA had not taken any formal steps to find out who its rank-and-file actually preferred for the Democratic nomination, but it’s no secret that many in the union favored Sanders, citing the socialist’s “opposition to charter schools, support for collective bargaining rights and free tuition at public higher education institutions.”

Then on June 19th, Budzinski warned colleagues of an impending endorsement of Sanders by NEA’s Vermont affiliate. “NEA is concerned their VT affiliate could do a Tuesday (next week) recommendation of endorsement (with potential press release). This is not confirmed. The bigger concern is that RI and MA might go with VT as well.” While Budzinski went on to say that these states’ endorsement was not a “serious concern” for the Clinton endorsement, she felt it to be an “optics problem” and began to work behind the scenes with Carrie Pugh, NEA’s political director.

Amber Walker:

Isabel Rameker, a sophomore at West, addressed the elephant in the room with her question about representation.

“From what I’ve heard, a big goal of this is to close the achievement gap, specifically for African-Americans and students with disabilities. Looking around, it doesn’t look like this is a super diverse group of parents,” Rameker said. “As this goes on, now and in the future, where are you going to get input from those parents?”

Principal Thompson ensured Rameker that there are strategies in place to reach out to diverse communities.

“We are partnering with different facilities in our neighborhoods to make it more accessible for people who can’t make it here for this presentation,” she said.

Fralin stressed that Personalized Pathways is for all students.

“We actually want to create more options for more students, not a small group or a subgroup of students,” he said. “It is not designed to limit, but actually expand opportunities and choices for kids.”

Fralin pointed out that the district is partnering with institutions like Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to expand opportunities for learning and advanced level coursework.

Treiber believes some of the backlash against Pathways by some of the parents who attended the meeting stems from unconscious bias.

“We have a serious issue in Madison that we are not interested in addressing. It is not intentional; it is not meant to be hurtful, but we cannot seem to get over the fact that if something is changing that somehow ‘I’m going to get less,’” she said. “I think we have that in our nation and we have that in our city. (Madison) is a microcosm of our country and we are not really interested in looking at that. We caveat it with ‘I’m worried about my kid.’ Your kid is going to be fine.”

Schools will continue to host informational sessions about Pathways. The list of upcoming meetings is available on the MMSD website.

Previous Madison High School initiatives include: English 10 (one size for all) and “small learning communities“.

– via a kind reader.

Issie Lapowsky:

San Quentin’s dev shop is the brainchild of Chris Redlitz, a venture capitalist who founded the Last Mile as a nonprofit in 2010 to offer inmates entrepre­neurial training. Working with the coding school Hack ­Reactor, Redlitz spun up a tech incubator inside the prison called Code.7370 (after the government classification number for software companies). Inmates learn Java­Script, Python, and WordPress before presenting their portfolios at a Demo Day. By year’s end, the program will be active in three additional prisons.

The Last Mile Works gives Code.7370 grads a way to get real-world experience on the inside. Because they can’t use the internet, the dev shop’s coders work on a closed network, and a manager pushes the results to the outside. Any money the shop makes is funneled back into the nonprofit. The tech industry is the perfect fit for job seekers with unusual résumés, Redlitz says. “It’s about the quality of your work, not your back­ground.” Inmates can’t go online, but coding connects them to the 21st-century economy they’ll enter when they’re free.

Morgan Chesky:

A King County letter that ended up in the mailboxes of thousands of pet owners is raising concerns over privacy.

The letter told pet owners to license their pets or face a $250 fine.

“It feels weird to me, it feels like they’re kind of snooping around in a place where they shouldn’t be,” said dog owner Chris Lee.

Turns out for the last four years, King County has been using data companies to target specific taxpayers, or in this case pet owners. That means every time customers swipe those rewards cards, they’re gathering data.

“This is kind of standard marketing practice or procedure that people use,” said Cameron Satterfield, from King County Animal Services.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

“Inconsistency in grading and academic expectations between the middle schools may contribute to difficulty in transitioning to high school. The differences between the feeder middle schools are significant.”

– MMSD Coursework Review, 2014

A recent tax increase referendum funded the expansion of Madison’s least diverse middle school: Hamilton.

We’ve long spent more than most, now about $18,000 per student annually, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Worth a deep drive: Madison measures of academic progress (MAP) results….

Tyler Arnold:

Bucking the free-speech zone trend, Kansas State University is telling students they are legally permitted to demonstrate or protest anywhere they want for any cause they want.

“The whole campus is a free speech area,” the K-State Office of General Counsel states in its October legal briefing, noting that as a public university, the school cannot and will not require anyone to register with the university prior to having a public demonstration or protest.

“As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended.”

Even when the speech in question is “controversial or offending,” such as a speaker shouting derogatory remarks at passersby, the school’s attorneys declare emphatically that only behaviors rising to the level of criminality are subject to intervention.

“As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended,” they point out, arguing that “if the government started shutting down speech that is offensive to some, it would end up shutting down all speech, because virtually everything can be offensive to some.”

Zach Cmiel

After reading Nathan Bashaw and Hank Green’s articles on the school system, I was inspired to write my own version. (Nathan’s and Hank’s)

I’m a junior in high school and I love entrepreneurship and business. I’ve made 14+ apps on the iOS App Store and have explored design and marketing through an e-commerce t-shirt shop and music discovery newsletter.
I agree with many of the points that both Nathan and Hank stated. Nathan brought up many notable points such as that the internet will continue to push the boundaries in education and push progress forward.

He goes on to say that his version of the education system would be very much curiosity based where students are encouraged to ask questions in which they must find the answers. No courses. No curriculm. It’s a very student led process with guidance by a mentor.

Madison administrators ave attempted a number of redesign schemes on our $18k / student k-12 system. One size fits all (English 10) and small learning communities are just two examples.

Sarah Karp

But Chicago Public Schools officials said the cap does not necessarily mean there’s a district-wide moratorium on expanding charter schools.

“There’s plenty of room for high quality charter operators to apply and to go through our process,” said CPS CEO Forrest Claypool. “There is not a moratorium and there’s room under the cap for high quality charter operators.”

Charter schools are publicly funded, privately run schools that have long been criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union.

The new contract negotiated between CPS and the union states there will be no net increase in the number of charter schools approved by the Chicago Board of Education, the governing body overseeing CPS. The agreement also says the number of students enrolled at charter schools by the end of the 2018 to 2019 school year will not exceed 101 percent of the total number of students in charters during the 2015 to 2016 school year.