Jack Dolan

Proponents sold the measure in 1999 with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers. The state employees’ pension fund, they said, would grow fast enough to pay the bill in full.

They were off — by billions of dollars — and taxpayers will bear the consequences for decades to come.

This year, state employee pensions will cost taxpayers $5.4 billion, according to the Department of Finance. That’s more than the state will spend on environmental protection, fighting wildfires and the emergency response to the drought combined.

And it’s more than 30 times what the state paid for retirement benefits in 2000, before the effects of the new pension law, SB 400, had kicked in, according to data from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Rahm Emanuel:

Fight the toughest battle: The toughest nut for urban school districts to crack is high school, but again, investing in quality is the key. While we have backed quality charter options in Chicago, we have also invested in quality through magnet, military, IB and STEM schools to the point that 50 percent of our kids attend one of these models. IB and STEM programs in particular are proven to raise graduation and college enrollment rates for students of all racial and income backgrounds. In fact, our IB-enrolled students boast a nearly 100 percent graduation rate, and 81 percent enroll in college, a higher rate than their peers.

Failure is not an option: Children get only one chance at a good education. We closed failing charter and neighborhood schools and expanded those with higher quality. The incoming presidential administration should promote proven programs to turn around failing schools. In Chicago, in partnership with the Academy for Urban School Leadership, we worked to turn around 14 failing schools. Today, roughly 80 percent of these schools have attained high-performing quality ratings.

Propublica links on Rahm Emanuel.

Marta Jewson:

For the first time since New Orleans charter schools started using a common enrollment system, the Recovery School District is tracking how many students transfer schools in the middle of the year due to special-education needs.

Such transfers aren’t new, enrollment director Gaby Fighetti said. Before, they were handled under a catch-all category in which principals at each school agreed to the transfer. As a result, there was no way to know exactly how many students moved due to special-education needs.

Public schools are required to serve any student who walks through their doors — including those with severe disabilities, who generally cost more to educate because they require special attention.

Emily Roden:

That’s when Mr. Tillerson began to speak. Humbly, delicately, and without an ounce of condescension toward those who disagreed, he began walking us all through the details of the case. I even recall being moved by his thorough explanation about the nature of doubt and the standards set forth by our justice system. With great patience, this man who strikes multi-billion dollar deals with foreign heads of state brought our scrappy jury together to bring a sexual predator to justice and to deliver justice for a scared and deeply wounded little girl.

A local nonprofit was instrumental in fostering that young girl through this process, providing her counseling and legal help. I was so struck by their mission that I toured their facility the week following the case in order to learn how I could donate and volunteer to their cause.

On a whim, I decided to reach out to Mr. Tillerson to encourage him to do the same. I found an email for him online and sent him a note, touting the role this agency played in our trial and urging him to consider supporting the great work that they do. To my surprise, I received an email back thanking me for my note, my jury service, and ensuring me that he would contact the agency. I later received a call from the director of that nonprofit to let me know that Mr. Tillerson followed-through and gave a generous donation.

Kieran Corcoran

A Cornell student claims she was ambushed, thrown to the ground and abused for being a Republican who publicly backed Donald Trump.

Olivia Corn, a sophomore who is chair of the Cornell Republicans, says she was attacked from behind the day after the election, and called a “racist bitch”.

Cornell Police are investigating the alleged attack, which happened late at night, when it was too dark for Corn to properly identify her attacker.

Jeffrey Young:

Udacity touts its nanodegree as a new kind of credential—so new, that it defies traditional classifications and laws. But officials in Minnesota say the professional program could still fall under state regulations designed for degree programs, which would require Udacity to register with the state if it wants to offer online courses to its residents.

The state’s Office of Higher Education sent a letter to Udacity officials last month notifying the company that Minnesota law requires schools offering degrees to “register with our office prior to offering distance education programs to residents of Minnesota.” Education providers that fail to register “must not advertise or operate in Minnesota,” or else face an injunction or fines, says the letter signed by Betsy Talbot, Manager of Institutional Licensing and Registration for the state office. The letter asked Udacity to provide more information about its programs.

Catrin Einhorn & Jodi Kantor:

As soon as Bayan Mohammad, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, arrived here last winter, she began her transformation. In her first hour of ice-skating, she managed to glide on her own. She made fast friends with girls different from any she had ever known. New to competitive sports, she propelled herself down the school track so fast that she was soon collecting ribbons.

Bayan glued herself to the movie “Annie,” the ballet “Cinderella” and episodes of “Wheel of Fortune,” all stories of metamorphosis. As her English went from halting to chatty, she ticked off everything she hungered to do: An overnight school trip. Gymnastics lessons. Building a snowman — no, a snow-woman.

“I just want to be Canadian,” she said.
The volunteers resettling her family — a group of teachers, pediatricians and other friends and neighbors spurred by devastating images of young refugees and casualties of war — watched Bayan with wonder. Her parents, Abdullah and Eman Mohammad, a former grocery store owner and a nurse from a rural village, felt both pride and alarm.

Linda Poon:

Across the metropolises of the United States, the middle class is shrinking. In 9 out of every 10 cities, the share of adults living in middle-income households has fallen.

It’s an ongoing phenomenon that’s a key factor in dividing the nation between the rich and poor. When you zoom into some of the most populous cities with some of the highest income gaps, as mapping-software company Esri did in a new interactive project, “Wealth Divides,” the geography of where the poor and rich live, and how their neighborhoods are divided, is even more staggering.

Using data from state and federal governments, the team mapped the median household income of each census tract in five cities: New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Census tracts in light blue have a median household income between $100,000 and $150,000, while those in darker blue represent more than $150,000. Those colored in orange represent median household incomes of less than $100,000. The darker the shade, the lower the income.

CityLab looked at three of the mapped cities, all ranked among the top 10 in the U.S. in terms of income inequality.

Till Krause und Hannes Grassegger

Facebook refuses to disclose the criteria that deletions are based on. SZ-Magazin has gained access to some of these rules. We show you some excerpts here – and explain them.

Introductory words

These are excerpts of internal documents that explain to content moderators what they need to do. To protect our sources, we have made visual edits to maintain confidentiality. While the rules are constantly changing, these documents provide the first-ever insights into the current guidelines that Facebook applies to delete contents.

Renee Dudley

Finishing the redesign quickly was essential. If the overhaul were ready by March 2015, he wrote in a later email to senior employees, then the New York-based College Board could win new business and counter the most popular college entrance exam in America, the ACT.

Perhaps the biggest change was the new test’s focus on the Common Core, the controversial set of learning standards that Coleman himself helped create. The new SAT, he wrote, would “show a striking alignment” to the standards, which set expectations for what American students from kindergarten through high school should learn to prepare for college or a career. The standards have been fully adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia – and are changing how and what millions of children are taught.

Reuters audio.

The Economist:

But Estonia has also taken a deliberately inclusive approach, argues Mart Laidmets, a senior official at its ministry of education. It tries to avoid at all costs having pupils repeat years of school. Holding pupils back can help. But too often it is used as an excuse not to teach difficult kids. It may also reflect bias or discrimination. In countries such as Russia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, poor boys are especially prone to being kept back a year, despite decent academic achievements.

Estonia, like Finland and Canada, also tries to keep selection by ability to a minimum. It delays “tracking” children into academic or vocational routes until they are 15 or 16 years old. Mr Laidmets argues that it helps pupils find jobs later in life, since better maths and literacy make it easier for them to adapt to changes in the labour market and to earn new skills.

By contrast, where pupils are diverted from an academic track at an early age, whether towards a vocational school or a less rigorous class in the same school, the gap between rich and poor children tends to be wider. In the Netherlands pupils at vocational schools have results equivalent to about three years less of schooling than their peers at general schools. “The more academically selective you are the more socially selective you become”, says Andreas Schleicher, the head of education at the OECD.

All of which suggests what countries should not do. But are there any sure-fire tips from the best performers? Or is their success just down to pushy parents and tuition after school?

Culture matters but so, too, does policy, says Lucy Crehan, author of “Cleverlands”, a new book on PISA-besting countries. She points out that most of these states delay formal schooling until children are six or seven. Instead they use early-years education to prepare children for school through play-based learning and by focusing on social skills. Then they keep pupils in academic courses until the age of 16. Even Singapore, which does divert some pupils to a vocational track at the age of 13, ensures that pupils in those schools keep up high standards in reading and maths.

Top performers also focus their time and effort on what goes on in the classroom, rather than the structure of the school system. For while test scores and pupils’ economic background are linked across the OECD, so too are specific things that the best schools and teachers do (see chart 3).

Jacqueline Rabe Thomas:

The question was straightforward: Is it possible for a student to make it all the way through his or her senior year, be given a high school diploma – and be illiterate?

Fran Rabinowitz testifies

Fran Rabinowitz, the leader of Connecticut’s largest school district, took a deep breath and then responded to the Superior Court judge’s question.

“Yes,” testified Rabinowitz, the superintendent of public schools in Bridgeport, which awards diplomas to about 1,000 students each year. “I would hope it doesn’t happen, but I can’t say with complete certainty that it hasn’t happened or doesn’t happen.”

Graduation rates in struggling school districts have been rising for years.

But among the 72 percent of Connecticut students in the Class of 2010 who went on to college, at least 22 percent had to take non-credit courses to learn reading, writing or math skills they should have acquired in high school. Among the 58 percent of Bridgeport’s Class of 2010 who went to college, at least half had to take a remedial course. It’s unclear whether things have improved along with the graduation rates since then, because the state has not made public updated data.

fxqi:

The goals of the Foundational Questions Institute’s Essay Contest (the “Contest”) are to:
Encourage and support rigorous, innovative, and influential thinking about foundational questions in physics and cosmology;

Identify and reward top thinkers in foundational questions; and,

Provide an arena for discussion and exchange of ideas regarding foundational questions.

For examples of previous FQXi contests, please see the list to the left.

Steve Sailer:

Here are the overall 2015 PISA scores (averaging the Science, Reading, and Math scores equally), with color coding to put the various American scores (red bars) in perspective.

Keep in mind that some countries didn’t do a good job of rounding up everybody who was supposed to take the test, which probably serves to boost their scores slightly.

American whites went up 1 point since 2012′s PISA, while American Asians were down 31 points (roughly 3 tenths of a standard deviation). I don’t know why. In general, East Asian countries were down a little from 2012.

There were a number of big changes in the PISA from 2012 to 2015. I think they switched from paper to computer and made some other changes as well. So it’s probably best not to worry too much about score changes from 2012 to 2015.

Larissa MacFarquhar:

The first day of his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, Danny Murillo walked into the Cesar Chavez building and saw a white man with tattoos on his arms. Something about the man felt familiar. He could tell from the tattoos that the man was, like him, from Los Angeles, and he was around his own age, mid-thirties, but it was something else that he recognized. He went up to the man and said, “Damn, I feel old around all these youngsters.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I haven’t been in school for a long time.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was on vacation.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was in the Pelican Bay shu.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.”

The Pelican Bay shu—Security Housing Unit—is where California sends some of its most recalcitrant inmates. Both Murillo and the white man, Steven Czifra, had spent much of their lives in prison, including many years in solitary confinement, but by the time they met they were pretty sure they were never going back. Neither had finished high school—Czifra got sent to juvenile hall at twelve—but now they were undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley. They knew that although most people who had lived lives like theirs were still in prison, many were capable—given the right advice, incentives, and money—of making it to college and leaving prison forever. They started talking, and during the next few months they formed a plan to get those people out.

Scientific American Blog

Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in “1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug” that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study. Miller elaborates:

“Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey, with 12 percent of adults reporting that they filled prescriptions for these drugs… In addition, 8.3 percent of adults were prescribed drugs from a group that included sedatives, hypnotics and anti-anxiety drugs, and 1.6 percent of adults were given antipsychotics.”

Ainsley O’Connell:

The engine that used to drive the American Dream is in danger of grinding to a halt. Nine out of 10 children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents, according to research published last week. But just half of children born in 1980, who are now in their mid-30s, can say the same today.

“The idea that you’re going to do better than your parents defines the American Dream,” says Howard Wolfson, a former political strategist who now oversees education initiatives for Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by billionaire Mike Bloomberg. “For a lot of people, that’s not happening.”

Who likes talking about what you’re doing wrong? Pretty much nobody, and that has certainly applied to educators and education institutions for many years, both locally and nationally. Everyone has opinions on what should be changed; few are willing to look in the mirror.

But schools are one of the best examples of places where candidness and self-reflection about what’s not working are assets, provided they are paired with willingness to change and improve.

I offer here a national example that smells to me of unwillingness to focus on how to make progress and a local example that offers a hopeful step toward frank discussion and significant change.

In the last couple of decades, several international tests have measured how students in a few dozen nations are doing in reading, math, science and occasionally in other areas. The most prominent of them is known as PISA and is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris.

Riva-Melissa Tez

It’s 3 AM on a warm Thursday night in December, a usually quiet street in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona is bustling with activity, as a cohort of 200 artificial intelligence researchers leave in single-file out of a sprawling yellow mansion. The police count heads as the researchers film the procession on their phones and tweet #rocketai.

The guest list looked like the results of a search for most popular AI authors on arXiv. Every major corporate and academic AI lab was in attendance — Google DeepMind, Open AI, Facebook AI Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT, U of Montreal, as well as a multitude of other AI start-ups and investors from around the world — all in town for the 30th annual NIPS conference.

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) has become the academic and industry AI conference, growing near-exponentially over the past decade as corporate sponsors fight to keep the loyalty of their engineers and aggressively recruit others. Corporates plan months in advance to parade their capital expenditure and technical talent. Tickets for the main conference, despite nearly doubling in quantity since last year, sold out more than 6 weeks before the event.

Georg Dyson:

In 1916, social theorist Thorstein Veblen called for the post-war institution of “academic houses of refuge… where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work.” In 1923, Oswald Veblen contacted Simon Flexner, who suggested “you might speak with my brother, Mr. Abraham Flexner,” thus bringing in Louis Bamberger and Carrie Fuld, whose fortunes had been launched selling distressed merchandise out of a Newark storefront in 1892. In this public lecture, George Dyson, Director’s Visitor (2002–03), explores how as a flood of distressed intellectuals began fleeing Europe, the Veblens, the Flexners, and the Bambergers opened a department store for the freedom of ideas.

David Blood and Andrew Rininsland:

Ipsos MORI has published the results of its annual Perils of Perception poll of 40 countries, revealing some startling disparities between people’s preconceptions about their country and the realities.

Take our quiz to see how your perceptions compare to those of the country overall, as well as to other quiz-takers.

Antonia Okafor:

Last week, BuzzFeed came out with an article titled “19 School PowerPoint Presentations that Give Zero F***s.” The list was essentially a tribute to Millennials “bold” enough to call out racism with more racism. Apparently, if you are white and living in America, then your privilege must be checked by these woke college kids.

According to the article, here are the unforgivable crimes committed by “white people” being taught at your local community college campus:

Christina Farr:

Lloyd Pendleton grew up on a ranch in rural Utah, an upbringing that taught him values like rugged individualism and self-reliance. When Pendleton saw a homeless person on the street during visits to Salt Lake City, he recalled wondering why they didn’t just get a job.

This kind of thinking is so prevalent in the United States, a country with more than 500,000 homeless people, a quarter of them children, that it was once named the most pervasive myth about homelessness. Pendleton’s thinking didn’t budge until later in life.

After a stint at Ford Motors, he got a job with the Mormon church, where he was offered the opportunity to help out with the state’s largest center for homelessness. He eventually became the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force. “I became aware of this new approach called the ‘harm reduction model,'” Pendleton told the audience at TEDMED in Palm Springs, CA, last week. “They were passing out clean needles and condoms, which I initially thought was a stupid idea.”

Lev Borodovsky

Housing inventories (to buy or to rent) remain tight (that is why shelter inflation has been so strong), giving homebuilders reasons to be optimistic. However, will the recent spike in mortgage rates dampen some of the enthusiasm? The equity markets certainly think so, with homebuilder shares underperforming the S&P500 by nearly 4% over the past week.

W Lee Hansen:

At the school where I taught for almost 35 years, the University of Wisconsin—Madison, campus leaders continue their rush to respond to the BlackOut demands put forth by black student leaders last spring. As at many other universities in recent years, the administration has chosen to placate student radicals in ways that balkanize the campus and interfere with its educational mission.

The latest example is the creation of a center for black students in the university’s centrally located, historic Red Gym. According to the Dean of Students, Lori Berquam, “its goal is to provide black students in particular with a place to study, collaborate, and get support from staff members in the Multicultural Student Center, another office in the Red Gym.” She added that students of all races will be welcome in the center.

Kim-Mai Cutler:

Q: So what can be done from a policy perspective to support this type of labor?

This breaks down to a number of problems.
You need to find highly-skilled labor. The highly-skilled operators and CAM programmers? There’s not enough of them that are being created. Companies in the U.S. are shortsighted. They should just pay people to go to school. You have to remember that most of these people don’t have a lot of money. There’s a disconnect. In Germany, there are government subsidies for vocational training. We should have tax credits for this. If you train people a certain amount for a certification, you would get it back in tax credits if people leave. Companies can’t do it on their own though. The margins at a company like Flextronics are like 6 percent gross. So they are trying to squeeze every little penny out of it. In the long run, this is a big risk to them.

Adam Coleman:

On Fridays during the fall, Tracey Jackson leaves her sanctuary and enters chaos.

The story was reported by Scott Helman, Maria Cramer, Jenna Russell, Michael Rezendes, and Todd Wallack of the Globe Spotlight Team. It was written by Helman.

“It always feels like it’s forever to get there on a call like this,” Williams says from the driver’s seat.

EMTs are inside the modern brick house when Williams and Sabo pull up. Williams finds the boyfriend. Sabo heads for the bedroom.

A woman in a blue tank top and white athletic socks sits on a black folding chair. Minutes earlier she’d stood on that chair and put her neck through a slipknot hung from the ceiling rafters. The rope now lies at the foot of her unmade bed.

“I’m good,” she says to Sabo, her speech slurred. Her boyfriend overreacted to a Halloween joke, she says.

Sabo doesn’t buy it. He pries further, his gentle tone more social worker than cop. He learns that she struggles with alcohol, had attempted suicide before, and takes psychiatric medication. He’s leaning in close now, almost whispering.

Samuel Barrows, Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West:

Over the past 25 years, charter schools have offered an increasing number of families an alternative to their local district schools. The charter option has proven particularly popular in large cities, but charter-school growth is often constrained by state laws that limit the number of students the sector can serve. In the 2016 election, for example, voters in Massachusetts rejected a ballot question that would have allowed further expansion of charters in communities that had reached the state’s enrollment ceiling.

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.

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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.”