Vimal Patel:

Do American universities produce too many Ph.D.s?

It’s a decades-old question that has intensified in recent years as worries about a stagnant academic-job market, record graduate-student debt, and the often-tough working conditions for doctoral students have grown. The situation has led some university administrators and students to call for a reduction in the number of Ph.D.s, especially in the arts and humanities, where those problems seem most acute.

New data show that such efforts may be having an effect.

First-time doctoral enrollment in history, English, and other arts-and-humanities disciplines fell 0.5 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to a report published on Thursday by the Council of Graduate Schools and based on a survey of 636 universities. The small decline caps a steady downward trend in enrollment from 2009 to 2014, when it fell an average of 1 percent a year.

James Sherk:

The union movement has changed considerably since American workers began observing Labor Day more than a century ago. Unions in the 1880s consisted of private-sector workers voluntarily banding together to fix horrendous working conditions. This is what most Americans envision when they think about unions: workers on the assembly line, or on a construction site, bargaining for safety or higher wages.

But half of today’s union movement works in government-sector jobs. A movement formed to defend blue-collar laborers now fights primarily to help white-collar workers expand government.

These transformations have been underway for the past half century. The problems that initially attracted members to unions vanished a long time ago. Federal law, for example, prohibits child labor and requires safe working conditions. Workers comp programs provide for those injured on the job. The forty-hour workweek has been standard since before any employees today started working.
As unions scored these protections, employee interest in unionizing waned. It has been many years since unions organized more new workers than they lost to unionized firms going out of business. In the 1950s, one out of every three workers belonged to a union. Today less than 7 percent of private-sector workers do.

Lucy Kellaway:

Last week online readers of the FT, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were accosted by this question in a big white banner advertisement paid for by UBS. As I glanced at it two further questions occurred to me: a) what business is that of a bank? and b) what about mothers?

“For some of life’s questions you are not alone. Together we can find an answer” the advertisement went on.

So I clicked through, and it turns out that the bank has found an answer already. The trick to being a good father is to hand over your money to UBS. “We can . . . help you plan for the future, and provide the life you want for your loved ones.”

This raises a further question: whether chutzpah and disingenuity work as a marketing strategy. I pondered this for a bit, but then lost interest and returned to the FT website. There the question was again. Am I a good father?

And am I a good mother?

It might seem odd given that I’ve had 24 years in which to consider the matter, but until now I have avoided asking myself this question. That is partly because of the pointless guilt that comes with it, but it’s also because I have four children, who have needed very different things from me at different times. Some of those things, like fish fingers and early bedtimes, have been easy to provide. Others have been much harder. Sometimes things go to plan. More often they don’t.

PDK/Gallup Poll:

• A majority of Americans don’t support tenure for teachers: 59% of all Americans and 54% of public school parents oppose tenure. However, responses from black Americans differ: More blacks (47%) support rather than oppose tenure (32%). Republicans are less likely than Democrats to favor teacher tenure (15% versus 35%, respectively).

• 62% of public school parents said they trust and have confidence in the nation’s teachers. Republicans, however, are evenly split on the question, with 42% saying they do trust and have confidence in teachers, and 43% saying they do not.

• About half of U.S. adults said high-achieving high school students should be recruited to become teachers. But two in 10 Americans said they didn’t know what they believed on that question.

• About three-quarters of Americans said teachers should be required to pass board certifications in addition to earning a degree, a process that would be similar to professions like medicine and law.

• Teacher salaries in their community are too low, according to a majority of Americans. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to think these teacher salaries are too low (44% compared with 72%). No group said teacher salaries are too high.

McKenzie Wark:

Maybe we could think of it as a sort of meta- or hyper-avant-garde, that wanted not just a new way of communicating in a media but new kinds of media themselves. Kay and Nelson in particular wanted to give the possibility of creating new information structures to the user. For example, consider Richard Shoup’s, Superpaint, coded at Parc in 1973. Part of what it does is simulate real-world painting techniques. But it also added techniques that go beyond simulation, including copying, layering, scaling and grabbing frames from video. Its ‘paintbrush’ tool could behave in ways a paintbrush could not.

Ben Collins:

Some would sign up for his class only to see if it was easy, then bail after the first session if it wasn’t. But only Howley thought to counter this quiet menace with something that could stop it: a cat-eating space alien who was expelled from Earth to face his inevitable death in 1990.

The assistant classics professor stuck a command for his students to send him a picture of Alf—the ’80s sitcom star and alien from the planet Melmac—into the middle of his syllabus to see if anybody noticed.

From the number of Alf images he received, he figured he’d be able to find out early on if he’d have enough students to keep the class engaged, or even to keep it going. And maybe, he thought, he’d teach them something along the way.

One Oakland United:

Common Enrollment came up in a recent school board meeting in Oakland, the school district I work in. My job is Community Engagement and as such I work to listen to how the community is receiving information. Well, this conversation around Common Enrollment led to a conversation accusing the process of being a tool for charter schools. Once the work ‘charter’ is evoked, it becomes a new conversation. The term is so charged, so visceral.

To put it simply, common enrollment is an enrollment system that would make the process for finding and selecting schools easier by having parents fill out one ‘common’ form that includes both traditional public schools and charters.

Listen, I’m not pro or anti-charter, I’m pro-child. I don’t care what the delivery system is as long as poor Black kids are being educated. Period. So with that thought, I believe parents should have the access and ability to choose the school that they feel is best for their child. It’s that simple for me. I see common enrollment as a tool for equity. It allows poor parents to have the same footing as someone with means.

Caroline Frederickson:

In early June, California labor regulators ruled that a driver for Uber, the app-based car service, was, in fact, an employee, not an independent contractor, and deserved back pay. The decision made national news, with experts predicting a coming flood of lawsuits. Two weeks later, FedEx agreed to a $288 million settlement after a federal appeals court ruled that the company had shortchanged 2,300 California delivery drivers on pay and benefits by improperly labeling them as independent contractors. The next month, the company lost another case in a federal appeals court over misclassifying 500 delivery drivers in Kansas. Meanwhile, since January, trucking firms operating out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have lost two major court battles with drivers who claim that they, too, have been robbed of wages by being misclassified as independent contractors.

Michelle G.:

There have been hundreds of equally alarming studies regarding stereotype threat and of similar identity-related conditions that impair performance. I don’t think we have time to recount every one in detail, but I’ll leave you with some more interesting findings. Regarding women in math: research at Indiana University found that females’ performance decreases significantly after simply watching a video showing “dominant” male behavior, and at Harvard they found that Asian-American women perform better or worse on math assessments depending on which identity is highlighted to them. A 2005 study showed that girls score much lower than boys on an identical test when it was described as a “math test,” but slightly (though non-significantly) better than them when it’s a “problem solving” test. Another study suggested that female AP Calculus test-takers would benefit if the demographic bubble-filling were postponed until after the exam.

Similar findings have been shown regarding racial identities: for example, asking black students to indicate their race before a test both significantly increases their anxiety and lowers their test scores. Black students’ performance under a “diagnostic” condition is improved when the test administrator is black as opposed to white (that 2.9% black MIT faculty tho) and black participants taking what was actually an IQ test scored better when the same questions were presented as a test of “hand-eye coordination.” Unsurprisingly, the same stereotype threat effects that were initially found for black test-takers were also found to apply to Latinos and students of low socioeconomic status.

Danny Feingold:

When California Governor Pat Brown helped create the modern University of California system in the early 1960s, he envisioned many things: a world-class structure of higher education, universal access to students from every background, a gateway to middle-class careers, cutting-edge research centers. All of that has come to pass, making UC an enduring part of Brown’s legacy.

One thing Brown did not foresee, however, was UC becoming embroiled in an emblematic fight over economic inequality, with critics charging that one of the nation’s most prestigious public institutions is perpetuating poverty.

The controversy over UC’s use of thousands of contract workers who earn low wages with few, if any, benefits has taken center stage in Sacramento, where legislation that would end such practices is expected to clear the Assembly floor this week. The fate of Senate Bill 376, sponsored by state Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), likely will rest with Pat Brown’s son, current California Governor Jerry Brown, who has yet to indicate whether he would sign or veto the legislation. The bill would require UC contractors to meet the same wage and benefit standards as the university for comparable labor — what backers call “equal pay for equal work.”

Jack Grove:

Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Japan are to close after universities were ordered to “serve areas that better meet society’s needs”.

Of the 60 national universities that offer courses in these disciplines, 26 have confirmed that they will either close or scale back their relevant faculties at the behest of Japan’s government.

It follows a letter from education minister Hakuban Shimomura sent to all of Japan’s 86 national universities, which called on them to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] organisations or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs”.

The ministerial decree has been denounced by one university president as “anti-intellectual”, while the universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, regarded as the country’s most prestigious, have said that they will not comply with the request.

John Biggs:

In a move that is sure to end well for the Department Of Homeland Security and the police in Lebanon, New Hampshire, officials have asked a New Hampshire public library to shut down its TOR node to prevent terrorism and other mean, nasty things.

The library was the first in the country to run a secure TOR exit node – essentially a system that allows users to web surf anonymously from anywhere in the world – and the DHS and local police quickly approached library officials after launch. The Lebanon Public Libraries are part of the Library Freedom Project, an effort to add more exit nodes in existing libraries. This would help web users desiring to remain anonymous on the Internet and ensures that folks browsing from their homes can’t be spied upon by touchy regimes. Wrote Vice:

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

By his own lghts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”

ACTA:

According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years.

The survey coincides with the upcoming commemoration of Constitution Day, September 17. Nearly a decade ago, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) spearheaded the designation of the day, mandating that all publicly funded educational institutions provide educational programming to improve knowledge of the Constitution. Just this year, higher education leaders called on Congress to eliminate the Constitution Day educational requirement as undue interference in a university’s autonomy.

Eric Westervelt:

America, by far, has the highest incarceration rate among developed nations. The rate of imprisonment in the U.S. has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years, fueled by “three strikes” and mandatory-minimum sentencing laws.

Studies show that prisoners who get access to education behind bars are far less likely to return to prison, are are more likely to land a job once they’re released.

But few of America’s crowded prisons have higher education programs that reach inmates face-to-face.

One exception is San Quentin State Prison on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay in Marin County, Calif. While the prison has a nasty national reputation, the fact is that some inmates want to get transferred to San Quentin to access its university, with volunteer teachers from top schools.

Thomas Donlan:

In a mythical country church a long time ago, the minister preached a sermon every year on the subject of coeducation. He was horrified, because, “They take decent boys and girls and make them matriculate together. They even have to use the same curriculum.”

Nowadays matriculation is far more shocking than the fictional minister could have imagined, and not just because coeducation with all of its benefits is nearly universal. Starting college signals the beginning of four years of wretchedly excessive tuition payments for many parents and a decade or more of burdensome loan payments for many students.

Published prices for tuition at private, four-year, nonprofit colleges and universities have more than tripled in real terms, adjusted for inflation, in the past 40 years. The College Board’s annual report on “Trends in Higher Education” says the sticker prices at government-supported four-year colleges have risen almost as fast.

Compare the inflation-adjusted price of room and board—the other main product produced at institutions of higher education. It hasn’t quite doubled in the same period. That doubling would be outrageous if it were not overshadowed by the price of tuition.

Jennifer Medina:

advertising campaign that looks as if it came from Apple’s marketing department, the initiative is meant to create high schools with new approaches to education. In essence, Ms. Powell Jobs and her team of high-profile educators and designers hope they can crowd-source a solution to a problem that has flummoxed policy makers for decades.

“The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago,” Ms. Powell Jobs said in an interview here Friday. “Things are not working the way we want it to be working. We’ve seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we’re saying, ‘Start from scratch.’ ”

Called XQ: The Super School Project, the campaign is meant to inspire teams of educators and students, as well as leaders from other sectors, to come up with new plans for high schools. Over the next several months, the teams will submit plans that could include efforts like altering school schedules, curriculums and technologies. By fall next year, Ms. Powell Jobs said, a team of judges will pick five to 10 of the best ideas to finance.

Related: Madison’s “High School Redesign” and “Small Learning Community” adventures.

Will Fitzhugh:

Some people say that when offenses are old enough, they should be allowed to lie undisturbed, and while the Crow may feel that way about the Sioux, and the Croatians about the Magyars, and the Rus about the Huns, and the Parthians about the Romans, we Saxons should never forget what the Normans did to our people.

Eurocentric history teachers portray the Battle of Hastings as a great victory for civilization in 1066, but they seldom note that while the Norman invaders had a nice dinner with their wives and families before their easy crossing of the Channel, we Saxons had to fight a bloody battle with the Danes in York and then had to march all the way down to Hastings, just arriving in time to form a battle array of our Carls, having had no sleep and almost nothing to eat. This clearly discriminatory ethnic imbalance in the battle conditions is rarely emphasized in the history books.

As might have been predicted, after an exhausting day of battle, the Normans “conquered,” to use that odious expression. And that was just the beginning of our oppression. The Normans immediately took over the administration, the courts, the army, the navy, and all the good jobs. The glass ceiling for Saxons was about 100 feet thick. In every walk of life Saxons were treated like second-class citizens. Even to hear the word “Saxon” pronounced in the Medieval French of the invaders did a number on our self-esteem.

Of course, some argued we should go along to get along, and learn the Continental ways of our oppressors. And most of us did, eventually. It is very hard to find anyone now, just 949 years later, who identifies herself primarily as a Saxon. The Celtics and the Huns are remembered, as are the Apaches and the Aryans, but who ever thinks about the plight of the Saxons, demoralized and defeated so long ago?

Some argue that it is too late to do anything about it, that the Normans are too deeply entrenched and too oblivious to their guilt to be affected by anything we Saxons might say or do.

Nevertheless, the true leaders of the Saxon community have asserted that it is never too late to address a grievance, thus: “Dear Grievance, think of all the good you can now do for us, even though we have neglected to press your claims for so long?”

It may be impracticable to try to arrest all the Norman descendants and deport them back to France, or better, back to Norway, but it is not too late to identify them and expose them publicly. The Domesday Book gives a place to start, and many Normans have foolishly taken pride in tracing their own ancestry back to the Battle of Hastings itself.

These people can be contacted and presented with our claims for restitution. They will try to defend themselves of course. They will cite the thousands of historical examples of peoples who have been overrun and enslaved by other people, and over the due course of some centuries, have gone about the daily business of making something of their own lives anyway.

Nevertheless, if we approach it right and time it well, it is not too much to hope that we might press for an apology for the intolerable oppression of the Saxon people from 1066 to the present, and once we have that apology in hand, we can push on to the real practical business of significant cash compensation. It is difficult to estimate how many Norman descendants are now in positions of power and wealth, but it seems likely that many CEOs, Senators, Consultants, Movie Stars and others have more than a trace of Norman blood and can be shown their obligations to Saxon survivors.

In spite of the example history has put before us of the horrific battles among the Ruthenians, Greeks, Slovenians, Montenegrans, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Albanians, Serbians, Macedonians, Turks, Roumanians, Croatians, and others in the Balkans during their ethnic battles of the 20th century, which might have suggested to us that we follow John Kennedy’s advice to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” now is Saxon time, while identity politics is still the name of the blame game in the United States. We must press on, against the claims of Navajos, Ukrainians, Cambodians, Iroquois, Jamaicans, Arabs, Cubans, Hungarians, Comanche, and other Americans, lest we be left out in the spoils of U.S. balkanization…

[Next—Dravidian Reparations from the Aryans]

Will Fitzhugh:

The College Board and Atlantic Magazine, recently joined their forces to lower standards for academic expository writing in the English-speaking world. Although their efforts did not match in scope and daring those of groups like InBloom, Amplify, and others, they persuaded 3,000 secondary students to meet their contest guidelines. They asked for papers of less than 2,000 words, on a single document, and published the “winner,” a piece from a student in New Zealand on the benefits of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech for better relations with the Maori.

High School students interested in being published in The Concord Review—the only journal in the world for the history papers of secondary students—must understand that their serious academic history research papers could not meet the guidelines for The College Board and Atlantic Magazine. Essays in the Fall 2015 issue, for example, (#106), averaged 7,400 words in length, with endnotes and bibliography, not on one speech, but on dozens of sources—books, articles, and others. Their topics included the Tape v. Hurley case in California, Abraham Lincoln’s changing attitudes about Christianity, Margaret Sanger’s fights with feminist groups of her day, Augustus’ imperial cult in Rome, varying identities among the Manchus in the Qing Dynasty, the records of women in combat in ancient Greece and China, relations among Nietzsche, Wagner and Mahler, the influence of Friedrich Hegel, Footbinding in China, the denial about AIDS in the South African government, and the development of the Socialist Parties in France.

Clearly, they were not limited to a single document or prevented from writing a paper longer than 2,000 words, as The College Board and Atlantic Magazine demanded for their submissions. Some years ago one of The Concord Review’s authors wrote:

I am extremely honored in having my paper on Chinese Communism published in the The Concord Review. I truly thank you for providing the wonderful opportunity and motivation for students like me passionately to pursue research and history.

I wrote this paper independently, during my own time out of school. My motives for doing so were both academic and personal. Although history has always been my favorite subject, I had never written a paper with this extensive research before. After reading the high quality of essays in The Concord Review, I was very inspired to try to write one myself. I thought it was a significant opportunity to challenge and expand my academic horizons. Thus during the summer before my Senior year, I began doing the research for my own paper.

Choosing the topic of Chinese Communism was not difficult. As I briefly mentioned in my biographical information, my own Chinese heritage greatly influenced me to study this subject. My own family past has been touched by the often scarring effects of Communism. For instance, my paternal great-grandmother—the wife of a landlord—was a victim of the Communists’ “authorized” land redistribution. Like many members of China’s property classes, she and my grandmother were thrown off their land and survived the next few years by begging on the streets. From the chaotic Cultural Revolution to the outrageous Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, I have often been told firsthand of the devastating effects of Communism. From all of these background experiences, a singular and upsetting question emerged in my mind: if Communism has had so many damaging effects on the Chinese people, why and how did it succeed in taking over the country in the first place? As in many cases, only the past provided the answers. It was the determination to find them that empowered me to write this paper.

Furthermore, by choosing a topic so intimate to my own family background, I was able to experience history on a new and more exciting level. Exploring places and events which once had involved my own ancestors gave history an almost magical sense of life and vivacity. All in all, writing this paper has definitely been a rewarding experience in every way. By exploring China during the 1930s and 1940s, I am now better able to understand and bond with my grandparents (who have been constantly impressed—and a bit surprised—that their American granddaughter can tell them the exact route of the Long March).

Next year, I will be attending Columbia University as a John Jay National Scholar—an honor given to incoming students who demonstrate a variety of achievements and independence in thinking. I plan to major in Economics-Political Science and/or East Asian Studies. Given Columbia’s excellent humanities departments, I cannot imagine a better choice for me. Needless to say, I am very excited about starting my college career, one that will no doubt be happily filled with many history classes and continued research.

Fortunately, this young lady was better prepared for college because she did not have to shrink her research and her academic expository writing in history to the dumbed-down requirements of The College Board and Atlantic Magazine. Nevertheless, by asking for and publishing the short paper they made their “winner,” these two organizations have only limited the academic horizons of the many secondary students they have been able to reach with their “contest.” Other students have been able to read, see, or hear of The Concord Review, and they know there is a place with the high academic standards that more than 1,000 of their peers from 41 countries have met since 1987, and quite a few of them still decide that they would like to meet those standards for themselves.

Will Fitzhugh
fitzhugh@tcr.org
www.tcr.org

Annie Waldman and Sisi Wei:

A ProPublica analysis of newly available federal data shows that some of the nation’s wealthiest colleges are leaving their poorest students with plenty of debt.

New York University’s commencement ceremony in 2012. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty)
New York University is among the country’s wealthiest schools. Backed by its $3.5 billion endowment, the school has built campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, invested billions in SoHo real estate, and given its star faculty loans to buy summer homes.

But the university does less than many other schools when it comes to one thing: helping its poor students.

Debt By Degrees

Use our interactive database to search new federal data on almost 7,000 schools in the U.S. to see how well they support their poorest students financially. Explore the app.

(Sisi Wei and Annie Waldman, ProPublica)
A ProPublica analysis based on new data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that students from low-income families graduate from NYU saddled with huge federal loans. The school’s Pell Grant recipients – students from families that make less than $30,000 a year – owe an average of $23,250 in federal loans after graduation.

That’s more federal loan debt than low-income students take on at for-profit giant University of Phoenix, though NYU graduates have higher earnings and default less on their debt.

NYU is not the only university with a billion-dollar endowment to leave its poorest students with heavy debt loads. More than a quarter of the nation’s 60 wealthiest universities leave their low-income students owing an average of more than $20,000 in federal loans.

At the University of Southern California, which has a $4.6 billion endowment, low-income students graduate with slightly more debt than NYU’s graduates: $23,375. At Boston University ($1.5 billion endowment), it’s $27,000, and at Wake Forest University ($1.1 billion endowment) low-income students graduate with $29,150 in debt.

More from Michael Shear.

Debt by degrees.

Jordan Weissman:

“The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me. It’s a quip that, for obvious reasons, has become pretty popular in recent years. In 2014, the university’s legendary endowment, overseen by a team of in-house experts and spread across a mind-bending array of investments that range from stocks and bonds to California wine vineyards, hit $36.4 billion. “They’re just collecting tons, and tons, and tons of money,” says Schneider, a former Department of Education official who is currently a fellow at the American Institutes for Research.

Of course, normal hedge funds have to pay taxes on their earnings. Because it’s a nonprofit, Harvard doesn’t. And since bestowing tax exemptions is the same as spending cash from the government’s perspective (budgeteers call them “tax expenditures” for a reason), that means the American public effectively subsidizes Harvard’s moneymaking engine. The same goes for Stanford (endowment: $21.4 billion), Princeton (endowment: $21 billion), Yale (endowment $23.9 billion), and the country’s other elite institutions of higher education.

Alan Borsuk:

I’ve been involved in a lot of discussion in the last three years about whether there should be more cooperation between the Chicago and Milwaukee areas in spurring economic development. There’s a lot to be said for that.

But I can tell you two areas where Chicago and Milwaukee stick to their own turf in ways that I doubt will ever change.

One is the Packers vs. the Bears. But on the weekend of the renewal of this great rivalry, we’ll leave commentary on football to others.

The other is schools. You ever heard of Chicago and Milwaukee people talking to each other about schools? My answer: Not never, but close.

That’s understandable. Schools are a classic local and state matter, so people are focused on their own turf.

But Chicago and Milwaukee face such similar issues — big systems facing too much poverty and too little educational success.

Are there perhaps things people in each place could learn from the other? I’d say yes. To support that, let me offer a glimpse of the Chicago situation and some thoughts on what each metropolis could learn from the other.

“They’re in a world of hurt” — that’s how one person put it when I asked about the current state of Chicago Public Schools.

Ogechi Emechebe:

Rather than the typical one-on-one conferences where parents meet with teachers for 15 minutes, schools may follow the model of the Academic Parent Teacher Teams (APTT).

APTT replaces standard parent-teacher conferences with three group meetings during the academic year, where teachers meet with parents all at once in the classroom. The meetings typically take place once during the fall, winter and spring.

During the sessions, parents are provided with information on their child’s performance. Teachers then explain how how to interpret the data based on overall classroom performance, state standards and school benchmarks. Parents and teachers work together to set goals for the students individually and as a class.

In the Madison School District, first grade classrooms at Thoreau Elementary school were first to pilot the new program. Kindergarten and second grade classrooms will also hold parent-teacher team meetings this academic school year.

Nichelle Nichols, family, youth and community engagement director, said the new model will be used at several more schools this year.

How might this change affect Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results?

Keyon Vafa, Christian Haigh, Alvin Leung, Noah Yonack:

Prices for online tutoring services from The Princeton Review differ based on the consumer’s geographical location in the United States. It is understandable that tutoring companies have different prices across different geographic locations for in-person tutoring, as tutoring quality and labor costs can differ across geographical regions. Online tutoring, however, should theoretically be priced consistently because it draws from the same group of tutors, regardless of the geographic location of the consumer.

Results summary: The Princeton Review website gives a price for its SAT Private Level 24-hr Online Tutoring Package based on the 5-digit ZIP (or postal code) in the United States entered. After capturing the prices given for each of 32,989 5-digit ZIP codes in the United States, we found 3 different prices for the same online tutoring package: $2,760 or $115 per hour (in 24,492 ZIPs or 74.2 percent of the ZIP codes), $3,000 or $125 per hour (in 5,971 ZIPs or 18.1 percent) and $3,240 or $135 per hour (in 2,526 ZIPs or 7.66 percent). ZIP codes receiving the higher prices were in the Northeast and parts of New York. Bands of the middle prices appeared in parts of California, Texas, and the Midwest. Consumers who enter almost any ZIP code outside these areas will receive the lowest price.

Angela Hanscom:

I still recall the days of preschool for my oldest daughter. I remember wanting to desperately enrich her life in any way possible – to give her an edge before she even got to formal schooling. I put her in a preschool that was academic in nature – the focus on pre-reading, writing, and math skills. At home, I bought her special puzzles, set up organized play dates with children her age, read to her every night, signed her up for music lessons, put her in dance, and drove her to local museums. My friends and I even did “enrichment classes” with our kids to practice sorting, coloring, counting, numbers, letters, and yes….even to practice sitting! We thought this would help prepare them for kindergarten.

[Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today]

Like many other American parents, I had an obsession: academic success for my child. Only, I was going about it completely wrong. Yes, my daughter would later go on to test above average with her academic skills, but she was missing important life skills. Skills that should have been in place and nurtured during the preschool years. My wake-up call was when the preschool teacher came up to me and said, “Your daughter is doing well academically. In fact, I’d say she exceeds expectations in these areas. But she is having trouble with basic social skills like sharing and taking turns.” Not only that, but my daughter was also having trouble controlling her emotions, developed anxiety and sensory issues, and had trouble simply playing by herself!

Anne Boyer:

1. only ask the questions to which you really need answers

2. demonstrate uncertainty

3. reconstruct for your students your own previous errors of thought and elucidate to your students what factors lead to a changed mind

4. do not let the terms with which you understand the world get in the way of understanding it

5. give up any desire to be the smartest person in the room

6. remember that students have bodies and that bodies require movement, sustenance, rest, and relief

7. leave an inheritance of dialectic

8. preserve and sustain whatever delusions you’ve found necessary to behave in good faith

Felix Salmon:

The best piece of in-depth investigative reporting you’re likely to read this week comes not from any journalist, but rather from the office of Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general. His 55-page report into what went wrong at Cooper Union should be required, and sobering, reading for anybody who cares about higher education in America.

The story here is narrowly about Cooper Union, and the way in which two presidents – George Campbell first, then Jamshed Bharucha – managed to bring a great institution to its knees, destroying its most precious and unique principle. More broadly, the report is an indictment of otiose trustees, egotistical technocrats, and a culture where university administrators gone wild can effectively railroad all stakeholders, including students, faculty, alumni, and even the attorney general’s office.

There’s a hint of good news, too, primarily in the fact that the New York authorities were willing and able to conduct a year-long investigation into Cooper Union. They write:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

An Uberized education is when –as in antiquity — one goes to a specific teacher to get lectures, bypassing the university. The students and the teachers are thus matched. If a piece of paper is necessary, it would be given by *that* teacher, or a group of teachers. It is not too different from the decentralized apprentice model.

This already works well for executive “education”. I give short workshops in my specialty of applied probability (I have given a few with PW, YBY and RD, though only lasting 1-2 days), limited to professionals. An Uberization would consist in making longer workshops, say of 2-3 week duration, after which the attendees would be getting a piece of paper of sorts.

David Auerbach:

Te best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, a prodigious yet modest and approachable figure visiting from Oxford, changed my mind. In large part because of Pears’ instruction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been directly relevant to my thinking about computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. When other scholars were thinking that language and thought could be reduced to a universal, logical language, Wittgenstein turned the matter to practical questions and raised incredibly inconvenient questions that gained traction in artificial intelligence in the 1970s, 40 years after he was working on them.

Ottoman Detective:

In 1910 the United States and the Ottoman Empire began an unprecedented era of friendship. The Ottomans had undergone some major changes in the preceding years. A party of reformers calling themselves the Young Turks had swept into power, proclaimed a new constitution and deposed of the autocratic Sultan Abdulhamid II, and instituted a new era of government. Many Americans saw new opportunity to extend ties. Richard Gottheil, the chair of the Semitic Languages department at Columbia, had just spent a year in the Ottoman Empire, primarily in Palestine. By his account, only Germany seemed to see the potential in the market there and that the Americans had a large opportunity. Speaking to a group of Columbia students in September of 1910 he noted that the Young Turks were removing barriers to Jewish immigration to Palestine and setting up new irrigation system. A couple of months later at a round table at Teachers College on the same issue he claimed that reasons for all these positive signs could be traced to three sources: the new generation of literati, the role of American Colleges, especially Robert College in Istanbul, and the clear influence of women. Though we know in hindsight that the Ottoman Empire would only last another decade, for many at that time there was no end in sight. Many had noted its recent fall in fortunes, with massive loss of territory in the Balkans, but it had been around for 800 years and it seemed to be newly reinvigorated.

John Higgins:

After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes.

The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

Eight new charter schools are opening in Washington this fall, in addition to one that opened in Seattle last year.

It was not immediately known what would happen with the schools that are already running. The parties have 20 days to ask the court for reconsideration before the ruling becomes final.

Related: WEAC, $1.57 million for four senators.

Student Activism:

This afternoon at two o’clock the New York State Attorney General will announce the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Committee to Save Cooper Union, a group of activist students, faculty, and alumni against the Cooper Union trustees. The settlement will impose various reforms to Cooper Union governance, establish an independent financial monitor for the college, and begin the slow, difficult process of re-establishing Cooper Union as a free, healthy institution.

Today’s settlement is a huge victory for those who have fought to preserve the mission that Cooper Union has advanced since its founding a century and a half ago and a final repudiation of the failed administration whose financial mismanagement, fomenting of division, and punitive governance laid Cooper low.

The signs of rebirth at Cooper have been visible for months. Five of the most recalcitrant trustees resigned (in an extraordinary fit of pique) in June, and widely-despised president Jamshed Bharucha quit the following day. Other resignations and retirements followed, as it became clear that the Attorney General’s investigation of Cooper Union had real teeth.

There’s a tremendous amount to unpack here, and I’ll be writing much more in the coming days. In particular, the release of the full text of the settlement this afternoon will answer a lot of questions (and likely raise many others). In the meantime, though, a few highlights:

Jim Puzzanghera:

Students around the country — and often their parents — have racked up so much college debt since the recession that it now threatens the nation’s economic growth.

The debt weighs down millions of Americans who might otherwise buy homes or start businesses. And the financial horror stories of debt-saddled students, combined with continued increases in tuition, could deter others from attending college and could produce a less-educated workforce.

“The impact on future [economic] growth could be quite significant,” said Cristian deRitis, who analyzes consumer credit economics for Moody’s Analytics.

The amount of outstanding student loans has skyrocketed 76% to almost $1.2 trillion since 2009 as college costs have shot up and graduates have had difficulty finding good-paying jobs.

Medievalists:

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

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

Nimisha Jaiswal:

Nearly 500,000 people wrote “the mother of all written exams in India” for a chance to get a government job. Only 1,100 will succeed

Dan Dempsey:

A study, entitled “The Mirage,” was based on surveys of 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders, along with interviews with more than 100 staff involved in teacher development. The surveys and interviews were conducted in three large school districts and a mid-sized charter school network.

PD costs were found to average $18,000 per student per year. Based on findings, it is estimated that the 50 largest U.S. school districts alone spend about $8 billion annually on teacher development, far more than was previously thought.

Given the large increase in instructional time, it is extremely hard to believe that the new fidelity of implementation to the new K-5 Everyday Math textbook series and associated professional development accompanying the adoption were of any value.

There was NO … observable, measurable progress toward an ambitious standard for teaching and student learning due to this fall 2007 adoption of EDM materials and accompanying professional development.

It is way past time to REEVALUATE existing professional learning supports and programs.

It would also be a good idea to use relevant data in the selection of textbooks and materials.

Charles Chieppo: Teaching Teachers: Big Costs, Little Payoff:

Given that it’s become a truism that teacher quality impacts student learning more than any other variable within the four walls of a school, the results of a new study of teachers’ professional development programs are particularly troubling. There are two main takeaways from the report by TNTP, a nonprofit formerly known as The New Teacher Project: Taxpayers invest a lot more resources in teacher development programs than previously thought, and there is no link between these programs and improved classroom performance.

That second finding, in particular, will have a positive impact if it prompts school districts to clearly define what teacher effectiveness looks like and to measure professional development programs in terms of how they help teachers get closer to that goal.

The study, entitled “The Mirage,” was based on surveys of 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders, along with interviews with more than 100 staff involved in teacher development. The surveys and interviews were conducted in three large school districts and a mid-sized charter school network.

Natalia Antelava:

Georgia’s liberal politicians say only alignment with Europe and US will allow Georgia to overcome its post-Soviet past and survive as an independent nation. But in the way of Georgia’s pro-Western course stands its Orthodox neighbour Russia and, increasingly, the country’s own Orthodox Church. Natalia Antelava visits her old school in Tbilisi to see how the country’s most conservative, anti-Western institution is influencing the next generation.

Megan Erickson:

Today, nearly half of American children born to parents with low incomes grow into adults with low incomes, and 40 percent of children born to wealthy parents become high-income adults. In the United States, which has based much of its social safety net on educational mobility, the ability to do better than one’s parents by completing more years of schooling did indeed rise between 1947 and 1977, but it has decreased sharply since.

Correlation of educational attainment between parents and children is now higher in the United States than in European countries, particularly Nordic countries, where a tiny fraction of low-income children becomes low-income adults. As Richard Wilkinson, coauthor of The Spirit Level, has said, “If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.”

Mike Konczul:

Sometimes you hear something that sounds so much like common sense that you end up missing how it overturns everything you were actually thinking, and points in a far more interesting and disturbing direction. That’s how I’m feeling about the coverage of a recent paper on student loans and college tuition coming out of the New York Federal Reserve, “Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs,” by David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen Shen.

They find that “institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition,” or for every dollar in increased student loan availability colleges increased the sticker price of their tuition 65 cents. Crucially, they find that the effect is stronger for subsidized student loans than for Pell Grants. When they go further and control for additional variables, Pell Grants lose their significance in the study, while student loans become more important.

There’s been a lot of debate over this research, with Libby Nelson at Vox providing a strong summary. I want to talk about the theory of the paper. People have been covering this as a normal debate about whether subsidizing college leads to higher tuition, but this is a far different story. It actually overturns a lot of what we believe about higher education funding, and means that the conservative solution to higher education costs, going back to Milton Friedman, will send tuition skyrocketing. And it ends up providing more evidence of the importance of free higher education.

David Harris:

Catherine Candisky, via a kind reader:

While getting grilled in July about leaving online schools out of charter-school sponsor evaluations, David Hansen, the former Ohio Department of Education’s school-choice head, did not share a report critical of the online schools.

Three days later, Hansen resigned.

And in December, he directed staff to not talk publicly about another study showing Ohio students fared much worse at charter schools.

“No comment about it outside the department,” Hansen wrote in an email to staff members days before the report was released.

On Friday, several members of the Ohio Board of Education said they had never heard about the most recent report, commissioned by Hansen’s office, until told about it by The Dispatch.

Changing Universities:

Thus as education levels and technological advances have increased since 1970, the profits generated from these activities have not been shared with the average worker. The problem then is not a question of education or skills or even technology, the issue is how profits are distributed.

In an act of great ideological deception, business leaders and politicians have been able to turn our attention to higher education as the solution to wage stabnation because they do not want us to look at some of the real causes, like profit hording, de-unionization, financial speculation, executive pay, regressive taxation, and outsourcing. Cassidy points out that in place of dealing with these real economic issues, we are told that America has a fair meritocracy, and the key to economic advancement for individuals and the country as a whole is to produce more people with college degrees.

The myth of the meritocracy is an effective ideological tool because it tells us that if someone does not have a good job, it is their own fault. After all, we have a fair system of equal opportunity, which provides everyone the chance for social mobility. The reality of the situation is that our economic system is enhancing inequality and higher education is making things worse. Looking at the relation between family income and college attainment since 1970, we see that people in the top quartile income bracket who enter college have increased their degree attainment from 55% to 99%, while people from the bottom bracket have moved from 22% to 21% during the same forty-three-year period:

Corey Robin:

No one knows the power of literature better than the censor. That’s why he burns books: to fight fire with fire, to stop them from setting the world aflame. Or becomes an editor: Stalin, we now know, excised words from texts with about as much energy and attention as he excised men and women from the world. As Bertolt Brecht archly noted of the East German regime’s efforts to control what he wrote: “Where else in the world can you find a government that shows such interest and pays such attention to artists?”

This week, as I head back to the classroom amid controversy — from Columbia to Berkeley to Duke — over what college students will or will not read, I’m mindful of Brecht’s observation. Could it be that the men and women who most appreciate what we, professors of the humanities and social sciences, have to offer are the students who’ve been vilified as coddled and cosseted, demanding trigger warnings on syllabi or simply refusing to read the books we’ve assigned them because those books make them uncomfortable? Could it be that they, like the censor, are the ones who truly understand the power of the books we teach?

David Johnson:

The 9/11 attacks occurred the week I had to defend my dissertation in philosophy. I took my first tenure-track job (yes, such a thing existed back then) during the launch of our now fourteen-year-old “war on terror.” As I made my way in academia in the midst of George W. Bush’s presidency, my new colleagues and I would inevitably discuss the authoritarian and distorting turn of American public discourse. How could so many be so cowed and so misled into supporting such an obvious misadventure as the Iraq war? How could our leading institutions—and especially the media—fail so miserably to underline the immorality of torture and question the claims as to Saddam Hussein’s threat to national security? This dismal time raised the specter of propaganda, and posed the questions of how the false alibis of power could hold such sway in a liberal democracy and what could be done about it.

In 2004–2005, I was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan. By then, I had become so radicalized by the American political situation and so frustrated by the restrictive horizons of my research—my specialty was ancient Greek philosophy—that I felt I had to make a choice. On the one hand, I might continue on the academic track and try to speak out where I could. (Like many of my peers, I was an active extramural blogger.) On the other, I could leave the ivory tower behind and plunge into journalism.

Ed Kazarian :

It occurred to me, in the midst of a conversation where folks were marveling at the money being spent by a flagship state university on a marketing initiative, that it should, at this juncture,* be possible to formulate a very simple test for evaluating the wisdom of this and other university spending initiatives:

“How many part time lines could be made full time and / or how many adjunct lines could be made permanent with the money being spent on this**?”

Jennifer Reuf:

So unions protect the working conditions of teachers, which protects the learning environments for children. If you want decent learning conditions for students, protect decent working conditions for their teachers. It is no coincidence that there is a record shortage of teachers to staff Wisconsin’s famously excellent public schools this year.

A colleague once told me she really appreciated university students who hailed from Wisconsin public schools because they can think critically. The tide is turning, and informed Wisconsin citizens need to make sure it does not sweep Wisconsin children out to sea. Please examine the evidence. It is not too late. It is time to empower teachers by empowering unions.

Anonymous Academic:

A few months ago, an editor from an academic publisher got in touch to ask if I was interested in writing a book for them.

I’ve ignored these requests in the past. I know of too many colleagues who have responded to such invitations, only to see their books disappear on to a university library shelf in a distant corner of the world.

If someone tried to buy said book – I mean, like a real human being – they would have to pay the equivalent of a return ticket to a sunny destination or a month’s child benefit. These books start at around £60, but they can cost double that, or even more.

This time, however, I decided to play along.

So I got the editor on the phone and he asked if I had an idea for them. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Perhaps I could write a book about…” – and here I started piling up ugly-sounding buzzwords.

Open Culture:

Worth a quick mention: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost — the first three volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” He continues:

People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.

If you head over to this page, then look in the upper left, you will see links to three volumes (available in a free PDF format). My suggestion would be to look at the gallery of color illustrations for each book, links to which you’ll find below. The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. It was created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), and it features the world mapped in the shape of a heart. Pretty great.

Andrew Ross Sorkin:

In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T-shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching DVDs from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series. On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history.

Simon During:

Universities may be among the oldest of our institutions, but they have changed significantly during the millennium or so since they were established.

Roughly speaking, the history of the European university proceeds through four phases.

First, the medieval ecclesiastical-juridical phase in which, first in Italy and gradually across Europe, universities were granted and then claimed privileges from sovereign authority, often on the model of the guild. At this time, their primary purpose was to prepare students for careers in the law, medicine, and most of all the church.

Jenny Burman;

Like money that grows on trees, it seems like a child’s impossible dream: not to go to school today, next week, next season—to stay up late, play Minecraft, read comics, climb a tree, with permission to boot.

But for some children this is no fantasy. As the number of homeschooled children grows nationwide, so too does the number of “unschoolers,” families whose children follow no formal curriculum, unless the children themselves devise it. Instead of going to school, the kids plan their own day and largely do what they want. While they do sometimes take organized classes, it only happens when the child wants to. There are not a lot of statistics available for unschoolers—the U.S. Census counts them as homeschoolers—but anecdotal evidence suggests unschooling appears to be largely the purview of middle-class families with educated parents. “Research in unschooling remains in its infancy,” according to Kellie Rolstad and Kathleen Keeson, who wrote “Unschooling, Then and Now,” in a 2013 volume of The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning.

The Code Word:

EQUALITY
All teachers and students are equal. But teachers are more equal than students.

FREEDOM
Each of us is entitled to freedom of expression, as long as the expression has been approved in advance by the administration.

The article spoofed every category in the original Winston’s Way. I no longer have it, so I’ve paraphrased the above examples from memory, but I’m sure you get the general idea.

The other thing I did was create and print some forms that would facilitate the feature of my newsletter that I expected to be its crowning glory: Teacher Report Cards. We spit-balled a lot of silly ideas around the library table on that fateful afternoon, but the one that struck a chord with all of us–the one we all agreed would be the defining feature–was the teacher report cards. Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish. The teachers graded us, after all, wasn’t it only fair for us to return the favor?

State Senator Jennifer Shilling:

It’s clear that we need to take a close look at how student funding cuts and increasing poverty rates are affecting classroom learning. Instead of taking more resources away from Wisconsin children, we must work together to invest in local schools, reduce student hunger and improve student achievement.

For too long, Republicans have prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of funding for our schools and communities. In recent months, Gov. Walker’s presidential ambitions have overshadowed the real challenges facing families and distracted from our ability to find solutions to this growing crisis.

It is high time we focus on the important issues affecting Wisconsin families and local schools. Together, we can work to end childhood hunger in Wisconsin and provide all hardworking students the opportunity to succeed.

Related: recent Wisconsin K-12 budget comments.

Jennifer Shilling notes and links.

Doug Erickson:

Candidates still got scored this year, but on a newly developed set of core competencies that district officials say better match the skills that matter most for teaching in Madison. One of the new competencies is “data proficiency,” described as the ability to “use data beyond standardized assessments to diagnose student learning needs and differentiate instruction in the classroom.”

In a break from the past, only those candidates with clear deficiencies, such as not having the right professional certification, were dropped right away, said Hargrove-Krieghoff, hired in August of last year.

“We did not look solely at a number and say, ‘You’re in or you’re out,’” she said. “We looked at a variety of information, because we want to move away from this idea of a cut score and more toward looking at the competencies and understanding each candidate’s strengths.”

Hundreds more than usual advanced to a phone interview, and the interview length was expanded from five or 10 minutes to a half-hour or more, she said.

The process took more time — retired district administrators came back to help. But at least in the first year under the new rules, the district wanted to collect as much information as possible on as many candidates as possible. It can now go back and study whether an applicant’s initial score ended up being a good predictor of being hired, Hargrove-Krieghoff said.

The district also revised its interview questions to reduce the potential for unconscious cultural bias, Hargrove-Krieghoff said. This meant replacing opinion-based questions with scenario-based ones that ask, for instance, how applicants would handle certain classroom situations.

“It’s much more about the craft of teaching and about the skills the person will bring to the job, not whether the person looks or sounds like you do,” Hargrove-Krieghoff said.

Related (2009): an attempt to change teacher credentialism.

David Searls:

Less than two years ago, the author published an online bioinformatics curriculum in this journal and made the claim (with some important caveats) that a sufficient number and variety of free video courses had made their way to the web that it was possible to obtain a reasonably comprehensive bioinformatics education on one’s laptop [1]. In that compilation of courseware, only a few entries originated from the then-nascent Coursera platform (https://www.coursera.org), and none came from its academic competitor edX (https://www.edx.org). In the intervening time, these platforms and several others have fairly exploded with new content, such that on the order of a thousand courses are now available online from over a hundred academic institutions. That fact alone justifies an update to the curriculum and a reassessment of the viability of online education in this field.

To begin with the latter, it should first be acknowledged that MOOCs are controversial in many regards. This article will not attempt to review or comment on the generic issues beyond making a few general observations in the Conclusion below. It is the opinion of the author that MOOCs are indeed a valuable resource even if they are not a magic bullet. The general limitations as regards bioinformatics were discussed in the previous article [1] and in a companion piece giving practical advice to online learners [2] and need not be recapitulated here. Certainly the sizeable increases in content that have occurred in the interim have improved the prospects, yet they have also raised the bar, and it is now clearer than ever where the gaps and shortcomings are in the available curriculum. Specific instances will be commented upon in the appropriate contexts below. One general observation is that the MOOC universe provides good coverage at the introductory level and plenty of specialized “elective” courses, but comprehensive intermediate and advanced courses are thin on the ground in some areas, including biology. For example, as of this writing there are no MOOCs dedicated to the subject of structural biology, which is surprising given the importance of visualization in the field and the availability of excellent online resources. Nevertheless, the sizeable expansion of courses available, particularly in allied fields such as neurosciences and evolutionary biology, has been deemed sufficient to widen the scope of this edition to encompass the more expansive term “computational biology” as opposed to “bioinformatics” (for those who consider the distinction important).

Harvard Crimson, via a kind reader:

Part III of The Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2019 looks at the beliefs and lifestyles of the incoming freshmen. Almost two-thirds of the surveyed students are virgins, but respondents who took a gap year between high school and college were more likely to report having had sexual intercourse before arriving in Cambridge. Most have minimal experience with drugs and alcohol. A majority identify politically as at least somewhat liberal, but a plurality—45 percent—reported feeling unsure about whether their new school should divest its endowment from the fossil fuel industry, a raging debate on campus. Forty-one percent said they are “not confident at all” that the police treat white people and black people equally.

Molly Beck:

The number of students using vouchers to attend private schools grew from 22,439 during the 2011-12 school year to 29,609 last school year, according to the DPI. At the same time, 870,650 students attended public schools last year — which is about the same number that did in the 2011-12 school year. Enrollment grew to 873,531 in the 2013-14 school year before decreasing last school year.

Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers have created new voucher programs in Racine and statewide to join the program in Milwaukee, created in 1990 as the country’s first.

Milwaukee and Racine school districts are allowed to raise property taxes to offset their reductions in state aid.

Related: SIS

Ongoing education spending rhetoric often lacks facts, such as the recent Wisconsin State Journal Headline replaying annual school budget theatre (thankfully, the article did mention the planned 9(!) increase in healthcare spending).

I recently requested historic data on Wisconsin education spending and have posted the results below, along with the raw data. Tap the charts to view a larger version.

Helen Warrell:

A
week after students begin their distance learning courses at the UK’s Open University this October, a computer program will have predicted their final grade. An algorithm monitoring how much the new recruits have read of their online textbooks, and how keenly they have engaged with web learning forums, will cross-reference this information against data on each person’s socio-economic background. It will identify those likely to founder and pinpoint when they will start struggling. Throughout the course, the university will know how hard students are working by continuing to scrutinise their online reading habits and test scores.

Behind the innovation is Peter Scott, a cognitive scientist whose “knowledge media institute” on the OU’s Milton Keynes campus is reminiscent of Q’s gadget laboratory in the James Bond films. His workspace is surrounded by robotic figurines and prototypes for new learning aids. But his real enthusiasm is for the use of data to improve a student’s experience. Scott, 53, who wears a vivid purple shirt with his suit, says retailers already analyse customer information in order to tempt buyers with future deals, and argues this is no different. “At a university, we can do some of those same things — not so much to sell our students something but to help them head in the right direction.”

US Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 251,096,000. Of those, 157,065,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,065,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 251,096,000 civilian noninstitutional population — the same as it was in July and June. Not since October 1977, when the participation rate dropped to 62.4, has the percentage been this low.

Doug Erickson:

UW-Madison is the 11th best public college in the country and the 69th top college overall, according to Forbes Magazine.

The magazine is out this week with “The Smarter College Guide,” a 360-page book that ranks colleges and universities in the U.S.

This is the second year in a row UW-Madison placed 11th among public colleges. It’s up one notch overall, having placed 70th last year.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, Lawrence University in Appleton placed 129th overall, Marquette University in Milwaukee 157th overall and Beloit College 158th overall.

UW-Madison ranked 23rd in the list of Best Value Schools, up from 24th last year.

Ed Yong

On a warm summer afternoon in Amsterdam, a line of visitors snaked toward the entrance of the Artis Royal Zoo, queuing to see the typical assortment of elephants, giraffes, penguins, lions, and so on. I, however, was more interested in the building opposite the ticket booths, which had a very different menagerie inside. A large banner draped over the building’s two stories displayed a collection of fuzzy colored balls, shaped like a waving person. This towering gestalt figure represented the human microbiome—the trillions of bacteria and other microörganisms that inhabit our bodies. With its purposeful stride and genial wave, it welcomed passersby into Micropia, the world’s first museum devoted entirely to microbes.

Micropia launched in September, 2014, after twelve years of development and ten million euros of investment. None of the creatures in its exhibits is bigger than an ant, and most are substantially smaller—zipping water fleas, invincible tardigrades, green algae, and innumerable bacteria. The place is a shrine to the super-small, a haven for charismatic minifauna, a place where the cages and paddocks of the neighboring zoo have been swapped for agar plates and glass slides. The fact that it exists at all is a tribute to the growing realization that the great majority of microbes are neither signs of filth nor bringers of disease but vital parts of the world around and within us.

WORT’s A Public Affair:

Just in time for the new school year, today guest host Mike Wagner talks with UW professor Robert Asen on his new publication, “Democracy, Deliberation, and Education,” on the difficult decisions school boards have to make the democratic process behind it.

From Penn State University Press, “Democracy, Deliberation, and Education” looks at three Wisconsin school boards and democracy at the local level that occurs to make decisions for school districts.

Asen is a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin- Madison Robert, with a focus in public policy debate, public sphere studies, and rhetoric and critical theory, and the way political and economic inequalities interact with relations of power to shape public discourse.

I believe Professor Asen overstates the role and applied power of most school boards. While they are certainly capable of great change, Madison’s experiences is illustrative. In general, the Madison School Board has operated as a go along, get along governing body. One example: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results: 2005, 2013 editions…

A “focus on adult employment“.

Maria Lam:

The red markers started to disappear from classrooms. In some of the brand-new marker boxes, the count became seven instead of eight. It was always the red one missing. We, the teachers, hadn’t thought much of it initially; rarely do we end the school year with the same amount of supplies with which we begin. But that was changing now that the students needed red to make corrections and complete their schoolwork—or, for some, to color in the hearts they’d scribbled on love notes. A blend of orange and yellow wouldn’t suffice as a substitute, so we were determined to find the culprit.

But even before investigating, red writing started showing up all over our classrooms. On desks. On folders. On looseleaf. On whiteboards. It became clear that the red markers had a new owner. And that owner he left us little opportunity to apply our Law and Order sensibilities: He used the red to tag his name. And by tagging, I don’t mean the kind of elaborate graffiti that once covered the murals at 5 Pointz in Queens—it was just his handwritten name. If his handwriting were a font, it’d be pretty close to Comic Sans: child-like, nothing distinct or loud—besides the color.

Samantha Winslow, Alexandra Bradbury

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda Poon:

With its grassy fields, brightly colored walls, and wide open spaces, the Las Colinas Detention and Re-Entry Facility in San Diego County, California, looks more like a college campus than a jail for women. Communal buildings have large windows to allow in plenty of natural light, and designers have replaced stainless-steel furniture with items made from wood and softly colored plastic. Outside, walking paths guide inmates from one building to another, and the central quad lets inmates interact with each other.

For this particular jail, which in 2014 replaced a bleak and overcrowded facility built in the 1960s, the county and the designers looked to higher-education campuses for inspiration. It’s certainly a different way of thinking about adult correctional facilities. But with traditional designs heavily focused on punishment and failing to reduce the rate of recidivism, this new approach could be a model for the future.

“All that reflects what their daily lives would be when [the inmates] return to the community,” says Jim Mueller, who was the principal in charge of the project at KMD Architects. “The intent was to replicate, as much as possible, the demands and responsibilities they would face out in the community within this particular facility.”

Jonathan Rees:

Historian Rachel Hope Cleaves recently identified a recurring meme in the history of food advertising: pigs slaughtering themselves. She first tweeted an image of pig leaping into a meat grinder. Others followed with different examples of suicide, some not requiring machines. Over and again, our porcine friends happily sacrifice themselves for our gustatory delectation. The irony of these pictures, if you know anything about pigs, is that they are among the smartest animals in the animal kingdom, and therefore unlikely to carve themselves up to be served on a platter. Yet there they are, happily chopping away.

While nobody has suggested carving the professoriat up for dinner (at least not that I’ve heard), there has been plenty of discussion in education technology circles about carving their jobs into pieces and distributing those pieces to separate people—Silicon Valley’s friendly sounding term for this is “unbundling.” I first saw that term used during the now-legendary MOOC frenzy of 2012. “Why should you lecture, when you can get some hotshot from Harvard to do your job for you?” the thinking went, implying that professors are akin to “content providers,” and learning a species of “content distribution.” After all, the argument went, isn’t a college seminar basically a podcast?

Dylan Matthews:

H&R Block’s entire business model is premised on taxes being confusing and hard to file. So, naturally, the tax preparation company has become — along with Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. For example, the Obama administration has pushed for automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit.

But H&R Block’s latest lobbying effort is even more loathsome than its opposition to automatic filing. At the company’s instigation, the Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a funding bill covering the IRS whose accompanying report instructs the agency to at least quadruple the length of the form that taxpayers fill out to get the Earned Income Tax Credit.

scroll.in

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi due to visit Silicon Valley to promote his Digital India initiative late in September, leading South Asian experts at US universities on Thursday issued a statement urging information firms to be cautious of doing business with a government that has “on several occasions already, demonstrated its disregard for human rights and civil liberties, as well as the autonomy of educational and cultural institutions”.

The signatories include Columbia University’s Akeel Bilgrami, Stanford University’s Thomas Blom Hansen and the University of Chicago’s Wendy Doniger.

John Cassidy:

If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment and prosperity. The consensus dates back at least to 1636, when the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College as America’s first institution of higher learning. It extended through the establishment of “land-grant colleges” during and after the Civil War, the passage of the G.I. Bill during the Second World War, the expansion of federal funding for higher education during the Great Society era, and President Obama’s efforts to make college more affordable. Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Three Democratic candidates—Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders—have offered plans to reform the student-loan program and make college more accessible.

Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation and rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few,” the White House Web site states. “Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.” Commentators and academic economists have claimed that college doesn’t merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy and helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, and that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. “Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both,” they wrote in a subsequent paper. “The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility.”

Molly Beck:

According to the Department of Administration, bids were sought for a Web-based exam testing third- through eighth-graders in English and fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders in math and science. A separate bidding process was set up for a new exam to test students in social studies. Daniel Wilson of the DOA said the process remains open.

Wisconsin students, who must be tested annually for the state to get federal funding, will have taken three different tests in as many years.

The state budget also requires the state to provide schools with a menu of tests they can give their students, but only if the federal government gives the OK. Bradley Carl, a researcher at UW-Madison’s Value-Added Research Center, said it’s pretty unlikely that’s going to happen.

“It’s a huge ‘if’ because I have not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that … it’s a sure thing that there will be federal blessing” for test options, Carl said.

The budget directs VARC to draft a list of three to five alternative tests that could be compared to the state-adopted test, but the center doesn’t get any funding to do so until the federal waiver is approved. Carl said there are likely only three to five tests that would fit the state’s criteria, and speculated that if a test company knew it was already tapped to provide an alternative test, there would be little incentive for it to offer a competitive price.

The Wisconsin DPI long promoted the discredited WKCE.

Liz Morrish:

The photo above made me start contemplating the intrusion of a repressive disciplinary culture into UK universities. Disciplinary action for tailgating? Whatever happened to having a quiet word with somebody? Just a few years ago, campus security was left in the capable hands of a few retirees from the services and the police. They knew academics and students by name, and exerted a calm authority refined through years of dealing with minor infractions. Now, a mere parking violation incurs a meeting with HR.

Many of us will be aware of new university policies on disciplinary procedures. If we have read them, we will be aware that the policies themselves are often not in the least repressive or out of kilter with professional expectations. It is when these policies intersect with over-zealous performance management procedures that things get troublesome – I have previously blogged about so-called under-performing professors

Jasdev

1 year, 3 months, and 13 days ago I graduated from college. I feel the transition from high school to college is openly discussed, but the following transition into the real world is not. Life after school has taught me a lot about myself and I am writing this post as a reflection on some of the lessons I have learned (a few the hard way).

Everyone Is Making It up as They Go
There is no manual to life and how you should live it. Your parents, idols, mentors, managers, and favorite celebrities are all making it up as they go. That is the beauty of it! It is yours to define. All of your past experiences, successes, and failures have brought you to this exact moment.

Betsy Hammond:

Oregon high school students are on track to complete a record number of college classes this school year, racking up free or low-cost undergraduate credits before they are even admitted to college.

More than one in four juniors and seniors will take and pass at least one class that carries college credit, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive sho

Anya Kamenetz:

Have you ever done your children’s homework for them? Have you driven to school to drop off an assignment that they forgot? Have you done a college student’s laundry? What about coming along to Junior’s first job interview?

These examples are drawn from two new books — How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims and The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey. Both are by women writing from their experience as parents and as educators. Lahey is a middle school teacher and a writer for The New York Times and The Atlantic; Lythcott-Haims was the longtime freshman dean at Stanford.

The books make strikingly similar claims about today’s youth and their parents: Parents are “too worried about [their children’s] future achievements to allow [them] to work through the obstacles in their path” (Lahey) and “students who seemed increasingly reliant on their parents in ways that felt, simply, off” (Lythcott-Haims).

Michael Lind:

In my old age, I hope to found a new university, called rather unimaginatively the New University, with funding from one or another imprudent billionaire (a prudent billionaire would turn me down). In contemporary universities and colleges there is often a division among the natural sciences, social science and humanities. In my New University, there would be only two faculties: natural sciences and the humanities. The social sciences would be abolished.

Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century. Auguste Comte formulated a Religion of Humanity based on “the positive philosophy” or Positivism. Karl Marx went to his grave convinced that his discovery of laws of history had made him the Darwin or Newton of social science.

Positivism mercifully had little political influence, except in 19th-century Brazil, to which it contributed the national motto “Order and Progress.” In the 20th century Marxism split between a revisionist branch which became indistinguishable from welfare-state capitalism and communist totalitarianism, which survives in pure form today only in North Korea, and from the devastating effects of which Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries are slowly recovering.

Bret Stephens:

Why teach? More than once in recent years I’ve heard from teachers, nearing or past retirement, who wondered whether they had chosen the right profession. One thought that maybe she would have done better as an architect. “That way,” she said, “at least I could point to something I made.”

I suspect that many teachers harbor these sorts of doubts—the wiser the teacher, the graver the doubt. Teaching at its best is less in the business of imparting knowledge than it is of shaping souls. But who can tell what, if anything, has been shaped, much less how well? How much can any single teacher do, in the space of a semester or two, to form the interior spaces of her students’ intellectual and emotional lives?

Amy Kass, one of the best teachers I ever had (along with her husband, Leon, also at Chicago), was not immune to these sorts of doubts. She knew that even in the best classrooms at the University of Chicago, with the brightest students in the country, there was a limit to what she could accomplish.

Harry Frankfurt:

There is very considerable discussion nowadays about the increas­ingly conspicuous discrepancy between the incomes of wealthier Americans and the incomes of those Americans who are less wealthy. President Barack Obama has declared that income in­equality is the greatest political challenge of our time. But just what is so awful about economic inequality? Why should we have this great concern, urged upon us by so many politicians and public figures, about the growing gap between the in­comes of the richest people in our country and the incomes of those who are less affluent?

The first thing to notice is that economic inequal­ity, however undesirable it may be for various reasons, is not in­herently a bad thing. Think about it: We could arrange for the members of a society to be economically equal by ensuring that the economic resources available to each member of the society put everyone equally below the poverty line. To make everyone equally poor is, obviously, not a very intelligent social ambition.

Brentin Mock:

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

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

Eric Fonor:

No living historian has done more to shape our understanding of the American Civil War era than Eric Foner. A rare scholar who is both prominent outside the historical community and esteemed within it, over the course of a fifty-year career Foner has acquired virtually every award, tribute, and professional honor available to a historian in the United States.

Yet the true measure of his legacy lies not in accolades but influence. Foner’s most important books have transformed the way we see — and the way we teach — the origins of the Civil War, the significance of slave emancipation, and the politics of postwar Reconstruction.

Foner grew up in a New York family equally devoted to historical scholarship and left-wing politics. His father, Jack, and his uncle, Philip, both taught history at City College before they were dismissed and blacklisted as Communists.

Kristina Rizga:

ONE HOT MORNING in May, Kiana Hernandez came to class early. She stood still outside the door, intensely scanning each face in the morning rush of shoulders, hats, and backpacks. She felt anxious. For more than eight months she had been thinking about what she was about to do, but she didn’t want it to be a big scene.

As her English teacher approached the door, she blocked him with her petite, slender frame. Then, in a soft voice, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to take the test today.” The multiple-choice test that morning was one of 15 that year alone, and she’d found out it would be used primarily as part of her teacher’s job evaluation. She’d come into class, she said, but would spend the hour quietly studying.

Douglas Belkin:

Elida Gonzalez feared drowning in college debt on her road to a middle-class job, so instead she sold investors a piece of her future.

The now-23-year-old daughter of a farm worker from Santa Maria, Calif., signed up with 13th Avenue Funding, borrowing $15,000 to complete her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Sacramento-based nonprofit group agreed to fund her college expenses in exchange for a share of her future earnings in an arrangement called an income-share agreement.

“I was able to trust them, which is really hard for me to do,” said Ms. Gonzalez, who could pay back more than the cost of a traditional loan if she does well, but is on the hook for only 5% of her income for 15 years if she doesn’t. Repayments don’t kick in until she makes at least $18,000 a year.

Eric Morath:

A family of four can meet its basic needs for $49,114 a year in Morristown, Tenn.—about half the income needed to raise a family in New York or Washington.

There are 140 communities and regions where a family can meet basic needs such as rent, health care and taxes for less than $60,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator released Wednesday.

But in Washington, New York, San Francisco and six other areas, the same essentials cost at least $90,000 a year.

Madison’s growing property tax burden is a not insignificant factor in family costs.

Bloomberg

Chinese sales of U.S. government debt may have kept yields from falling this month as a selloff in global stocks prompted investors to favor the safest assets.

“By selling Treasuries to defend the renminbi, they’re preventing Treasury yields from going lower despite the fact that we’ve seen a sharp drop in the stock market,” David Woo, head of global rates and currencies research at Bank of America Corp., said on Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “China has a direct impact on global markets through U.S. rates.”

China Holdings
The latest available Treasury data and estimates by strategists suggest that China controls $1.48 trillion of U.S. government debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That includes about $200 billion held through Belgium, which Nomura Holdings Inc. says is home to Chinese custodial accounts.

The PBOC has sold at least $106 billion of reserve assets in the last two weeks, including Treasuries, according to an estimate from Societe Generale SA. The figure was based on the bank’s calculation of how much liquidity will be added to China’s financial system through Tuesday’s reduction of interest rates and lenders’ reserve-requirement ratios. The assumption is that the central bank aims to replenish the funds it drained when it bought yuan to stabilize the currency.

Related: Hillary Clinton’s plan to borrow and spend more for student debt….

Ian Sample:

A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science.

An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings.

The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research.

The first imperative: Science that isn’t transparent isn’t science
Read more
“There is no doubt that I would have loved for the effects to be more reproducible,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology who led the study at the University of Virgina. “I am disappointed, in the sense that I think we can do better.”

Comwriter:

There are more than 130 million students and faculty in Higher Education worldwide. Every one of these individuals needs to write academic papers and articles. However, the tools we have for academic writing are extremely limited (see Table 1):

Microsoft Word is, primarily, desktop with a wide range of features making it difficult to learn and demands too much time to manage the formatting, and also causes version control issues
Google docs is a cloud-based product with excellent collaboration features, but is limited for most academic work
Scrivener is a Mac product that has some nice note features, but has a very confusing user interface
Authorea is a relatively new cloud-based word processor, but it is a latex product that requires knowledge of this technical language

Blackjack:

Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I had no idea how to do that so I spent a bunch of time reading online forums like College Confidential (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com) to figure out what works. I then acted on the advice, became the first kid from my school to go to an Ivy, and gave presentations/tutoring sessions at school to help other kids – I’m still close with my principal and try to be involved in the community there.

Anyways, I really wanted to consolidate my knowledge in book form, but there are other books on college admissions. So what I did was programmatically scrape the forums to gather admission results for nearly 5,000 kids over several years to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Most of you have graduated college already, but I really want to use the book to share this info broadly. Specifically, college admissions consulting is a multi-million dollar industry for no reason – it’s all built on information asymmetry. I want to get this stuff into the hands of every interested kid, and I wanted to use real data/outcomes instead of “oh well this one kid a few years ago did X”, so I put in the effort and wrote this book.

Jelani Cobb:

Jamaica High School, in Queens, was once the largest high school in the United States. For most of its history, it occupied a majestic Georgian Revival building on Gothic Drive, designed in the nineteen-twenties by William H. Gompert, who had begun his career at McKim, Mead & White. With east and west wings, granite columns, and an elaborate bell tower, the building looked like a state capitol that had been dropped into the middle of a residential neighborhood; it sat on the crest of a hill so imposing that planners would have been guilty of pretense had it housed anything other than a public institution.

One evening in June of last year, Jamaica students wearing red and blue gowns gathered with their families and teachers and with members of the school staff at Antun’s, a catering hall in Queens Village, for the senior-class commencement ceremony. Accompanying the festivities was the traditional graduation boilerplate—about life transitions and rising to new challenges—but it carried a particular significance on this occasion, because it was as applicable to the faculty and the staff, some of whom had been at the school for nearly three decades, as it was to the students. After a hundred and twenty-two years, Jamaica High School was closing; the class of 2014, which had just twenty-four members, would be the last.

a16z:

Longtime New York Times technology and science writer John Markoff joins the a16z Podcast to discuss our changing relationship with technology and machines … as well as the changing nature of Silicon Valley itself (where Markoff grew up).

Jumping off from the themes of Markoff’s new book, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, we explore the future of human and robot work; hear about chatbots that keep kids enthralled during “toilet time;” and the implications of “the wheels finally falling off of Moore’s Law” — something people have long predicted but has never happened yet. And finally, why education is the raw material for a future where humans and intelligent machines work hand in (robotic) hand.

Troy Senik

What’s truly unsettling is that it has been widely taken as read among both the media and the general public that Mrs. Clinton will likely avoid serious legal consequences for her behavior because the Justice Department is ultimately answerable to President Obama – and Democrats will not use the instruments of government to destroy one of their own. Whether that eventually proves true, the sentiment itself reveals a troubling trend in American politics.

While it’s far from unheard of for public officials to apply less-exacting standards to their partisan allies, it’s unnerving that the segments of society charged with keeping those officials in check – namely, the media and the voters – now regard such lack of principle as so unremarkable that it barely merits mention. We have transformed into a country in which it’s difficult to imagine precisely what kind of official malfeasance would be met with more than a shrug of the shoulders.

While this trend has been at work for decades – you can thank both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton for hastening the decline – it has reached escape velocity during the Obama years. The Justice Department, for example, already took a pass on prosecuting Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the scandal in which conservative groups were singled out for special scrutiny by the federal government on the basis of their political beliefs. If there’s anything that ought to be a matter of consensus in American politics, it’s that holding the reins of power doesn’t give you carte blanche to turn the power of the state against your partisan rivals. Yet Ms. Lerner, having done that very thing, doesn’t seem to be much worse for the wear.

Megan McArdle:

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

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

Peter Fisher:

Why are central bankers so concerned with liquidity? Is this sympathy for the plight of the hard-working bond trader? It is more likely they wonder if the lofty asset prices they have engineered with quantitative easing can be sustained.

By liquidity we mean our ability to sell an asset without material loss. In this sense, individual transactions can be liquid and some of us can find liquidity for some of our assets some of the time. But we cannot all withdraw our deposits from the bank the same day nor sell all our bonds and stocks at the same time.

In financial markets when we rush for the exits the doors get smaller. The system rests on a liquidity illusion. Keynes derided the idea that liquidity was a virtue, calling it an antisocial fetish that “forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole”.

Related: Madison property tax growth compared with income (ability to pay)…

BBC:

I’ve had a few interviews, but even those jobs that are advertised for graduates end up being taken by people with experience.

Who is going to hire someone with no experience when they can get someone who has it?

I went to university as a mature student after realising, aged 25, what I wanted to do.

But I can’t do that, and now I’m 35 and working in a pub because I have lots of experience in that industry.

It’s either that or a call centre – that is all my CV says.
I’ve given up applying for town-planning jobs, it’s pointless.

Anya Kamenetz:

So it’s not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. educating its top performers?

His answer: not very. “High achievers are being neglected in all sort of ways by schools that had no incentive to push them farther up.”

His research became a book, with co-author Brandon Wright, out next month from Harvard Education Press. It’s titled Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. It contains an analysis of the U.S. issue, plus case studies on gifted education from a dozen countries around the world.

Khan Academy:

A collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and Khan Academy. Sponsored by Disney.

Daniel Henninger:

In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted.

Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the…

Anne Trafton:

In 2011, MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe and colleagues reported that in blind adults, brain regions normally dedicated to vision processing instead participate in language tasks such as speech and comprehension. Now, in a study of blind children, Saxe’s lab has found that this transformation occurs very early in life, before the age of 4.

The study, appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that the brains of young children are highly plastic, meaning that regions usually specialized for one task can adapt to new and very different roles. The findings also help to define the extent to which this type of remodeling is possible.

“In some circumstances, patches of cortex appear to take on other roles than the ones that they most typically have,” says Saxe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience and an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “One question that arises from that is, ‘What is the range of possible differences between what a cortical region typically does and what it could possibly do?’”

Ben Cohen:

In 2013, Auburn University’s curriculum review committee took up the case of a small, unpopular undergraduate major called public administration. After concluding that the major added very little to the school’s academic mission, the committee voted to eliminate it.

But according to internal documents and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the committee’s decision was ultimately overruled by top administrators after it met significant opposition from another powerful force on campus: Auburn’s athletic department.

For 20 years, 14 of those in England, I’ve been giving lectures about the social power afforded to dictionaries, exhorting my students to discard the belief that dictionaries are infallible authorities. The students laugh at my stories about nuns who told me that ain’t couldn’t be a word because it wasn’t in the (school) dictionary and about people who talk about the Dictionary in the same way that they talk about the Bible. But after a while I realized that nearly all the examples in the lecture were, like me, American. At first, I could use the excuse that I’d not been in the UK long enough to encounter good examples of dictionary jingoism. But British examples did not present themselves over the next decade, while American ones kept streaming in. Rather than laughing with recognition, were my students simply laughing with amusement at my ridiculous teachers? Is the notion of dictionary-as-Bible less compelling in a culture where only about 17% of the population consider religion to be important to their lives? (Compare the U.S., where 3 in 10 people believe that the Bible provides literal truth.) I’ve started to wonder: how different are British and American attitudes toward dictionaries, and to what extent can those differences be attributed to the two nations’ relationships with the written word?

Our constitutions are a case in point. The United States Constitution is a written document that is extremely difficult to change; the most recent amendment took 202 years to ratify. We didn’t inherit this from the British, whose constitution is uncodified — it’s an aggregation of acts, treaties, and tradition. If you want to freak an American out, tell them that you live in a country where ‘[n]o Act of Parliament can be unconstitutional, for the law of the land knows not the word or the idea’. Americans are generally satisfied that their constitution — which is just about seven times longer than this blog post — is as relevant today as it was when first drafted and last amended. We like it so much that a holiday to celebrate it was instituted in 2004.

Jamie Holmes:

IN the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” Her idea was not well received; at one foundation, an official told her he would rather resign than support a class on ignorance.

Dr. Witte was urged to alter the name of the course, but she wouldn’t budge. Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. “Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer,” she said some years later, “without ever telling the student that we just don’t know very much about it.” She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”

Classes like hers remain rare, but in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.

Issie Lapowsky

But four years ago, these six students were among the first to enroll in a new public high school called P-TECH, short for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. The program, backed by IBM, aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology. The idea is to earn a high school diploma and a free associate degree in six years or less. The students sitting in Barclays tonight—P-TECH’s inaugural graduates—plowed through the program in just four.

Since it opened in 2011, the likes of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Obama himself have praised the school as a potential solution to the nation’s high youth unemployment rate and its growing need for a skilled tech labor force. That makes tonight’s graduation more than a milestone for these six students. It’s a milestone for the model itself. From this day forward, Cletus Andoh, Gabriel Rosa, Kiambu Gall, Michelle Nguyen, Radcliffe Saddler, and Rahat Mahmud will be held up as irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work.