By Padraig Belton and Matthew Wall:

Digital technology has certainly had a profound effect on the traditional book publishing and retailing industries, but has it also given the book a new lease of life?

At one point it looked as if the rise of e-books at knock-down prices and e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook posed an existential threat to book publishers and sellers.

“Literature found itself at war with the internet,” as Jim Hinks, digital editor of Comma Press, succinctly puts it.

But contrary to expectations, the printed book is still surviving alongside its upstart e-book cousin, and technology is helping publishers and retailers reach new audiences and find new ways to tell stories.

Onion:

Saying the long nights of cramming from the study guide and the constant drilling from flashcards had really worn on his nerves, Arne Duncan told reporters Tuesday that preparing for the upcoming standardized Secretary of Education Test was completely stressing him out. “I know I’ve got the stuff on FSA loans down, but it’s super unrealistic for them to think I’ll memorize every little thing about federal lunch voucher requirements—what if I’m wrong, though?” Duncan said of the yearly four-hour exam, adding that he wasn’t a very good test-taker to begin with and that even thinking about how he would get through the essay portion in just 50 minutes was making him anxious. “Half the multiple-choice questions on the SETs are on things like the Office of Migrant Education that hardly ever come up in everyday life, and the other half seem like they’re designed to trick you. Ugh, why can’t this be over?” Duncan went on to say that he’d probably do far better on the test if he could afford a high-priced tutor like former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Douglas Belkin:

One of the largest providers of massive open online courses is teaming up with several major financial and technology companies to offer new classes this fall, the latest sign MOOC providers are scaling back their ambitions to upend the world of academia to make a profit.

Wall Street Journal Video:

Success Academy Founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz on the latest test score results and the argument for school choice.

Richard Adams

Weeks after students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland sweated through A-level and GCSE exams, their fate is being decided in a windowless basement near the centre of Cambridge – decisions that mean joy for some and despair for others.

There’s a hush of concentration in the room, the only sound the turning of pages and scratching of pens, as the group sit poring over the anonymous exam papers in front of them – but no exams are actually being marked.

Instead, the small group of experts for the OCR examination board is working its way through piles of scripts arranged by score, weighing up where the boundary should fall between an A or B for this particular humanities subject.

This is the most highly regulated and delicate part of the examination system, which the public never sees. OCR, one of the five main examination boards, granted the Guardian exclusive access to its inner workings – revealing a process characterised by caution, rigour and sophisticated technology.

James Gingell:

ere’s a riddle. I’m a translator, but I only know one language. I can’t talk in my Welsh Mam’s mother tongue and my Francophonic floundering leaves my friends in fits of giggles. I did German GCSE, but plonk me in the middle of Prussia and I’m not certain that asking the way to the nearest Italian restaurant would be enough to keep me out of trouble. I can only speak one language and it’s English.

I call myself a translator because, thanks to five and a bit misguided years doing two biochemistry degrees, I can change things like this:

“p53-p66shc/miR-21-Sod2 signalling is critical for the inhibitory effect of betulinic acid on hepatocellular carcinoma”

into things like this:

“A chemical called betulinic acid can slow down the growth of liver cancer cells, but it’s only effective when a gene called p53 is fully functional.”

It’s now my job to do this every day – to transform scientific language from gibberish and gobbledegook into something more digestible. When I’m feeling particularly puffed up, I think of myself as Hermes, passing messages down to Earth from the gods of science. And while the day-to-day office reality is certainly less grand, I hope that my efforts mean that people can appreciate some of the divine wonder of scientific research without having to spend their youth in dimly lit laboratories and libraries.

Cory Doctorow.

Tara Garcia Mathewson:

Matthew Pittinsky calls it the “quiet revolution.” The CEO of Parchment and co-founder and former CEO of Blackboard has watched the relatively rapid shift from paper to digital transcripts with at least a bit of awe. He admits that as the CEO of a digital credential management company, he’s probably biased, but there’s no denying the fact that 20 years ago, well into the dot-com bubble, virtually no colleges sent or received digital transcripts. It took Parchment — originally Docufide — seven years to send its millionth transcript. Now the service processes that many transcripts every two months.

“Why print and mail transcripts when most receivers of them would prefer to get them as machine readable data and when most students would prefer to request them electronically and have them in digital form?” Pittinsky said.

Higher education institutions have moved en masse toward receiving transcripts digitally, but they’ve been slower to shift when it comes to sending them. Over the last few years, Pittinsky has watched the trend catch on rapidly across institutions. It doesn’t cost more money. Schools already charge for transcripts, so instead of putting that money toward staff time, it goes into vendor contracts. Mostly, Pittinsky said, the delay has been because of culture — getting comfortable with a new internal process, with the idea that digital transcripts are secure, and with the idea that receivers will accept the digital versions.

The Economist:

Student debt in America now totals $1.2 trillion, up more than threefold over the past decade. On August 10th Hillary Clinton announced a $350 billion plan to reduce this sum. It would increase federal subsidies granted to state-school students, and help existing borrowers refinance their liabilities. New loan originations have decreased every year since 2010, and default rates have stabilised.

Daniel Drezner:

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been paying close attention to the War on College for quite some time, and it has concluded that the state of higher education is simply awful. College is just a horrible place to send your children — because you are spending obscene sums of money for a substandard education.

The reasons why it’s a substandard education can get a bit confusing at times, however. Best not to think to much about it.

You still want to think about it? Okay, but I warn you, you’re not going to like my conclusions.

This week two cover stories came out about the state of higher education. Both were very critical of the status quo, but for very different reasons. Let’s start with the Atlantic’s cover story by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt chronicle the rise of a new wave of political correctness on campuses.

80,000 hours:

Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?

To do a test, we made the following game. We’ve described ten major US social interventions, and you’ll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.

The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that’s available on major social interventions to decide whether they’re effective or not. We chose the top ten interventions that were easiest to explain and had the clearest conclusions, so it’s clear what the answers are. There’s no trick!

Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett:

Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.

People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are.

Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data.

Guardian:

A star is born. Geography, for so long a Cinderella subject, the easy option for students who found physics or chemistry too daunting, is soaring in popularity. According to the Royal Geographical Society, 13% more took the subject at A-level this year than last, up to 37,100 – the biggest jump of any of the major subjects.

Part of the explanation is Michael Gove’s determination to make schools focus on more traditional academic subjects at GCSE and A-level, rather than general studies or critical thinking. That is good for those who can benefit from a narrower academic focus, but not so much for those who struggle. It may be, however, that the bigger reason is that geography is a subject for our times. It is inherently multidisciplinary in a world that increasingly values people who have the skills needed to work across the physical and social sciences. Geographers get to learn data analysis, and to read Robert Macfarlane. They learn geographic information systems. They can turn maps from a two-dimensional representation of a country’s physical contours into a tool that illustrates social attributes or attitudes: not just where people live, but how, what they think and how they vote. They learn about the physics of climate change, or the interaction of weather events and flood risk, or the way people’s behaviour is influenced by the space around them.

Leah Constantine:

Whether we’ve admitted to it or not, we live in an extremely digital world. As you read this, I am able to communicate with you digitally. It is an expansion ubiquitous to technological advances and our enhanced lifestyles. So what does this term “digitalism” mean for the art world? Today, it means a change. Art is one of the oldest forms of visual discourse we’ve ever known. From viewing, to sharing, and even buying, we are seeing the world of art change before us. To study this expansion of digitalism in art, I am visiting an article published in 2014 by Jonathan Bowen from Birmingham City University and Tula Giannini from Pratt Institute titled Digitalism: The New Realism? Through this article and other examples of digital expansion, we can observe the important affects of digitalism in art.

The term “digital” has many definitions depending on the context of its use. Before understanding its meaning in the art world, we need to be able to define it as it is used in the contemporary art world. Bowen and Giannini observed digitalism in a cultural and artistic context in order to define and understand its involvement with society. According to their definition, “digital” in art refers to artists’ use of computers and its involvement in the creation and sharing of the arts.1

Jennifer Maloney:

Last fall, Andrew Vestal found himself rocking his baby daughter, Ada, back to sleep every morning between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Cradling Ada in the crook of his arm, he discovered he could read his dimly-lit phone with one hand. That’s how he read David Mitchell’s 624-page science-fiction saga “The Bone Clocks.”

Mr. Vestal’s iPhone has offered him a way to squeeze in time for reading that he otherwise might have given up. He reads on lunch breaks. He even reads between meetings as he walks across Microsoft’s Seattle campus, where he works as a program manager.

Before he tried it, he wondered whether reading in snippets might be dissatisfying. But to his surprise, he found he could quickly re-immerse himself in the book he was reading. “I want reading to be part of my life,” said Mr. Vestal, age 35. “If I waited for the kind of time I used to have—sitting down for five hours—I wouldn’t read at all.”

Alex:

There is a huge disconnect today in the way we teach computer science to students who wish to become software engineers, and what the industry expects of them when they graduate. Ask a recent graduate what the algorithmic complexity for a binary search of a sorted list, and he’ll (likely) give you the correct answer of O(log(n)), but many recent graduates struggle with designing any kind of complete system from the ground up.

I recently spoke to a friend of mine who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in computer science about the interviews he was going through, and he told me about one particular interview where the question asked was how he would design a system to keep track of the positions of all of the trains in the Washington D.C. subway system.

He also told me how he answered it. He spoke of the data structures one would use– binary tree this; linked list that, but when I asked him how he said the data would get from the train to whatever computer his software was running on, he couldn’t give me an answer. Should there be a computer at each station that communicates with a central computer over HTTP? Again, no answer.

Jessica Lahey

I’ve known the mother sitting in front of me at this parent-teacher conference for years, and we have been through a lot together. I have taught three of her children, and I like to think we’ve even become friends during our time together. She’s a conscientious mother who obviously loves her children with all of her heart. I’ve always been honest with her about their strengths and weaknesses, and I think she trusts me to tell her the truth. But when she hits me with the concern that’s been bothering her for a while, all I can do is nod, and stall for time.

“Marianna’s grades are fine; I’m not worried about that, but she just doesn’t seem to love learning anymore.”

Vincent Roscigno

Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to organized crime may seem, at first-glance, far-fetched. Deeper reflection, however, has prodded me to take the possibility seriously. Indeed, what began as a “for fun” sociological thought experiment has led to the sad realization that they are really not as distinct as one might like to believe. To be sure, one is seen as legitimate while the other illegal. Yet, if one openly considers the parallels, including: (1) the hierarchical, bureaucratic and coordinated structure of each; (2) the accruing of riches to those on top, (3) how both require explicit or tacit governmental support, and; (4) the extraction of income from and ultimately harm done to well-intentioned families, to adjuncts and lecturers, and to the intellectual mission of public higher education most broadly, the similarities become more apparent, intriguing and certainly troubling.

Stephen Marche:

These policy decisions eventually have wide-reaching consequences. But I wrote that in the heart of a recession, when it was possible to argue that the problem with the growing gap between poor youth and rich old was simply timing: The young entered the marketplace at the worst possible moment and thus were hapless victims of the cycles of the economy—it sucked, but nobody was to blame. Unfortunately, new research from St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability and the Pew Research Center extinguishes that last glimmer of counter-argument.

Jpminda:

This is more than just being offended by a comedian or a class about rape. I think there is a process of infantilization at universities (more so in the US than Canada, but its here too)…often created by universities to retain students, and them reinforced by students. Students and administrators are addicted to comfort. It often starts with a full week of orientation and non-stop entertainment/DJs/bands and activities reminiscent of a summer camp. Then there are offices to help students with anything that could possibly upset them (I suppose to ensure that they remain enrolled and thus paying fees and tuition). My university, like most, has offices for diversity, indigenous student support, sexual orientation, even a mental health office specifically for international students, etc. As a professor, I am frequently asked to make academic accommodations for every religion and every possible religious holiday that might conflict with assignment. I ensure that every disability is accommodated. Most disabilities that I am asked to accommodate seem to be unspecified and are remedied by providing the students with a separate, quiet location and an extra 30 minutes to take an exam.

Jason Song:

For years, the food bank at Michigan State University was one of the few, if not the only, such organizations in the country. By 2008, only four other groups offered college students free meals.

But as the economy continued to sink, Michigan State began to get a lot of company. There are now 199 similar groups throughout the country, according to the College and University Food Bank Alliance, including food pantries at UC Berkeley and UCLA. The California State University system is conducting a study to determine the number of students on its campuses who do not have regular sources of food and housing. And one student is attempting to convince vendors and restaurants at Santa Monica College to accept food stamps.

Jodi S. Cohen and Christy Gutowski:

University of Illinois senior administrators used personal email accounts to discuss sensitive and controversial issues, and then failed to disclose the records when they were requested by the public.

U. of I. released 1,100 pages of emails Friday on three hot-button issues, some of which would have been responsive to previous open records requests. The documents are related to Steven Salaita, the professor whose job offer was withdrawn last year; the hiring of felon James Kilgore; and the proposal to open a new engineering-based medical school on the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Many of the emails are from the personal account of U. of I. Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who abruptly resigned Thursday.

Daniel Allington:

In a powerful essay cheekily posted on the website of what may be the UK’s most obsessively corporate university (check menu on the right “Get Rid of Academic Leadership”), Suman Gupta bluntly asserts that ‘[t]here is no place for leaders in academia.’ (2015, parag. 1) As he observes, once academics-turned-administrators begin ‘imposing some Great Order… by managing and strategising and propaganda, seeking compliance and exercising opaque executive prerogatives, they start killing off academic work’ (2015, parag. 2). With its recent series of questionable management initiatives, from concentration of resources on bureaucratically-selected ‘strategic research areas’ to development of a (second) free MOOC platform on its paying students’ tab, Gupta’s employer must certainly have provided him with ample opportunity to judge the truth of this proposition. But the relevance of his critique is much wider than a single institution, as we see from the tragic case of Stefan Grimm: a highly successful medical researcher who committed suicide whilst being threatened over his failure to meet arbitrary funding targets (see Parr 2014). While the killing off of scholarly work does not invariably mean the killing off of scholarly workers, it is clear that, across the UK, the term ‘academic leadership’ is ‘now unequivocally taken [to mean] “management of academic workers and institutions from above”’, and those that practise it have come to be ‘regarded as being worth more than academics of any sort.’ (Gupta 2015, parag. 5) In his last words to his colleagues, the late Prof. Grimm put it more forcefully, describing his employing institution in terms that at least some readers of this article may find resonant: as he saw it, it had become ‘a business with very few up in the hierarchy… profiteering and the rest of us… milked for money’, wherein the ‘formidable leaders’ that do the milking ‘treat us like shit.’ (Grimm 2014, parags. 12, 10, 16, reproduced in Parr 2014) It hardly needs pointing out that there has never been an attempt to demonstrate that academic work benefits from ‘leadership’ in the sense described by Gupta and Grimm: top-down control by target-setting, HR-sanctioned procedural bullying, and ‘strategic vision’. The drive for ‘leadership’ is, rather, part of an ideologically motivated investment in management at the expense of labour, clearly seen in the ballooning of executive salaries, both inside and outside educational institutions, during an age of so-called ‘austerity’.

Tim Scott and Deborah Keisch:

Education systems in all societies are designed to serve as the primary institutions that reproduce dominant social and economic orders, customs and beliefs systems. In U.S. public education, this makes schooling a function of capitalism, white supremacy and their intrinsic restraints on democracy and social equality. Current efforts to reform primary and secondary public education are based within the violence of white supremacy aligned with the broader brutality of neoliberalism. Elite, Eurocentric education policymakers continue to espouse a language of equity while simultaneously maintaining private elite schools for their own children, spaces that look nothing like the ones they are designing for the masses. This results in a hyper intensification of the sorting of students based on their “value” as defined by a neoliberal worldview steeped in white supremacy. In this system, those identified to have the least amount of value are ultimately deemed disposable.

This article is composed of several components that seem on the surface distinct but are actually quite connected, and will illustrate the relationship between education reform policies and the lives of children and communities of color in the United States. Essential to this project are selected audio interviews with some of the most powerful U.S. critical education scholars and activists of our time. Alongside our own narrative, we share their voices and stories, collected by Education Radio[1] from July 2011 through June 2012. The two authors of this article were producers for Education Radio, which documented testimony and analysis of the impact of U.S. education reform policies on schools and communities. We have selected pieces of that audio from the Education Radio collection as a way to weave together a narrative of a public education system that is structured—both historically and contemporarily—within the violence of white supremacy. Our hope is that the voices we share will both enhance the story we are telling as well as connect readers more deeply to the issues we discuss.

Danielle Paquette and Peyton M. Craighill:

More than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers in the United States say they’ve passed up work opportunities, switched jobs or quit to tend to their kids, according to a new Washington Post poll.

While it has long been clear that finding affordable, dependable child care is a daily challenge for parents of young children, the new poll provides rare data on the breadth of the problem and how it’s shaping careers for millions of American parents.

The poll also signals that the issue will figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, with about twice as many Americans saying Democrats would more reliably ensure access to child care than Republicans.

Karen Finney:

Economists have tallied up how much it will likely cost to care for all Americans with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) this year: $268 billion.

In 10 years that number is expected to climb to $461 billion, but they say it could top out at $1 trillion if ASD prevalence continues to increase.

The study is published online in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

“The current costs of ASD are more than double the combined costs of stroke and hypertension and on a par with the costs of diabetes,” says study senior author Paul Leigh, professor of public health sciences and researcher with the Center for Healthcare Policy and Research at University of California, Davis. “There should be at least as much public, research, and government attention to finding the causes and best treatments for ASD as there is for these other major diseases.”

Lane Anderson:

After World War II, there was a golden era when Americans, especially those that had an education, could expect to have a job and keep it until retirement and retire with an adequate pension.

Those days, which Allison Pugh, professor of Sociology at University of Virginia, refers to as the “20-year career and a gold watch” model, are over. Between a competitive global market, recession and job automation, and a switch to part-time and contingent workers, Americans now live in a culture of perpetual job insecurity, in which they are easily laid off, at both high and low-level jobs, and can expect to switch jobs, or locations, at least a half dozen times during their careers.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard eliminated 34,000 jobs, and JC Penney and Sprint announced cuts, while JP Morgan Chase has cut 20,000 from its workforce since 2011. In double-earner families, at least one parent reports feeling “insecure” about their job, and in almost half of those both think their job is insecure.

This dynamic creates a constant tension for workers, who are beset by uncertainty. It has bred what Pugh calls the “one-way honor system,” in which workers are beholden to employers, but employers are not, says Pugh, author of “The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity,” out earlier this year.

David Levin:

Textbooks are expensive. There, I said it.

The high price of print textbooks is something that students and parents have been bemoaning increasingly over the past decade, and understandably so. Enrolling in college requires a significant financial investment from students and their families, and I understand the frustration they feel when, after signing up for years of loans, they see a charge for an expensive textbook appear on their credit card. The icing on a pricey cake.

This – debate around the price of textbooks – and I hesitate to call it a debate, as it only has one side – continues this back-to-school season with a fresh round of criticism over $300 textbooks weighing down backpacks across the U.S. And while I’m tempted to offer a defense of these prices citing the costs involved, I won’t. It’s really yesterday’s conversation, because we now have a better answer: replacing print textbooks with learning technology that’s not only cheaper but – more importantly – way more effective.

Rose Hackman:

“Dad, can you please teach me how to swim?”

Goodson’s answer to his daughter broke his heart. It was no. “I told her I don’t know how to swim myself.”

This summer, the pleas have started again.

Goodson, who’s 37 and works in the restaurant industry, says he would do anything for his daughter. But growing up in Alabama, he was just simply never taught to swim. His story is part of a common narrative, not a singular occurrence.

In the US, swimming ability is starkly divided along racial lines. White Americans are twice as likely to know how to swim as black Americans.

The consequences of this can be deadly: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black children aged five to 14 are three times more likely to die from unintentional drowning than their white counterparts. In the US, approximately 10 people die from unintentional drowning every day.

Jeffrey Tucker:

How do these kids get away with this? In fraternities and sororities, it all happens on private property, not public and commercial spaces, and so campus police can look the other way. Most everyone does.

Indeed, being able to drink with friends, and unhampered by authority, is a major appeal of the Greek system on campus. It’s a way to get around the preposterously high drinking age. Getting around this law will consume a major part of the energy and creativity of these kids for the next three years.

As for everyone else who cannot afford to join, it’s all about a life of sneaking around, getting to know older friends, lying and hiding, pregaming before parties just in case there is no liquor there, and generally adopting a life of bingeing and purging, blackouts and hangovers, rising and repeating. And so on it goes for years until finally the dawn of what the state considers adulthood.

Marilyn Achiron:

The book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal wrote of reading Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, “with a deepening sense of dread”.
The Economist understatedly called the book “bracing”. What does Cowen, a professor at George Mason University and daily blogger on marginalrevolution.com, say that provokes such fear and trembling in readers? Essentially this: if you’re not among the 10-15% of the population that has learned how to master and complement computers, you’ll be doomed to earn low wages in dead-end jobs. We spoke with Cowen when he was in Paris recently to participate in the OECD Forum. His comments are drawn from both our interview and his presentation at the Forum.

“There are two things people need to learn how to do to be employable at a decent wage: first, learn some skills which complement the computer rather than compete against it. Some of these are technical skills, but a lot of them will be soft skills, like marketing, persuasion and management that computers won’t be able to do any time soon.

But the second skill, and this is a tough one, is to be very good at teaching yourself new things. Right now, our schools are not so good at teaching this skill. The changes we’ve seen so far are just the beginning; 20-30 years from now, we’ll all be doing different things. So people who are very good at teaching themselves, regardless of what their formal background is, will be the big winners. People who do start-ups already face this. They’ve learned some things in school, but most of what they do they’ve had to learn along the way; and that, I think, is the future of education. I’m not convinced that our schools will or can keep pace with that; people will do it on their own.

There has arisen a kind of parallel network – a lot of it is on the Internet, a lot of it is free – where people teach themselves things, often very effectively. But there is a kind of elitist bias: people who are good at using this content are people who are already self-motivated.

The better technology gets, the more human imperfections matter. Think about medicine: the better pharmaceuticals get, the more it matters which people neglect to actually take them in the right doses. Education is entering the same kind of world. There’s so much out there, on the Internet and elsewhere. It’s great; but that means that human imperfections, like just not giving a damn, will matter more and more.

John Agresto:

I was a few minutes early for class. Father Alexander, my high-school sophomore-homeroom teacher, was standing outside the room, cigarette in his mouth, leaning on the doorjamb. “Morning, Father.”

His response was to put his arm across the door. “Agresto,” he said, “I have a question I’ve been thinking about and maybe you can help me.”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Do you think a person in this day and age can be called well educated who’s never read the ‘Iliad’?” I hadn’t read the “Iliad,” and am not even sure I had heard of it. “Hmmm. Maybe, I don’t see why not. Maybe if he knows other really good stuff . . .” His response was swift. “OK, Agresto, that proves it. You’re even a bigger damn fool than I thought you were.”

Caitlin Flanagan

hree comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out.

This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the answer. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a brutal winter for the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), to sell themselves and their comedy on the college circuit. Representatives of more than 350 colleges had come as well, to book comics, musicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists, magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, and every kind of boat act, inspirational speaker, and one-trick pony you could imagine for the next academic year.

For the comics, the college circuit offers a lucrative alternative to Chuckle Hut gigs out on the pitiless road, spots that pay a couple hundred bucks and a free night in whatever squat the club owner uses to warehouse out-of-town talent. College gigs pay easily a grand a night—often much more—and they can come in a firecracker string, with relatively short drives between schools, each hour-long performance paid for (without a moment’s ugliness or hesitation) by a friendly student-activities kid holding out a check and hoping for a selfie. For all these reasons, thousands of comics dream of being invited to the convention.

Noam Chomsky:

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

On the other hand, we are no longer living in Prussia.

Investigation Office of the Independent Monitor:

Following the procedures set forth in Section 14 of the Modified Consent Decree (MCD), the Plaintiffs’ Counsel provided the District with a written notice of intent to file a complaint, as well as declarations and supporting documentation of the alleged complaint, and met and conferred with the District in an attempt to resolve the complaint through mutual agreement. The basis of the complaint was that Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams lack the authority to determine services and placements during IEP meetings and that these decisions are often predetermined by school officials.

Because a resolution could not be met, on September 8, 2014, the Plaintiffs’ Counsel filed a formal written complaint (Attachment A) with the Independent Monitor (IM) alleging that the District was in systemic violation of its obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the following ways:

More.

George Anders:

In less than two years Slack Technologies has become one of the most glistening of tech’s ten-digit “unicorn” startups, boasting 1.1 million users and a private market valuation of $2.8 billion. If you’ve used Slack’s team-based messaging software, you know that one of its catchiest innovations is Slackbot, a helpful little avatar that pops up periodically to provide tips so jaunty that it seems human.

Such creativity can’t be programmed. Instead, much of it is minted by one of Slack’s 180 employees, Anna Pickard, the 38-year-old editorial director. She earned a theater degree from Britain’s Manchester Metropolitan University before discovering that she hated the constant snubs of auditions that didn’t work out. After dabbling in blogging, videogame writing and cat impersonations, she found her way into tech, where she cooks up zany replies to users who type in “I love you, Slackbot.” It’s her mission, Pickard explains, “to provide users with extra bits of surprise and delight.” The pay is good; the stock options, even better.

ICDL Foundation

Language barriers have never been more pronounced. Whether in an urban area of a modern country (e.g. the Chicago Public School system has 73 different languages represented in its student population) or the rural areas of a less developed country (e.g. Mongolia, where the ICDL has its first “branch” and where rural schools do not yet support a culture of reading for pleasure), differences in language are making it harder and harder for educational initiatives to bring about success.

As families move from Kenya to Finland or Brazil to Mexico or Viet Nam to California, books published in their native country or in their first language often must be left behind. In their new homelands, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to find children’s books from their cultures and in their mother tongue. Parents have little access to the books and stories from their youth to pass on to the next generation. Many children must grow up without knowledge of their family’s heritage and first language. A fundamental principle of the Foundation is that children and their families deserve to have access to the books of their culture, as well as the majority culture, regardless of where they live. According to a paper published in 2005 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in preparation for the second meeting on the World Summit on the Information Society, “Denial to access to information in one’s mother tongue is equivalent to a denial of a human right.” The report also concludes, “In terms of pedagogy, how do children learn best? In their mother tongue.”

Eva Moskowitz:

Not only does playing games in school develop the kind of social and emotional skills that translate to adult success, it’s also a means by which special needs kids without vocal agility can demonstrate their ability in nontraditional ways. In this video interview, Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz shares how playing chess allowed her son the chance to shine. She also delves into the need for schools to allow different types of children with different strengths and growth areas their own opportunities to learn and excel.

Tara García Mathewson:

Nanodegrees from Udacity, microdegrees from Coursera, and other programs like them resemble the trade certificates or extension programs of the past, but some see these new innovations as the latest “game-changers” in higher ed.

The accelerated certificate programs create their curricula with employers to offer a course that directly readies adults for jobs waiting in industries increasingly open to hiring employees without four-year degrees in their fields.

In many cases, the mini degree programs attract college-educated students looking for a career change, but some students are starting to look at them while getting a degree or before college entirely.

Laura Moser:

New data on child well-being released Tuesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation make for depressing reading on many levels, not least because the findings are so deeply unsurprising. The basic gist is that, despite the economic recovery, more kids are living in poverty (defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as an annual income of $23,834 for two adults and two children) today than during the recession. A lot more, actually—roughly 22 percent, or a total of 16 million kids, were living in poverty in 2013, a jump of 4 percentage points and 3.2 million kids from five years earlier. Break this figure into subgroups and the picture looks even grimmer, with 39 percent of black kids and 33 percent of Hispanic kids in poverty.

Poverty directly affects a child’s educational outcome, and the Casey Foundation also looks at educational data spanning from preschool to the end of high school. The good news, such as it is, is that the U.S. graduation rate has hit an all-time high of 81 percent—although that promising-looking statistic might be at least partially a result of mislabeling students and easing graduation requirements (like offering “alternative diplomas”), among other shady practices, according to a recent NPR report. As for actual skills, here the U.S. remains in dismal shape, with a total of 66 percent of students—55 percent of non-Hispanic white kids, and more than 80 percent of black and Latino kids—not reading proficiently by fourth grade.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Solutions:
Janet Hilary, head of St. George’s School Battersea, talks about turning failure to success in a high poverty school in South London.
​
Theresa Plummer, specialty teacher at St. George’s, talks about what it takes to successfully teach reading and spelling to all students.

– Via the Wisconsin Reading Coalition.

October 5-7: Wilson Reading System Introductory Workshop at CESA #1, N25W23131 Paul Rd., Pewaukee, WI
​
November 5-6: 2015 Fall Reading Institute of the 95% Group in Hoffman Estates, IL, Keynote Speaker Marilyn Jager Adams

There’s a New University in Town!
Wisconsin teachers may now earn their 316 Reading Teacher License by pursuing online coursework in Reading Science from the College of Mount St. Joseph. The Mount’s programs are accredited by the International Dyslexia Association as meeting IDA’s Standards for Teachers of Reading, and are based on the research presented in the Report of the National Reading Panel. LETRS and the Orton-Gillingham Multisensory Reading approach are included. The first Badger joined the August online cohort, and the next cohort will begin in January, 2016, with registration required by mid-December. For more information, you may contact Jack Ballman: jack.ballman@msj.edu.

The following statement from Wisconsin DPI describes the process to transfer the Mount’s coursework toward the Wisconsin 316 license:

Please note that the program for which you have applied is not a formal Wisconsin approved program. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has indicated that Wisconsin residents that successfully complete the MSJ Ohio Reading Endorsement program, including the Ohio Assessment for Educator’s Reading Subtests 1 and 2, will be able to transfer this coursework towards the requirements of the Wisconsin Reading Teacher 316 license by completing FORM PI-1612-T and submitting the PI-1612-T form to WI DPI with the required MSJ transcripts and the completion of the Wisconsin Reading Test in addition to any other requirements imposed by DPI. As a Wisconsin resident, DPI states that it is your responsibility to know and understand the DPI requirements related to successful licensure in WI. Further questions regarding the transferability of the Mount St. Joseph University Reading Endorsement coursework for the WI Reading Teacher 316 license should be directed to Ms. Julie Hagen with Wisconsin DPI. Ms. Hagen can be reached by email at Julie.Hagen@dpi.wi.gov.

Laura Waters:

Much of the sturm und drang over higher-level standards and assessments has been provoked by a theme, often evoked by teacher unions and wealthier parents, that students suffer from undue stress created by overwork, especially in high schools. For example, in the film “Race to Nowhere” students are portrayed as depleted by the “pressure-cooker” of high school academics: sleep-deprived afflicted by anxiety and depression, even suicidal. We work them too hard! The director of the film, Vicki Abeles, wrote last September in USA Today that school should be a place to explore “personal passions, participate in [the] wider community, and connect with friends.”

The logical extension of this analysis is that responsible parents should opt their kids out of standardized tests and oppose more challenging course standards.

However, this sentiment is disconnected from the reality of high school graduates who are, oftentimes, ill-prepared for college and careers. Hart Research Associates (sponsored by Achieve) surveyed 767 college instructors and 407 employers who either taught or interviewed 1,347 recent high school graduates.

Alana Semuels:

Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Kippnick’s classroom is a small study she’s set up in her home in rural Michigan, where she can stare out at apple trees and the occasional passing deer. She can finish her degree as quickly or as slowly as she wants. It costs her just $5,000 a year.

David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld and Karen Shen:

When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs—for example, by relaxing students’ funding constraints. To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.

Michaela Hustyn:

Quite a few people in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are looking online for information about Kantian morality. And the relationship between education and philosophy is piquing the interest of web surfers worldwide.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which includes 1,478 vetted entries about all manner of philosophical topics, is updated almost daily, thanks to nearly 2,000 contributors.
How do we know this? The data comes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the web’s oldest and arguably most credible open-access source of philosophical information.

Launched two decades ago, years before Wikipedia existed, the site led the way in academic information sharing. It now includes 1,478 authoritative and vetted entries about all manner of philosophical topics. It is updated almost daily, thanks to about 2,000 contributors.

The encyclopedia averages more than a million Internet hits per week. Users include students, scholars, librarians and even military officials.

Due to its alternative scholarly publishing model – the encyclopedia is free and edited by experts – the SEP is one of the few of its kind.

“There was just no model for this, a reference work that was revisable where all the scholarly standards were maintained,” said Stanford’s Edward Zalta, the executive editor of the site and a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. The encyclopedia is one of the leading resources for scholarly research, Zalta said.

The Economist:

THE Ken Ade Private School is not much to look at. Its classrooms are corrugated tin shacks scattered through the stinking streets of Makoko, Lagos’s best-known slum, two grades to a room. The windows are glassless; the light sockets without bulbs. The ceiling fans are still. But by mid-morning deafening chants rise above the mess, as teachers lead gingham-clad pupils in educational games and dance. Chalk-boards spell out the A-B-Cs for the day. A smart, two-storey government school looms over its ramshackle private neighbour. Its children sit twiddling their thumbs. The teachers have not shown up.

Robby Soave:

Syracuse University is scrambling to offer retirement buyouts after an audit discovered that the university employs hundreds of administrators who only oversee one or two employees.

Victor Mair:

These are totally new concepts for me. Until David Cragin told me about them, I had never heard of reader-responsible language and writer-responsible language.

Dave works for Merck in the Safety & Environment group, knows Mandarin, has been to China 12 times since 2005, and teaches a short course on risk assessment and critical thinking at Peking University every year. He was recently appointed to the Executive Committee of the US-based Sino-American Pharmaceuticals Professional Association (SAPA), so he has a professional and personal interest in cross-cultural communication.

In an earlier post, we discussed another, related issue that interests Dave: “Critical thinking”.

Let us begin our inquiry by considering this post from the CAL Learning (Culture and Language Training for a Multicultural Workplace) Blog by Lauren Supraner: “Who Is Responsible for the Message?”

Susan Cohen:

Finnegan’s blood glucose monitor arrived last month, and it should make a big difference in his life. The eight-year-old has diabetes, and now, instead of having his finger pricked eight times a day, his parents will be able to track his blood sugar levels painlessly.

Finnegan’s mother, Kayleigh Cassella, and stepfather, Arran Phipps, are both Ph.D candidates in UC Berkeley’s physics department, and like thousands of others, they’re enrolled in the school’s Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP). Their kids are on it, too; the comprehensive policy helps offset the costs of Finnegan’s new monitor. “I can’t imagine not having [the monitor],” Phipps said. “Just the supplies for that would be $150 a month, and with the insurance I only have to pay $50 a month. I literally would not be able to afford this without the SHIP dependent insurance.”

Keri Blakinger.

Nellie Bowles:

“Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco’s unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night. “You know he rebuilt Yo’s backend. He’s baller.”

We watched the sun set over Twin Peaks, and Matin told me about his high school dropout friends like Latta, 17, who served as lead engineer of Yo, a viral messaging app that simply sends the message “Yo.” A large steel vent, on which someone had written the words Boob Mansion, pumped out hot air and the smell of tortillas from a vegan Mexican restaurant downstairs. Matin warmed himself under it.

Lisa Vaas:

Even if you aren’t on top of everything your child posts, your kid’s school well might be, given all the social media monitoring software on the market.

If you live in Florida’s Orange County, those kind of posts could mean school officials come looking into whatever’s going on.

That’s because Orange County is one of the latest school districts to start monitoring all of the thousands of social media posts made by both students and teachers.

It’s doing so with a new monitoring software called Snaptrends that monitors social media posts from all accounts in its location.

The school district reportedly paid $14,000 for a one-year Snaptrends license.

That buys the district’s schools the ability to search thousands of posts on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, hunting for keywords that might indicate trouble.

School officials say that the goal is to flag potential dangers including cyberbullying, suicide and crime.

Alan Borsuk:

There is no serious prospect for eliminating revenue caps and not much chance in the foreseeable future for annual increases anything like in days of old. Combine that with reductions in other areas, such as federal aid, and the forecast is for money to stay tight for schools.

Some school districts have used local referendum votes to get more operating money than the revenue caps allow. Success in passing such referendums is on the rise as more people appear willing to pay to boost education in their own community’s schools. But that has brought concern that lower-income communities, such as Milwaukee, are the ones least likely to conduct or approve referendums. The net effect could be to increase disparities between well-to-do and not-well-to-do districts.

Is spending more on education worth it? A lot of money has been spent on education programs that haven’t succeeded, and many schools used to be too generous in their spending habits. There are studies that conclude there is no match between more spending and better student achievement.

But schools need adequate fuel in the tank. That’s why people who have means almost always live in communities that have high-quality offerings in their schools, or they send their kids to expensive private schools.

James W Loewen:

On May 13, 2015, I heard you at Politics & Prose, the independent bookstore in Washington, D.C. Perhaps you saw me in the audience and later in the question line. (We have met several times, most recently two years ago, when we walked together from one part of Arlington Cemetery to another for the burial with military honors of two bodies recovered from the wreckage of Monitor.) Eventually I abandoned the question line, however, because my question was going to be critical, even embarrassing, and it wasn’t appropriate to embarrass you in front of your book-tour audience.

Recent events have convinced me, however, that I must ask you more than one question, not about your most recent book, but about your middle-school textbook, The American Journey. I shall ask them here, in this letter sent to you and to History News Network, HNN, where at least some of the historical profession comes to learn about itself.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

I’m tired of band-aids on university policy problems that never heal the underlying wounds, so I asked that we faculty do some new things in a piece that appeared in Inside Higher Ed last week. Called “Time for a New Strategy,” it argues that defenses of tenure and academic freedom will increasingly fail, as they did in Wisconsin this year, unless we call for the same protections for all employees.

The big advantage, I argue there, would be that we faculty would no longer base our claim to academic freedom on an exceptional status that most of the public doesn’t accept. Another advantage would be that we would no longer have to rely on our university boards and executives to protect us, which is also not working well. A third advantage would be that we could broaden our claims to public benefits beyond the competitive excellence that we generally mention first as tenure’s product.

Libby Nelson:

When University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing was charged with murder today for shooting Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop, the prosecutor in the case had harsh words for university police in general.

“I don’t think a university should be in the policing business,” said Joe Deters, the Hamilton County prosecutor, saying he thinks the city should handle it.

But nearly all universities are in the policing business. Almost all four-year colleges with more than 2,500 students had their own law enforcement agency during the 2011-’12 academic year, according to a survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Most of those officers can carry and use guns. In some cases, they have jurisdiction outside campus boundaries for traffic stops, such as the stop that ended with DuBose’s murder on July 19.

Madison School District (4.2MB PDF).

Molly Beck summarizes the report.

It would be useful to determine if substantive progress is being made on Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Ed in the Apple:

Has the statute of limitations expired? I admit it, I scrubbed Regents exam essays, or. to use the current term, “re-scored” the exams. We weren’t worried about graduation rates or teacher evaluation; we simply wanted to give kids a break. We took a look at every paper with grades from 61 to 64, sometimes you “found” one or two points, and, sometimes not. If the kid came to class, did his/her homework and tried, a little push over the top seemed warranted. If the kid cut class, was truant, no mercy, if he/r failed the course, take the course over, night school or summer school; such were the unwritten rules for decades.

In the post 2002 world of accountability graduation rates matter, they determine the future of a school and they determine the future of a teacher. Under federal rules states must identify low performing schools as identified by student scores on state grades 3-8 tests and graduation rates determined by credit accumulation and Regents passing rates. In New York State 700 out of the 4400 schools fall into the “struggling” categories – focus, priority and persistently struggling. 62 of these schools could fall into receivership, i. e., removed from the school district and handed over to a company to manage. (Read the program description here).

There are three ways to increase student achievement:

– Via Will Fitzhugh.

Will Fitzhugh:

When it comes to Words, our High School English Departments are the Rulers. They dominate reading and writing, partly because the other departments—including the History and other Social Studies departments—don’t want to assign book reports or term papers and they certainly don’t want to read and grade them.

The English Word Experts are supported in this by the K-12 Literacy World, which never saw a student history research paper they could not ignore. Everywhere you look, reading and writing mean fiction, and for fiction, the Literacy World is adamant that the responsibility for that belongs to English (English Language Arts) Departments.

College professors and employers, with near unanimity, complain about the nonfiction reading, research, and writing abilities of the young people they work with. Talking to the schools and/or the Literacy World about their concerns is just exactly like talking to a dead phone. They cannot hear what they are being told.

Students are not lobbying, in most cases, for the chance to write a serious 5,000-6,000-word term paper, and only later will they face the consequences of their lack of preparation.

Since 1987, The Concord Review has published 106 issues, with 1,165 history research papers by secondary students from 44 states and 40 other countries. The average length of the eleven papers in the Winter issue last Fall was 7,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography. Some of those papers came from International Baccalaureate schools, which still require an Extended Essay for the full Diploma. Some came from private schools, where faculty (and parents) still expect students to write at least one serious term paper before college.

Many of the papers lately have been from an Independent Study, or from Summer programs, like the Stanford Summer Humanities Institute and the TCR Summer Program for high school students. But in general, our public high schools, in my experience, even including an exam school like Boston Latin School, not only do not assign serious term papers, they also do not even want students to see the exemplary work that has been published by their peers, so that they cannot be inspired by them to work harder on reading history and on writing research papers themselves.

Thanks to the Web, more and more students are finding such examples anyway, and they take advantage of them. (e.g. www.tcr.org) One example of hundreds:

————————-

“Thank you so much for publishing my essay on the Irish Ladies’ Land League in the Spring issue of The Concord Review. I am honored that my writing was chosen to appear alongside such thoughtful work in your journal.

“When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports. A week before a paper was due, I would visit the local university library, check out all available books on my assigned topic and write as articulate a summary as possible. Such assignments are a useful strategy for learning to build a coherent argument, but they do not teach students to appreciate the subtleties and difficulties of writing good history. Consequently, few students really understand how history is constructed.

“As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women’s history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts.

“Gradually, I came to understand the central difficulty of writing history: how do you resurrect, in words, events that took place in a different place and time? More importantly, how do you resurrect the past only using the words of someone else? In the words of Carl Becker,

History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning.

“Flipping through my note cards, the ideas began to fit themselves together in my mind. I was not certain, but there was an excitement in being forced to think rigorously; in wrestling with difficult problems I knew I could not entirely solve. Writing about the Ladies’ Land League, I finally understood and appreciated the beautiful complexity of history.

“In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.”

Sincerely,
Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse
[North Central High School, Indianapolis, Indiana
and Columbia University]

===========

Let’s do make an effort to free our high school students from the English Department/Fiction-Only Monopoly, and allow them to be inspired, by the serious academic expository writing of their peers, to attempt real term papers themselves, before they go on, as most now do, to find themselves both unprepared and a Literacy Problem for their professors and their future employers.

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
www.tcr.org

Dave Dleozier:

Elementary schools in the district saw an almost 10 point gain over two years in literacy and math.

“Our high school graduation rate continues to move in the right direction almost across the board for every student group,” MMSD Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said. “In addition, there are pockets of accelerated results. When it comes to graduation rates, for example the four-year graduation rate for African-American students at La Follette High School increased to 75 percent, a 10 percent point gain.”

Elvehjem Elementary School is symbolic of the improvements seen throughout the district. The school has seen improvements in MAP reading proficiency for grades three through five from 40 percent to 46 percent. For African-American students that number increased from 12 percent to 25 percent. Reading proficiency for special education students improved from 12 percent to 21 percent.

Introduction by Karen Hawley Miles (PDF):

School district leaders face an array of challenges that affect how they allocate scarce resources to schools—stubborn achievement gaps, changing and complex demographics, and shrinking federal and state support. As the range of need grows more complex, schools are growing as diverse as the students they serve. In this context, many leaders are actively seeking ways to ensure that all schools have flexibility to organize resources to match student and school needs, while also ensuring equity across school types.

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) leverages more than 15 years of experience helping district leaders strategically reallocate their resources to improve student performance. As part of this work, we’ve collaborated with some of the leading districts that have made bold changes to their funding systems and worked through the results of these changes. Our work on funding is part of our broader School System 20/20 vision—an action-oriented framework for urban school districts to ensure that every school succeeds for every child.
Our work on school funding is based on seven principles for effective school budgeting. We believe that all school funding systems need to rest on this foundation:

Gillian Tett:

This summer, LinkedIn, the social media platform beloved by many professionals (albeit disliked by anyone annoyed by incessant emails), is taking part in a striking little experiment in Colorado.

This initiative does not aspire to connect ambitious MBA students with exciting jobs or link the alumni of elite colleges. Instead, LinkedIn, in tandem with non-governmental groups such as the Markle Foundation, a technology-focused charity, is connecting employers who need skilled and semi-skilled workers with local community colleges. The hope is that this will help colleges and students see where jobs are being created — and thus work with companies to create the right college courses to deliver training.

Or to put it another way, instead of using the power of digital connections to help people find jobs, LinkedIn is going a step back — using cyber platforms to enable colleges to train students in the best way.

……

But, in reality, state institutions tend to be too stodgy and slow-moving to reform education in any meaningful way, particularly given the speed at which digitisation is changing the economy. And while some companies are still running effective apprenticeship and training schemes, this tends to occur in an ad hoc way in places such as the US.

Vivian Wang:

Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options.

Maurice Thomas’ planned Milwaukee Excellence Charter School, set to open in 2016, promises an “unapologetically college preparatory” education for grades six to 12, complete with longer school days, an extended school year and strict disciplinary standards. By 2024, Thomas said, 100% of graduates will be at a four-year college.

Such “no excuses” schools have produced higher rates of graduation and better test scores than conventional schools in some parts of the country. Such a school could be especially impactful at the planned location on the city’s northwest side, a historically underserved area in education.

The school will likely be housed in the vacant Edison Middle School building at 5372 N. 37th St.

As a charter school authorized by Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee Excellence will keep the public dollars that follow students into its classrooms in MPS coffers. As an independent school, though, it can be staffed by non-district, non-unionized employees and operate free of some regular rules governing public schools.

Wolfram:

38 high schoolers; 2 weeks; -> 38 original #WolfLang projects

Mikhail Zinshsteyn:

Education writing is famous for its alphabet soup of acronyms and obscure terms, but it could just as well be faulted for trafficking buzzwords in search of clear definitions.

Ideas like grit, motivation, fitting in, and learning from one’s mistakes—often summarized as noncognitive factors—are just some of the concepts that are coming up more frequently these days. A new paper from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching provides definitions for many of these new terms, which arose in part because of the recent push by psychologists, economists, and education experts to delve more deeply into what compels students to understand complex new material.

Each concept has its own section and is accompanied by summaries of key experiments that gave rise to the ideas’ relevance (as well as reference points for reporters whose inboxes are inundated with the latest efforts to boost student grades and college prospects).​

School vouchers may be the most effective anti-poverty program around, yet they’re fought tooth and hammer by the teachers unions. Late last week the North Carolina Supreme Court awarded a victory to poor kids by protecting vouchers from another union attack.

Two years ago Tar Heel Republicans passed a modest reform offering low-income students $4,200 scholarships to attend qualifying private schools. The law requires, among other things, that private schools report graduation rates and test scores. It also mandates an annual report comparing the learning gains of voucher recipients and public school students.

Taxpayer plaintiffs backed by the union argued in a lawsuit that vouchers accomplish no “public purpose” because private schools don’t have to adhere to such state educational standards as teacher licensing requirements. You have to admire the gall of a union to argue that private schools are “unaccountable” when only one in five black fourth-graders at North Carolina public schools scored proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented voucher parents in the case, five of six low-income students fail the state’s end-of-grade math or reading tests.

John C. Osborn, John Fensterwald, and Matt Levin:

After a complete redesign and the addition of new data, we’re excited to relaunch “States in Motion.”

The project explores numerous datasets through interactive charts for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The idea behind the project is to take a historical look at how the economic and social conditions have changed for each state over time, and how those changes have impacted investment in education and student achievement. Each section explores specific data in chart form and offers context in related text. There could be many stories in each chart; we’re telling just one of them.

The charts and context below are California-centric, meaning we mainly explored how California has changed compared with other states historically over numerous data metrics. Some of the questions going into the project include:

Wall Street Journal:

This being America, no good deed goes unlitigated, but sometimes the good deed still wins. So it is in Michigan, where on Wednesday the state Supreme Court turned a union lawsuit on its head and said the state’s right-to-work law applies to 36,000 government workers.

In 2012 Michigan passed a right-to work statute that lets workers decide whether to join a union and thus pay union dues. The United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents 17,000 state workers, brought a lawsuit claiming the law doesn’t apply to its members because their employment terms are set by the Michigan Civil Service Commission.

CR Denning:

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is supposed to make getting documents from the government straightforward. But a Goodrich, Michigan, mom named Sherry Smith is finding out just how crooked the process can be. When she filed a FOIA request for educational records related to her son, Mitchell, the school system told her there would be a hefty price tag—to wit, $77,718.75.

Mitchell has an intellectual disability, which means the state will pay for his education until he turns 26. Having just finished high school, he and his family found a program at a local college they felt was just right for him.

Rob Lazebnik:

Congratulations. Two months ago, your kid graduated from college, bravely finishing his degree rather than dropping out to make millions on his idea for a dating app for people who throw up during Cross Fit training. If he’s like a great many of his peers, he’s moved back home, where he’s figuring out how to become an adult in the same room that still has his orthodontic headgear strapped to an Iron Man helmet.

Now we’re deep into summer, and the logistical challenges of your grad really being home are sinking in. You’re constantly juggling cars, cleaning more dishes and dealing with your daughter’s boyfriend, who not only slept over but also drank your last can of Pure Protein Frosty Chocolate shake.

Clare Ansberry:

Kathy Reveille began taking her granddaughter, Bianca, to church because no one else did.

Bianca’s mother was Catholic and her father was Baptist. They couldn’t agree on what church to attend so they didn’t go. “I really wanted to belong to a church. I didn’t care what kind,” says Bianca, who is turning 15 this week. She always felt she was missing something, she says. The absence became more pronounced after her father died.

“That’s when the big questions come up,” says her grandmother, Ms. Reveille. “I stepped into the gap.”

Bianca High received rosary beads from her grandmother after her confirmation this past spring. ENLARGE
Bianca High received rosary beads from her grandmother after her confirmation this past spring. PHOTO: KRISTIAN THACKER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mikhail:

Schools that that teach low-income students a notoriously demanding curriculum are almost twice as likely to see those students enroll in college, a new report shows.

This news comes on the heels of growing research suggesting that challenging assessments, which are a staple of the International Baccalaureate program featured in the report, help students develop a deeper understanding of key subjects like math and history. That “deeper learning,” in turn, may lead to more college opportunities.

The International Baccalaureate, a nonprofit organization that sells its stable of intensive coursework for various subjects to schools around the world, released the study last week, calculating that more than half of the 1,650 schools in the United States that use IB material fit the federal designation of Title I schools, which means they enroll a large low-income student population. In fact, the number of Title I schools offering IB programming increased by 50 percent between 2009 and 2013, the report said.

The IB program provides curricula tailored for specific grade levels, including the IB “diploma program” for high school students. The IB study tracked how many of its low-income diploma program students attending Title I schools enrolled in college, finding that in 2013 nearly eight in 10 went on to a postsecondary institution. The national college-going average for low-income students is 46 percent, the report notes. According to IB, about a third of the diploma program test-takers were considered low-income students. To become an International Baccalaureate school, campuses must go through the program’s authorization program.

Bob Sullivan:

Higher education doesn’t work like a normal business. It’s much harder to get the results you want out of the investments you make. In my book with Andrew Kelly, Reinventing Financial Aid, I have a chapter where I go back to the inception of the financial aid system and I work through the set of decisions that were made and put in place at the beginning. (There was the question) “Should you send aid directly to students or to schools?” The thinking at the time was – led by economists, including Milton Friedman — we should not send the money to schools, but to students. They argued that doing this would exert control over schools the way we think vouchers do today.

But the thing is (it doesn’t) end up working in the way vouchers were intended. The customers (college students) have a very hard time extracting accountability. Institutions don’t seem constrained at all. I argued in that chapter that we made a critical mistake. By not sending money to the schools we (state and government agencies) gave up the ability to hold schools accountable. But I don’t think we can back our way into that now by attaching a bunch of new rules to existing programs. I think we have to create financial aid version 2.0.

Key & Peele:

In a clip previewing Wednesday night’s episode of Key & Peele, the Comedy Central duo discuss teachers as if they were professional athletes. They stage a fake draft at Radio City Music Hall and critique how and why teachers call on certain people in class.

Although it’s all in good fun, the jokes about the salary differences between a teacher and a professional athlete is the most depressing part. Just imagine if a public school teacher could actually sign a contract guaranteeing a $80 million salary over the next six years with a $40 million in incentives based on test scores.

Sam Sturgis:

Every kid likes to draw. But in India, young people living in slums are using their sketching skills to spur urban change.

As part of a broader civic campaign centered on “child clubs,” groups of children are creating detailed “social maps” of their marginalized neighborhoods to voice their concerns about public space, as first reported in Citiscope, a CityLab partner site.

Since 2011, UNICEF has been encouraging kids to use mobile technology and open data to map environmental and health issues near their homes. But that technology isn’t available to everyone. Instead, much of the child-led mapping campaign sweeping India today relies on old-school topography materials—paper and a rainbow-spectrum of markers.

Lee Hall:

Like most university teachers today, I am a low-paid contract worker. Now and then, a friend will ask: “Have you tried dog-walking on the side?” I have. Pet care, I can reveal, takes massive attention, energy and driving time. I’m friends with a full-time, professionally employed pet-sitter who’s done it for years, never topping $26,000 annually and never receiving health or other benefits.

The reason I field such questions is that, as an adjunct professor, whether teaching undergraduate or law-school courses, I make much less than a pet-sitter earns. This year I’m teaching five classes (15 credit hours, roughly comparable to the teaching loads of some tenure-track law or business school instructors). At $3,000 per course, I’ll pull in $15,000 for the year. I work year-round, 20 to 30 hours weekly – teaching, developing courses and drafting syllabi, offering academic advice, recommendation letters and course extensions for students who need them. As I write, in late June, my students are wrapping up their final week of the first summer term, and the second summer term will begin next week.

Jules Polonetsky

With all of these benefits come risks. Some worry that the vendors providing these new technologies could use the detailed student data they hold for marketing purposes. Others worry the data could be sold. Although more than 150 companies have signed a Student Privacy Pledge, legally committing to not sell student data, federal and state lawmakers continue to seek ways to expand student privacy laws to more effectively protect student data.

One key issue has emerged as a point of contention among many of the proposed bills. Should parents have the right to tell a company holding their child’s data to enable additional services, such as sending homework information to a tutoring service or sending a transcript to a college or for a scholarship application? Should a parent be able to use the school’s network to share their child’s art portfolio with relatives or even online? Or, what if a child, with parental permission, wants to continue to maintain their school email account or use an educational app to practice test questions? Oddly, the leading state privacy law passed in California does not make allowances for parents to expressly enable new services, and the drafters of federal legislation have largely followed suit.

Jonathan Taplain:

We have become convinced that only machines and corporations make the future, but I don’t think that is true. In thinking about the role of the humanist in our technology-driven future, I was drawn to a sermon Martin Luther King preached at the National Cathedral in Washington two weeks before he was killed. At the outset he told the story of how Rip Van Winkle had passed a sign with a picture of King George III of England on the way up the mountain where he fell into a long sleep. When he came down the mountain, the same sign bore a picture of George Washington.

With such economic power comes political power. Uber recently hired Obama campaign svengali David Plouffe to help it navigate the political lobbying waters of Washington, taking a page from Google’s bible. Google outspends all but a few financial and military firms in its lobbying efforts. The main financial backers of the Libertarian movement, the Koch brothers, have vowed to spend $900 million in the 2016 election cycle to ensure that the “no regulation, no taxes” principles of the movement are sacrosanct in the corridors of power.

The digital monopolists are not above using the rhetoric of libertarianism to spread the message that they alone are the guardians of freedom in the world. When the media companies tried (in an admittedly ham-handed fashion) to pass a law (Stop Online Piracy Act) that would require Google to block sites that were making millions off of stolen content, Google unleashed an online campaign stating this would amount to censorship. The uproar from the crowd quickly killed the bill.

Laurence Schall:

In my day job, I run Oglethorpe University, a liberal arts college in Atlanta. Over the last 40 years, I’ve also worked in the bleached-white collar realms of law and real estate.

This summer, I added a new line to my resume: Uber driver.

I signed up because I wanted to broaden my perspective on today’s “sharing economy.” After all, my students are confronting a very different job market than I did. Since the 2008 recession, many Americans have been pushed into or chosen to join the freelance marketplace, taking jobs with no regular hours, no benefits and no office. My wife calls it “Panera World,” where she, a freelance advertising executive, joins dozens of other freelancers who spend hours in the restaurant bakery working on their computers and phones every day. Some may forgo full-time work altogether, choosing by necessity or by choice to string together a series of part-time opportunities.

Byron Reese:

hearing the term “artificial intelligence”?

Stephen Wolfram: That is a good question. I don’t have any idea. When I was a kid, in the 1960s in England, I think there was a prevailing assumption that it wouldn’t be long before there were automatic brains of some kind, and I certainly had books about the future at that time, and I’m sure that they contained things about them, how there would be some electronic brains, and so on. Whether they used the term “artificial intelligence,” I’m not quite sure. Good question. I don’t know.

Would you agree that AI, up there with space travel, has kind of always been the thing of tomorrow and hasn’t advanced at the rate we thought they would?

Eli Meyerhoff

opular narratives portray society as made up of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. Figures of the citizen, the worker, and the graduate are contrasted with the deviant, the criminal, and the dropout. For the safety of ‘good’ people, we are supposed to put ‘bad’ people in separate places. When they are younger, those stigmatized as ‘bad kids’—as delinquents, failures, dropouts—are sent to lower tracked courses, detention, or juvenile hall. If they continue ‘down’ this criminalized life path, they are sent to jails and prisons. By contrast, those deemed ‘good’ through the categorizing and sorting of education are admitted to the place where ‘good’ people rise: ‘up’ through the school grades and into higher education.

Prisons and universities complement each other as two sides of the same coin. They are institutions for producing obedient, governable subjects—shaped in an accounting mode with incarceration for ‘debts to society’ and education for ‘credits.’ Abolitionist movements should seek to abolish this whole coin. From a decolonial, abolitionist perspective, this coin is the intersecting regimes of white supremacist, settler colonial, hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Abolitionists have organized against institutions associated with the ‘bad’ side of the dichotomy of ‘good’/‘bad’ persons—including prisons, corporal punishment in schools, the schools-to-prisons pipeline, the death penalty, and the police—as well as against the ‘redemptive’ intermediaries of the military and work. Yet, abolitionists also need to resist institutions, such as higher education, that are associated with the ‘good’ side of the coin.

Peter Gratton Review:

Brown’s Undoing the Demos and Maurizio Lazzarato’s Governing by Debt (first published in Italian in 2013) aim both to diagnose the contemporary neoliberal condition and to demonstrate the tragedy of its growing ubiquity. Brown’s is a markedly nostalgic work, at least rhetorically, since it hearkens to the imperiled values of a previous era of political liberalism before the current reign of homo oeconomicus (economic man) (her past writings are best known for demonstrating the failures of liberalism to confront the problems of patriarchy and economic inequality). Where Brown sees the promise in rejuvenating a political thought that replaces rampant economism, Lazzarato argues all forms of politics act as apparatuses for the capture of wealth by a given elite. For this reason he calls for strikes against the contemporary system, and the wholesale destruction of any economic structures that support it. This, too, is strikingly nostalgic — large-scale workers’ actions of the kind Lazzarato prescribes are modeled on an era more and more outmoded as neoliberalism spreads.

Marc Bousquet:

Bernie Sanders has long aimed to end the influence of money in politics. Now he hopes to reduce the corrosive influence of money in higher education with the College for All Act, a federal bill that would bring back tuition-free public higher education. Like most of Sanders’ proposals – supporting Social Security, a reasonable minimum wage, investment in infrastructure – his college plan is closely aligned with the mainstream views of the US electorate. On top of the free tuition, Sanders would regulate student loans and student labor, provide financial aid for living expenses and set a national standard for tenured/track faculty, including at teaching institutions. Nothing in the plan is without abundant precedent, both in the United States and abroad.

The popularity of College for All has forced reaction from the other presidential contenders, on both sides of the aisle.

Chuck DeVore

Rognlie then makes an interesting insight; housing prices are going up because of artificial scarcity caused by land-use regulation. Put another way, the concentration of wealth is not an issue of the “1 percent” winning while the rest of us lose—it’s an issue of homeowners benefitting from government restrictions on property rights that prevent a free market in homebuilding, restricting supply and driving up prices.

If Rognlie is correct (and the data suggests he is), then the liberal prescription to address growing wealth inequality misses the mark. Further, it complicates the Left’s attempt to capitalize on Occupy populist outrage. Going after homeowners is a much different electoral and rhetorical proposition (especially if you’re still living in your parent’s basement) than going after the vilified “1 percent.

John Torinus

The successive withdrawals of support for our once esteemed university system was necessitated because political leaders of both parties have ducked the biggest budget buster for state government: out-of-control health costs for public employees and Medicaid recipients. That under-management, or mismanagement, call it what you will, means that other priorities get crowded out. The university in one in a long list of diminished priorities.

Are the Republican leaders real fiscal conservatives when they don’t deal with the largest fiscal crisis on their plate? Real fiscal conservatives manage fiscal challenges. They aren’t just slashers.

Cathy Sandeen, the new chancellor for the colleges and UW Extension, faced up to the fiscal realities imposed by the GOP and decided to take the cuts out of administration so instruction and students would be impacted as little as possible. That means at least 83 administrative positions will be eliminated on the 13 campuses, or about six or seven per campus. For perspective sake, the West Bend campus has about eight administrative positions at present.

When the reorganization shakes out over the next five months, the University of Wisconsin – Washington County in West Bend will probably be headed by an associate dean. The campus will no longer have its own dean, a loss since UWWC deans have long been prominent leaders in the county. The likelihood is that the regional executive officer will be based at UW – Waukesha, a larger campus than West Bend or Sheboygan in the new southeast regional grouping.

David Talbot:

China knows a thing or two about distance learning. For two decades, the country’s education ministry has used the television airwaves to broadcast agricultural lessons to more than 100 million rural students—making it the largest such program in the world. And in the early 2000s, the charitable Li Ka Shing Foundation installed satellite dishes and computers to broadcast lectures to 10,000 rural schools. Now this top-down model of online learning is being joined by a surge in new commercial and university offerings.

And it’s no longer just about reaching rural provinces. In China a rapidly rising middle class—part of a population that now totals 1.4 billion—is creating a demand for education far outpacing what traditional teachers and schools can supply. In response, Chinese startups are identifying market niches and developing entirely new products, while universities are emulating online platforms first developed in the United States.

Warwick Mansell:

A “good” Ofsted judgment for any school is a cause for celebration and congratulation. So why would a leading headteacher say she was “sick” when she heard of a local school being given a good report by the inspectorate?

That is a question that will be of intense interest to those following the fate of the Hewett school in Norwich, a comprehensive currently in a maelstrom of controversy over its likely takeover by a local academy chain.

Email correspondence seen by us shows the head of Inspiration Trust, a chain highly regarded by the Department for Education, admitting she was less than pleased in 2013 when the Hewett got its “good” Ofsted report.

In an email to Sir Theodore Agnew, chairman of the trust, who at the time was also a DfE director, Dame Rachel de Souza, the trust’s CEO, says: “Hewett on 42% [provisional figures for the proportion of pupils achieving five good GCSEs in August 2013] – is it vulnerable again? That good they got [from Ofsted] made me sick!”

Sarah Lam:

The school was half the size it is today, with 400 kids who were mostly Somali, part of a sudden infusion of Africans in the mostly white Longfellow neighborhood.

No one from Longfellow sent their kids to Sanford. Instead, as busloads of kids from outside the neighborhood rolled in each morning, busloads of Longfellow kids rolled out. It was as if a color-coded invisible fence had been placed around the school.

That changed with Val Ausland. Nine years ago, her oldest son was finishing up fifth grade at Dowling Elementary and needed a middle school. Sanford’s reputation as a “tough school with lots of fights” kept neighborhood families away for years, Ausland says. But she wasn’t ready to believe the hype.

Instead, Ausland, a beaming woman with a reputation as a volunteer extraordinaire, investigated it herself. A conversation with the principal convinced her that Sanford was trying to change for the better, and that she and her neighbors could help.

Ana Tintocalis:

Van Zandt admits he has high expectations for his children. He also has high expectations for San Francisco Unified, which is why he and many parents like him were outraged when they learned Algebra 1 will no longer be taught in middle school under Common Core, the state’s new academic standards.

Instead, all students will have to wait until their freshman year in high school to take the class.

Valentina says delaying Algebra 1 is going to hurt gifted students because some classes are “too easy” or “aren’t very challenging” for high-achieving students.

The shift to now require Algebra 1 in high school may seem like a subtle change, but it hits on a deep-rooted debate over when advanced math should be introduced, and to which students.

Some say Algebra 1 at a young age causes students to flounder.

Laura Waters:

These days “education reform” is a loaded phrase, evoking politically charged disruptions of cherished institutions, Christie-ish harassment of honorable educators, and testing-mania. Certainly, if our schools are fine, we don’t have to change. If they’re not but we pretend they are, then we’re doing our children a disservice. As Mark Twain said, “denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

So let’s look squarely at the data.

The median annual household income in New Jersey is $71,637. Those of us who dwell in middle-class suburban New Jersey know that our children don’t have access to schools like those in moneyed Millburn (median household income: $156,078), where 85 percent of students get more than 1550 points on the 2400-point SAT (1550 is considered a benchmark for college and career readiness) and 63 percent take an AP course, another marker for success beyond high school. But we also know that we don’t have the same concerns as families in Trenton (median household income: $36,727), where only 11 percent of high school seniors get at least a 1550 on the SAT and 4.9 percent take an AP course.

Let’s take three middle-class New Jersey communities: Nutley (Essex County), Florence (Burlington County), and Plumsted (Ocean County) and look at the most recent available data from the New Jersey Department of Education’s 2013-2014 school performance reports. All three towns have median household incomes that are average for New Jersey and all three have high schools that, according to the narrative that begins each performance report, are considered average in terms of “graduation and post-secondary readiness.”

First, Nutley, eight miles from Newark, which has a median household income of $76,167. Almost every student at Nutley High passed the High School Proficiency Assessments in math and language arts (the HSPAs, just replaced this past spring with PARCC tests). But only 35 percent of Nutley High’s graduating class got 1550 or better on their SATs and only 23 percent took an AP course. Sixteen months after graduation, 81 percent of students were enrolled in two- or four-year colleges.

UCI News:

Book co-authored by UCI sociologist debunks idea that Asian American academic achievement is due to unique cultural traits or values

One in four Americans today are either immigrants or children of immigrants. As the U.S. moves from a black and white society to a potpourri of racial and ethnic groups, researchers are turning their attention to why certain immigrant and second-generation groups are more likely to succeed. Asian Americans stand out for having the highest median household income and education level of all groups, including native-born whites, according to the Pew Research Center.

It’s a demographic that’s often stereotyped as the “model minority,” who seemingly get ahead because they have the “right” cultural traits and values. But there are very specific immigration patterns, institutions and social psychological factors that foster high academic achievement among certain Asian American groups, says Jennifer Lee, UCI professor of sociology and co-author of The Asian American Achievement Paradox – a forceful rebuttal to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Matthew Yglesias:

Public schools are a really nice idea. The government builds a building, right in your neighborhood, where anyone can send their kids to get an education for free. It’s simple and appealing.

But in practice, it’s quite a bit different. Land that is in the intake zone for a good school becomes more expensive, and you create a situation in which the school is open exclusively to the “public” of people who can afford a very expensive house.

Look at this chart showing the correlation between the price of a family-size house and the reading proficiency scores in the local school (the outlier, Garrison, where the reading scores are terrible and the houses are expensive anyway is my neighborhood public school):

Christopher Newfield:

It’s a widely noted fact that colleges and universities are under new pressure to justify their value and function. The same is true of tenure-track faculty members, who are at the heart of the higher education system whose benefits much of society now claims to find mysterious, and whose job security is increasingly criticized.

While colleges face criticism for converting most of their teaching posts to non-tenure-track status, they also face criticism for offering tenure to the rest. The final decision by the Wisconsin Legislature to weaken tenure and shared governance in the University of Wisconsin System teaches a lesson that should resonate beyond Wisconsin: the standard defense of tenure and shared governance isn’t good enough to address widespread skepticism about their public benefits.

Hannah Gold

In 2014 ShotSpotter launched its SecureCampus technology, offering the sound-monitoring hookup to campuses across the country. In September of that year, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) became the first school in the nation to install ShotSpotter, and on 17 June, Newark Memorial high school’s principal, Phil Morales, a former police officer, announced it had become the first high school to plant the technology throughout its campus. So far only these two schools have bought ShotSpotter, but it probably won’t stay that way for long.

“We’ve had a variety of colleges interested in the project, from all over the country – east and west, large and small,” Journey said. “The interest seems to be growing.”

Journey would not reveal how many schools are considering adopting ShotSpotter, but he did say: “We haven’t deployed it in any elementary schools at this point in time, but we certainly know that the technology is useful in all sorts of settings.”

The Economist:

FOR an hour or two on a foggy morning last December, some students at the University of Iowa (UI) mistook one of their professors, Serhat Tanyolacar, for a fan of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr Tanyolacar had placed a canvas effigy based on Klan robes, screen-printed with news cuttings about racial violence, on the Pentacrest, the university’s historic heart. The effigy had a camera in its hood to record public reactions.

The reaction among some black students was to fear for their safety, and that is not surprising. What is more of a puzzle—for anyone outside American academia, at least—is that students and UI bosses continued denouncing Mr Tanyolacar for threatening campus safety even after the misunderstanding was cleared up. In vain did the Turkish-born academic explain that he is a “social-political artist”, using Klan imagery to provoke debate about racism. Under pressure from angry students, university chiefs issued two separate apologies. The first expressed regret that students had been exposed to a “deeply offensive” artwork, adding that there is no room for “divisive” speech at UI. The second apologised for taking too long to remove a display which had “terrorised” black students and locals, thereby failing to ensure that all students, faculty, staff and visitors felt “respected and safe”. An unhappy Mr Tanyolacar feels abandoned by the university. He left Iowa earlier this month, when his visiting fellowship came to an end, and has suspended his teaching career.

Andrea Zani, via a kind reader:

Three days after the most recent Madison school year ended, Toki Middle School teacher Dani See was back on a bus. It wasn’t a yellow school bus, but a fancy coach bus, one of two that was taking 58 students and six staff chaperones on the school’s annual eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C.

For See, it was the 20th consecutive year she was making the trip as its coordinator and tour director. The six-day trip takes students on a whirlwind tour of the nation’s capital, with additional stops at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania and Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg. It reinforces the social studies, civics and history curricula of eighth grade in a way no classroom work can, See said.

“I tell the kids and parents that my D.C. trip safeguards our heritage and our future by providing a first-hand understanding of history,” she said. “(It) creates a ‘hands-on’ approach to learning.”

Andy Hawf:

That is not to say we haven’t achieved great things. We have expanded and protected parents’ right to choose their children’s schools through a citywide unified enrollment system. We have created a city in which independent charter schools and charter management organizations are enthusiastically and successfully serving a population much more at risk than that of the traditional school district. And while people in cities like New York and Washington, D.C. argue over whether charter schools should “backfill,” our charter schools are already serving all students, accepting them year-round, and creating innovative programs for students with significant disabilities.

So, what does this mean? And what does it mean for the next 10 years?

The Economist:

WHEN offices handle public money, said Aristotle, “there must of necessity be another office that examines and audits them.” Today’s equivalent is the “Supreme Audit Institution”, and 192 countries have one. These beancounters-cum-watchdogs check on behalf of legislatures and the public that their governments spend money cleanly and sensibly—and hold them to account when they do not. Though public, they are (or at least are supposed to be) independent of government.

In “The Art of Audit”, Roel Janssen, a veteran Dutch journalist, tells their story through conversations with former top auditors from eight countries. Number-crunching may be number-crunching, but their experiences, and the outfits they run, differ enormously.

America’s 94-year-old Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a bulky, sophisticated machine employing 3,000 people that holds the government’s feet to the fire on behalf of Congress. David Walker’s main achievement, as its head from 1998 to 2008, was to raise the alarm about America’s exploding federal debt. Running Iraq’s audit board from 2004 to 2014, Abdulbasit Turki Saeed worried more about being blown up himself. His predecessor was killed in the job, as were some people on Mr Turki’s team; he had a lucky escape when he discovered a bomb under his car.

Related: Spending issues on Madison’s last maintenance referendum lead to calls for a maibtenance audit.

Michael Moynihan:

Boring bien pensant opinion in Europe has long maintained that low-brow American culture — all the greasy fast food, oafish Hollywood shoot ‘em up films (often starring a muscle-bound Austrian, Belgian, or Swede), and schlock television — has done incalculable damage to highbrow European culture. And it has happened with the assent of the average European, who happily scarfs down a McRib sandwich, feet swaddled in Air Jordans, while queuing for the latest “Transformers” film.

But there is a more pernicious American cultural invasion, as irritatingly destructive as the North American gray squirrel and, unlike the Hollywood blockbuster, wholly immune from free market pressures. It was noticed in 1994 by a reporter for Reuters, who gravely reported that the scourge of political correctness, “an American import regarded by many Britons with the same distaste as an unpleasant virus, finally seems to be infecting British society.” First it poisons the local universities, then within a generation wends its way into the broader culture, wreaking havoc on the native intellectual ecosystem. It’s the most odious, implacable, and least remarked upon manifestation of American cultural imperialism.

Tom Coburn:

Yet despite their numbers, none of them is addressing in a meaningful way the greatest threat to our republic: our gigantic and rapidly growing national debt. America’s cumulative borrowing is rapidly approaching $20 trillion, while the federal government’s unfunded liabilities (future expenditures minus future tax revenue) now exceed a whopping $127 trillion — better than $1.1 million per taxpayer.

That’s not merely unsustainable; it’s suicidal.

Following a similarly risky path, Greece has now defaulted on its obligations, sending a shock wave through financial markets around the world. This was a crisis that could have been avoided through sound fiscal policy, but the Greek government has for years lacked the political will to do what it takes to secure that nation’s financial health. The nightly news showcases the unfolding Greek tragedy as though it were another TV reality show. A country on the verge of collapse, full steam ahead on a similar trajectory as the American economy — and journalists are largely silent.