Patrick J. Wolf Larry D. Maloney Jay F. May Corey A. DeAngelis:

One might assume that policymakers moved swiftly to remedy the injustice of charter school funding inequity revealed in the 2005 report. Sadly, that was not the case. We re-examined the charter school funding gap using data from 2006-07 and adding seven more states to our sample. In Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists, we reported that the gap favoring TPS stood at 19.2 percent nationally, only trivially smaller than the original gap of 21.7 percent. Even more concerning, a third study of 2010-11 revenue data identified the gap across an expansive sample of 30 states plus D.C. to average 28.4 percent more funding for TPS than charters, provoking the report title of Charter School Funding: Inequity Expands.11 All three of these charter school revenue studies have concluded that funding gaps are larger in urban areas, due to more local funding and categorical
funding earmarked for districts with disadvantaged students going to TPS than to charters, even though public charter schools enroll a high proportion of low-income students.

This report contributes to the school funding policy literature by taking a deep dive into the realities of charter and TPS funding in major urban areas across the country. We examine funding disparity levels from all possible revenue sources in 15 different metropolitan areas for the 2013-14 school year. We selected the locations based on either a high concentration of charters in the metropolitan area or potential for charter school growth there. Eight of them have been the subject of our prior funding research, allowing us to track their charter school funding gaps over time, as we do in a section of this report. The remaining six locations add greater diversity to our sample, as they are smaller and newer charter school communities. Together, our selected
cities represent a cross-section of the current and projected charter school enrollment across the country. We highlight differences in local, state, and federal public funding, as well as all nonpublic funding for the same locations. This study represents the latest evidence regarding remaining public charter school funding inequities with a focus on where charters are most common: in cities.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 school districts.

Walker Bragman:

At the height of the conflict, O’Rourke publicly mused about disbanding the police union, calling it “out of control” and lamenting his colleagues’ unwillingness to stand up to the powerful political force. A year later, he was calling for “better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.”

The fight came at one of the bleakest moments of the Great Recession, and the city was stuck in contracts with the police and firefighters unions that provided for annual raises and benefits. The city manager was proposing a 5 percent property tax increase and other hikes in fees to pay for them, but the city council wanted the unions to defer some of the wage increases and forfeit some of the holidays. The Firemen and Policemen’s Pension Fund was in need of more money, which meant they were open to negotiations, but O’Rourke was frustrated at how dug in he said they were.

Police unions have increasingly found themselves in conflict with progressive Democrats in cities across the country, and are notorious for defending even the worst officers on the force against charges of assault or murder. Chris Evans, O’Rourke’s spokesperson, said that when he relayed The Intercept’s inquiry to O’Rourke, O’Rourke’s first memory of the fight was that police were demanding a provision that would give officers a 48-hour window after a police shooting before they would have to answer an investigator’s questions. That provision is indeed in the contract; O’Rourke’s remarks at the time, however, were focused on officer compensation and El Paso’s strapped budget.

O’Rourke, in public, took particular exception to some of the demands from the police union in the ongoing negotiations, including its continued insistence on maintaining the wage increases, which he said amounted to 8 percent each year. In an August 3, 2010, meeting, a seemingly exasperated O’Rourke went so far as to ask the city’s attorney if there was a way to eliminate the union altogether.

“In my opinion, the basic problem with this whole setup is you’ve got a very powerful police union that’s been able to extract an unsustainable increase in salaries year over year and an unsustainable series of additional benefits,” he said, following an exchange over the city manager’s proposal to create a second police academy. “What are the provisions or opportunities for the voters of El Paso to go back to some other form of representation for the police officers?”

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

Fran Spielman:

Bill Daley wants to turn America’s third-largest school system into what he calls the “nation’s first pre-K-through-14” system — by merging the Chicago Public Schools with the City Colleges of Chicago.

By turning two giant bureaucracies into one, Daley hopes to generate as much as $50 million worth of administrative savings — enough to provide free community college to all CPS graduates, not just those who maintain a B average.

But the ground-breaking merger is not about saving money. It’s about positioning CPS to produce more students prepared and trained for jobs without the back-breaking burden of student loans.

Chris Rickert:

In June, after she’d lost her bid for a second term on the board, Moffit emailed district general counsel Matthew Bell and executive director of student services John Harper a copy of a letter sent to a prospective Shabazz student letting the student’s family know that the student hadn’t met the criteria for getting into Shabazz. She said it’s not the same student as the one whose family filed the formal complaint.

“I am surprised that this is legal, since Shabazz is a public school,” Moffit wrote Bell on June 6. “Are you aware that their Principal is sending out this information?”

Moffit never received a response.

DPI data show the percentage of students with disabilities at Shabazz last year, about 19 percent, was higher than in the district as a whole (about 14 percent). Twenty-four percent of students at Capital High, however, had disabilities.

Fralin said he’s hoping changes to Shabazz’s eligibility requirements will be in place by the start of the next school year.K-12 school districts.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

Zachary R. Mider and Zeke Faux:

In theory, Barbarovich’s reach ends at the city limits. In practice, it spans the nation. From a third-floor office near Coney Island in Brooklyn, he has grabbed cash from a physician in California, a roofer in Florida and a cattle auctioneer in Illinois. Borrowers say he and other marshals routinely push the limits of their authority.

“How could they pull all that money? I’ve never even been to New York,” says Jose Soliz, a masonry contractor near Amarillo, Texas, who had more than $56,000 taken from his bank account by Barbarovich last year. “It’s a con.”

Barbarovich, who declined to be interviewed, said in an email that he follows the rules for issuing legal demands. Michael Woloz, a spokesman for the New York City Marshals Association, said his members aren’t responsible for their clients’ business practices. “Marshals simply enforce court judgments,” he said.

The companies making Barbarovich rich advance money at rates that can top 400 percent annualized. To get around state laws designed to stamp out loan sharking, they say they aren’t making loans but buying the money that businesses will likely make in the future at a discounted price. Courts have generally recognized this distinction, and the industry, known as merchant cash advance, has grown to an estimated $15 billion a year.

A City Marshal’s Fortunes Rise

David Fleshler and Megan O’Matz:

Despite an extraordinary series of governmental failures leading to the bloodshed in Parkland, just a few low-level employees have faced consequences over errors that may have cost lives.

But not the school administrators who failed to act on warnings of weak security at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, or the ones who mismanaged gunman Nikolas Cruz’s special education needs when he was a student there. Not the sheriff’s deputies who took cover while children were shot, or their supervisors. And, by all indications, no one at the FBI, which fumbled compelling, back-to-back tips about Cruz in the months before his rampage.

“There were so many mistakes,” said Broward County Commissioner Michael Udine, whose district includes Stoneman Douglas. “I don’t feel there’s been sufficient accountability. But more importantly, the people that live in northwest Broward, my neighbors and friends, don’t feel there’s been accountability.”

Cruz, who has confessed, clearly deserves the most blame for the Feb. 14 shooting. And the easy availability of firearms in Florida played a role in an attack in which the gunman stalked the halls with a high-capacity rifle and fired into classrooms, killing 17 and wounding 17.

But at the agencies charged with keeping Broward County’s schools safe, where leaders have been quick to pat themselves on the back for their work, few people have suffered consequences for multiple errors that have come to light since the shooting.

Eduardo Porter:

You don’t want to be hit by a recession in a city like Steubenville, Ohio.

Eight years into the economic recovery, there are thousands fewer jobs in the metropolitan area that joins Steubenville with Weirton, W.Va., than there were at the onset of the Great Recession. Hourly wages are lower than they were a decade ago. The labor force has shrunk by 14 percent.

The dismal performance is not surprising. Built on coal and steel, Steubenville and Weirton were ill suited to survive the transformations brought about by globalization and the information economy. They have been losing population since the 1980s.

Fran Spielman:

Chicago’s Department of Water Management has known since June that 17.2 percent of tested Chicago homes with water meters had elevated lead levels, but failed to notify owners of all 165,000 metered homes, continued to install meters and is only now offering those homeowners free, $60 filtration systems.

The testing, quietly done by City Hall, found that 51 of 296 tested homes with meters had elevated lead levels above the federal standard of 15 parts-per-billion of lead.

But, Water Management Commissioner Randy Conner and Health Commissioner Dr. Julie Morita refused to say precisely how elevated those levels were. They initially refused to provide any specific test results. The precise figures were provided after-the-fact by the mayor’s press office.

Looking more like deers in the headlights, the two department heads would only say that there was no need to panic.

“When you look at the data here and you see the progress that’s been made, we’re not looking at a public health crisis,” Morita said.

Nick Summers:

Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, disagrees with the current plan because it would give the trust power to approve data collection that isn’t anonymized or “de-identified” at the source. “I had a really hard time with that,” she told Engadget. “I just couldn’t… I couldn’t live with that.”

Cavoukian’s exit joins the mounting skepticism over Sidewalk Labs and the urban data that will be harvested through Quayside, the first section of a planned smart district called Sidewalk Toronto. Sidewalk Labs has always maintained that the neighborhood will follow ‘privacy by design’, a framework by Cavoukian that was first published in the mid-1990s. The approach ensures that privacy is considered at every part of the design process, balancing the rights of citizens with the access required to create smarter, more efficient and environmentally friendly living spaces.

Erin Richards:

Test scores tell another story. Less than 5 percent of students are proficient in English and math on the state exam. The vast majority score “below basic,” the lowest category, in both subjects.

Despite devoted teachers, a spirit of achievement, extra money and five years of attention from Milwaukee’s best minds in business and education as part of an unprecedented turnaround effort, Carver’s students are stuck academically.

The school’s biggest obstacle turned out to be something nobody was even tracking: Student turnover.

More than a third of Carver’s students — 38 percent — were brand new to the school last year. Just a few students from the elementary grades stay through middle school each year, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of the social and academic consequences of chronic school-switching.

Improving urban education has no silver bullet. Low performance is too interrelated with poverty and toxic stress and the generational trauma many children carry into schools. But new data suggests that student turnover is a massive indicator of academic struggle and stagnation. Test scores drop because of it. Graduation rates fall because of it. Teachers don’t know what to do about it. Principals can’t recognize their own students as a result of it.

And until now, nobody knew the extent of it.
Angela Peterson / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Third grade teacher Symona Gregory works with Kamariana Brown, 8, in preparation for a math test in May 2018. Gregory is a fourth-year teacher at Carver Academy and a former City Year staff member. She was named teacher of the year at the school in 2017-’18.

Enrollment and test-score data analyzed by the Journal Sentinel revealed the quiet churn of more than 22,000 Milwaukee students across all types of schools last year — a phenomenon that’s ravaging the city’s prospects for educational improvement.

David Cantor:

Seventy-five tenured teachers found guilty of abuse or incompetence — many of them male, veteran educators assigned to struggling New York City schools — were fired over 16 months in 2015 and 2016, an analysis of disciplinary records obtained by The 74 has found.

Educators were terminated for choking students, publicly taunting children who couldn’t read, and, in the case of one Brooklyn technology teacher in 2011, threatening to “shoot up everyone” at a school. But the majority were found by their schools to be inadequate as instructors.

Jeanne Whalen:

This spring, residents of this Mississippi River city published a book celebrating three decades of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who first visited as a regional official in 1985 to learn about modern farming practices.

That visit, and one Xi made in 2012, helped forge a relationship that turned China into a major consumer of Iowa’s agricultural exports. It also turned Muscatine into a pilgrimage site for Chinese officials and tourists wanting to meet the people Xi refers to as “old friends.”

So it was with some surprise that, a few months after the book’s publication, Muscatine watched Xi respond to a trade war with the United States by slapping steep tariffs on one of Iowa’s biggest exports: soybeans.

The tariffs caused a 20 percent drop in the price of U.S. soybeans and the first serious strain in a decades-long alliance on which U.S. farmers and Chinese consumers have come to rely. Local farmers say they understand the White House’s desire to challenge China on trade issues, but they worry that they will lose their grip on an export market developed through years of citizen diplomacy.

“I grow a lot of food, and they have a lot of people who need to eat. The tariffs are bad for both of us,” said Tom Watson, who grows corn and soybeans a short drive from Muscatine.

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg:

In the five years since the group’s inception, MOST has not given the public notice of its meetings times, dates, locations, and agendas, allowing little to no oversight.

According to an internal document from a 2014 meeting, MOST formalized an “Action Team” that began meeting twice a month starting July 2013. But, the group did not make meeting notices publicly available. The same handout said the City’s Education Committee adopted MOST as one of its “key initiatives” in November 2013.

According to MOST meeting notes sent only to MOST participants by the former coordinator, Jennifer Lord, on Nov. 3, 2013, concerns about the committee’s need to comply with open records laws were discussed. In response, city employees cited a desire to want to remain an “independent coalition.”

But, a desire to remain an “independent coalition” is not sufficient to grant MOST immunity from open meetings laws. Nor does this desire grant MOST immunity from open records laws.

Tom Kamenick is a deputy counsel and litigation manager at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a non-profit organization that advocates for open government and civil liberties. WILL successfully litigated the 2017 Supreme Court case.

Kamenick said in an email to Simpson Street Free Press that after briefly reviewing MOST, he was unable to definitively determine if the group qualifies as a public body. But, he also said the Attorney General has stipulated open records and meetings laws should be “applied expansively.”

According to Kamenick, there is a five-factor test for determining if groups must comply with open records and open meetings laws; whether the group is funded government money, whether the group serves a government function, whether the group appears to be a government entity, whether the group is subject to some level of government control, and whether a governmental body can access to group’s records.

MOST is a publically funded city initiative staffed by government officials on the city payroll.

Taxpayer funded MOST’s website.

Matt Taibbi:

How to Survive America’s Kill List

Bilal Abdul Kareem is an expert in staying alive.

Born Darrell Lamont Phelps, he grew up just north of the Bronx in Mount Vernon, New York. He did what lots of kids in his neighborhood were doing in the late Seventies and Eighties: He spent his time rolling on the floor laughing to comics like Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor.

Later, after college at SUNY Purchase in Westchester, he decided to try stand-up himself. Hecklers were a problem.

In upscale white clubs where he sometimes performed, audiences would clap politely if his jokes missed. Not so much in the Brooklyn clubs he worked. The mostly black audiences there let him have it when he was off.

“Black folks always want to get involved in the act, you know what I’m saying?” he recalls, laughing. “Then you gotta respond with some ‘Yo mama’s so fat’ jokes just to get them to sit down and shut up.”

Over a decade later, after some major life changes – he’d converted to Islam and found himself working as a TV reporter in the Middle East under his new name, Bilal Abdul Kareem – he again drew upon his stand-up experience to stay alive. Only he wasn’t worried about dying on stage this time. This time it was more serious.

In the waning days of the Battle of Aleppo, as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces closed in on the city, Kareem found himself in a room full of desperate Free Syrian Army rebels.

Geoff Boeing:

We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
 
 In 1960, one hundred years after Emerson’s quote, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city’s spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city’s street network oriented in terms of the streets’ compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities’ orientations (EDIT: by popular request, see also this follow-up comparing world cities):

Jeremie Berlioux:

Morning sun rays filter through colourful stained glass windows, shining on a group of teenagers and students in their 20s sitting on wooden benches having breakfast.

Near the small Turkish village of Sirince, which sits above the Aegean Sea about 10 kilometres away from the ruins of Turkey’s ancient Greek city Ephesus, this scene could resemble any other summer camp if it weren’t for the students mulling over intricate polygons and matrices.

Alex Zimmerman:

With just 10 percent of male students of color graduating “college ready” at the time, city officials hoped to boost that number by giving extra money and support to schools that already made strides getting those students to graduation. With extra resources, the theory went, those same schools might be able to nudge young men of color into college while the city studied and replicated their approaches.

But after four years and $24 million, the program has not lived up to its promise, according to a report released Wednesday by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. Schools in the program turned out to be no better at preparing young men of color for college or helping them enroll than a group of similar schools that didn’t receive extra support.

“The aspirations were very high,” said Adriana Villavicencio, the lead author of the study, which, like the initiative itself, was funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “[The initiative] was not able to move the needle on a number of student outcomes — in particular college readiness and coll

“They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine – NOT!”

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Hilde Kahn, via Will Fitzhugh:

One of few bright spots in the just-released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results was an increase in the number of students reaching “advanced” level in both math and reading at the 4th- and 8th-grades.

But the results masked large racial and economic disparities. While 30 percent of Asian students and 13 percent of white students scored advanced on the 8th-grade math test, for example, just 2 percent of blacks, 4 percent of Hispanics, and 3 percent of low-income students reached that level.

The highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in suburban Washington, D.C., known as TJ, offers a window into a significant source of the disparity, and suggests a solution to the problem.

A recent survey of TJ parents revealed that Asian-American students, who make up a disproportionate percentage of students admitted to elite public STEM schools like TJ, are spending their afternoons, weekends, and breaks learning math.

Most of them enroll in advanced math classes as early as possible in their school careers, even though by their parents’ admission fewer than one third of them are highly gifted in math. But more importantly, their parents do not rely on school programming to prepare their children for TJ admissions or any other milestone on their way to top STEM careers.

Instead, they make sure that at every step of the way their children have access to high-quality extra-curricular math that prepares them for, clarifies, complements, and extends the instruction they’re obtaining in their accelerated public school programs.

If we’re really serious about increasing the number of low-income students and students from underrepresented groups who are learning math at the level required to contribute to our increasingly computational world, we should take a page from the playbook of those who are already successful: We should provide high-quality math enrichment for many more kids, as early in their educational lives as possible.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

Nor are the families of successful students the only ones who know the secret to STEM success. Education experts have long been aware that extra-curricular math is essential for high-level math achievement.

Almost 20 years ago, a College Board task force found that “some of the most academically successful groups in our society have created a network of supplementary opportunities for their children that may best be described as a parallel educational system.” The panel recommended that “a much more extensive set of supplementary education institutions and programs…for minority students should be deliberately designed to provide the breadth of supplementary opportunities available to many youngsters from more educationally advantaged and successful groups.”

The reason we haven’t implemented the suggested programs is because providing students from underrepresented groups with years of quality math enrichment takes time, money, faith in the ability of students to prevail against all odds, and a willingness to acknowledge the limits of our educational system—all of which are in short supply. It is far more politically expedient to heed repeated calls for quick-fix measures such as admission quotas for exam schools like TJ that alter the numbers while doing nothing to provide students with needed skills.

In addition to the above challenges, misguided beliefs about the causes of the excellence gap hinder our ability to reverse it.

Myth 1: The excellence gap is primarily a result of socioeconomic disparities.

At New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School, the school with the City’s most competitive admissions process, 68 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2022 were Asian; and at TJ, 65 percent of students admitted to this fall’s class were Asian. In both cases, most of these Asian students were the children of immigrants.

But the similarities end there. At TJ, 61 percent of families with two Asian immigrant parents have incomes over $200,000 per year and 76 percent have advanced degrees. In fact, only seven of the 485 students admitted to this fall’s class were eligible for free or reduced lunch. At Stuyvesant, however, Asian students make up the overwhelming majority of the 45 percent of students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Yet, despite financial and other constraints, Stuyvesant’s low-income Asian students obtain high-quality math enrichment, and it is perhaps even more critical to their success than it is to the success of TJ’s upper-middle-class Asian students.

Myth 2: The excellence gap is primarily a result of cultural, or even innate, differences.

Asian immigrant parents have high expectations for their children’s academic performance and believe hard work matters more than natural ability. They prioritize education, sacrificing time, money, and other goals in order to give their children the best chance at a better future. And they bring a competitive approach to education from their home countries.

These factors undoubtedly contribute to their children’s academic success. But cultural norms do not automatically lead to learning. Whatever the bright children of Asian immigrant parents are doing to master challenging math topics at younger and younger ages, other bright children can do as well.

Every diverse urban and suburban school district in this country would benefit from an intensive STEM enrichment program that targets capable students from underrepresented groups and begins as early as possible. Such programs should also embrace features of successful extra-curricular academies that serve low-income Asian students, including outreach to parents and an emphasis on fostering an environment where it’s not only OK to be good at math but where students are admired for their genuine interest, aptitude, and perseverance. Sadly, very few such programs exist, and most of them are underfunded.

One is Boston’s well-financed Steppingstone Academy, which provides summer, after-school, and weekend enrichment to low-income students, beginning in 5th- or 6th-grade. It has been phenomenally successful in increasing opportunities for students, 90 percent of whom gain admission to their schools of choice, including competitive public magnet schools.

Another promising program is New York City’s BEAM (Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics) program, which identifies 6th grade students from low-income neighborhoods and provides intensive math instruction, relying heavily on curriculum from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). Thanks to a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation grant, BEAM recently expanded to Los Angeles.

In a pilot program intended to test the benefits of reaching students at younger ages, an AoPS academy recently partnered with the foundation that supports the STEM magnet at Montgomery Blair High School (Blair Magnet) located across the river from TJ in Montgomery County, Maryland. The program, the Magnet Pipeline Project, aims to provide three years of after-school or weekend math enrichment to select students, beginning in 3rd grade, with the goal of increasing the number of underrepresented students admitted to the middle-school program that feeds into the Blair Magnet. The foundation has raised about $20,000 toward the cost of the program, largely from Blair Magnet alumni.

For its part, TJ provides summer STEM courses, mentorships, and test-prep for underrepresented 7th- and 8th-graders through a program launched with Cooke Foundation funding. And a company run by a TJ alum provides free test-prep for 8th-graders applying to the school. But these programs have had limited effect because they aren’t reaching students early enough with the kind of math enrichment that makes a real difference.

We’re going to need a lot more leadership and significantly more funding to ensure that programs like these succeed, and to spread the most successful ones to other school districts. We’ll need the support of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who know very well what it takes to achieve at the highest levels and who constantly complain of the lack of diversity in their applicant pool.

We’ll also need buy-in from other STEM industry leaders who consider themselves stewards of their communities and likewise suffer from a lack of available talent. Closing the excellence gap should be the highest philanthropic priority of all who value what is most precious about this country, the unlimited opportunities it provides to those willing to put in the hard work.

Thirty-five years ago, A Nation at Risk linked the end of America’s industrial dominance to a scarcity of workers with sufficient technological training and blamed both on our educational system, which it recognized as the institution responsible for ensuring that all children fulfill their potential. The report’s warning is no less compelling today.

It is both a moral and political imperative that every student be able to reach his or her potential. In an era when Americans compete for jobs against, as well as work alongside, the graduates of educational systems from around the world, it is no longer enough that our strongest students graduate from college; they must enter the workforce with the skills necessary to succeed in a global economy.

Now that technology is available to do much of the easy work, our best graduates must be prepared for the complex work of building, training, and working with existing technologies, inventing new ones, and mastering any number of unknown and unpredictable challenges. Eliminating excellence gaps is therefore nothing less than “an issue of equity and social justice, community development, economic advancement, and national security.”

Instead of viewing the excellence gap as a symbol of systemic failure, we should follow the lead of parents of the most successful students and aim to provide students from underrepresented groups with the most powerful extra-curricular interventions money can buy—even as we redouble our efforts to ensure that schools provide advanced course work for talented students of every background.

Hilde Kahn is the parent of three Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology graduates and served for nine years on the board of the school’s private foundation.

Related:

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!.

English 10

TAG Complaint

Small Learning Communities

Round and round and round and round we go.

Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven Altman (PDF):

Proceeding to country-level results, the ten most glob- ally connected countries in 2015 were (in descending order): the Netherlands, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the United Arab Emirates. On the depth dimension of the index, which compares countries’ inter- national flows to the sizes of their domestic economies, the most deeply connected economies were: Singapore, Hong Kong SAR (China), Luxembourg, Ireland, and Bel- gium. On the breadth dimension, which evaluates the extent to which countries’ international flows are dis- tributed globally or more narrowly focused, the leading countries were: the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Japan.

Roughly 70% of the variation in countries’ observed levels of global connectedness can be explained based on structural characteristics such as their sizes, levels of economic development, and geographic remoteness. The countries that most outperformed expectations on the depth dimension of global connectedness, in particular, were: Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Mozambique.
Comparing the global connectedness of advanced versus emerging economies reveals the former to be far more connected than the latter. On trade depth, advanced and emerging economies are roughly at parity, but ad- vanced economies are about four times as deeply inte- grated into international capital flows, five times as much on people flows, and nine times with respect to information flows. The rising proportion of economic activity taking place in emerging economies continues to prompt international flows to stretch out over greater distances (and to become less regionalized), but this shift toward interactions over greater distances has deceler- ated since the crisis years.

This report also introduces two new city-level globaliza- tion indexes: “Globalization Hotspots” and “Globaliza- tion Giants.” While these new indexes cover the same four pillars as the DHL Global Connectedness Index, dif- ferent (and fewer) component measures are used due to more limited availability of city-level data.

Survey data suggest that the phenomenon of globaloney extends to breadth—in this context via people underes- timating the extent to which distances and differences between countries constrain international flows. In a sur- vey of Harvard Business Review readers, 68% of respondents agreed with the quote from Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book The World is Flat that we have witnessed the creation of “a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for… collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or in the near future, even language.”16

Actual international activity, however, still turns out to
be strongly dampened by distance. The average distance between two countries around the globe is roughly 8,500 km, but the flows covered on the breadth dimension of
the DHL Global Connectedness Index average a distance
of only 4,963 km. Figure 1.2 provides a somewhat more sophisticated take on the same pattern by comparing the distance traversed by specific types of flows to how far those flows would be expected to travel if distance and cross- country differences had ceased to matter.17 On average, this sample of flows went only 58% as far as they would in a “flat” world.

Alternative link.

Tyler Cowen:

1. Houston. It still has plenty of Texas conservatives, but enough non-conservatives to elect a lesbian mayor. Mexicans fit along a political spectrum of their own.

2. Washington, D.C. and environs. The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be — just don’t think too hard about who actually lives here! Most of all, everyone is used to the fact that there are oodles and oodles of forces on the other side of the debate. No one flips out over this. Even the media types have a reasonable amount of non-left representation.

Peter Jamison, Emma Brown:

Alarming news reached the upper ranks of D.C. Public Schools in spring 2013. In a city where families from Maryland have been known to illegally send their children to the public schools at the expense of District taxpayers, a new perpetrator had been found.

She sat in the chancellor’s office.

Angela Williams-Skelton, executive assistant to then-schools chancellor Kaya Henderson, was driving her grandchildren from the home they shared in Frederick, Md., to attend Miner Elementary School in Northeast Washington, an internal investigation found. The children’s mother, who also lived with Williams-Skelton, had allegedly evaded more than $130,000 in tuition payments required for students who live outside the District, according to current and former city officials.

Residency fraud is a persistent problem in the District’s traditional and public charter schools, contributing to a severe shortage of seats at desirable campuses. But Henderson did not act for another six months.

Karen Rivedal:

“Sometimes we get to the point where it’s a detriment in our community because we are so scared of being called racist,” Reyes said. “We have to call that out, get over it and be able to move on as a community to help support all students. And we have to have a diverse representation on the school board. It’s important.”

Reyes has called for active-shooter response training for school staff and for beefing up school security infrastructure to help keep students safe. She also has supported keeping police officers in the four main high schools, an issue that has risen in prominence after a first semester in which disciplinary problems led to a 32 percent rise in high school suspensions locally and after a mass shooting in a Florida high school galvanized students nationwide in support of stricter gun controls.

As deputy mayor, Reyes handles issues related to public safety, civil rights and community services.

Amber Walker:

Before joining the mayor’s office in 2014, Reyes was a Madison Police detective. She started Amigos en Azul — Spanish for Friends in Blue — a group dedicated to improving relations among police officers and the Latino community. She also played a pivotal role in establishing the youth court system on the city’s south side.

During her campaign, Reyes supported keeping police officers in schools and advocated for restorative justice practices. As a Madison School Board member, Reyes said she plans to make school safety her “first priority” during the first few months of her term.

Much more on the 2018 Madison school board election, here.

Michael Hansen :

Many education policymakers and practitioners across the country recognize the need to recruit and retain more racial and ethnic minorities into the teaching profession. As we’ve previously discussed in our ongoing teacher diversity series, there is credible evidence that minority teachers can boost a range of minority student outcomes, yet minorities are underrepresented among the population of public school teachers.

In light of the scarcity of minority teachers, many states and districts have begun trying ways to somehow bring more minorities into the classroom. To our knowledge, most of these methods have taken the form of targeted outreach, whether to minority communities or teacher preparation programs in universities serving high concentrations of minority students. Though it may be too soon to know whether these different strategies ultimately pan out, we ask if another type of strategy might be effective. That is, could financial incentives help diversify the teacher workforce?

In this installment, we use school- and district-level data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) to examine this question.[1] We explore whether districts that offer different types of financial incentives to teachers tend to have greater diversity among teachers within their schools. Based on our analysis, we see a strong association between workforce diversity and four incentive policies that may be particularly attractive for minority teachers. Though we cannot say whether these relationships are causal, the results suggest these policies are worth exploring as strategies for diversifying the teacher workforce.

2018 – Kansas City Star Editorial:

Taylor was blunt in linking educational attainment with dollars spent.

“The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded. She also said a 1 percentage point increase in graduation rates is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in costs in lower grades and a 1.9 percent increase in costs at the high school level.

That amounts to a breathtaking repudiation of the long-standing conservative argument that there’s no link between outcomes and spending.

“It’s a validation of what I have been working on with a lot of colleagues and advocates and parents for many years.” said state Rep. Melissa Rooker, a moderate Republican from Fairway who has worked for years to boost school funding.

1998: Money and school Performance, Paul Ciotti:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its support-
ers have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they
did try. To improve the education of black students and
encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas
City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-
object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers
to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more
money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any
other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money
bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such
amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwa-
ter viewing room, television and animation studios, a robot-
ics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United
Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field
trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was
12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the
country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the
black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not
greater, integration.

More, here.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported school districts, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Julia McCandless/a>:

Pamela Cotant:

The fleet service high school apprenticeship program was launched this semester at the division’s central repair shop on North First Street.

The students, who are paired with automotive technician mentors, are learning how to inspect and repair equipment like police squad cars, parks department pickup trucks, engineering cargo vans and fire department ambulances. They also work on abandoned vehicles.

The students are working 10 to 15 hours a week during the semester and earning school credit and $13.01 per hour. The students are expected to continue working through the summer to complete 450 hours.

Elysium Health:

Some 45 years later, Silva’s project, The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, or the Dunedin Study, has far outpaced his goals, and even his participation. He retired as its director in 2000, but the study is still running, with a stunning 95 percent of its original 1,093 participants from a range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds still involved. Its data has been used in the publication of some 1,200 scientific papers, two-thirds of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Several have provided landmark findings and have been cited thousands of times across scientific fields.
The Dunedin Project has used raw data to cut through the noise of everyday life, giving researchers across the world the chance to observe the implications and consequences of developmental, genetic, and social influences on its subjects’ health, wealth, and happiness. The end result offers one of the clearest pictures of what makes us who we are, and why. It’s proof that we can learn from a single study over an incredibly long period of time. And in some ways, 45 years in, the study has only just begun.

Joe Kotkin:

The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

Redesigning cities has become all the rage in the tech world, with Google parent company Alphabet leading the race to build a new city of its own and companies like Y Combinator, Lyft, Cisco, and Panasonic all vying to design the so-called smart city.

It goes without saying, this is not a matter of merely wanting to do good. These companies are promoting these new cities as fitter, happier, more productive, and convenient places, even as they are envisioning cities with expanded means to monitor our lives, and better market our previously private information to advertisers.

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

In reality, Google is entering the “smart city” business in no small part to develop high-tech dormitories for youthful tech workers and the cheaper foreign noncitizen workers in the U.S., including H1B indentured servants; overall noncitizens make up the vast majority of the Valley’s tech workforce. Even as the tech fortunes have grown ever larger, the companies own workers have been left behind, with the average programmer earning about as much today as she did in 1998 even as housing costs in tech hubs have exploded.

Chris Papst:

Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state test scores released this fall. We paged through 16,000 lines of data and uncovered this: Of Baltimore City’s 39 High Schools, 13 had zero students proficient in math.

Digging further, we found another six high schools where one percent tested proficient. Add it up – in half the high schools in Baltimore City, 3804 students took the state test, 14 were proficient in math.

Related: Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Brian Sherwood-Jones:

Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?

The battle over the design and control of urban infrastructure pits two distinct ideas against each other. One narrative of “networked urbanism” envisages the city driven by data analytics and networks controlled in part by machines. In this “smart city”, technological solutionism is rampant, with everything connected and automated. This is Googleville: a posthuman urban laboratory.

Sam Anderson:

A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.

Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.

Ally Marotti:

Starting this spring, more Chicago Public Schools students will have a new language to learn: the one spoken by iPhone apps and Apple’s iOS operating system.

The tech giant is teaming up with the city to get its coding curriculum into more CPS classrooms and into the City Colleges of Chicago, and area companies and nonprofits are joining in by offering internships and mentoring opportunities.

The free curriculum is part of Apple’s year-old Everyone Can Code program and teaches the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s programming language, Swift.

“We hope we eventually get coding required in all public schools in America, not only for a year but for every year,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. “It’s a progression, just like English is, just like mathematics and other kinds of courses that are viewed as foundational.”

Apple developed its own coding language because it wanted something as easy to learn as its products are to use, Cook said. “We wanted it to be something that you could begin learning on but you could then, through the course of time, write the most powerful applications imaginable.”

While the students will learn just one programming language, those in the coding world say that learning one is the starting point for learning more. Swift has fueled the creation of apps such as Airbnb, Yelp and Venmo.

Monica Disare:

New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School.

New York State wants to allow some students with disabilities to take below-grade-level exams — a plan that special-education advocates opposed and New York City officials questioned, arguing that would lower the standards for those students.

The state asked the federal education department in September for permission to give students with significant cognitive disabilities tests matched to their instructional level, rather than their age. State education department officials say this will provide schools with more useful information about what students have actually learned, while other supporters say it will spare those students from taking tests they have no chance of passing.

Amadou Diallo::

Although Say Yes’s allure of free college tuition was immediately obvious in a city where 54 percent of children live in poverty, many initially viewed the program with skepticism. Dedecker, who was instrumental in bringing the program to Buffalo, recalled low expectations at the outset from almost everyone.

“One of the most common statements I heard when I was meeting with all the stakeholders,” Dedecker said, “was ‘This will never work here.’ Because people just didn’t get along. There was so much acrimony and such a history of distrust and malfunction.”

Among those who held little hope for success was Samuel Radford, president of the Buffalo Schools District Parent Coordinating Council. “I came to Say Yes as a skeptic,” he said, noting previous broken promises to fix the city’s schools. “In Buffalo we’d had 25 percent graduation rates for African-American males for the last 50 years. Can you imagine the devastation to a community … year after year after year?”

Buffalo’s 2017-2018 Budget is $930,000,000 for 34,000
Students or 27k (!) per student.

Mark Kim:

salesman has to visit every major city in the U.S. What is the cheapest way to hit them all exactly once and then return to the headquarters? The computation of the single best answer for what is known as the traveling salesman problem is famously infeasible. Nevertheless, computer scientists have long known how to find a pretty good route — one that incurs no more than 1.5 times the optimal cost.

The traveling salesman problem assumes that a trip between any two cities will cost the same going in either direction. But that’s often not the case. For example, perhaps a flight from Chicago to Denver is cheaper (or takes less time) than the flight from Denver to Chicago. Finding the optimal flight path under these conditions — known as the asymmetric traveling salesman problem — is also computationally infeasible. But unlike when solving the plain vanilla traveling salesman problem, researchers didn’t know how to find a near-optimal route for a trip to a large number of cities. That is, until last month, when three computer scientists announced that they had devised an approximation algorithm that remains efficient in all cases.

Daniel Borenstein:

In Alameda, an island community with a long history of strong labor influence, the city manager could lose her job because she resisted political pressure to hire a union leader as fire chief.

The people who probably should be removed from City Hall are council members Malia Vella and Jim Oddie, who apparently violated the city charter by meddling in the selection process. Oddie even threatened to fire City Manager Jill Keimach if she didn’t bend to his wishes, the police chief says.

The charter specifies that hiring decisions rest with the city manager. Council interference is prohibited and grounds for removal from office for malfeasance. City Attorney Janet Kern said Monday she will hire an outside law firm to investigate.

Rather than capitulate to the union, Keimach conducted an open and rigorous recruitment for a new chief to manage the 111-person fire department and its $34 million annual budget.

Last week, she hired Edmond Rodriguez, the chief of the Salinas Fire Department, to fill the post. Questioned by four interview panels, Rodriguez ranked highest in the selection process.

Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 District has long resisted changing its non-diverse governance model, most recently rejecting a psuedo charter school proposal.

Lisa Speckhard Pasque:/a>

Ashley Powers:

“Hey,” the text began. It was from the friend she’d been crashing with for the past few nights.

“Would you move back into your godmoms until you find another place?”

She sighed. It was just before 8 a.m. one Thursday this spring, and Liz Waite had a million other things she’d rather stress about than where she was going to sleep.

Liz was 24 and halfway through her first semester at California State University, Long Beach. She was a theater major (with a theater major’s predilection for randomly breaking into song), and that day she was juggling, among other things, a midterm on the play structure of Aristotle and a meeting at the affordable-housing advocacy group where she was an intern. She eventually replied to the text, her tone stiff: “My friend is picking me and my stuff up Saturday.”

Liz dashed across four lanes of traffic on Long Beach Boulevard, a glittering cloth headband matting her damp blond hair. Her face was mostly scrubbed of makeup, save for a slash of blue eyeliner, and she wore a thin green-and-pink dress, an off-the-shoulder sweater, and two small pins: One pictured John Coltrane; the other said FOOD NOT BOMBS. She carried a big reddish purse that a co-worker at the affordable-housing group swore someone had abandoned. Liz suspected the co-worker bought it for her but was too kind to say so.

All her life, Liz had been told by her teachers that college was a passport to prosperity. With a bachelor’s degree, you’re more likely to climb the income ladder, less likely to tumble back down, and better able to withstand a recession. So Liz had spent the past six years slogging through community college but still fell short of a degree. Like many students, she took classes she didn’t need, partly due to poor advising and partly because she was feeling her way toward a major. She’d also had problems with her financial aid, and she probably needed two and a half more years at Cal State to get her bachelor’s, which would mean she’d be in college close to nine years total.

Four days a week, Liz spent a half-hour on the city bus rumbling to campus. She was a shaken Coke can, ready to explode. She was broke, estranged from her parents, and lacked a reliable place to sleep. These days, she usually curled up on her godmom’s couch, cats Miles and Baby Girl purring nearby, sunrise peeking through a curtain that gave the entire room a greenish tint. But the situation was untenable: Liz’s godmom was 60, and she lived in a seniors-only apartment building. They worried that if other residents noticed Liz was crashing there, her godmom would lose her housing.

Tom Jackman

A device that tricks cellphones into sending it their location information and has been used quietly by police and federal agents for years, requires a search warrant before it is turned on, an appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday. It is the fourth such ruling by either a state appeals court or federal district court, and may end up deciding the issue unless the government takes the case to the U.S. Supreme Court or persuades the city’s highest court to reverse the ruling.

The case against Prince Jones in 2013 involved D.C. police use of a “StingRay” cell-site simulator, which enables law enforcement to pinpoint the location of a cellphone more precisely than a phone company can when triangulating a signal between cell towers or using a phone’s GPS function. Civil liberties advocates say the StingRay, by providing someone’s location to police without court approval, is a violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment right not to be unreasonably searched. The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed in a 2 to 1 ruling, echoing similar rulings in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and federal district courts in New York City and San Francisco.

Steve LeVine:

In 1986, Geoffrey Hinton co-authored a paper that, four decades later, is central to the explosion of artificial intelligence. But Hinton says his breakthrough method should be dispensed with, and a new path to AI found.

Speaking with Axios on the sidelines of an AI conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a Google researcher, said he is now “deeply suspicious” of back-propagation, the workhorse method that underlies most of the advances we are seeing in the AI field today, including the capacity to sort through photos and talk to Siri. “My view is throw it all away and start again,” he said.
Keep reading 158 words

The bottom line: Other scientists at the conference said back-propagation still has a core role in AI’s future. But Hinton said that, to push materially ahead, entirely new methods will probably have to be invented. “Max Planck said, ‘Science progresses one funeral at a time.’ The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.”

James Bartlett:

If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh’s rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.

We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can’t. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.

Tim Harford:

But given the huge investment this involved, they were often disappointed with the savings. Until about 1910, plenty of entrepreneurs looked at the new electrical drive system and opted for good old-fashioned steam.
 
 Why? Because to take advantage of electricity, factory owners had to think in a very different way. They could, of course, use an electric motor in the same way as they used steam engines. It would slot right into their old systems.
 
 But electric motors could do much more. Electricity allowed power to be delivered exactly where and when it was needed.
 
 Small steam engines were hopelessly inefficient but small electric motors worked just fine. So a factory could contain several smaller motors, each driving a small drive shaft.
 
 As the technology developed, every workbench could have its own machine tool with its own little electric motor.
 
 Power wasn’t transmitted through a single, massive spinning drive shaft but through wires.
 
 A factory powered by steam needed to be sturdy enough to carry huge steel drive shafts. One powered by electricity could be light and airy.
 
 Steam-powered factories had to be arranged on the logic of the driveshaft. Electricity meant you could organise factories on the logic of a production line.
 
 More efficient
 
 Old factories were dark and dense, packed around the shafts. New factories could spread out, with wings and windows allowing natural light and air.
 
 In the old factories, the steam engine set the pace. In the new factories, workers could do so.

Kai Strittmatter:

It is actually very simple, the professor in Beijing says. “There are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now imagine a world in which the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones punished”. A world in which those who respect their parents, avoid jaywalking, and pay all their bills on time are rewarded for good behavior. A world where such people enjoy special privileges, where they are allowed to buy “soft sleeper” tickets on a train or get easy access to bank loans. In contrast, the poorly behaved – the ones who cheat on university admissions tests, download films illegally, or have more children than the state allows – are denied this extra comfort. It is a world in which an omnipresent, all-knowing digital mechanism knows more about you than you do. This mechanism can help you improve yourself because it can tell you, in real time, where you failed and what you can do to become a more honest and trustworthy person. And who doesn’t want a world full of fairness and harmony?

Honesty. In Shanghai, there is an app for that: it’s called “Honest Shanghai”. You just download it and register. The app uses facial recognition software to recognize you and gain access to troves of your personal data, which is drawn from different government entities. According to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, where the data converge, the app can currently access exactly 5,198 pieces of information from a total of 97 public authorities. It knows whether you’ve paid your electricity bill, donated blood, or travelled on the subway without paying for a ticket. The software then processes the information and lets you know whether your recorded behavior is considered “good”, “bad” or “neutral”. Good Shanghaiers are currently allowed, for instance, to borrow books from the public library without paying the mandatory 100-yuan deposit.

Peter Cunningham:

No institution in America has done more to perpetuate segregation than public schools. Until 1954, segregated schools were legal in America and it was the standard practice in much of the South.

Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation. Some parents of color have been jailed for trying to enroll their children in schools where they don’t live.

Today, one of America’s most segregated school systems is in New York City, where Randi Weingarten once ran the teachers union. As a recent fight on the Upper West Side of Manhattan shows, even white progressive parents resist integration.

School systems across America and the colleges and universities that prepare teachers have also done a terrible job recruiting people of color into the teaching profession and an even worse job keeping the few they have. Nationally, the student body is over 50 percent people of color, but the teaching profession is just 17 percent people of color. Only about two teachers in 100 are Black males.

The roots of this institutional racism in the teaching field go back to the 1950s, when the Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal. Tens of thousands of Black teachers working in all-Black schools could not find work in integrated schools.

Madison has recently expanded its Least diverse schools.

Christopher Bergland:

Cognitive capacity and overall brain power are significantly reduced when your smartphone is within glancing distance—even if it’s turned off and face down—according to a recent study. This new report from the University of Texas at Austin, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” was published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

During this study, the UT Austin researchers found that someone’s ability to hold and process data significantly improved if his or her smartphone was in another room while taking a test to gauge attentional control and cognitive processes. Participants who kept their phones in a pocket or bag also outperformed those who kept their phones on the desk while taking the same test. Again, even if the phone was turned off and face down on the desk, the mere sight of one’s own smartphone seemed to induce “brain drain” by depleting finite cognitive resources.

City of Milwaukee:

For this RFP, the City of Milwaukee is using a Bonfire portal for accepting and evaluating proposals digitally.

All required documents are available for download on the Bonfire portal.

Your submission must be uploaded, submitted, and finalized prior to the Closing Time of May 30, 2017 at 2:00 PM CST. We strongly recommend that you give yourself sufficient time and at least ONE (1) hour before Closing Time to begin the uploading process and to finalize your submission.

Catherine Brown, Scott Sargrad, and Meg Benner:

In 2014, parents of students at Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest Washington, D.C., spent over $470,000 of their own money to support the school’s programs.1 With just under 290 students enrolled for the 2013-14 school year, this means that, in addition to public funding, Horace Mann spent about an extra $1,600 for each student.2 Those dollars—equivalent to 9 percent of the District of Columbia’s average per-pupil spending3—paid for new art and music teachers and classroom aides to allow for small group instruction.4 During the same school year, the parent-teacher association, or PTA, raised another $100,000 in parent donations and collected over $200,000 in membership dues, which it used for similar initiatives in future years.5 Not surprisingly, Horace Mann is one of the most affluent schools in the city, with only 6 percent of students coming from low-income families.6

Horace Mann is not unique. Throughout Washington, D.C., and around the country, parents are raising hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars to provide additional programs, services, and staff to some of their districts’ least needy schools.7 They are investing more money than ever before: A recent study showed that, nationally, PTAs’ revenues have almost tripled since the mid-1990s, reaching over $425 million in 2010.8 PTAs provide a small but growing slice of the funding for the nation’s public education system. While the millions of dollars parents raise is equivalent to less than 1 percent of total school spending, the concentration of these dollars in affluent schools results in considerable advantages for a small portion of already advantaged students.9
This situation risks deepening school funding disparities, which already exacerbate inequities. In many states, state and local funds allocate more money to affluent districts and schools than neighboring districts and schools that have higher rates of poverty. According to a U.S. Department of Education report based on 2008-09 data, 40 percent of schools that received Title I money received significantly less state and local money than non-Title I schools.10 Twenty-three states spent more on affluent districts than high-poverty districts. In Pennsylvania, for example, the districts with the highest levels of poverty received 33 percent less state and local funding for education than affluent districts.11

Federal funding goes a long way to compensate for these discrepancies. When considering federal, state, and local spending, nationwide, the highest-poverty districts spend about the same amount—only 2 percent less—per student as the most affluent districts.12 In the majority of states, per-pupil spending in high-poverty districts is about equal or more than per-pupil spending in affluent districts.13
These numbers, however, do not illustrate the full picture of funding discrepancies. Average district per-pupil spending does not always capture staffing and funding inequities.14 Many districts do not consider actual teacher salaries when budgeting for and reporting each school’s expenditures, and the highest-poverty schools are often staffed by less-experienced teachers who typically earn lower salaries.15 Because educator salaries are, by far, schools’ largest budget item, schools serving the poorest children end up spending much less on what matters most for their students’ learning.

Damon Hewitt:

If the administration is truly committed to admitting black and Latino students who deserve to be in specialized high schools, it must find the courage to disrupt the status quo and ask the harder questions. For example, why not ask how the schools could do a better job — not of expanding or improving the applicant pool, but of recognizing the talent we know exists among black and Latino students? What if the school district (still under significant mayoral control) and the State Legislature (which mandates a test-only policy for three of the schools) started from scratch to create an admissions process that rewards those who do well in middle school? What if school officials and the public actually believed there are many talented black and Latino students who can succeed in an elite setting? What if they were willing to create a process that recognized their merit?

These are the big questions. Asking these types of questions will help to shift the false, prevailing narrative that only a few black and Latino students are good enough for the city’s best high schools. It will help New Yorkers get to some real solutions and a fairer process — not only for those students, but for everyone.

KC Johnson:

Over the last few years, we have become all but immune to what, under any other circumstances, would be a fantastic claim—that one in five female undergraduates will be victims of sexual assault. This rate would translate to several hundreds of thousands of violent crime victims (with almost all of the incidents unnoticed) annually, and, as Emily Yoffe has pointed out, implies that about the same percentage of female college students are sexually assaulted as women in the Congo where rape was used as a war crime in the nation’s civil war.

Even within this environment of pie-in-the-sky statistics, a recent survey from Duke stands out. According to the survey, 40 percent of Duke’s female undergraduates (and 10 percent of Duke’s male undergraduates) describe themselves as victims of sexual assault. This data would mean that each year, a female undergraduate at Duke is 5.5 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than a resident of St. Louis, which FBI statistics listed as the nation’s most dangerous city in 2016. And yet, incredibly, parents still spend around $280,000 to send their daughters into this den of crime for four years.

Mike Mullen:

As detailed in a report from Tony Webster earlier this week, a Hennepin County judge has granted the Edina Police Department an extraordinary degree of access to citizens’ Google history, as cops attempt to crack the case of an attempted wire transfer fraud.

In specific, police want to know who has searched for a particular name used as part of that fraud. Typed into Google, a search for the same name — “Douglas” something, according to a warrant — also turns up photos that were used on a fake passport by the criminal, who was seeking a fraudulent wire transfer of $28,500.

Cops figure if they could just find out who in that affluent suburb has Googled that name, they’d narrow their suspect list right down. Of course, people’s Google search history not only isn’t public, it’s not usually available to local cops trying to bust a small-time swindler.

Peter Nickeas:

Snow reflected light from dirty yellow streetlamps, casting an industrial glow over the neighborhood. The sky was an eerie shade of lavender. A police officer wanted to know who I was, then told me I’d get a better picture of the body if I circled back through the alley to the other side of the crime scene. The cops said a man had been shot after stepping on someone’s shoe at a house party. A murder over nothing, almost too petty to be believed.

I didn’t know the body would still be there. I didn’t know the police would be OK with me being there. I didn’t know what to do when the family showed up—the dead man’s son was there. I didn’t know how to talk to them. This was only my second murder scene in the city. Being out in the night was still new, and I carried an anxiety in my stomach wherever I went.

I tried to make myself invisible, but I was the only white person outside the police tape. As family members started walking away, I stopped a few of them and handed out my card, in case they wanted to talk. (They didn’t.)

Wang Lianzhang:

Foreign shoes were given the boot at a secondary school in eastern China in an effort to cure students of their sneaker fever.

According to a February post on Hupu.com, a popular internet forum on sports, a teacher told parents in a group chat message that students would only be allowed to wear domestic shoe brands.

“If we find any student still wearing imported shoes, parents should send domestic shoes to the school for them to change into,” the teacher from privately owned Zijiang Middle School in Jinjiang, a city in Fujian province, reportedly wrote. The regulation was implemented to put a stop to the trend of “invidious comparisons of luxury goods.”

“Some students aren’t competing in their studies but instead are competing for footwear, and they ask their parents to buy expensive imported shoes,” the teacher wrote, adding that the phenomenon ran contrary to the secondary school students’ “austere and healthy image.”

Jason McGahan:

A reported 81 cents of every dollar contributed to the L.A. city election has been spent on supporting or opposing one candidate or another for school board, according to the L.A. City Ethics Commission. Most of it is coming from backers of public charter schools. So far this year, charter backers are outspending labor unions there by a ratio of 2-to-1.

Former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan upped the ante by donating $1 million in January to a group called L.A. Students for Change, which opposes the re-election of school board president Steve Zimmer in District 4, covering the Westside and west San Fernando Valley. The group is one of a few connected to the California Charter Schools Association.

The CCSA and its financial backers have spared no expense in targeting Zimmer, who has shown increasing support for more stringent fiscal and operational oversight of charters. As of Feb. 20, more than $1.2 million from charter-backed groups has gone to opposing Zimmer.

Stephanie Farr and Sam Wood:

But pressure is mounting from a confluence of political, societal, and economic forces to finally clean up this gulch of horrors for good.

From a task force convened by the mayor to address the city’s opioid epidemic, to growing development around the site, and an increase in rail traffic, a flash point seems to have been reached.

“This neighborhood has been struggling for decades, and when my administration came into office last year, we said this has to stop,” said Mayor Kenney. “It’s not an easy issue, it’s going to take many years and a ton of money, so that may have been why it hasn’t been addressed in the past – but that’s not an excuse.”

Thomas Fuller:

In a compact studio apartment on the fringes of the Castro district here a young couple live with their demanding 7-year-old, whom they dote on and take everywhere: a Scottish terrier named Olive.

Raising children is on the agenda for Daisy Yeung, a high school science teacher, and Slin Lee, a software engineer. But just not in San Francisco.

“When we imagine having kids, we think of somewhere else,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s starting to feel like a no-kids type of city.”

A few generations ago, before the technology boom transformed San Francisco and sent housing costs soaring, the city was alive with children and families. Today it has the lowest percentage of children of any of the largest 100 cities in America, according to census data, causing some here to raise an alarm.

Erin Hinrichs:

When Rashad Turner stepped down from his leadership role with Black Lives Matter in the city of St. Paul in early September, he pinned his decision on a single point of contention: National leadership of both BLM and the NAACP had recently called for a moratorium on charter schools, a move that he, fundamentally, didn’t agree with.

A strong supporter of charter schools and education reform, he told media he felt the movement had been “hijacked.” He could no longer be affiliated with a cause, he explained, that was prioritizing an attack on charters — many of which are successfully serving marginalized students — over an attack on the root causes of the achievement gap, such as the disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions of children of color in local schools.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

1. Most MMSD schools are not over capacity. One elementary school and no middle or high schools had a Third Friday enrollment above their calculated capacity as currently configured.

2. Eighteen of the 32 elementary schools, three of the 12 middle schools, and one of the five high schools had a Third Friday enrollment above the ideal 90% of capacity.

A recent tax and spending increase referendum funded the expansion of our least diverse schools: Van His elementary and Hamilton Middle Schools.

Enrollment projections (PDF).

Monica Disare

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

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

Darrell Etherington:

Sebastian Thrun’s online education startup Udacity recently created a self-driving car engineering nanodegree, and on stage at Disrupt today Thrun revealed that the company intends to build its own self-driving car as part of the program, and that it also intends to open source the technology that results, so that “anyone” can try to build their own self-driving vehicle, according to Thrun.

Megan McArdle:

Venezuela seems to be hovering on the edge of tipping into hyperinflation. Or perhaps it has already fallen into the abyss. Given the paucity of official data — the none-too-believable official figures were last published in February — it’s a little hard to tell. The best guess we have at the value of a Venezuelan bolivar comes from the Colombian village of Cucuta, where people go to buy currency so they can smuggle subsidized fuel and other price-controlled goods out of Venezuela. As The Economist notes: “Transactions are few; the dollar rate is calculated indirectly, from the value of the Colombian peso. The result is erratic, but more realistic than the three official rates.”

Using those rates, economist Steve Hanke recently told Bloomberg that annual cost-of-living increases are running at about 722 percent. To put that in some perspective, it means that a $400 monthly grocery bill would climb to $2,888 in a year. That may not approach the legendary status of Hungary’s postwar inflation, which reached 41.9 quadrillion percent in a single month, but it’s devastating for savers, or for people like pensioners whose incomes consist of fixed payments. It’s also pretty bad for the economy.

Related: US Debt Clock.

Kyrie O’Connor:

Buying a 3-D printer was out of the question, of course. “Our next option was to find somebody who had one,” she said.

This is where the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library, and its staff members Jim Johnson and Patrick Ferrell, came in.

Ferrell manages the Maker Space at the library, part of the Harris County Public Library system, which is a workshop area where patrons can use laser cutters and 3-D printers and the like. It’s the only such library space in Southeast Texas. “It’s just another way libraries can offer new services,” Ferrell said. They see everyone from astronauts to artists to schoolchildren come in to use the equipment.
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An artist’s rendering of NoLo Studios, a residential development planned for artists in Acres Homes.
Race, gentrification, Houston and the de Menil legacy
1973: COLLEGE STATION, TX – JUNE 10: Driver Bobby Allison holds up a confederate flag with Miss Winston, Noneen Hulbert, before the Alamo 500 race at the Texas World Speedway in College Station, Texas. (Photo by Dozier Mobley/Getty Images)
White-trash pride: Working-class whites are having a moment
You know those blue, white and green flags with a tree you’ve been seeing at soccer games? That’d be Cascadia. (The regional MLS championship is the Cascadia Cup and uses the “Doug” flag, hence the confusion.) Depending on who is talking, this secession scheme would have British Columbia, Washington and Oregon as well as bits of the surrounding states and provinces break away to form a Pacific Northwest republic. Note: An earlier version of this item included a photo of Seattle Sounders fans holding the Cascadia Cup. My sincere apologies to those who were offended by being associated with the secessionist movement. Those who corrected me have my thanks. – Levi Pulkkinen, seattlepi.com
Secession: It’s not just a Texas thing
In this composite photo, Renan Brandao, a store manager for two Mattress Firm stores on Rice Boulevard, looks for things to do, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016, in Houston.
The loneliness of the mattress salesman
ZIP code: 77028 Births: 3,357
Unzipped: Shrinking in 77028

But Katelyn’s hand was different.

Ferrell and his team of volunteers had never made anything like it.

The Vincik family drove the two-plus hours to Clear Lake to make sure the hand would be measured and scaled correctly.

“We had to do a lot of analyzing,” said Ferrell.

Xeni Jardin:

A report out this week from Bloomberg says that since January, 2016, people in the city of Baltimore, Maryland have secretly and periodically been spied on by police using cameras in the sky. Authorities today effectively admitted that the report is accurate.

In response to Tuesday’s Bloomberg article, Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith today said not to worry unless you’re a “criminal,” and that the flights by a specially equipped spy plane were “effectively, a mobile citywide camera.”

In a feature released on Tuesday, Bloomberg Businesweek reported that police in the mostly black city used a Cessna airplane carrying an ultra-wide-angle camera array developed for use during the Iraq War. The police surveillance flights spent hours flying overhead, sending footage back to massive hard drives.

Monte Reel’s report for Bloomberg begins outside the Baltimore courthouse where ‘not guilty, all counts’ messages were popping up on reporters’ phones, in the Freddie Gray death by police case.

Paul Jossey:

But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned—all that was left were the PACs and their lists.

***

Any postmortem should start with the fact that there were always two Tea Parties. First were people who believe in constitutional conservatism. These folks sense the country they will leave their children and grandchildren is a shell of what they inherited. And they have little confidence the Republican Party can muster the courage or will to fix it.

Second were lawyers and consultants who read 2009’s political winds and saw a chance to get rich.

For 18 months ending in 2013, I worked for one of these consultants, Dan Backer, who has served as treasurer for dozens of PACs, many now defunct, through his law and consulting firm. I thus benefited from the Tea Party’s fleecing.

The PACs seem to operate through a familiar model. It works something like this: Prospects whose name appear on a vendor’s list get a phone call, email or glossy mailer from a group they’ve likely never heard of asking them for money. Conservative pundit and Redstate.com Editor-in-Chief Erick Erickson described one such encounter. A woman called and asked if she could play a taped message touting efforts to help Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz fight for conservative governance. When the recording stopped an older man (the woman was gone) offered Erickson the chance to join “the Tea Party.” He wouldn’t say who paid him, just “the Tea Party.” Membership was even half price. For just $100 he was in! Erickson declined.

Erickson’s call came from InfoCision or a similar vendor hired by PACs to “prospect” for new donors. Often PAC creators have financial interests in the vendors—in fact, sometimes they are the vendors, too—which makes keeping money in house easier, and harder to track. PAC names include “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” “Freedom,” or some other emotive term to assure benevolence. And names and images of political figures the prospects admire (or detest), usually accompany the solicitation, giving the illusion of imprimatur. Those people are almost never actually involved and little money ends up supporting candidates.

According to Federal Election Commission reports between 80 to 90 percent, and sometimes all the money these PACs get is swallowed in fees and poured into more prospecting. For example, conservative activist Larry Ward created Constitutional Rights PAC. He also runs Political Media, a communications firm. The New York Times reviewed Constitutional Rights’ filings and found: “Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising—making no donations to candidates.” Ward justified the arrangement by saying Political Media discounts solicitations on behalf of Constitutional Rights.

Let that sink in. Ward takes his PAC’s money and redistributes it to his company and other vendors for more messaging and solicitations, but suggests critics should rest easy since the PAC gets a discount on Political Media’s normal rate. Constitutional Rights PAC may be extreme but it’s hardly an outlier.

Patrick Wall:

By allowing veteran principals to take on new challenges without abandoning their longtime schools, the split role has drawn effective leaders into buildings that need them. Where those principals have simply become mentors to other educators, weaker schools seem to be revitalized and stronger schools have not been impaired.

But experts remain wary of cases like Wiltshire’s, where one principal oversees two schools. The principals who are trying to make that arrangement work have generally handed off their original school to a deputy—but even then, playing double duty can be punishing. “This is like running a city and running a village,” said Connie Hamilton, the founder of a successful small school who was brought in to stabilize a large Brooklyn school. “I’m exhausted.”

Mike Newall:

The one that has moved in for a few days – the media, the delegates, the protesters of all the stripes – and the one we live in every day. The one of contradiction and divide. The one with a downtown bursting with new growth and neighborhoods plagued by the highest poverty rate of any big city in the nation.

The one where working men like Henry and Jones sit on a bench in a Center City that is becoming shinier by the day and talk about the neighborhoods where they live. Neighborhoods just a few miles away that might as well be a universe away. Neighborhoods plagued by poverty and hunger – the types of issues that have not garnered nearly enough attention during this bizarre and frightening election.

God help us all if Donald Trump wins. But how is it that two nights into a Democratic National Convention held in a city where one out of four people lives in poverty, where one of five children goes without enough food, where 700 people sleep on the streets each night, the words hunger or homelessness have barely been mentioned from the lectern, if at all?

When the circus leaves, we will remain, as will our problems.

It was a point not lost on David Brown. He sighed as he watched the protesters, wishing the crowds were clamoring for something else: the end of homelessness.

I know David, having written about him. For more than 20 years, he slept on benches on the Parkway or inside refrigerator boxes in a lot next to the Free Library. Three years ago, he finally accepted a Project HOME outreach worker’s plea to come inside. Now he lives in an apartment and manages a boutique.

Having seen enough, Brown left the protests and walked to the library, passing the benches where he once slept.

At the Free Library on Tuesday, Project HOME was holding its own DNC event, “Stories From the Margins.”

Madison School District PDF:

Executive Summary:

As part of its long-range facility planning efforts, MMSD requires a refined approach for predicting enrollment arising from new development and changes in enrollment within existing developed areas. As urban development approaches the outer edges of the District’s boundary, and as redevelopment becomes an increasingly important source of new housing, these issues are critical.

Study Approach

The study period examined MMSD enrollment through the 2036-2037 school year in five-year segments. The projection model applied current MMSD student enrollment rates to 26 specific residential building forms, ranging from single-family homes to downtown redevelopment mixed-use buildings. Using these “residential typologies”, future development was mapped on more than 300 redevelopment locations and more than 2,000 greenfield locations on the periphery of the District.

Development locations, typologies, and timing were confirmed by planning department staff in Madison and Fitchburg. The model also factored in the continued decline in students per household at a rate of about 1% for every five-year period, consistent with official projections. Three Scenarios were examined, varying by the pace of development. Scenario 3, based on an extrapolation of population growth in MMSD, between 2010 and 2015, was identified as most likely.

Key Findings
1. District Territory is Approaching Build-Out by 2040
Under the selected scenario, by the year 2040, all the developable lands in MMSD’s territory (including the transferring areas from the Middleton-Cross Plains and Verona Area School Districts) are likely to be fully developed. After that point in time, all future changes in land use will occur solely through redevelopment. The economics of redevelopment require greater densities, resulting in a larger proportion of apartments – which have lower student generation rates. As a result, MMSD enrollment is likely to decline after greenfield build-out. If current household size trends hold constant, the resulting rate of enrollment decline will be about 1% for every five years following build-out in about 2040.

and

MMSD “Leavers” and “Enterers” are a Significant Enrollment Factor.
Challenge:

District leavers include students living in the MMSD territory who choose to attend non-MMSD schools. These include students choosing open enrollment at other public schools, and students attending private and non-MMSD charter schools.

Overall net open enrollment patterns show more students living in the MMSD area choosing open enrollment in other districts, than students living in other districts choosing open enrollment in MMSD. In the fall of 2015, the net loss of 999 students was a result of 316 entering students and 1,315 leaving students. This is about 4% of MMSD’s total enrollment.

Many factors are involved in open enrollment decisions, including the availability of space in other districts. The Monona Grove School District (MGSD) is the most popular destination of students leaving MMSD through open enrollment. Several MGSD schools are at capacity, and MGSD staff has indicated that they maintain full capacity by adjusting the number of open enrollment attendees. Other important considerations, cited by studies and MMSD staff, include the proximity of other schools, the condition and range of school facilities, and resulting travel distances and routes.

This study estimates that about 2,000 resident students are enrolled in private schools in the region – which represents about 9% of MMSD’s total enrollment. This estimate is based on the difference between the 2014 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates within the MMSD area for the total number of children of K-12 age enrolled in schools of any kind, the estimated number of resident students electing open enrollment outside of MMSD, and actual MMSD enrollment.

7.Key Trends:

MMSD net “Leavers” comprise about 3,000 school age children residing within MMSD territory.

Reduced capacity in many schools in adjacent districts, reflecting strong suburban population growth, is becoming a more frequent limiting factor on MMSD leavers being accepted through open enrollment in other school districts.

Rapidly evolving options, particularly for charter schools and distance learning, make projecting future enrollment changes through net leavers very difficult.

Key Assumption:
1. MMSD net “leavers” will be consistent with their current levels – about 3,000.

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Joe Siedlecki:

Portfolio strategy ≠ charter school growth strategy

Far too often, we run into situations where stakeholders believe a portfolio strategy is nothing more than a charter school growth strategy. We encourage city leaders to think beyond the obvious. While we ultimately aim for a system of autonomous and accountable schools, we know there may be more than one path to get there.

Nikkole Hannah-Jones:

I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district’s voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us. Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to the “best” public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.

Madison is expanding its least diverse school….

Patrick Wall:

Wiltshire has openly questioned a core tenet of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature school-improvement program: that each struggling school must partner with a nonprofit, which is tasked with helping treat students’ social and emotional needs. After repeatedly clashing with Wiltshire, Boys and Girls’ partner organization informed him this week that it will no longer work with the school after this year.
In addition, Wiltshire’s controversial plan to move his former school, the high-performing Medgar Evers College Preparatory School, into Boys and Girls’ Bedford-Stuyvesant campus has caused a headache for the city. The proposal stoked suspicions at Boys and Girls that Wiltshire arrived at his new job with ulterior motives, even as Medgar Evers parents voiced concerns about the move. Still, the city went along with Wiltshire, turning his plan into an official co-location proposal — one whose future is now in doubt after a Medgar Evers leadership team officially rejected the move on Friday.

Laura Waters:

ew Jersey may be the Garden State, but don’t think you’ll find any country bumpkins in Newark, the state’s largest city with a school district that enrolls 44,000 children. Every Newarkian knows that mayors, city councilmen, and ward operators control municipal elections, including the three seats up this year for the nine-member School Advisory Board (SAB). Consequently, voter-turnout rates on school board candidate election days typically hover at a sparse 7 percent; residents know it’s not their vote that truly matters.

But the April 19th school board election three weeks ago was different because “an army of charter parents” found their voice — and started speaking as one.

Motoko Rich, Amanda Cox and Matthew Bloch:

Why racial achievement gaps were so pronounced in affluent school districts is a puzzling question raised by the data. Part of the answer might be that in such communities, students and parents from wealthier families are constantly competing for ever more academic success. As parents hire tutors, enroll their children in robotics classes and push them to solve obscure math theorems, those children keep pulling away from those who can’t afford the enrichment.

“Our high-end students who are coming in are scoring off the charts,” said Jeff Nash, executive director of community relations for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

The school system is near the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina, and 30 percent of students in the schools qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, below the national average.

The wealthier students tend to come from families where, “let’s face it, both the parents are Ph.D.s, and that kid, no matter what happens in the school, is pressured from kindergarten to succeed,” Mr. Nash said. “So even though our minority students are outscoring minority students in other districts near us, there is still a bigger gap here because of that.”

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

Paul Hill:

More and more cities are trying community schools, which wrap health, dental, therapeutic, and family support services around existing schools to try to mitigate the effects of poverty and thereby improve students’ learning and life prospects. This idea is not new; its modern incarnation started in Cincinnati in the early 2000s and has now spread to New York City and Philadelphia.

MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.

Lauren Camera:

Flint, Michigan, Democratic presidential candidates were asked what they’d do to turn around financially flailing and academically failing school systems, like that of nearby Detroit.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders blamed congressional inaction and front-runner Hillary Clinton said she would create a “SWAT team” at the Department of Education and reinstate a federal program to assist states and districts with funding to repair and modernize schools.

The list of big-city school districts around the country that are broke or well on their way to being in the red is growing. But the real reasons behind their dire financial straits weren’t mentioned by either candidate.

A recent k-12 spending report.

Ellen Wexler:

Soon after Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2017, the protests began at New York City’s public colleges.

Nearly 500 students and faculty members traveled to Albany two weeks ago to attend a rally, and another group returned Tuesday to meet with legislators. Last week, the University Student Senate held a press conference on the steps of City Hall.

Why are you targeting our colleges? they asked. Do you know how much the higher education system matters to our city?

For decades, the state has paid for most of the operating funds of the City University of New York’s four-year colleges and universities, much like it does for campuses of the State University of New York (though CUNY’s community colleges do receive city funds). But in January, Cuomo announced his plan to reduce state funding by $485 million. On Thursday, the New York State Assembly rejected the plan in its one-house budget, which proposes restoring the $485 million and freezing tuition for two years. But the matter is far from resolved.

Noah Smith:

The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various U.S. states, and see whether the ones that spend more on education enjoy better outcomes. This has been done many times, with decidedly mixed results. Some studies show little state-by-state correlation between spending levels and educational performance, while others show a fairly substantial one.

The second case against increased spending comes from looking at correlations across time. If more money is better, we’d expect to see increases in school funding followed by improvements in performance. In fact, though public school spending has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, achievement hasn’t really increased much.

So with mixed evidence from state-by-state analysis and discouraging evidence from the history of spending increases, many people are ready to conclude that throwing more money at education is a losing battle. Some spending opponents place their hopes in charter schools and other reform efforts, while others claim that education just doesn’t work — that academic ability is either innate or learned from an early age.

Kansas City dramatically increased spending years ago, and……

Daniel Dale

—On weekday afternoons, Gaulien “Gee” Smith, a prominent Milwaukee barber and businessman, walks out of the Gee’s Clippers shop on North Doctor Martin Luther King Dr., steps into his shiny new limited-edition pickup truck, and begins the 20-minute drive to a parallel universe.

He heads north. Past vacant lots and vacant storefronts. Past the boundary of the city’s north side, where almost all of his customers and almost everybody else is black. He crosses into the suburb of Glendale. The stares begin.

Glendale is home to an Apple Store and a Brooks Brothers and a Swarovski. And white people. A whole lot of white people. Smith, a charismatic 45-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, doesn’t need the probing eyes as a reminder.

The white people are why he’s there in the first place.

Smith makes the trip across the invisible race border to pick up two of his sons, one from a private school and one from an elite public school. He chose the schools, in part, for their whiteness.

Laura Waters:

Here’s the problem, Madam Secretary: The nature of teacher union contracts — rigid and prescriptive — is what typically precludes wider adoption of successful charter school innovations. While Clinton’s recitation of teacher union scripture may win her endorsements, it won’t win any votes from parents of New York City’s 95,000 charter school students, most of whom are Latino and black, nor will it win her the votes of the parents of another 50,000 city students who sit on charter school waiting lists, nor the the support of the parents of three million students who attend charter schools nationwide.

Can we blame them? The most recent CREDO study out of Stanford notes that New York City’s charter schools “stand out for providing positive gains for their students in both math and reading and serving a student body with achievement equal or higher than the average achievement within the state,” including black and Hispanic students, those from high-poverty backgrounds and those with disabilities.

Let’s take one simple example of the way in which teacher contracts forestall realistic implementation of innovative approaches to learning. While typical New York City school students attend school for a contractually-prescribed 178 days, 6 hours and 20 minutes per day, public charter schools are free to extend both the length of the school day and the length of the school year. Many N.Y.C. charter school students attend school for between 190 to 200 days per year, and about eight hours a day.

Caroline Bermudez:

In a city with the greatest economic inequity in the country and with a rapidly expanding charter school now serving nearly half of the city’s students, D.C. is one of the few traditional public school districts in the country with enrollment gains and is on track to exceed 50,000 students by 2017. Much of the credit goes to Henderson’s leadership.

STRONG LEADERSHIP
Henderson’s relentless energy and boundless public praise in support of her teachers and principals has created positive morale and considerable buy-in among classroom educators to what is one of the most ambitious reform agendas in the country.

She has also maintained labor peace even while driving an aggressive teacher quality agenda that links evaluation and compensation in part to student growth, something few other urban superintendents can claim.

Madison rejected a proposed IB charter school several years ago.

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

Michael DeArmond:

We recently released a report that looked at nine indicators to measure educational improvement and opportunity in 50 cities across America. Despite a few bright spots, the results paint a sobering picture of the state of urban public education today, especially for students from low-income households and students of color.

With few exceptions, students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and students of color in the 50 cities were less likely than more advantaged students to enroll in a high-scoring elementary and middle school, take advanced math classes in high school, and sit for the ACT/SAT. Equally important, the odds of a student being in a supercharged school where these education gaps might be wiped out were slim: overall, only about 8 percent of all students in the 50 cities enrolled in a school that “beat the odds” and outpaced demographically similar schools statewide. How can city leaders address these problems? Although the report can’t provide any answers, it offers some clues.

mosaic:

When Velveth Monterroso arrived in the USA from her hometown in Guatemala, she weighed exactly 10 stone. But after a decade of living in Oklahoma, she was more than five stone heavier and fighting diabetes at the age of 34. This friendly woman, a mother of two children, is a living embodiment of the obesity culture cursing the world’s wealthiest country. “In Guatemala it is rare to see people who are very overweight, but it could not be more different here,” she said. “I saw this when I came here.”

As soon as she arrived in the USA she started piling on pounds – an average of half a stone each year. In Guatemala she ate lots of vegetables because meat was expensive. But working from eight in the morning until eleven at night as a cook in an Oklahoma City diner, she would skip breakfast and lunch while snacking all day on bits of burger and pizza. Driving home she would often resort to fast food because she was hungry and exhausted after a 15-hour day slaving over a hot grill. If she and her husband Diego – also a cook – made it back without stopping, they would often gorge on whatever was available rather than wait to cook a decent meal.

Melinda Anderson:

Sitting on the campus of a historically black college in July, Baltimore teen Scott Thompson II was in his comfort zone. In a stroke of luck and good timing, Scott’s mom, Myeisha Thompson, had been able to enroll the 13-year-old in the Maya-Baraka Writers Institute, a five-week intensive summer writing camp hosted by the college for the city’s youth. Infused with the spirit of the Institute’s namesakes—Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka, two socially and racially-conscious black storytellers—Scott set out to write a verse expressing his take on school systems and police departments that only see young, black males as problems.

Cat Zakrrzewski:

Online computer programming educator Udacity announced on Monday it would expand on the ground in India, the country where the service is growing the fastest.

Udacity’s free and nanodegree services are available worldwide, but with Monday’s announcement, the company will begin accepting rupees for the service and expanding its staff in the country. Nanodegrees are credentials recognized by many companies, such as Google and Salesforce.

Courses will cost 9,800 rupees a month, which is about $50 less than the price in the United States of $200 per month.

“Udacity’s mission is to democratize education, and India is one of the world’s fastest growing economies,” said Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun in an interview with TechCrunch.

Google and Tata Trust will each offer 500 full Android nanodegree scholarships to students in India. Google will also host a job fair in India for standout nanodegree graduates and potential employers next year. Udacity said it is seeking to increase partnerships with more companies based in India.

Farhad Manjoo:

I’m the least experienced person on my engineering team at Google,” Kelly Marchisio, a 25-year-old computer programmer, told me recently. “I frankly might be one of the least experienced engineers at Google, period.”

Ms. Marchisio was not assuming false modesty. Like many Googlers, she has an enviable academic background, including a master’s degree from Harvard. But her degree, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, had to do with the interactions between neuroscience and teaching, a field far removed from software engineering. In 2013, Google hired Ms. Marchisio as a customer service representative, a job that paid the bills but failed to ignite her intellectual passions.

Medievalists:

A recent poll in Canada revealed that 51 per cent of post-secondary students had asked their parents for additional financial support last year because they ran out of money. This news prompted experts to comment on how necessary it was to teach students “the importance of balancing a budget.” However, the idea that students were asking their parents for money is not a new phenomenon – it began soon after the emergence of universities in medieval Europe. As one medieval Italian father puts its, “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.”

Here is a typical example from the 1220s:
B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres and Bacchus Apollo grows cold.

Samantha Winslow, Alexandra Bradbury

Washington teachers waged rolling one-day strikes calling attention to decades of underfunding. Photo: WEA.

Lawmakers in Washington state are scrambling to get ready for a special session after the state’s highest court announced it will start charging a penalty of $100,000 per day while legislators continue illegally underfunding the public schools.

The court’s move comes on the heels of one-day strikes that rolled across the state this spring. Half the members of the Washington Education Association (WEA), in some 65 school districts covering 40,000 teachers, walked out—including on the state’s conservative side, east of the mountains.

The state’s attorney general claims teacher strikes are illegal, but that didn’t stop the teachers.

Picket signs read, “On Strike against Legislature,” highlighting that this strike was against the state government, not the school districts. In fact, some districts announced their support.

Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment.

Brentin Mock:

Referring to New Orleans as anything like a “laboratory” during the first weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters receded would have been a bad move. As displaced residents trickled back into the city, they were first and foremost seeking help with piecing their old lives back together: How were they going to pay for a new roof? Where could they find their displaced aunts and nephews? How would they soothe their traumatized children back to sleep during rainstorms? Any conversation about “experimentation” wasn’t going to fly with already rattled residents.

And yet, public hypothesizing about a “new” New Orleans began nearly immediately. James Reiss, an avatar of Uptown wealth and chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, helicoptered back into New Orleans after the floods to declare, “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”

Megan McArdle:

The problem was that the money he was using was, essentially, the nation’s seed corn. Venezuelan crude oil is relatively expensive to extract and refine and required a high level of investment just to keep production level. As long as oil prices were booming, this policy wasn’t too costly because the increase offset production losses. But this suffered from the same acceleration problem that we discussed earlier: The more production fell, the more the country needed prices to rise to offset it. Between 1996 and 2001, Venezuela was producing more than 3 million barrels a day. It is now producing about 2.7 million barrels a day. In real terms, the price of a barrel of oil is barely higher than it was in August 2000, but Venezuela is producing something like 700,000 fewer barrels each day. Policies that looked great on the way up — more revenue and more social spending — became disastrous on the way down as the population was hit with the double whammy of lower production and lower prices.

This was predictable. Indeed, many people predicted it, including me, though I was just channeling smarter and better-informed people, not displaying any particular sagacity. But the Venezuelan government either didn’t listen to the predictions or didn’t believe them. Now falling oil prices are crushing government revenues at exactly the time the country most needs money to help the people who are suffering great misery as the oil cash drains out of their economy. In the beginning, printing money may have looked like the best of a lot of bad options. By the time it became clear that the country was not fudging its way out of a temporary hole, but making a bad situation worse, it was committed to a course that is extremely painful to reverse.

Matthew Hennessey:

For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of what we were going to do—it was what we weren’t going to do,” she says. In the end, the Wades opted to homeschool. “Homeschooling is in some ways the easiest option. We’re driving our children’s education. We’re giving up a lot to do it, but in the end we thought it would make us most satisfied.”

At first, the Wades knew no other homeschoolers, and, like many young parents in the city, they had no family nearby, so they prepared themselves to go it alone. Before too long, however, they found a growing network of urban homeschoolers. “In a city like this, you can find your tribe,” says Wade. “You can find your homeschoolers. And there are a lot of us.”

Not so long ago, homeschooling was considered a radical educational alternative—the province of a small number of devout Iowa evangelicals and countercultural Mendocino hippies. No more. Today, as many as 2 million—or 2.5 percent—of the nation’s 77 million school-age children are educated at home, and increasing numbers of them live in cities. More urban parents are turning their backs on the compulsory-education model and embracing the interactive, online educational future that policy entrepreneurs have predicted for years would revolutionize pedagogy and transform brick-and-mortar schooling. And their kids are not only keeping pace with their traditionally schooled peers; they are also, in many cases, doing better, getting into top-ranked colleges and graduating at higher rates. In cities across the country, homeschooling is becoming just one educational option among many.

Michelle Hackman & Mark Peters:

The death of a 7-year-old boy during another Fourth of July weekend marred by multiple murders and dozens of shootings here is bringing renewed attention to the difficulty of curbing street violence in the nation’s third-largest city.

Amari Brown was shot shortly before midnight on July 4 as he watched fireworks on Chicago’s West Side, one of seven homicides and 34 shooting incidents here from Friday evening through Sunday, according to city officials.

His family is preparing for the funeral of a boy who they say loved cars and candy and would have started second grade this fall, while police say they suspect that his father’s alleged gang ties may have been a factor in the shooting.

“Something good’s got to come out of Amari dying on the street like a dog,” said Vedia Hailey, the boy’s maternal grandmother.

Jay Altman, via a kind Deb Britt email:

In addition to nurturing our character, early working experiences, including internships, help young people explore career interests and learn about different professions. This career education dimension can play a critical transitional role for young people who are not planning on attending college immediately after graduation. For those who are planning to go on to college, these internships can help provide purpose and direction that will aid college persistence later on.

Young people who have access to a wide range of experiences have a tremendous advantage over those who have a very narrow range of opportunities during their youth. Let’s give the youth of New Orleans that advantage.

What would it take to turn this vision of jobs for learning into a reality? Commitment from people in the city to partner with schools and parents in supporting the development of high school students. We have much more work to do to continue improving the academic programs in our schools, but our schools alone cannot provide the range of opportunities for learning that we should aspire to for our young people. Like-minded people across the city can partner with schools by providing these work and service experiences. The more businesses and organizations contribute to such a partnership, the greater the range of experiences that can be offered and the more young people who can

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.

Yevgeny Feyman, via a kind reader:

Last year, as part of a contract deal with the teachers’ union, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he and the city’s unions had agreed to cut $3.4 billion in worker health-care costs over four years. Even with these “savings,” though, Gotham’s health-insurance spending is projected to grow 6 percent annually through 2018—totaling a whopping $6.2 billion that year. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, more than 90 percent of city employees are enrolled in plans that require no premium contributions from workers. Most other city governments require employees to pay something toward their health-care costs. In the private sector, such contributions are standard.

The massive cost of paying full freight for nearly half a million employees’ health care is one reason why the city budget will run a $1.4 billion deficit in 2018, according to de Blasio administration projections. Even without the looming Cadillac Tax, the city’s budgetary status quo is unsustainable. Making these expensive benefits even more costly is a recipe for fiscal disaster.

The ACA imposes a 40 percent excise tax on the value of health insurance costing $10,200 or more for individual plans and $27,500 or more for family plans. And because the tax is indexed to the general rate of inflation rather than to faster-growing health-care inflation, it will hit more plans each year. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health estimate that the tax will affect 75 percent of employer-provided plans within a decade of its implementation. It likely won’t take that long for the tax to hit New York’s typical HMO coverage plans for city workers. In 2013, one plan offered to workers cost $6,600 annually for individual coverage. Assuming that these premiums grow at the same rate as overall costs for the city’s health insurance, such a plan would cost over $9,000 annually by 2018. In just a few years, these plans would cross the Cadillac Tax threshold. Who will bear the burden? With no required contributions from city employees, local taxpayers will be on the hook.

Maggie Ginsberg interviews Brandi Grayson:

Can you give an example of what you’ve described as “intent versus impact?”

The Behavior Education Plan that the [Madison Metropolitan] school district came up with. The impact is effed up, in so many words, and that’s because the voices that are most affected weren’t considered. It’s like standing outside of a situation and then coming in and telling people what they ought to do and should be doing, according to your experience and perspective, which is totally disconnected from the people you’re talking to and talking at. In order to come up with solutions that are effective, they have to come from the people who are living in it. When I first heard about this Behavior Education Plan, I immediately knew that it was going to affect our kids negatively. But people sitting on that board thought it was an amazing idea; we’ll stop suspensions, we’ll stop expulsions, we’ll fix the school-to-prison pipeline, which is all bullcrap, because now what’s happening is the impact; the school is putting all these children with emotional and behavioral issues in the same classroom. And because of the lawsuit with all the parents suing for advanced placement classes and resources not being added, they’ve taken all the introduction classes away. They can’t afford it. So then our students who may need general science or pre-algebra no longer have that. So then they take all these students who aren’t prepared for these classes and throw them in algebra, throw them in biology and all together in the same class. And you know it’s very intentional because if you have a population of two percent Blacks at a school of two thousand and all the Black kids are in the same class, that is not something that happens by random. And then you have kids like my daughter, who is prepared for school and can do well in algebra, but she’s distracted because she’s placed in a class with all these kids with IEP issues who, based on the Behavior Education Plan, cannot be removed from the classroom. So what does that do? It adds to the gap.

Speaking of education, you’ve mentioned the critical need to educate young Black kids on their own history.

Our children don’t know what’s happening to them in school, when they are interacting in these systems. Whether it’s the system of education, the justice system, the human services system, the system within their own families—that’s programming them to think they’re inferior. We have to educate our kids so they know what they’re dealing with. In Western history, we’re only taught that our relevance and our being started with slavery, but we know as we look back that that’s a lie. That we are filled with greatness and magnificence and if our children can connect the link between who they are and where they’ve come, then they can discover where they’re going. But with that disconnection, they feel hopeless. They feel despair. They feel like this is all life has to offer them and it’s their fault and there’s no way out. We have to begin to reprogram that narrative at kindergarten on up. We have to teach our children the importance of reading and knowledge and educating yourself and not depending on the education of the system because it’s already biased, based on the very nature of our culture.

Related: Brandi Grayson.

Talented and gifted lawsuit

English 10

High School Redesign

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results. This is the core issue, one that has simmered for decades despite Madison spending double the national average per student.

Ironically, the April, 2015 Madison schools tax increase referendum includes a plan to expand two of the least economically diverse schools:

Van Hise Elementary / Hamilton Middle

Problem: With enrollment numbers on the rise, this combination elementary/middle school exceeded capacity in 2013 and 2014. Because the building is designed for a smaller student enrollment, simply adding classroom space is not a solution.

Proposed Solution: Relocating the library to the center of the building and dividing it into elementary and middle school spaces will free up seven classroom-sized spaces currently used for library activities. Est. Cost: $3,151,730 – View Plan Details.

teachburge

Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers tortured at least 112 African American men and youth. Victims were as young as 13 years old, and at least 26 officers were involved. CPD Detective Jon Burge, the leader of CPD’s Area 2 midnight shift on the South Side of Chicago, appears to have been primarily responsible for introducing the torture techniques, which included electric shock, suffocation, burns, many kinds of beatings, use of cattle prods, use of nooses, mock executions with guns, and genital pain. Burge likely learned the electric shock tactic during his service as a military police sergeant in a Prisoner of War camp during the Vietnam War. The practical goal of the torture was often to produce confessions from suspects that could be used to convict them or others of crimes under the purview of Area 2’s investigatory responsibilities, raising Area 2’s arrest and conviction rates and assisting Burge’s rapid rise through the CPD ranks. The torture was systemic and rooted in deeply held racist beliefs. In fact, Burge and his men referred to the apparently homemade electrical device that they used to shock men with as the “nigger box.” The torture became an “open secret” among both the CPD and the city’s political establishment.

Over the course of decades, torture survivors, their families and local organizers have fought for justice. The City of Chicago has acknowledged the torture, and the UN has called for redress. Yet scores of survivors still suffer from the ongoing impact of the trauma they endured – without compensation, assistance, or recourse.

Adam James Smith:

Yuan Xiaomei, a community supervisor in Kangbashi, China, tears open a cardboard box and hands out brochures and promotional fans to crowd of locals. The fans are emblazoned: “To build a civilised city, we need you. Thank you for your participation.” The residents fan themselves and flip through the brochures. One woman explains to her friend who can’t read: “It’s telling you how you should act in the city. Don’t spit, don’t throw rubbish on the streets, don’t play loud music, don’t drive on the pavement.”

It’s a lot to take in for people who, weeks earlier, were living in remote villages spread across the sparsely populated Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, China.

Fifteen miles away to the south, if you look out from the front entrance of Hao Shiwen’s farmhouse, you can see the tower blocks of Kangbashi looming over an otherwise unusually quiet pastoral landscape. Kangbashi – which became known as China’s “ghost city” when it was first built four years ago – is where Shiwen has been debating whether to move. He must decide whether to follow the path of his previous neighbours, seduced to the city by the government’s generous compensation package, or to stay in his village, now left surreally empty and quiet.

Charles Pierce:

One of my favorite John Wayne movies is Trouble Along the Way, in which the Duke plays Steve Williams, a former major-college football coach reduced by circumstances and scandal to hustling pool and making book to raise his young daughter. Into their lives comes Donna Reed, as a straitlaced social worker who knows offensive line play, and Charles Coburn, as Father Burke, an elderly priest and the rector of St. Anthony’s, a struggling Catholic college1 somewhere in New York City. Donna has come to make sure that the little girl isn’t becoming too damaged living in a bar and grill. Coburn has come to offer Steve a job, and gives him carte blanche to turn the program around. So Steve starts raiding recruits from other colleges, hiring coal miners and returning war veterans, and cutting in the help on the concessions and all the other ancillary revenue. Naturally, the whole thing collapses, but it all collapses in a heartwarming way. Steve stays at St. Anthony’s, Father Burke retires, and it is clearly implied that Donna Reed and the coach soon will be making the ol’ single-wing with each other.