Rich Kremer:

The share of Wisconsin high school students deemed to be college-ready has declined since the 2014-2015 school year according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. While the state leads most others that test 100 percent of high school students, the data also shows significant gaps in college-readiness based on race and economic status.   

The Wisconsin Policy Forum analyzed ACT data collected by the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) since it began requiring all high school juniors to take the ACT.

The report shows that the state’s composite score — an average of all results — fell slightly last school year to 19.6 compared to the average of 19.8 from the 2017-2018 academic year. The state’s composite ACT score during the 2014-2015 school year was 20. Those numbers are important because ACT scores are one of the factors colleges use when deciding which students to admit. For the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire an ACT composite score of 21-26 is recommended students. For UW-Madison an ACT score of 27-32 is recommended.

The Policy Forum notes, however, that the slight decline in the state’s composite score “is masking potentially significant declines within each subject area that are relevant to students’ ‘college readiness.'”

The ACT sets benchmarks to determine a student’s ability to earn passing grades in English, math, reading and science. In each subject, less than 50 percent of students met the goal. The state’s benchmark scores for reading increased slightly during the last school year over numbers from 2017-2018.

Annysa Johnson:

Fewer than half of high school juniors in Wisconsin are considered college-ready in core subjects, based on the latest round of ACT test results, according to a new analysis released Friday by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

And the percentage of students who met that benchmark has declined in every subject but one since the state began requiring the test in the 2014-15 school year, it said.

According to the report, about 48.7% of students who took the ACT last year were deemed college-ready in English, down from 54% in the 2014-15 school year. Math dropped from 36.2% to 29.2%, and science from 31.7% to 31%, after peaking three years earlier.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Additional Madison notes and links.

“As with other standardized tests — including the Wisconsin Forward Exam and the [NAEP] — the ACT data show significant gaps among students along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines.” https://t.co/VaCLMFVP0i

— Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) February 1, 2020

via Yes, they graduated, but can they read?. Madison school district touts graduation rates, but academic proficiency in question.

Shanzeh Ahmad:

The four demands are: end zero-tolerance policies, mandate black history and ethnic studies, hire more black teachers and increase funds for counselors in schools instead of police.

There are several ways school communities can take part in the Week of Action, Hagopian said, such as wearing the Black Lives Matter T-shirt, having a school assembly to talk about injustice in schools, or teaching lessons in classrooms that correspond with the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement. The coalition’s website has additional resources.

Hagopian said the four demands are “structural changes that must be in place” in order to create an equitable system. The goal is to be able to have an understanding across the board that there are different identities that exist in society, he said.

In Wisconsin, 2% of teachers and 5% of principals are African American, while 9% of students are African American, according to a report released in November.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Property Academy IB charter school.

Sean Wilentz:

With much fanfare, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue in August to what it called the 1619 Project. The project’s aim, the magazine announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. “Our democracy’s founding ideals,” its lead essay proclaimed, “were false when they were written.” Our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. Accordingly, the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. From then on, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

The opportunity seized by the 1619 Project is as urgent as it is enormous. For more than two generations, historians have deepened and transformed the study of the centrality of slavery and race to American history and generated a wealth of facts and interpretations. Yet the subject, which connects the past to our current troubled times, remains too little understood by the general public. The 1619 Project proposed to fill that gap with its own interpretation.

To sustain its particular take on an immense subject while also informing a wide readership is a remarkably ambitious goal, imposing, among other responsibilities, a scrupulous regard for factual accuracy. Readers expect nothing less from The New York Times, the project’s sponsor, and they deserve nothing less from an effort as profound in its intentions as the 1619 Project. During the weeks and months after the 1619 Project first appeared, however, historians, publicly and privately, began expressing alarm over serious inaccuracies.

Heather Mac Donald:

On November 27, 2019, Harvard University denied tenure to an ethnic-studies professor specializing in Dominican identity. Students and faculty at Harvard and across the country sprung into protest mode. The failure to tenure Lorgia García Peña, they said, resulted from Harvard’s racism. NBC Nightly News, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other outlets covered the controversy from the same angle.

In fact, García Peña had been catapulted into the academic firmament with a speed that most non-intersectional professors can only dream of. She has been showered with benefits. Thirty-one percent of Harvard’s tenure-track professors lost their tenure bids in the 2018‒19 academic year without alleging bias, since most of those failed contenders were white. Yet García Peña has gone through her academic career playing the victim, reflexively accusing those around her of white supremacy. In this, she is a perfect synecdoche for ethnic studies itself, which also stakes its identity on the conceit that it is in a nonstop battle for survival against the forces of racism and exclusion.

To the contrary, ethnic studies is ascendant. It is spreading rapidly throughout K‒12 schools; its ideology has already bled into the political realm. It’s worth reviewing García Peña’s career as an emblem of a fast-rising academic field whose worldview is taking over American culture.

Jennifer Ouellette:

1. Number: The Language of Science
Tobias Dantzig
Plume, 2007

“First published in 1930, this classic text traces the evolution of the concept of a number in clear, accessible prose. (None other than Albert Einstein sang its praises.) A Latvian mathematician who studied under Henri Poincare, Dantzig covers all the bases, from counting, negative numbers and fractions, to complex numbers, set theory, infinity and the link between math and time. Above all, he understood that the story of where mathematical ideas come from, how they relate to each other, and evolve over time, is key to a true appreciation of mathematics.”

Politico:

We aren’t just approaching the end of a very newsy year; we’re approaching the end of a very eventful decade. To mark the occasion, Politico Magazine asked a group of historians to put all that happened over the past 10 years in its proper historical context—and literally write the paragraph that they think will describe the 2010s in American history books written a century from now.

Will the seemingly significant events we have lived through this decade be important in the grand scheme? Are there powerful historical forces playing out that we’re missing? Where will Black Lives Matter, the social media revolution, #MeToo, climate change, Barack Obama and Donald Trump fit into the history books?

Many described the 2010s, in the words of Andrew Bacevich, as an era of “venomous division,” characterized by massive racial, economic and political divisions. Some saw hope in the discord—as a catalyst for much needed reform, soon to come. Still other historians pointed out less-noticed trends—in technology and foreign policy—that will resonate far into the future.

How will the future remember the 2010s? Here’s what the experts had to say:

Constance Grady:

So what happened? How did the apparently inevitable ebook revolution fail to come to pass?

To figure out the answers, we’ll have to dive in deep to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2012 against Apple — newly entered into the ebook market with the advent of the iPad — and five of what was then the Big Six publishing houses. The Department of Justice accused Apple and the publishers of colluding to fix ebook prices against Amazon, and although the DOJ won its case in court, the pricing model that Apple and the publishers created together would continue to dominate the industry, creating unintended ripple effects.

The case of US v. Apple encapsulates the dysfunction of the last decade of publishing. It’s a story about what we’re willing to pay for books — and about an industry that is growing ever more consolidated, with fewer and fewer companies taking up more and more market share. What happened to the ebook in the 2010s is the story of the contraction of American publishing.

Laura Waters:

On New Year’s Eve The Nation published an analysis by Jennifer Berkshire called “The Democrats’ School Choice Problem.” Her piece is instructive because it illustrates a strategy commonly employed by those who regard themselves as warriors against craven privatizing shysters intent on expanding charter schools and/or voucher programs. This is how it works: Ignore context. Ignore math. Ignore inconvenient facts. And hustle together a specious I argument that plays to those who —perhaps responding to the Trumpian lurch to the right by Republican Party leaders in D.C. —believe that the only way to retain decency and moral order is by careening just as far to the left, which seems to me a surefire way to guarantee Trump a second term. (Not sure what these directions mean anyway. Since when is limiting public school choice, which primarily benefits low-income children of color, a value of left-wingers? Since when is it a violation of Democratic Party loyalty to want better schools for your kids?)

To unknowing readers (which apparently includes The Nation’s fact-checking department) Berkshire’s argument, as context and fact-free as it is, holds power. So let’s demystify the mystique and look at some of the ways that Berkshire makes her argument that the Democratic pro-choice coalition is “unraveling” and that no choice is the right choice.

First, to give credit where credit is due, Berkshire  begins with the recent AFT/NEA “school choice forum” last month in Pittsburgh where seven candidates begged for union money and endorsement. She notes that the invitation-only audience was greeted by a Black mother affiliated with the Working Families Party (closely tied in agenda and funding with AFT/NEA) while 250 Black mothers (she says 100 but who’s counting) stood in a cold rain because they were locked out of the “public forum” for wanting quality schools for their children even if they can’t afford to live in Gloucester. (See here.) Why were they outside in the rain? Because the candidates, with the sole exception of Mike Bennett, refused to walk down the block and meet with them in a hotel room paid for by a GoFundMe campaign. Inside, audience members wore “F*%k Charter Schools” tee-shirts.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K – 12 school district has resisted school and parental choice.

A majority of the school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory Academy ib charter school in 2011.

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most K-12 school districts, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Mark Perry:

The table above is based on some of the items in the list “For every 100 girls….” that I featured last April on CD here. The list was originally created by Tom Mortenson in 2011 and I updated the list earlier this year with Tom’s permission. Special thanks to Gale Pooley for helping create the table.

The data in the table show that on many, many measures of: a) educational, behavioral and mental health outcomes, b) alcohol, drug addiction, and drug overdoses, c) suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, d) job fatalities and e) homelessness, boys and men are faring much worse than girls and women. And yet despite the fact that boys and men are at so much greater risk than girls and women on so many different measures, those significant gender disparities that disproportionately and adversely affect men get almost no attention. In fact, it’s girls and women who get a disproportionate amount of attention, resources, and financial support, including:

1. There are women’s centers and women’s commissions on almost every college campus in the country, but not a single men’s center or commission that I’m aware of.

Alan Borsuk:

The Wisconsin Reading Coalition: A controversial choice, some might say. Dismal reading scores overall for Wisconsin students raise a lot of alarms. Yet little is done to change how schools statewide teach reading. The coalition is a small group of dedicated, even adamant, supporters of increased use of practices such as structured phonics. They’re not satisfied with the state of things and they push to do something about it. That earns them appreciation in my book.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Washington Post:

“An earlier version of the piece stated that public funding for schools had decreased since the late 1980s.

That is not the case. In fact, funding at the federal, state, and local levels has increased between the 1980s and 2019.”

Scott Gerard:

Between now and the 2024-25 school year, the district will lose another 1,347 students, according to district projections. Since the 2011-12 school year when MMSD added 4-year-old kindergarten, the district has always had at least 26,000 students. Projections show it will drop below that in 2024-25 for the first time since.

Projections from Vandewalle and Associates show enrollment stability in the “long term,” the report adds.

The district’s projections are based on what the report calls a “sharp decrease” in the birth rates in the cities of Fitchburg and Madison in 2016 and 2017, the last two reported years. Continued drops in enrollment are significant for the district’s funding, as state aid is largely based on enrollment, measured each September on the third Friday of the school year.

The drops are projected to initially come in elementary schools, as kindergarten classes will continue a trend of being smaller than the year prior. At the high school level, East and Memorial are projected to grow in attendance by the 2024-25 school year, while West will have five students fewer than this year. La Follette is projected to lose 49 students from this year to 2024-25.

The overall enrollment decrease means that most buildings are projected to be at or below the “ideal” 90% capacity use five years from now, according to data included in the report, which is calculated using factors including class size policy, section availability and building size. The most significant exceptions are Falk Elementary School, which is projected to be at 104.4% of its capacity in five years, and West High School, projected at 98.7% — just below its current 98.9% utilization.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district recently expanded their least diverse schools.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Madison School District projects loss of 1,100 students over next five years

But by 2024-25, the total number of students is projected to drop to 25,779 students, about 1,400 fewer students, or a 5% reduction, from enrollment 11 years prior, according to the report

Madison taxpayers recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite nearby available space. Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

David Karpf:

Online disinformation and propaganda do not have to be particularly effective at duping voters or directly altering electoral outcomes in order to be fundamentally toxic to a well-functioning democracy, though. The rise of disinformation and propaganda undermines some of the essential governance norms that constrain the behavior of our political elites. It is entirely possible that the current disinformation disorder will render the country ungovernable despite barely convincing any mass of voters to cast ballots that they would not otherwise have cast.

Much of the attention paid by researchers, journalists, and elected officials to online disinformation and propaganda has assumed that these disinformation campaigns are both large in scale and directly effective. This is a bad assumption, and it is an unnecessary assumption. We need not believe digital propaganda can “hack” the minds of a fickle electorate to conclude that digital propaganda is a substantial threat to the stability of American democracy. And in promoting the narrative of IRA’s direct effectiveness, we run the risk of further exacerbating this threat. The danger of online disinformation isn’t how it changes public knowledge; it’s what it does to our democratic norms.

Related:

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Matthew Ladner:

School choice is a hot topic in the United States. Private school vouchers, public charter schools, open enrollment, and homeschooling all regularly appear on the policy agenda as ways to improve the educational experience and outcomes for students, parents, and the broader society. Pundits often make claims about the various ways in which parents select schools and thus customize their child’s education. What claims about school choice are grounded in actual evidence?

This book presents systematic reviews of the social science research regarding critical aspects of parental school choice. How do parents choose schools and what do they seek? What effects do their choices have on the racial integration of schools and the performance of the schools that serve non-choosing students? What features of public charter schools are related to higher student test scores? What effects does school choice have on important non-cognitive outcomes including parent satisfaction, student character traits, and how far students go in school? What do we know about homeschooling as a school choice? This book, originally published as a special issue of the Journal of School Choice, provides evidence-based answers to those vital questions.

Max Read:

Paradoxically, the ephemerality — and sheer volume — of text on social media is re-creating the circumstances of a preliterate society: a world in which information is quickly forgotten and nothing can be easily looked up. (Like Irish monks copying out Aristotle, Google and Facebook will collect and sort the world’s knowledge; like the medieval Catholic church, they’ll rigorously control its presentation and accessibility.) Under these conditions, memorability and concision — you know, the same qualities you might say make someone good at Twitter — will be more highly prized than strength of argument, and effective political leaders, for whom the factual truth is less important than the perpetual reinscription of a durable myth, will focus on repetitive self-aggrandizement.

John Rosenberg

Over the years polling and survey data have consistently shown overwhelming public opposition to racial preference policies. Although “affirmative action” polls well so long as it is undefined, when it is defined respondents consistently reject it by large margins. Four times between 2003 and 2016, for example, Gallup asked the following question:

Alexandra Stevenson and Cao Li

Madison, which has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts is planning a large referendum for 2020.

Jose Cabranes

First, colleges and universities have subordinated their historic mission of free inquiry to a new pursuit of social justice. Consider the remarkable evolution of Yale’s mission statement. For decades the university said its purpose was “to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge.” The language was banal enough, but nevertheless on the money. In 2016, however, Yale’s president announced a new mission statement, which no longer mentions knowledge. Instead, Yale is now officially “committed to improving the world” and educating “aspiring leaders”—not only through research, but also through “practice.”

Second, American colleges and universities have been overwhelmed by a dangerous alliance of academic bureaucrats and student activists committed to imposing the latest social-justice diktats. This alliance has displaced the traditional governors of the university—the faculty. Indeed, nonfaculty administrators and activists are driving some of the most dangerous developments in university life, including the erosion of the due-process rights of faculty and students, efforts to regulate the “permissible limits” of classroom discussion, and the condemnation of unwelcome ideas as “hate speech.”

How did the university lose its way? How did this new alliance of activists and administrators supplant the faculty?

Though there are many factors, they all point back to a far-reaching intellectual confusion that pervades the nation’s campuses, from dorm rooms to classrooms. Too many in higher education are unwilling or unable to maintain a distinction that lies at the core of the liberal democratic project, and at the center of the West’s intellectual tradition: the distinction between inquiry and action, speech and conduct.

nhpr:

In the 2018-19 year, the law school’s total operating budget was $5.5 million, but it spent $11.9 million. That’s more than double its operating budget, with a total loss of $6.4 million in that year alone.

The most dramatic year to date was the 2017-18 year, with a total loss of $6.7 million, and an operating margin of negative 130 percent. …

Enrollment did increase this academic year, up to 145 students in the incoming class. But in 2016, there were only 71 incoming students, according to numbers provided by current UNH Law Dean Megan Carpenter.

In fact, the law school is losing millions of dollars in an era when the state’s university system is receiving some of the lowest state funding in the country. UNH doesn’t see these losses as a barrier, but rather, as an investment.

Scott Shackford:

Department of Justice attorneys turned the screws on actor Lori Loughlin and 10 other parents this week by bringing new charges against them for attempting to use their wealth to buy their kids spots at selective colleges.

The new charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and money laundering, filed Tuesday, came just a day after four other parents caught up in the “Varsity Blues” scandal accepted plea deals in Boston. This is not a coincidence. As USA Today’s reporting makes abundantly clear, the parents who pleaded guilty did so because prosecutors had threatened them with these additional charges. Loughlin and the other parents face harsher criminal punishment now entirely because they are insisting on their innocence:

Wisconsin’s new Governor, Democrat Tony Evers, recently acknowledged his support for thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge exam mulligans.

Now comes Politifact:

As proof, Thiesfeldt’s staff pointed to the most recent Wisconsin Student Assessment System results. The annual tests include the Forward Exam for grades three to eight and ACT-related tests for grades nine to 11.

In the 2018-19 tests, 39.3% of students were rated as proficient or advanced in English Language Arts, and 40.1% reached those levels for math, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

For starters, calling 60% the “vast majority” is overstating things quite a bit.

But let’s focus on the “grade level” part of Thiesfeldt’s claim. Is it reasonable to say anyone below proficient is also below grade level?

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Politifact is correct to say that proficiency on state txams don not necessarily align with grade level performance, a nebulous term which means different things at different times in different contexts. This means Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt was technically incorrect when he equated the two during a radio interview.

Technically.

But Thiesfeldt was not being technical. He was not having a conversation about psychometrics and cut-scores, how to set them and how to anchor them from one year to the next so scores can be compared over time. He was making the point that we’re not doing very well. He was pointing to the bar and making sure we know how few students get over it. We can forgive him If that complex story is hard to tell in the kind of one sentence sound bites the media both requires and then dissects.

It might help to know that before 2013, before we were required to set our categorical cut-scores for proficient. advanced, etc., at new, more rigorous levels aligned with national standards.

Wisconsin set them at laughably low levels. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel missed this part of the story when it reviewed

The Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading, based on Massachusetts’ best in the States MTEL requirement)

“the majority of ALL 11th-grade students in Madison read and write below basic proficiency. Translated: they are functionally illiterate.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

More on our long term, disastrous reading results, here.

“an emphasis on adult employment”.

Betsy DeVos is coming to Wisconsin. So I’m heading to Milwaukee early tomorrow morning to join @MTEAunion and Milwaukee families in sending a crystal clear message: the Trump/DeVos team might not believe in public schools, but we do. https://t.co/XHUzMPbuVn

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) September 16, 2019

Valerie Strauss:

For students who fear they can’t get into college with mediocre SAT or ACT scores, the tide is turning at a record number of schools that have decided to accept all or most of their freshmen without requiring test results.

Meanwhile, two Ivy League schools have decided that many of their graduate school programs do not need a test score for admissions, fresh evidence of growing disenchantment among educational institutions with using high-stakes tests as a factor in accepting and rejecting students.

invent Caruso:

Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson earns the baseline $85,000 salary each county board member receives. On top of that, Johnson, whose county district covers areas of the west side of Chicago, has simultaneously collected a second full-time income of at least $103,000 from the Chicago Teachers Union, according to federal filings. Between the union and county, Johnson collects at least $188,000 annually.

CTU’s most recent federal filing, covering the period from July 2018 through June 2019, lists Johnson as a “legislative” employee. The filing shows 94% of his duties involved “representational activities.”

Johnson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Illinois Policy Institute.

Carolyn Johnson:

One key to a longer life could be a quieter brain without too much neural activity, according to a new study that examined postmortem brain tissue from extremely long-lived people for clues about what made them different from people who died in their 60s and 70s.
“Use it or lose it” has dominated thinking on how to protect the aging brain, and extensive research shows there are many benefits to remaining physically and mentally active as people get older. But the study, published in the journal Nature, suggests more isn’t always better. Excessive activity — at least at the level of brain cells — could be harmful.
“The completely shocking and puzzling thing about this new paper is … [brain activity] is what you think of as keeping you cognitively normal. There’s the idea that you want to keep your brain active in later life,” said Michael McConnell, a neuroscientist at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, who was not involved in the study. “The thing that is super unexpected is … limiting neural activity is a good thing in healthy aging. It’s very counterintuitive.”

Beth DeCarbo:

Fall is hunting season across the U.S., a time when high-school seniors target their favorite colleges and their parents aim for financial aid.

One factor to consider when applying: the impact of your home’s equity on financial aid. But prepare yourself. It seemingly takes an advanced degree to calculate eligibility, since formulas vary widely from school to school.

“I wish it weren’t so complicated. I study this day and night,” says Paula Bishop, a college financial-aid adviser in Bellevue, Wash.

Almost all U.S. colleges and universities require financial-aid applicants to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which doesn’t ask parents about home equity. However, several hundred other schools—many of them elite, private institutions—also require the College Scholarship Service Profile (or CSS Profile), an application created by the College Board for nonfederal financial aid. It asks applicants for the home’s purchase price, purchase year, current value and current debt and determines the home’s equity (value minus debt).

Here’s the catch: Schools that require the CSS profile handle the home-equity information differently. Boston College, for example, looks at 100% of home equity. Stanford University announced last year that it won’t consider home equity all. Cornell University will limit home equity to 1½-times the family’s adjusted gross income. So for a household with $800,000 in home equity making $200,000 a year, home equity is capped at $300,000 (200,000 x 1.5).

Tang Fanxi:

Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang, a key character in the Netflix documentary “American Factory,” has lashed out at labor unions, saying such groups only disrupt production.

“As long as there are unions in America, factories (there) will not improve their efficiency,” Cao said Monday in an interview with The Beijing News, weeks after the documentary’s release. “If a factory can do without a union, it’s better not to have one.”

Cao’s comments shed light on an important labor issue that became a source of tension between employees and managers at the Chinese company he owns when it expanded into the American Midwest. In 2014, Cao’s Fuyao Group repurposed the former site of a General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio, transforming it into a glassmaking factory.

The documentary tells the story of a Chinese company injecting money into a flagging local economy by creating over 2,000 jobs. Through a human-centric lens, it examines the different work cultures to which local and Chinese staff are accustomed. When some of the American workers move to unionize, Fuyao mobilizes to crush the initiative.

Cao told The Beijing News that productivity directly correlates with employee welfare and claimed that Fuyao’s welfare scheme had led to “stability” within the company, as well as “loyalty” and a “good mental state” among staff, without elaborating on the nature of the welfare scheme.

“Once a factory has a union, it will have to invest time and legal resources in it,” Cao said. “There’s not one thing we can decide — everything has to go through the union.”

Describing labor unions as the biggest cultural difference Chinese businesses face when they expand into Europe or North America, Cao said he would rather incur losses than be “messed around” by unions. “Mental distress is worse than financial loss,” he said.

The 73-year-old billionaire also complained that some of the scenes in the documentary “vilified” his company. Addressing backlash over the depiction of some of his American employees working extended hours at the Ohio factory, Cao said such work schedules were common in Chin

Marta Jewson:

Court-appointed monitors overseeing special education services in New Orleans have been reviewing the wrong schools. The problem may force the extension of a four-year-old federal consent decree negotiated to settle a 2010 lawsuit that charged that the city’s charter schools were admitting too few special-needs students and failing to provide proper services to the ones they did enroll.

A June case record in the long-running federal class-action lawsuit identified “potential errors” with the monitoring process. And this week, a state Department of Education spokeswoman confirmed what those errors were.

The issue calls into question the past two years of supervision, during which state Department of Education employees and federally appointed monitors have recorded progress in improving their oversight of special education services. Over that period, the defendants in the suit — the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Department of Education — were found to have achieved “substantial compliance” with the consent decree. They are now nearing a point at which federal Judge Jay Zainey — who is presiding over the case — could lift the decree, ending court and monitor supervision.

Brian Howard:

On the Expectations We Place on Kids
“Most parents believe their children are smarter than they actually are. On the plus side, children will often rise to the occasion. Conversely, some parents believe their children can skip certain parts of the curriculum, creating major gaps.” — A teacher at a Montgomery County public elementary school.

On Standardized Tests
“I am a huge fan of the new term ‘educational apartheid,’ and that’s how these standardized tests are used. It’s proving that the kids who have access, ability, resources and support can do well on these tests, and the kids who don’t have that, can’t.” — Sheila Myer

“They provide minimal to no useful feedback to classroom teachers.” — A kindergarten teacher at a West Philadelphia charter school

“We need to make sure all parents and kids know that anyone can opt out. Opt out if you wish to not put that stress on your student. Opt out; it’s okay!” — A middle-school teacher in the suburbs

“I know the grading in our school is incredibly inflated — everyone gets A’s. How do we differentiate? That’s where standardized testing comes in. But the pressure it puts on kids is extraordinary. It’s unfair to kids who don’t test well and will never be able to show how smart they are.” — A high-school teacher at a private single-sex school

“The stakes are too high for just a few weeks of testing. It is concerning that the written portions of the test are graded by non-educators with just a bachelor’s degree who get temp jobs by answering ads online.” — David Hensel

“I hate it. I hate it so much. It takes away from what you’re actually trying to do. I have to prepare my students for what’s going to be on that test. That leaves little room for my struggling students or for my high-achieving students. It keeps us all in second gear.” — Hector Wangia

Dana Ansel:

Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature decided that the time had come to understand the state of education that gifted students receive in Massachusetts. They issued a mandate for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the policy and practices of education in public schools for gifted students as well as for students capable of performing above grade level.

The challenge that this mandate presents is that Massachusetts neither defines giftedness nor collects data on gifted students. We can nevertheless review what districts report about their practices and what parents of gifted children report about their experiences. We can also report on the state’s policies toward gifted education. In addition, we can analyze the academic trajectory and social-emotional well-being of academically advanced students based on their math MCAS scores. All of this information is valuable in painting a picture of gifted education in Massachusetts, but it is nonetheless limited.

To begin, Massachusetts is an outlier in the country in its approach to gifted education. Nearly every other state in the country defines giftedness. Nor is there an explicit mandate to either identify or serve gifted students in Massachusetts. In contrast, 32 states reported a mandate to identify and/or serve gifted students, according to the State of the States in Gifted Education. In terms of preparing teachers to teach gifted students, Massachusetts used to have an Academically Advanced Specialist Teacher License, but it was eliminated in 2017 because of the lack of licenses being issued and programs preparing teachers for the license.

We do not know how many gifted students live in Massachusetts, but a reasonable estimate would be 6–8 percent of state’s students, which translates into 57,000 – 76,000 students.1 Without a common definition and identification process, it is impossible to pinpoint the precise number. According to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) 2015-16 survey, 6.6 percent of students were enrolled in gifted programs nationally. This number includes states such as Massachusetts that have very few gifted programs, and other states that enroll many more than the average. Another source of data, a nationally representative survey of school districts, found that the fraction of elementary school students nationwide who have been identified as gifted and enrolled in a gifted program was 7.8 percent (Callahan, Moon, & Oh, 2017)

Related: Wisconsin adopted a very small part of Massachusetts’ elementary teacher content knowledge licensing requirements, known as MTEL.

Massachusetts public schools lead the United States in academic performance.

However and unfortunately, the Wisconsin Department of public instruction has waived more than 6000 elementary teacher exam requirements since 2015…. (Foundations of reading)

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

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

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

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

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

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

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

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

Yi-Jhen Wu, Claus H. Carstensen & Jihyun Lee:

This study examined learning strategy use in mathematics among East Asian students in East Asian educational systems. By employing latent class analysis on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data, we found four classes of learning strategy types, namely memorization with metacognitive strategies (17.49%), metacognitive strategies with memorization (50.70%), elaboration only (10.33%), and metacognitive strategies with elaboration (16.47%). The results showed that the majority of the students in all seven East Asian educational systems belonged to the ‘metacognitive strategies with memorization’ class, and most students adopted more than one type of learning strategy when learning mathematics. Additionally, students who reported the use of metacognitive strategies along with either memorization or elaboration showed higher mathematics achievement. We conclude that the cognitive processes employed by students of East Asian backgrounds are more complex and nuanced than the previous perception that they relied heavily on memorization.

Derek Thompson:

The counties that make up Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia shed a combined 2 million domestic residents from 2010 to 2018. For many years, these cities’ main source of population growth hasn’t been babies or even college graduates; it’s been immigrants. But like an archipelago of Ellis Islands, Manhattan and other wealthy downtown areas have become mere gateways into America and the labor force—“a temporary portal,” in the words of E. J. McMahon, the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “The woman from Slovakia comes to Queens, lives in her second cousin’s basement, gets her feet on the ground, and gets a better apartment in West Orange, New Jersey,” he said. Or a 20-something from North Dakota moves to Chicago after school, works at a consultancy for a few years, finds a partner, and moves to Missoula.

The Madison school board is planning various tax and spending increases referendums. I wonder what the various population forecasts reveal?

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported school districts ($18.5 to 20k per student, depending on the district documents).

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Suburban Madison area school districts grew substantially from 199-2019. Madison remained largely flat.

nctm:

Current mathematics education research is used to frame equity-based teaching practices through three lenses useful for building one’s teaching: reflecting , noticing , and engaging in community .

Reflecting . Equity-based teaching requires a substantial amount of reflection, which involves not just reflecting on your pedagogy and your classroom norms, but also considering how you identify yourself and how others identify you (Crockett, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2013b; Walshaw, 2010).

Noticing . Noticing generally refers to paying attention to students’ mathematical thinking (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010), yet it is a crucial skill for equity-based teaching; noticing helps teachers pay attention to how students position and identify themselves and each other (Wager, 2014).

Engaging in Community . Community engagement is powerful, in all aspects of teaching. While there are many ways to engage in your multiple communities, we highlight two specific communities here: your classroom and your teaching community.

Commentary.

Related: Madison’s math task force [Report] and the use of reform math curricula.

(2009) What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement? James Wollack
and Michael Fish:

Major Findings

CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students

Change in performance was observed immediately after switch

Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly

Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis

CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as the traditional-AP students
Both sample sizes were low

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

MIT:

Factoring integers into prime factors has a reputation as an extraordinarily difficult problem. If you read some popular accounts, you get the impression that humanity has worked hard on this problem for centuries, if not millennia, and that the chances of an efficient algorithm are negligible. If true, that would be great, because some important cryptosystems rely on the difficulty of factoring. Unfortunately, it’s mostly hype based on wishful thinking. Enough people have tried to find efficient factoring algorithms that we can be confident the problem isn’t easy, but there’s no reason to think it’s impossible.

The first thing to realize is that until the advent of public key cryptography in the 1970’s, few people cared about factoring. Some people were interested in it for its intrinsic beauty, but nobody thought it was good for anything, and it certainly wasn’t the notorious unsolved problem it is today. If anything, it was mildly obscure.

Even today, how many researchers have ever seriously tried to find an efficient factoring algorithm? I don’t know, since most people who fail don’t announce their attempts (and who knows how much classified work there has been), but it’s not hard to estimate. Let’s say a serious attempt consists of several months of work by an expert, someone who knows enough number theory to read the literature on this problem. Then the number of people who have seriously tried must be on the order of magnitude of 100. It would be ridiculous to say “100 smart people tried and failed to solve this problem, so it’s clearly impossible,” but that’s what most claims regarding the difficulty of factoring amount to.

Abigail Hess:

According to the College Board’s 2018 Trends in College Pricing Report, from 1988 to 2018, tuition prices tripled at public four-year schools and doubled at public two-year and private non-profit four-year schools.

But tuition rates and published sticker prices are not entirely indicative of the cost of college today. During the 2018-2019 school year, the reported tuition at private non-profit four-year schools was an average $35,830. But in reality, many students end up paying far less after grants and scholarships are factored in. The average net price of tuition and fees in 2019 is $14,610.

At Cornell University, many students end up paying less than the published tuition price — some significantly so. For the 2019-2020 academic year, undergraduate tuition for New York residents studying agriculture and life sciences, human ecology or industrial and labor relations is $37,880 per year, while tuition for students from other states and studying other subjects is $56,500.

Porsha Monique:

Detroit’s all male Loyola High School recently announced that every 2019 graduating senior has been accepted into a two-year or four-year college. The high school, which is a Catholic school in the Jesuit tradition, nurtures a culture of hope and academic success for young men challenged by an urban environment and prepares them to be men of Christian love, justice, and service who act with integrity, compassion, and courage. This year marks the ninth continuous year that 100% of Loyola’s graduating class has been accepted into their college of choice.

Jack Davis:

Frustrated with the dominance of Chicago in Illinois politics, Republicans are proposing legislation to lop off the city from the rest of the state.

Having one city that has an inordinate influence on state politics has long prompted calls for a similar solution in New York state. The issues at stake go from money to power to a vast social gulf between city residents and rural ones.

The same gulf exists in Illinois as well, according to state Rep. Brad Halbrook, a Republican and strong supporter of jettisoning Chicago from a state where he said it is out of step with the rest of the population.

“Our traditional family values seem to be under attack at every angle,” he said, according to the State Journal-Register.

Halbrook has introduced a House resolution — Resolution 101 — asking Congress to take Chicago out of Illinois and make it a separate state. Five fellow lawmakers have signed on, but the measure is a long shot to even make it out of committee, according to the Journal-Register.

Holly Else:

“This is terrible for the field, as it is for any field”, in particular because the investigator’s grants could have gone to more deserving researchers, says James Brown, a cancer researcher at the National University of Ireland Galway. Many scientists have used the Nature paper to build an understanding of DNA-repair processes mediated by a protein called KAT5 (also known as TIP60), he says.

The journals withdrew the studies on 11 April. In its retraction notice1, Science said that one author — Abderrahmane Kaidi, who was a cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, until 2013 — had falsified data used in the 2010 study. The journal had issued an expression of concern about the paper in September 2018.

Nature’s notice2 says that the authors are retracting their 2013 paper because the work has “issues with figure presentation and underlying data” and the authors “cannot confirm the results in the affected figures”. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team.)

In a statement to Nature’s news team, Cambridge said that it had completed an investigation into Kaidi under its misconduct in research policy, and found that he had misrepresented and falsified data in both papers.

James Vincent:

Academic publisher Springer Nature has unveiled what it claims is the first research book generated using machine learning.

The book, titled Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research, isn’t exactly a snappy read. Instead, as the name suggests, it’s a summary of peer-reviewed papers published on the topic in question. It includes quotations, hyperlinks to the work cited, and automatically generated references contents. It’s also available to download and read for free if you have any trouble getting to sleep at night.

“a new era in scientific publishing”
While the book’s contents are soporific, the fact that it exists at all is exciting. Writing in the introduction, Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger (a human) says books like this have the potential to start “a new era in scientific publishing” by automating drudgery.

Jesse Singal:

Diversity trainings are big business. In the United States, companies spend about £6.1 billion per year, by one estimate, on programmes geared at making companies more inclusive and welcoming to members of often-underrepresented groups (British numbers aren’t easy to come by, but according to one recent survey, over a third of recruiters are planning to increase their investment in diversity initiatives).

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence-backed consensus about which sorts of diversity programmes work, and why, and there have been long-standing concerns in some quarters that these programmes don’t do much at all, or that they could actually be harmful. In part because of this dearth of evidence, the market for pro-diversity interventions is a bit of a Wild West with regard to quality.

For a new paper in PNAS, a prominent team of researchers, including Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, partnered with a large global organisation to measure the real-world impact of the researchers’ own anti-bias intervention, designed principally to “promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors toward women, whereas a secondary focus was to promote the inclusion of other underrepresented groups (e.g., racial minorities).” The results were mixed at best – and unfortunately there are good reasons to be sceptical that even the more positive results are as positive as they seem.

Robby Soave:

Eyewitnesses told Reason that the hecklers were not enrolled at Chicago, though one student did attempt to record Kontrovich on a cell phone, and was silently involved in the protest.

Kontrovich, an alumni of the law school, told Reason he had been invited by a student group to discuss the First Amendment as it pertains to laws that target the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for direct action to oppose Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. A group of about five pro-Palestinian activists showed up for his talk and shouted over him as best they could, making it very difficult for attendees to hear.

“During the first few minutes of this disruption, Professor Kontorovich could not proceed with his lecture,” Seth Cohen, a student who attended the lecture, told Reason. “After about five minutes, we gathered around Professor Kontorovich, and he attempted to resume the talk. The protestors raised their voices.”

Todd McElroy, David L Dickinson, Nathan Stroh, Christopher A Dickinson:

physical activity level is an important contributor to overall human health and obesity. Research has shown that humans possess a number of traits that influence their physical activity level including social cognition. We examined whether the trait of “need for cognition” was associated with daily physical activity levels. We recruited individuals who were high or low in need for cognition and measured their physical activity level in 30-second epochs over a 1-week period. The overall findings showed that low-need-for-cognition individuals were more physically active, but this difference was most pronounced during the 5-day work week and lessened during the weekend.

Bethany Blankely:

“Will massive increases in spending actually improve student outcomes?” WILL asks. According to an analysis of education spending and outcomes, WILL says, “probably not.”

WILL’s Truth in Spending: An Analysis of K-12 Spending in Wisconsin compares K-12 spending on Wisconsin public schools and student outcomes. Based on the most recent available data, Wisconsin’s K-12 education spending is comparable to the rest of the country, but it already spends more money, on average, than the majority of states, according to the report. Wisconsin spends $600 per pupil more than the median state spends.

Based on WILL’s econometric analysis, no relationship between higher spending and outcomes exists in Wisconsin. On average, high-spending districts perform the same or worse on state-mandated exams and the ACT relative to low-spending districts, the analysis found.

Slinger and Hartford school districts spend significantly less than the state average on education but their students’ Forward Exam performances are significantly higher than other districts, the report found. By comparison, White Lake and Bayfield districts have “woeful proficiency rates despite spending far more than the average district,” the report states.

In Evers’ budget address, he said, “more than one million Wisconsinites have raised their own property taxes to support local schools in their communities,” Matt Kittle at the MacIver Institute notes. “But they chose to do so,” Kittle says, “through the mechanism of referendum that offers school districts the ability to set their own priorities and not make taxpayers elsewhere pick up an ever-increasing portion of the tab.”

Evers’ budget plan calls for a return to the state picking up two-thirds of K-12 funding, but would put more money into the state’s long-failing schools, Kittle notes, “while he looks to punish Wisconsin’s school choice program.”

This is counterintuitive to the facts, WILL argues, as private choice schools and charter schools in Wisconsin achieve more with less. According to recent analysis, these schools achieve better academic outcomes despite spending thousands less per student than traditional public schools.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, now around $20,000 per student.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

US Department of Justice:

Duke University has agreed to pay the government $112.5 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting applications and progress reports that contained falsified research on federal grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Justice Department announced today.

“The resources utilized by NIH and EPA to fund important research and clinical programs across the nation are limited,” said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt for the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. “Today’s settlement demonstrates that the Department of Justice will pursue grantees that knowingly falsify research and undermine the integrity of federal funding decisions.”

“Taxpayers expect and deserve that federal grant dollars will be used efficiently and honestly. Individuals and institutions that receive research funding from the federal government must be scrupulous in conducting research for the common good and rigorous in rooting out fraud,” said Matthew G.T. Martin, United States Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. “May this serve as a lesson that the use of false or fabricated data in grant applications or reports is completely unacceptable.”

Duke is a private university located in Durham, North Carolina. Duke receives millions of dollars in funding from NIH and the EPA for hundreds of grants each year. The settlement resolves allegations that between 2006 and 2018, Duke knowingly submitted and caused to be submitted claims to the NIH and to the EPA that contained falsified or fabricated data or statements in thirty (30) grants, causing the NIH and EPA to pay out grants funds they otherwise would not have. Specifically, the United States contends that the results of certain research related to mice conducted by a Duke research technician in its Airway Physiology Laboratory, as well as statements based on those research results, were falsified and/or fabricated.

Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year..

Negassi Tesfamichael:

In an open letter to the community released Thursday morning, Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham acknowledged that the district “cannot be silent” on issues of racial justice.

The letter comes eight days after media reports surfaced regarding an alleged assault at Whitehorse Middle School. In that incident, which is still being investigated by the Madison Police Department, a white staff member allegedly pushed an 11-year-old girl and pulled her braids out. Rob Mueller-Owens, the staff member facing accusations in the Whitehorse incident, is a positive behavior support coach. He is currently on administrative leave and will not return to Whitehorse, according to MMSD.

Cheatham said in her letter that the incident at Whitehorse was “especially horrific” and said there was failure on part of the district regardless of what comes out of the police investigation.

The letter:

February 28, 2019

Dear Madison Community,

I have talked with enough people in Madison to know that racism is a problem in our community and has been for a long time. We are not immune to it. It is at times intentional and unintentional. It is everywhere, every day. It is within us and surrounds us. Any school district is a microcosm of the society we live in.

The polarization in our country today puts a tremendous amount of pressure on young people and the people who work in schools to somehow get it right, while the rest of society gets it wrong.

But as a school district that exists to protect children and cultivate the beauty and full worth of every single child, we must be held to the highest possible standard.

The series of racial slur incidents that have occurred this school year and caused harm to Black students, their families, and our community are indefensible. They run counter to our core values and our commitment to serving youth and families.

The most recent incident at Whitehorse Middle School was especially horrific. No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part. We will review every fact to understand what happened so that we can take aggressive action.

If we are serious about our vision — that every school is a thriving school — we have to disrupt racism in all of its forms. We cannot be silent. We cannot perpetuate it. We must examine everything. In no way can we, as a community of educators, accommodate or make excuses for actions that hurt the very students we have dedicated our lives to help.

As the superintendent of this school district, as a leader for racial justice, as a mother, I know I’ve been charged with making changes that will disrupt this pattern, and even more, uplift the students we serve. I embrace that charge and will continue to do so.

For those who are demanding meaningful change, I want you to know that there are many inside this institution who are already actively engaged in making it, including our staff of color and white coconspirators. It is through their unwavering commitment and continual push for change that we have a clearer path forward, more momentum, and cause to move faster. There are a number of critical actions currently underway. Those include:

A new system for staff, students, and families to report incidents of racism or discrimination that will launch this spring

A full review of investigation and critical response protocols to ensure they are culturally responsive, grounded in restoration, and more transparent Revision and consistent application of the MMSD equity tool to ensure current and future HR policy and practice, as well as Board policy recommendations, are developed through a racial equity lens

A refresh of the School Improvement Planning process to ensure that race, rigor and relationships are central to school based decision making

A new required professional development series for all staff on racial identity, implicit bias, and racial inequity in the United States, along with a refined support and accountability system to monitor progress

We are also committed to working alongside our community and will hold several facilitated community meetings in the next two months dedicated to building trust and ensuring our collective actions support the students and families we serve.

Last fall, we reaffirmed, more strongly than ever before, our belief in the inherent brilliance, creativity and excellence of Black youth, families, and staff. We know that requires an equal commitment to confront the practices, policies, and people that stand in the way of Black Excellence shining through.

I promise this community that we are going to work hard to get it right. I know we will continue to be challenged. More issues will likely surface. And we will be relentless in our efforts. This is the work we signed up for. Most important, we will listen and learn in a way that models the best instincts of this community that we love.

In partnership,

/s/

Jennifer Cheatham
Superintendent

Related: Graduation rates and non reading in the Madison School District:

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at East, especially if you are black or Hispanic. But when 70 percent of your minority students earn diplomas and fewer than 20 percent of them are able to read at grade level, what does that high school diploma mean?

East ninth-graders who don’t know how to read might not want to go to school (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might be chronically absent. They might not want to go to class (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might engage in disruptive activities elsewhere. And they might not be able to keep up (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might fail.

Rather than focus so heavily on attendance, behavior, and socioemotional learning, as described in the article, teachers and administrators should prioritize teaching students how to read. Students who know how to read are more likely to come to school, go to class, work hard, and have a meaningful and rewarding post-high school life.

David Blaska:

But nothing about holding parents and students responsible for their actions. Nothing about requiring children to obey their teacher. Nothing about parents’ responsibility to read to their children and instruct them to be good citizens. Nothing about maintaining civility at school board meetings.

What is more, Cheatham appears to have thrown that vice principal at Whitehorse middle school under the bus. Perhaps the superintendent is in a position to know the whole story. Perhaps she is yielding to the strongest voices.

“No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part.”

In would be interesting to know exactly what was that failure?

Lindsey Burke:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., unveiled Tuesday a proposal to subsidize universal early education and child care through federal subsidies.

According to The Huffington Post, “no family would have to spend more than 7 percent of its household income on child care, no matter the number of kids.” Providers would have to meet safety and curriculum standards, and the proposal would be financed through a “tax on wealth.”

But the fact is that a new large-scale federal subsidy day care is unlikely to improve educational outcomes for children. It will cost billions—according to one estimate, $700 billion over 10 years for the Warren plan—and furthermore, it may not reflect the preferences of families when it comes to their children’s care in their formative years.

Although the Warren plan talks about day care subsidies rather than “preschool” subsidies, the reference to “curriculum standards” suggests the effort will be about more than child care for parents.

Warren’s plan reportedly calls for “requiring child care providers that receive federal funds [to] meet standards similar to those that now apply to Head Start.”

Well, Head Start is far from a success story when it comes to participant outcomes.

Viktor Vecsei:

Consider two statements from different ends of the privacy awareness spectrum:

Facebook and Google helps me by offering great, free-to-use services. The ads they show me are not so bad, they usually match my interests and that’s fine. Everyone is using their products, so they can’t be very harmful. I understand they collect some data on what I’m doing, but I have nothing to hide.
Most things I’ve done, said or searched for online is stored somewhere, controlled by people who haven’t earned my trust. They can use that knowledge to change what I see online, influence how I spend my time and my money, coerce me into giving them more information and help others to monitor me or feed me propaganda. This freaks me out.
Which one would you say reflects your views better?

If it’s the first, are you ready to learn why it might be a false picture?

If you picked the second, would you like to do something about it?

Listing all the ways our realities are being tracked by companies is a challenging task. Browsing history, decisions, clicks and taps were the start, then with the rapid adoption of smartphones, fitness trackers and IoT devices, it’s now the data on how often you hit the breaks in your car, what products you pick in the supermarket and what you say during intimate conversations in your bedroom. There is little going on in your life that at least one major corporation doesn’t know about. Data collection like this can be framed as inevitability, as progress, as a necessity that brings us free services or convenience and personalized experiences. And it can be framed as something Shoshana Zuboff in her new book calls “surveillance economy”.

Considering the possibilities of where all this might take us by 2025 is an alarming exercise. As you walk into a furniture store, a shop assistant equipped with an AR device gets a summary of your backstory and preferences based on your past logged actions to help her close a sale. All motion and voice data captured by millions of miniature low-power devices on buildings is aggregated and tied to your personal ID; corporations use it to monitor, control, influence and possibly blackmail you. Searching for and writing about topics online deemed inappropriate are known to authorities within a second thanks to cooperating companies; the consequences range from increased surveillance and punishments determined by an AI to public shunning.

Elena Stepanova:

We emphasize that color composition is an important characteristic of a painting. It impacts the auction price of a painting, but it has never been considered in previous studies on art markets. By using Picasso’s paintings and paintings of Color Field Abstract Expressionists sold in Chrisite’s and Sotheby’s auctions in New York between 1998 and 2016, we demonstrate the method to analyze color compositions: How to extract color palettes from a painting image and how to measure color characteristics. We propose two measures: (1) the surface occupied by specific colors, (2) color diversity of a painting composition. Controlling for all conventional painting and sale characteristics, our empirical results find significant evidence of contrastive paintings, i.e., paintings with high diversity of colors, carrying a premium than equivalent artworks which are performed in monochromatic style. In the case of Picasso’s paintings, our econometric analysis shows that some colors are associated with high prices.

S.3805:

term ‘deep fake’ means an audiovisual
10
11 record created or altered in a manner that the
12 record would falsely appear to a reasonable observer
13 to be an authentic record of the actual speech or
14 conduct of an individual; and
15 ‘‘(3) the terms ‘interactive computer service’
16 and ‘information content provider’ have the same
17 meaning given the terms in section 230 of the Com-
18 munications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230).
19 ‘‘(b)
20 means or
21 22
23 24 25
00:04 Dec 23, 2018
OFFENSE.—It shall be unlawful to, using any facility of interstate or foreign commerce—

Much kore on Deep Fake, here.

Christopher Osher:

But districts are free to use their READ Act per-pupil funds on whatever curriculum they want, even on interventions researchers have found ineffective.

“Typically, as with any education policy, we’re only given so much authority on what we can tell districts to do and what we monitor for,” Colsman said in an interview with The Colorado Sun.

The state spends $3 million annually through the READ Act to provide diagnostic software school districts can use to assess student reading levels, but not all districts use it. Data shows the state’s software is used on fewer than half of the students in the state. The reading proficiency of most of the young students in Colorado is determined through other diagnostic tools never subjected to quality reviews by the state.

Meanwhile, state tracking of READ Act student performance shows that only 6 percent of children identified with a significant reading deficiency in kindergarten were reading at their grade level by third grade.

“All of us are looking for a way to get better results for kids because we can’t wait a generation for this,” Colsman said.

Half of state districts see worsening rates for significant deficiencies

Nearly half of the state’s 178 school districts saw the rate of students with significant reading deficiencies worsen since the READ Act program was put in place, according to a review of state data.

Commerce City’s Adams County 14 school district, home to 7,500 students, received more than $3 million in per-pupil READ Act funding to tackle significant reading deficiencies from 2012 through 2018, but reading problems there have worsened over same period.

In 2014, slightly more than 18 percent of the district’s kindergarten through third-grade students had a significant reading deficiency, according to state records. By 2018, that rate had more than doubled to nearly 40 percent.

New administrators at the district, forced by the Colorado Board of Education in November to hire an outside management consultant, said they’ve discovered the reading curriculum they were using was ineffective and not suited to the district’s heavily bilingual student population. They’ve since switched curriculum and are putting in place a summer school program devoted solely to reading instruction.

“Over the past 19 years we’ve had a high turnover in teachers and administrators,” said Jeanette Patterson, who was hired as the district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction last summer. “We’ve had to do a lot of training and retraining and retraining. That leads to inconsistency in the literacy block at the elementary school level.”

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques on Madison’s disastrous reading results:

Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and flat. According to the most recent data from 2017-18, fewer than 9 percent of black and fewer than 20 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were reading proficiently. Year after year, we fail these students in the most basic of our responsibilities to them: teaching them how to read.

Much is known about the process of learning to read, but a huge gap is between that knowledge and what is practiced in our schools. The Madison School District needs a science-based literacy curriculum overseen by licensed reading professionals who understand the cognitive processes that underlie learning how to read.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Routing around Madison’s non-diverse K-12 legacy governance model:

In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.”

Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School Board member Ed Hughes to a September meeting of the Goodman Community Center board of directors to express the district’s opposition to another proposed charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Hughes gave the board a letter from Cheatham to UW System President Ray Cross that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, pointed to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s charter proposal, and asked that Arbor either be rejected or at least kept out of Madison.

Hughes also told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

Becky Steinhoff, Goodman executive director, later told the Wisconsin State Journal that Goodman was “experiencing a period of enormous change,” including the recent opening of a new building, and chose not to work with Arbor.

“I understand the climate and the polarizing topic of charters” in Madison, McCabe said, but he wasn’t concerned the district would attempt to thwart Milestone and he said it would “be a dream come true” if Milestone were one day folded into the district.

He said Community—Learning—Design has an application due to the state Feb. 22 for a federal planning grant.

Much more on our 2019 school board election:

Seat 3

Kaleem Caire, 7856 Wood Reed Drive, Madison

Cristiana Carusi, 5709 Bittersweet Place

Skylar Croy, 502 N. Frances St., Madison

Seat 4

David Blaska, 5213 Loruth Terrace, Madison

Laila Borokhim, 2214 Monroe St., Madison

Albert Bryan, 4302 Hillcrest Drive, Madison

Ali Muldrow, 1966 East Main St., Madison

Seat 5

TJ Mertz, 1210 Gilson St., Madison

Ananda Mirilli, 1027 S. Sunnyvale Lane Unit A, Madison

Amos Roe, 5705 Crabapple Lane, Madison

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

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

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

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

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

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

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

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sarah Manski and Ed Hughes “withdrew” from their respective races in recent elections. The timing, in both cases was unfortunate for voters, and other candidates.

Diogo Monica:

Are strategy and tactics really different concepts, or just different levels of the same thing? If different, in what do they differ? Should they be handled differently? The goal of this blog-post is to describe strategy and tactics from the point of view of the Captain of a pirate ship, in the hope that the analogy will be sticky enough to allow remembering the concepts the next time this topic comes up. Let us first set up the context, and then clarify the concepts.

A Pirate’s conundrum

In March 1699, after a years-long voyage as a privateer, Captain Kidd found himself in the Caribbean commanding a captured, undermanned, treasure-laden vessel (the Quedagh Merchant). There, he learned that he and his crew had been declared pirates and were to be arrested. The accusation of piracy stemmed from having captured two ships (the Quedagh being one of them), which led to an immense diplomatic and political upheaval. However, Kidd had in his possession the French passes presented to him by those ships, which made the captures legal (at least technically), and thus constituted his proof of innocence against the piracy accusations.

Glenn Fleishman:

The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”

For academics fearful of quoting from copyrighted texts, teachers who may be violating the law with every photocopy, and modern-day artists in search of inspiration, the event is a cause for celebration. For those who dread seeing Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires, “Public Domain Day,” as it is sometimes known, will be less joyful. Despite that, even fierce advocates for copyright agree that, after 95 years, it is time to release these works. “There comes a point when a creative work belongs to history as much as to its author and her heirs,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild.

Tristan Shaw:

The conquistadors were Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who explored much of the world during the Age of Discovery. They are best remembered for their conquests and exploration of the Americas. Conquistadors like Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro became legendary for their conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires, honored as national heroes for centuries after their deaths.

In modern times, people have taken a more skeptical view toward the conquistadors, dismissing them as greedy and careless barbarians interested only in gold. While this was true of many of them, the conquistadors were certainly a fascinating lot of adventurers, filled with larger-than-life characters whose dreams, failures, and occasional triumphs—overshadowed by the big, successful names like Cortes and Pizarro—make for some fascinating stories.

Justin Murphy and Georgie Silvarole:

Federal data shows black students in particular face serious obstacles to advancing education

Black and Latino students spoken to for this report say they thrive on opportunities, but still run into instances of racism

In 10 districts with significant black populations, those students were more than a year behind

Suburban school districts are growing increasingly diverse, with 40 percent of the county’s minority students attending

Will Barrett, an 11th-grader at Fairport High School, has avoided the pitfalls of many other suburban students of color. He takes several Advanced Placement classes and doesn’t have any disciplinary problems.

Even so, he said he is constantly confronted by the sort of overt racism that many white people believe disappeared generations ago.

He recalled one instance where another student said that black people come from the jungle. Black people commit the vast majority of crimes, the white student continued, so the country would be better off without them.

Vermont Agency of Education:

The State Board of Education’s Final Report of Decisions and Order on Statewide School District Mergers is a requirement of Act 46. It is the conclusion of a multiyear process to create more sustainable and efficient school governance structures and improve access to quality PreK-12 education for all Vermont students.

Creating the Plan
In crafting the Final Report of Decisions and Order, the Board paid careful attention to the goals and requirements of Act 46. Additionally, the Board encouraged input and testimony from all affected districts and from the citizens of Vermont. While there were many tough decisions, the Board was careful to adhere to the Vermont General Assembly’s requirements as laid out in the law.

By the Numbers
The goal of Act 46 is to improve education outcomes and equity by creating larger and more efficient school governance structures. The Board’s Final Report of Decisions and Order has:

Merged 45 districts in 39 towns to form 11 new union school districts.
Enlarged 3 existing union school districts.

Created a net reduction of 34 districts.

Conditionally required an additional 4 districts to merge with 4 existing union districts.

When the impacts of Act 46 are combined with those of predecessor legislation (Act 153 of 2010 and Act 156 of 2012), the results are:

206 districts in 185 towns have formed 50 new union school districts (a reduction of 156) districts.
63% percent of Vermont K-12 students will live in a new union school district created by Acts 46, 153 and 156 (as of July 1, 2019).
84.4% of students will reside in a new union school district or a pre-existing supervisory district (preferred structure) such as Burlington or Springfield SDs.

Alex Carp:

What was America? The question is nearly as old as the republic itself. In 1789, the year George Washington began his first term, the South Carolina doctor and statesman David Ramsay set out to understand the new nation by looking to its short past. America’s histories at the time were local, stories of states or scattered tales of colonial lore; nations were tied together by bloodline, or religion, or ancestral soil. “The Americans knew but little of one another,” Ramsay wrote, delivering an accounting that both presented his contemporaries as a single people, despite their differences, and tossed aside the assumptions of what would be needed to hold them together. “When the war began, the Americans were a mass of husbandmen, merchants, mechanics and fishermen; but the necessities of the country gave a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants, and set them on thinking, speaking and acting in a line far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.” The Constitution had just been ratified at the time of Ramsay’s writing, the first system of national government submitted to its people for approval. “A vast expansion of the human mind speedily followed,” he wrote. It hashed out the nation as a set of principles. America was an idea. America was an argument.

The question has animated American history ever since. “For the last half century,” the historian and essayist Jill Lepore told an interviewer in 2011, academic historians have been trying “to write an integrated history of the United States, a history both black and white, a history that weaves together political history and social history, the history of presidents and the history of slavery.” Over the same period, a generation of Americans have had their imaginations narrowed, on one side by populist myths blind to the evidence of the past, and on the other by academic histories blind to the power of stories. Why, at a time when facts are more accessible than at any other point in human history, have they failed to provide us with a more broadly shared sense of objective truth?

Steven Elbow:

To make their point, the couple traced reading and math proficiency rates for the class of 2017 through the years, finding that the black and Hispanic cohorts saw little if any improvements between grades three to 11 and trailed white students by as many as 50 percentage points.

“Both of these things suggest to us that the district’s efforts to educate our minority students have failed (for whatever reason or reasons),” they wrote. “Nevertheless, we are finding ways to give these students high school diplomas. But what good is a high school diploma to a young person if they cannot read or do math?”

They’re calling for more resources, especially in younger grades, like reading specialists to oversee literacy programming, and reading specialists to run intervention programs in the middle and high schools.

“Further, we need to hold those people and other school staff accountable for improving literacy in their student body — i.e., for increasing the percentage of students (in every demographic group) in their school who are reading at grade level,” they wrote.

In the Isthmus article, Henriques and Frost also accused the district of whitewashing data.

“We have long been frustrated by the way the district selectively compiles, analyzes, and shares student data with the community,” they wrote, adding, “For too many district administrators and school board members over the 20+ years we have been paying attention, making the district look good has been more important than thoroughgoing honesty about how our students are doing.”

Cheatham bristled at the criticism, maintaining that the district publicly posts all data, both favorable and unfavorable, and that there’s nothing wrong with publicizing good results.

“We’ll never hide our progress,” she said, “and it’s important to recognize the progress we have made, which is substantial.”

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, now around $20k per student.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

More.

2006: They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: “Plenty of Resources“.

“What’s different, this time?”

2017: Adult employment.

2018: Seeing the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship Between Madison School District (WI) Graduation Rates and Student Achievement

Syk Houdeib:

When I first started thinking about becoming a developer, I would read articles like this one with a bit of skepticism. I kept on looking for something in the writer’s background that made them “special”. That made them suited for this job. Something that I didn’t have.

I have since come to understand that this is not how it works. There aren’t any “special” requirements to becoming a developer. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, because it isn’t. But the good news is that all the requirements are things that are in everyone’s reach. You have to be willing to work hard, learn a lot, and be consistent. You need to persist when things get tough. Talk yourself out of the moments of desperation when you feel like you are not cut out for this. That’s all it takes, and everyone can do these things with a bit of practice.

I started with no related background study. I had no money to spend on expensive courses, no time in my already busy day, and I was already almost middle aged. Everyone’s circumstances are different, but I learned that if you put your mind to it, you can do it.

Dahlia Lithwick Susan Matthews:

One afternoon late in her first year at Yale Law School, Linda sat down to create a contemporaneous record of a conversation she’d had the night before. She’d met with one of her professors, Jed Rubenfeld, in his office after hours at his suggestion, following repeated attempts to see him in the afternoon about a paper she was working on for him. Rubenfeld had made her uncomfortable throughout the year, commenting on her appearance and asking her about his. While friends had told her she had reason to feel creeped out by his behavior, Linda wondered whether she was being too sensitive and agreed to the 8 p.m. meeting. She really needed to make progress on the paper, after all. But given the queasy feeling she already had, she asked her partner to pick her up that night, and to come looking for her if he hadn’t heard from her after a reasonable amount of time.

Will Flanders:

Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement. A school with a population of 100% students who are economically disadvantaged would be expected to have proficiency rates more than 40% lower than a school with wealthier students. Indeed, this economics achievement gap is far larger in terms of proficiency effects than the racial achievement gap, and has important implications for the rural areas of the state, where the percentage of low-income families is higher than most suburban and some rural areas.

While the initial data release by DPI did not include sufficient data for apples-to-apples comparisons among private schools in the choice program, the data was comprehensive enough for charter schools. Particularly in Milwaukee, these schools continue to outperform their peer schools. For this preliminary analysis, we pulled out independent and non-instrumentality charters from MPS, while leaving instrumentality charters—or charters in name-only—as part of the district’s performance. In both mathematics and English/language arts, charter schools continue to outperform their other public school peers.

In English/Language Arts, “free” charters had approximately 9% higher proficiency than traditional public schools. In mathematics, these schools had 6.9% higher proficiency. This is consistent with our past analyses which have found that independence from MPS is a key component of better student outcomes, whether through the chartering or the school choice program.

“We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said.

Madison, despite spending far more than most, has tolerated long term, disastrous reading results.

Tony Evers, currently runnng for Governor, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?

The Wisconsin DPI has aborted our one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements: “Foundations of Reading” for elementary teachers. Massachusetts’ MTEL substantially raised the teacher content knowledge bar, leading to their top public school rank.

An emphasis on adult employment, also Zimman.

Alan Borsuk:

“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …

“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?

Matthew DeFour:

Not all districts have the same revenue level. DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy highlighted some differences:

The Beloit School District, with higher poverty and lower property values, can receive $9,626 per student, about 83 percent of which comes from state aid. So when revenue limits increase, the district typically uses all of the extra funding without having to raise property taxes much.

The more rural Plum City School District in northern Wisconsin can collect $10,271 per student, about half of which comes from aid and half from property taxes, so when limits increase the district has to engage with its community about whether to raise property taxes.

The Nicolet Union High School District in a higher property value district Milwaukee suburb receives $15,344 per student, only 5 percent of which comes from state aid, so in order to raise funding levels the district must raise property taxes.

McCarthy added, “per pupil aid subverts all of these considerations.”

In the last budget Walker proposed more money for schools than Evers, even with the high price tag of the Evers funding formula change, but most of the increase went to per-pupil aid and property tax credits. Kitchens said the Legislature didn’t use the funding increase to back Evers’ plan because “politically there wasn’t a will to come back and change it.”

He also acknowledged that continuing to pump money into per-pupil aid is problematic.

“If we keep doing that, we’re defeating the purpose of the formula,” Kitchens said. “I know politically there may be advantages to giving everybody something so everybody’s happy, but that does defeat the purpose.”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by Mr. Evers, has aborted our one attempt to improve teacher content knowledge requirements, as Massachusetts has done (via MTEL), in an effort to address our disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 school districts, nearly 20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, and recently promoted improved graduation rates despite declining academic results.

balint:

When someone in the security community raised this, it turned out that apparently this is intended behaviour from Google’s side as confirmed by multiple googlers and they were wondering why the new behaviour might feel abusive to some people. Some folks working on Chrome pointed out that most people can’t differentiate between logging into a Google Site and logging into Chrome and this has lead to problems with shared computers, where person A logs into GMail, but person B is logged into Chrome. This prompted Chrome developers to come up with the change that erases the distinction entirely.

It is at this point that I should note that I don’t personally use Chrome, as I felt it was too closely corporate Google even before this change. This is also not a post arguing that “some users can tell the difference, therefor…”, I do believe software should be written with the common users in mind. Interestingly, the common user belief that strongly equates Chrome with a Google Service (and not an application or tool) is probably the more accurate view of Chrome, post release 69. It’s worth wondering from where users got that impression and why.

So if this change is just about bringing Chrome in line with what most users believe anyway, what’s the fuss? Perhaps it’s not about what people believe, but what is right. Perhaps Google doesn’t want Chrome, currently having majority browser market share, to be a neutral platform. A lot of people, developers especially, believe that Chrome is a Google-influenced but more or less neutral tool and then this widespread belief has to be reconciled with the Chrome-as-a-service thinking.

Violating the content vs browser separation layer doesn’t just conform to what a lot of users believe, it also ties what’s happening inside the browser to Google on an unprecedented level, throwing the neutrality of Chrome as a platform into question. What’s the next thing that Google and only Google can make Chrome do? Concerned about shared computers but you’re not Google? There is no neutral API to log someone out from Chrome and prevent data from being synced if it’s about person A logging into Facebook in person B’s Chrome profile.

Many schools, including Madison, use Google services. Matthew Green dives into Google’s privacy policy.

He Huifeng Celia Chen:

Amid the sprawl of drab, dusty concrete factories in Shunde district in the southern Chinese city of Foshan, one gleaming new structure stands out.

The 40,000 square metre (430,000 square feet) factory, designed by an American architect, cost 120 million yuan (US$17.5 million) to build and is expected to triple Jaten Robot & Automation’s annual production to 10,000 robots.

Just a few miles away, work is under way on an 800,000 square metre, 10 billion yuan industrial estate that will house three ventures between Chinese appliance maker Midea and German robotics firm Kuka, which Midea bought in 2016. The new complex will have the annual capacity to produce 75,000 industrial robots by 2024.

Jaten and Midea are among the biggest players helping to make Foshan – a city of 7 million people best known as the home of the Cantonese style of lion dance and kung fu – the hub of China’s robotics industry.

CBS News:

Our series, School Matters, features extended stories and investigations on education. In this installment, we’re looking at a lawsuit winding its way through the federal appeals process that questions whether access to literacy is a constitutional right. A federal judge in Michigan recently ruled it wasn’t when he dismissed a 2016 case. That case claimed students in some of Detroit’s lowest-performing schools were denied “access” to literacy due to poor management, discrimination and underfunding.

For years, Detroit public schools were under control of emergency managers, who were trying to lift the district out of debt. But, this case has drawn national attention because of its wide-ranging implications, possibly leading to federal changes to the education system.

March 10, 2018: The Wisconsin State Journal published “Madison high school graduation rate for black students soars”.

September 1, 2018: “how are we to understand such high minority student graduation rates in combination with such low minority student achievement?”

2005:

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

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

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

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

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

In closing, Madison spends far more than most K-12 taxpayer funded organizations.

Federal taxpayers have recently contributed to our property tax base.

Yoni Applebam:

The results have been catastrophic. As the procedures that once conferred legitimacy on organizations have grown alien to many Americans, contempt for democratic institutions has risen. In 2016, a presidential candidate who scorned established norms rode that contempt to the Republican nomination, drawing his core support from Americans who seldom participate in the rituals of democracy.

American government’s most obvious problems—from its dysfunctional legislature to Donald Trump himself—are merely signs of this underlying decay. The political system’s previous strength and resilience flowed from Americans’ anomalously high rates of participation in democratically governed organizations, most of them apolitical. There is no easy fix for our current predicament; simply voting Trump out of office won’t suffice. To stop the rot afflicting American government, Americans are going to have to get back in the habit of democracy.

In the early years of the United States, Europeans made pilgrimages to the young republic to study its success. How could such a diverse and sprawling nation flourish under a system of government that originated in small, homogeneous city-states?

One after another, they seized upon the most unfamiliar aspect of American culture: its obsession with associations. To almost every challenge in their lives, Americans applied a common solution. They voluntarily bound themselves together, adopting written rules, electing officers, and making decisions by majority vote. This way of life started early. “Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. “The same spirit pervades every act of social life.”

Citizen Stewart:

When we talk dollars and cents in public education, there are a few truisms: teachers are paid too little, schools are underfunded, private and charter schools “drain” funds from traditional districts, and when schools can’t make ends meet it is the result of things done to them and never stuff they do.

The public buys that story and many in the education industry eager to supply endless examples to multiply the trope. Those of us saying school spending is at least equal to school funding as an issue are forced to wear t-shirts that say “I am the day after Christmas.”

If raising concerns about lax controls on public spending makes me December 26th, I’m okay with it.

There are two ways to say we need more money in education. The first is to demand taxpayers give more, and the second is to require elected officials to stop squandering what they already get.

Almost everyone has the former covered, but the latter gets crickets.

I’ve blogged and Tweeted, and begged and pleaded, about the repeating instances of poor stewardship of public dollars. I’ve talked about the millions of public dollars misspent for unneeded technology; a $72 million high school football stadium; the $152 million bill New York pays for teachers that don’t teach; the $300 million Los Angeles Unified School District paid out in sex abuse settlements; the school board that signed an irresponsible decade-long teachers’ contract with 4% raises locked in; the high school rebuild that started at $30 million for a 1,600 seat school but ballooned to $250 million due to poor planning and limp oversight; or the school district under scrutiny for waste and “cronyism” in its $300 million bonding program.

Maria Repnikova:

In the summer of 2008, when I interviewed for an internship at Google London headquarters, one of the questions was whether I would have supported Google’s entry into the Chinese market in 2006. This was two years prior to Google’s official and dramatic exit from China on account of ethical considerations.

My answer at the time was yes. I argued that some information access is better than none. In my view, the polarizing human rights narrative about the Chinese market is more concerned with our Western sensibilities than with the actual demands of Chinese citizens. While we want them to be liberated from the chains of the Communist Party, Chinese citizens may be more concerned with food safety, clean air, and consumer rights – information they may find on Google.

Eight years after its exit, Google faces a similar dilemma, but some things have changed. China’s tech sector became competitive on the global market and Chinese citizens experience more intensive censorship and surveillance than they had back in 2010. China became simultaneously more globalized and more closed. And American tech giants, including Google, are dealing with more regulations in Western markets and competition from Chinese artificial intelligence.

Once again, a number of human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, but also Google’s own employees who have been kept in the dark about this project, are decrying this decision as unethical.

The ethical lines, however, remain blurry.

Yevgeniy Brikman:

First, it looks like similar 10:1 rules show up in film, journalism, music, and photography! How cool is that?

Second, a common response is that even a single character change may show up in Git as an “inserted line” or “deleted line”, so when you see 100,000 lines were changed, it doesn’t mean that all the text in those lines was rewritten. This is true, but as I wrote above, there are also many types of changes missing from the data:

I don’t do a commit for every single line that I change. In fact, I may change a line 10 times, and commit only once.
This is actually even more pronounced for code. While doing a code-test cycle, I may change a few lines of code 50 times over, but only do one commit.
For my books, a lot of edit rounds and writing happened outside of Git (e.g., I wrote some of the chapters in Google Docs or Medium and O’Reilly does copyediting in a PDF).
My guess is that these two factors roughly cancel out. It won’t be exact, of course, and the actual ratio may be 8:1 or 12:1, but the order of magnitude is probably correct, and 10:1 is easier to remember.

Annie Waldeman:

Under federal law, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Office for Civil Rights is responsible for ensuring equal access to education and investigating allegations of discrimination in the country’s schools and colleges. Families and students can file complaints with the office, which then investigates and determines whether a college or school district may have violated federal law. If violations are substantiated, the office typically negotiates a settlement or prescribes corrective changes, which it sometimes oversees. For some complaints, the office may mediate a resolution. It receives more than 10,000 complaints annually, and has a target of resolving 80 percent of them within six months.

As the Obama administration tackled more complicated investigations, the cases took longer to resolve. From 2010 to 2015, time spent on the average sexual violence investigation increased from 289 to 963 days; on a school discipline case, from 198 to 451 days; and on a harassment probe, from 200 to 287 days. At the department’s request, Congress boosted the office’s budget.

Locally, the Simpson Street Free Press has covered the office of civil rights investigation into the Madison school District.

I’ve not seen substantive mention of this in the traditional media.

Madison, despite spending more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

2006: they’re all rich white kids and they will do just fine, not!

Small Learning communities.

English 10

Talented and gifted lawsuit

Dave Maass:

Update 7:30 p.m. July 10, 2018: The Irvine Company provided The Verge with the following response.

“Irvine Company is a customer of Vigilant Solutions. Vigilant employs ALPR technology at our three Orange County regional shopping centers. Vigilant is required by contract, and have assured us, that ALPR data collected at these locations is only shared with local police departments as part of their efforts to keep the local community safe.”

EFF urges the Irvine Company to release the names of the three regional shopping centers that are under surveillance and to provide a copy of the contract indicating the data is only shared with local police. The company should also release the names of which local agencies are accessing its data. We remain concerned and skeptical. EFF would appreciate any information that would clear up this matter. The public deserves greater transparency from The Irvine Company and Vigilant Solutions.

A company that operates 46 shopping centers up and down California has been providing sensitive information collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to Vigilant Solutions, a surveillance technology vendor that in turn sells location data to Immigrations & Customs Enforcement.

The Irvine Company—a real estate company that operates malls and mini-malls in Irvine, La Jolla, Newport Beach, Redwood City, San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale—has been conducting the ALPR surveillance since just before Christmas 2016, according to an ALPR Usage and Privacy Policy published on its website (archived version). The policy does not say which of its shopping centers use the technology, only disclosing that the company and its contractors operates ALPRs at “one or more” of its locations.

Eli Chait:

This is the first in a series of essays on the findings from a six month marketplace research project. My co-founders and I sold our last company to OpenTable and spent three years working on products to grow the supply side of OpenTable’s marketplace. There has been a lot written about online marketplaces and our goal was to test these theories by exploring data from a broader set of companies. We started by making a list of every marketplace founded, identifying 4,500 companies in total, then collected public data to classify and compare these companies (read more about the approach).
 
 Company success can be measured in many ways, but in the context of this project, we focused on two key metrics: revenue and capital efficiency (measured as the ratio of revenue to capital raised).1
 
 This post focuses on how the top 100 most successful marketplaces created value for their first users and which of the top three most popular “seeding” strategies has been the most effective. We discovered that one specific marketplace seeding strategy helped companies achieve higher revenue with less capital than other marketplaces.
 
 The chicken and egg problem
 
 A marketplace connects many suppliers to many buyers, typically enabling them to transact with one another and taking a fee for enabling the connection. But since marketplaces create value by aggregating supply and demand this creates the “chicken and egg” problem. What is the value to supply and demand when the marketplace is just getting started and doesn’t yet have many buyers or suppliers? The marketplace’s seeding strategy is how it solves the chicken and egg problem.
 
 OpenTable’s seeding strategy is what Sangeet Paul Choudary calls Standalone Mode and Chris Dixon calls “Single Player Mode.” OpenTable sold software to restaurants that created value for them without requiring any diners on the “buyer” side of the marketplace. They built a unique table management and CRM product (the “Electronic Reservation Book”) and charged a subscription fee for the service. The initial benefit to restaurant customers was the software. Once OpenTable acquired hundreds of restaurants in a city, they started to have a compelling diner value proposition.
 
 From studying the top 100 largest marketplaces (see here for methodology and list of marketplaces) we found that OpenTable’s strategy was actually the most common. This is also the most capital efficient strategy. Marketplaces that use this approach to seed the marketplace were 10x as capital efficient as marketplaces that used the second most popular strategy.

Melissa Korn and Nicole Hong:

A closely watched lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants is approaching a critical juncture, as court filings later this week are expected to reveal new details about how the school’s undergraduate admissions process affects different ethnic and racial groups.

Both sides are due to submit lengthy documents Friday in Boston federal court that will serve as a preview for an October bench trial, in which a federal judge will decide whether the school’s affirmative-action practices are unconstitutional or illegal under federal civil-rights law.

The lawsuit against Harvard was filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit whose members include Asian-American students who were denied admission to Harvard.

The plaintiffs allege Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian-American students who are admitted and holding them to a higher standard than students of other races.

Friday’s motions are likely to include thousands of pages of supporting documents both sides have gathered over the past two years, including dozens of depositions and statistical analyses of detailed admissions data covering six years, during which roughly 200,000 people applied to Harvard.

AJ Dellinger:

Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system. There’s just one problem: the software used to run the lottery isn’t actually random.

The Globe and Mail reported the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) uses Microsoft Excel to run the immigration lottery to select 10,000 people for permanent resident status from a field of about 100,000 applications received each year. Experts warned that the random number generating function in Excel isn’t actually random and may put some applicants at a disadvantage.

First, it’s best to understand just how the lottery system works. An Access to Information request filed by The Globe and Mail shows that IRCC inputs the application number for every person entering the lottery into Excel, then assigns them a random number to each using a variation of the program’s RAND command. They then sort the list from smallest to largest based on the random number assigned and take the first 10,000 applications with the lowest numbers.

The system puts a lot of faith in Excel’s random function, which it might not deserve. According to Université de Montréal computer science professor Pierre L’Ecuyer, Excel is “very bad” at generating random numbers because it relies on an old generator that is out of date. He also warned that Excel doesn’t pass statistical tests and is less random than it appears, which means some people in the lottery may actually have a lower chance of being selected than others.

Delano Franklin & Samuel Zwickel:

Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow William F. Lee ’72 is serving as the lead trial lawyer for an affirmative action lawsuit against the University and has recused himself from the Corporation’s discussions regarding the suit since he took on this role, Lee said in an interview Monday.

“About a year ago, I actually recused myself from any Corporation discussion of the case so that I can act as a lawyer for Harvard in the case,” Lee said.

“I literally step out of the room,” he added.

Lee has been a member of the 13-person Harvard Corporation since 2010. He is also a partner at WilmerHale, the law firm representing the University in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit in question was filed against the University in 2014 by the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions. It alleges the College illegally discriminates against Asian Americans in its admissions process. The College has consistently denied the allegations, arguing it “does not discriminate against applicants from any group in its admissions processes.”

Acting in his capacity as the University’s lawyer, Lee penned an April 9 letter calling the Justice Department’s intervention in the lawsuit “perplexing” and “entirely unnecessary.” The Justice Department filed a briefing April 6 asking the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts to unseal previously confidential admissions documents and information.

Matthew Braga, Nahlah Ayed, Dave Seglins, Julian Sher, Michelle Gagnon:

His activism ended with his arrest — but started, he has said, with the censorship of his popular online discussion forum. Experts now say it was blocked with help from Canadian technology that has repeatedly found itself in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

As part of a globe-spanning investigation released Wednesday, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say they have found fresh evidence that internet-filtering technology developed by Waterloo, Ont.-based Netsweeper is being used in 10 countries to censor access to news, religious content, LGBTQ+ resources, and political campaigns.

India and Pakistan, both parliamentary democracies, are two notable entries in a list of regimes that includes the UAE.

Jeremy Adams:

Something is wrong—very, very wrong. Teachers across the country at all grade levels, in all subjects, teaching a wide variety of student populations, can sense it. There is a pulse of dysfunction, a steady palpitation of doom that the path we are on is not properly oriented.

There is a raw and amorphous anxiety creeping into the psyche of the corps of American teachers.

We may have trouble pinpointing the exact moment when something in our schools and broader culture went wildly astray, leaving in its wake teachers sapped of optimism and weighted with enervate comprehension. The following is a small sampling—this list could easily have been twice as long if my conversations with fellow teachers are any indication—of problems that teachers were not facing ten years ago.

Alan Borsuk:

Teachers and the teachers’ union. Don’t expect a happy workforce. The union has turned up the volume on its unhappiness and it remains a powerful force, even without the bargaining powers it had before Act 10, which dramatically curtailed collective bargaining for most public employees, including teachers. Beyond the union itself, it won’t be easy for MPS to attract and retain top teachers, given the renewed money crunch.

Principals. You can advocate all sorts of things as superintendent, but carrying them out depends a lot on the 150 or so principals running schools. I suspect if Driver were candid, she’d say that she worries about the quality of principals overall. And there is concern that a wave of retirements is coming. Good luck finding great principals.

Student achievement. Driver accomplished some things as superintendent, but the most important big picture point to me is that student achievement didn’t change much. A few indicators improved a bit. Overall, the situation continues to be deeply alarming. Year after year, one in five students in MPS (and in the private school voucher program) rates as proficient in reading. Fewer than that are proficient in math. Is it Driver’s fault that things haven’t improved much? Obviously, there’s lots of blame to share. But, ultimately the coach is judged by how the team does on the field. The team is chronically beleaguered.

Relationships. This was Driver’s biggest strength. She connected with all sorts of people — community leaders, philanthropists, business leaders, elected officials, leaders from elsewhere in Wisconsin. This translated into both tangible and intangible support for MPS. But relationships require a lot of tending, especially with so many competing interests. Driver will be a tough act to follow on this front.

Srijan Kumar, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky:

1% of all communities initiate 74% of all conflicts on Reddit. The red nodes (communities) in this map initiate a large amount of conflict, and we can see that these conflict intiating nodes are rare and clustered together in certain social regions.

“Come look at all the brainwashed idiots in r/Documentaries
Seriously, none of those people are willing to even CONSIDER that our own country orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. They are all 100% certain the “turrists” were behind it all, and all of the smart people who argue it are getting downvoted to the depths of hell. Damn shame. Wish people would do their research. Here’s the link.”

The above post in reddit.com/r/conspiracy (now deleted) led to several members of r/conspiracy posting uncivil comments (starting a ‘raid’) on the linked post in reddit.com/r/Documentaries.

Therefore, in this research work (accepted and to be presented at World Wide Web conference, WWW 2018), we conduct a data driven analysis of how conflicts/raids occur between communities in Reddit, their impact, mitigation, and prediction.

Amber Walker:

Several dozen parents, students and community members from La Follette High School showed up to Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting to address mounting concerns about safety at the school.

The outcry follows the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, earlier this month. In the last two weeks, Madison Police have responded to high profile incidents at La Follette, including disarming a student who brought a handgun to campus.

Parents like Jose Pacheco urged the School Board to do more to make students feel safe at school.

Related:

Gangs and school violence forum.

Police calls to Madison Schools: 1996-2006

Annysa Johnson:

The bill’s author, Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du Lac), defended the measure, saying he was open to amendments but that something has to be done about the rise in assaults and threats against teachers. He blamed what he described as the “social justice agenda” in some schools, saying it does not hold students accountable for their negative behavior.

“It’s an unfortunate reality that negative behavior without consequences promotes more negative behavior,” Thiesfeldt said. “What truly grows the school to prison pipeline is the current trend toward minimizing serious negative behavior and the coddling of children with no serious consequences,”

Thiesfeldt’s wide-ranging bill would, among other things:

Related: Gangs and school violence Forum.

Charisse A. Gulosino
Elif Şişli-Ciamarra:

This study provides the first systematic analysis of the composition of charter school governing boards. We assemble a dataset of charter school boards in Massachusetts between 2001 and 2013 and investigate the consequences of donor and founder representation on governing boards. We find that the presence of donors on the charter school boards is positively related to financial performance and attribute this result to the donors’ strong monitoring incentives due to their financial stakes in the school. We also show that financial outcomes are not generated at the expense of academic outcomes, as the presence of donors on the boards is also associated with higher student achievement. Founder representation on charter school boards, on the other hand, is associated with lower financial performance but higher academic achievement.

Mai Ngoc Chau:

Vietnam is deploying a 10,000-member military cyber warfare unit to combat what the government sees as a growing threat of “wrongful views” proliferating on the internet, according to local media.

Force 47 has worked pro-actively against distorted information, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Nguyen Trong Nghia, deputy head of the general politics department under the Vietnam People’s Military. The disclosure of the unit comes as the Communist government pressures YouTube Inc. and Facebook Inc. to remove videos and accounts seen damaging the reputations of leaders or promoting anti-party views.

Forrest Brazeal:

The stack.

You have one. So do I. It’s sitting on your bedside table now, or on the floor, or spread around the house – that growing, tottering, guilt-inducing pile of books that you are absolutely going to read.

Soon. One of these days. When you’re not so busy.

I know how you feel. I’m pretty busy, too. But I got tired of feeling guilty about all those unread books, so at the beginning of 2017 I decided to take action.

I decided to see if I could read one hundred books this year, without cutting anything else – school, work, family, side projects – out of my life.

You Already Have Time To Read

I won’t bury the lede. Here’s the secret I learned: despite how busy I might be, I didn’t need to “make time to read”. I didn’t have to wait for the perfect opportunity, like a long evening cuddled by the fire. (I haven’t lit a fire in my fireplace in three years. I don’t have time.)

American Institutes for Research (AIR):

Wisconsin annually differentiates across all public schools based on scores for the individual federally-required accountability measures (not annual summative ratings for all schools/all students based on all indicators). Schools for comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, and additional targeted support and improvement are identified using the following composite index (see also “School Improvement Categories”).

WI also proposes to maintain a “separate” state accountability system that incorporates additional accountability measures and generates an annual 1 to 5 star rating (see Appendix D of the Wisconsin ESSA State plan for additional details).

WI provides 3 composite index weighting schemes: schools in which English learners (ELs) make up at least 10% of the population, school in which ELs are less than 10% of the population but the minimum N size is met, and schools that do not meet the minimum EL N size.

Summary of State Accountability Snapshots.

Much more on the “Every Student Succeeds Act“.

Sasha Chavkin, Emilia Díaz-Struck and Cecile S. Gallego:

Hidden in the 25,000 offshore entities we added to the Offshore Leaks Database today are some of the world’s most prestigious universities and colleges.

ICIJ and its partners found more than 100 educational institutions in offshore law firm Appleby’s client database, which was part of the Paradise Papers leaks.

Some of these elite institutions hold tens of billions of dollars in their endowments, and in the eyes of the law, they are treated as charities: altruistic, mission-driven and tax-exempt.

The only time university endowments pay taxes is when they invest in debt-financed financial firms such as private equity funds and hedge funds. These investments are considered a business activity unrelated to their tax-exempt missions.

Nick Anderson and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

ouse Republicans have slashed the number of colleges they are targeting for a new tax on endowment income.

The GOP majority on the Ways and Means Committee voted Monday night to modify a tax bill that includes several provisions affecting higher education. Among them is a proposal that makes college presidents blanch: an excise tax on endowment income for certain private colleges.

Under the first version of the bill, made public last week, private colleges would have been subject to a 1.4 percent tax on net investment income if they had 500 or more students and an endowment of at least $100,000 per full-time student. A Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found that about 140 schools would have been affected. The American Council on Education estimated the number affected as 155.

Alan Borsuk:

But the ice-breaker question was to name our favorite childhood book.

I said, “Horton Hears a Who,” by Dr. Seuss.

I’ve given that answer pretty often over the years. There are several reasons I think it’s a great book. One is that, in the end, the community of “Whos” is saved when all of them join together to raise their voices. And it’s not until the last, silent Who lets out a “yop” that the totality of their voices is heard, to great benefit.

What if that were true, at least in some way? What if we all raised our voices to insist on better things for Milwaukee and on better ways for meeting the needs of so many people here?

Jim Soland:

Achievement gaps are one of education’s most important policy metrics. Gaps between boys and girls, as well as white and racial minority students, are often used to measure the effectiveness and fairness of the education system at a given point in time, over the course of decades, and as children progress through school. Major policy initiatives related to accountability, assessment, and funding are partially motivated by a desire to close gaps.

As is so often the case, however, estimates of achievement gaps are not as straightforward as practitioners and policymakers might like. Gaps result from the sum total of students’ schooling, after-school activities, home life, and neighborhood experiences. Further, gaps are not measures of intelligence or ability, but of performance. Therefore, observed scores are impacted by factors that adults control (like what students are taught), and by factors that may be unrelated to achievement (like motivation to perform).

Ryan Devereaux, Spencer Woodman:

An internal handbook obtained by The Intercept provides a rare view into the extensive asset seizure operations of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, an office that trains its agents to meticulously appraise the value of property before taking it.

HSI’s 71-page “Asset Forfeiture Handbook,” dated June 30, 2010, underscores the role seizures play in “helping to fund future law enforcement actions” and covering costs “that HSI would otherwise be unable to fund.” It thus offers an unprecedented window into ICE’s wide-ranging asset forfeiture operations and the premium the agency places on seizing valuable property. Forfeiture proceeds can bolster ICE’s partnerships with local police departments, which are now the subject of heightened debate given the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Matt Welch:

So the “Unsafe Space” campus speaking tour sponsored by Spiked (and hosted at least once so far in an emergency backup way by Reason) continues to generate interesting collisions between libertarian commentators and the angry campus progressives who seek to shout them down. One recent incident, while not coming close to a Berkeley-style riot, or a “Cocks Not Glocks” dildo-waving protest of gun-right speaker Katie Pavlich, or even the latest Charles Murray kerfuffle, nonetheless caught my attention because it involved old pal Kmele Foster, and my favorite piece of writing by Martin Luther King.

Foster (see video below) had just sat through a series of emotional audience harangues defending identity politics and speech-sensitivity as necessary pushbacks against a racist power structure, when he attempted to make a case familiar to Reason readers—that free-speech protections are crucial precisely for minority populations’ struggles against the majority:

Will Flanders and Natalie Goodnow:

Much has been made in recent years about the rate of suspensions and expulsions across the country and the role that student race ostensibly plays in them. A 2016 U.S. Department of Education study showed that African American students were 3.8 times more likely than white students to be suspended. But other scholars claim that racial disparities in suspensions are emblematic of other problems, such as poverty (Eden, 2017; Kersten 2017). In an unprecedented, controversial manner, the Obama Administration took action to ensure that race was not a factor in school suspension decisions. Through the Supportive School Discipline Initiative and a “Dear Colleague memo,” the U.S. Justice Department and Education Department under the Obama Administration threatened public school districts with legal penalties in order to change their disciplinary policies. The letter told schools that unlawful discrimination can occur if it has a disproportionate effect on minority students and the school cannot justify the difference. None of these actions went through the traditional rulemaking, regulatory process – or were implemented into law though Congress. School districts changed disciplinary policies to comply. Since 2011-2012, according to the Manhattan Institute, over 50 of the largest school districts and 27 states changed their laws or policies relating to school discipline. These changes resulted in fewer suspensions and, as highlighted by Wisconsin talk radio show host Dan O’Donnell, made the classroom less safe. As a result, the disciplinary policy changes were unpopular; a 2015 EdNext poll found that a majority of the public – and nearly 60% of teachers – disapproved of the Obama Administration’s actions. Wisconsin was not immune to the national trend. This paper seeks to build on previous studies by providing the most comprehensive analysis, to date, of how the Obama Administration’s disciplinary policy changes have impacted Wisconsin public schools. We provide the historical context for changes in suspension policy before conducting extensive analyses of data on suspensions in Wisconsin since the 2007-08 school year. Some of our findings include:

Jill Tucker:

Now, he’s Mr. Wilson the music teacher. Instead of playing Puccini’s “La Bohème” at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, the 58-year-old maestro is working up to 14 hours a day coaxing “Jingle Bells” out of beginners and pouring much of his life savings into bringing music back to a school where 95 percent of students live in poverty. If he can take kids who can’t play a note and teach them a song, Wilson believes, they will not just feel successful, but see new possibilities everywhere in their lives.

It is his fourth year of teaching at DeJean, of testing that belief. And, though he doesn’t know it yet, it also will be his last.

So he stands on the platform, this unconventional man with disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes, a black apron on his waist to hold pens, bathroom passes and good-behavior raffle tickets, and waits for his students to quiet down. Only when the chatter finally abates by an almost imperceptible decibel does he begin to count: One and two and three and …

The students play. The notes aren’t perfect. A trumpet is flat, and a trombone is off by an octave. But the song is unmistakable: The itsy bitsy spider is climbing up the water spout.

When the music stops. Wilson jumps off the stage, then leaps again, spinning in a circle, his glasses bouncing. His five band classes, mostly students who picked up an instrument for the first time five weeks earlier, have played a song together.

biztimes:

According to a story posted on BizTimes.com, GPS Education Partners has partnered with local manufacturers to provide high school juniors and seniors with work-based education programs, in which students take courses on-site at the businesses, called “education centers,” and apply those lessons on the manufacturing floor. The non-profit is based in Brookfield, Wis., and launched in 2000.

The organization has grown from just 5 students at Waukesha, Wis.-based Generac Power Systems Inc. in its initial year to now having served 500 students, in partnership with 100 businesses.

Now, as worker shortages persist and a growing number of schools look to bolster their career and technical education offerings, GPS is expanding its reach with a new service model.

The organization is beginning to provide consulting services to schools as they launch their own apprenticeship education programs — a hybrid of the traditional GPS education center model.

Mike Antonucci:

he Clark County Education Association, representing 10,000 teachers who work for the Las Vegas schools, filed a lawsuit earlier this month against its parent affiliate, the Nevada State Education Association, alleging a breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract.
Soon after, NSEA and the National Education Association filed a countersuit also charging of breach of contract, as well as unjust enrichment and fraud.
The dueling lawsuits are just the latest in a long series of conflicts between NSEA and its locals, particularly Clark County, whose membership comprises almost half of NSEA’s total. I questioned the outlook for the Nevada union’s survival last March, and now a crisis appears imminent.
The Clark County lawsuit details the timeline of its deteriorating relationship with NSEA and lays out what the local union wants.

Patrick Kiger::

A patient fills in a questionnaire and sleep diary before undergoing a polysomnography at a sleep center in Switzerland. What are some biasess scientists need to be aware of when conducting studies? AMELIE-BENOIST /BSIP/Getty Images

Arrhythmia, an irregular rhythm of the heart, is common during and soon after a heart attack and can lead to early death. That’s why when anti-arrhythmia drugs became available in the early 1980s, they seemed like a major life-saving breakthrough [source: Freedman].

The problem, though, was that although small-scale trials showed that the drugs stopped arrhythmia, the drugs didn’t actually save lives. Instead, as larger-scale studies showed, patients who received such treatments were one-third less likely to survive. Researchers had focused on stopping arrhythmia as a measure of effectiveness rather than on the problem that they were trying to solve, which was preventing deaths [sources: Freedman, Hampton].

Colleen Flaherty:

Arif A. Mamun, PhD, Erik W. Carter, PhD, Thomas M. Fraker, PhD, …

To better understand how early work experience shapes subsequent employment outcomes for young people (ages 18 to 20) with disabilities, we analyzed longitudinal data from the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation to test whether the employment experiences of 1,053 youth during the initial year after entry affected their employment during the third year after entry. To derive causal estimates, we used a dynamic-panel estimation model to account for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that may be correlated with youth’s self-selection into both early and later employment. We also controlled for other socioeconomic and health factors that may affect later employment. We found that early work experience increases the probability of being employed 2 years later by 17 percentage points. This estimate is an important advancement over the correlational approaches that characterize the current literature and provides stronger evidence that early work experience is a key determinant of subsequent labor market success.

Victor Tan Chen:

Over the last several decades, the proportion of Americans who get married has greatly diminished—a development known as well to those who lament marriage’s decline as those who take issue with it as an institution. But a development that’s much newer is that the demographic now leading the shift away from tradition is Americans without college degrees—who just a few decades ago were much more likely to be married by the age of 30 than college graduates were.

Today, though, just over half of women in their early 40s with a high-school degree or less education are married, compared to three-quarters of women with a bachelor’s degree; in the 1970s, there was barely a difference. The marriage gap for men has changed less over the years, but there the trend lines have flipped too: Twenty-five percent of men with high-school degrees or less education have never married, compared to 23 percent of men with bachelor’s degrees and 14 percent of those with advanced degrees. Meanwhile, divorce rates have continued to rise among the less educated, while staying more or less steady for college graduates in recent decades.

The divide in the timing of childbirth is even starker. Fewer than one in 10 mothers with a bachelor’s degree are unmarried at the time of their child’s birth, compared to six out of 10 mothers with a high-school degree. The share of such births has risen dramatically in recent decades among less educated mothers, even as it has barely budged for those who finished college. (There are noticeable differences between races, but among those with less education, out-of-wedlock births have become much more common among white and nonwhite people alike.)

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.