diracdeltas

[Update (12/14/16): Reuters has specified that the rootkit was implemented as a Linux kernel module. Wow.]

Yesterday morning, Reuters dropped a news story revealing that Yahoo installed a backdoor on their own infrastructure in 2015 in compliance with a secret order from either the FBI or the NSA. While we all know that the US government routinely asks tech companies for surveillance help, a couple aspects of the Yahoo story stand out:

Laura Ungar & Mike Nichols:

All of this endangers millions of people across the country, mostly in remote and rural communities. Utilities like East Mooringsport Water, serving part of a bayou town of about 800 people, where drinking water went untested for more than five years. Or Coal Mountain, W.Va., a remote 118-person outpost where a retired coal miner pours bleach into untested water at the system’s wellhead in hope of keeping it clean. Or Orange Center School outside Fresno, Calif., where for more than a decade regulators let about 320 grade-school kids drink water that had tested high for lead.

Individually, the communities served by small utilities seem tiny. But together, the number of people getting lead-contaminated drinking water, or water not properly tested for lead, since 2010 is about 5 million.
Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards, one of the nation’s top experts on lead in drinking water who helped identify the crisis in Flint, Mich., laments that people in America’s forgotten places — rural outposts, post-industrial communities and poor towns — are most at risk from the dangers of lead exposure, such as irreversible brain damage, lowered IQ, behavioral problems and language delays.

M Dansinger:

I am aware that you recently admitted to wrongly publishing, as your own, a scientific research paper that I had submitted to Annals of Internal Medicine. After serving as an external peer reviewer on our manuscript, you published that same manuscript in a different medical journal a few months later. You removed the names of the authors and the research site, replacing them with the names of your coauthors and your institution.

bloomberg

It’s the sort of thing you see in a Jason Bourne movie. A security camera watching over a crowded space snaps a picture of someone. A few seconds later, a supercomputer churns through a database and returns the person’s identity. The CIA knows all.

That same technology is now, for better or worse, available to anyone with a smartphone. Earlier this year, a couple of Russian programmers released an app called FindFace. It lets people take pictures of complete strangers and then almost instantly find them on social networks. See a pretty girl or guy on the street? Snap a pic, get to know them. What could go wrong?

Doug Erickson:

A small, environmental-themed charter school in Madison with a substandard academic record is facing heightened School Board scrutiny as its charter comes up for renewal.

Badger Rock Middle School, 501 E. Badger Road, opened in 2011 amid great enthusiasm for its emphasis on urban agriculture, environmental sustainability and project-based learning. Last month, though, it landed in the “fails to meet expectations” category on the latest round of state-issued report cards.

The school’s overall accountability score, which takes into account such things as test scores, student academic progress and college and career readiness, was the lowest of the 45 district schools that received ratings.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham this week called Badger Rock an “under-performing” school but said it “has incredible potential to be an excellent school.” She said she is leaning toward recommending a charter renewal of three years. That’s less than the five-year contract sought by school leaders, but the recommendation still should be seen as a vote of “confidence and hope,” Cheatham said.

The School Board is expected to vote on the issue Monday. Wright Middle School, the district’s oldest charter school, also is to be up for discussion the same night, but for a very different reason. Its leaders say they want to drop the school’s charter status.

The designation no longer makes sense for them, they say, as Wright has operated for many years as a traditional district school. The change in designation would have little effect on day-to-day school operations, district officials said.
Badger Rock

A charter school is a publicly funded school that does not have to adhere to many of the state laws governing traditional public schools. The intent is to foster innovation and experimentation and to give students more choices.

Madison has three charter schools. In addition to Badger Rock and Wright, there’s the dual-language Nuestro Mundo Community School. Each is an “instrumentality” of the district, meaning the district authorizes the school, employs the staff and retains ultimate authority.

Madison’s K-12 world lacks governance diversity. Many cities, including Minneapolis, offer families diverse school options.

Wright developed from the largely aborted “Madison Middle School 2000” project.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School several years ago.

James Wigserson:

A new study says the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will have a $473 million economic impact on the Milwaukee area by 2035 because of higher graduation rates for voucher school students compared to their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools.

“There are many well-known benefits of graduating from high school,” Will Flanders, co-author of the study and education research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, told Watchdog in an interview. “You can have access to better jobs. You’re more likely to have health insurance and therefore likely to be in better health. You’re likely to have a better income and less likely to become reliant on social welfare programs.”

Doug Erickson:

Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Road, is poised to give up its status as a charter school after 22 years.

Kaleem Caire, a community member who has been heavily involved in helping the school discern its future, said the decision came about in part due to changes by the state Legislature.

In July, the state began requiring school districts to be much more deliberate and rigorous in authorizing and renewing charter schools. The new rules give charter schools greater autonomy but also impose new requirements and responsibilities.

Madison’s K-12 world lacks governance diversity. Many cities, including Minneapolis, offer families diverse school options.

Wright developed from the largely aborted “Madison Middle School 2000” project.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School several years ago.

Bob Davis:

During the manufacturing downturn that began in the late 1990s, Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., provided a steady source of employment, improved the nimbleness of the local workforce and helped attract new businesses to replace those that fled when times got tough.

In 2014, General Electric Co. chose its new plant in Auburn as the company’s first to use 3-D printing to make high-volume products. Thirty printers that look like a row of commercial pizza ovens build thousands of jet-engine nozzles a year, tended by a few technicians in lab coats.

About 190 people work in the factory, which also produces turbine blades using conventional manufacturing methods, and GE expects the workforce to increase to 300 employees. Starting pay is about $16 an hour, compared with about $12 an hour for many manufacturing jobs elsewhere in the county.

Related: The politics of resentment.

Kate Conger:

Google dropped a single National Security Letter into its most recent transparency report without much fanfare, but today the company published eight more NSLs in an attempt to shed more light on government surveillance of Google users.

The eight letters published today were sent to Google from FBI offices across the country. Cumulatively, the NSLs seek broad access to content for around 20 user accounts. The usernames of the targets are redacted, although the FBI does not require it. A Google spokesperson said the usernames were redacted to protect user privacy and that the targeted individuals had been notified.

Stop Data Mining Me:

StopDataMining.me is the central source for consumers to learn what kinds of information data brokers have about them and how to exercise their opt-out choices.

Huichan Zhao, Kevin O’Brien, Shuo Li and Robert F. Shepherd

Because of their continuous and natural motion, fluidically powered soft actuators have shown potential in a range of robotic applications, including prosthetics and orthotics. Despite these advantages, robots using these actuators require stretchable sensors that can be embedded in their bodies for sophisticated functions. Presently, stretchable sensors usually rely on the electrical properties of materials and composites for measuring a signal; many of these sensors suffer from hysteresis, fabrication complexity, chemical safety and environmental instability, and material incompatibility with soft actuators. Many of these issues are solved if the optical properties of materials are used for signal transduction. We report the use of stretchable optical waveguides for strain sensing in a prosthetic hand. These optoelectronic strain sensors are easy to fabricate, are chemically inert, and demonstrate low hysteresis and high precision in their output signals. As a demonstration of their potential, the photonic strain sensors were used as curvature, elongation, and force sensors integrated into a fiber-reinforced soft prosthetic hand. The optoelectronically innervated prosthetic hand was used to conduct various active sensation experiments inspired by the capabilities of a real hand. Our final demonstration used the prosthesis to feel the shape and softness of three tomatoes and select the ripe one.

Kim Schroeder (President of the Milwaukee Teacher Union:

Critics may say that not all charter schools are bad, which may be true. But only a small percentage of private charters outperform traditional public schools. And private schools serve fewer English-language learners and children with special needs; expel a disproportionate number of minority students; and, even though they are funded with public dollars, are not held to the same legal standards as public schools. We should not consider funding these schools with public dollars unless they are held to the same standards as public schools.

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association represents the educators who work with the children and families of Milwaukee Public Schools. We cannot stand by as the private school profiteers cheer, waiting for DeVos to funnel every last dollar from our public schools into their bank accounts — without any strings attached. This single cabinet appointment could undo decades of advances in public education set up to protect the educational rights of every child in this nation.

Robin Lake:

With Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education, people in the education world have picked sides faster than in a Super Bowl office pool. A common subject of debate, raised by Doug Harris in a New York Times op-ed, is the education track record in Ms. DeVos’s home state of Michigan. Ms. DeVos is an unabashed supporter of school choice, including the expansion of for-profit charter schools and vouchers. In Michigan, an aggressive choice policy has resulted in schools of wildly varying quality. Harris asserts that Michigan represents choice run amok, “a triumph of ideology over evidence.” Choice advocates in the state have come rushing to their schools’ defense, often sounding like union representatives protecting their weakest members.

At CRPE, we’ve spent time studying Detroit’s and Michigan’s choice systems. We’ve looked at student outcomes, visited schools, and spoken to choice advocates and district officials. Most importantly, we’ve interviewed and surveyed parents. We have been clear that families are, for the most part, experiencing a chaotic, low-quality, and largely unregulated charter school environment. But we’ve also been clear that the facts don’t support neat and tidy conclusions. In Michigan, the problem hasn’t been choice itself: the failure is in the way choice has been executed.

Lenore Skenazy:

Kid
Constantin Opris / Dreamstime
A mom, dad, and their preschooler went to Home Depot in Valley Stream, Long Island, last Saturday to get some Christmas lights. The boy fell asleep in the car, so the parents cracked open the sun roof and let him snooze while they ran their errand. A passerby saw the boy and called 911 to report a child in a car, “unconscious.”

When the parents came out about 20 minutes later (the lights had been hard to find), they found a huge commotion at their car. Cops! Firemen! An ambulance! A fireman had smashed open their rear passenger window and was extricating their son as if the car was on fire.

Then, rather than seeing that the boy was startled but fine, the safety kabuki began.

Jim Vertuno

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — This week, Texas will launch what state officials say is the nation’s largest effort to track brain injuries among young athletes.

The University Interscholastic League, Texas’ governing body for public high school sports, is partnering with the O’Donnell Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center for the project, from which they hope to gauge whether rules or equipment changes are improving player safety and what more can be done to protect athletes.

Michael Mace:

Summary. In the tech industry we worship “disruption,” but to most people it’s a dirty word. In a world where insecurity and mistrust in institutions are on the rise, tech is increasingly out of step with the values of the public. This puts our companies at risk of hostile regulation and customer backlashes. We need to change our attitude and our behavior, or our industry may be seriously damaged in the years to come.

The situation: No more win-win.

Across many countries, and across the political spectrum, we are seeing a dramatic erosion in peoples’ faith in win-win situations. Compared to the past couple of decades, there’s less willingness to believe that the benefits of any change will outweigh the costs. Along with that, there’s a general feeling of mistrust in institutions. Many people on both ends of the political spectrum believe the political and economic system is being gamed by insiders to the detriment of everyone else.

Sarah Knapton:

A simple test at the age of three can determine whether children will grow up to be a burden on society, needing excessive welfare, ending up in jail or becoming obese.

Scientists at King’s College London followed more than 1,000 children from before school until they were 38, to find out if it was possible to predict who would go on to lead troubled lives.

All were given a 45 minute test aged three to gauge intelligence, language and motor skills, and were also assessed about their levels of tolerance, restlessness, impulsivity and social disadvantage.

Molly Beck:

All Wisconsin high school students participating in extracurricular activities would be subject to random drug testing under legislation being drafted by a Republican lawmaker.

The bill would also require random testing for students who want to park vehicles on school grounds.

Rep. Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, said that when lawmakers reconvene next year he will introduce a bill that requires private and public schools to have policies requiring random drug testing for students participating in voluntary activities.

Eshe Nelson

To properly understand globalization, you need to start 200,000 years ago.

Richard Baldwin skillfully takes on this daunting task in a new book, starting all the way back with the hunter-gatherers. For too long, he says, traditional analysis of trade has been too narrow, he argues.

The economist, who is a professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and president of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, has been researching globalization and trade for 30 years. As anti-globalization forces now sweep across the world, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization (Harvard University Press) is well timed.

website:

Children’s prospects of achieving the “American Dream” of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century. This decline has occurred throughout the parental income distribution, for children from both low and high income families, as shown in the chart below.

Jim Tankersley has more.

Dan Kopf:

A recently published study shows that students are more likely to major in a subject if they received a higher score on the AP test for that subject, even compared to students who performed almost identically in raw numbers, but whose results are rounded to a lower score. The researchers, from Stanford University, Harvard University and the College Board, find that the effect is primarily a response to positive feedback.

Paul Caron:

The latest change calls for faculty performance evaluations, which are generally done by other professors, to include an “independent, substantive review” of the faculty member by a dean, provost or chancellor. That administrator would then make the “final assignment … reflecting the overall results of the review,” according to the policy.

A review that finds a professor is not meeting expectations would lead to a remediation process, and if the faculty member does not improve he or she could be fired. …

John Tierney:

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

Rebecca Greenfield:

Automation may be gutting American manufacturing jobs, but there’s one thing the robots still can’t beat us at: people skills.

It just so happens that the future of American labor will require a lot of them.

The occupations projected to add the most jobs in the next 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, all require people skills—like home health aides, registered nurses, and retail and service workers.

Nic Kristof

I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.

We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.

I fear that liberal outrage at Trump’s presidency will exacerbate the problem of liberal echo chambers, by creating a more hostile environment for conservatives and evangelicals. Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.

Pirelli

What impact will robots have on a world in which they are becoming increasingly more widespread and used across all fields? Will automatons be our work mates of the future? Will they be the teachers of the future? Will they be able to prescribe the right medicines when we are ill? These and other questions will be discussed at the Innovation and Science Festival, organised by the Settimo Torinese Local Authorities with the contribution of the ECM (Esperienze di Cultura Metropolitana) Foundation on October 15 to 23. The event will expand its horizons this year and involve the surrounding towns.

As in the past, the 2016 edition, entitled “We, Robots”, will be packed with ideas and debates, workshops for students, meetings with culture and science personalities, project exhibits created by schools and universities and “science cafés” for fostering informal exchanges between students and adults.

Brian Rosenthal:

Refugees, immigrants and other kids who do not speak English are entitled to the same special education services as native speakers. But in this Southeast Texas city, they seldom get them.

Chris Johnson:

An Oxford graduate is suing the prestigious university for 1 million pounds ($1.27 million), claiming that its “appallingly bad” teaching prevented him from having a successful career as a lawyer.

Jesse Saffron & Stephanie Keaveney:

Recently, a legislative proposal aimed at improving graduation rates at the University of North Carolina system’s 16 institutions was nixed due to vehement opposition from university leaders. In its place is a watered-down initiative that delays much-needed reform and emphasizes academic handholding rather than high academic standards and student readiness.

There is a strong connection between students’ high school GPAs and SAT scores and those students’ ability to perform well in—and finish—college. For instance, UNC-Chapel Hill, which boasts the highest entering student GPAs and SAT scores in the system, also has the highest six-year graduation rates in the system—consistently hovering near 90 percent.

Jack Encarnacao

The lawyer for one of two Babson College students investigated on unsubstantiated racism allegations stemming from their celebration of Donald Trump’s election is demanding an apology and threatening a defamation lawsuit after the school lifted its campus ban on the pair yesterday.

Babson Dean of Students Lawrence Ward informed students Parker Rand-Ricciardi and Edward Tomasso by letter yesterday that the school is “removing any interim restrictions on your access to campus.” The letter cites the “formal conclusion of the investigation phase of the College’s Community Standards process” as the reason for the lifting of a ban imposed shortly after the Nov. 9 incident.

Robin Hanson

Imagine that you are junior in high school who expects to attend college. At that point in your life you have opinions related to frequent personal choices if blue jeans feel comfortable or if you prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream. And you have opinions on social norms in your social world, like how much money it is okay to borrow from a friend, how late one should stay at a party, or what are acceptable excuses for breaking up with boy/girlfriend. And you know you will soon need opinions on imminent major life choices, such as what college to attend, what major to have, and whether to live on campus.

But at that point in life you will have less need of opinions on what classes to take as college senior, and where to live then. You know you can wait and learn more before making such decisions. And you have even less need of opinions on borrowing money, staying at parties, or breaking up as a college senior. Social norms on those choices will come from future communities, who may not yet have even decided on such things.

Amber Walker:

As the Madison Metropolitan School District begins to introduce its Personalized Pathways program to students, it continues to face questions from parents and teachers about the plan.

As a new model for Madison’s four main high schools, pathways will be rolled out next fall. The program combines project-based learning with collaboration across multiple subject areas. MMSD officials have said the goal of pathways is to allow students to explore their interests and graduate from high school with a plan for their future.

On Monday, hundreds of middle school students and their parents gathered at the Alliant Energy Center to learn more about the new model. Staff from East, West, La Follette and Memorial high schools were on hand to meet them and talk about what pathways will look like at each school.

At the same time, the discussion at a Madison School Board work group meeting struck a different tone. In addition to its regular monthly meetings, the Madison School Board gathers for work groups to discuss instructional and operational issues. Typically, the crowd is small, with little to no public comment, but Monday’s meeting drew a larger than usual number of parents and teachers who expressed concerns about pathways. About 20 attended the meeting and more than a half-dozen spoke.

Perry Link

Some people, and I am one, feel that Tang (618–907 CE) poetry is the finest literary art they have ever read. But does one need to learn Chinese in order to have such a view, or can classical Chinese poetry be adequately translated?

In 1987 Eliot Weinberger, who has written brilliant essays on topics as various as the mystical I Ching (Book of Change), Buddha as “impostor,” Albanian Islam, and a connection between Michel Foucault and George W. Bush—and who has translated Chinese poetry, too—published a little book with Octavio Paz called Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. There Weinberger and Paz choose a four-line poem by Wang Wei, one of the best Tang poets, and present it many ways: in Chinese characters, in a transliteration into modern Mandarin, in a character-by-character literal translation, and in seventeen different ways translators have tried to put it into English, French, or Spanish.

Bob Davis

Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents. Even rapid economic growth won’t do much to reverse the trend.

Economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard and the University of California set out to measure the strength of what they define as the American Dream, and found the dream was fading. They identified the income of 30-year-olds starting in 1970, using tax and census data, and compared it with the earnings of their parents when they were about the same age.

In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%.

Reuters:

CPS, the nation’s third-largest public school system, is struggling with pension payments that will jump to about $720 million this fiscal year from $676 million in fiscal 2016, as well as drained reserves and debt dependency – factors that have pushed its GO credit ratings deep into the junk category and led investors to demand fat yields for its debt.

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner last week vetoed a bill to give CPS a one-time $215 million state payment to help cover pension costs.

Ratings for the new bonds, backed by a $45 million a year property tax levy approved by the Chicago City Council in 2015, were not available. Because that tax revenue can only be used to fund capital projects and not operations, CPS is hoping bondholders will consider the debt a safer bet than the district’s GO bonds.

A CPS spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment.

National Council on Teacher Quality:

No parent wants his or her child to be taught by an ineffective teacher. As the school year begins each September, parents sometimes worry that their child’s teacher may not be able to manage the classroom, may not be able to inspire students to reach higher levels of learning, or simply may not be up to the job. These worries grow when a teacher is new to the classroom, teaching without the bene t of a few years of experience. The responsibility for these worries often falls on a state’s teacher preparation programs, so it is crucial that the programs set high standards to admit only the best candidates.

A strong body of research supports a relationship between student performance and the selectivity of admissions into teacher preparation. Nations, such as Finland, whose students outperform ours on national tests recruit teacher candidates from the top 10 percent of their college graduates. High admissions standards are especially important because after a candidate is admitted to a preparation program, he or she will probably face few hurdles for entry into the profession.

State admissions standards rose between 2011 and 2015 and fell in 2016
Raising the bar for entry into preparation programs resonates with states and school districts, which certainly recognize the importance of attracting talented college students into the teaching profession. As a result, 25 states strengthened admissions standards between 2011 and 2015, with 11 states establishing higher admissions standards through state law and 14 states doing so through national accreditation. The number of states establishing a minimum 3.0 GPA requirement went from seven in 2013 to 25 in 2015, and the number requiring that teacher candidates take tests designed for all college students (such as the ACT or SAT) went from three to 19 during that same time. While both approaches have advantages and limitations, some states have put forward admissions policies that employ multiple measures and exibility.

Tap for a larger version.

Madison School District Administration Slides (PDF):

Compensation:

Prior Years Strategy
– Funded step advancement, lane movement, & base wage increase (varies), offset by multiple reductions in personnel / non-personnel areas

For 2017-18:
– With referendum resources, provide for step advancement, lane movement, and base wage increase (TBD), without multiple offsetting reductions

– Additionally, looking for a win-win on health insurance design which could provide additional employee compensation

Madison Schools’ budget priority items (PDF).

Anne Tergesen:

Myth 1: I’m not going to find a good job.
REALITY: Baby boomers are getting jobs with better pay, status and working conditions than prior generations of older workers.

Older workers are benefiting from a number of trends—in the economy, the workforce and their own profile. For one thing, many boomers are living longer and staying healthier than prior generations. So they’re able to take on more demanding work and are better able to keep pace with younger peers.

Moreover, as the U.S. economy shifts from manufacturing to services, it’s creating more positions in which cognitive skills matter more than physical ability. That means more opportunities for older workers.

Tim Chambers:

“What arrangements and plans have been made relative to concentration camps in the Hawaiian Islands for dangerous or undesirable aliens or citizens in the event of national emergency?” — Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, August 10, 1936 in a note to the military Joint Board

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

BRMS was founded to empower its students to thrive as citizens, entrepreneurs, leaders, collaborators, and innovators, working to restore the natural world and to better the cultural environment while creating just, nourishing, and sustainable communities. Today, BRMS embraces this through an urban agriculture lens and a philosophy of participatory, place-based learning through real-life, inquiry-driven projects designed by students and teachers emphasizing social change within the local community. Currently, there are 75 students attending BRMS (36% Hispanic, 25% African American, 17% bi- or multiracial, 17% white, 37% ELL, 27% SPED, and 75% low-income).

On October 24th, BRMS submitted their charter renewal application. Upon receipt, the MMSD Charter Review Committee scored the application using the publically available renewal rubric. Ultimately, BRMS was found to have areas that did not meet expectations. In early November, the MMSD Chief of Staff met with school leadership and governing council members to share the feedback and next steps for resubmission.

On Number 17th, BRMS resubmitted their charter renewal application based on the feedback given on the original submission. The Charter Review Committee scored the final applications again. Summary conclusions are below.

Much more on Badger Rock Middle School.

NPR Series

Many parents and teachers report that schools won’t use the word dyslexia. Why might this be? And what is the Department of Education doing about it?

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

Wright was founded to successfully educate all students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence required to participate fully in an evolving global society. The school was created to be a pioneer in the use of thematic integrated and multi-cultural curricula as a way of connecting with the lives of its students. Today, Wright’s focus is on resiliency, rigor through collaboration, social action, self-efficacy and community. They aim to demonstrate how innovations can accelerate student outcomes. 223 students currently attend Wright (50% Hispanic, 23% African American, 9% bi- or multiracial, 54% ELL, 19% SPED, and 87% low-income).

On October 24th, Wright submitted their charter renewal application. Upon receipt, the MMSD Charter Review Committee scored the application using the publically available renewal rubric. Ultimately, Wright was found to have areas that did not meet expectations. In early November, the MMSD Chief of Staff met with school leadership and governing council members to share the feedback and next steps for resubmission.

On Number 17th, Wright resubmitted their charter renewal application based on the feedback given on the original submission. The Charter Review Committee scored the final applications again. Summary conclusions are below.

Much more on Wright Middle School, here.

Related: Madison Middle School 2000.

The Atlantic.

Paul Brown.

November 7, 2016

November 14, 2016

November 21, 2016

November 28, 2016

December 5, 2016

flowing data:

The National Center for Education Statistics maintains a variety of metrics related to various levels of schooling. Poking around, I wondered what the kids these days are learning and how it might be different from decades past, which led me to the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred by field of study, going back to 1970. I ranked them over time.

eLearning Industry

Invented by MIT, Scratch is an open source system that enables individuals to program interactive stories, games and animations. Scratch is an ideal tool for teaching kids how to code. All the material is free and there are many resources to help teachers integrate coding with their curriculum.

.

Greg Piper:

Indiana’s Purdue University is making a strong play for best public university in the country, based on its demonstrated commitment to free speech.

And now it’s getting interest in taking that approach to other schools, whose leaders may be tiring of giving in to student demands to censor and punish students, faculty and staff for their speech and nonthreatening behaviors.

The university has been approached by NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education) to present the “methodology” for its “free speech orientation program” – the first of its kind in the nation – at an upcoming conference, Director of Student Success Programs Dan Carpenter told the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

aaup:

A committee composed of representatives from the American Association of University Professors, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center formulated this joint statement in fall 2016. The document received the endorsement of all four sponsoring organizations.

In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement spawned protests on college and university campuses from coast to coast as students, faculty, and staff sought to draw attention to what they perceived as institutional racism in higher education. The glare of the national spotlight revealed genuine problems and had real consequences, with policy changes enacted and university presidents stepping down.

The movement also shone light on the status of student journalists and their faculty and staff advisers, as demonstrated by an incident involving a faculty member and a student videographer at the University of Missouri and by one involving the student newspaper at Wesleyan University.1 While unusual for the attention they garnered, these incidents were by no means unique or even rare. It has become disturbingly routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience overt hostility that threatens their ability to inform the campus community and, in some instances, imperils their careers or the survival of their publications, as the sampling of cases discussed in this report demonstrates. Administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to provide a space for intellectual exploration and debate.

Jessi Hempel

esse Leimgruber has 22 employees, and every last one is older than him. He tells me this over coffee at a downtown San Francisco Starbucks that is equidistant from his company’s coworking space and the one-bedroom apartment he shares with his girlfriend. Leimgruber is the CEO of NeoReach, a digital marketing tools firm he started in 2014 with his brother and a friend; they have raised $3.5 million so far, and last year they did over a million dollars in sales. He is 22.
Leimgruber is one of 29 people who make up this year’s class of Thiel Fellows — the crazy smart youth paid by Peter Thiel to double down on entrepreneurship instead of school. Leimgruber has dramatic eyebrows, longish hair, and the kind of earnest perma-grin that creeps across his face even when he’s trying to be serious. He speaks with the authority of a three-time CEO who has learned a lot on the job, explaining a challenge particular to fellows like him: “A common piece of advice is, don’t hire your peers; They probably aren’t qualified.”

Monte Reel:

In late October, a group of Maryland legislators met with police officials, attorneys, privacy advocates, and policy analysts to discuss creating a legal framework to govern aerial surveillance programs such as the one the Baltimore Police Department had been using to track vehicles and individuals through the city since January.

“What, if anything, are other states doing to address this issue?” Joseph Vallerio, the committee’s chairman, asked the panel.

“Nothing,” replied David Rocah, an attorney with the ACLU. “Because no one has ever done this before.”

The Baltimore surveillance program broke new ground by bringing wide-area persistent surveillance—a technology that the military has been developing for a decade—to municipal law enforcement. The police department kept the program secret from the public, as well as from the city’s mayor and other local officials, until it was detailed in August by Bloomberg Businessweek. Privacy advocates, defense attorneys, and some local legislators called for the program to be suspended immediately, until the technology could be evaluated in public hearings.

Paul Hannon:

High-school students in many parts of east Asia continue to have a better command of science and other subjects than their counterparts in the rest of the world, but there is little sign that increased spending on education is producing better results in most countries.

That is a worrying development for the long-term economic outlook, since most economists believe that growth is partly driven by improvements in education levels—or what they call human capital—although the strength of the relationship is uncertain.

Esko Kilpi (ed.)

HAVE BEEN WORKING in di erent positions in public service for more than 25 years. The mission has stayed the same: serve the common good of Finland. Everything else has changed. What used to work is not working any more.

The grown interconnectivity, complexity and uncertainty have redecorated our space for manoeuvre. It is unclear if our well-intended decisions will cause positive outcomes. Decisions do not turn into delivery in the way they used to. There is no clarity regarding what should be done and who has the power to do it. Organizations are busy fulfilling their tasks, but alone and siloed they fall short of their targets. There is a huge disconnect between existing structures, organisations, management culture and leadership and the reality that surrounds us. Work is no longer what it used to be.

Context matters more, and it never stays the same. It is not only a question of what is the policy for the nation but it is also the question of how we all do things, how we all, both as individuals and together, solve problems, learn and work. That is why this book on perspectives on New Work is so important.

I have been reading this book with relief. There is so much explanatory power in it that it can really make a difference. It makes sense. The experience of a “frustrating combination of new technologies and old ways of doing things” is something felt every day. The practices of man- agement and leadership have a lot to accomplish with the ideas in this book.

The newest outcomes of research from different disciplines are knotted together into an easily read narrative. Although it is easy to read, it is hard to swallow. What makes it hard is the fact that it changes the way we look at things. It has changed my ideas about my future career. Be ready for a transformational experience.

McKinsey:

Whenever people imagine virtual something, they sometimes put it at odds with the physical incarnation of it. That is exactly not what we imagine when we think of Khan Academy. When we think of Khan Academy, yes, if you have nothing, if you are a villager in some rural part of India and you have no school, hopefully we can get a device out to you and then get you access. We can help you learn and move up your knowledge edge.

But the ideal is you have a physical environment. You have inspiring mentors and adults and teachers around you. You have your peers around you in a social environment. And in that context, we see ourselves as a tool to enable really personalized instruction. That ability to move to a competency-based model as opposed to a seat-time model, that ability to move to a differentiated model as opposed to a one-pace-fits-all model is really a necessary ingredient to actually moving the dial. At the end of the day, we are a tool to empower teachers. And it is up to the teacher to decide how that tool is used.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

DPI-crafted school report cards are the primary means we have of discovering and comparing outcomes in Wisconsin schools. Schools in all sectors that receive public funding – traditional public, charter, and parental choice private schools – now all use the same annual Forward exam for students and will be evaluated with the same school report card. It’s easy to see that the transparency and honesty of the school report card design is critical to all stakeholders.

As we have stated for several years on WRC, when a school has fewer than half of its students reading proficiently, but is rated as meeting or exceeding expectations on the state report card, we question whether DPI’s expectations match parents’ expectations. Concerns about the disconnect between the report card and reality have been expressed recently in these articles:

Humphries: Is this Wobegon or Wisconsin?, from John Humphries, candidate for Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Hallelujah – MPS Is Successful Despite the Data and All the Failing Schools, from the MacIver Institute

Alan Borsuk moderated a discussion this week about school vouchers in Milwaukee, with articulate participants Scott Jensen and Julie Underwood. With vouchers clearly here to stay, attention is now shifting to the fundamental question of how to make sure each child is in a successful school, regardless of whether it is traditional public, charter, or choice. This forum is available online:

Lessons from a Quarter Century of School Vouchers

George Leef:

One member of the UT Board of Regents who believes that he should look for threats to the integrity of the university and diligently pursue any he finds is Wallace Hall. Mr. Hall, a graduate of UT himself, was appointed to the University of Texas Board of Regents in February 2011.

It wasn’t long before he began to suspect corruption and mismanagement.

First, there was a scandal involving a large slush fund run by the dean of the law school, allowing him to hand out “forgivable loans” to select faculty members. The university’s president, William Powers, promised an investigation by an in-house lawyer, who dutifully produced a “nothing to see here” report. Hall argued that the matter required a more objective assessment, but his complaints were ignored.

Quoted in this piece, Hall said, “I was overruled. That’s when I first felt like, one, there’s a problem at UT, and, two, the system has set up a scheme that gives the opportunity for a less than robust investigation.”

But Hall kept pushing the Board to insist that the Texas attorney general’s office dig into the matter. It did, and then the truth finally came out that the dean of the law school was using the fund simply to hand out favors, including a $500,000 “loan” to himself. The AG’s report brought down the house of cards. The dean resigned and the scandal contributed to the pressure on president Powers to choose between resigning and being fired.

nctq

Why teacher prep programs should have strong preparation in elementary mathematics

Teaching elementary children the fundamentals of arithmetic—dividing fractions, operations with signed numbers, or basic probability—requires a deep understanding of the underlying mathematics. For elementary teachers, it’s simply not suf cient just to know “invert and multiply.” One must know and be able to explain why that works, building upon the more fundamental whole number operations. This requires specialized mathematics coursework speci cally for prospective elementary teachers. Typical college-level coursework (such as calculus) does not address these topics.
To earn an A in elementary mathematics, a program must dedicate suf cient time for at least 75 percent of topics identi ed by mathematicians as being critical for elementary teachers, and require at least one course in the methods of teaching mathematics to elementary-aged children.

For more information about analysis and program grades, see the Methodology in brief and Understanding program grades sections below.

Much more on nctq.

Lisa Speckhard

Several individuals have filed paperwork to run for the Madison School Board this spring, ending its members’ trend of running unopposed.

During the last school board election, with three seats up for grabs, TJ Mertz, Dean Loumos and James Howard all ran unopposed. Including those three, six of the last seven board races had no challengers.

There are seven at-large members of the board who serve three-year terms. Elections are held each April. Next April, the terms for seats 6 and 7 will end.

Seat 6 is currently held by Michael Flores, a Madison firefighter and paramedic. Seat 7 is held by Ed Hughes, an attorney and partner at Stafford Rosenbaum LLP. Both Flores and Hughes will run for re-election.

So far, two individuals have filed a declaration of candidacy with the Madison City Clerk to challenge Flores: Matthew Andrzejewski and Cristiana Carusi. Carusi is a PTO member and school volunteer. She has two children who attend school in the district. Andrzejewski teaches in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Links: Ed Hughes, Nicki Vander Meulen, Michael Flores, Matthew Andrzejewski and Cristiana Carusi.

Madison has long tolerated a non-diverse K-12 world, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Carole Cadwalladr:

Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

BetaNews

Although artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other emerging technologies may reshape the world as we know it, a new global study has revealed that the majority of CEOs now value technology over people when it comes to the future of their businesses.

The study was conducted by the Los Angeles-based management consultant firm Korn Ferry that interviewed 800 business leaders across a variety of multi-million and multi-billion dollar global organizations. The firm says that 44 percent of the CEOs surveyed agreed that robotics, automation and AI would reshape the future of many work places by making people “largely irrelevant”.

plus.maths.org

What did it feel like proving Fermat’s last theorem after searching for a proof for so long?

It’s just fantastic. This is what we live for, these moments that create illumination and excitement. It’s actually hard to settle down and do anything – [you’re] living on cloud nine for a day or two. It was a little difficult at first to go back to the normal working life. I think it was hard to go back to normal problems.

Do you think your proof of Fermat’s last theorem was the beginning of something, rather than the end of something?

Well, it was both. So it was a finishing point for that particular classical romantic problem and that was the problem that drove me to mathematics and brought me to mathematics as a child, so it was an end of that childhood romantic view of mathematics.

What it began was it opened a little door to the Langland’s programme, and a new way of trying to get at results in the Langland’s programme. Opening that door, [has allowed] a lot of people to go through and develop it, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do too.

Holly Hacker

As Baylor’s president and chancellor, Ken Starr took home a sweet paycheck in 2014. He earned $896,000, including a $175,000 performance bonus.

But that’s paltry compared with what Art Briles made as head football coach: $5.9 million. Three other coaches (men’s basketball, women’s basketball and assistant football) all made more than Starr, too.

If a college’s salaries reflect its values, then it’s clear what many Texas schools treasure, based on a new report showing what universities paid their presidents and other top employees.

Antonia Okafor

Worried that your child is going to go to college and waste your hard earned money on courses that not only are a complete waste of time, but that tell them what — not how — to think? You should be.

Thankfully, there are groups such as the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a national student organization, which has compiled a comprehensive list of courses that students get to choose from.

So, parents, this Christmas season, whip out that checkbook, make cursive handwriting great again with that alumnus ballpoint pen, and write in the notes section of that $40,000 check you write each year — big and bold now — “Dear God, what have I done?”

Here are five of our absolute favorites of YAF’s “Dirty Dozen” list — the most politically correct and bizarre college courses in America.

Sam Lessin:

This stood in stark contrast to the public sphere—speaking on a stage or to a mass audience through a broadcast—where your audience could be of almost unlimited size. But your speech was limited to the messages which would appeal to a diversity of people and you had to be OK with everyone knowing what you said.

In its first iteration, the largely anonymous internet of webpages looked like a simple, if powerful, extension of the public sphere. It allowed individuals to speak to more people than previous mediums did, on a far wider diversity of topics.

But, as the internet has become ever more personalized, it increasingly represents a strange hybrid of the public and private spheres. Through micro-targeting and customization, the internet now provides the opportunity for people to reach an unlimited audience with unlimited speech.

If there is, therefore, a conversation to be had about the impact of the internet on the election, it shouldn’t be about fake news and feed ranking (which I believe are red herrings). It should be about what it means that a public candidate can for the first time effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Jake Bryant and Jimmy Sarakatsannis:

Shifts in the education landscape are opening doors for investment.

The US market for educational products and services, across K–12, higher education, and corporate learning, is more than $1.75 trillion, and growing. While that figure alone warrants attention from investors, much of this market has historically been difficult for investors to access. K–12 and higher education are largely seen as public goods for the government to provide. Corporate learning has been the responsibility of employers, which often have little appetite for innovation. For-profit companies and investors have mainly played supporting roles and have found a few opportunistic ways to provide resources where providers of learning required support.

Today, because of stagnation in learning outcomes and other shifts in the education landscape, schools and corporations are rethinking how they teach and train—opening the door for private investors and for-profit education providers. In 2015, deal activity involving education companies hit an all-time high of $7 billion (up about 25 percent from 2014), with the annual private-equity deal count remaining steady from 2014 at around 100.

Bloomberg:

And this year? Racist algorithms that measure a defendant’s risk of committing a crime in the future (damn you, ProPublica). The corporate defense lawyer who turned his life upside down to take on DuPont when an Appalachian cattle farmer whose cows were dying reached out for help (ptui, New York Times). A portrait of the richest touring musician in the world … guess who … nope (Deadspin!). A cottage industry of Balkan teenagers faking out Trump supporters with fake news (oh you BuzzFeed, you).

William Gibson

Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.
 
 I’ve never been able to fit the concepts of privacy, history and encryption together in a satisfying way, though it continues to seem that I should. Each concept has to do with information; each can be considered to concern the public and the private; and each involves aspects of society, and perhaps particularly digital society. But experience has taught me that all I can hope to do with these three concepts is demonstrate the problems that considering them together causes.

priceonomocs:

Living at home with your parents isn’t just for little kids anymore. Young adults are now more likely to live with their parents than in any other living arrangement, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center . Recent college grads aren’t alone; adults in the 25-29 and 30-34 age brackets are also moving home in record numbers.

What forces are steering people into their parents’ basements? We wanted to find out, so we analyzed data from Earnest , a Priceonomics customer. We analyzed a dataset of more than 60,000 user responses to questions about their living situations to understand how it’s influenced by factors like gender, age, location, and education.

Laura Isensee

In the latest round of global test results, the United States remained in the middle of the pack.

But one Houston school stood out and highlighted how the United States did the best out of all developed countries to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers.

The test is called the PISA and it’s administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2015, it tested about half a million 15-year-olds from 72 countries.

Students at Chavez High School in Southeast Houston showed significant improvement, outperforming their peers at similar schools with high poverty.

Peter Van Voorhis

A sweeping free speech resolution has been rejected by Tufts University’s student government, whose members called the effort to broaden and clarify students’ First Amendment rights “unsafe.”

Tufts has a “red light” speech-code rating from FIRE, which means it maintains at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.

Student Jake Goldberg’s free speech resolution called for an end to campus anti-free speech rules at Tufts, including vague administrative provisos that crack down on the “use of nicknames,” “hurtful words,” “bias-fueled jokes,” “comments on an individual’s body or appearance,” “innuendos of a sexual nature,” “gender bias,” and dozens more similar examples cited in the measure.

Real Vision:

Underfunded government pensions to the tune of $1.3 trillion, with a gap that just can’t be filled, is the ticking time bomb facing the US economy, which faces dramatic cuts in public services and potentially riots reminiscent of Athens six years ago.

Danielle DiMartino Booth is the tough talking former Federal Reserve advisor and President of Money Strong, with an insider’s perspective on finance. As she picks apart the danger signs with the US on the precipice of recession, it’s the impending pensions crisis that’s really keeping her awake at night.

With so few people privy to what little recovery we’ve had and given how stretched pensions are, checks are going to have to be written from Washington sooner than you think, DiMartino Booth told Real Vision TV in an interview.

“The Baby Boomers are no longer an actuarial theory,” she said. “They’re a reality. The checks are being written.”

Amanda Ripley

Here’s what the models show: Generally speaking, the smartest countries tend to be those that have acted to make teaching more prestigious and selective; directed more resources to their neediest children; enrolled most children in high-quality preschools; helped schools establish cultures of constant improvement; and applied rigorous, consistent standards across all classrooms.

Of all those lessons learned, the United States has employed only one at scale: A majority of states recently adopted more consistent and challenging learning goals, known as the Common Core State Standards, for reading and math. These standards were in place for only a year in many states, so Mr. Schleicher did not expect them to boost America’s PISA scores just yet. (In addition, America’s PISA sample included students living in states that have declined to adopt the new standards altogether.)

But Mr. Schleicher urges Americans to work on the other lessons learned — and to keep the faith in their new standards. “I’m confident the Common Core is going to have a long-term impact,” he said. “Patience may be the biggest challenge.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump and Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, have called for the repeal of the Common Core. But since the federal government did not create or mandate the standards, it cannot easily repeal them. Standards like the Common Core exist in almost every high-performing education nation, from Poland to South Korea.

Vivett Dukes:

We can all agree that people who hang out together and are close friends or acquaintances tend to pick up on the cues of those whom they spend a lot of time with: mannerisms, choice of words, etc.. Chrissy asked, as a White teacher whose closest friends are Black, if it was wrong to use phrases that come from Black culture?

This might sound like an ignorant question, but it was a sincere query from a sincere White woman. There are White teachers who seek to learn, not to offend; however, according to Chrissy, during this post-election season on social media, White teachers feel attacked when they ask questions about race. Black teachers appear dismissive and frustrated. As a White teacher who teaches all Black students with mostly Black teachers, she feels like she’s walking on egg shells. She doesn’t want to “mess up” and say the wrong thing. I wonder how many other White teachers feel this way? Does this resonate with you?

Jakob Nielsen:

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.
 
 For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.

Rich McCormick:

Uber is investigating its top New York executive after he was alleged to have tracked a journalist’s location without her permission using an internal company tool called “God View.” Buzzfeed News reporter Johana Bhuiyan used the private car service earlier this month to travel to a meeting with Josh Mohrer, general manager of Uber New York. On arriving at the company’s Long Island City headquarters, Bhuiyan says she found Mohrer waiting for her. “I was tracking you,” he reportedly said, and pointed to his iPhone.

wbez:

Despite the uncertainty, CPS has time. The $215 million was earmarked to pay part of the district’s contribution to the teachers pension fund. That payment is due on June 30.

CPS spokesman Michael Passman said the Chicago Board of Education plans to vote Wednesday on an amended $5.5 billion operating budget. The vote is required to account for the increased costs of a new teacher’s contract. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is freeing up money from special taxing district’s called TIFs to pay those costs. In addition, the board will vote on a supplemental capital budget.

While there is some wiggle room, the loss of this $215 million could hurt classrooms more than cuts in the past. Over the past few years the district has provided schools less money but instructed principals to keep cuts away from the classrooms. Principals have, to some degree, found ways to limit staff layoffs but it is increasingly difficult to see how schools can keep cuts from classrooms.

Andrew Perrin:

About a quarter of American adults (26%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form. So who, exactly, are these non-book readers?

Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about three times as likely as college graduates (40% vs. 13%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey shows that these less-educated adults are also the least likely to own smartphones or tablets, two devices that have seen a substantial increase in usage for reading e-books since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Molly Hensley-Clancy

The cost blowout, disclosed in a Government Accountability Office report this week, provides fodder to critics of Obama’s loan forgiveness efforts, some of whom have also sought to dismantle parts of the Education Department.

The report found deep inaccuracies in the Education Department’s estimates of how much student loan relief programs — like income-based repayment, graduate loans, and public-service loan forgiveness — would cost taxpayers. The programs will have a total price tag of $100 billion or more — tens of billions more than the Education Department once claimed. The difference is due to basic accounting errors and shortcomings by the Department, the GAO report said.

Socializing debt…..

The Economist

IN 1983 the Reagan administration published “A Nation At Risk”, an apocalyptic report into the state of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law last December, a “Christmas miracle”.

That sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23rd Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades Mrs DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats.

James Panero

What’s a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in The New Criterion. It’s one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it’s one that I wish museums would ask more frequently of themselves. Because the answers are changing—through assumptions that are often unannounced, unacknowledged, and unexplored.

Stephen Henderson:

In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance. Two years later, its charter was renewed.

Or if you live downtown, you could try Woodward Academy, a charter that has limped along near the bottom of school achievement since 1998, while its operator has been allowed to expand into other communities.

For students enrolled in schools of choice — that is, schools in nearby districts who have opened their doors to children who live outside district boundaries — it’s not much better. Kids who depend on Detroit’s problematic public transit are are too far away from the state’s top-performing school districts — and most of those districts don’t participate in the schools of choice program, anyway.

Evan R. Goldstein:

ne night this spring, the New York Institute for the Humanities hosted a gathering to discuss, as the title of the event put it, “new public intellectuals.” At the front of a crowded room, seated at a rectangular table, were three paragons of this ascendant breed — Nikil Saval, co-editor of n+1; Sarah Leonard, a senior editor at The Nation; and Jon Baskin, co-editor of The Point. All are under 40, not pursuing careers in academe, and integral to what the event’s organizers hailed as a “renaissance in cultural journalism.”

It is a notably upbeat claim, especially when compared with the hand-wringing that typically accompanies talk of public intellectuals in America, who seem always to be in the act of vanishing. The few who remain pale in comparison to the near-mythic minds that roamed the streets of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when rents were cheap, polemics were harsh, and politics were radical. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. What happened? Intellectuals who couldn’t survive as freelance writers — and as New York gentrified, who could? — became professors. By the 1960s, few nonacademic intellectuals remained. Careerism and specialization gradually opened up a gulf between intellectuals and the public. The sturdy prose of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe gave way, by the mid-90s, to the knotted gender theorizing of Judith Butler and the cult-studies musings of Andrew Ross.

Mareesia Nicosia:

They’ve waited every morning since, Gunter told The 74 in a recent interview, until the doors open and staff welcomes them warmly inside, trading handshakes and high-fives as music courses through the halls.

Not long ago, though, there was little enthusiasm from students, their families — and staff, for that matter. The pre-K–5 school is located in North Omaha’s Highlander neighborhood, for decades one of the poorest, most segregated and most violent areas in the city of 440,000.

Roughly 97 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; about 22 percent are English-language learners, and 29 percent are refugees, higher than the district average in each case, according to 2015–16 data. While students have made gains on state test scores in recent years, the school had long been one of the worst-performing in Omaha, which serves about 52,000 students, and one of the lowest-ranked in Nebraska.

Madison voters recently approved additional tax and spending to expand our least divers schools: Hamilton middle and Van Hise elementary.

Evgeny Morozov

Amazon also unveiled its cloud-based artificial intelligence services, including systems for recognising objects in images, processing speech commands, and operating chatbot applications. Thus, it’s joining Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM in the already crowded field of advanced AI.

For Amazon, this is hardly new territory. By now, it must have built a robust AI operation for its own use, what with all the data it has amassed on its users (it’s precisely the troves of such data that explain recent breakthroughs in one of the most promising strands of contemporary AI – deep learning).

Now, Amazon wants to make money by letting others tap into its existing AI infrastructure. It did something similar a decade ago, when it realised it had a lot of spare server infrastructure it could lend out to others. A clever move: today Amazon’s cloud services often generate more profits than its retail operations in North America.

Its nascent AI operation is likely to rely on a similar model: clients will pay to tap into Amazon’s ability to recognise images or voices and insert such magic into their app or service. The other four AI giants are also unlikely to settle on a charity model. As they integrate AI products into healthcare, education, energy and transport, they will eventually pass on the bill to citizens – either directly, as usage fees, or indirectly, through lucrative contracts with institutions such as the NHS.

Antonia Okafor:

Buckeyes for Concealed Carry on Campus, a chapter of the national group, Students for Concealed Carry, posted a public statement on its Facebook page and created an online petition via Change.org asking the Ohio Senate body to revise HB 48.

The law currently allows campus carry in Ohio, but delegates that decision to each individual school and reduces the penalty of having a gun on campus from a felony to a misdemeanor. Unlike the Texas version of “campus carry,” Ohio State University was allowed to opt out of letting permit holders to carry firearms on campus.

Jeff Amy:

Graduating high school seniors: does the University of Southern Mississippi have a deal for you!

The 14,500-student school has cut annual out-of-state tuition and fees from $16,529 this year to $9,964 next fall, even as it increases the cost for Mississippi residents by 4 percent, to $7,963.

The idea is to reverse a 2,000-student enrollment dip by pricing a USM education below some public universities in nearby states, and attract enough high-schoolers from Houston, Dallas and San Antonio to raise overall revenue.

“I really believe that this pricing strategy is going to open us up to people looking at the University of Southern Mississippi from places we traditionally haven’t drawn from,” said Douglas Vinzant, USM’s vice president for finance and administration.

Southern Mississippi is joining a trend: The Associated Press counted at least 50 public colleges and universities nationwide that have lowered nonresident tuition by more than 10 percent in recent years without making similar reductions for in-state students.

William Hicks:

By William Hicks | 5:10 pm, November 27, 2016

An assembly at a New Jersey high school devolved into name-calling and racially charged drama after the speaker drifted from her topic of “digital safety” into a lecture admonishing students for their white privilege. The principal later apologized to students and parents for the speaker’s comments.

Prestigious Princeton High School invited Alison Macrina, the head of the Library Freedom Project, to speak to students about cyber security. Students assumed this would be a practical lecture on how to protect themselves online, but instead got an anti-Trump screed on identity politics.

The speech went south when Macrina began speaking about racist and sexist online trolls. Some of the students in the audience started laughing — they would later argue that they were simply laughing at the idea of trolls.

But Macrina was not amused. She accused the students of cheering for white supremacist symbols like Nazi swastikas. Discussing the incident afterward on Twitter — where she goes by the handle “local resistance” — Macrina said she was “astonished”.

Ananya Roy:

My pinned tweet says that I will neither participate in nor condone the normalization of Trumpism. I might have to keep it posted for the full four years of the (first) Trump presidency. After all, the normalization of the Trump regime is fully underway, from calls for a peaceful transition of power to those for unity and healing across electoral allegiances. President Obama described the election as an “intramural scrimmage” insisting that “we’re Americans.” As the recent Hamilton furor demonstrates, dissenters have to prove their civility, casting their criticism of the Trump-Pence government in polite and respectful terms, pleading with these newly elected leaders to consider that the United States is a country of diversity and difference.

But we have to ask ourselves what it means to plead thus with an administration that seems fully committed to white supremacy, misogyny, and virulent nationalism. Do the times demand of us civility or civil disobedience? And what does the peaceful transition of power entail when the new state that is taking shape is premised on the show and force of violence?

Jason Tucker and Jason VandenBeukel:

Can you give us a brief background of your academic career and your interests?

For the first two years of my undergraduate degree I studied Political Science and English Literature. I was very interested in politics, but what I was learning in economics and political science was just not correct. There was too much emphasis placed on the idea that economic interests were the prime motivators for human beings, and that was not obvious to me at all. I was spending a lot of time thinking about the Cold War, and the Cold War was not primarily an economic issue. So I started taking psychology, and I was interested in clinical psychology. I did my PhD under Dr. Robert Pihl, and I worked on drug abuse, alcoholism, and aggression – there was a heavy biological emphasis. I did my post-doc with Dr. Pihl, and Maurice Dongier. Then I taught at Harvard for six years, and I’ve been at the University of Toronto ever since then.

My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is “we must never forget.” I’ve learned that you cannot remember what you don’t understand. People don’t understand the Holocaust, and they don’t understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called “Maps of Meaning,” which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

John Naughton:

When, in the mid-1990s, the world wide web transformed the internet from a geek playground into a global marketplace, I once had an image of seeing two elderly gentlemen dancing delightedly in that part of heaven reserved for political philosophers. Their names: Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.

Why were they celebrating? Because they saw in the internet a technology that would validate their most treasured beliefs. Smith saw vigorous competition as the benevolent “invisible hand” that ensured individuals’ efforts to pursue their own interests could benefit society more than if they were actually trying to achieve that end. Hayek foresaw the potential of the internet to turn almost any set of transactions into a marketplace as a way of corroborating his belief that price signals communicated via open markets were the optimum way for individuals to co-ordinate their activities.

Barry Adams:

This is no cookie walk. And it’s definitely not a cake walk, figuratively or literally.

The two-day cookie, craft and soup sale, billed as the largest in Wisconsin, wraps up today at St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in this Dodge County farming community of 1,645. But the 19th annual event is more like a marathon.

It includes an army of bakers, decorators and other workers and truckloads of ingredients. The endgame is to raise more than $15,000 for mission programs, the church and its small school that educates students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

St. Peter’s Lutheran Church and school.

Inspyro

Michael LaPointe

Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals.

The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. There’s no author, no title. It isn’t written in a foreign language; rather, this language is totally unknown. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning—it’s totally incomprehensible.

Cyrus Farivar:

Most pieces of software don’t have the power to get someone arrested—but Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager does. This is the case management software that runs on the computers of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of court clerks and judges in county courthouses across the US. (Federal courts use an entirely different system.)

Typically, when a judge makes a ruling—for example, issuing or rescinding a warrant—those words said by a judge in court are entered into Odyssey. That information is then relied upon by law enforcement officers to coordinate arrests and releases and to issue court summons. (Most other courts, even if they don’t use Odyssey, use a similar software system from another vendor.)

Gwynn Guildord:

People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup.

That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne. The remit of their study, which the Journal of Democracy will publish in January, analyzes historical data on attitudes toward government that spans various generations in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. They find that, across the board, citizens of stable liberal democracies have grown jaded about their government, say Mounk and Foa—and worse.

Sarah Sparks

U.S. students are generally improving in math and science, along with their peers around the globe, but the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study results—including a longitudinal look for the 20th anniversary of the tests—show more of a slow uphill slog than a breakout performance.

“The [United States] is a large and diverse country, so it’s difficult to see a large increase over a short time,” said Michael O. Martin, a co-executive director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College. The center has conducted the TIMSS in the United States, with the National Center on Education Statistics, every four years since 1995.

Related: Stretch Targets.

Nathan Vanderklippe

China appears to have massively upgraded its powerful online censorship apparatus, using it to more severely block sensitive topics in group conversations while allowing freer rein in private chats – a sign, one expert says, of a dramatic leap in the use of artificial intelligence to silence speech that falls afoul of the Communist Party.

The growing sophistication of China’s Internet blocking, uncovered by researchers at the University of Toronto, offers a window into how the country’s authoritarian regulators are growing savvier at choking out what they see as undesirable speech – while limiting the anger their deletions stir both domestically and abroad.

Patty Murray

It’s an almost immediate way to let students know of their acceptance, said UW-Green Bay Social Media Specialist Jena Richter Landers, who works out of the admissions department.

“We see that they’re screenshotting them,” Landers said. “We’ll see that they’re sharing them in their own personal stories. We’ll get excited selfies back. It’s a great way to celebrate with them.”

This fall marks the first time the university is using the app to alert applicants they’ve been accepted.

Katie Vlachina, the admissions department’s social media intern, said using apps such as Snapchat is a good, modern way to communicate. Plus, it’s fun.

Marcy Wheeler

With the news of Donald Trump’s deal to keep 1,100 of 2,100 Carrier jobs in Indiana, coastal elites appear to have just discovered tax-supported Midwestern manufacturing jobs, even as they continue to ignore tax-supported defense contractor (manufacturing) jobs.

As best as I can understand it from the details released so far, the deal may be best understood as a mix of typical state-level efforts combined with the leverage of a federal level effort. Over 25% of the jobs saved will be engineer and headquarter jobs — important for retaining technological capacity in the US, but not a big help to blue collar workers.

The package is reportedly substantially similar to one IN Governor and soon to be Vice President Mike Pence already offered.

Dave Umhoefer:

“If you really want to drain the swamp, as Trump says, that would be a way to do it,” Walker said in an interview.

Walker added: “It’s the work rules, the seniority, all those things. If they could tackle that in a similar way to what we did, long term it would be a major, major improvement.”

Most federal employees only have bargaining rights over working conditions. Wages and benefits were not part of bargaining, unlike in Wisconsin, where until Walker’s 2011 legislation public-sector unions had full bargaining rights.

Two federal unions sounded ready to fight to hold their ground.

Trump has some good ideas, but if he targets working people after promising to “drain the swamp,” it will be the biggest bait and switch ever, said Randy Erwin, national president-elect of the National Federation of Federal Employees.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Just when it seemed like the annual trends involving the education landscape of Milwaukee had become predictable and boring, a couple of unpredicted things happened.

Around this time every year since 2008, I’ve put together a chart showing where Milwaukee children are getting a publicly funded education, sector by sector. I try not to get too hung up on “sector wars,” but the trends for school enrollment are crucial to understanding our complicated education scene.

In summary, the percentage of students enrolled in the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system was falling by 1 to 2 percentage points almost every year. Use of publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, almost all of them religious, was rising each year (this year, just under a quarter of the city’s students are in the voucher program). Enrollment in non-MPS charter schools was rising each year. And the number of Milwaukee children going to public schools in the suburbs rather than in MPS, using the state’s open enrollment law, was rising substantially.