Tara García Mathewson:

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

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

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

Laura Moser:

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

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

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

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

– Via the Wisconsin Reading Coalition.

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

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

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

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

Laura Waters:

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

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

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

Alana Semuels:

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

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

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

David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld and Karen Shen:

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

Michaela Hustyn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economist:

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

Robby Soave:

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

Victor Mair:

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

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

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

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

Susan Cohen:

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

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

Keri Blakinger.

Nellie Bowles:

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

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

Lisa Vaas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Borsuk:

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

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

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

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

James W Loewen:

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

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

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

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

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

Libby Nelson:

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

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

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

Madison School District (4.2MB PDF).

Molly Beck summarizes the report.

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

Ed in the Apple:

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

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

There are three ways to increase student achievement:

– Via Will Fitzhugh.

Will Fitzhugh:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===========

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

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
www.tcr.org

Dave Dleozier:

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

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

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

Introduction by Karen Hawley Miles (PDF):

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

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

Gillian Tett:

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

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

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

……

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

Vivian Wang:

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

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

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

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

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

Wolfram:

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

Mikhail Zinshsteyn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

CR Denning:

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

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

Rob Lazebnik:

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

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

Clare Ansberry:

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

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

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

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

Mikhail:

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

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

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

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

Bob Sullivan:

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

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

Key & Peele:

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

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

Sam Sturgis:

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

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

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

Lee Hall:

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

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

Jules Polonetsky

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

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

Jonathan Taplain:

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

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

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

Laurence Schall:

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

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

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

Byron Reese:

hearing the term “artificial intelligence”?

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

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

Eli Meyerhoff

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

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

Peter Gratton Review:

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

Marc Bousquet:

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

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

Chuck DeVore

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

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

John Torinus

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

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

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

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

David Talbot:

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

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

Warwick Mansell:

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lam:

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

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

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

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

Ana Tintocalis:

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Waters:

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

So let’s look squarely at the data.

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

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

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

UCI News:

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

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

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

Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

Christopher Newfield:

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

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

Hannah Gold

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

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

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

The Economist:

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

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

Andrea Zani, via a kind reader:

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

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

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

Andy Hawf:

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

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

The Economist:

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

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

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

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

Michael Moynihan:

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

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

Tom Coburn:

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

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

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

Jeff Gerth:

At issue in the court case is a rule established at the program’s inception that requires providers to set rates for schools and libraries at the lowest prices offered to comparable customers. The theory was that bargain rates would help schools in less-wealthy areas provide their students with access to the Web.

An investigation in 2012 by ProPublica found that the preferential pricing rule had been widely neglected by AT&T and the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program. The result was that many schools were paying more than the program’s framers envisioned, draining the federal fund and limiting the reach of the subsidies.

AT&T said then, and reaffirmed in a recent email to ProPublica, that it complies with the requirement that it charge such customers what is known as the “lowest corresponding price.”

Heath, whose consulting work involves helping school districts obtain refunds from telecom overcharges, first sued Wisconsin Bell, a unit of AT&T, in 2008, alleging that the company routinely withheld information about the available lower rates from public school and library customers and billed them at higher levels. He filed it as a whistleblower case, meaning he would secure a percentage of any damages if Wisconsin Bell were found liable or reached a monetary settlement.

While that case made its way through the court system, Heath in 2011 filed another whistleblower lawsuit in Washington against AT&T and 19 of its subsidiaries for allegedly defrauding E-Rate from 1997 to 2009.

Jane Ford-Stewart:

Fewer than half of underclassmen at the two high schools here said they felt safe at school in their responses to voluntary annual youth risk behavior surveys taken during the school year that just ended.

The 48.4 percent who said they feel safe is significantly lower than the 58.4 percent from the year before who responded that they felt safe.

The survey results also show that more than 28 percent of respondents said violence is a problem at their schools, and nearly 14 percent reported being in a physical fight at school. The percentage of respondents in fights is up a bit from the year before while far fewer students than the previous year felt that violence is a problem.
Suspensions up, too

In addition to the survey, district information shows that two of the four intermediate schools reported many more suspensions for all causes last year than the year before. Fighting and threatening behavior were the two major reasons for the increases, Daniel Weast, director of student services, told the West Allis-West Milwaukee School Board last week.

The intermediate schools seeing the signficant increases were Frank Lloyd Wright and West Milwaukee, with both still well below their 10-year highs in the number of suspensions.

John K. Wilson:

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of educational policy and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is under fire for tweeting to some incoming freshman an article about the budget cuts and attacks on tenure at her institution. The campus College Republicans started a campaign denouncing her tweets as “disgusting and repulsive” and declared, “The College Republicans of UW-Madison call on the University of Wisconsin-Madison to address the harassment of these future Badgers on Twitter.”

This is a disturbing reaction: engaging in a conversation or political debate on Twitter is not even remotely close to harassment. The fact that the College Republicans describe it as “harassment” (they replace this with the term “out-of-line actions” in their formal press release) indicates that they think it is deserving of punishment. We need to reject the very stupid notion that being exposed to an idea you disagree with is a form of “harassment.”

Katharine Hall, Dubravka Kapa:

In the fall of 2012, Concordia University Libraries started planning for renovations which would result in the increase of study spaces in one of its two libraries and the reduction at the other. In order to maximize the functionality of the reduced study space footprint, a survey and focus groups were used to better understand the specific space needs of the library’s campus community. The study revealed differences in the use of the library among the respondents from different programs of study. Respondents enrolled in science programs visit the library more often but seek assistance less than the respondents in social sciences programs. The survey comments and focus groups pointed to students’ dissatisfaction with the quality of study spaces the library offers, either for individual or group study. Library users wanted larger table space, comfortable furniture, and more desktop computers. The overall ambience of study spaces proved to be rather important and a large point of dissatisfaction. The findings from the study have provided valuable information on how to prioritize targeted improvements and which aspects of the library’s space and services to highlight when promoting library services to different departments.

Elizabeth Harrington, via Will Fitzhugh:

The federal government has invested nearly $100,000 to bring Shakespeare to the stage—only without the legendary playwright’s words.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its state agency the Virginia Commission for the Arts has funded numerous shows from the Crystal City-based Synetic Theater, including a production of Hamlet without words, making the title character’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy slightly less potent.

The Wall Street Journal bemoaned the dumbing down of Shakespeare, noting Shakespeare’s plays “without puns is like French cooking without butter,” in a recent review of Synetic’s adaptations.

“The latest Shakespeare fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces and grins—with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert,” James Bovard wrote on Monday.

John McWhorter:

At street level and in popular culture, Americans are freer with profanity now than ever before—or so it might seem to judge by how often people throw around the “F-bomb” or use a certain S-word of scatological meaning as a synonym for “stuff.” Or consider the millions of fans who adore the cartoon series “South Park,” with its pint-size, raucously foul-mouthed characters.

But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?

Ben Branstetter:

While not so concernng on its own, this means PowerSchool — and all the student data it owns — is now in the hands of a company that has failed to join the 153 education companies that have pledged to not sell student data or use targeted advertising toward students.

The slow creep of private software companies into public education has accelerated enormously since PowerSchool was first founded in 2000. According to Education Week, public schools in the U.S. spend over $3 billion providing digital services to their students. Some, like Code.org and Kahn Academy, offer individualized tutoring to help take the load off of overpopulated schools. Others, like Google, have offered their own free versions of expensive digital tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word.

Kids Count (PDF)

An Uneven Recovery for Low-Income Families
Let’s start with the good news. With 2.95 million jobs created, 2014 was the best year of job growth in the United States since 1999.1 For 12 consecutive months, from March 2014 through February 2015, the economy added more than 200,000 jobs per month.2 Although there was a drop in jobs created in March 2015, the numbers have since rebounded.3 At 5.4 percent, April’s national unemployment rate was at its lowest level since April 2008.

But there are some worrisome economic indicators for families in the bottom half of the income scale, particularly African Americans and Latinos. Although new job growth has occurred at all wage levels, it has been disproportionate in low-wage sectors, such as retail and food services, and in some of the lower-wage positions within health care and home care.5 And, a stagnating federal minimum wage has exacerbated low wages.

Karen Herzog:

“While our share of the overall UW System budget cut was eventually reduced, the nearly $5 million cut that we are left with is the largest in our history,” the chancellor, who has been in the job since December, said Tuesday. “The challenge we face is not new, but it is now acute. We can no longer avoid taking significant action.”

Only $100,000 (0.25%) will be cut from the instructional budget. No faculty positions will be eliminated, and there will be no campus closures, she said.

“The reforms we are developing, with extensive and valuable input from our internal and external stakeholders, will help UW Colleges position itself for the future,” Sandeen said in a prepared statement.

Under the new model, the 13 UW Colleges campuses will be grouped into four regions, with a single executive officer/dean for each region. One associate dean will be located on each campus and will oversee day-to-day operational needs. The four regions are:

Maura Smale and Mariana Regalado:

Information and communications technology (ICT) has become indispensable in the twenty-first century and is integral to the undergraduate student experience. From standard productivity software to specialized multimedia applications, from online research to course management systems, undergraduates use technology throughout their academic experience. Despite the persistence of the digital native image in the media, however, not all college students own and use these technologies to the same extent, which can hamper their ability to use ICT effectively for academic purposes. At the same time, budget pressures and restructuring discussions mean that colleges increasingly adopt academic technologies to help address some of the challenges facing higher education. How does this rising use of academic ICT change students’ experiences?

Academic institutions and higher education research organizations use data to make decisions about student services and academic technologies, yet much of the data collected is quantitative. Although surveys can show how many students own a smartphone or how long each student commutes to campus, they tell us little about the lived experiences of our students. In contrast, qualitative research lets us hear student voices and can add valuable detail about the college experience; that, in turn, can inform and guide faculty and administrative decisions about instructional technologies for student use.

Jennifer Ruth:

Bowen and Tobin argue that universities must rewrite their rules so as to meet the demands of the twenty-first century. If they intend to reclaim their role as “engines of mobility,” institutions of higher education need to feature strong leadership at the presidential level, to use technology aggressively, and to implement what they call a “professional teaching staff.” About this last, they write:

Jon Marcus:

In the intensifying debate over whether to reduce federal government regulations on universities and colleges, one number has been at the forefront: $150 million.

That’s what Vanderbilt University says a study found it spends each year complying with government red tape: 11 percent of the university’s entire budget.

The figure was in a report drafted by the principal higher education lobbying organization, the American Council on Education, or ACE, at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. It was the headline of a news release from the committee’s chairman, Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Alexander cited it again in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And other advocates for easing rules on colleges and universities have repeated it, adding that it averages out to $11,000 per year in additional tuition for each of Vanderbilt’s 12,757 students.

Russell Sage Foundation:

During her time in residence at the Foundation, Elizabeth Shermer (Loyola) has worked on a book that examines the origins of the contemporary crisis in public higher education. She argues that contrary to popular belief, state universities have always been subject to market forces. Shermer finds that there was never enough government funding to create a geographically-uniform system of mass higher education, and that as a result, public universities have long been influenced by private sector interests.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Shermer discussed the complex history of the rise of public education in the U.S. and recommended policies for expanding access to higher education for low-income students.

Navneet Alang:

Sylvia’s handwriting was looping and crisp and clean. Though she was my girlfriend, I was, as with most girls I knew in high school, intensely jealous of her penmanship—of what seemed, at the time, like its unreachable, feminine perfection. My handwriting was, by comparison, a mess: the hand of a drunken man trying to scrawl down gibberish while riding on the back of a motorcycle, a different script every time. It wasn’t neatness or clarity on their own that I envied, though—it was the solidity and consistency of someone who wrote the same way each time, could reliably and assuredly express themselves. In the same manner, day after day, manifested on the page, they seemed to be saying: I know who I am—here, let me show you.

Gary Saul Morson

Go to just about any English department at any university, gather round the coffee pot, and listen to what one of my colleagues calls the Great Kvetch. It is perfectly summarized by the opening sentence of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book: “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” She is not speaking of looming environmental disaster or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. You see, those are threats we can discern. The danger Nussbaum is highlighting “goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government.”

When a writer invokes the insidious progress of a cancer, you know she hopes to forestall the objection that there is little visible evidence to support her argument. What is this cancer threatening democracy and the world? Declining enrollments in literature courses. Her book is titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

Jude Webber:

The move, co-ordinated with Mr Peña Nieto’s government, was equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet to a union that has paralysed implementation of the education reform in Oaxaca and three other states. “They will not take what is ours,” Rubén Nuñez, a leader of the Oaxaca chapter of the union, vowed at a rally in the city’smain square as the union prepared to define its full response on Wednesday.

“This is a really important, even brave announcement,” said Marco Fernández, a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey and researcher at the México Evalúa and Wilson Center think-tanks. “Unavoidably there will be conflict in the coming days.”

Although investors have given more attention to the government’s energy reform, lifting education standards is considered vital to Mexico’s ambitions to boost productivity and vault into the advanced, high-income economy bracket.

The biggest obstacle to achieving that was the CNTE. Though it has only about 200,000 of Mexico’s 900,000 teachers — the rest belong to the SNTE that backs the reform — about 60 per cent of CNTE members are in Oaxaca. Victory over opponents there, the government reasons, will ensure the education reform is unstoppable.

The Economist:

“I CAN speak Chinese, I’m so awesome!” reads a sign on the wall of the Mingde primary school in Shufu, a town near the oasis city of Kashgar in the far western province of Xinjiang. Nearby, children’s artworks hang beneath another banner which proclaims: “The motherland is in my heart.” Though every pupil at the school is Uighur, one of China’s ethnic minority peoples, most lessons here are taught in Mandarin—a very different language from their Turkic one. It is the same at ever more schools across the region. Educating young Uighurs in Mandarin may one day help them find work—but it is also a means by which the government hopes to subdue Xinjiang and its many inhabitants who chafe at rule from Beijing.

Xinjiang began to fall under China’s control in the mid-18th century. It was then mainly populated by ethnic Uighurs, whose culture and Muslim faith set them apart from much of the rest of China; Kashgar is far closer to Kabul and Islamabad than it is to Beijing. Despite the migration into Xinjiang of Hans, China’s ethnic majority, minorities (mainly Uighurs) still make up 60% of its residents, compared with less than 10% in China overall.

Nick Anderson:

The explosion of free online education, known mainly for targeting adults, is reaching ever further into high schools.

On Wednesday, a new sequence of lessons for high school Advanced Placement courses in calculus, physics and macroeconomics went live on a free Web site founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The lessons, developed by Davidson College for the site called edX, represent a new step in the evolution of ties between the popular AP college-level program and the “massive open online courses” known as MOOCs.

Other MOOCs in recent months have targeted AP students in subjects such as biology, computer science and chemistry. They aim to prepare students for exams that offer potential college credit for high scores. One philanthropist, Steven B. Klinsky, has even suggested that these MOOCs can help create a pathway for students to obtain a full freshman year of college credit for free.

Mike Antonucci:

changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States.

In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.”

That day is here. WEAC’s 2015 membership numbers show an organization with fewer than 50,000 total members, and fewer than 40,000 who are currently employed in Wisconsin’s public school system. The downward spiral is so pronounced the union cut dues by $60 , but it does not seem to have reversed its fortunes.

Despite the rosy picture NEA attempted to paint earlier this month , the union still faces enormous membership problems, with only a handful of state affiliates slowly returning to health. I will have the full story in today’s communiqué.

Related: $1.57m for four senators.

The Conversation:

If you ask most people what goes on in business schools, they would probably assume that a bunch of pointy heads tell other pointy heads how to read spreadsheets. Push a bit further and you might get some stories about foreign students, shiny buildings and courses that teach people how to be bastards and make lots of money. The financial crisis has often enough been blamed on business schools too for the ways that they spread the gospel of selfishness. But an odd thing is happening beneath the glass atrium – the academics are rebelling.

All around the world, the business school is now the fastest growing part of higher education. In many countries, particularly the UK, its expanding revenues are compensating for a decline in state funding and ensuring that the history department stays open.

Jonathan Chait:

In 2010, Diane Ravitch, an activist for the most militantly anti-reform wing of the teachers-union movement, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing that Republicans use their newfound control of the House of Representatives to roll back the Obama administration’s education reforms. Since then, the union backlash against the Obama administration’s agenda has gained force. Yesterday, it manifested itself in a Senate vote in which Republicans and the unions worked in more open cooperation – against the Obama administration and civil-rights groups allied with it – than at any time in the past.

You should read Libby Nelson’s terrific explanation of the dynamics behind the vote. The gist of the alliance is that both the Republicans and the unions want to reduce the federal government’s ability to direct the course of education policy. Nelson detected an interesting rhetorical confluence:

Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who now leads the Senate education committee, has a favorite epithet for how Duncan has used his power. Alexander is fond of saying that Duncan created a “national school board.”
Eskelen García echoed Alexander, hardly an ideological ally, in a Thursday interview. “Nobody elected the education secretary to be the national superintendent of schools or the national school board,” she said.

Erin Richards:

In an interview Monday at St. Marcus School, a voucher school at 2215 Palmer St., Johnson said a staffer brought the investigation to his attention, which prompted him to write letters to U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch this summer, asking for evidence of the basis of their investigation.

The department has declined to comment, saying the investigation is ongoing.

Johnson, who was the only member of his committee at the hearing, said he invited other members to attend and bring witnesses, but all declined.

The official speaker list, then, included pro-voucher witnesses chosen by Johnson, including two former students of voucher schools: Justice Shorter, a graduate of Messmer High School who’s now in graduate school, and Diana Lopez, a graduate of St. Anthony High School who is headed to Yale. It also included Bob Smith, former principal of Messmer; John Witte, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Richard Komer, senior attorney at the Institute of Justice.

“While participating in the parental choice program, I received the same voucher as all students, which didn’t account for the extra costs of my visual impairment,” said Shorter.

Komer said the justice department held on to the disability rights complaint in 2011 instead of referring it to the Department of Education, as is custom.

Hacker Rank:

If statisticians have historically been leaders of data, why was there a need for a brand new breed of data scientists? While the world is exploding with bounties of valuable data, statisticians are strangely working quietly in the shadows. Statistics is the science of learning from data, so why aren’t statisticians reigning as kings of today’s Big Data revolution?

In 2009, when Google was still fine tuning its PageRank algorithm based on the statistical innovation Markov Chain, Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian declared statistician as the sexiest job of the decade. We’re about halfway through, and it seems that Varian missed the target.

“Professional statisticians are milling at the back of the church, mesmerized by the gaudy spectacle of [Big Data] before them.” – David Walker, statistician, Aug 2013.

John Reitmeyer:

Gov. Chris Christie has taken an aggressive approach to dealing with public workers and their unions since taking office in early 2010. He’s encouraged voters to reject school budgets in communities where teachers weren’t accepting pay freezes, pushed to change civil-service rules, and signed legislation that forced employees to pay more toward to their pensions and health benefits.

Now that Christie has joined the 2016 GOP presidential primary field, his administration is taking another tough stance. It recently told thousands of union members whose contracts expired June 30 that they won’t be receiving annual incremental pay increases while there’s no new deal in place.

In the past, the unions say workers have generally received their annual increases if their performance merited the bump — even without a contract in place.

Christie’s freeze affects state office workers, college professors, corrections officers, and other groups of public workers who haven’t yet reached the top of their pay scales.

Public-worker unions have been responding to the Christie administration’s new position on pay increments — something many view as a pressure tactic — by filing administrative grievances and at least one union, Policemen’s Benevolent Association Local 105, has filed suit in Superior Court.

Lance Lopez, the president of PBA Local 105, said the Christie administration’s freeze affects 3,700 members of his union. The prior agreement with the state said that the rules established under a contract that expired on June 30 would be extended for a year if no new agreement was reached, he said. And the union would have had to have been informed in writing by February 1, 2015 of any change, which didn’t occur, he added.

Michelle Diamont:

their obligations under special education law.

The U.S. Department of Education says that just 19 states qualified for the “meets requirements” designation for the 2013-2014 school year. The rest of states were classified as “needs assistance” or “needs intervention.”

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Education Department must evaluate states annually on their efforts to implement special education programs.

The ratings carry significant weight. If a state fails to meet requirements for two or more years, the Department of Education must take enforcement action, which can include a corrective action plan or withholding funds, among other steps.

This is the second year that the Education Department has relied on stricter measures to assess compliance.

Laura Waters:

Marianne Lombardo at Education Reform Now looks at the recent report on NAEP scores from the National Center for Education Statistics. Results show that many states have standards that are less ambitious than the concepts tested, especially in 4th grade reading. While, she says, “NAEP frameworks and benchmarks are established by the National Assessment Governing Board and are based on the collaborative input of a wide range of experts and participants in the United States government, education, business, and public sectors,” states set their own standards when creating course objectives.

These standards range across a spectrum from “Basic” to “Proficient.” Remember, most, if not all, of the data derives from pre-Common Core days. So, for instance, while New York State consistently sets its standards on the high end of proficient for all areas – 4th grade reading and math; 8th grade reading and math – “most states set standards equivalent to the “Basic” range in the national assessment. “

Lenore Skenazy:

Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a supporter of the Free-Range Kids movement, has proposed groundbreaking federal legislation to protect the rights of kids who want to walk to school on their own.

That’s right: a Free-Range Kids provision made its way into the Every Child Achieves Act, a reauthorization of major federal law that governs funding and regulation of elementary education in the United States. The Free-Range Kids portion of the law would permit kids to walk or ride their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate, without the threat of civil or criminal action.

Laws like this one could prevent—or at least deter—local officials from waging harassment campaigns against parents who want give their kids some autonomy. If this had been the law of the land when the Meitivs allowed their kids to walk home by themselves in Maryland, it might have forestalled the whole shebang. (Though, admittedly, the kids were coming back from the park, not school.)

A rather sad commentary on the nanny state.

Aaron Taylor:

The ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education recently released its report identifying factors driving the high costs of legal education. One factor cited by the task force was law school scholarship policies based on high Law School Admis­sion Test scores, instead of financial need. These policies contribute in large part to high levels of law student debt, particularly among first-generation students. Worse yet, they result in the neediest students paying a tuition premium — a “merit surtax,” if you will — that subsidizes the attendance of their wealthier peers.

An analysis of data from the 2014 administration of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement charts how this phenomenon unfolds. The purpose of the analysis was to identify trends relating to the law school experience that were attributable to socioeconomic factors. … We found that average LSAT scores increased as parental education increased.

Privacy SOS:

The Department of Justice’s National Institute for Justice funds law enforcement research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year. The full list of grants, posted each year, is a valuable insight into future of law enforcement trends in the United States. NIJ funding for 2014 appears to have primarily focused on two issue areas: school safety and clearing DNA backlogs at police departments across the country.

Among the dozens of projects that focus on school safety, there are some that appear progressive, at least judging from the limited amount of information available online. But while a slice of the funding explicitly aims to examine and interrupt the school to prison pipeline using restorative justice methodologies, a lot of the money is going toward research that will probably further entrench disparate outcomes based on race in the criminalizing trend in school discipline.

One of those projects is a City of Chicago Board of Education program called “Connect and Redirect to Respect (CRR),” which aims “to use social media monitoring to identify and connect youth to behavioral interventions.” In other words, the DOJ is giving $2.1 million dollars to the Chicago public schools to conduct research on how spying on student social media can impact school discipline. In New York, police spying on youth social media has resulted in the criminalization of speech.

Doug Erickson:

A math team coached by a Madison Memorial High School graduate is getting praise from President Barack Obama and many others following its David-vs.-Goliath victory over China this week in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

The team of six teenagers, led by coach Po-Shen Loh, 33, topped more than 100 countries during the 10-day competition in Thailand.

The U.S. had not won the competition in 21 years, leading the White House to tweet celebratory congratulations and a “Go Team USA!”

As a high school math whiz, Loh attained considerable acclaim and won numerous state and national honors.

He twice represented Wisconsin in the national MathCounts competition and competed on Team USA in the 1999 International Math Olympiad.

He is now an associate professor of math at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Kelli Woodhouse:

The 2015 Survey of College and University Business Officers, Inside Higher Ed and Gallup’s fifth such study, reveals that as institutions deal with financial concerns, they are using some strategies, like increasing enrollment, more widely than more unpopular methods of trimming the budget. And that’s not necessarily to the benefit of struggling colleges, analysts interviewed for this article say.

In the survey, 64 percent of business officers this year strongly agreed or agreed that their financial model is sustainable over the next five years, compared to 62 percent last year. That confidence drops to 42 percent over 10 years, roughly similar to last year’s response of 40 percent.

The Onion:

In an effort to provide sanctuary for Lynnfield College students exposed to perspectives different from their own, a new campus safe space was dedicated Wednesday in honor of Alexis Stigmore, a 2009 graduate who felt kind of weird in class one time.

Addressing students at the dedication ceremony, parents Arnold and Cassie Stigmore noted that while the college had adequate facilities to assist victims of discrimination, abuse, and post-traumatic stress, it had until now offered no comparable safe space for students, like their beloved daughter, who encounter an academic viewpoint that gives them an uncomfortable feeling.

“When our Alexis felt weird after hearing someone discuss an idea that did not conform to her personally held beliefs, she had no place to turn,” said Arnold Stigmore, standing outside the $2 million space that reportedly features soothing music, neutral-colored walls, oversized floor cushions, fun board games, and a variety of snacks. “God forbid any of you, in your years at this institution, are ever confronted with an opinion you do not share. But if you are, you will have a refuge on this campus.”

Leslie Brody & Jennifer Maloney:

The release Tuesday of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” gave English teachers some tricky summer homework: how to reframe their lessons on “To Kill a Mockingbird” now that its moral center, Atticus Finch, has been depicted as a racist.

Many teachers said they are excited that this twist adds a thought-provoking dimension to the classic and will lead to valuable classroom discussions of flawed heroes, bigotry and the fact that Ms. Lee’s father, the model for Atticus, abandoned his segregationist views later in life, as the author worked on revising “Mockingbird.”

Some said these issues would be especially resonant after a year of protests around the country against police killings in confrontations with unarmed black men, South Carolina’s Confederate flag controversy and other racially charged news.

Danny Yadron:

In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned the enmity of government officials for writing software.

Mr. Marlinspike created an encryption program that scrambles messages until they reach the intended reader. It’s so simple that Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp made it a standard feature for many of the app’s 800 million users.

The software is effective enough to alarm governments. Earlier this year, shortly after WhatsApp adopted it, British Prime Minister David Cameron called protected-messaging apps a “safe space” for terrorists. The following week, President Barack Obama called them “a problem.”

Peter Berkowitz:

American universities are enjoying boom times abroad. Many of the most prestigious have established branch campuses overseas and launched collaborations with foreign governments and institutions of higher education, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. While numerous programs deal with science and technology, of special interest are undertakings to bring the advantages of liberal education to countries that do not protect liberty of thought and discussion.

The tension is real and the stakes large. In an age in which developments in transportation and communication have intertwined national economies to an unprecedented extent, it is to be expected that American educators would seek to disseminate liberal education around the world—to enhance their reputations, improve their bottom lines, and benefit America by fostering knowledge of the principles, and cultivating the spirit, of freedom.

C. Bradley Thompson:

America’s universities are collapsing into a miasma of nihilism, postmodernism, political correctness, multiculturalism, affirmative action, bureaucratization, and skyrocketing costs—and no one seems able to do anything about it. With the exception of a few “Great Books” colleges, the overarching vision of higher education that once sustained the West for centuries seems all but dead.

American higher education is now defined by an aimless mish-mash of courses on trivial topics that present no clear view of what a human being must know in order to be considered liberally educated. The result: the liberal arts have been gutted and repackaged to serve various ideological and political interests.

Michelle Hackman & Mark Peters:

The death of a 7-year-old boy during another Fourth of July weekend marred by multiple murders and dozens of shootings here is bringing renewed attention to the difficulty of curbing street violence in the nation’s third-largest city.

Amari Brown was shot shortly before midnight on July 4 as he watched fireworks on Chicago’s West Side, one of seven homicides and 34 shooting incidents here from Friday evening through Sunday, according to city officials.

His family is preparing for the funeral of a boy who they say loved cars and candy and would have started second grade this fall, while police say they suspect that his father’s alleged gang ties may have been a factor in the shooting.

“Something good’s got to come out of Amari dying on the street like a dog,” said Vedia Hailey, the boy’s maternal grandmother.

Karen Herzog:

An outspoken University Wisconsin-Madison professor has tweeted herself into a world of controversy.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is under fire for finding future Badgers on Twitter and essentially encouraging them to take their money elsewhere — as well as for comparing Gov. Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler.

College Republicans blasted her on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Goldrick-Rab was rebuked by UW-Madison’s faculty governing group in a withering statement that said she hurt both academic freedom and the university “with inaccurate statements and misrepresentations.”

Goldrick-Rab is a tenured professor of educational policy studies and sociology with a national profile in both her field of research and the ongoing debate over faculty tenure at Wisconsin public universities. She has openly that said she’s looking for another job because she believes academic freedom is in jeopardy in Wisconsin.

Goldrick-Rab acknowledges that she searched Twitter for future Badgers. The prolific Twitter-user says she just wanted to inform them of changes to faculty tenure and shared governance that were about to become part of state law — changes that she believes would hurt the quality of their education, but that the university wasn’t telling them about.

While some future Badgers thanked her, a group who had just graduated from a Kenosha high school took exception. One of them contacted the College Republicans of UW-Madison, who called on the university Wednesday to address it — more than a month after the Twitter contact occurred.

It’s fine to engage those with different viewpoints in a respectful way, when they are interested in having a discussion, Anthony Birch, chairman of the young Republicans group, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.