Helen Dale America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one. State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s … Continue reading “Low state capacity”: spending more for less →

Washington Post didn’t mention that real public school funding per student increased by 152% since 1970. Here’s the latest national data showing inflation-adjusted changes in public school funding per student & average teacher salary since 1970 Where’s all the money going? pic.twitter.com/bbMDP6utM9 — Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) May 7, 2022

Sam Biddle Jack Paulson: According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities … Continue reading Civics: merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter →

Robby Soave: On March 16, Washington, D.C., became one of the very last major metropolitan areas in the country to finally end mask mandates for students. According to Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, kids who attend D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) no longer have to wear masks. That’s not always what happens in practice, of course. Earlier this … Continue reading “People’s irrational fears are taking over these policy decisions,” says one parent. →

Nicholas Wade: The argument is ingenious. Its fatal flaw lies in assuming that the non-market cases chosen for study were selected at random by the Chinese authorities. In fact, as Chan has noted, one of the authorities’ criteria was closeness to the market. The spatial pattern of non-market cases reflects this selection bias, not a … Continue reading Notes on Science Reporting veracity →

Pat Schneider (2018), dives into a look at the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school proposal (2011). The book includes several recommendations to improve information exchange around controversial public policies. Talk about the most important. The most important thing is that we all do our own individual work of understanding our own biases. We … Continue reading Status quo defense: “everyone was so proud of their school district and yet they had some of the largest disparities in the country” →

Keith David: At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel. Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an advisee of mine for … Continue reading Notes on academic veracity →

The press response to NEA’s latest survey reinforced the futility of any contrary view, but after a prayer to St. Jude, I note that over the last 3 years about 4.2 million public school employees quit or retired, and we hired about 5.8 million new ones. https://t.co/feAviUrFNV pic.twitter.com/80hyBliPmD — Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) February 2, 2022

Helen Raleigh: Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only … Continue reading Why San Francisco’s School Board Recall May Be One Of 2022’s Most Important Elections →

Helen Raleigh: Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only … Continue reading WHY SAN FRANCISCO’S SCHOOL BOARD RECALL MAY BE ONE OF 2022’S MOST IMPORTANT ELECTIONS →

Jennifer Calfas: The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot. Named the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt,” it was commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940 at the museum, which his father had helped found. The museum requested the … Continue reading The bronze monument, long the subject of debate in the city, will be moved to the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota →

Vinay Prasad: Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough … Continue reading Commentary on Media Veracity, “the best and brightest” and public health →

Josh Gordons Burner: I’d like to preface this by stating that remote learning was absolutely detrimental to the mental health of myself, my friends, and my peers at school. Despite this, the present conditions within schools necessitates a temporary return to remote learning; if not because of public health, then because of learning loss.  A … Continue reading I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation is Beyond Control. →

Maureen Kelleher: And that family is…mine. Regular readers here know that I made a case before the school year started for Chicago Public Schools to partner with the Chicago Park District to offer “remote-plus” learning: mostly remote at home but with opportunities for teachers and students to gather in socially distant outdoor spaces. I wanted this opportunity … Continue reading Here’s How One Chicago Family Is Trying Hybrid Learning with a Twist: Outdoor Classes →

Tom McKay and Dhruv Mehrotra In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover … Continue reading U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists →

Andrew Stiles: Dr. Anthony Fauci was spotted Tuesday nightwithout a mask while he attended journalist Jonathan Karl’s book party at Café Milano, the élite Washington, D.C., bistro frequented by Hunter Biden’s corrupt business partners. “As gawkers tried to snap pictures of [Fauci] indoors not wearing a mask, America’s doc would put it on and take it off depending … Continue reading Mandates for thee but not for me: “I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn’t know, I would put my mask on,” Fauci replied. →

Matt Burgess: Christian Landgren’s patience was running out. Every day the separated father of three was wasting precious time trying to get the City of Stockholm’s official school system, Skolplattform, to work properly. Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his … Continue reading These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops →

NY Post: After weeks of stonewalling, the city’s Department of Education finally had to make public the 2021 school year enrollment figures but was still shifty.  With an Oct. 31 deadline to report the numbers to the state Education Department, the DOE announced a total of 938,000 students enrolled, compared with 955,000 last year.

Abigail Becker: “Yet most of the one-time funds for the current budget fixes will be exhausted by 2023 and even if the city’s pandemic woes resolve themselves, it will almost certainly be left with its prepandemic budget gaps and few tools to address them.”

Jeff Flynn-Paul: Last month, in the middle of the Covid panic, a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, … Continue reading The myth of the ‘stolen country’ What should the Europeans have done with the New World? →

Hello Galt: Third, yeah, we can see it coming. They want all our money. Why should we work for them? This is something the left doesn’t get. The other thing they don’t get because they can’t, is that no, they don’t have the support of the majority. Or even a substantial plurality. And that this … Continue reading They need everyone working and paying taxes. EVERYONE. Even then their system doesn’t work, but it fails SLOWER. →

Susan Edelman: City educators are scrambling to find what some officials fear are 150,000 or more kids who have not yet set foot in school — and others who don’t show up on a given day. “Reach out to every absent student every day,” the Department of Education instructed principals last week in a memo obtained by … Continue reading City orders educators to find the thousands of students ‘missing’ from schools →

Thomas Brewster: In 2019, federal investigators in Wisconsin were hunting men they believed had participated in the trafficking and sexual abuse of a minor. She had gone missing that year but had emerged claiming to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, according to a search warrant reviewed by Forbes. In an attempt to chase down … Continue reading Government Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Searched A Sexual Assault Victim’s Name, Address And Telephone Number (Keyword Warrant) →

Izabella Kamiunska: For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun. Despite a lack of formal … Continue reading Biohacking: “He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly” →

‘”Yeah, I didn’t find the CDC’s statement entirely accurate.” Wenseleers, one of first scientists to formally calculate the transmission advantage of the alpha and delta variants over the original versions of SARS-CoV-2@NPR corrects @CDCgov misinfo:https://t.co/aBgJXjvZjA — Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) August 11, 2021

Nambi Ndugga, Latoya Hill and Samantha Artiga: Close to 70% (68.3%) of the adult population in the United States have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. While this progress represents a marked achievement in vaccinations that has led to steep declines in COVID-19 cases and deaths, vaccination coverage—and the protections provided by it—remains … Continue reading Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity →

Dean Mosiman: The earlier proposal for one-time payments, which equaled 3.75% of the average annual yearly wage of $70,950 for all permanent general municipal employees, would have cost a total $4.5 million. About 1,400 of the city’s 2,900 employees are classified as general municipal employees. Employees in the city’s police, firefighter and Teamster bargaining units … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Madison plans 6% city employee pay raise over 3 years →

Odette Yousef: But a WBEZ analysis of mass shootings suggests that Chicago is, in fact, unique for its frequency and volume of mass shootings. Defining such incidents as those involving at least four shooting victims or deaths — excluding the shooter — the city has seen 124 such events since Jan. 1, 2019. That’s at … Continue reading With 124 mass shootings since Jan. 1, 2019, Chicago has twice as many as the city with the second-highest tally, a fact rarely highlighted. →

Jenna Robinson: Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.” But politics needn’t have … Continue reading It’s Not About ‘Politics’—The Brouhaha over Nikole Hannah-Jones →

Jill Tucker: When the teachers union over the weekend announced the “exciting news” that San Francisco’s high school seniors will get a chance to go back to classrooms starting Friday, they left out details about the plan, including that students might only be back for just one day. In addition, the class of 2021 won’t … Continue reading S.F. seniors might go back to school for only one day before term ends. Parents are furious →

Amber Athey: ‘As we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable,’ the author … Continue reading Where life is normal:
Just outside of city centers the pandemic is hardly visible →

Scott Girard: Madison Metropolitan School District high schools plan to move away from “standalone honors” courses for freshmen and sophomores in the next few years, with an Earned Honors system expected to replace them. The goal, MMSD leaders told the School Board Monday, is to bring rigor to all classrooms for all students and give … Continue reading Deja Vu: Taxpayer supported Madison high schools moving toward eliminating standalone honors courses for ninth, 10th grades →

Stewart Lawrence: Getting a good college education turns out to be a lot easier than it used to be. It’s not that the courses have gotten any easier, but academic cheating has, and most schools seem powerless to stop it. In recent months much of the media has focused on the high-profile college admissions scandals … Continue reading Academic “Ghost-Writing”: The Cheating Scandal No One Will Discuss →

James Vaznis and Felicia Gans: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted on Friday to give Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley the power to force districts to bring students back to the classrooms full-time, a move that aims to put student learning and wellbeing back on track after a year of epic disruptions. The … Continue reading Mass. education commissioner wins authority to force school districts to bring students back to classrooms full-time →

Chris Papst: IA shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average. Tiffany France thought her son would … Continue reading City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA →

Joel Kotkin: Even before 2020, America’s great cities faced a tide that threatened to overwhelm them. In 2020, the tsunami rose sud­denly, inundating the cities in ways that will prove both troubling and trans­formative, but which could mark the return toward a more hu­mane, and sustainable, urbanity. The two shocks—the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring, … Continue reading The American City’s Long Road to Recovery →

Daniel Lennington: When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he offered Americans, of all races, a compelling vision of a society no longer prejudiced by race. He envisioned a country where citizens are judged “by the content … Continue reading Wisconsin’s Capitol City Is Trying To Ban White People From Police Oversight Board →

Kristen A. Graham and Maddie Hanna: The Philadelphia School District and its teachers’ union on Thursday moved toward a possible showdown over plans to reopen schools next week, with teachers questioning whether it’s safe to return to buildings and Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. saying he expected them to do so. Days after criticism erupted over … Continue reading Philly teachers’ union says it’s ‘not safe’ to reopen schools, city to appoint mediator. Will teachers return? →

Amber Walker: I sometimes wonder where I would be today if my kindergarten teacher hadn’t encouraged my mother to have me take the admissions exam for Chicago’s selective elementary schools. That one test result earned me a coveted spot at Edward W. Beasley Academic Center, one of the city’s gifted and talented elementary programs, where … Continue reading How personal experiences shaped one journalist’s perceptions →

Logan Wroge: The council voted 13-4 against an appeal the private Catholic high school filed last year seeking to overturn a denied permit to install four field lights — the latest chapter in a years-long saga that has pitted the school’s desire to improve the Goodman Athletic Field against neighborhood concerns about noise and light pollution. For … Continue reading City Council upholds denial of field lights for Edgewood High School →

Wisconsin Institute for Law and liberty: Notice of Claim asserts racial quotas violate the law, Constitution The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a Notice of Claim, Wednesday, putting the City of Madison on notice that an ordinance and resolution creating the new Police Civilian Oversight Board imposes unconstitutional racial quotas. WILL represents … Continue reading Civics: WILL Warns City of Madison of Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional Racial Discrimination →

Patrick O’Donnell: Thousands of Cleveland students aren’t showing up for daily online classes — skipping class, dropped off the rolls, or never enrolled at all, data analyzed by The 74 show. That means a district with 36,900 students last school year now has about 28,200 attending classes on a typical day, a drop of more … Continue reading The Concerning Case of Cleveland’s No-Show Students: More Than 8,000 Kids Are Missing From City’s Online Classes as Absenteeism Rates Double →

Hank Berrien: A group of Wisconsin parents, along with School Choice Wisconsin, is suing the city of Racine after the city closed its schools, defying a Wisconsin Supreme Court restraining order preventing the city from closing the schools. The sequence of events preceding the lawsuit included Dottie-Kay Bowersox, the City of Racine Public Health Administrator, … Continue reading Wisconsin Parents Sue City For Closing Down Schools →

CDC.gov: What is already known about this topic? As of October 15, 216,025 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in the United States; however, this might underestimate the total impact of the pandemic on mortality. What is added by this report? Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, … Continue reading Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19, by Age and Race and Ethnicity →

Joanne Jacobs: Several parents noted that many private schools are teaching in person. City-funded preschool programs are operating if they’re in private schools, but closed if they’re in district buildings. If the chaos and incompetence drives middle-class families out of the city or into private schools and students who remain have learned little but knock-knock … Continue reading ‘I’ll leave the city for my kids to get educated’ →

Stephen McDonell: It’s only when you sit back and ask yourself, “What has Tony Chung actually done?” that you realise just how draconian Hong Kong’s state security law is. Among the accusations against Mr Chung: that he posted on social media advocating independence for Hong Kong. According to Joshua Rosenzweig, the head of Amnesty International’s … Continue reading Civics: What has 19 Year Old Tony Chung Actually Done? →

All City of Madison Aldermanic Seats and City of Madison Municipal Judge will be up for election in 2021. Seats 1 and 2 of the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will also be on the ballot in 2021. Recent aldermanic education rhetoric. More. Key Dates: December 1, 2020: Nomination Papers may be circulated. December … Continue reading Run for Office 2021: Madison City Council →

Wisconsin Policy Forum: As we noted in our first Madison budget brief last year, Wisconsin’s capital city relies heavily on a single source of revenue – local property taxes – that is limited by state law. Because of these restrictions, the proposed budget would increase 2021 property taxes on this December’s bills by one of … Continue reading K-12 Tax, Referendum & Spending Climate: 2021 City of Madison Budget Brief →

WILL: WILL Policy Brief revisits how state law was thwarted by local actors for the last five years The News: A new Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) policy brief reveals how a state law passed in 2015 intended to make vacant Milwaukee schools available to charter and private schools has been thwarted by … Continue reading Surplus Property Law Results in Just One Vacant Milwaukee School →

Joel Kotkin: “No Bourgeois, No Democracy” – Barrington Moore Protecting and fighting for the middle class regularly dominates rhetoric on the Right and Left. Yet activists on both sides now often seek to undermine single-family home ownership, the linchpin of middle-class aspiration. The current drive to outlaw single-family zoning—the one protection homeowners possess against unwanted … Continue reading K-12 Tax; referendum and spending climate: Blue-city urbanization imposes a downward mobility people don’t want and don’t need. →

iqoqi: More than two years ago, on February 26th 2018, I was contacted by the Royal Society Open Science Journal to referee a submitted manuscript. Two prior referees had accepted the paper and two had rejected it, and I was the tiebreaker. The manuscript, Quantum Correlations are Weaved by the Spinors of the Euclidean Primitives … Continue reading Dishonesty in academia: the deafening silence of the Royal Society Open Science Journal on an accepted paper that failed the peer review process →

Aaron Gordon: In November 2011, the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project published a 595-page document that was supposed to finally end a decades-long battle over a highway. The project was a controversial one, to say the least. At a time when many cities around the country were re-evaluating whether urban highways had a place … Continue reading The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation →

Elizabeth Beyer & Emily Hamer: West Dayton Street outside of the Madison School District administration building became the latest field where protesters and city employees faced off in a battle of wills Friday morning. The city’s Streets Division crew attempted to remove a mural on the road that read “Police free schools,” which was painted … Continue reading City of Madison attempt to remove ‘Police free schools’ street mural blocked by protesters →

Logan Wroge: In 2017, Anderson and a partner approached the UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity about starting an independent charter. The school’s design team was formed the next year, and Milestone received approval from the System in 2019 to open as Madison’s third independent charter. Independent charters are tuition-free, public schools authorized by government … Continue reading Independent Madison charter Milestone Democratic School designed ‘by youth, for youth’ →

Jon Miltimore: The Atlantic recently asked PredictWise, an analytics firm, to rank US counties based on partisan prejudice (“affective polarization”). The results are now in, and they are fascinating. The most intolerant country was not Rabun County in northeastern Georgia, where the film Deliverance was shot. Nor was it in Albany County, Wyoming, where Matthew … Continue reading “The Most Intolerant County in America (and the Most Tolerant City)” →

Michael Petrilli: Most rural communities, small towns and modest-sized metro areas have seen dramatically lower rates of Covid-19 infection than big urban areas, especially the super-dense New York City region. This has led to predictable upset and pushback when state officials treated less populated regions the same as more crowded ones. As one county commissioner … Continue reading The Unequal American City →

Noam Scheiber, Farah Stockman and J. David Goodman: Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis, police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the … Continue reading Governance: How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts (Act 10) →

Tara Isabella Burton: Yet the Thiel Fellowship is, on closer inspection, radically subversive—as much an attempt at delegitimizing the contemporary American educational landscape as it is about rewarding young would-be founders. The American collegiate system, Thiel, his staff, and his fellows unanimously affirm, has become a giant scam, transforming potential innovators into subservient drones; indoctrinating … Continue reading “The American collegiate system, Thiel, his staff, and his fellows unanimously affirm, has become a giant scam, transforming potential innovators into subservient drones” →

George Joseph: In hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations, police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, reveal widespread corruption, brutality and other misconduct in the troubled Westchester County city just north of the Bronx. Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, … Continue reading Civics: The Mount Vernon Police Tapes: In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed →

Nancy LeTourneau: To get some idea of the battle that goes on between the mayor and the police union, here is a story that was reported about a year ago. In open defiance of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, the union that represents the city’s roughly 900 rank-and-file police officers announced that it is partnering with a national … Continue reading Civics: In Minneapolis, a Police Union Gone Rogue →

Kelly Ho: Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has claimed that students should be protected from being “poisoned” as she said that “false and biased” information had spread on campuses. She also rejected criticism on her administration’s Covid-19 measures and warned against legislative filibustering and “foreign interference.” In an interview with state-run newspaper Ta Kung Pao published … Continue reading Students cannot be ‘poisoned’ with ‘false, biased’ information says Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam, vowing action →

Oshrat Carmiel: The College of New Rochelle has a 15.6-acre campus with tree-lined paths and a 19th-century castle and it’s just 20 miles from New York City. But is it worth $50 million? The school, founded as a Catholic women’s college in 1904, filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 20, crushed under the burden of $80 … Continue reading For Sale: College Campus, Convenient to New York City, Castle Included →

: In a memo to council members on Wednesday, which mentions a local political party but doesn’t name Progressive Dane, May wrote, “I was deeply disturbed to hear reports this week that seven or eight alders met privately to discuss matters on the City Council agenda. Such meetings almost certainly involve negative quorums on some … Continue reading Madison City Council members warned about illegal meetings →

Lee Hawkins: When New York City special-needs teacher Marie Cornicelli learned in March that the city’s 1.1 million public-school students would be migrating to remote learning, she expected the foray into “crazy, unknown and unfamiliar territory” to be a difficult one. “I wondered if my students would be able to do the work well at … Continue reading One New York Special-Needs School Is Ahead of the Curve With Remote Learning →

Chris Stewart: Sometimes I feel like I’m the last man standing in favor of standardized testing. I don’t think people know that when I ask “how are the children,” I’m usually asking about their intellectual care and development. I’m an education activist so when you answer, I expect to hear results from a relatively objective … Continue reading One thing way worse than standardized testing is unstandardized testing →

Katy Grimes: In March 2019, California Globe reported Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar and seven other administrators spent more than $35,000 to attend a six-day conference at the Harvard Business School, while the district teetered on the verge of insolvency, and under the threat of state takeover as it struggled with a … Continue reading Sacramento City Schools Superintendent Aguilar Takes a Big Pay Increase While Schools Closed →

Public Policy Forum: The level of competition varies in these counties, but in none are even half the seats contested. Eleven of Brown County’s 26 seats (42.3%) are contested placing it at the top of the list, while none of Waukesha County’s 25 seats are competitive. In Wisconsin’s two largest counties, few seats are up … Continue reading Civics: How Competitive Are City and County Legislative Seats? →

Mural Hemmadi: The City of Toronto is obtaining cellphone data from wireless carriers to help it identify where people have assembled in groups, part of its attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19, Mayor John Tory said on Monday. But city staff said Tuesday morning the city doesn’t plan to collect such data. “We had … Continue reading Civics: Toronto is gathering cellphone location data from telecoms to find out where people are still congregating amid coronavirus shutdown: Tory →

James Pasley: As Arthur Holland Michel, who wrote a book about high-tech surveillance, told The Atlantic in June, “Someday, most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance.” New York City has an estimated 9,000 cameras linked to a system the New York Police Department calls the “Domain … Continue reading Civics: I documented every surveillance camera on my way to work in New York City, and it revealed a dystopian reality →

Neal Morton: A year after Seattle voters approved the city’s largest-ever education tax, money has started flowing from the $600 million-plus levy to expand preschool classrooms and get more students into college. The city’s education department also recently announced a $400,000 initiative with the YWCA Seattle-King-Snohomish to help youth experiencing homelessness. And for the first time, charter … Continue reading Three months into Seattle’s new $600 million-plus education levy, where has the money been going? →

Li Yuan: Hong Kong’s protests have disrupted Yang Yang’s family life. Though the 29-year-old lives in mainland China, he was inspired by the demonstrations to write a song about freedom and upload it to the internet. When censors deleted it, he complained to his family. They weren’t sympathetic. “How can you support Hong Kong separatists?” … Continue reading China’s Political Correctness: One Country, No Arguments →

Chan Ho-him, Brian Wong, Kelley Ho and Joanne Ma: Hundreds of secondary school students protested against Hong Kong’s anti-mask law on Tuesday in a show of solidarity with schoolmates arrested during the ongoing citywide protests. Forming human chains and staging sit-ins, students across the city voiced support for peers ­arrested under the law since its … Continue reading Hong Kong school week kicks off with citywide student protests against anti-mask law arrests →

James Vaznis: A preschool seat in the Boston Public Schools often seems harder to come by than a winning Megabucks ticket, even for some of the city’s most politically connected residents. City Councilor Michelle Wu struck out getting a seat for her 4-year-old son, Blaise, who was waitlisted earlier this year at the Sumner Elementary … Continue reading At Boston Public Schools, even the city’s most politically connected can get the runaround →

Abigail Becker: Currently, schools without a campus master plan located within the Campus Institutional zoning district do not need approval from the city to create uses that occur outside of an enclosed building. These types of uses include outdoor sports and recreational facilities. The main change within the zoning text amendment is that all entities … Continue reading Edgewood would need city permission to make field changes under Plan Commission recommendation →

Rod Dreher: You have to read this long Atlantic piece by George Packer, in which he describes the disillusioning of him and his wife — good urban liberals — by the militant wokeness that overtook the New York City public schools that their children attended (and that their son still attends). The piece begins with … Continue reading The Progressive Dystopia Of NEw York City Schools →

Scott Girard: Bidar said it would be a challenge to become a decision-making body, given that any initiatives would require approval by three different legislative bodies, but there’s still value in the committee. “Once we have clarity and agreement around what we want to be, it’s sharing the information with the rest of our colleagues,” … Continue reading Much ado about nothing: City of Madison education comMittee; ReAding? →

John Maxwell: Lately, I’ve been having an alarming amount of conversations arise about the burdens of loneliness, alienation, rootlessness, and a lack of belonging that many of my peers feel, especially in the Bay Area. I feel it too. Everyone has a gazillion friends and events to attend. But there’s a palpable lack of social … Continue reading Loneliness Is a Big Problem →

Will Flanders: At Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), there exist two distinct school systems. Despite its economic growth, low-income families in Madison are more likely to stay poor for their entire lives. While 60% of white students at MMSD are proficient or higher on the Forward exam, only 9.8% of African Americans are proficient. This … Continue reading Two Madisons: The Education and Opportunity Gap in Wisconsin’s Fastest Growing City →

Amanda Cantrell: Three weeks after I enrolled my youngest child in a neighborhood nursery school in Brooklyn, I got the call. An administrator and my child’s lead teacher urgently wanted to meet with my husband and me. Our daughter, it turned out, was wandering out of the classroom. She wasn’t making eye contact. She didn’t … Continue reading Pop culture lionizes the dazzling brilliance of money managers on the autism spectrum. Reality rarely measures up. →

Brian Solis: You’re walking along the street, and bump into a friend. After a quick hello, this friend compliments you. What do you do in response? Most likely, offer a compliment in return. Or, at the least, say thank you. A few steps further down the street, you see someone drop a wallet. You pick … Continue reading The Death of Social Reciprocity in the Era of Digital Distraction →

Gail Heriot: On April 23, 2019, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report entitled Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. This Statement is part of that report. In the report, the Commission finds “Students of color as a whole, as … Continue reading Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. →

Derek Thompson: A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size … Continue reading The Future of the City Is Childless America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births. →

Jeffie Lam: Veteran liberal studies teacher Kwan Chin-ki felt the subject helped raise awareness of societal issues among students but there was not a direct link to young Hongkongers’ participation in politics. Meanwhile, presidents of three universities called on different parties to resolve the rift through constructive dialogue. HKU president and vice-chancellor Professor Zhang Xiang … Continue reading “The liberal studies curriculum is a failure,” Tung said. “It is one of the reasons behind the youth problems today.” →

Margaret Grace Myers: “It’s like Uber, for babysitting,” is something that sounds vaguely like a joke and is one of the ways that I make rent every month. This could be an essay about the horrors of the gig economy and how you can have two master’s degrees and a full-time job and still not … Continue reading I BabySit for the One Percent →

Kay Hymowitz: Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness. The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” … Continue reading Alone The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness. →

Benjamin Schneider: If I asked my neighbors in San Francisco if they’d support a policy that reduces fossil-fuel consumption, protects unspoiled wildlands, increases economic mobility, and creates more affordable housing, they would probably all say yes. But if I told them such a policy would legalize small apartment buildings in our neighborhood of charming, million-dollar … Continue reading Increasing the density of America’s cities is a crucial part of progressive city planning. →

Adam Harris: Last fall, Lanus ran for school board and won. His campaign was criticized for receiving outside funding, but his central message resonated with voters: The schools in Baton Rouge had been inequitable for too long, and it was time for a change. “If you look anywhere south of Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge—which … Continue reading Residents of the majority-white southeast corner of Baton Rouge want to make their own city, complete with its own schools, breaking away from the majority-black parts of town. →

Zack Whittaker: Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above. But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for anyone to look … Continue reading Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system →

Jim Schutze: It’s sort of remarkable, is it not, almost as if they have a small research team somewhere in the city attorney’s office. Twice a year someone tells them, “Scour the books for something Groden isn’t doing wrong so we can charge him with it and get ourselves kicked out of court again.” Kizzia … Continue reading Civics: Dallas Has Now Lost 82 Cases Against Robert Groden. Someone Call Guinness. →

Yuan Yang: China’s “intelligence-led policing”, which relies on gathering data to identify possible or repeat offenders, was partly copied from the British police, who pioneered the approach in the 1990s, Mr Walton said. The IJOP app prompts police to gather a vast range of details about individuals they are interrogating. In addition, the app presents … Continue reading Civics: Xinjiang phone app exposes how Chinese police monitor Uighur Muslims →

University of Pennsylvania: In the 1950s and early ’60s, with the Cold War at its peak, the United States flew U2 spy planes across Europe, the Middle East, and central eastern Asia, taking images of interesting military targets. Though the missions typically connected Point A to Point B, say an air field and an important … Continue reading Declassified U2 spy plane images reveal bygone Middle Eastern archaeological features →

Geremie R. Barme: On 30 March 2019 we received the text of a powerful article by an academic at Tsinghua University written in support of Professor Xu Zhangrun. We believed we had a clear understanding that China Heritage had permission to publish that text in translation. We were mistaken. Subsequent to publication, we were belatedly … Continue reading Silence + Conformity = Complicity — reflections on university life in China today →

David Perell: America’s biggest Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are losing market share. Across consumer goods industries, brand loyalty is dying. The percentage of affluent consumers in the top 5% of household income who can identify their favorite brand is in sharp decline (see Figure 1). The reason is simple: brands are about trust and … Continue reading “ the shift from information scarcity to information abundance” →

Joey Garrison and Maria Puente: Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin and nine college coaches are among the 50 people charged Tuesday in what federal officials say is the nation’s largest-ever college admissions bribery case prosecuted by the Justice Department. The Justice Department charged 33 affluent parents, which include CEOs and television stars, with taking … Continue reading Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin among 50 indicted in largest-ever case alleging bribery to get kids into colleges →

Linda Lutton: Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare. The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here. “It raises a … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Everywhere — In Chicago It’s Almost Gone →

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: When Amazon decided to locate its second headquarters in New York, it cited the supposed advantages of the city’s talent base. Now that progressive politicians have chased Amazon out of town, the tech booster chorus has been working overtime to prove that Gotham, and other big, dense, expensive cities, are … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Contrary to media hype, tech firms and millennials not flocking to “superstar” cities.| City Journal →

David Bandurski: Gone are the days when you can simply ignore that stack of Party newspapers in the corner of the office, or switch off the Party’s nightly newcast, “Xinwen Lianbo.” The app’s name, “Xi Study Strong Nation,” or Xue Xi Qiang Guo (学习强国), is derived from a now widely used official pun on the … Continue reading Civics: The Dawn of the Little Red Phone →

Bill Lueders: This led to a determination that the vast majority of case records must be made public, as they should have been all along. As the Journal Times reported, the released invoices show Racine taxpayers have shelled out nearly $18,000 to fund Letteney’s crusade against Weidner. This went to pay two attorneys $350 and … Continue reading Civics: Bad judgment in Racine: City attorney and judge kept routine public records secret →

Christopher Osher: But districts are free to use their READ Act per-pupil funds on whatever curriculum they want, even on interventions researchers have found ineffective. “Typically, as with any education policy, we’re only given so much authority on what we can tell districts to do and what we monitor for,” Colsman said in an interview … Continue reading “One issue state officials say they have detected as they monitor the effectiveness of the READ Act is that not all teachers are up to date on how best to teach reading.” →