Heather Mac Donald:

American employers regard the nation’s educational system as an irrelevance, according to a Census Bureau survey released in February of this year. Businesses ignore a prospective employee’s educational credentials in favor of his work history and attitude. Although the census researchers did not venture any hypothesis for this strange behavior, anyone familiar with the current state of academia could have provided explanations aplenty.

One overlooked corner of the academic madhouse bears in particular on graduates’ job-readiness: the teaching of writing. In the field of writing, today’s education is not just an irrelevance, it is positively detrimental to a student’s development. For years, composition teachers have absorbed the worst strains in both popular and academic culture. The result is an indigestible stew of 1960s liberationist zeal, 1970s deconstructionist nihilism, and 1980s multicultural proselytizing. The only thing that composition teachers are not talking about these days is how to teach students to compose clear, logical prose.

Predictably, the corruption of writing pedagogy began in the sixties. In 1966, the Carnegie Endowment funded a conference of American and British writing teachers at Dartmouth College. The event was organized by the Modern Language Association and the National Conference of Teachers of English. The Dartmouth Conference was the Woodstock of the composition professions: It liberated teachers from the dull routine of teaching grammar and logic.

The Dartmouth Conference rejected what was called a “transmission model” of English in favor of a “growth model.” In a transmission mode, teachers pass along composition skills and literary knowledge. In a growth mode, according to Joseph Harris, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, they focus on students’ “experience of language in all forms”—including ungrammatical ones. A big problem with the transmission model of English, apparently, is that it implies that teachers actually know more than their students do. In the growth model, in contrast, the teacher is not an authority figure; rather, he is a supportive, nurturing friend, who works with, rather than challenges, what a student has to say. Dartmouth proponents claimed that improvement in students’ linguistic skills need not come through direct training in grammar and style but, rather, would flower incidentally as students experiment with personal and expressive forms of talk and writing.

The Dartmouth Conference and subsequent writing pedagogy reflected the political culture of the time. It was anti-authoritarian and liberationist; it celebrated inarticulateness and error as proof of authenticity. But it was also a response to the looming problem of race. City University of New York (CUNY) began the nation’s first academic affirmative-action program in 1966; other schools would soon follow suit. The movement to legitimate black English began at that time. Confronted with a barrage of students who had no experience in formal grammar or written language, it was highly convenient for professors to learn that students’ natural way of speaking and writing should be preserved, not corrected.

There is a final ideological strand in composition pedagogy that has its roots in the late 1960s: Marxism. Teachers on the radical left began arguing that the demand for literacy oppresses the masses. Writing in Radical Teacher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology humanities professor Wayne O’Neill explains that “it has become important for the ruling class to exclude the potentially radicalizing elements of higher education from the colleges. Thus everywhere along the scale of education there is a relentless march toward the basics.” James Sledd, professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in College English that standard English is “essentially an instrument of domination,” and that coercing students to speak properly conditions them to accept the coercion of capitalism. Richard Ohmann, humanities professor at Wesleyan, has pronounced the “decline of literacy…a fiction, if not a hoax.”

The political process

The Dartmouth Conference gave rise to what became known as the process school of composition. Peter Elbow of Evergreen State College is its most influential practitioner. Not all of Elbow’s ideas are bad. He emphasizes that writing is a continuous process, composed mostly of rewriting. He encourages students to think of their essays in terms of multiple drafts, rather than single-shot efforts. He had vigorously promoted “free writing,” a warm-up exercise in which the author writes continuously for a fixed period of time, uninhibited by grammar, punctuation, or logic.

But the drawbacks of the process school cancel its contributions. Elevating process has driven out standards. Rather than judging a piece of student writing by an objective measure of coherence and correctness, teachers are supposed to evaluate how much the student has grown over the course of a semester. The hottest trend in grading—portfolio assessment—grows out of the process school. Elbow created the method after he saw the “harmful effects of writing proficiency exams.”

Among the most harmful of those effects is apparently the assault on self-esteem that results from a poor grade. In portfolio assessment, students’ evaluations are based on drafts of papers, diary entries, letters, and other informal assignments compiled over the course of a semester, rather than on the freestanding merit of a paper or exam. Often the student “collaborates” with the teacher in assigning a grade to the portfolio. Portfolio assessment allows for the radical reduction of standards, imports greater subjectivity into grading, and is extremely time-consuming.

For the process school, politics undermines pedagogy. Elbow added an additional week of free writing to the start of his courses at Evergreen State College when he saw how useful the practice was in “building community” in the classroom. Elbow rails against grading because it interferes with his ability to connect meaningfully with his students. “Good writing teachers like student writing,” he explains, and “it’s hard to like something if we know we have to give it a D.”

In keeping with the anti-authoritarian commitment of process practitioners, students in a process classroom teach each other. Students form small groups to read aloud and comment on each other’s writing, while the teacher surveys the scene benignly. The students may be admonished to say two good, as well as two critical things about each other’s essay—a task that would tax the invention of Shakespeare. Many of the groups I have observed quickly turned their attention to more compelling matters, like last weekend’s parties or the newest sneakers. And no wonder, given the abysmal prose they are supposed to discuss. The following two paragraphs are from a student’s answer on CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam. The question was: “Do you think the personal life of a political candidate…should be considered a factor in determining his or her ability to do the job?”

“We are living in a world that’s getting worse everyday. And what we are doing nothing, just complaining about the other person’s life. We should stop because if we don’t stop by looking on every candidate lifestyle and focus more on how, we could make it better. We all gonna die of, hungry, because we wouldn’t have nothing to eat and no place to life.

“People tends to make mistake in life. We all are humans. That’s why we should never judge a person for the cover of a book. People change in life, most of them tends to learn from their mistake. We live in a world that we should learn to forgive and forget everyone mistake and move forward.”

While peer teaching may have value for more experienced student-writers, for the incompetent—which includes not just remedial students but increasing numbers of all incoming students—it is an egregious case of the blind leading the blind. It ignores the reason students are in remedial classes in the first place and violates the time-honored principle that one learns to write by reading good, not awful, writing.

The process school’s determination to break down hierarchy extends beyond the teacher-student divide. A pioneering freshman composition course at City College combines students who fail the CUNY writing exam with those who passed. Says Acting Provost Mike Aarons: “The idea behind the program [which is being replicated in other areas of the college] is that the more successful students help the less successful.”

Aarons might have added that another idea behind such programs is radical egalitarianism. Individual effort must go to raising the collectivity, not to raising oneself above the collectivity; individual success betrays the good of the whole. The course received a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education—apparently the federal government likes the idea of fighting elitism as well.

In a process classroom, content eclipses form. The college essay and an 18-year-old’s personality become one and the same. Effie Cochran, an English as a second language professor at Baruch College, gushes: “Here I am—teacher-confessor. All these [gay] people are coming out to me through autobiographical reports who wouldn’t come out to a priest.” One process professor recommends that the profession “pay more attention to the experiences of psychotherapists regarding role-modeling, sexual tension, and transference.”

Students who have been told in their writing classes to let their deepest selves loose on the page and not worry about syntax, logic, or form have trouble adjusting to their other classes. A student at St. Anselm’s College complained to her writing teacher that her humanities professor had prevented her from developing her ideas on Homer, Cicero and the Hebrew prophets. His sin? He had insisted on numerous references to the text and correct English prose. “In humanities,” she whined, “I have to remember a certain format and I have to back up every general statement with specific examples. Oh, and that word, ‘I,’ I just used. You would never see that word in one of my humanities papers.” In process-school jargon, the poor humanities student has been denied “access to a personal language.”

With its emphasis on personal experience and expression, the process school forgets that the ultimate task of college writing is to teach students how to think. In the personal essay, assertions need not be backed up by anything more than the author’s sincerity. According to Rolf Norgaard of the University of Colorado, evaluation then becomes a judgment upon students’ lives, their personalities, their souls. But how can you tell a student, he asks, that her experiences or family life were not terribly original or striking?

The process school of writing has spread well beyond college campuses. Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago introduced process methods six years ago in the hope of improving students’ catastrophic performance in reading and writing. Teachers tossed out their red pencils and workbooks; from then on, students would simply write, unfettered by such enthusiasm-crushing methods as rote learning. Students worked in groups, grades were out, cooperation was in.

The initial response, euphoria, was short-lived. Student groups rarely completed their assignments. They made little progress in mechanics. Some teachers started giving grades and teaching the basics again. But when they handed out incompletes and tried to hold students to higher standards, they caught heat from both parents and the principal, who told them that their expectations were too high. Lesson: Once out of the bottle, the process genie is hard to get back in.

Derrida’s writing lessons

In the early 1980s, a few process teachers started to sense that something was deeply wrong. While they had been unleashing an orgy of self-expression in their classes, across the hall in the literature department, the hippest teachers were preaching that the self was a fiction, a mere product of language. The process theorists, in other words, stumbled across deconstruction. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was not difficult to do, since just about every field in the humanities during that period scrambled to parrot the impenetrable prose of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault.

What an embarrassment for the poor process teachers! Deconstructionism declared the self dead, and they had been assiduously cultivating it. And what to do about their favorite genre, the personal essay, which seems to presuppose a writing subject, a concept anathema to deconstructionists?

The solution to this dilemma demonstrates the resourcefulness of college professors today. While some process advocates, such as Elbow, have continued their former ways unchanged, many others have simply grafted deconstructive rhetoric onto a process methodology. The result is pedagogical chaos. Students are writing personal essays, but they are deconstructing them at the same time. Such writing assignments are designed with one sole purpose: to make the professor feel that he is at the cutting-edge. They have nothing to do with teaching writing.

Witness the rhetorical sleight of hand of Joel Haefner, a professor at Illinois State University. Haefner manages to demonstrate disdain for process pedagogy, while nevertheless preserving it. “Calls to revive the personal essay,” he writes in College English,

“carry a hidden agenda and rest on the shibboleth of individualism, and concomitantly, the ideology of American democracy…As we interrogate our assumption about the essay genre and its role in a “democratic” and “individualistic” pedagogy, we will find, I think, that it makes more sense to see the essay as a cultural product, as a special kind of collective discourse. Hence there is still a place for the “personal” essay in a collaborative pedagogy.”

This tortured reasoning may preserve Haefner’s credibility with the post-structuralists, but its practical result must tie students up in knots. Here are some of Haefner’s deconstructive writing projects that are intended to “critique the fiction of a singular author”: writing groups create a personal essay that purports to be the work of a single author; individual students write a personal essay using “we”; teams rewrite a personal essay from other singular viewpoints; and (this is my favorite) students are encouraged not to create a unified and coherent first-person-singular voice, but, rather, a mix of “I” speakers.

This borders on pedagogical malpractice. Here are students who are unable to write coherent paragraphs, and they are being encouraged to cultivate an incoherent writing voice.

Multicultural writing

But academia can be cruel. No sooner did writing teachers master deconstructive jargon than a new, improved version came along. After years on the top of the charts, deconstructionism has been pushed aside by multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is both the direct offspring of deconstructionism and its nemesis. The current obsession with racial, sexual, and ethnic difference grew directly out of deconstructionism’s obsession with so-called linguistic difference. But, whereas deconstructionism was a mandarin pursuit that had only contempt for political engagement, multiculturalism asserts the centrality of politics to every human endeavor.

For would-be composition theorists, the most important consequence of multiculturalism has been the reemergence of the self as the central focus of concern. But the new multicultural self is defined exclusively by racial, sexual, and ethnic identity. The multicultural writing classroom is a workshop on racial and sexual oppression. Rather than studying possessive pronouns, students are learning how language silences women and blacks.

As New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described in his recent book, Dictatorship of Virtue, the University of Texas at Austin exploded in controversy in 1990 over a proposed writing course called “Writing about Difference.” The course text was Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, by Paula Rothenberg, a national leader in the movement to inject race and gender into every aspect of the curriculum. “One assumption of this book,” writes Rothenberg, “is that racism and sexism pervade American culture, that they are learned at an early age and reinforced throughout life by a variety of institutions that are part of growing up and living in the United States.” Students in the new writing course would use the text’s readings to explore their own role as oppressors or victims.

In a rare victory for common sense, the course was cancelled after a bitter fight. Most colleges have not been so lucky, however. Students in Muhlenberg College’s Third World Experience composition course, for example, study works by third-world authors to learn how colonialism and gender each have their unique system of oppression. According to two critics of the course at Muhlenberg, it primarily requires that students “wade through the material, applaud, and announce its authenticity.”

Effie Cochran of Baruch College assigns her remedial-writing students role-playing exercises so that women can vent their anger at the discrimination they suffer in and out of school. Whether these performances improve students’ writing skills is anyone’s guess.

The personal essay remains a cornerstone for the multicultural classroom; it is a special favorite of feminists. But it has been supplemented by “ethnography.” David Bleich’s students at the University of Rochester conduct personal ethnographies on social relations in the classroom, observing how their gender, race, and class allegedly determine their response to literary works. The most frequently assigned topic for student ethnographers, however, is popular culture—in other words, describe and respond to your favorite rock video.

Every writing theory of the past 30 years has come up with reasons why it’s not necessary to teach grammar and style. For the multiculturalists, the main reason is that grammatical errors signify that the author is politically engaged. According to Min-Zhan Lu of Drake University, the “individual consciousness is necessarily heterogeneous, contradictory, and in process. The writer writes at the site of conflict.”

It is the goal of current writing theory to accentuate that conflict. Today’s theorists berate former City College professor Mina Shaugnessy, whose book, Errors and Expectations, heralded the remedial-writing movement, for trying to introduce her students—however gently—to academic prose. Min-Zhan Lu write: “We need to contest teaching methods which offer to ‘cure’ all signs of conflict and struggle which the dominant conservative ideology of the 1990s seeks to contain.”

There is a basic law at work in current composition theory: As students’ writing gets worse, the critical vocabulary used to assess it grows ever more pompous. James Zebrowski of Syracuse University claims that doing ethnographies makes students “constructors of knowledge.” John Trimbur of Worcester Polytechnic Institute describes what he calls “post-process, post-cognitivist theory”: It “represents literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions.” According to Trimbur, “literacy crises result not from declining skills but from the contention of various interested representations of literacy.” In other words, students who can’t read and write are simply offering up another version of literacy, which the oppressive conservative ideology refuses to recognize. Such double-talk harks back to the 1960s, when open-admissions students were described as coming from a culture where “orality” was dominant.

Wanted: writers

The bottom line to all this nonsense is drastically lowered expectations of student skills. Marilyn Sternglass, a composition theorist at City College, argues that students should be able to pick up the topics for CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam before the test is administered because “responding to the questions cold makes too many demands on students. If they concentrate on content, their mechanics will suffer; if they concentrate on mechanics, they lose their train of thought.” It never occurs to her that such a zero-sum tradeoff indicates precisely what the test is supposed to measure: the inability to write.

Professors are expending vast amounts of energy making excuses for their students. At a 1994 composition conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, Geraldine de Luca, director of freshman English at Brooklyn College, railed against grammatical rules. Though teaching rules in response to individual students’ questions, she said, can be “empowering, the rules have a way of taking over. And some teachers think that’s fine: ‘It’s about time they learned some grammar,’ they say. ‘I knew this stuff when I was in the fifth grade.’ But in what time, in what community, in what country?” asked Luca melodramatically. “Even the concept of error,” she concluded, “is beginning to feel repugnant to me.”

Today, at CUNY and elsewhere, there is a growing movement to abolish the distinction between remedial writing and reading courses and regular freshman courses, on the grounds that placing students in remedial courses injures their self-esteem. Remedial-writing courses at Baruch College and elsewhere are now known as “English as a Second Dialect,” or ESD, courses. Proudly displaying their knowledge of Foucault, composition theorists argue that the category “remedial education” is merely an artificial construct imposed by the ruling class on the oppressed. Marilyn Sternglass of City College quickly corrected me when I asked about students who needed remedial work: “They are ‘judged’ to need remedial classes,” she retorted haughtily.

Professors who exempt students from the very standards that governed them when they were in school feel compassionate, noble, and powerful. But the professors’ power is limited to their world. Though they may be willing to overlook spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in favor of a “holistic” approach to student writing, employers are clearly not as generous, as the census survey suggests.

[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal] – Via Will Fitzhugh.

Joseph R. Teller

My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives, and I’ve had it.

In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work — you name it — all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want to read. And as anyone who keeps up with trends in higher education knows, such efforts largely fail.

For a while now, compositionists have been enamored of a pedagogical orthodoxy that assumes the following:

Composition courses must focus on process, not just product.
Students should compose essays that tackle complex issues rather than imitate rhetorical modes (as in the much-maligned “current-traditional” pedagogy of years past).
Writing and reading instruction should be combined in the same course.

After years of experimenting with those three principles, here’s what I’ve learned: They rarely work.

First, a simple truth: Students do not revise. This cuts to the very heart of how most of us teach composition. It is an a priori assumption that a composition course must emphasize revision: Writers learn to make rhetorical decisions based on their audience, and that means the arduous process of “substantial revision.”

But substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses. I have tried requiring students to write only three essays developed over several drafts, each of which I comment on without a grade. I have used peer workshops to help students respond to each other’s writing. I have used portfolio systems and deferred-grading schemes. I have cajoled; I have encouraged; I have experimented with more rubrics than I can count.

The invariable result? Weak drafts remain weak; stronger drafts get slightly stronger, but not by much.

In peer workshops, while students get more confident in sharing feedback on each other’s work, they generally ignore their classmates’ suggestions. And more often than not, when they do revise based on peer feedback, it’s often unhelpful and inexperienced advice — for example, telling a student that the paper has a clear thesis when it has no coherent argument at all.

How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist?

Yes, some professors assert that workshops allow students to find blind spots in each other’s essays. But, as their teacher, I can do that more succinctly and quickly, and it wouldn’t require the loss of another hour of class time.

A second observation: Even when students engage complex issues from readings in their papers, they do not use the basic argumentative structures they need in order to give their ideas voice, cohesion, and support.

In a recent course, I gave students a set of readings on liberal education and its role in a democratic society. Now, class discussion had been interesting, and students had struggled productively to understand Seneca, John Henry Newman, Mike Rose, and Rabindranath Tagore; they had even produced essays with some refreshing insights. But few of their essays contained a clear and unifying argument, and many students seemed unable to focus on one point for more than a paragraph.

Let me put it another way: How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist?

If a student’s essay on mass shootings could benefit from a broader discussion of the causes of violence, but the student does not know what it means to argue by causation, then in what sense is an effective rhetorical choice available to her? Writing well involves making rhetorical decisions, but it’s clear that you can’t choose from what you don’t know.

Finally, it’s a mistake to insist that “critical reading” should be as integral to a writing course as the teaching of argumentation, structure, paragraphs, and sentences.

First, study after study shows that reading comprehension is tied to background knowledge and context. So while we can teach general strategies for “reading actively” in our composition courses, there is no such thing as a universal approach to reading aside from a few basic principles: Read slowly and deliberately, annotate as you read, make summary notes, connect to the knowledge you already have. That’s why most composition instructors thematize their courses. We realize that we cannot talk about “reading” very long before we have to talk about reading about something.

Second, because “reading strategies” are context-bound, many composition instructors make their courses about their themes, which leads to two problems: (1) The course becomes more about the content than about writing at the nuts-and-bolts level, and (2) a number of composition instructors, for reasons stemming from the structures of higher education, are not academically qualified to be teaching disciplinary content (e.g., sociology, cultural history, gender criticism) with any semblance of expertise.

That is why students in a composition course can talk about, say, the role of sexism in children’s toys, but can’t write a clear sentence about it. In short, the more time a course focuses on “critical reading” and content, the less time it spends on structure, argument, evidence, logical reasoning, and concise, clear prose — the tools a composition class should give undergraduates.

So how can I help my students write better?

Some of the following injunctions might reek of the “current-traditional.” But they have been my interior manifesto as I move forward with this fall’s set of 100 students:

Students need to write an actual essay and receive feedback on it from me very early in the course. Whether I use neo-Aristotelian rhetoric or process pedagogy, by Week 2 of the semester, students need to have written a short argumentative essay and received feedback on their thesis, use of evidence, and integration of sources. There is no excuse for students to be halfway through the semester without having received this kind of clear response.

Students need to spend less time on difficult texts and more time writing arguments. The more time one spends on content, the less time one has for structure and form. Even if I require only three major essays developed through several drafts, more homework assignments should be short essays that receive clear feedback.
Alternatively, I might structure a course around many short argumentative essays that emphasize rhetorical structure, building up to larger essays. Either way, the point is frequent essays, frequent feedback.
Not every essay requires multiple drafts or peer response. I have foolishly assumed that students cannot submit an essay before having spent at least one class period hashing over a draft with their peers. That should change. Yes, students should be encouraged to read each other’s writing and learn to respond to it. But let’s face it: Unless one believes a writing teacher’s feedback carries no more weight than anyone else’s, this is unnecessary for every essay. (Some academics do claim that a writing teacher’s comments are no more authoritative than any other reader’s, but I doubt such instructors tell their own editors anything like that.)

The writing process is a means to an end. Of course the writing process is important: It can be therapeutic, formative, an aid to figuring out what we believe, the record of a mental life, an endless imaginative resource. But in a freshman composition course, process serves product. Let me put it this way: If a bright student sits down the night before a paper is due and hammers out an excellent essay in one draft, do I fail that paper? If I do, then I am not ultimately interested in helping students write effective essays, but in something else.

Sometimes it’s better to ditch an essay and move forward. Even professional writers admit that, at some point, you throw out a project and start over, or you put a project away to work on later (or never). Substantial revision is part of writing, but not for every project. After all, a number of writing contexts do not require, and might even be hampered by, overwrought attempts at revision. Sometimes writing has to come out adequate the first time. And “process” does not have to be restricted to a single piece. Being a writer is a process, too, a process of moving from one project to another, of learning from what worked the last time and what didn’t, of knowing when to revise and when to hit the delete key.

My job is not to save my students from cultural impoverishment. It is to teach them how to express themselves effectively in writing. The development of cogent, clear prose is at the heart of freshman composition. For too long, I have deluded myself into thinking that my job in a composition course was to introduce students to a rich academic topic, make them read difficult texts, make up for years of barely-more-than-functional literacy and book aversion, teach them to be critical thinkers, and help them understand the oppressive structures of late capitalism — all while helping them write focused arguments, revise, polish paragraphs, and edit sentences. Should college students be expected to read difficult texts? Sure. Should students develop a love of reading? Absolutely. Should students learn to express their views and persuade others in cogent, clear prose? Without question. But that last one is the only unique provenance of a composition course.]

So as much as I want to teach my students to love justice, be passionate about politics, and to think deeply about the future of humanity, they are not legitimate outcomes of a writing course. Neither are fostering a fetishistic love of the writing process or trying to teach “critical reading of difficult texts.”

My guess is that by the end of the semester, my students will hate my course because it is “boring,” “hard,” and “a lot of work.” They probably won’t have life-changing epiphanies about oppressive political structures. And I won’t swear to make them read esoteric academic articles. But if they show up, do the work, and turn off their phones, they just might leave my class able to write a sentence.

Joseph R. Teller is a professor of English at College of the Sequoias.

– Via Will Fitzhugh

Thomas Sowell:

One of the few things that could penetrate the “iron curtain” were ideas conveyed on radio waves. “The Voice of America” network broadcast to the peoples of the Soviet bloc, so that they were never completely isolated, and hearing only what the Communist dictatorships wanted them to hear.

Ironically, despite the victory of democracy over dictatorship that brought the Cold War to an end, within American society there has slowly but steadily developed in too many of our own colleges and universities a set of restrictions on what can be said on campus, either by students or professors, or by outside speakers with views that contradict the political correctness of our time.

There is no barbed wire around our campuses, nor armed guards keeping unwelcome ideas out. So there is no “iron curtain.” But there is a curtain, and it has its effect.

ai.stanford.edu

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, launched in the fall of 2014, is a long-term investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society. It considers the science, engineering, and deployment of AI-enabled computing systems. As its core activity, the Standing Committee that oversees the One Hundred Year Study forms a Study Panel every five years to assess the current state of AI. The Study Panel reviews AI’s progress in the years following the immediately prior report, envisions the potential advances that lie ahead, and describes the technical and societal challenges and opportunities these advances raise, including in such arenas as ethics, economics, and the design of systems compatible with human cognition. The overarching purpose of the One Hundred Year Study’s periodic expert review is to provide a collected and connected set of reflections about AI and its influences as the field advances. The studies are expected to develop syntheses and assessments that provide expert-informed guidance for directions in AI research, development, and systems design, as well as programs and policies to help ensure that these systems broadly benefit individuals and society.

Ken White

For some time, Hillary Clinton’s critics have been citing her defense of a 1975 rape case to attack her, and her defenders have been absolving her of any blame. Kathy Shelton — the victim1 in the case — has openly condemned Clinton and asserted that Clinton gratuitously attacked her, and others have criticized Clinton’s description of the case from a recorded interview in the 1980s. The criticisms are (mostly) wrong and the defenses are (mostly) right.

AP PDF.

Gowers Weblog:

Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Education, has expressed a wish to see almost all school pupils studying mathematics in one form or another up to the age of 18. An obvious question follows. At the moment, there are large numbers of people who give up mathematics after GCSE (the exam that is usually taken at the age of 16) with great relief and go through the rest of their lives saying, without any obvious regret, how bad they were at it. What should such people study if mathematics becomes virtually compulsory for two more years?

A couple of years ago there was an attempt to create a new mathematics A-level called Use of Mathematics. I criticized it heavily in a blog post, and stand by those criticisms, though interestingly it isn’t so much the syllabus that bothers me as the awful exam questions. One might think that a course called Use of Mathematics would teach you how to come up with mathematical models for real-life situations, but these questions did the opposite, and still do. They describe a real-life situation, then tell you that it “may be modelled” by some formula, and proceed to ask you questions that are purely mathematical, and extremely easy compared with A-level maths.

Anna Brown

The employment landscape in the U.S. has undergone profound changes, and the public is adapting to the new realities of the workplace and rethinking the skills they need to compete. A new Pew Research Center survey, conducted in association with the Markle Foundation, and analysis of government data finds that employment in occupations requiring more education and training is on the rise, and many workers are realizing that retraining and upgrading their skills needs to be a lifetime commitment.

Here are six key takeaways on the state of American jobs:

Lara Prendergast

A study came out last week that should have caused great alarm. For 13 years, researchers at the University of Copenhagen studied more than a million women between the ages of 15 and 34 who were taking a type of drug — one that is popular in all developed countries. Taking this drug, the researchers found, correlated with an increase in the risk of depression. The correlation was particularly strong in adolescent girls, who showed an 80 per cent higher chance of being diagnosed with depression.

Usually when a story about women’s health and depression breaks, a phalanx of activists and campaigners pop up all over the media to ‘raise awareness’ of the issue. Last week, however, barely a peep — the papers carried the story and a few online sites ran delicately objective surveys of women on the pill, but there were few howls of outrage.

Bob Kerrey:

Few if any candidates for federal office will tell you that as a consequence of current federal law, young Americans are being screwed in two life-changing ways.

First, under current law, every Social Security beneficiary under the age of 48 will have their promised benefits cut by a third. And second, every young person who works is contributing between $10,000 and $20,000 to the health care and retirement of those lucky Americans who are already drawing benefits under federal law.

In some ways the second screwing is worse than the first. Young workers do not have the defined benefit retirement programs commonly enjoyed by their grandparents, and if they do have health care through their jobs, their annual deductibles are probably greater than what their grandparents paid to have children and attend college.

Perhaps the media will notice that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have something very important in common: Both are on Social Security, or at least they are eligible for the old age benefit guaranteed by Social Security.

Annie Holmquist

Last week the Nation’s Report Card announced that no more than 40% of America’s 4th and 8th graders are proficient in reading and math. Those are scary numbers, but the numbers for writing are even more frightening: only 27% of American 8th and 12th graders attained proficiency.

Why are American students such terrible writers?

Several answers to this question dawned on me while reading through an 1897 text by Dr. Edwin Lewis. Entitled A First Book in Writing English, Dr. Lewis’ book was recommended for freshman and sophomore students and used in places such as Ann Arbor High School around the turn of the 20th century. Needless to say, American schools, students, and even adults regularly violate three principles which Lewis deemed essential to the writing process.

1. They Don’t Read High Quality Literature

As has been previously noted, today’s schools often fail to present their students with many literature selections which demonstrate good examples of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other components of high-quality writing. A thorough and challenging reading program, however, is one of Lewis’ keys to successful writing.

“One of the quickest ways of learning to know good English, is oral reading. For him who would write the language it is therefore a great economy to learn to read it. It is an invaluable habit to read aloud every day some piece of prose with the finest feeling the reader can lend to it. In no other way can one so easily learn to notice and to remember new words. In no other way can one catch the infinitely varied rhythm of prose, and acquire a sense of how a good sentence rises gradually from the beginning and then descends in a cadence. This rise and fall of the sentence is not merely a matter of voice; it is a matter of thought as well.…

If the student reads aloud from writers whose work was natural, unforced, original, he will gradually come to see his own ideas more clearly, feel his own feelings more keenly.”

2. They Skim

The fast-paced age of the internet has trained all of us – adults and children alike – to become text skimmers. But such a practice diminishes thought and understanding, two facets essential to good writing.

“To gain new words and new ideas, the student must compel himself to read slowly. Impatient to hurry on and learn how the tale or poem ends, many a youth is accustomed to read so rapidly as to miss the best part of what the author is trying to say. Thoughts cannot be read so rapidly as words. To get at the thoughts and really to retain the valuable expressions, the student must scrutinize and ponder as he reads. Each word must be thoroughly understood; its exact value in the given sentence must be grasped.”

3. They Don’t Memorize

“Drill and Kill” and the memorization of facts has become a prominent no-no in an age where creativity and feelings are encouraged. But is the de-emphasis on memorization actually depriving children of valuable writing material?

“To the habit of memorizing, many a person is indebted not merely for high thoughts that cheer hours of solitude and that stimulate his own thinking, but for command of words. The degree to which the language of modern writers is derived from a few great authors is startling. Shakespeare’s phrases are a part of the tissue of every man’s speech to-day. Such writers as Charles Lamb bear Shakespeare’s mark on every page. The language of the King James version of the Bible is echoed in modern English prose and poetry. It formed styles so unlike as those of Bunyan, Ruskin, and Abraham Lincoln. Most teachers would declare that a habit of learning Scripture by heart is of incalculable value to a student’s English.”

Would we see American writing ability increase if these three elements were restored to the classroom?

– Via Will Fitzhugh.

Russell Rickford:

I’m delighted that you are mobilizing. Your demonstration reflects your recognition that the escalating crisis of racial terrorism requires a firm and uncompromising response.

Your protest in the face of daily atrocities is a sign of your humanity and your determination to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.

But as we demonstrate, we must take pains to avoid certain tactical and programmatic errors that often plague progressive protest in a neoliberal age.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy.

Red Jahncke:

When the U.S. Education Department shut down ITT Technical Institute at the beginning of the fall semester, some people saw it as just desserts for the for-profit college. Given ITT’s relatively low graduation rates, alleged use of deceptive job placement figures in its recruiting efforts, and high numbers of loan defaults and delinquencies, the government may have seemed justified in refusing to fund more loans to ITT students.

Yet, now, 35,000 students are suddenly without a school and 8,000 faculty and staff are unemployed, and the entire episode shows that the government remains fixated on problems in the for-profit sector while virtually ignoring that all of U.S. higher education has long been guilty of what, in another business, might be called price gouging.

Becky Stone:

When you research how to donate your books to prisons, the same phrase comes up over and over again: that books are a lifeline for prisoners.

As someone who is fortunate enough that most of my experience with the prison system has happened through Netflix, I took that to mean simply that when you’re in the same small space day after day, it gets boring. But providing prisoners with books offers so much more than relief from monotony.

According to a Baltimore Sun article about Maryland’s prison libraries:

Doyin Oyeniyi:

Since the public outcry began, Momentum Instruction has reviewed the book again, but Dunbar stated that the publishers only found one factual error: a passage that suggests that the national language of the United States is English. Dunbar defended the textbook, saying that the company had no “agenda” when they published it, but she’s not sure about the intentions of the textbook’s critics, who told her they would reveal the errors they found during a press conference.

“We have no agenda other than trying to make sure that book presents the best material for the students,” Dunbar told the Dallas Morning News. “I’m not sure really now what their agenda is because they were more concerned with the press conference than they were with errors.”

The disregard for Mexican-American input on the book and the belief that the scholars have biases that Dunbar’s “experts” somehow don’t are on full display in emails obtained by the Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog nonprofit organization monitoring far-right activities in Texas. In one of the emails obtained by TFN through a public information request, one education board member, David Bradley, suggested “deny[ing] the Hispanics a record vote” to Thomas Ratliff, another board member.

Sean Williams:

The U.S. is often referred to as the land of economic opportunity. Apparently, it’s also the land of consumption and “spend everything you’ve got.”

We don’t have to look far for confirmation that Americans are generally poor savers. Every month the St. Louis Federal Reserve releases data on personal household savings rates. In July 2016, the personal savings rate was just 5.7%. Comparatively, personal savings rates in the U.S. 50 years ago were double where they are today, and nearly all developed countries have a higher personal savings rate than the United States. In other words, Americans are saving less of their income than they should be — the recommendation is to save between 10% and 15% of your annual income — and they’re being forced to do more with less in terms of investing.

Walden is the U.S. flagship of Laureate Education, which paid “honorary chancellor” Bill Clinton $17.6 million over five years before he stepped down in 2015 just ahead of wife Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign run.

Elizabeth Talbot, manager of Institutional Legislation and Licensing at the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, said the agency is conducting “a qualitative and a quantitative analysis” of student complaints and comparing it to Walden’s marketing materials.

“I want to make sure the proof is in the pudding that their marketing claims match with student outcome,” Talbot said.

“Is it a policy issue, a culture issue or is it something more nefarious? And we don’t know until we complete the program review.”

She said that after the NBC News report in August, there was an increase in the number of individuals contacting her office and the state Attorney General’s office about Walden.

Josh Mandela

Reardon found some of the largest black-white achievement gaps in the U.S. in the college towns of Berkeley, California, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Charlottesville also displayed a significant black-white achievement gap.

Reardon hypothesized that low-income black students in college towns are adversely affected by the level of academic competition in these communities, where many children have highly educated parents.

“The pattern is even more striking and evident in these data, but I think people knew before that this was a problem in some of those places,” Reardon said.

Reardon acknowledged a flaw in his Virginia testing data — he said he did not know middle-school students take different math assessments in seventh and eighth grades, depending on what level of math they take in those years. He said these assessments soon would be removed from the dataset.

Nigel Warburton:

The students enter, taking their places in the circle, ready for the seminar to begin. The teacher sits with them in the circle and gets straight down to business. ‘Am I the same person today as I was yesterday?’ she asks. Debate breaks out immediately. The teacher says little, interjecting occasionally to ask for clarification of a point, or to suggest that the class gives further consideration to an argument that one of the students has made.

After a lively initial exchange of ideas, things calm down a little and the teacher makes some remarks about the distinction between essential and non-essential properties. She then suggests the students read an extract from the writings of the philosopher John Locke. This stimulates further discussion and debate.

Jeff Guo:

Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.”

As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil servants exercise real power over how the government operates. They write and enforce rules and regulations. They might not decide what becomes law, but they have a hand in how laws are drawn up and how laws are implemented.

For all their influence, though, nearly all of these technocrats are unelected, and they spend most of their time with people who are just like them — other highly educated folk who jog conspicuously in college tees and own a collection of NPR totes.

In their new book, which is part ethnography and part polemic, Bachner and Ginsberg argue that Washington’s bureaucrats have grown too dismissive of the people they are supposed to serve. Bachner and Ginsberg recently sent around an informal survey to selected members of this technocratic class, and the results, they say, were shocking.

“Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served,” they write in their book, “What Washington Gets Wrong.” “Further, we found a wide gulf between the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington. We were left deeply worried about the health and future of popular government in the United States.”

Michelle Ray:

It may have never been formally codified into law, but freedom of choice may be one of the most important liberties we hope to enjoy as American citizens. It’s one we exercise daily, from the food we choose to eat to the products we choose to buy. We choose our leaders, and even choose not to choose if we are so inclined. So why is it that we should allow the government to restrict citizens to a single choice when it comes to education?

Public schools in America face a number of basic issues. They have suffered from classroom overcrowding since the 1990s. No Child Left Behind changed their focus from helping kids learn to making them learn to decode tests. Common Core has left many parents bewildered as children are taught ridiculously circumspect ways to solve basic problems.

In the most egregious cases, dilapidated buildings put children at risk, such as in Detroit where striking teachers published photos of bullet holes in windows and mold & mushrooms growing from the walls. The New York City Public Schools’ notorious “Rubber Room” was a wasteful concession to the public education unions where failed educators remained on the payroll while sitting around playing games and awaiting hearings instead of being fired for outrageous infractions.

David Runciman:

On 23 February, Donald Trump stood before a rally of cheering supporters to celebrate a thumping victory in the Nevada Republican caucus – his third consecutive win, in defiance of the naysayers who had predicted that his bubble was about to burst. “If you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much – and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” he bragged. “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

That last line provoked immediate waves of mockery. It sounded at the time like another one of Trump’s many gaffes – he loves that people do not get a decent education? Yet behind the mockery was a real sense of disquiet, which has not gone away: Trump loves the less educated because they appear to love him back. As the Atlantic reported in March: “The best single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary is the absence of a college degree.” Education – or the lack of it – seemed to be propelling the Trump bandwagon.

Andrew Ogles and Luke Hilgemann:

Tennessee is ground zero for ObamaCare’s nationwide implosion. Late last month the state insurance commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, approved premium increases of up to 62% in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse,” she said.

Then last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. “We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,” the company said, “which is unsustainable.” As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.

BlueCross is only the latest insurer to head for the exits. Community Health Alliance, the insurance co-op established under ObamaCare, is winding down due to financial failure, leaving 30,000 people without coverage. UnitedHealthcare said in April it is departing Tennessee’s exchange after significant losses. That’s another 41,000 people needing new plans.

Kevin Hartnett:

If we could snap our fingers and change the way math and science are taught in U.S. schools, most of us would. The shortcomings of the current approach are clear. Subjects that are vibrant in the minds of experts become lifeless by the time they’re handed down to students. It’s not uncommon to hear kids in Algebra 2 ask, “When are we ever going to use this?” and for the teacher to reply, “Math teaches you how to think,” which is true — if only it were taught that way.

To say that this is now changing is to invite an eye roll. For a number of entrenched reasons, from the way teachers are trained to the difficulty of agreeing on what counts in each discipline, instruction in science and math is remarkably resistant to change.

That said, we’re riding the next big wave in K-12 science and math education in the United States. The main events are a pair of highly visible but often misunderstood documents — the Common Core math standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) — that, if implemented successfully, will boldly remake the way math and science are taught. Both efforts seek to recast instruction in the fundamental ideas and perspectives that animate the two fields.

“What we did in reorganizing the content of school mathematics was long overdue,” said Phil Daro, one of three lead authors of the Common Core math standards.

The changes go beyond the contentious new methods of teaching arithmetic that have grabbed headlines and threatened to blunt the momentum of Common Core math. Both documents developed out of decades of academic research on how children learn, and they reflect similar priorities. They exhibit an elegant rethinking of the basic structure of knowledge, along with new assertions of what’s important for students to be able to do by the time they finish high school.

Related: Connected Math; Math Forum audio and video.

Alan Borsuk:

About a dozen years ago, Willie Jude, a longtime Milwaukee Public Schools administrator who was principal of Custer High School at the time, told me that many Custer grads who went on to higher education (and there weren’t that many) realized quickly they were way behind many other students when it came to academic preparation.

That’s because those other kids were learning the B and C parts of the book when you were learning the A part, Jude said he told them.

In other words, a lot of freshmen hit college with a high school diploma that says they are more likely to succeed than students with other diplomas. The difference breaks strongly along lines of income and race.

This is so unsurprising, but still hugely important and sad. Many efforts to even things up by raising the success rates of those in the lower end of this spectrum have yielded little progress.

A report issued Sept. 20 by University of Wisconsin System administrators provides new ways of looking at this. In 2015, the Legislature approved a proposal by Rep. John Jagler (R-Watertown) that requires UW to identify Wisconsin high schools each year with more than six graduates required to take remedial classes in English and math when they entered any UW System program.

Barron’s:

The cost of a college education is rising for everyone in the U.S., even Uncle Sam. A government program forgives the federal loans of grads who take on public-service jobs and pay 10% of their discretionary income toward the loan balance for a decade. It’s poised to cause headaches for the government once borrowers begin to cash in next year.

Policy makers probably didn’t realize how costly Public Service Loan Forgiveness would be when they approved it in 2007. The program still isn’t widely used, but a quarter of the U.S. workforce has an eligible job—meaning a position with a federal, state, local, or tribal government (including schools and the military), child or family services agency, a 501(c)3 nonreligious nonprofit, or tribal college—and the folks taking advantage of the program tend to carry a lot of debt.

Although undergraduate debt averages $30,000, borrowers using PSLF have median debt of over $60,000, Education Department data show, and 30% of them have over $100,000. Since most undergrads can’t take out more than $31,000 in federal loans, this suggests that many using the program got costly graduate degrees.

EDWIN RIOS AND KRISTINA RIZGA

In late July, the NAACP called for a national moratorium on charter schools, claiming they target low-income and minority communities with practices mirroring the predatory subprime mortgage lending industry. Now a group of more than 160 black civic leaders is asking the civil rights group to reconsider, arguing that charters create opportunities for black families that could allow minority students to excel.

In a September 21 letter, a coalition of educators, current and former politicians, public officials, and black leaders claimed that a charter school moratorium would deny parents the opportunity to choose “what’s best for their children”—and restrict access to high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The proposed resolution cites a variety of cherry-picked and debunked claims about charter schools,” the letter reads. “The notion of dedicated charter school founders and educators acting like predatory subprime mortgage lenders—a comparison the resolution explicitly makes—is a far cry from the truth.”

The NAACP’s proposed resolution, which will be voted on at the national board meeting next month, said that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation and raised concerns over disproportionately “punitive and exclusionary” disciplinary practices, fiscal mismanagement, and lackluster oversight. A few weeks earlier, the Movement for Black Lives, a network of 50 organizations brought together by Black Lives Matter, released a policy agenda that included a similar call to curb the growth of charters.

While the charter school industry is littered with the occasional bad actor, and some charters have even been found to practice “skimming”—illegally screening out potentially challenging students, according to a 2013 Reuters investigation and a recent report by the ACLU and Public Advocates, a public interest law firm—the pro-charter letter highlighted research showing the positive academic benefits and opportunities for black students at charters. Here are three of its main arguments:

1. Black students stand to make short-term academic gains: The letter, citing a study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), argues that black students benefit from added exposure to charter schools. The 2015 study of 41 cities in 22 states found that students attending charter schools in those areas made slightly higher academic gains in both math and reading compared to students in traditional public schools. The gains were particularly pronounced for low-income, black, and Hispanic students, as well as English-language learners. Poor black students, for instance, received the equivalent of 59 additional days of math learning and 44 days of reading learning. For poor Hispanic students, the gains were 48 days of math instruction and 25 days of reading.

Andrew Maul, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Graduate School of Education, questioned the CREDO report’s research methods, including that the sizes of the effects “are very small.” (In response, CREDO noted that the study looked at the change in student test scores from year-to-year as a sign of academic growth, rather than the test scores themselves.)

Graham Allison & Niall Ferguson:

The problem is by no means limited to the Middle East or to Bush. President Obama’s inattention to the deep historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine led him to underestimate the risks of closer ties between Ukraine and Europe. “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” President Obama told The New Yorker for a January 2014 article, referring to the great Cold War–era diplomat and historian. By March, Russia had annexed Crimea.

To address this deficit, it is not enough for a president to invite friendly historians to dinner, as Obama has been known to do. Nor is it enough to appoint a court historian, as John F. Kennedy did with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. We urge the next president to establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers. Historians made similar recommendations to Presidents Carter and Reagan during their administrations, but nothing ever came of these proposals. Operationally, the Council of Historical Advisers would mirror the Council of Economic Advisers, established after World War II. A chair and two additional members would be appointed by the president to full-time positions, and respond to assignments from him or her. They would be supported by a small professional staff and would be part of the Executive Office of the President.

Jonathan Moules:

When he was studying for his doctorate in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Levin suffered a crisis of confidence about his academic career, sparked by his failure to make progress with a paper on the jobs market.

“I was working every minute but at the end of every day I’d pretty much throw out all my notes,” Prof Levin admitted in a candid recent posting on Quora, the question-and-answer website. “Research can be incredibly frustrating when you are getting nowhere.”

Two decades later, it is abundantly clear that Prof Levin is getting somewhere. The 43-year-old former economist is days into his new job as dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“I feel incredibly lucky,” he says, speaking to the Financial Times in his first interview since being appointed.

The former head of Stanford’s department of economics has been handed control of one of the richest and most oversubscribed business schools in the world at a time when the nomination committee’s key requirement was a safe pair of hands.

Last year, the school received 7,899 applications for just 407 places on its MBA programme, which was placed fifth in the Financial Times 2016 global MBA rankings, and top for entrepreneurship.

Simon Kuper:

The robots are coming to demolish your career. “No office job is safe,” says Sebastian Thrun, an expert on artificial intelligence at Stanford University. Lots of lawyers, accountants, even surgeons will be automated away. Having spent my career watching the long, slow carnage of my own industry, I have some insight into how that will feel, and how to cope.

When I entered journalism in 1995, it was a pretty cushy business. People bought newspapers — not necessarily for the articles but often just to find out the weather forecast, the football results, the stock prices or the TV schedule. Consequently, even mediocrities and alcoholics could have long, well-paid journalistic careers. I remember crabby FT subeditors of the 1990s who owned not just houses in London but second homes in France. When I started out, deadlines were about 6pm, after which — since rolling-news websites hadn’t been invented yet — everyone went to the pub. Expenses were good too: I’m told that at the FT, into the early 1990s, you could fly business class as long as you said you were working on the plane. So people would buy a copy of The Economist at the airport.

Dan Solomon:

When Christopher Durham told students at the sixth-twelfth grade Grand Prairie Collegiate Institute to Google him because he’s “famous,” they probably expected that he had been in a movie or a TV show. Or at the very least, they probably weren’t anticipating that his claim to fame is that he was arrested in Oklahoma after making very specific threats during his divorce case.

Back in 2013, the Oklahoman reported that Durham had threatened Judge Lynne McGuire, who presided over his case; Tom Daniel, the attorney who represented his ex-wife; and Ken Klingenberg, the attorney appointed to assist with the sale of the home he and his ex-wife owned.

Kate Grossman

Administrators at four Chicago public high schools inflated annual student attendance rates over the last four years by systematically falsifying daily attendance records, making it appear as if dramatically more students attended class than actually did, according to a CPS inspector general report obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

“The schools engineered the appearance of significantly improved attendance rates,” the inspector general said in the report to be released Thursday.

Lauren FitzPatrick

Chicago’s practice of appointing a school board violates the rights of all city taxpayers to elect who taxes them, disproportionately affecting minority voters, and has left the district in worse financial shape since 1995, when it was placed under mayoral control.

That’s according to former Gov. Pat Quinn and a handful of active Chicago Public Schools families and Local School Council members sued the city’s school board and the state Board of Education on Wednesday in state and federal court.

Thomas Kane:

IN NOVEMBER, VOTERS in Massachusetts will decide whether to raise the cap on charter school enrollment. The irony is that for most voters—those living in suburban and rural communities with charter enrollment far below the current cap—the vote is inconsequential. The charter cap applies to the percentage each school district’s spending which can be sent to charter schools and most communities remain far below the cap. However, for many parents living in communities which are bumping up against the current cap—cities such as Boston, Holyoke, Chelsea and Lawrence—the stakes are very high. In November, their fellow citizens will determine their children’s future educational options.

Casey Newton:

When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type.

“Roman,” she wrote. “This is your digital monument.”

It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.

A message blinked onto the screen. “You have one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in your hands,” it said. “Solve it.”

Kate Hardiman:

Student leaders of this year’s freshman orientation at James Madison University were given a list of 35 things they should avoid saying, including phrases such as “you have such a pretty face,” “love the sinner, hate the sin,” “we’re all part of the human race,” “I treat all people the same,” “it was only a joke,” “I never owned slaves,” and “people just need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” among other expressions.

Richard Whitmire

What’s the matter with Newton?

That’s what Dawn Tillman wants to know. Why would her neighbors in the hyper-upscale Boston suburb of Newton, located just eight miles to the west, deny a KIPP charter high school to a kid in hyper-downscale Roxbury, where she lives?

Not just any kid. Tillman is thinking of her son, Brandon, who currently attends a KIPP middle school but faces dicey prospects for high school. KIPP could quickly expand its current middle school into a high school, but the current cap on charter schools prevents that.

Oddly, the question on the Massachusetts November 8 ballot to raise the current cap on charter schools — Should charter schools be allowed to expand by 12 a year? — will be decided by white suburban voters in places such as Newton, which lacks a single charter school “threatening” its budget.

Mike Wilkinson:

Albion College is one of the most expensive private schools in Michigan and many of its students come from families of means.

On the surface, it would appear the liberal arts students at Albion would have little in common with those living in the poor neighborhood that surrounds the school, where a third of residents live in poverty.

Yet they do, and most students are likely unaware of this stunning fact: A greater percentage of Albion students are receiving federal welfare money than those in the neighborhood surrounding the campus.

At Albion, 63 percent of in-state students receive a Michigan Competitive Scholarship or a Michigan Tuition Grant, college aid the students themselves might be surprised to learn is funded almost entirely with federal anti-poverty money. This at a college in which the median family income of students receiving financial aid is nearly $76,000.

That rate is also more than double the percentage of Albion students who were awarded a Pell Grant in the 2013-14 school year, which go to U.S. college students coming from the poorest of family backgrounds.

Gretchen Livingston:

About one-in-ten mothers with a Master’s degree or more are staying at home in order to care for their family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. Among mothers with professional degrees, such as medical degrees, law degrees or nursing degrees, 11% are relatively affluent and are out of the workforce in order to care for their families. This is true for 9% of Master’s degree holders and 6% of mothers with a Ph.D.

These so-called “opt-out moms” (roughly 10% of all highly educated mothers) make up just 1% of the nation’s 35 million mothers ages 18 to 69 who are living with their children younger than 18. For our purposes, “opt-out moms” are mothers who have at least a Master’s degree, an annual family income of $75,000 or more; a working husband; and who state that they are out of the workforce in order to care for their family.

Mike Antonucci:

Last Thursday the National Education Association Executive Committee approved a request for $3 million in additional funding for the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s campaign against lifting the cap on charter schools in the state. The union’s board of directors concurred on Saturday.

This will bring NEA’s total contribution to the Massachusetts campaign to $4.9 million.

Molly Beck

“I think having a lot of different opportunities, it creates a customized education experience because our kids (are not) one-size-fits-all,” he said.

He said he hasn’t made up his mind about whether to introduce a bill creating the accounts.

Among the states that offer Education Savings Accounts, just Nevada has implemented a program that allows any parent — regardless of income or a child’s ability status — to use the accounts.

But on Friday, the Nevada Supreme Court struck down the law that provides them, saying the program violated the state’s constitution by sending money reserved for public schools to parents who could use it to pay for private school tuition.

Bender said the Nevada court endorsed the idea of education accounts but rejected the funding mechanism.

Michael Skapinker

English is the language of business and science. The government in Rwanda, and many people in Tunisia, prefer it to French. Singapore makes sure every child is fluent in it. It is the world’s lingua franca, the key to success for every ambitious parent and a central part of the curriculum of every sensible school.

That is one way of looking at it. The other is that English is a “bully, juggernaut, nemesis”, an “unnerving border crosser, criminal and intruder”, an international conspiracy run by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, Nato, the British Council and the massed ranks of Anglo-American capitalism. The worldwide spread of English reflects the “Washington linguistic consensus”, which is the “aggressive promotion of English to serve Western political and economic interests”. The supposed benefits of English to ordinary people around the world — better jobs, higher salaries, access to new technologies — have been vastly oversold. Only national elites and their foreign sponsors benefit from the penetration of English. For the vast majority, “English promises much but delivers little.”

Kellee Azar:

Some parents in Aloha are concerned about a “white privilege” survey their children received as homework.

Jason Schmidt’s son, a senior at Aloha High School, was given the survey as homework. Schmidt said he’s not too happy about the form.

“I think he should be learning actual education and not be a part of some social experiment or some teacher’s political agenda,” Schmidt said.

Robby Soave:

You would think students instructed to report to the Gender-Based Misconduct Office had committed serious transgressions. Its name conjures images of creepy guys harassing and violating women.

Columbia University graduate Benjamin Sweetwood claims he did nothing of the sort. He got in trouble for doing something completely inoffensive: he referred to himself as handsome in a class.

“Now I’ve graduated from Columbia University, I am finally ready to reveal a dark and shameful secret I have kept buried for almost two years,” writes Sweetwood in a recent article about his experience. “I, Ben Sweetwood, committed ‘gender misconduct’ while a student at the above mentioned institution of higher learning.”

Jillian Follert:

Whitby mom of two Elaina Daoust says she was “infuriated” last year when her son, then in junior kindergarten at Romeo Dallaire P.S. in Ajax, was told he was not allowed to eat a small piece of banana bread for his morning snack, because it contained chocolate chips.

Instead he was instructed to eat grapes out of his lunch.

“He came home with a chart (listing healthy snack ideas) and told me he and the teacher talked about it and healthy choices. She also sent a note to me. I was really, really, really mad for several reasons,” Daoust says.

She explains that her son is a picky eater, and that she bought the snack-size banana bread because many teachers discourage home-baked treats, and these were labelled as being nut-free and safe for school.

Vishaka Sonawane:

Halloween is approaching and a school district in Connecticut has called for a ban on clown costumes and any “symbols of terror” as the “creepy clown” phenomena has put Americans in multiple states on edge, the Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday.

Authorities at New Haven Public Schools said Monday that principals and building leaders were urged to ban clown costumes until more information on clown-related incidents is available, according to the AP.

The development comes as investigators examine an Instagram account that posted four photos of the clowns. The photos were captioned warning several school areas to “watch out” and “wait and see.” Authorities are looking into whether the threats are authentic or fake.

Ashley Bateman:

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta stands a city that has overcome an economy built and sustained on slave labor, a cotton industry built on the backs of field hands, and now a high school that has integrated itself more equitably than any school in the Delta.

But while Cleveland, Mississippi, has transformed itself from the land up, federal government has chosen to make the city’s schools a national example, forcing local schools to consolidate in the name of desegregation. But many local families of all races don’t want that, and they don’t necessarily consider the effects their individual choices to constitute systemic racism.

U.S. courts hold a legal responsibility to eliminate forced integration. So last May, Judge Debra Brown ordered Cleveland’s middle and high schools to consolidate, in keeping with a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice motion “to enforce the previously-entered desegregation orders governing the district and compel the district’s compliance with federal law.”

Jonathan Margolis.

Joseph Menn:

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

Molly Hensley-Clancy

The campus that launched New York University’s aggressive global expansion misled students and charged them exorbitantly high prices, according to allegations in a new lawsuit. NYU’s Tisch Asia, the suit says, was an “educational scam” that was “not even remotely worth” its $50,000 yearly tuition fees.

The now-defunct Tisch Asia campus in Singapore promised students the same education they’d get in New York, the lawsuit says. But while they forked over the same sky-high tuition charged by NYU’s campus in lower Manhattan, Tisch Asia students got subpar faculty, inadequate equipment, limited access to fellowships, and a dysfunctional building, the suit alleges.

George Will:

The “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor-force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.

Associated Press

First lady Michelle Obama will mark International Day of the Girl on Oct. 11 by Skyping with girls around the world about education challenges in their lives.

The event is sponsored by Glamour magazine’s The Girl Project, which offers education help to more than 50 million girls worldwide.

Obama will be joined from the Newseum in Washington, D.C., by “Black-ish” actress Yara Shahidi and Glamour editor-in-chief Cindy Leive.

Clare Milliken:

“I would say that journalism education is slowly recognizing … that the jobs and opportunities that they traditionally trained students for are changing and expanding,” Ferrier said. “And so we see new job opportunities in social media management or engagement editor or engagement reporter. These are new job titles that didn’t even exist in 2010.”

Ferrier said there are now more classes focused on social media campaigns, social media marketing and analytics, as well as the development of different content forms. At Scripps, Webb’s report explained, Ferrier devised a two-week module on mobile technology. The time for the module was integrated into course syllabi, and Ferrier brought in an expert to teach the “class-within-a-class.” This educated both students and teachers about a specific topic without disrupting the curriculum, and Ferrier said faculty began teaching the module on their own.

The bad news, according to Newton, is that not enough schools are changing and adapting. Newton cites a report from Columbia Journalism School and Stanford University that looked into data journalism education in the U.S. The report found almost 50 percent of journalism programs offer no classes in data journalism, defined as “using data for the journalistic purpose of finding and telling stories in the public interest,” and the classes that are offered are, in large part, introductory.

mindshift

Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum.

School 21, a public school in London has made “oracy” a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another’s thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven’t been taught how to make “turn and talks” truly effective.

Kenneth Saltman:

At more than $1.3 trillion dollars as of 2016, US student loan debt has become widely discussed in the media, the business press and academia as a new debt bubble with the potential to burst and trigger a global economic crisis that puts everyone at risk. The student debt bubble is regularly compared to the subprime mortgage debt bubble that resulted in the failure of banks, the great recession and the public bailout of Wall Street and the auto industry in 2008. Prior to the subprime crisis, high- and low-risk mortgages were packaged together into investment bonds so that when enough of the high-risk mortgages defaulted, the bonds that had been rated as safe collapsed. Similarly, one form of student debt investment security, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), is composed of pooled student debt.

A crucial difference between the subprime debt bubble and the student debt bubble is that the properties that comprised subprime mortgage securities served as collateral to the mortgage debt. If a homeowner defaults on a mortgage, the bank claims the property in its stead. Student loan debt has traditionally not been collateralized. In other words, if a student or former student defaults on student loans, there is no tangible asset for the bank to claim. However, since a great deal of student loan debt has been federally subsidized and especially reinsured, private banks that package student loan debt into investment securities have been able to sell these investment securities because they carry the full faith and credit of the federal government. Despite having no collateral, they have the federal guarantee.

Kate Irby:

With costly healthcare, a stereotype of obesity and a culture of creatively fatty foods, “healthy” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of the United States.

But according to the Legatum Prosperity Index’s findings for 2015, the U.S. is the healthiest country in the world. However, when it comes to freedom, an ideal most Americans pride themselves on, the U.S. falls to 15.

So what’s the country with the most personal freedom? Canada, followed by New Zealand, Norway, Luxembourg and Iceland.

Personal freedom, as defined by the London-based Legatum Institute, measures a nation’s performance at both guaranteeing individual freedom and encouraging social tolerance. Canda was ranked No. 1 due to 94 percent of its citizens saying they believed they had the freedom to choose the course of their own lives and 92 percent saying there was tolerance for ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Russell Rickford:

I’m delighted that you are mobilizing. Your demonstration reflects your recognition that the escalating crisis of racial terrorism requires a firm and uncompromising response.

Your protest in the face of daily atrocities is a sign of your humanity and your determination to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.

But as we demonstrate, we must take pains to avoid certain tactical and programmatic errors that often plague progressive protest in a neoliberal age.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy.

Tressiemc:

I have watched many cities burn over the past two years.

I cried over Ferguson.

I cried over Baltimore.

But there’s nothing like seeing your hometown on social media with a hashtag.

I don’t want to talk about my family and friends. Worrying about them keeps me up at night. I don’t want to talk about.

I am only giving myself permission to think about Charlotte in public, not feel. Feeling is for private.

The first night of protesting I remarked that we don’t do this in Charlotte. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of inequality that defined Ferguson. We do. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of urban warfare between citizens and police that defined Baltimore. I didn’t mean that we don’t do extra-judicial murder. I have written about Johnathan Ferrell. I know that we do.

I meant that Charlotte does not have the deep, varied social organizing culture to quickly mobilize mass actions. We are not Chicago.

We certainly have a robust civic community. But, that isn’t the same thing.

Matt Wirz & Heather Gillers:

The Chicago school system needed money—fast. Two Wall Street players saw an opportunity to invest.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Chicago-based Nuveen Asset Management have made realized and paper profits exceeding $110 million on purchases this year of $763 million in Chicago Public Schools bonds. The school system has said it needed the money to replenish its dwindling coffers before the new school year and to build and repair facilities.

The terms of the bond sales highlight the choices the school district faces after years of pension shortfalls and relying heavily on borrowing. The 397,000-student school district struggled to sell municipal bonds in February until Nuveen bought about one-third, and the district decided in July to borrow directly from J.P. Morgan for fear that investors might balk again, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board of Education said.

Carolyn Phenicie:

As a child growing up in the nation’s capital, in a tough neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs, Christopher liked school — mostly — except for math. His favorite subject was social studies.

“I guess that’s where my strength is at, stuff like that,” said the sturdy young man, dressed in dark sweatpants on a cool-for-August day, his work ID swinging on a lanyard around his neck.

Yet by the time he was 21, after several years in and out of various D.C. schools and juvenile detention facilities across the country, all he had to show for it was a single high school credit.

Petra Sauer

Using the IIASA/VID dataset of populations by age, sex and level of education, I calculate education Gini coeffients and decompose the overall degree of educational in-equality into age, sex and within-group components. I analyze the relative relevance of these components for inequality reduction and investigate the distributional outcomes of education expansion. I find that, on average, equalization between males and females, younger and older cohorts as well as within these subgroups of the population has signif- icantly contributed to declining educational inequality over the observed sample period around the globe. But the relative role of these components fluctuates in the process of education expansion. First, as improvements are initiated by enhancing the educational opportunities of the youth, the gap between cohorts widens in transition phases but van- ishes thereafter. Second, gaps between sexes have been reduced but are predicted to widen again if either males or females are the first to enter higher education levels. To a lesser extent, this is also true for gaps within population subgroups which can be due to the ethnic background or the social and economic status of people.

Dan Mihalopoulos and Lauren FitzPatrick:

The top attorney for the Chicago Public Schools supervised work done for CPS by a law firm that’s still making $200,000-a-year severance payments to him, email records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

When the Sun-Times first reported in July that CPS had hired Jenner & Block LLP, schools CEO Forrest Claypool said his hand-picked general counsel, Ronald Marmer, “recused himself” and had no role in choosing the firm.

But the newly obtained documents show Marmer reviewed drafts of a lawsuit the firm was preparing to file on behalf of CPS and sent revisions of the planned suit to Jenner & Block lawyers.

Sarah Phillips

The state of Texas recently threatened to pull out of the federal refugee resettlement program over security concerns related to Syrian refugees, a move that the Texas Civil Rights Project has condemned as furthering suffering of populations of the world.
On Sept. 21, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced its intention to withdraw from the resettlement program if the Office of Refugee Resettlement cannot assure security.
“Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people,” Abbott said in a statement. “Therefore, Texas will withdraw from the refugee resettlement program. I strongly urge the federal government to completely overhaul a broken and flawed refugee program that increasingly risks American lives.”

Embedded in Academia

The other day a non-CS friend remarked to me that since computer science is a quantitative, technical discipline, most issues probably have an obvious objective truth. Of course this is not at all the case, and it is not uncommon to find major disagreements even when all parties are apparently reasonable and acting in good faith. Sometimes these disagreements spill over into the public space.

The purpose of this post is to list a collection of public debates in academic computer science where there is genuine and heartfelt disagreement among intelligent and accomplished researchers. I sometimes assign these as reading in class: they are a valuable resource for a couple of reasons. First, they show an important part of science that often gets swept under the rug. Second, they put discussions out into the open where they are widely accessible. In contrast, I’ve heard of papers that are known to be worthless by all of the experts in the area, but only privately — and this private knowledge is of no help to outsiders who might be led astray by the bad research. For whatever reasons (see this tweet by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt) the culture in CS does not seem to encourage retracting papers.

Brian Rosenthal

The federal government on Monday ordered Texas state officials to eliminate an 8.5 percent benchmark on special education enrollment enforced in the state’s 1,200 school districts unless they can show that it had not kept children with disabilities from receiving appropriate educational services.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

I’ve always believed that university professors are willing and able to govern academics, but now I am not so sure. I am worried about growing fatalism among even tenured faculty activists. I’m concerned about the tacit belief that unstoppable historical forces have already destroyed the universities they want to keep. From this standpoint, local resistance can work but remaking is futile, though remaking is the premise of shared governance and of academic freedom.

My summer travels took me to London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Liverpool, Bonn, Cambridge, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Crewe, York, and Valencia, mostly for lectures and discussions with faculty members about the state of universities in their country. I was struck by the contrast between the great intelligence and professional commitments of the professors on the one hand, and their lack of hope for universities on the other. Several of the visits revolved around higher education conferences, where I heard brilliant analyses of the nuts and bolts of national education initiatives that lacked a standpoint for faculty intervention.

Zaid Milani & Naomi LaChance:

Since NFL 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem in August to protest oppression of people of color, many Americans, particularly professional athletes and students, have followed suit. But their constitutional right to engage in such gestures of dissent is not always being respected.

Threats from school administrators and teachers have put free speech advocates like the ACLU on high alert. At Lely High School, a public school in Naples, Florida, the principal told students that they would be removed from athletic events if they refused to stand during the national anthem — though he said the quote was misunderstood when the ACLU of Florida reached out.

Robby Soave

A student has taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by University of Michigan’s new pronoun policy, which allows students to list their chosen pronouns on the official bios that are sent out to their teachers.

The student, Grant Stroble, has listed his pronoun as “His Majesty.”

He is stunning and brave. Applaud his courage. Weep openly, if you must.

Are you finished? Still reading? It’s quite a moving story, I know.

Joe Sanka:

Kentucky joined a number of other states with disappointing results from this summer’s bar exams, as only 65 percent of those taking the state exam passed in July. The total pass rate of 69.9 percent from all winter and summer exams in 2016 marked a low point for Kentucky in the past decade, falling over 10 percentage points from its previous high in 2011.

The fall in pass rates over the last five years among first-time bar exam takers in Kentucky was even larger, with this year’s rate at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law and University of Kentucky College of Law decreasing by nearly 20 and 15 percentage points from their previous high marks in 2011, respectively.

The Economist

IN 1962 Jacob Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He had analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical “power” (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.

Wind the clock forward half a century and little has changed. In a new paper, this time published in Royal Society Open Science, two researchers, Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Merced, and Richard McElreath at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, show that published studies in psychology, neuroscience and medicine are little more powerful than in Cohen’s day.

Joel Handley:

rk called Willie Mae Swansey’s case in a crowded courtroom last February, the 72-year-old approached the judge slowly, supporting herself with a four-pronged cane. It had been a busy afternoon in the Daley Center’s civil forfeiture courtroom, with more than a dozen quick hearings and a pair of trials preceding her own. The crush of defense lawyers and hopeful claimants had thinned by the time Swansey stepped up to the bench. She steadied herself beside a prosecutor and stood with a stately straightening of her back.

Swansey was here to reclaim her car. The Chicago Police Department had seized the 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser two years prior, arresting the driver, Swansey’s son, and charging him with manufacturing or delivering 15 to 100 grams of heroin. The car had been impounded ever since. Swansey herself was never charged with a crime, and it was her name, not her son’s, on the title. All the same, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had agreed with CPD that the vehicle, which the office valued at $1,400, was worth keeping for good.

John Wisely

A report finds the nation’s most segregated school district border sits between Detroit and the Grosse Pointes.

Story Highlights

Lawsuit is part of growing trend of litigation aimed at failing schools.
Because it’s a federal case, it could reach the U.S. Supreme Court and have nationwide impact.

Everyone knows that literacy is important, but is it a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution?

That’s the question being raised in a lawsuit filed against the State of Michigan on behalf of Detroit schoolchildren who struggle in some of the state’s worst-performing schools. Advocates insist that it is, saying that people who can’t read can’t exercise other constitutional rights such as voting, accessing the courts and serving in the military.

To argue the case, they have assembled a nationwide legal team that includes Carter Phillips, a Washington lawyer who has argued more than 80 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s most frequently cited experts on the Constitution.

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

Michael Stratford:

But what Sallie Mae wanted to preserve was widely criticized as a taxpayer boondoggle — and the company has drawn the ire of progressives like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Kaine’s little-known intervention on behalf of Sallie Mae, as detailed in about a half dozen emails in 2009, reveal a pragmatist who, in this case, was willing to forward a special interest’s concerns to the right people — albeit without his full-throated endorsement.

While the Clinton campaign has cast her vice presidential pick as a fighter on progressive issues, his involvement with Sallie Mae suggests a more conventional politician willing to carry water for a constituent dangling hundreds of local jobs — even if progressives might criticize it as working against the interests of taxpayers and needy students who would get additional financial aid under Obama’s proposal.

Kaine’s involvement with Sallie Mae is not the only time he has supported the agenda of banks: This summer, just before Clinton tapped him as her VP nominee, he came out in favor of loosening some regulations for regional banks — a move that drew fury from progressive groups.

Neerav

Mojo Moment #3: Thousands Rally for 100,000 More Charter Seats

Thousands of families and educators, joined by special guest Common, marched in New York City to support the doubling of the charter sector from 100,000 to 200,000 students.

I wish that those who criticize charters would grapple with the reality that families who are forced to send their children to failing public schools are marching in the streets for more high-quality charter schools.

With these rallies as a backdrop, calling for a moratorium on charter schools seems out of touch at best and malevolent at worst.

Government and civic leaders should be serving, not denying, families in need.

Gene Epstein:

Who won last Monday’s verbal smack-down between the two main presidential candidates? On issues relating to the economy, it was too close to call: They both lost, each having matched the other with displays of economic illiteracy. Space limitations permit only one ignoramus award per candidate.

Consider Democrat Hillary Clinton’s analysis of the Great Recession of 2008-09. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession,” she noted, “the worst since the 1930s.” After that valid observation, she declared that the disaster “was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”

That somewhat jumbled formulation almost seemed calculated to stir class hatred. The horrors of the Great Recession must still haunt millions of Americans. As Clinton herself went on to remark, “Nine million people lost their jobs” and “five million people lost their homes.” Yet in her view, “slashed taxes on the wealthy” was a principal cause of this misery, while the “tax policies” that apparently kicked “the middle class” to the curb was a related factor.

Jonathan Gruber on “stupid Americans”.

Alexandra Wolfe

For younger students, Prof. Christensen thinks that education needs to be reformed across the board. In his 2008 book “Disrupting Class,” he asked why government investment in education has yielded so little progress. He believes that his latest theory can help here too. “The job is that kids need to feel successful every day,” he says. As one example, he points to Khan Academy, which offers free online courses. Students have to master each level before they can move on, giving them a feeling of achievement.

DN Lee

I am sitting in on a big lecture course – Biology for Majors – that I will teach next fall. Faculty, both junior and senior faculty, rotate and teach core courses here. I haven’t had to think about foundational biology in a decade and I’m taking notes on the material as well as the presentation emphasis of my senior colleague.

Thought bubble: Was there a memo about the rearranging and reassigning of organisms into different groups? Domains, Kingdom, Paraphyletic groups #howsway?!

Seriously, here I am in the course, sitting mid-range in this huge auditorium. I can see both my colleague’s expression and note the level of engagement (via facial expressions and the amount of scribbling students are doing)…He asks simple feedback questions and no response.

Chemistry Blog

Future chemistry faculty will have to be twice as smart, work with twice the efficiency, and reach the correct positions of influence if they want this type of unhealthy cultural attitudes to finally be put to rest. This is my goal at least.

Update 1: Guido Koch now.

Update 2: The underlying macroeconomic cause for why professors can get away with this behavior.

Update 3: This story has really struck a cord, thank you for sharing this link and supplying our first 20,000 visitor day!

Update 4: A transcribed letter from Robert Tjian

Maia Szalavitz

Drug education is the only part of the middle school curriculum I remember — perhaps because it backfired so spectacularly. Before reaching today’s legal drinking age, I was shooting cocaine and heroin.

I’ve since recovered from my addiction, and researchers now are trying to develop innovative prevention programs to help children at risk take a different road than I did.

Greg Durrett

The Berkeley Document Summarizer is a learning-based single-document summarization system. It compresses source document text based on constraints from constituency parses and RST discourse parses. Moreover, it can improve summary clarity by reexpressing pronouns whose antecedents would otherwise be deleted or unclear.

Kolmogorov Complexity

And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, each string has an equal chance (2^{-50}) in being chosen at random from all sequences of 50 binary digits. So in a sense, the huge body of mathematics underlying probability has already failed us at this basic juncture because we cannot speak of how random one particular outcome of an experiment is. We need a new notion that overcomes this difficulty.

Definition: The Kolmogorov complexity of a string w, denoted K(w) is the length of the shortest program which outputs w given no input.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

On Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm CST, more than 130 local Black men will participate in Madison’s Premiere Black Male Photo Shoot on the steps of Wisconsin’s State Capitol, City Hall and the Monona Terrace. The photo shoot has been organized One City Early Learning Centers in partnership with Marcus Miles Photography, Justice Productions and Hedi Rudd Photography.

As part of One City’s Ready by 5 Campaign that will kick-off in November 2016, this unique photo shoot will benefit the children of One City Early Learning Centers and promote the importance of high quality preschools being available, affordable and accessible to all children in Dane County. One City will sell printed calendars, posters and photos as a fundraiser during the 2016 holiday season to support the operations of our school. The Campaign will also promote positive images of Black men to children and adults across Dane County.

Participants include:
University of Wisconsin’s Associate Head Basketball Coach Howard Moore

UW-Madison Vice Provost for Diversity & Climate Patrick J Sims

UW-Madison Assistant Dean José J. Madera

UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Randolph Ashton

Deputy Mayor Enis Ragland

Judge Everett Mitchell

Madison Metropolitan School District Board President James Howard and Chief of Secondary Schools Alex Fralin

Health & Fitness champion Haywood Simmons

Pastors Colier McNair, David Smith Sr., Rick Badger and Kevin Doss

Several Members of the Madison Fire and Police Departments

Councilman Samba Baldeh

YWCA’s Bill Baldon

The Duke Dennis McClain

Radio Personality Derrell Connor

Retired Police Lt. and South Side Raiders President Wayne Strong

County leader Andre Johnson

…and many more

For more details about the photo shoot, please visit goo.gl/d9e36g. One City will host additional photo shoots featuring more diverse citizens to build a movement of awareness and support for its preschool, and for preschool education in general in Dane County.

Three additional photo shoots: Real Women of Madison – We Do Everything, Real Leaders of Madison – We Support All Children, and Future Leaders of Madison – Yes, We Have A Plan will take place during the winter and spring with a release at One City’s first annual event next year.

Caire stated that, “The photo shoots are fun and meaningful activities designed to build awareness, support and a movement for high quality, affordable and accessible early education for all children. They will also help cultivate a new vision of future career possibilities among our children while highlighting the widespread support that exists in all segments of our community to eliminate poverty and achievement gaps.”

Marcus Miles of Marcus Miles Photography added, “I’m very happy to be a part of this project. Our children’s future depends on how well we prepare them before age 5. They must be ready by then if we want them to succeed in school and life.”

About One City Early Learning
One City is a nonprofit preschool located in South Madison that opened in September 2015. They presently serves 35 children ages 1 to 5 and plan to grow to serve 110 (including infants) by 2018 in our current location. The organization’s mission is to prepare young children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life, and ensure they enter grade school reading-ready. We operate a year-round program from 6:45am to 5:30pm Monday through Friday. For more information about One City Early Learning Centers, visit www.onecityearlylearning.org and click below to like us on Facebook and Twitter.

Get Involved.

“Progressive Army”

A leaked memo titled “BRL Interview Prep MEMO – CO03, CO06, IA01, NE02, UT04” detailed the state of five competitive Congressional races. The document reveals the Party’s collusion and close tie with the press, its active work to control the narrative and ensuring positive press coverage in Utah’s 4th district:

Most reporters are a rather long way from Mencken.

Brian Krez’s:

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.

The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.
Vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into “bots,” forcing them to report to a central control server that can be used as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The Hackforums user who released the code, using the nickname “Anna-senpai,” told forum members the source code was being released in response to increased scrutiny from the security industry.

“When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn’t planning on staying in it long,” Anna-senpai wrote. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO [link added]. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.”

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Mirai is one of at least two malware families that are currently being used to quickly assemble very large IoT-based DDoS armies. The other dominant strain of IoT malware, dubbed “Bashlight,” functions similarly to Mirai in that it also infects systems via default usernames and passwords on IoT devices.

According to research from security firm Level3 Communications, the Bashlight botnet currently is responsible for enslaving nearly a million IoT devices and is in direct competition with botnets based on Mirai.

Erin Richards:

On a mid-September morning, Pulaski High School on Milwaukee’s south side appeared peaceful and studious, its hallways free of roaming students and Principal Lolita Patrick holding sway in front of the auditorium.

Teachers instruct with the doors open now. Students wear uniforms, suspensions and incidents are down and the lunchroom is far more civilized this year, she said.

Those are small but meaningful steps for Pulaski, a struggling high school embarking on a big, urgent turnaround while hosting a new upstairs neighbor: Carmen Southeast, the third campus of the Milwaukee-based Carmen Schools of Science and Technology charter network. Downstairs, Pulaski is working on cementing an International Baccalaureate program into its curriculum.

The co-location deserves particular attention because the proposal to put Carmen in Pulaski drew a pitched fight last fall between Carmen supporters and the teachers union. Carmen is a popular, high-expectations charter school that wanted to add a third campus. Pulaski is a traditional high school with extra space because of declining enrollment. Patrick and MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver were in favor of the co-location, but the Milwaukee School Board was split. A key member changed his mind, and a narrow 5-4 vote let the partnership proceed.

Simon Keper:

‘A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain’

I’d like to have a soldier stationed outside the classroom door,” my son’s teacher told the parents’ meeting. “And I’d like him to be young and handsome.” My children’s primary school in Paris is a few minutes’ walk (or a frantic sprint) from the sites of last year’s terrorist attacks. Across the city, the new term has started with drills on what to do if terrorists get into the school. The teacher announces “Intrusion”, turns off the lights, puts something in front of the door, and everyone hides under their desks.

My kids don’t seem traumatised. One of my sons came home chuckling at the memory of his fat middle-aged teacher trying to squeeze under her desk. Still, his generation will be shaped by the spectre of terrorism.

Every society tries to make the trade-off between security and freedom. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s at the tail-end of a western era that prioritised freedom. According to Google, mentions of “freedom” exceeded mentions of “security” in English-language books every year from about 1830 through to 1985. When I was eight, living in a small Dutch town, all the children in my class cycled to school alone. Our parents rarely knew where we were (and probably didn’t care). Freedom was the spirit of the times.

Statistically, in fact, we were in much greater danger than children today. My two schoolmates who died of cancer might well have survived now. And when I was eight, Dutch traffic deaths were more than triple today’s level.

By the end of my childhood, society began getting more protective. In 1985, mentions of “security” surpassed “freedom” in books, and the word has steadily expanded its lead since. We entered an era of compulsory seatbelts, bans on public smoking and laws against drink-driving.

“Oh ye of little faith”….

Lawrence Summers

On the basis of these factors, I expect that more than one-third of all men between 25 and 54 will be out work at mid-century. Very likely more than half of men will experience a year of non-work at least one year out of every five. This would be in the range of the rate of non-work for high school drop-outs and exceeds the rate of non-work for African Americans today.

Will we be able to support these people and a growing retired share of the population? What will this mean for the American family? For prevailing ethics of self-reliance? For alienation and support for toxic populism? These are vital questions. Even more vital is the question of what is to be done.

Elizabeth Campbell

Chicago, the nation’s biggest junk-rated city, has raised taxes and moved to shore up its debt-ridden pension system, but for its schools, the triage still has a ways to go. […]

The Chicago Board of Education is facing a potential strike by its teachers, which could further strain its coffers. The third-largest U.S. school district’s budget counts on state aid and union concessions that may not come. And this week, Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating deeper into junk, citing its “precarious liquidity” and reliance on borrowed money, as preliminary data showed an enrollment drop of almost 14,000 students — a loss that may cut into its funding.

The chronic financial strains may lead investors to demand higher interest rates from the debt-dependent district. With $6.8 billion of general-obligation debt, it’s already paying yields of as much as 9 percent, according to Moody’s. More than 10 percent of this year’s $5.4 billion budget is eaten up by principal and interest costs.

Brian Resnick:

But Michèle Nuijten, a PhD student at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who co-created Statcheck, has her sights on fixing a much smaller but surprisingly impactful problem in science: rounding errors.

“When starting this project, I wouldn’t say [this was a big problem],” Nuijten tells me. “We’re detecting when people are making rounding errors, who cares?”

But she and some colleagues in the Netherlands were curious enough to check. They built a computer program that could quickly scan published psychological papers and check the math on the statistics. They called their program “Statcheck” and ran it on 30,717 papers.

Related: Math Forum.

David Tran:

I grew up in East Oakland, California, as the youngest son of Teochew-Vietnamese immigrants. School was always easy for me — I never really felt challenged throughout elementary school. Amid the droves of teacher strikes and substitutes, the truly dedicated teachers of Oakland’s Maxwell Park Elementary School were few and far between.

But in fifth grade, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mrs. Harris, who changed my life forever. On weekends, Mrs. Harris invited students to her house for lunch. Using her own money, she gave away trinkets to those who did well on assignments.

And during a parent-teacher conference, she did something unthinkable and so incredible that I didn’t fully comprehend its impact until years later. She begged my parents to have me apply to private middle schools to get me out of the failing Oakland public schools.

David Robson.

Thomas Donlan:

The dry-run delegates proposed:

• Requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to approve any increase in the national debt, and ending the power of Congress to mandate spending by states or municipalities.

• Placing 12-year term limits on members of Congress.

• Limiting the powers under the constitutional clause that authorizes Congress to regulate interstate and international commerce.

• Giving Congress a right of approval of federal regulations. No regulation challenged by 25% of the members of either house would go into effect without support from majorities in both houses, and the president would have no veto against their decisions.

• Repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized imposition of the income tax in 1913, and requiring supermajority votes for creating or raising federal taxes.

• Giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order by votes of three-fifths of state legislatures.

See more at conventionofstates.com.

David Pilling

For a group that has helped change the way economics is taught at universities up and down Britain, the Post-Crash Economics Society had a less than momentous start.

It was November 2012 when seven undergraduates met in a cramped room on the top floor of Manchester university’s student union. Chairs drawn into a semi-circle, they listened as the two founding members went through a brief PowerPoint presentation explaining what they thought was wrong with the economics curriculum. A polite discussion followed before everyone shuffled off for the Christmas holidays. It wasn’t exactly Paris 1968.

The students had gathered in response to an email with the subject line: “CALL OUT TO ALL THE ECONOSCEPTICS OUT THERE”. “In the middle of the biggest global recession for 80 years,” the email read, “students across the world are questioning the very foundations of our discipline.”

Sam Biddle:

Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.

This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address — which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that “we do not store data related to customers’ location,” identify a customer’s location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices,” orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.

The Intercept received the document about Apple’s Messages logs as part of a larger cache originating from within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Electronic Surveillance Support Team, a state police agency that facilitates police data collection using controversial tools like the Stingray, along with conventional techniques like pen registers. The document, titled “iMessage FAQ for Law Enforcement,” is designated for “Law Enforcement Sources” and “For Official Use Only,” though it’s unclear who wrote it or for what specific audience — metadata embedded in the PDF cites an author only named “mrrodriguez.” (The term “iMessages” refers to an old name for the Messages app still commonly used to refer to it.)

Elizabeth Patitsas, Jesse Berlin, Michelle Craig, and Steve Easterbrook

Although it has never been rigourously demonstrated, there is a common belief that CS grades are bimodal. We statisti- cally analyzed 778 distributions of final course grades from a large research university, and found only 5.8% of the dis- tributions passed tests of multimodality. We then devised a psychology experiment to understand why CS educators believe their grades to be bimodal. We showed 53 CS pro- fessors a series of histograms displaying ambiguous distri- butions and asked them to categorize the distributions. A random half of participants were primed to think about the fact that CS grades are commonly thought to be bimodal; these participants were more likely to label ambiguous dis- tributions as “bimodal”. Participants were also more likely to label distributions as bimodal if they believed that some students are innately predisposed to do better at CS. These results suggest that bimodal grades are instructional folklore in CS, caused by confirmation bias and instructor beliefs about their students.

CeliaSue Hecht

Every night and every morning, I wonder how it got to be like this. If I’m lucky, I’ll get maybe six hours of shuteye, but usually it’s a lot less. The fear of police or someone else finding me makes me nervous. After a while, the lack of sleep sets in. I feel groggy, low energy, and my legs and feet get swollen and stiff. Sleep deprivation is a torture technique the military uses, and it works just as effectively on an old lady like me.

Not having a home is hard. Now imagine not having a home at the age of 66.

Derek Thompson

A “crisis of abundance” initially seems like a paradox. After all, abundance is the ultimate goal of technology and economics. But consider the early history of the electric washing machine. In the 1920s, factories churned them out in droves. (With the average output of manufacturing workers rising by a third between 1923 and 1929, making more washing machines was relatively cheap.) But as the decade ended, factories saw they were making many more than American households demanded. Companies cut back their output and laid off workers even before the stock market crashed in 1929. Indeed, some economists have said that the oversupply of consumer goods like washing machines may have been one of the causes of the Great Depression.

Marybeth Gasman:

While giving a talk about Minority Serving Institutions at a recent higher education forum, I was asked a question pertaining to the lack of faculty of color at many majority institutions, especially more elite institutions.

My response was frank: “The reason we don’t have more faculty of color among college faculty is that we don’t want them. We simply don’t want them.” Those in the audience were surprised by my candor and gave me a round of applause for the honesty.

Given the short amount of time I had on the stage, I couldn’t explain the evidence behind my statement. I will do so here. I have been a faculty member since 2000, working at several research universities. In addition, I give talks, conduct research and workshops and do consulting related to diversifying the faculty across the nation. I have learned a lot about faculty recruitment over 16 years and as a result of visiting many colleges and universities.

Nico Savage:

Out-of-state students and those in UW-Madison’s professional schools could soon see another round of tuition increases after Chancellor Rebecca Blank told faculty Monday she plans to ask the university’s governing board in the coming months to raise prices for those students.

Blank also said UW-Madison plans to distribute $9 million in raises and bonuses to its faculty and academic staff in a move aimed in part at shoring up morale among employees.

The chancellor announced the initiatives during her State of the University speech Monday at a meeting of the UW-Madison faculty senate, where she touted the university’s achievements over the past year but acknowledged the challenges it faces in creating a “more stable financial base” amid declining state funding.

Brianna Reilly:

Two West High School students were arrested Thursday afternoon after an officer stationed at the school took a BB gun from one of them, Madison police said.

The students, both 14-year-old boys, were outside the school on Regent Street at 1:25 p.m. when the officer took the gun away from them, Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said.

After the officer took the gun, the students ran to the high school and tried to get in, but the door was locked, police said. One student broke a window after punching it while trying to get in.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio/video.

Madison West Principal Beth Thompson, via a kind reader email:

Dear West HS Families:

I’m writing to let you know that this afternoon, we briefly directed students to remain in their classrooms while we investigated a safety concern that originated outside our school. Shortly after 1:30 pm, our ERO was talking to a student near the Regent Street Market when he noticed the student had a gun. The officer was able to obtain the gun safely, which turned out to be a BB gun. The student and a companion then ran toward the school and attempted to gain entry into the building. In the process of forcibly knocking on the door, a window was shattered. Both students were taken into custody by the police.

Please know that the safety of our students is a top priority in our school and that we communicate closely with the police to ensure the safety of our students. I want to reassure you that school safety was not compromised and staff responded quickly and appropriately to help manage the incident and to re-direct students.

We make every effort to keep our families informed about incidents that occur in our school.

Please contact me if you have any questions,

Respectfully,

Beth Thompson, Principal
West High School