Michael Mimoso:

U.S.-based security researchers may soon be championing the case of Grant Wilcox, a young U.K. university student whose work is one of the few publicly reported casualties of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Wilcox last week published his university dissertation, presented earlier this spring for an ethical hacking degree at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. The work expands on existing bypasses for Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), free software that includes a dozen mitigations against memory-based exploits. Microsoft has on more than one occasion recommended use of EMET as a temporary stopgap against publicly available zero-day exploits.

Jonathan Katz

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in “holding pattern” postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don’t pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists’ Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn’t get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that’s not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Larry Cuban:

School reformers seek to fix problems. Many of these “solutions” appear and disappear again and again–as the previous post argued. Yet some past reforms do stick. How come?

In investigating school reforms that have taken place over the last century and a half, I have divided them into incremental and fundamental changes (see here and here). Incremental reforms are those that aim to improve the existing structures of schooling; the premise behind incremental reforms is that the basic structures are sound but need improving to remove defects. The car is old but if it gets fixed it will run well; it has been dependable transportation. It needs tires, brakes, a new battery, and a water pump-incremental changes. Fundamental reforms are those that aim to transform, to alter permanently, those very same structures; the premise behind fundamental reforms is that basic structures are flawed at their core and need a complete overhaul, not renovations. The old jalopy is beyond repair. We need to get a completely new car or consider different forms of transportation-fundamental changes.

If new courses, new staff, summer schools, higher standards for teachers, and increased salaries are clear examples of enhancements to the structures of public schooling, then the introduction of the age-graded school (which gradually eliminated the one-room school) and Progressive educators’ broadening the school’s role to intervene in the lives of children and their families (e.g., to provide medical and social services) are examples of fundamental reforms that stuck.

Patricia Cohen & Ron Lieber:

Experts are struggling to figure out exactly why. “We don’t know to what extent they’re not working because they can’t find a job, or aren’t interested, or are doing other stuff — like going to summer school, traveling, volunteering, doing service learning,” said Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research organization based in Washington.

What is clear is that those who need a job the most are often the least likely to get one. To a large extent, the higher a household’s income, the more likely a teenager is to get a job. Suburbanites have a better shot than city dwellers, and white teenagers face far better odds than blacks, in part because of disappearing federal support for summer jobs.

Upshot:

Five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has finally regained the nine million jobs it lost. But not all industries recovered equally.

John McDermott

Presumably this is how they found out that half of households are net beneficiaries.

But here’s the mistake. The ONS also tries to estimate the value to households of so-called “in-kind” benefits, such as state education and the National Health Service. Once these benefits are included then, yes, 52 per cent of households take in more than they pay in tax.

That is still not ideal.

That’s your opinion but these numbers do not reveal a conspiracy; at every election we vote indirectly on how to distribute money. One might add that there are a lot of “benefits” to living in Britain that are not included here, such as a decent legal system, Match of the Day, and a sceptical approach to revolutions.

Not to mention a sceptical approach to inequality.

Perhaps, but the UK tax and benefit system does keep income inequality in check. Before any taxes and benefits — including benefits “in-kind” — are considered, the highest earning fifth of households makes an average of £80,800 per year, 15 times more than the bottom fifth, which earns £5,500. Once you take into account the deductions and additions, that gap narrows to four times: £60,000 versus £15,500. And contrary to what many people believe, standard measures of income inequality in the UK have not changed much in two decades.

NY Daily News:

Which will mean thousands of struggling young people will have long interruptions in their educations — and are that much less likely to make up ground.

This year, the city recommended that just 19,400 third- through eighth-grade students take summer classes — 6.2% of all eligible kids, down from 7.4% last year and 10% the year before that.

And if last year — when just 1.2% of students were held back at the end of summer, half the rate of 2013 — is any indication, that will result in far fewer kids repeating a grade.

The evidence strongly suggests a return to social promotion in the public schools.

Washington’s blog. Video

William Tierney & Gerard Postiglione:

The international race to have a “world-class university” in Hong Kong has been in full swing for more than a decade. Whether you use the QS ranking, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, or the UK’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the vast majority of the top 100 are in the US and Europe, with the former having the lion’s share of the top 25. Not surprisingly, other countries are trying to ape what they think of as the “American model”.

Many observers think fiscal and organisational structures enable universities to be world class. Some of the best universities – Harvard, Stanford, the University of Southern California – are private and do not rely on government largesse. Even so-called state universities in the US get little funding from government any more. The implication for other countries is that their universities should be more entrepreneurial. Universities in many countries have begun to sing the praises of entrepreneurialism as never before.

Others look at private philanthropy in endowing positions for academic staff and erecting buildings on America’s campuses. Of consequence, many aspiring universities have begun to create or expand their development offices. The University of Hong Kong’s medical school accepted its renaming as the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Many libraries at China’s universities are named after Run Run Shaw.

Central governments also have a role. Federal spending on the research infrastructure of America’s best universities contributes to their excellence. The result is that other governments, including Saudi Arabia and China, now invest heavily in building facilities and providing the funds to hire academic staff so that some of their universities might be considered world class in research.

US universities are not consistently atop the world rankings because of their funding streams or organisational models, but rather their ability to drive excellence in teaching and research. The role of academic freedom cannot be underestimated, as it allows professors to speak their minds, search for truth and not worry that they will face sanctions in their work. Eliminate that and US universities drop in the world rankings.

Hacker Rank:

If you think about it, computer science (CS) has had–at best–a rocky relationship with education.

Let’s rewind for a minute. Born at the merging of algorithm theory, math logic and the invention of the stored-program electronic computer in the 1940s, it wasn’t truly a standalone academic discipline in universities until at least 20 years later.

Initially, most people thought the study of computers was a purely technical job for select industries, like the department of defense or aerospace, rather than a widespread academic science. The proliferation of computers in the 1990s pushed universities to create a standard computer science department to teach students the fundamentals of computing, like algorithms and computational thinking.

Simon:

It’s old news for those of us who have already drank the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid. We already know being an entrepreneur is fantastic gig. But what if you’re still working a 9 to 5 job and feeling stuck in life because you’re struggling to make ends meet or you’re feeling unhappy with where your life is heading? I think many of us in our 20s, 30s, and perhaps in our 40s have felt this way as one point.

The world has changed in the past 40 years. Whilst we were born into a world dominated by corporations and a knowledge based job market, it no longer is good enough to be a university graduate and hope that a job exists for you out there. If you’re a recent graduate, you’ll be acutely aware of the mess we call the job market.

But it’s not just the job market. The whole way we look at work-life balance is a problem. We — as a society — are living lives where our priorities are misplaced, pursuing goals in ways which are unfulfilling at the same time.

Taylor Pearson attempts to reconcile these issues in his book. The solution, he argues, is that we must become entrepreneurial.

Japan Subculture:

The Japanese government is moving forward with plans to scrap humanities programs from public universities by withholding funds from “non-performing” universities and research centers engaged in activities that subversively undermine the profit-generating imperatives of a burgeoning, neoliberal fascist state. Shusuke Murai of the Japan Times cites various government sources on this latest scheme to transform public institutions from centers of intellectual activity into taxpayer funded vocational training centers for corporate employers.

You don’t need advanced studies to decipher the latest Imperial proclamation being issued from Nagatacho. In fact, it’s better to discourage genuine literacy altogether in order to prevent some uppity serf from reading into the implications of the Abe government’s latest assault on the democratic institutions that don’t advance the cause of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party or its feudal “reforms”. This time, America’s shadow puppet PM is warning national universities that they won’t receive crucial subsidies unless they scrap their unproductive, money-wasting humanities programs entirely. If you want “to build a system to produce human resources that match the needs of society by grasping accurately changes in industrial structure and employment needs, you’re not going to accomplish any of the above with the current system that favors “theoretical” mumbo-jumbo above more “practical” concerns of industry. Roughly translated: Less thinking in the brains and more elbow grease! And off the record, of course: Chew on that, you bespectacled, pointy-headed sociology major! Here’s a “three-pronged economic growth strategy” for your indolent, non-productive life – one for each orifice.

Pricenomics:

In the opening pages of American Psycho, a novel set in the finance boom in 1980s New York, a fictional investment banker raves, “I mean am I alone in thinking we’re not making enough money?”

From context, it’s clear that the character is indignant that his — seemingly enormous — paycheck isn’t higher. But, in a sense, financiers don’t “make” money. They just move it around. The sector makes most of its revenue through providing a service, not to their individual customers but to the economy. As Nell Irwin explained in The New York Times: “[Finance] exists to channel capital effectively from savers to investment. […] Most of modern finance doesn’t exist as an end in itself, but to make the rest of the economy more efficient.”

Once upon a time, the finance sector was vilified in Western culture, for exactly this reason. (Also because, since Catholic doctrine banned money lending for interest, in Europe for centuries it was the nearly exclusive profession of Jews). Slowly, capitalism emerged, people realized the benefits of an efficient economy, and finance was lionized.

“While there have been dissenting views, today it is accepted that finance is not simply a by-product of the development process, but an engine propelling growth,” economists Stephen G. Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi wrote in a 2012 study. “This, in turn, was one of the key elements supporting arguments for financial deregulation. If finance is good for growth, shouldn’t we be working to eliminate barriers to further financial development?”

Greg Nichols:

Luke Matheny keeps getting pulled away. We are on a rented soundstage on the outskirts of Los Angeles’s Koreatown, sitting in director’s chairs in front of a television monitor. A woman standing nearby flips through script pages on a clipboard, and a few crew members mill around with practiced nonchalance. On the monitor is a live feed of four middle schoolers sitting at desks on the other side of a big prop wall. From this set, which looks like a museum piece — presidential portraits, American flag, the words monroe doctrine scrawled on a dusty blackboard — someone is hollering for Matheny, the 38-year-old director of Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street. “To be continued,” Matheny calls over his shoulder as his expansive snarl of dark hair disappears around the corner. I catch a brief glimpse of his pants on the monitor as he strides past the camera.

Gortimer, which debuted last year on Amazon to critical acclaim, is about a 13-year-old boy whose suburban street provides the backdrop for fantastical adventures with his two best friends. Matheny won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and hasn’t done children’s television before, but he says he fell in love with the show when he first read the pilot. “It felt like The Wonder Years, but with a supernatural element,” he tells me. Today, he’s shooting an episode in which Gortimer discovers a charmed blazer that makes others see and treat him as an adult. While Gortimer characteristically weighs the implications of his newfound power and hesitates to use it for his own gain, his mischievous best friend Ranger goes on a spree of lottery-ticket buying and R-rated-movie watching.

Charles Hugh Smith:

The core problem with pension plans is that the promises were issued without regard for the revenues needed to pay the promises. Lulled by 60 years of global growth since 1945, those in charge of entitlements and publicly funded pensions assumed that “growth”–of GDP, tax revenues, employment and everything else–would always rise faster than the costs of the promised pensions and entitlements.

But due to demographics and a structurally stagnant economy, entitlements and pension costs are rising at a much faster rate than the revenues needed to pay the promised benefits. Two charts (courtesy of Market Daily Briefing) tell the demographic story:

David Hookstead:

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point officials have advised faculty that the term “America is a melting pot” is a racial microaggression.

The common phrase was among a list of examples of so-called racial microaggressions used “as a discussion item for some new faculty and staff training over the past few years,” a campus official told The College Fix in an email.

Other phrases on the list included: “You are a credit to your race,” “where are you from,” “there is only one race, the human race,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”

The list is very similar to a list of microaggressions distributed by University of California system administrators in voluntary faculty trainings held over the last school year. That list suggested similar phrases to the ones distributed by the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

In the case of Wisconsin, the document is broken down into three columns: theme, microaggression and message. It lists “everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” racial microaggressions because those phrases supposedly send the message that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race. People of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”

Miles Goslett:

In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh.

She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment felt at ease. Cameron told his shadow ministers that Camila embodied the Big Society. He suggested they study her work and design policies that reflected it.

Pat Schneider:

The late long-time principal of Madison East High School touched the lives of many students, some of whom say his influence on them was transformational.

So it’s not surprising that the East High class of 1995, looking to do something big to mark its 20th reunion, got to thinking about a scholarship honoring McPike.

Unexpected, perhaps, is how the idea caught fire, through word of mouth and social media.

Organizer Craig Karlen said that interest in mounting a campaign for the scholarship quickly spread from members of his class, to East High alumni more broadly and into the community.

That has allowed the effort to tap the skills of volunteers in media, fundraising and other fields to get the campaign rolling, he said.

Chris Rickert:

In other words, it’s wrong for a school board member to vote specifically on policy affecting his finances, but OK to vote on a budget including that very same policy.

There are probably people in other parts of Wisconsin who would object to a local school board that gives itself big, immediate raises and to a school board member who votes on a budget that continues to excuse him from doing something the majority of workers already do — help pay for their health insurance.

But this is Madison, and as long as the board keeps its politics liberal and its teachers union happy, it’s doing a pretty good job.

Related: School Board member Ed Hughes (2005):

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

District officials were able to close about a third of the budget deficit by negotiating rate freezes with the three insurers it contracts with for employee health coverage — which is great, but isn’t going to put any more of those 79 positions back in the classroom.

The district, like local taxing bodies throughout Dane County, is wont to blame all its money woes on four years of tight-fisted and damaging Republican control of state spending.

It’s a fair point, although my experience over 15 years of covering local government is that cities, counties and school districts are quite capable of experiencing budget woes no matter who happens to be in charge at the Capital.

And who’s responsible for budget woes probably matters less than who suffers their effects.

Much more on Madison’s 2015-2016 budget and its long term disastrous reading results, here. Note that Madison has long spent more than double the national average per student.

Michael DaSilva:

The fight for funding started with House Republicans refusing to budge from a 1.25 percent increase. Democrats wanted a 6 percent increase, but eventually dropped to 2.62 percent trying to reach a deal. The break-through came when both sides agreed to the 1.25 percent increase, along with an additional $56 million in funding. As of Thursday night, we know those lengthy negotiations were a waste of time.

Governor Branstad vetoed the bi-partisan deal, eliminating the $56 million in funding.

Walter Kimbrough:

I had a conversation with Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston a few years ago after he did an opening convocation at my previous institution. We talked about living in the communities we serve, and what that means for the schooling options for your children. He said, “Get your kids into the best schools you can afford. Don’t feel guilty about that.”

Recently on a visit home to speak for my high school alumni association, my closest classmate met me for dinner. She spoke about having her seventh-grader attending a $25,000 a year school, with the youngest about to start kindergarten, probably going to the same school. She spoke of many of our classmates, public high school graduates, in the Atlanta suburbs doing likewise.

They are paying college tuition for 12 years — to get their children ready for college.

Gerald Graff

COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic skill of writing in English” (Goodbaum). A few years earlier, in 2006, a survey sponsored by the Conference Board posed the same questions to human resource professionals, and 81 percent of them judged high school graduates deficient in written communications, 47 percent of them said the same of two-year college graduates, and 28 percent of four-year college graduates.

A 2012 survey of employers by the Chronicle of Higher Education concluded, “When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills.” More bad news comes from the standardized test universe—for instance, the SAT exam, which added a writing component in 2006. Since then, the national average has dropped every year except 2008 and 2013, when it was flat. (The 2012 SAT reading result marked the lowest figure since 1972.) In the 2013 administration of the ACT exam, only 64 percent of the 1.8 million test takers achieved a “college-ready” score in English.

On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam in writing (the “Nation’s Report Card”), only 24 percent of twelfth-graders reached “Proficient.” The findings of these surveys and tests are often framed as a national crisis. Bad writing means lower productivity in the workplace, and it also spells deteriorating discourse in the civic sphere. Since the quality of our writing reflects the quality of our thinking, slovenly writing breeds weak citizens—people who are slow to see through propaganda and nonsense, unable to detect contradictions, and poor at grasping the implications of consequential policy choices…

(2015-05-22). The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism
(Kindle Locations 1027-1044). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

Warren Adler:

There is nothing wrong with providing young students with more access to non-fiction and its many manifestations that include all the documentation of historical facts, biography, science, government, analysis, travel, real life adventure and anything else in this category. Any scrap of informational reading is absolutely essential to a well-rounded education and deserves a prominent place in the education of young minds, but not at the expense of fiction.

Works of the imagination, of which fellow authors and I are proud dispensers, is not only essential material for a well-rounded curriculum, it is crucial. In fact, it should be expanded. Imagination, in my view, often trumps information and hard scholarship.

Via Will Fitzugh.

Christian Schneider:

In describing how one becomes eloquent, Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.” Given the state of education at universities in 2015, Emerson is as prescient as he is erudite.

Universities have long fought the perception that they are intellectual castles, where common sense is kept outside their high walls. But recently, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point filled its moat with alligators.

Last fall, on its official website, the university issued a document titled “Examples of Racial Microaggressions,” which sought to spur discussion about acceptable language on campus. The list was part of a diversity seminar for new faculty and staff, but only recently became the talk of the Internet. The suggested language restrictions are the latest in a long line of university efforts to discourage discussion of race, gender, age or socioeconomic status, as any of those topics may cause a “hostile learning environment.”

But even well-meaning students could run afoul of these guidelines without knowing it. According to the document, statements such as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” perpetuate the “myth of meritocracy,” which assumes “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”

Also on the list of racially insensitive utterances are statements such as, “I’m not a racist. I have several black friends,” “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” and “America is a melting pot.”

You read that correctly — denying you are racist is now racist.

Molly Beck:

The motion also adds a proposal allowing teachers or school administrators who have licenses from other states and have taught or worked for at least one year in that state to receive Wisconsin licenses. Administrators must have been offered a job in Wisconsin before they can apply for a license, the proposal says.

Officials with the state Department of Public Instruction, which blasted the licensing proposals when they were introduced this spring, said they were pleased to see the two most controversial provisions removed from the budget. DPI spokesman John Johnson said better pay and benefits, not lower licensing standards, will attract teachers to rural schools.

But Johnson also said the agency did not support the changes to licensing for technical education and out-of-state teachers — measures he said would mean lawmakers were lowering teaching standards for the third legislative session in a row.

When a stands for average.

Zheping Huang:

While many of his peers get their sense of achievement from online video games, Li Shengyao, a 21-year-old sophomore at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gets it from playing the stock market. He describes himself as a short-term trader who “can’t stop my fingers from making orders.”

Li spends at least three hours every night dissecting day-trading activity and company disclosures to prepare for the next morning. “When everyone else is losing like a dog,” he said. “I’m still making money.”

One thing Li is not: an outlier. In China, it’s surprisingly common for college students to be active traders on the nation’s volatile stock markets, often with their parents’ money and consent, and sometimes at the expense of their studies.

Pat Schneider:

“I will consider contributions to health care, depending on what we see in terms of costs and the budget,” Burke said. “But we need to look at compensation in its entirety to make sure we remain competitive while we are accountable to the taxpayers.”

The school district is in the process of preparing to hire a consultant to conduct a study of employee compensation, she said.

Representatives of Madison Teachers Inc. say the fully paid health care premiums are a benefit bought with concessions on salary increases over the years.

That’s exactly why it’s so important to look at the district’s compensation as a whole, Burke said.

“We want to make sure the school district is a place that can attract quality people. That’s why the survey will not only compare us to other school districts, but also to other professions,” she said.

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s three major health insurance providers — Group Health Cooperative, Dean Health Plan and Unity Health Insurance — each agreed to hold the line on premiums next year. That helped the school district hold the line on a major expense — more than $61 million annually — in a budget round that saw operating expenses up nearly 11 percent as state aid dropped.

Madison’s 2015-2016 budget and its long term disastrous reading results, here. Note that Madison has long spent more than double the national average per student.

Kate Russell:

It is a sad fact of life today that while women make up around 46% of the UK workforce, they are extremely poorly represented in the STEM professions – in other words science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to recent Government figures, if you exclude medical professions just 15.5% of UK STEM jobs are filled by women, and that figure drops to 8% when you look at engineering jobs.

Despite the gender imbalance being a mainstream topic of debate the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. According to 2014 e-skills, the number of women working in the tech sector has fallen from 17% to 16% again this year – and that is a figure that’s been falling year on year for over a decade now. When you consider that UK businesses face an ever growing skills gap when it comes to recruiting digitally skilled workers, it seems a no brainer that we should try to boost the number of girls enterting the field.

Conor Fiedersdorf:

When William Deresiewicz published “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” his critique struck such a chord that he turned it into a book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

On Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks––who teaches high achieving kids at Yale––read a passage from that book to an Aspen Ideas Festival audience. It was filled with people whose kids or grandkids attend elite colleges or universities.

The passage:

What do you owe your parents?

Andy Wright:

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?
But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

Jake Wallis Simons:

Parents who fail to comply with the new “Child and Youth Welfare Protection Act” — or rather, fail to enforce it upon their children — may be fined 50,000 Taiwan dollars ($1,576).

Now, as much as I dislike the excesses of bloated, interfering governments, I couldn’t help but emit a yelp of joy when I read of these developments in Taiwan (which follow similar measures in China and South Korea).

Of course, there are obvious difficulties with the legislation. For a start, it fails to define a “reasonable” length of time, leaving its application open to interpretation and abuse.

Maria Sanchez Diez:

Some people in the Dutch city of Utrecht might soon get a windfall of extra cash, as part of a daring new experiment with the idea of “basic income.”

Basic income is an unconditional and regular payment meant to provide enough money to cover a person’s basic living cost. In January of 2016, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands and its partner, the University of Utrecht, will create several different regimes for its welfare recipients and test them.

Walt Gardner:

Faced with the demands of the new global economy, Japan and the United States have reached the conclusion that the humanities have little value in higher education. That’s a mistake they will regret in the years ahead.

The humanities have never been intended as training for a specific vocation. Instead, the study of languages, literature, the arts, history, philosophy and religion exists to provide students with the critical thinking skills needed for personal growth and participation in a democratic society.

Erika Sanzi:

Parents prefer relationships to data. Most of us enjoy people more than numbers and like parent teacher conferences better than bar graphs. We take comfort in knowing that our kids are being educated in a safe space and worry very little about the high school profile or SAT participation rate in our town.

It’s human nature to listen to our hearts instead of our heads and it’s normal to be driven by connections we feel to teachers and coaches and school leaders to whom we entrust our children every day.

Hard truths however are better learned early than too late. Parents in my little state of Rhode Island deserve to know how their kids match up educationally against kids from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even Maryland. Is the education they’re receiving as good as it feels like it is or are there systemic and measurable deficiencies that parents need to acknowledge?

And will those deficiencies impact the future that they have already envisioned and perhaps even planned for their children?

For example, many parents do not realize that their child’s high school profile has a significant impact on how college admissions officers view their application. And unfortunately for top tier students especially, their applications are looked at less favorably because of what other kids in their class are or are not doing.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Dana Liebelsoh:

When the video above was filmed, the girl on the bed was 17 years old. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Jamie. There was a time when she liked acting in goofy comedy skits at her Detroit church or crawling into bed with her grandmother to watch TV. She loved to sing—her favorite artist was Chris Brown—but she was too shy to perform in front of other people.

Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn’t always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front door that she broke the glass mail chute. Jamie denies the assault—and the police report notes that the brick may not have hit her friend—but she admitted to officers that she was “mad” and “trying to get back in the house.” The Wayne County court gave her two concurrent six-month sentences, for assault and destruction of a building.

Leonard Cassuto:

Arthur Levine, the head of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has been a vituperative critic of teacher education programs for years. His recent announcement that he’s partnering with MIT to start a new teacher education graduate degree program has brought new attention to these teacher training programs – and to teacher training generally.

Levine’s indictment of education school teaching has legs. The teaching of teachers is in a serious disarray. Requirements and standards for the master’s degree in education, the recognized certification credential for US public school teaching, vary wildly from university to university. And the effects of such variations ripple through the entire K-12 education system.

There is no doubt that education schools have faced some special difficulties. The number of master’s degrees in education awarded in the US has more than doubled since 1990. This increase has brought more attention to the problems with these degrees.

But these concerns should also draw our attention to a larger problem with the teaching in graduate schools in general.

Campbell Brown:

Former CNN host Campbell Brown went from a career in journalism to a second life as an education-reform advocate. Now she is looking to combine the two.

Next month, Ms. Brown will be launching a non-profit, education-focused news site called The Seventy Four, which she says refers to the 74 million school-age children in classrooms across the U.S.

“There are a lot of entrenched interests that are standing in the way of some the best possibilities for innovation” in education, she said in an interview at the offices of her nascent site in Lower Manhattan. “We want to challenge and scrutinize the powers that be.”

But the creation of the site is likely to stir controversy. Since turning to advocacy in the years after she left CNN in 2010, Ms. Brown became a lightning rod for criticism from the teachers’ union and its supporters who have seen her efforts – most notably a push to reform tenure rules in New York – as part of a thinly-veiled campaign aimed at union busting.

Ms. Brown has denied wanting to destroy the union, and says she just wants to reform a system she says fails to adequately serve children. She says the site will be non-partisan but won’t shy away from advocacy.

Daniel Wagner:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating whether some collection agencies are involved in lawsuits against student loan borrowers even when the companies can’t prove their legal right to collect on the loans, according to agency documents and people familiar with the investigation. The CFPB is weighing “whether Bureau action is warranted” against the collectors, documents say.

If investigators can prove wrongdoing, thousands of low-income borrowers could be spared years of wage garnishment that would place them at greater risk for financial hardship, including bankruptcy.
The lawsuits mirror illegal practices by mortgage companies seeking to foreclose after the 2008 financial crisis. Banks have paid billions to settle charges related to “robo-signing” — the practice of swearing falsely that a person has direct knowledge about a loan and the chain of companies that owned it. The people claiming to have that knowledge turned out to be signing hundreds of affidavits a day, often without reviewing the underlying loan files.

Lenora Hanson & Elsa Noterman:

National attention has turned to Wisconsin yet again due to a Republican-led charge to eliminate longstanding and historically progressive state protections for employees. Last week, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC), a subcommittee of the Legislature, approved an omnibus motion that not only cuts the university budget by $250 million but also removes tenure protections for faculty from state statutes. The tenure item has led many around the country to conclude that Wisconsin is a conservative testing ground for ALEC-styled initiatives, while media representation would seem to suggest that there has been an active, political response to it. For instance, headlines last week read, “Wisconsin faculty incensed by motion to eliminate tenure,” “Faculty members protest tenure, shared governance changes,” and “Outraged UW-Madison faculty call for full court press on tenure.” (The titles of the first two pieces, written by Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed, have recently been changed to remove any mention of faculty response. They are now entitled “Trying to Kill Tenure” and “Losing Hope in Wisconsin.”)

But these titles are misleading, as we will outline here, for numerous reasons – and importantly for strategic reasons. Early on in February when the Biennial Budget first announced the potential magnitude of the cuts, there was widespread agreement among university administration and many faculty and students that protest and political action would only worsen the situation. Despite the ongoing attacks on the university system by the state legislature – and the seeming complicity of the UW System President, Ray Cross – many faculty and students continue to trust the Board of Regents (BOR), UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, and Cross to diplomatically defend student and faculty interests against the conservative agenda set by the Legislature. By and large, faculty, students and others decided that political action would only ensure the passage of the $300 million cuts proposed in the 2015-17 Budget. Despite the fact that sixteen of the eighteen members of the Board of Regents are Governor Walker appointees, there was a hopeful assumption on the part of faculty that the Board would push back against the recent Joint Finance Committee’s motion – especially item #39 which alters the tenure system by moving tenure protections from state statutes to the Board of Regents.

Meagan Batdorff, Albert Cheng, Larry Maloney, Jay F. May & Patrick J. Wolf:

Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected—in excess of $600 billion annually— often masks which entities fund the education of our nation’s youth. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school sectors, school districts and individual schools are prominent in discussions of how to improve educational outcomes, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A year ago, our research team published the third in a series of national studies that uncovered a general lack of equity in the funding of the public charter school sector compared to the traditional public school (TPS) sector (Batdorff et al. 2014; Batdorff et al. 2010; Thomas B. Fordham Institute 2005). We found major discrepancies in the funding of all public schools, including traditional and charter. Nationally in academic year 2010-11, charter schools received a total of $3,814 less in per-pupil revenues from all sources than did TPS—a funding gap of 28.4% that has grown larger over time (Batdorff et al. 2014).
The funding of K-12 education comes from local, state and federal public sources, but TPS and public charter schools also generate funding from private and philanthropic sources (see Table 2 below). In the majority of cases, TPS received slightly more revenue ($571 per pupil) from non-public sources than did public charter schools ($552 per pupil). Based on our 2014 national study, non-public revenue in general does not allow the public charter school sector to close the revenue gap with traditional public schools. In fact, it makes the gap larger (Batdorff et al. 2014).

Meg Anderson:

Over half of CPS teachers surveyed for a small-scale study by an education policy group said they do not regularly use strategies learned in professional development provided by the district.

In addition, nine out of 10 said have rarely or never used the district’s online professional development tool, Learning Hub.

The study of 220 teachers by the group Educators 4 Excellence reinforced long-standing complaints by many teachers that the district’s ongoing training for them is ineffective. The report highlighted ineffective practices and offered recommendations for improvement.

E4E listed four main problems with PD: inconsistent quality across the district; a disconnect between PD and the district’s teacher evaluation system, which is supposed to point teachers toward areas where they can improve; a lack of communication about what PD is provided; and few avenues for teachers to give feedback on PD they have received.

“I definitely see that in a district of 22,000 teachers, it’s hard to feel a personal connection,” says Laura Ferdinandt, CPS Manager of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, after hearing the results. “We’ve got the foundations built. It’s just a matter of communicating.”

Karen Herzog:

Last week, two conservative educators — both University of Wisconsin-Madison professors — echoed much of what many of their liberal-leaning colleagues have been saying for weeks, albeit with a twist.

Changing tenure rules would put their viewpoints at risk, too, Donald Downs and John Sharpless wrote in a Politico piece.

“As far as college campuses go, we’re a rare, endangered species: two long-tenured professors who lean right and libertarian,” the political science professor and history professor, respectively, wrote. “But we’re increasingly worried that in trying to take up another conservative crusade, our governor, Scott Walker, is going to silence the very voices he claims to support.”

Without strong tenure protections, they wrote, “professors like us who fight for free speech and liberty — values Walker himself espouses — could be even more at risk of being targeted on college campuses for our beliefs.”

Sharpless was a Republican candidate for Congress in a tight race with Democrat Tammy Baldwin in 2000; Downs served on his campaign strategy and finance committees. Both were leaders of the free speech/academic freedom movement at UW-Madison in the 1990s, when conservative and liberal professors with tenure protection stood together against speech codes that were perceived as censorship.

The second assumption in the national debate is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a certain presidential candidate in 2016 — is the behind-the-scenes architect of the provisions in the GOP plan put forward by the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee on May 29.

It’s unclear what role the governor played, if any, in the layoff language that faculty are most upset about. Walker has been noticeably silent on the matter.

Oxford Primary

Andrew Hacker:

Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM. Still, he writes that there are facts to be faced:

In less than 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to second place in published research articles.

General Electric has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States.

Only four of the top ten companies receiving United States patents last year were United States companies.

The United States ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

The Madison School District continues to grow its K-12 monoculture, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Sarah Ahmed:

Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that?

An earlier version of this essay was posted at the blog feministkilljoyWhat do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error mes

Martin Robinson:

Newspaper columnists are like buses you wait for ages for one to write about education and then suddenly three columns turn up at once. Hutton, Heffer and Hartley-Brewer responded in today’s Sundays to the sad, early death of Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools.

Will Hutton wants everyone to get on his bus. His piece begins in tears and ends in hopelessness. Hutton brought his kids up in Oxford and thought the local comprehensive schools were good enough for his children despite the opinions of those middle class parents who sent their kids to the local private schools. Hutton argues that when Chris Woodhead became head of Ofsted the view of those middle class parents were echoed, he said that there were 15,000 teachers who should be sacked: “…his excoriation of soft teaching methods and praise of his insistence that kids needed to acquire both skills and knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Hutton says this was echoed by Gove: “…that we need yet more of that [Woodhead’s] energy now to mount the ongoing fight against the liberal/left blob still defending the indefensible.” Then comes an odd bit of logic:

Bet McMurtrie:

Hundreds of colleges in the United States live on the financial margins. Typically small and private, they struggle to pay bills, recruit students, and raise money. Yet few of them fail.

As Sweet Briar College’s projected demise and unexpected revival illustrate, small colleges are a resilient bunch. There are about 1,600 private, nonprofit four-year colleges in the United States, but only a handful close each year. In 2012, the most recent year for which data are available from the National Center for Education Statistics, just two of those institutions shut down.

College leaders and their advisers say that a number of factors keep troubled institutions in business. For one, even broaching the idea of a college’s demise is emotionally fraught. To students, professors, administrators, alumni, and trustees the meaning of their time on a campus depends, in many ways, on the college’s continued existence. Students and alumni may have had life-altering experiences or developed important networks, while professors may have found a community of like-minded people with whom they could picture spending their careers.

Somali Kohli:

There are Facebook pages devoted to adult colorers. There are coloring clubs. People who motivate themselves to pay off debt by coloring. Game of Thrones is making a coloring book.

What this means: Coloring is now a normal adult activity.

Thanks largely to a recent wave of publicity over the release of illustrator Johanna Basford’s second coloring book, coloring books as a whole have been enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.

Jennifer Tisdale:

To lower barriers to use of its collections, the Ransom Center has adopted an open access policy, removing the requirement for permission and use fees for a significant portion of its online collections believed to be in the public domain.

In conjunction with the release of the policy, the Ransom Center launches Project REVEAL (Read and View English and American Literature), a year-long initiative to digitize and make available 25 of its manuscript collections of some of the best-known names from American and British literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the authors represented in Project REVEAL are Joseph Conrad, Hart Crane, Thomas Hardy, Vachel Lindsay, Jack London, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sara Teasdale.

The Project REVEAL initiative generated more than 22,000 high-resolution images, available for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction or fees. The Ransom Center does, however, ask for attribution alongside the use of its images.

Predictive Pop:

We cleaned and analyzed this data and combined it with YouTube to create a visual interface for exploring the past 25 years of music history and their respective music videos.

The data canvas because wanted to find a more interesting way to display our data than the ways music charts are usually displayed. In this case we were interested in the relationship between the songs beyond just what was on the charts at the same times. The data canvas allows users to visually explore these relationships in ways that are powerful and memorable.

Chris Edwards:

Advances in theory and computer hardware have allowed neural networks to become a core part of online services such as Microsoft’s Bing, driving their image-search and speech-recognition systems. The companies offering such capabilities are looking to the technology to drive more advanced services in the future, as they scale up the neural networks to deal with more sophisticated problems.

It has taken time for neural networks, initially conceived 50 years ago, to become accepted parts of information technology applications. After a flurry of interest in the 1990s, supported in part by the development of highly specialized integrated circuits designed to overcome their poor performance on conventional computers, neural networks were outperformed by other algorithms, such as support vector machines in image processing and Gaussian models in speech recognition.

Older simple neural networks use only up to three layers, split into an input layer, a middle ‘hidden’ layer, and an output layer. The neurons are highly interconnected across layers. Each neuron feeds its output to each of the neurons in the following layer. The networks are trained by iteratively adjusting the weights that each neuron applies to its input data to try to minimize the error between the output of the entire network and the desired result.

Although neuroscience suggested the human brain has a deeper architecture involving a number of hidden layers, the results from early experiments on these types of systems were worse than for shallow networks. In 2006, work on deep architectures received a significant boost from work by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov at the University of Toronto. They developed training techniques that were more effective for training networks with multiple hidden layers. One of the techniques was ‘pre-training’ to adjust the output of each layer independently before moving on to trying to optimize the network’s output as a whole. The approach made it possible for the upper layers to extract high-level features that could be used more efficiently to classify data by the lower, hidden layers.

Miriam Posner:

I just want to say at the outset that there are people who specialize in humanities data curation, and I am not one of those people. A number of talented people, including Trevor Muñoz at the University of Maryland and Katie Rawson at the University of Pennsylvania, have started to take a very programmatic look at the data-curation needs of digital humanists. And I encourage you to check out their important work. But you don’t have Trevor or Katie; you have me! So what I can do is share my own perspective and experience on what it means to work with data as a humanist, and where libraries can help.

I’ll start with an anecdote, and I think that anyone who consults on digital humanities projects will be familiar with this scenario. Humanities scholars will sometimes describe elaborate visualizations to me, involving charts and graphs and change over time. “Great,” I respond. “Let’s see your data.” “Data?” they say. “Oh, I don’t have any data.”

Peter Schmidt

Louisiana State University has fired a tenured professor on its Baton Rouge campus against the advice of a faculty panel, raising new questions about the administration’s respect for shared governance and faculty rights.

The Louisiana State University system’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to uphold the firing of Teresa Buchanan, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, based on accusations she had engaged in sexual harassment and violated the Americans With Disabilities Act.

F. King Alexander, the system’s president, had called for Ms. Buchanan’s dismissal even though a faculty panel that he had appointed to hear her case concluded that the ADA charges against her were unsubstantiated and that she did not deserve to lose her job over the sexual-harassment charges. The latter allegations stemmed mainly from complaints that she had used obscene language in front of students and had spoken disparagingly to them about the sex lives of married people at a time when she was going through a divorce.

Bruce Schneier:

Encryption protects our data. It protects our data when it’s sitting on our computers and in data centers, and it protects it when it’s being transmitted around the Internet. It protects our conversations, whether video, voice, or text. It protects our privacy. It protects our anonymity. And sometimes, it protects our lives.

This protection is important for everyone. It’s easy to see how encryption protects journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists in authoritarian countries. But encryption protects the rest of us as well. It protects our data from criminals. It protects it from competitors, neighbors, and family members. It protects it from malicious attackers, and it protects it from accidents.

Encryption works best if it’s ubiquitous and automatic. The two forms of encryption you use most often — https URLs on your browser, and the handset-to-tower link for your cell phone calls — work so well because you don’t even know they’re there.

Tim Parks:
blockquote>There are moments when quite separate fragments of information or opinion come together and something hitherto only vaguely intuited becomes clear. Opening a new book called Forgetting by the Dutch writer Douwe Draaisma, I am told almost at once that our immediate visual memories “can hold on to stimuli for no more than a fraction of a second.” This fact—our inevitable forgetting, or simply barely registering most of the visual input we receive—is acknowledged with some regret since we are generally encouraged, Draaisma reflects, “to imagine memory as the ability to preserve something, preferably everything, wholly intact.”

The same day, I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov on the Internet: “Curiously enough,” the author of Lolita tells us, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Intrigued by this paradox, I checked out the essay it came from. “When we read a book for the first time,” Nabokov complains, “the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.” Only on a third or fourth reading, he claims, do we start behaving toward a book as we would toward a painting, holding it all in the mind at once.

Margaret Wente:

The other day a proud father showed me a photo of his son’s graduation. There was the beaming scholar, diploma in hand, tasselled mortarboard on head, ready to take on the world.

“Congratulations,” I said. But something puzzled me. The kid is only three feet tall. He’s graduating from nursery school.

“Since when do nursery schools have graduation ceremonies?” I asked.

“Oh, they have graduation ceremonies for everything these days,” he said. “It was a big deal. All the parents came. Grandparents too. And of course the nannies.”

Hair Ziyad:

I first applied in 1997 with an application filled out in chalk on the sidewalk of East 128th Street in East Cleveland. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in my personal essay, but it involved a game with squares and a basketball.

I was a shoo-in. A legacy admission, I thought. Turns out most of my family hadn’t really attended. Well, some uncles, aunts, and cousins had. My parents had, back in the day, but times had changed. It wasn’t the same school anymore. Different courses were being taught.

I watched my older siblings winning pickup games at the basketball court down the street where all the boys in the neighborhood went to play with their shirts off and teenage girls stood court-side and marveled. I marveled. My siblings were pretty good, and eventually I learned to play from watching them.

I had a nice jumper. I could compete with the other boys my age, and I did, but when I played with them my heart would slam relentlessly against my ribs and my throat would try its best to strangle itself. Something would go terribly wrong with my hands. The shots stopped dropping so often I’d pass the ball away whenever I had the chance. This is your world. Take the ball from me. Take from me. Take me. It’s crazy how pressure can thieve your talents. When I was alone, it was nothing but net.

Alan Borsuk:

But others differ on what research shows. Without attracting much attention, SAGE is undergoing a remodeling that is likely to de-emphasize class-size reduction in favor of other efforts that supporters think will have more impact.

Unlike some other major education changes, the new SAGE didn’t emerge from behind closed doors in the middle of the night. The legislature’s Joint Legislative Council, which works on developing legislation, created a bipartisan study committee of legislators and educators that met over several months.

State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who chaired the group, recalled a talk he heard at a national convention of legislators by Andreas Schleicher, an influential figure in studying the success of students around the world. Schleicher cited high-quality teachers and rigorous curriculum as bigger factors in student success than small class sizes.

During the Legislative Council sessions, Sarah Archibald, an aide to Olsen at the time, presented research that said that, while small class sizes help kids, high-quality teaching and high-quality one-on-one tutoring produce more significant results. (Archibald is now an education consultant in Madison.)

“People love small class sizes,” Archibald told me. “I get it.” But class-size reduction “is more expensive and less effective than other strategies.”

“I’d rather have an effective teacher with a large class than an ineffective teacher with a small class,” she said.

Madison has tolerated disastrous reading results for decades, despite any number of programs, inclding SAGE.

Joshua Kim:

This review is an argument for postsecondary leaders and emerging leaders to put No Ordinary Disruption on your summer reading list.

The consultants from the McKinsey Global Institute who wrote this fine book don’t have all that much to say about higher education. That is good, as postsecondary education is not their speciality. You will need to read this book and apply the ideas back your campus and our industry.

The big idea of No Ordinary Disruption will be a familiar one. Winter is coming. Change is occurring in every industry. The shift to a global information economy is 10 times as fast and 300 times the scale as the last major shift, that from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

The Economist:

IT IS not often that a criminal trial involves a prosecutor pushing for rehabilitation and appropriate counselling”, and a defence lawyer urging the judge to jail his client. But that is what happened at a hearing on June 2nd for Amos Yee, a 16-year-old Singaporean blogger found guilty of circulating an obscene image and insulting Christians.

The rub, in this case, is that the prosecutor was arguing for Mr Yee to be sent to a Reformative Training Centre, a heavily structured programme for young offenders involving military-style training as well as counselling, which can last up to 30 months. Mr Yee’s lawyer was pushing for a short jail term.

As it turns out, both sides will need to wait. At a hearing on June 23rd Mr Yee—who uploaded a cartoon which depicted Singapore’s founding prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew, and the late British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a compromising position, and who mocked Christians on his YouTube channel—was remanded for another two weeks. The court is awaiting a psychiatric report after the head psychiatrist for Singapore’s prison system said that Mr Yee may be autistic.

Both Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia have called for Mr Yee’s release. The UN body said Mr Yee’s punishment seemed “disproportionate and inappropriate”. Since being found guilty on May 12th, Mr Yee has remained defiant. He has described Singapore’s obscenity laws as “unnecessary [and] inane” and its laws and police as “dumb”. He has derided the Christian God as “fictitious, mass-murdering, sexist, racist [and] sadomasochistic” and has declared: “I have not ‘learnt my lesson’, nor do I see any ‘lesson’ that needs to be learnt.”

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon:

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

Jeff Kaufman:

Have you been accepted to a top college, one that promises to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need? (see list)? If you’re planning on anything near the $60k/year sticker price you are dramatically overpaying. What if I told you that you could attend one of these top schools for free?

They all figure your financial aid the same way. First they collect information about your income and assets using the FAFSA form, then they give you aid (effectively a discount) to make up the gap between what they charge and what they think you can afford. This is absolutely wonderful price discrimination: every industry would love to look deeply into your finances to figure out exactly what you’d be able to pay and charge you that, but only with colleges do we let them.

As a high school senior, you probably don’t have much in terms of income or assets. So why doesn’t the college see you can only pay very little, and give you financial aid for most of the cost of college? Parents. The FAFSA doesn’t just ask about your finances, it also asks about theirs too.

But what if there were a simple way to exclude your parents’ finances from consideration by the college? Where you’d be granted aid based only on your own income and assets? What’s the catch?

Farai Chideya:

On Facebook, it’s the season where parents are posting pictures of K-12 graduations, including moppets in tiny mortarboards. But unlike a generation ago, today’s smallest graduates are amassing a big data trail. Just as medical and government files have been digitized — some to be anonymized and sold; all susceptible to breaches — student data has entered the realm of the valuable and the vulnerable. Parents are paying attention. A recent study by the company The Learning Curve found that while 71 percent of parents believe technology has improved their child’s education, 79 percent were concerned about the privacy and security of their child’s data, and 75 percent worried about advertiser access to that data.

Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya:

Admissions to undergraduate programs in the colleges of Delhi University happen through the so-called ‘cut-off’ system: colleges rank students based on marks in the school-leaving examination and for each program announce a “cut-off” mark. Every student whose score is above the cut-off is eligible to join the program. Since there is a common pool of students applying to different colleges and programs, not all students who are offered admissions in a program join. So the process has to be run in multiple rounds. In each round colleges guess the proportion of those offered admissions who would join. And at the end of each round they must reduce the cut-offs to fill the seats unfilled in the last round. As the cut-offs fall students who get offers from their more preferred programs leave the colleges they had joined in the earlier rounds, creating new vacancies.

Marc Eisen:

There is passion in his voice when Krakauer says this. To his thinking, the tenure system is flawed. It’s not fair to junior faculty (tenure review is a form of hazing, he says bluntly) or to women and minorities. Nor is it important to researchers like himself in the natural or computational sciences. They function as academic entrepreneurs raising grants and moving from university to university for a better position. (That’s the new norm, he argues.) Tenure is much more important for the humanities, which can tackle controversial issues that don’t bring in big research grants.

“I wish we could have this conversation,” Krakauer says.

Sheba Goldberg:

App Academy is one of many coding bootcamps that have sprung up in the past few years. For those unfamiliar with the concept, imagine an introduction to development on steroids. Walk in the class a beginner, walk out a few months later with enough knowledge to start working in tech.

App Academy’s shtick is that they don’t charge up front for tuition. Says their homepage: “You only pay us if you find a job as a developer after the program.” Their Program and FAQ pages go into more detail: the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working, and a refundable deposit of $5,000 (or lower in exchange for a higher percentage).

British Academy:

Count Us In graphicA dramatic improvement in the UK population’s mastery of basic numeracy and statistics needs to happen if the country is to take advantage of the data revolution now sweeping the globe.

That’s the verdict of a major British Academy report Count Us In: Quantitative skills for a new generation.

The UK risks falling behind in the race to tap the potential of “big data”, while the countries’ middling record in numeracy is creating skills deficits for employers and means many citizens and consumers lack the skills to make informed choices.

These are among the warnings of the report, which calls for a transformation in our approach to building numeracy, statistics and data analysis skills to ensure that, within a generation, the UK rises to the challenge of becoming a fully data-literate nation.

Related: Connected Math.

Debbie Sharnal:

The average student who borrowed money for their bachelor’s degree has just over $35,000 in debt. What is perhaps most alarming about this number is how much and how quickly this number is rising. Just from 2014, the number rose almost $2,000 and from ten years ago, the number is roughly $15,000 higher.
The rising cost of colleges, and thus loans, has been decried as a national outrage. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been so far unsuccessfully working on a bill to lower interest rates on federal student loans, declared the student debt problem “an economic emergency…Forty million people are dealing with $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt. It’s stopping young people from buying homes, from buying cars and from starting small businesses.”

Timothy Ready:

The Promise abruptly reversed the district’s long-running enrollment slide, as the previous blog in this series showed. School enrollment has increased by nearly 25 percent and the city’s population once again has begun to grow. College-going rates have increased significantly, as Brad Hershbein will show later this week. However, there has been no major influx of professional families. In fact, the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch increased from 57 percent to 71 percent.

Kalamazoo kids remain poor
More than one-third of children in the district are below the federal poverty line, and 14 percent are in deep poverty—at or below 50 percent of the poverty line. Four in ten live in neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty (40% poor or more). Income inequality in the Kalamazoo area is above the 80th percentile for US cities—a correlate of low social mobility, according to Raj Chetty, and a predictor of a wide range of social problems in the US and internationally. A recent comparative analysis of social mobility found that Kalamazoo County has lower social mobility for poor children than more than four-fifths of all U.S. counties. While this analysis was based on data that predate the launch of the Promise, there is little evidence —yet — that the Promise has influenced rates of social mobility.

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

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

“All students” meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.

2004: Madison schools distort reading data.

Madison’s reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.

In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.

Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It’s true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 – bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.

In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.

2013: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results

In investigating the options for data to report for these programs for 2011-12 and for prior years, Research & Program Evaluation staff have not been able to find a consistent way that students were identified as participants in these literacy interventions in prior years.

As such, there are serious data concerns that make the exact measures too difficult to secure at this time. Staff are working now with Curriculum & Assessment leads to find solutions. However, it is possible that this plan will need to be modified based on uncertain data availability prior to 2011-12.

Proposals to again increase property taxes and school board members’ compensation are in the news (additional school board campaign rhetoric – a bit of history).

Madison spends roughly double the national average per student.

Unfortunately, Madison resists substantive change at every opportunity.

Compare Madison staffing.

Leah Libresco:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday released the 2014 results from the American Time Use Survey. The survey offers the most detailed, up-to-date portrait of how people in the United States spend their time. Here are five of the most striking results, nearly all of which have persisted at near identical rates for the past five years:

Americans still spend more time watching TV than all other leisure activities combined:

Robert Kelchen:

On a historical note, the 2013-2015 effort to rate colleges failed to live up to efforts a century ago, in which ratings were actually created but President Taft blocked their release. As Libby Nelson at Vox noted last summer, President Wilson created a ratings committee in 1914, which then came to the conclusion that publishing ratings was not desirable at the time. 101 years later, some things still haven’t changed. College ratings are likely dead for decades at the federal level, but performance-based funding or “risk-sharing” ideas enjoy some bipartisan support and are the next big accountability policy discussion.

I’d love to be able to write more at this time about the path forward for federal higher education accountability policy, but I’ve got to get back to putting together the annual Washington Monthly college rankings (look for them in late August). Hopefully, future versions of the rankings will be able to include some of the new information that has been promised in this new consumer information system.

Mitch Henck. much larger forces are at play on Madison’s monolithic “we know best” K-12 world.

Gov.uk:

This report looks at a project to develop the ability of teachers to teach topics involving multiplicative reasoning to key stage 3 pupils. It evaluates the effect professional development of teachers in this area had on pupil attainment, and includes teacher and pupil views on the project.
Multiplicative reasoning refers to the use of mathematical understanding to solve problems arising from proportional situations, often involving fractions.

Chris Rickert:

Because members are elected during low-turnout spring elections, special interest groups have a proportionally bigger voice in who wins. In Madison, it’s nearly impossible to win without union support unless you have tons of money.

But under a system of geographically assigned seats, there might be enough grassroots support in, say, a south Madison School Board district to mitigate the union’s influence.

Madison voters have the state Legislature to thank for the school district’s current, inane way of electing board members.

Until 1985, there were no numbered seats, and the top vote-getters for however many seats were up for election were declared the winners.

But in the late 1970s, there was a movement to force board members into one-on-one contests as a way to target specific members amid a broader debate on the board over plans to close some central-city schools.

A binding referendum to move to the current election system failed in 1978, but a bill to do the same was passed a few years later.

Today, School Board president James Howard tells me: “The board’s election process is not on our radar at this time.”

And I suppose it is easier just to hike pay.

Board members definitely work for their money — if not for a more democratic School Board.

Ideally, District academic achievement challengesand its $15k plus per student spending (double the national average) would always be transparent and easy to understand from year to year…

The Economist:

Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago. Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder. A year ago nearly 1,200 students with an e-mail account belonging to an American university posted a profile on the site every day; the daily average has risen to about 2,000. The site has even stopped advertising online. Its ads used to pop up with search results for terms such as “student loan”.

NPR:

Math teacher Sherry Read’s classroom is a total mess. The students are gone for the summer, and light fixtures dangle from the ceiling. The floor has a layer of dust. Down the hallway, workers make a racket while they renovate the school, which dates back to the 1890s. They’re working in what has become an archaeological site.

A construction crew at the Oklahoma City school made a startling discovery earlier this month. They found old chalkboards with class lessons that were written almost a century ago, and chalk drawings still in remarkably good condition. So Read doesn’t mind the mess. In fact, she’s amazed.

Related: Math Forum and Connected Math.

Olga Khazan:

Research labs, like most workplaces, come in two broad varieties: The cut-throat kind, where researchers are always throwing elbows in a quest for prestige, and the collaborative kind, where they work together for the good of the team. And when David Rand first established his Human Cooperation Lab at Yale University, he was clear about the kind of culture he wanted to promote.

Rand’s post-docs help each other and share their expertise willingly, he says. Rand spends some of the lab’s money on social events and happy hours. “Not in a lame, cheesy way, but in a way that’s fun for people,” he told me recently. “It creates bonds among people and makes them not want to cut each other down.”

Anne Merritt:

Every frustrated language learner has, at some point, proclaimed that they just “don’t have the gift” of picking up foreign languages.

It’s easy to imagine that the aptitude for learning a new tongue exists somewhere beyond our control, perhaps in our blood or brain chemistry, or in the drinking water that flows through Northern Europe and feeds the frustratingly fluent English-speaking Scandinavians from Oslo to Helsinki.

Language teachers will explain to students that anyone can learn a foreign language, and that the skill comes from nurture and not nature. But does biology play any role at all? Is there any part of our DNA that can predict whether or not we can be successful polyglots?

Simons Foundation video.

Caroline Bermudez:

Education is a public good, funded by taxpayer money. But to some, weighing in on education policy is the exclusive purview of those with classroom experience.

We venture down a slippery slope when we act as gatekeepers on issues with import on all our lives. Do you have to be a doctor to care about health-care policy? A police officer when public safety crises erupt?

A wide swath of Americans are affected by what transpires in schools: taxpayers whose dollars support public education, anyone who has ever attended public schools, parents of public school students and employers looking to hire qualified job applicants.

Ah, we know best…

Andrew Delbanco:

Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced it in 1848. Others had already raised their sights higher. As early as 1791, exulting in the egalitarian mood of the new republic, one writer declared it “a scandal to civilized society that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges and universities.”1

How that part has grown is a stirring story. It begins in the colonial period with church-funded scholarships for the sons of poor families. It continued after the Revolution with the founding of public universities such as those of North Carolina and Virginia. In the midst of the Civil War, it was advanced by the Morrill Act, by which Congress set aside federal land for establishing “land-grant” colleges, many of which became institutions of great distinction. By the later nineteenth century, when most colleges still admitted only white men, the cause was advanced again by the creation of new colleges for women and African-Americans.

Guardian:

The women who dug the graves, the kids who watched the largest battle in US history – and the slaves forced to help fighters at the front. 150 years after the last shots were fired, Guardian photographer David Levene travelled across the US photographing the sites scarred by the American civil war

Richard Adams:

The first students to graduate since the imposition of £9,000 annual tuition fees are more focused on securing a well-paid job than their predecessors to pay off their higher levels of debt, according to a major survey of post-university employment.

The survey of 18,000 final year students at 30 universities reported a record proportion had started researching career paths as early as their first year of studies, and more of them undertook work experience to improve their chances of getting a good job after graduation.

John Schoen:

rom Maine to Hawaii, some 36 states are allocating money for higher education based, in part, on performance measures designed to reward schools that raise graduation rates, award more high-tech degrees and better prepare students for the job market.
Proponents of the idea say that, as state budget cuts have forced lawmakers to make tough choices, it only makes sense to reward public colleges and universities that get the most bang for every taxpayer buck. But critics of these schemes say they don’t work, and can even produce unintended consequences that end up hurting students in the long run.

WPR:

Speaking on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Kathleen Dunn Show,” Brookfield Republican Rep. Dale Kooyenga downplayed those complaints, drawing a comparison to his experience serving in the U.S. Army.

“You know, before I got into politics, I was in Baghdad, and I was there in 2008 when things were not going well. And you want to talk about a crisis, a crisis is a child in a school in Baghdad in 2008. I mean, that’s to me a crisis. When I look at the Wisconsin education environment, our results are going up,” said Kooyenga.

Kooyenga said that Democrats have been saying for years that Republican changes to Wisconsin schools would gut education and lead the state to lag the rest of the country.

“And the numbers just dont say that. I think you need to look at not only money going into the schools, but you need to look at the outputs. And in every single output in education, we are in a better spot today in 2015 than we were in 2011,” said Kooyenga.

Much more, here.

Michael Lewis:

To: Harvard Management Company

From: Harvard Admissions

It’s been several painful weeks since Steve Schwarzman revealed that we denied him admission to the Harvard Class of 1969. As we now all know, the private equity billionaire (net worth: $13 billion and climbing) appeared on the Bloomberg channel and said that the dean of admissions at Harvard wrote to him a few years ago and said, “I guess we got that one wrong.” He also announced his $150 million gift to Yale, to erect a monument to our idiocy.

We in admissions have finished your requested review of the circumstances that led to our catastrophic error. We conclude a) we must improve our attempts at self-abasement and b) Harvard’s admissions process must be overhauled. It has proved imperfectly designed to identify and smile upon those children most likely to become extremely rich.

Constance Mitchell Ford:

Last week, Cornell University officially kicked off construction of Cornell Tech, a $2 billion science, research and technology campus rising on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

When the first phase of the campus is completed in 2017, it will include three buildings, one of which will be dedicated to business and innovation. When fully completed in 2043, the campus will have 2 million square feet of space on 12 acres serving more than 2,500 graduate students, faculty and staff.

In a city filled with large construction projects—from the $20 billion Hudson Yards development on the far West Side of Manhattan to the $15 billion-plus rebuilding of the World Trade Center—Cornell Tech isn’t one of the biggest deals in New York. But the campus is symbolic of a broader national trend: the rapid expansion of college and university campuses.

David Crouch:

In a quiet classroom adorned with the joyful creations of small children, Ville Sallinen is learning what makes Finland’s schools the envy of the world.

Sallinen, 22, is teaching a handful of eight-year-olds how to read. He is nearing the end of a short placement in the school during his five-year master’s degree in primary school teaching.

Viikki teacher training school in eastern Helsinki describes itself as a laboratory for student teachers. Here, Sallinen can try out the theories he has learned at the university to which the school is affiliated. It’s the equivalent of university teaching hospitals for medical students.

The school’s principal, Kimmo Koskinen, says: “This is one of the ways we show how much we respect teaching. It is as important as training doctors.”

Laura Waters:

This article in South Jersey Magazine is two years old, but it could have been written today. Here, journalist Jayne Jacova Feld profiles a young woman named Rebecca Basenfelder, who graduated from Shawnee High School, part of Lenape Public School district in a suburb of Burlington County, and proudly headed off to Burlington County College. There she discovered herself woefully unprepared for college-level work.

Shawnee High is, according to the N.J. Department of Education’s School Performance Report, a fine school in a middle-class town. (The median household income in Medford, where Shawnee is located, is $83,059 and the median income for a family is $97,135.) The school is strikingly homogeneous: almost all white, with only 6.3% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Test scores look great, with just about every student achieving proficiency or advanced proficiency on N.J.’s non-Common Core-aligned assessment called the High School Proficiency Assessment. The school meets every NCLB target.

Yet here’s Rebecca Basenfelder, one of Shawnee’s proud graduates who, upon arrival at Burlington County College, flunked both the English and math portions of Accuplacer (the college placement test) and spent her entire first year “taking non-credit bearing remedial classes, relearning math she vaguely remembered from middle school and brushing up on her rusty writing skills.” It wasn’t until her second year that she qualified to take college-level coursework.

Jay Matthews:

Vicki Schulkin, a Northern Virginia parent, knew her son Matt was bright but did not think this was a problem until some of his teachers began to bristle at the erratic working habits that sometimes accompany intellectual gifts.

“In fourth grade, his English teacher told me early in the semester that he didn’t belong in her high-level class because he wasn’t completing all of his homework,” Schulkin said. That teacher changed her mind after he showed great creativity in a poetry assignment, but other instructors were less understanding.

Related: English 10 and long term, disastrous reading results.

Alex Campbell & Kendall Taggert:

Texas will no longer jail kids for skipping school.

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a bill into law that makes truancy a civil offense rather than a crime. The law goes into effect on Sept. 1.

“Criminalizing unauthorized absences at school unnecessarily jeopardizes the futures of our students,” Abbott said in a statement Friday.

In April, a BuzzFeed News investigation found that more than a thousand teenagers were sent to adult jail on charges stemming from missing school in the past three years. Some students were locked up because of unpaid fines issued by a truancy court and ordered to pay it off by earning “jail credit.”

Students age 17 and above get locked up with adults, sometimes inmates charged with assault, robbery, and other violent crimes. While some students said their jail stint startled them into recognizing the value of school, others said they witnessed adult inmates beating each other and soliciting sex. The overwhelming majority of students charged are poor, and most are black or Hispanic.

BuzzFeed News’ reporting was cited on the state Senate floor during debates over whether and how to change the law. The truancy reform measures were supported by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, and the law passed with large majorities in both houses.

Advocates for the bill celebrated the news Friday. “We are of course delighted,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of the advocacy group Texas Appleseed, which pushed for the changes.

Derek Cohen, senior policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, known for its conservative Right On Crime campaign, said he was “heartened” by the governor’s decision. “It’s just good common sense policy, and I think the governor realizes that.”

Texas was one of the only states that handled truancy in adult criminal court. In addition to decriminalizing truancy, the new law will require school districts to take more steps to keep students in school before referring them to truancy court, and it will reduce the fines that can be imposed.

Mitch Henck:

Gee, Kaleem Caire and other black community leaders fought for Madison Prep. It was a proposed charter school aimed at serving young males, mostly black and Hispanic, to be taught predominantly by teachers of color for more effective role modeling.

Berg and several white conservatives in Madison, along with moderate John Roach, supported Madison Prep. It was voted down by white progressives, 5-2.

In 1983, white progressives voted for the Midvale/Lincoln and Randall/Franklin pairing plan 4-3. Berg joined conservative Nancy Harper and board president Salter in opposing the busing plan.

Gee says poor performance and bad behavior can be related to children of color feeling lost in an unfamiliar environment. That can lead to children “working” the teachers or pushing the envelope more than what would happen if teachers of color and similar culture could relate to parents and command more respect in class.

As reported in this paper last Sunday, Gee spoke to Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and other school officials about his ideas to close the achievement gap. “They didn’t run out of the room,” Gee said.

It’s not clear if Madison’s education establishment will budge on Gee’s ideas, which include recruiting more parent leaders and working with employers to train young entrepreneurs.

Caroline Porter

About 30 fifth-graders let out a collective “ooh!” as a monkey munched on dinner in front of them. The students asked questions of an expert, took notes and waved goodbye to the monkey. Then they returned to their seats at Plaza Vista School about 40 miles south of Los Angeles.

Their virtual field trip to an animal sanctuary in the U.K. was over.

In the wake of recession-era budget cuts and increased pressure on school performance, field trips at some schools consist of a webcam, projection screen and Internet connection instead of permission slips, brown-bag lunches and school buses. The techniques can be used to cut down the cost, time and expense of some real-world trips while expanding the number of possible field-trip-like experiences.

Brian Zorn:

The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in special education and frustrate the teachers who want them to succeed.

The tests, administered to third- through eighth-graders over six days each spring, evaluate students on uniform Common Core State Standards that have been adopted by most states and emphasize critical thinking. As this newspaper reported in 2013, the first year the tests were administered, many children in New York state “ran out of time, collapsed in tears or froze up.”

Madison School District Administration Slideware (PDF).

Much more on the $413,703,424+ 2015-2016 Madison School District budget, here.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

Longtime MTI activist Peg Coyne (Black Hawk), who was elected a year ago to her third term as MTI President, has decided to retire at the conclusion of the school year. Coyne also served as Union President for the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years, was on the Union’s Bargaining Committee for 12 years (2003-2015), and on the Union’s Board of Directors for five years (2010-2015). She has taught in the District for 42 years.

As a result of her leadership during the Act 10 protests, she spoke several times around the United States, including before the Chicago Teachers Union, at an international labor conference in Minneapolis, and at a social issues conference in Osaka, Japan.

Andy Waity (Crestwood), MTI’s President-elect, will assume the Union’s Presidency at the conclusion of the school year. Given Coyne’s retirement, Waity will serve for two years. Nominations for the remainder of Waity’s At-Large position on the MTI Board will be received at the September 15 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council, or can be made by contacting MTI Executive Director John Matthews (matthewsj@madisonteachers.org 608-257-0491). The election will be held at the October Council meeting. The term expires September, 2016.

Ben Egel:

“High school teachers are supposed to love Shakespeare, and I don’t, so I said I didn’t,” Dusbiber said. “I think the reliance on Shakespeare is something I find odd.”

After 25 years teaching in Sacramento, including the last 13 at Luther Burbank High School, she said she has replaced the Bard’s plays in her classroom with works by nonwhite authors. Dusbiber, who is white, said many of her students come from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds than her own.

In the 2013-14 academic year, 96 percent of Burbank students were nonwhites and 81 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches based on household income, according to state data.