ReclaimU

One the most important debates about the crisis of public higher education these days has to do with understanding the reasons for the restructuring of the public university, which is tied to everything from skyrocketing tuition and student debt to administrative corporatization. In very schematic terms, there are two answers: one focuses on state governments and budget cuts to public higher education, the other on university administrations and their profit-seeking protagonism. The way we choose to answer the question is politically important because it is part of what shapes our strategic and tactical response. If the state government is the primary actor, interventions will generally operate at the level of electoral politics, either through supporting candidates, lobbying, or more generally “making a case” for supporting public education. In contrast, if university administrations are the primary actors, interventions will generally occur more locally, at the level of the campus or system, through actions like rallies, walkouts, strikes, occupations, and so on. Of course, things aren’t always as clear cut as this dichotomy suggests. But in a context where austerity is so visible and “politics” is largely seen as something politicians do, it’s important to remember the active role of administrators in restructuring their universities into the ground.

These debates are organized in part by how the numbers are calculated. Take the recent and controversial New York Times essay by Paul Campos, which argued counterintuitively that government support for higher education has actually increased, not declined, since the 1960s. He claimed that the real reason tuition has gone up so much is not budget cuts but the skyrocketing expenditures that channel money into administrative bloat and building construction. Not surprisingly, the piece generated a quick response from folks who see state funding as the key. A number of these critiques turned on the claim that he was using the wrong metric—rather than aggregate support for higher education, he should instead be using per-student funding:

James Taranto:

“There are many ways to look at the minimum wage increase in Los Angeles from the current $9 an hour [under California law] to $15 by 2020—some hopeful, some cautionary, all good,” the New York Times editorialized last week.

The reader who alerted us to this editorial was incredulous: “ ‘All good’?! There are no downsides to a 67% increase in the minimum wage, according to the Times? Does the Times editorial board really believe this?”

Apparently not. The editorial spends two paragraphs acknowledging that higher wages do impose costs:

Douglas Belkin & Melissa Korn:

As U.S. universities search farther afield for international students, they are boosting not just their cash flow and their campus diversity, but also the likelihood of admissions fraud, experts say.

On Thursday, a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh announced indictments against 15 Chinese nationals on charges that they cheated on college-entrance exams by hiring impostors to take the tests for them. Several of the students ended up at schools across the U.S.

“This is a group of Chinese, but I believe the problem of protecting the integrity of [college admission tests] is bigger than that,” U.S. Attorney David Hickton said.

Doug Henwood:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is out with it latest household debt report, covering the first quarter of 2015. Its parent in DC, the Federal Reserve Board, publishes lots of similar data, but the New York Fed is the first source to publish rigorous numbers on student debt. The latest report is here; you can get the numbers behind it here.

Since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, households have been borrowing very cautiously (how much it’s their decision, their lenders’ decision, or a combination of the two, isn’t fully clear). The glaring exception is student debt. Here are just a few numbers to make the point:

Alberta Darling & Dale Kooyenga, via a kind reader (PDF):

2014 marked the 50-year anniversary of the war on poverty. Since 1964, taxpayers spent over $22 trillion to combat poverty.1 Little, if any, progress has been achieved. The trajectory is not favorable towards the poor and lower middle class and few would argue the federal government has made significant progress to win the war on poverty. The same 50-year-old programs are inflated with additional spending and new programs are consistently introduced, but the effectiveness of the original programs are rarely evaluated. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the buildup of a military industrial complex – for good reason – but few have foreseen a poverty industrial complex. There is a presumption in this nation that all we have to do is appropriate more money to address a problem, but over time we see no correlation between government money spending and the alleviation of poverty. Unfortunately, and ironically, areas that have received the most federal and state funding in the form of welfare have eroded relative to the areas that have received less attention from government.
Two-thirds of the incarcerated African-American men came from six zip codes in Milwaukee and it is no coincidence that those zip codes are also home to the greatest density of failing schools and the highest unemployment in the state.2 The policies we are advocating for seek to provide new tools to deal with a reality no one should accept. From new and innovative educational models, to free market policies that will allow for greater economic gains, the residents of Milwaukee County deserve better and more opportunities.

There is always a danger of oversimplifying a complicated problem, but there is also value in breaking down a 50-year-old paradigm and questioning the approach from a fresh perspective. We know the current expensive, overly complicated web of government programs are not working. The success stories predominately come from individual members of the community and not-for-profits that are entrenched in these communities that are more judicious with the limited resources they have.

The ideas put forth in this report are about new opportunities. The initiatives in this paper will not cost any taxpayer, at any level of government, a single cent. The ideas represent unleashing individuals, not unleashing government spending. The policies introduced are based on the belief that individuals want to work, as work is part of our human DNA. No one wants to be in poverty and no one wants to be dependent on the government. Race, sex, income, handicap, age or a litany of other characteristics does not change our belief that we were all created equal and that everyone has the ability to contribute something to our community.

Mitch Henck (video). Related: When A stands for average.

Madison Teachers, Inc.

The Joint MTI/MMSD Safety Committee is charged with evaluating the “implementation of and compliance with the District’s Behavior Education Plan(s) (BEP)” and periodically reporting to the Superintendent and MTI Board of Directors. Over the course of the 2014-15 school year, the Committee met multiple times and designed, conducted and analyzed a Survey of all school-based District staff. 1,589 employees (42% of District employees) completed the Survey, and over 600 took the time to add personal comments. A summary of the Survey findings, as well as policy recommendations (not comments), are included in the Joint Committee’s Report which can be reviewed on MTI’s website (www.madisonteachers.org).
In summary, the Report highlights significant challenges with the BEP.

While a majority of respondents (78%) understand the approach to behavior set forth in the BEP, only 18% agreed that the practices aligned with it have had a positive impact on student behavior. These results are even more pronounced among teachers at the secondary level where only 10% of middle school teachers and 9% of high school teachers agree that it has had a positive impact on student behavior. Also of major concern is that only 17% of respondents agreed that “when a student is returned to class following a behavior incident, he or she is ready to re-engage in learning”. Only 40% of respondents agreed that their school has a clear behavior support system when a student is struggling. The Survey findings reinforce employee concerns that there is insufficient staffing to support students with significant behavioral needs, and there is insufficient behavioral consequences, and insufficient training to ensure that ALL staff provide a consistent and coherent application of the BEP. Survey results also indicate that District staff believe safety in school and student behavior is at a critical stage.

Madison Teachers, Inc.

It’s that time of year when Administrators send emails, memos and letters outlining “required” trainings, professional development, and other meetings during the summer months. Often, staff are encouraged to attend meetings and trainings wherein administrators use language that does not clearly indicate that any attendance during the summer or the voluntary days for returning staff is entirely voluntary.

Addendum G of the Collective Bargaining Agreement is clear and provides that attendance at any District offered staff development opportunities during the summer recess be compensated, either with Professional Advancement Credit (PAC), extended employment salary, or payment for graduate credits (if such is offered). Addendum G also requires that such communications “clearly convey the fact that teachers will not be penalized or suffer harm for choosing not to volunteer .”

Anyone with concerns about a memo or notice from administration that seems to indicate your attendance is compulsory on a non-contract or voluntary day should contact Jeff Knight (knightj@madisonteachers.org) at MTI. MTI does not discourage voluntary participation; however, it is out of respect for MTI-represented individuals that the Collective Bargaining Agreement is clear and direct regarding one’s participation or lack thereof.
For the 20

Madison Teachers, Inc.

MTI’s Election Committee has tallied the ballots cast in last week’s MTI teacher bargaining unit general election and has certified the election of MTI officers: Andrew Waity (Crestwood) as President Elect; and the re-election of incumbents Art Camosy (Memorial) as Vice-President; Greg Vallee (Thoreau) as Treasurer; and Elizabeth Donnelly (Elvehjem) as Secretary. Officers will be installed at the May 19 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council. The MTI Board of Directors consists of ten members – six officers who are elected by the general membership and four at-large representatives elected by the MTI Faculty Representative Council.

Elected to the MTI Bargaining Committee are: High School Representative – Larry Iles (West); Middle School Representative – incumbent Michael Hay-Chapman (Spring Harbor); Elementary School Representative – incumbent Emily Pease-Clem (Schenk); At-Large Representative – incumbent Susan Covarrubias (Stephens); and Educational Services Representative-High School – Karyn Chacon (East). The MTI Bargaining Committee consists of 15 members. One from each of the referenced areas is elected each year.

Liz Moyer:

You have graduated from college and landed a job. Planning for retirement may seem like a distant concern, and paying off your debts may feel like a monumental task. But now is the time to make some crucial financial moves that could pay off handsomely in years to come.

“You need to have time work in your favor,” says Annamaria Lusardi, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in personal finance. “The trick is really to start early.”

Molly Beck:

“We are confident the proposal can fundamentally transform the educational opportunities that are available to students in Wisconsin’s two largest school districts,” he said.

Delaporte pointed to Department of Public Instruction data that shows less than 40 percent of Madison students have tested proficient in reading in recent years — slightly higher than the statewide average.
But Madison School District superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the proposal, saying in a statement: “We are incredibly determined, and we are making progress on behalf of all children. But at every step of the way, the Legislature puts more barriers in our way and makes our jobs more difficult.”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes called the proposal “breathtaking.”

“It looks like the UW President is required to appoint someone who could then authorize as many publicly funded but potentially for-profit charter schools in Madison as that unelected and unaccountable person wanted,” he said.

The proposal requires DPI to reduce a school district’s funding by the same amount that is paid per student to independent charter schools, currently about $8,000.

Cheatham also said independent charter schools have no consistent record of improving education and drain school districts’ funding.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending double the national average per student.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

The Secret Teacher:

I can honestly say I never thought I would make it. I’m nine years into a teaching career and the mental exhaustion at times is overwhelming. But this year has been the worst by far. I’ve been constantly under scrutiny and made to feel like nothing I ever do is good enough.

Around this time last year, my headteacher announced our classes for the year; once again, I had the class that other teachers spoke of with much disdain and damnation, as if they were almost feral. Having been at the school for two years, I knew that this wasn’t the case – the children just needed a firm set of consistent boundaries and expectations. I was up for the challenge. Looking back, I would not change my students for the world. I would change their parents, however.

In September, we took the year group on an outward-bound activity day. The weather, rather predictably, took a turn for the worst, with gale-force winds and torrential downpours. Nevertheless, the children had a great time. Back at school the next day, I was asked to call a particular parent who had reported he was unhappy with the trip. Somewhat curious, I called to hear his complaint, which was about the weather. He had already called the activity centre complaining for 45 minutes to them. When I asked what he would like me to do, he stated that I needed to guarantee there would be better conditions when we returned to the centre. I said I had no control over this, but was rather fiercely told it “was not good enough”. I placated him as much as possible then, shaking my head in disbelief, I returned to class thinking little of it. He has since complained about the weather again; this time it was too hot at lunchtime.

Dave Eggers:

One of the greatest challenges faced by cyber scholars and policymakers is how to predict the undesired social consequences of technological developments and to design the best policies to address them. Digital technology makes this challenge even harder: change is swift and getting swifter, and is often formulated in technical terms.

This is where legal scholarship and policymaking could benefit from a novel. The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian novel about the digital era. Many legal scholars have written over the past decade on the surveillance society, big data, contextual privacy, the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, transparency and accountability. However, the analysis of these issues in the legal literature remains abstract. The Circle offers a mirror image of our daily digital experiences, helping us to imagine what it would be like to live in a society of total transparency, and to experience the gradual loss of autonomy. The Circle tells a story about the human condition in the info era, the ideology of the digital culture, and the political structure which serves it. It could help us see in real time the social implications of digital technology, identify the forces that come into play, and design more concrete strategies to address them.

The book tells the story of Mae Holland, a young middle-class woman, who has accepted a coveted position at the digital corporation—The Circle. The Circle is everything you might expect of a typical multinational internet company, such as Facebook, Google or Twitter: young, innovative, professional, and exciting. Mae is drawn into the work and social life at The Circle which quickly becomes her entire world. It takes over her relationships with her parents, friends and lovers, as the outside world fades around her. Like her fellow employees, she becomes a living example of the services, the life style and the values that the Circle generates, and eventually becomes an object of the service she provides.

Gilbert Sewall:

Parents often think fate has singled their children out for poorly chosen school reading assignments. It hasn’t. A distressed father recently told me about seeing his high-school-age daughter’s summer reading list and realizing that it was devoted exclusively to contemporary writers such as David Eggers, Malcolm Gladwell and Barbara Ehrenreich. “This Boy’s Life,” Tobias Wolff’s highly regarded autobiography, published in 1989, was the oldest book assigned.

Whatever the list’s merits—and this is an ambitious set of books for 16- and 17-year-olds—the choices added up to a melancholy landscape of contemporary injustice, distress and dysfunction. The student’s father, a Thomas Hardy admirer, mourned the opportunity cost. I told him that summer-reading assignments are often a lot worse—at least there was no Young Adult dreck or Hobbit Lit here—but he asked if I could come up with an alternative reading list.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

In the pursuit of prestige, revenue, and rankings, more public universities have turned to dangling merit-based scholarships to attract more out-of-state students, according to a report by the New America Foundation released earlier this week. The result: shortchanging both poor students, who are less likely to receive such aid, and students in the states the universities are funded to serve.

Public colleges once devoted the biggest chunk of their financial aid money, some 34%, to students in the bottom income quartile, giving just 16% to the wealthiest students, the report says. That has now shifted dramatically: Financial aid at public colleges now goes equally to the top and bottom quartile of students, with wealthy students receiving 23% of financial aid. The poorest students now receive only 25%.

The push toward funneling aid to privileged out-of-state students reflects a change in the nature of public higher education. “By bringing in more and more wealthy nonresident students, these colleges are increasingly becoming bastions of privilege,” the report says.

Schools that provide merit aid, it found, tend to enroll far more students from out of state, who typically pick up more merit-based scholarships than in-state students. They also tend to enroll fewer poor students — and charge those poor students more money.

Mike akin zeal:

[T]hese stories tell us what is likely to happen as the public university system weakens: nothing. No one will step in to fill this crucial role of providing quality, mass higher education. In the first case, resources will go to bidding wars over whose name will go on a fancy building – vanity projects perfect for this age of inequality that will do nothing to provide education. In the second case, resources are extracted out to shareholders and executives in imploding Ponzi schemes, leaving behind nothing but students with poor educations saddled up to their eyeballs in debt.

Mass higher education – starting with the land-grant schools in the Nineteenth Century, and continuing through the GI Bill and the mid-century expansion – has always been a public project. And we need to embrace it.

This is why the recent proposals to expand and solidify public free higher education are essential.

We are no longer living in the 19th century….

Molly Beck

Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems.

Rep. Sondy Pope, D-Cross Plains, said the proposed state budget further harms already financially struggling public school districts. Barca characterized the estimated cost as funds “stolen” from public schools and diverted to the “private voucher school experiment.”

“We simply cannot afford to build two parallel school systems in this state,” said Barca.

Jim Bender, president of voucher lobbying group School Choice Wisconsin, said he could not respond to the memo because it was speculative. He added the memo was created to grab headlines. “Without seeing how they came up with the calculation, it’s very difficult to respond to,” he said.

More from Erin Richards.

It is useful to see an article with complete spending perspective data!

Much more on vouchers, here.

Joss Winn:

n the last 12 months, I have attended three conferences that have provided academics from all disciplines with the space to talk about these issues: Governing Academic Life at the LSE; Academic Identities at Durham; and Universities in the Knowledge Economy in Auckland. There is no doubt that academics are pissed off. Sometimes the blame is individualised: there are too many managers and administrators! When it’s not individualised, it’s politicised: the problem lies with neo-liberalism, or even ‘extreme neo-liberalism’. The concluding response to “what then should be done?” is often along the lines of a manifesto or collection of essays, a mailing list or web site to continue the conversation, or even to treat the misery of our condition as research data, effectively documenting the decline of our vocation.

Students are more viscerally outspoken about the need for fundamental changes in the governance of their universities. In occupation – most recently at UCL, Goldsmiths, KCL, LSE, UAL, and in Amsterdam – they too demand democracy as a basic requisite for a free university.

Meghna Sridhar

A character in some obscure British film I watched once said something that really stuck with me: the best way to forget something, he said, is to commemorate it.

What does it mean to go out into the world with the experiences of four years at Amherst — and what does it mean to hold an Amherst degree? Graduation should be a time where that question presses against us with all its weight and force; where the implications of that question burn within us with constant, raw, energy. Graduation is a time where the meaning of our place in the world must unsettle us — not just personally, but collectively, as a graduating class, as a body of students representative of Amherst and its supposed values. Graduation is a time to ask ourselves what these four years have meant to us, how they have changed us, broken us, questioned us and made us question Amherst; how much our education may have coopted us in structures of power, and how much it has enabled us to challenge these structures when we face “the real world.” (And what does that mean, too? Why is Amherst unreal, isolated, distant? Why is it that our education and experiences here must count for nothing except a degree credential and a leg up to the capitalist job network?)

Yet, too often, we let the institution answer this question for us — we let these answers be foreclosed, predetermined. What does graduation from Amherst mean? Easy. We’re all in this together. Best four years of our lives. Lives of consequences, investment banking jobs, the ability to talk about Plato over drinks in a meeting with a client or at a dinner party, to rave about your “diverse” classmates and “free curriculum,” terras irradiant. We’ve won. We did it.

Guillermo Lastarria:

On Thursday, April 16th more than 150,000 students, teachers, workers and citizens marched down Santiago’s main thoroughfare under the slogan “Less Corruption, More Democracy”. The protest had been called by the national roundtable of student federations, known as the CONFECH, as the first in a promised series of renewed mobilizations. The turnout was impressive and marked an upsurge in social agitation, reversing the trend of demobilization seen since the election of Michelle Bachelet in November of 2013. The strength of the march testifies to two significant developments in the relationship between society and politics. First is the denuding of the intimate relationship between the economic and political elite and second the ability of social forces to mobilize against a government that at least in rhetoric backs their demands.

Kentaro Toyama:

Sadly, what we found was that even when technology tested well in experiments, the attempt to scale up its impact was limited by the availability of strong leadership, good teachers, and involved parents — all elements that are unfortunately in short supply in India’s vast but woefully underfunded government school system. In other words, the technology’s value was in direct proportion to the instructor’s capability.

Over time, I came to think of this as technology’s Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm.

When I returned to the United States and took an academic post, I saw that the idea applies as much to higher education in America as it does to general education in India. This past semester, I taught an undergraduate course called “IT and Global Society.” The students read about high-profile projects like One Laptop Per Child and the TED-Prize-winning Hole-in-the-Wall program. Proponents argue that students can overcome educational hurdles with low-cost digital devices, but rigorous research fails to show much educational impact of technology in and of itself, even when offered free.

Eugene Volokh:

But government-run K-12 schools can’t just restrict speech because they think it “depict[s] negative stereotypes.” Speech that is likely to cause substantial disruption can be restricted, as can speech that contains vulgarities, or promotes drug use or other dangerous conduct that’s illegal for minors. But speech that simply expresses views that some see as negative toward particular races, sexes, religions, sexual orientations, and so on cannot be restricted. As the Seventh Circuit (the federal appeals court that is in charge of federal cases from Wisconsin) held in Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie School Dist. #204,

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Houman Harouni:

Nothing in the public debate on schooling suggests that education matters. Whether test scores do or don’t measure learning; whether schools should be privatized; whether Wikipedia will replace the teacher; whether we will ever escape Algebra; whether we can measure the ways in which kids of color “fail” or “succeed” on exams; whether to teach like a “champion”, a “guide”, or a “pirate”; whether the arts are a right or a privilege: all these questions owe their importance to the system of schooling that turned them into questions in the first place. The entire debate keeps folding back onto itself. It takes its own parameters for granted. The more one asks such self-referential questions (without, say, asking what on earth sets “success” apart from “failure”), the more one contributes to the education system as is—a system that has stagnated for seven generations.

Conor Friedersorf:

“If you want to know how Cooke ended up on her back, screaming in pain as the barbs from a stun gun delivered incapacitating electricity into her body, there are several possible answers,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes. “You could say this indignity was caused by her own stubbornness, her refusal to comply with the seemingly arbitrary dictates of a Border Patrol agent who was detaining her … Or you could blame the agent’s insistence on obeisance to his authority, which led him to assault an unarmed 21-year-old woman who posed no threat to anyone. But the ultimate responsibility lies with the Supreme Court, which has invited this sort of confrontation by carving out a disturbing and dangerous exception to the Fourth Amendment.”

Jonathan Rees:

In other words, the little fish (a.k.a all-online start-ups) will eventually eat the big fish (or all the big fish’s fish food) and the strategy will fail. The disruptors will in turn be disrupted themselves. This is indeed a very slippery slope

In the meantime, we will all have to cope with the fact that education technology has just become weaponized. Arizona State is now the first predator university. They are willing to re-define what education is so that they can get more students from anywhere. If they don’t kill other universities by taking all their students with a cheap freshmen year, they’ll just steal their fish food by underselling 25% of the education that those schools provide and leaving them a quarter malnourished. The result is that schools which stick to reasonable standards with respect to the frequency and possibility of teacher/student interaction now have to fear for their very existence.

While this is good for nobody, it is especially bad for faculty at all levels. Remember the good old days of MOOCs when the only people teaching those courses were going to be the best of the best – the superprofessors? Well, now that edX sees deflected tuition money on the table, they’ve thrown out that particular aspiration. No disrespect to the faculty of Arizona State University (which I’m sure has more than a few really outstanding professors on it), but I find it hard to believe that students are gonna say to themselves, “I need to take all my MOOCs from ASU because they have the best professors in every field.”

What we have here then are mostly ordinary faculty agreeing to participate in a scheme to steal the bread and butter of other ordinary faculty so that they won’t have their bread and butter stolen first. While I understand that the first rule of academia is every man and woman for themselves, in the long run the only folks who will benefit from this kind of inter-professional death match will be (to use a name coined by my old friend Historiann) the Lords of MOOC Creation…and whoever controls the endowments of Harvard and MIT.

Erin Richards:

The proposal comes amid continuing discussion over the rigor and selectivity of university teacher education programs.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said there are issues in Wisconsin around the recruitment of would-be teachers and the quality of their preparation. But he said the provision championed by Czaja is shortsighted and wouldn’t solve the problem.

“This is characteristic of bad and ineffective policy,” Bales said. “We think this puts all kids at risk.”

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the state teachers union, said teaching requires more than subject-matter expertise. Licensure, she said, provides some assurance that the person has received training in how to teach children.

“Children all across the state deserve to have teachers who have proven they can do the job,” Brey said.

In a 4-page letter this week to Assembly and Senate lawmakers, the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education said the changes would compromise the quality of adolescent education.

The association urged lawmakers to amend the budget, saying that putting unprepared teachers into classrooms was not only unwise and unfair, but “threatens the very foundation of a strong, competitive workforce.”

The state budget proposal is not final. It must be passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker. Walker had proposed easing teacher certification provisions in his original budget request.

The quality of Wisconsin teacher licensing schools has been in question recently.

When “A” stands for average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education receive sky high grades. How smart is that?

David Hookstead, via a kind reader:

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda.

“Undercommoning: A workshop on becoming a thief in the university,” was the exact wording of the subject line in a recent group email sent to University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars and others announcing the event, set for June 4.

The symposium, which will also be transmitted to a wider audience via Google Hangout, is described as a chance for campus radicals – students and scholars alike – to brainstorm ideas among their “newly formed Undercommoning Collective” on how to influence university resources and advance their socialist agenda and provocative causes.

Organizers did not respond to repeated requests for comment by The College Fix.

Their promotional literature – although rife with esoteric jargon, victimization claptrap, and academic gobbledygook – essentially explains that the daylong conference aims to equip participants with ideas on how to attack and exploit the American university from within.

One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.”

Details, here.

Jeremiah:

The idea of Manchu Sinicization is a hobgoblin unlikely to die anytime soon in China. Historians affiliated with what has become known as the “New Qing History” have been attempting to complicate this narrative for nearly three decades, and while scholars overseas — and even a few within China — are starting to come around, the dominant narrative inside China remains that the Manchus succeeded in ruling because, unlike earlier non-Han dynasties, they assimilated and adopted Chinese styles of rule and other cultural values. Indeed, according to the most strident adherents of “Sinicization”, the Manchus couldn’t help but assimilate once they encountered the vastly superior civilization of China.

Earlier this month, I came across an article in the China Daily on the study of Manchu language in China today and how this “archaic language is helping historians to solve Qing mysteries.” Sadly, after a few mentions of Manchu-language sources on the architectural and material culture of the Forbidden City and other imperial sites, the article descends into hoary and outdated old tropes:

Adeline Koh:

I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment.

Well, the reality is this: what has until recently been commonly understood as real “Digital Humanities” is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments from ever bigger budget cuts and potential dissolution.

Yes, of course, everyone will tell you that there are multiple debates over what actually defines Digital Humanities as a field, whether it is a field or not, yadda yadda yadda. But the projects which have until very recently dominated the federal digital humanities grants — the NEH grants, the ACLS grants, among others — are by default, the definition of the field, or the “best” the field has to offer. This means that until very recently and with few exceptions, the list of awardees rarely includes digital work that focuses more on culture than computation, projects that focus on digital pedagogy, or digital recovery efforts for works by people of color.

Mitch Henck.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Pat Schneider:

“Usually the first quarter is a honeymoon period when students are excited to be in school and behaviors are good. So when things were already deteriorating rapidly, it was a sign to me that this was not going in a good direction,” said Bush, 50, who has taught at Jefferson Middle School on Madison’s west side her whole career.

It wasn’t a specific incident, but the piling on of several serious incidents so early in the school year that troubled her.

“I’m seeing behaviors on a regular basis that I haven’t seen in 20 years of teaching,” Bush said. Some of this alarming conduct included students swearing at teachers, kicking trash cans, walking out of class, and kids wandering the hallways and in and out of classrooms, she said.

The behavior policy, implemented at the start of this school year, requires teachers to ask for outside help if they can’t control a misbehaving student. But Bush says such calls for help often go unanswered by overwhelmed support staff, who are supposed to walk an out-of-control student out of the classroom and “intervene” to get a sense of the causes of the misbehavior.

Related:

Madison’s disastrous long term reading results.

Deja vu: 2005: Gangs and school violence audio/video. More, here.

Police calls: 1996-2006.

Commentary from David Blaska

Mark Ponterelli:

Part 1: People not pixels, experiences not exposures

Articulating the value of any new experience through a problem statement is difficult. Potential users often don’t value what they can’t see. And ‘ideating’ use cases was simply not data driven enough to motivate the company to trust the opinions of the venture team. How could we deviate from the company’s traditional sustaining innovation processes (see Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma) to quickly and cheaply test whether people would embrace this technology?

We knew that ‘computational photography’ was a mouthful for most people. We also knew that any discussion of disparity algorithms and depth maps was beyond the target user who just want to focus on people, not pixels and experiences, not exposures. (Having a tagline doesn’t hurt the cause, by the way). We started by using tools like storyboards and animations to test what people might expect from this new camera. You could call this stage exploring the value of “better” – would people value better dynamic range in photos? Would they like better slow motion video? Would they like better sharpness? Of course. But it should not have been a surprise that we had limited success describing the real potential of something disruptive with usages that are much more sustaining in nature. Using these traditional practices, we learned that better was indeed better but better wasn’t ‘Wow!’

Alan Borsuk:

The content of the 100-question quiz I found on the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service is not like a college admission test. Some of the questions were easy.

(Who was the first president? What ocean is on the west coast of the United States?)

Others were not so easy.

(Name the chief justice. What did Susan B. Anthony do? What are the first three words of the Constitution? (“We the people…”) Quite a few involved provisions in the Constitution.

But, hey, you’d only need to get 60 out of 100 correct. And Edming said students could take the test as many times as they needed to.

Is the test so easy as to be no real problem? Or is the lack of civics knowledge so compelling that it calls for a graduation requirement? Advocates seem to argue both.

There is ample evidence of ignorance of civics. The National Assessment of Educational Progress released fresh results a few days ago from testing of samples of eighth-graders nationwide, concluding that only 23% were proficient or better in civics and 18% proficient or better in American history.

Wisconsin now has a set of requirements for graduation from public high schools, mostly relating to what courses are taken and total credits. But there is no requirement that students pass any test to graduate. There was a big controversy over a broader high school graduation test 15 years ago, but the idea died.

As far as private schools, this would be the first time there would be a state-imposed graduation requirement.

As much as any of us would like students to know about American government, would you want to stop someone from going to college or getting a job because they didn’t have a diploma due to a shaky grasp on the Constitution?

Scott Rank:

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

Jenny Turner:

ike contemplating Hamlet without the ghost: that’s what one historian calls anything about education in England that doesn’t mention the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. Before it, England had no such thing as a secondary-education system. If you were rich you might go to Eton or Rugby or Winchester or Harrow; if you were lucky you might live near a city merchant’s charitable foundation. But for most people there was nothing much at all. The 1869 act changed that by seizing the endowments that had been left, over the centuries, to the ancient grammar schools and distributing the money in what was, in some ways, a more sensible fashion: for example, by funding schools for girls. But the act also abolished provisions made for educating poor scholars completely free – this wasn’t the something-for-nothing society, this was Victorian England. And it helped split schools into three basic types, for working-class, middle-class and upper-class children – a divide, buried though governments have tried to make it, that continues to distort and disfigure the education system today.

There’s something else people need to know about the 1869 act. The heads of the endowed schools hated it, and set up a club, the Headmasters’ Conference, to defend themselves against it. It is now called the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, but it’s still the main body representing the elite education providers in Britain, the schools that, even now, can promise pupils a much better chance than average of gaining wealth, power, Ucas points, and membership of the mysterious old boys’ networks that continue to gird the globe. “More than half of the top medics, civil servants, lawyers, media figures and Conservative MPs” in Britain attended an HMC school, says David Turner, not to mention “pop stars – 22% of them, according to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission”. Worse, the very fact such privilege exists causes many people to feel that state schools, no matter how good they are, are never good enough. Academies, free schools and grammar schools, and church places, music places and places for whatever else: all spring from a sense of inadequacy that goes back decades.

Alec MacGillis

The Obama administration is set to achieve one of its top domestic policy goals after years of wrangling. For-profit colleges, which absorb tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants and loans yet often leave their students with little beyond crushing debt, will need to meet new standards or risk losing taxpayer dollars.

But as the July 1 deadline approaches, the troubled industry has been mounting a last-ditch effort to avert or roll back the new rules. And suddenly it’s getting a lift from a set of unlikely allies: traditional colleges and universities.

For years, the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business as both a rival and an unsavory relation — the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance. Yet in a striking but little-noticed shift, nearly all of the college establishment’s representatives in Washington are siding with for-profit colleges in opposing the government’s crackdown.

Most of the traditional higher education lobbying groups signed onto a recent letter to Congress stating their support for Republican legislation that would block the new restrictions on for-profit colleges, as well as undo or weaken other accountability rules for colleges. And a new report on higher education regulation commissioned by the Senate and overseen by the American Council on Education, the leading lobby group for traditional schools, slammed the rules on for-profit colleges as part of a broader critique of the administration’s approach.

Kayleb Moon-Robinson is a 12-year-old boy who lives in Virginia. One day at school, he kicked a trash can and was charged with disorderly conduct in juvenile court. A few weeks later, he disobeyed a new rule (made just for him) that he stay behind in the classroom while his peers left. When the school resource officer (SRO) arrived to take him to the principal’s office for disobedience, Kayleb reportedly struggled and swore. The officer allegedly slammed the boy down on a desk and handcuffed him. Kayleb is now being charged with felony assault on a police officer, and his future is very much in doubt.

Kayleb is autistic and African-American. The state of Virginia wants to brand him a criminal. The Center for Public Integrity names it as the state most likely to send students to jail. Virginia was also home to the Reginald “Neil” Latson case, in which a young man with autism encountered a police officer, didn’t comply with orders, started walking away and ended up in a brutal fight. He spent years in solitary confinement as a result before finally being pardoned.

Helen Wright:

Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set. For example, consider a “student” who runs the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm. Imagine a teacher who wants to teach the student a specific target hyperplane in some feature space (never mind how the teacher got this hyperplane in the first place). The teacher constructs a training set D=(x1,y1) … (xn, yn), where xi is a feature vector and yi a class label, to train the student. What is the smallest training set that will make the student learn the target hyperplane? It is not hard to see that n=2 is sufficient with the two training items straddling the target hyperplane. Machine teaching mathematically formalizes this idea and generalizes it to many kinds of learning algorithms and teaching targets. Solving the machine teaching problem in general can be intricate and is an open mathematical question, though for a large family of learners the resulting bilevel optimization problem can be approximated.

Alex & Seth

If you’re trying to build a self-driving car or detect whether a picture has a cat in it, big data is amazing. But here’s a secret: If you’re trying to make important decisions about your health, wealth or happiness, big data is not enough.

The problem is this: The things we can measure are never exactly what we care about. Just trying to get a single, easy-to-measure number higher and higher (or lower and lower) doesn’t actually help us make the right choice. For this reason, the key question isn’t “What did I measure?” but “What did I miss?”

To see the dangers of big data untethered to any other kind of analysis, consider the story of Zoë Chance, a marketing professor at Yale. In a TEDx talk that has been watched hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, she discusses her experience with a pedometer. She became so obsessed with increasing the count of her steps that she lost all proportion, taking walks at all hours and in all places. She told us that she even put the pedometer on her daughter so that her daughter’s steps would contribute to her number. She was able to “detox,” as she put it to us, only after she suffered an injury while walking in the basement, exhausted, in the wee hours of the night.

David Perry:

They are the problem, not a bureaucratizing corporate system that extracts wealth from students in exchange for the lowest possible standard of education that for-profits like ASU Online can provide. Yes, there are lots of problems with our system. Yes, I think the ways in which our prestige economy rewards research over teaching is an issue. But I am quite sure that faculty members pursuing grants is not what’s threatening higher education in America today.

Moreover, the forces driving the kind of quantitative assessment of scholarly productivity, where all that counts is what can be counted, are the same forces that create massive over-bureacratization, the for-profit wings of ASU, drive college costs ever higher, and otherwise contribute to a world in which StarbucksU looks like a solution. It may be, but it’s coming out of the same world that created the problems in the first place.

Leo Kozachkov

In his three recent and awesome posts on intelligence, Scott Alexander describes what it’s like to grow up intellectually lopsided (high verbal IQ and a low-ish math IQ, in his case). I’ve always been interested in intelligence (who isn’t), and I was struck by how similar Scott’s experience with lopsidedness is to mine. So that’s where this post is coming from. Note: whenever I say “IQ” hereafter I’m referring to math IQ. Let’s get started.

Terence Tao:

One can roughly divide mathematical education into three stages:

The “pre-rigorous” stage, in which mathematics is taught in an informal, intuitive manner, based on examples, fuzzy notions, and hand-waving. (For instance, calculus is usually first introduced in terms of slopes, areas, rates of change, and so forth.) The emphasis is more on computation than on theory. This stage generally lasts until the early undergraduate years.

The “rigorous” stage, in which one is now taught that in order to do maths “properly”, one needs to work and think in a much more precise and formal manner (e.g. re-doing calculus by using epsilons and deltas all over the place). The emphasis is now primarily on theory; and one is expected to be able to comfortably manipulate abstract mathematical objects without focusing too much on what such objects actually “mean”. This stage usually occupies the later undergraduate and early graduate years.

The “post-rigorous” stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. (For instance, in this stage one would be able to quickly and accurately perform computations in vector calculus by using analogies with scalar calculus, or informal and semi-rigorous use of infinitesimals, big-O notation, and so forth, and be able to convert all such calculations into a rigorous argument whenever required.) The emphasis is now on applications, intuition, and the “big picture”. This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond.

Beijinger:

Facebook was employed by police in Chaoyang District in a drug investigation that began April 17 and resulted in the detention of five foreign international school students for marijuana use and three foreign drug dealers carrying marijuana, ice, and heroin, The Beijing News reported Friday night

The revelation was part of a bevy of new details that emerged from a police report released Friday detailing an investigation that started when four international school students were caught smoking marijuana in the Beijing Riviera home of two of the suspects April 17.

It is unclear which of the suspects are still in custody, three weeks after the first arrest.

The report indicates police were initially tipped off by an unnamed informant who pointed out the suspects’ Facebook activity to police. Using that as a lead, investigators were able to catch the students in the act at home on the evening of April 17, with a camera crew in tow (video here).

The report names the four students detained in the original raid as being two New Zealanders and two Americans. From previous reports it is known that three of the suspects are 18 years old and the fourth, 17.

Molly Beck:

The added funding comes from a $250 per student special funding stream for school districts in the second year of the budget, according to the legislation package proposed by Republican co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee.

At the same time, the 1,000-student cap on the statewide voucher program would be lifted and students with disabilities would be eligible to apply for vouchers for the first time under a separate program. No more than 1 percent of a school district’s enrollment could receive vouchers, however.

The plan assures that private schools receiving school vouchers would receive about $7,200 for each K-8 student and about $7,800 for each high school student, the committee leaders said Tuesday. Walker’s proposed expansion would provide schools considerably less per student.

The voucher expansion would be paid for in a manner similar to the state’s open enrollment program for public schools — tax money would follow a student from the public district to the private voucher school. The plan could ultimately cost school districts about $48 million over the biennium, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo drafted last week for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

The package also proposes to adopt Walker’s budget language that prohibits the state superintendent from promoting the Common Core State Standards, and from adopting new academic standards created by the Common Core State Standards Initiative, though there are none in the works.

Erin Richards & Jason Stein:

Special-needs vouchers would allow parents of children with special needs to use taxpayer money to send their child to a private school. Standalone bills have been defeated twice in recent years, in large part because every established advocacy organization for those with disabilities have opposed the bills in public hearings.

Their chief concern: Private schools are not obligated to follow federal disability laws. They point to examples in other states where, in their view, under-qualified operators have declared themselves experts and started tapping taxpayer money to serve such students.

Critics also say the proposal would erode taxpayer funding for public schools.

Patrick Marley, Jason Stein & Erin Richards:

The GOP proposal would also phase out the Chapter 220 school integration program, put the Milwaukee County executive in charge of some low-performing Milwaukee Public Schools, create an alternative system for licensing teachers and require that high school students take the civics test given to those applying for U.S. citizenship.

Another provision would allow home-school students, virtual school students and private school students to participate in public schools’ athletic and extracurricular programs.

The plan would also reshape how the Racine Unified School Board is constituted, requiring it to have members representing different regions of the school district. Some of the students in that district are represented by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine).

Republicans were able to come up with more money for public schools and voucher schools in part by making a $105.6 million payment to public schools in July 2017 — outside of the two-year spending plan they are developing. That means the payment wouldn’t be counted in the budget lawmakers are writing, even though taxpayers would ultimately bear those costs.

Jessie Opoien

The funds will restore a $127 million cut next year that was proposed in Walker’s budget, and will provide an additional $100 per pupil in state aid the following year.

“It was really a challenge, but it was everybody’s first priority, and we made it,” said Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.

Darling and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, said Republicans also plan to move forward with a statewide expansion of the voucher program, capped at 1 percent of the students in each district.

The expansion would be modeled after the state’s open enrollment system, and would increase the amount of per-pupil aid for taxpayer-funded voucher schools to $7,200 per K-8 student and $7,800 per high school student.

That expansion will change the amount of funds that public schools receive, but Darling and Nygren declined to say by how much it could be.

“We don’t want the schools to suffer,” Darling said. “What we want to do is have the strongest education system we can for every child.”

Derek Thompson:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about the labor market for a longer forthcoming piece, and one of the mysteries I’ve been grappling with is: How do you describe how this economy is treating young people?

Let’s start by singing the necessary praises. Last year was was the best for job-creation this century. We’re in the middle of the longest uninterrupted stretch of private-sector job creation on record. After creating mostly low-paying service jobs for the first few years of the recovery, the labor market is finally churning out more high-skill jobs. All of these things should be great news for young people.

Harvard:

Phase 2: Causal Effects of Neighborhoods

The Effects of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates
Slides [PDF, PPT], Videos [Part 1, Part 2]
Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren

The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children – New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
Slides [PDF, PPT]
Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz

Carl Straumshein:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has chosen an unusual partner for its online M.B.A. program: massive open online course provider Coursera.

The program, known as iMBA, will deliver most of its course content through Specializations, Coursera’s term for course sequences. Students will be able to take those sequences in four different ways — two that award credit and two that don’t.

As with any MOOC, the content is available for free. Learners who wish to earn a credential but have no need for academic credit can pay a small fee, $79 a course, for an identity-verified certificate. Students can also apply to the College of Business and, if accepted, pursue the full M.B.A. degree. Finally, students can choose to take the courses individually for credit, postponing a decision about whether to go for a degree until they are well into the program.

Alec MacGillis:

The Obama administration is set to achieve one of its top domestic policy goals after years of wrangling. For-profit colleges, which absorb tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants and loans yet often leave their students with little beyond crushing debt, will need to meet new standards or risk losing taxpayer dollars.

But as the July 1 deadline approaches, the troubled industry has been mounting a last-ditch effort to avert or roll back the new rules. And suddenly it’s getting a lift from a set of unlikely allies: traditional colleges and universities.

For years, the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business as both a rival and an unsavory relation — the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance. Yet in a striking but little-noticed shift, nearly all of the college establishment’s representatives in Washington are siding with for-profit colleges in opposing the government’s crackdown.

Most of the traditional higher education lobbying groups signed onto a recent letter to Congress stating their support for Republican legislation that would block the new restrictions on for-profit colleges, as well as undo or weaken other accountability rules for colleges. And a new report on higher education regulation commissioned by the Senate and overseen by the American Council on Education, the leading lobby group for traditional schools, slammed the rules on for-profit colleges as part of a broader critique of the administration’s approach.

Josh Mitchell:

Erin Kelley grew up poor with parents who never went to college, but she is about to do something only 11% of Americans like her do: earn a degree.

The Boston College senior is the latest success story of Bottom Line, which counsels disadvantaged youth on how to get into college—and graduate. About 80% of the nonprofit’s clients earn a degree. And in an era of skyrocketing college costs and debate about the value of higher education, they typically leave with relatively little debt and a job waiting for them.

The work of Bottom Line, and other groups that provide intensive counseling, is increasingly being studied by academics seeking to boost the prospects of low-income, first-generation college students.

Gülden Özcan and Ersin Vedat Elgür

Gülden Özcan & Ersin Vedat Elgür (GÖ&EVE): Before getting into the details of your work, we would like to discuss with you the university as an institution and the current positions of academics in relation to politics. At the very beginning of your book Imagining the State you mention how the number of polemic style books and articles has been decreased and indeed almost become invisible as a result of academic research and evaluation practices that had been taking away the self-​confidence of academics under capitalism. With your work in general in a sense you re-​claim this right of producing polemical texts in the world of academia which has been dominated by the culture of capitalism. You not only claim but also practice this right by writing polemical books such as Imagining the State, The Fabrication of Social Order, Critique of Security and most recently, perhaps the most controversial of all, your edited book called Anti-​Security. In these works while dealing with the conventional assets of the discipline of political science such as the state, law, fascism and civil society on the one hand, you also introduce new terms, or rather the terms that only certain disciplines take issue with, to the area of political science such as police power, security, monstrous, the dead and pacification on the other hand. Can you tell us the kind of experience you have had while being in academia and producing such work? Also, our journal Kampfplatz, too, aims to offer a space for polemics (as, we hope, its name tells it all) and thus aims to have a kind of publication policy that stays away from academic rituals. Do you think there are ways to stay out of the academia in the act of producing knowledge, or is it possible to institutionalize knowledge-​production besides the academia? What would be the place for such activity: independent journals, independent academy-​like institutes, or perhaps community libraries?

Kate McGovern:

Give us the bigger picture here. What’s your philosophy of teacher retention?

The way we approach retention at DCPS is less about general retention and more about trying to make sure we’re keeping the teachers who have the greatest impact on kids. Everything we do at DCPS—the way we recruit and hire teachers, the way we support them and the way we approach retention—is based on teacher effectiveness.

It’s important to note, though, that we don’t necessarily see retention to mean being in front of students all day, every day. That’s not how careers work anymore. Many of our most talented educators aren’t interested in teaching in the same classroom for 30 years. I taught in DCPS for two years, and one of the reasons I left was because the career path seemed so linear. Today, we’ve really tried to layer in opportunities for teachers to grow and evolve their careers in different ways, inside and outside the classroom.

George Will:

Controversies about “free-range parenting” illuminate today’s scarred cultural landscape. Neighbors summon police in response to parenting choices the neighbors disapprove. Government extends its incompetence with an ever-broader mission of “child protection.” And these phenomena are related to campus hysteria about protecting infantilized undergraduates from various menaces, including uncongenial ideas.

The Meitivs live in suburban Montgomery County, which is a bedroom for many Washington bureaucrats who make their living minding other people’s business. The Meitivs, to encourage independence and self-reliance, let their 10- and 6-year-old children walk home alone from a park about a mile from their home. For a second time, their children were picked up by police, this time three blocks from home. After confinement in a squad car for almost three hours, during which the police never called or allowed the children to call the Meitivs, the children were given to social workers who finally allowed the parents to reclaim their children at about 11 p.m. on a school night. The Meitivs’ Kafkaesque experiences concluded with them accused of “unsubstantiated” neglect.

Christian Sandvig:

Today in Science, members of the Facebook data science team released a provocative study about adult Facebook users in the US “who volunteer their ideological affiliation in their profile.” The study “quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse” hard news “while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed.”*

The research found that the user’s click rate on hard news is affected by the positioning of the content on the page by the filtering algorithm. The same link placed at the top of the feed is about 10-15% more likely to get a click than a link at position #40 (figure S5).

The Facebook news feed curation algorithm, “based on many factors,” removes hard news from diverse sources that you are less likely to agree with but it does not remove the hard news that you are likely to agree with (S7). They call news from a source you are less likely to agree with “cross-cutting.”*

The study then found that the algorithm filters out 1 in 20 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified conservative sees (or 5%) and 1 in 13 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified liberal sees (8%).

Finally, the research then showed that “individuals’ choices about what to consume” further limits their “exposure to cross-cutting content.” Conservatives will click on only 17% a little less than 30% of cross-cutting hard news, while liberals will click 7% a little more than 20% (figure 3).

Fran Spielman:

Moody’s Investor’s Service on Tuesday dropped Chicago’s bond rating two more notches — to junk status — turning up the heat on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to raise property taxes and on the Illinois General Assembly to approve a Chicago casino.

“It is irresponsible to play politics with Chicago’s financial future by pushing the city to increase taxes on residents without [pension] reform,” Emanuel was quoted as saying in an emailed statement.

The decision to drop the bond rating that determines city borrowing costs — from Baa2 to Ba1 with a negative outlook — comes just days after the state Supreme Court unanimously overturned state pension reforms and placed Emanuel’s plan to save two of four city employee pension funds in similar jeopardy.

The rating applies to $8.1 billion in general-obligation debt, $542 million in outstanding sales tax revenue debt and $268 million in outstanding and authorized motor fuel tax revenue.

CBS Detroit:

A Michigan lawmaker proposed legislation Friday to create a state registry of homeschooled students following the deaths of two Detroit children who were found in a freezer.

The measure from State Rep. Stephanie Chang, a Detroit Democrat, would require visits with children at least twice per year by someone such as a licensed social worker or law enforcement officer. The bill would also require that parents who want to homeschool their children provide their names and ages, along with the name and address of a parent or guardian, to the superintendent of the school district in which they reside.

Chang cited the case of Stoni Ann Blair and Stephen Gage Berry as a reason for planning the legislation. Investigators believe Stephen was 9 when he died in August 2012 and that Stoni was 13 when she died the following May. Their mother, who is accused of torturing and killing them and then stuffing their bodies in the freezer, had said she homeschooled them.

Erik Stokstad:

Publishing is one of the most ballyhooed metrics of scientific careers, and every researcher hates to have a gap in that part of his or her CV. Here’s some consolation: A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year.

But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers.

The new research, published on 9 July in PLOS ONE, was led by epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with analysis of Elsevier’s Scopus database by colleagues Kevin Boyack and Richard Klavans at SciTech Strategies. They looked at papers published between 1996 and 2011 by 15 million scientists worldwide in many disciplines.

Mark Carrigan:

When questioned by a friend in 1980 as to whether he was happy at Princeton, the philosopher Richard Rorty replied that he was “delighted that I lucked into a university which pays me to make up stories and tell them”. He went on to suggest that “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” and that this is why he saw himself first and foremost as a writer, in spite of his already entrenched antipathy towards the philosophical profession which would grow with time. It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? This is the thought that keeps coming back to me as I’m preparing to participate in the Time Without Time symposium in Edinburgh later this week.

The problem is that employment in a university no longer requires that one simply reads books and reports what one thinks about them. Was this ever really the case? Either way, it’s a seductive vision. Unfortunately, it is belied by the over one hundred metrics to which each academic working within UK higher education is potentially subject. Contrary to Rorty’s ideal of scholars reading books, writing about them and occasionally deigning to share their reflections with students, we’re instead measured constantly in matters such as workload, teaching and research within institutions that are themselves ranked in a way constituted through the measurement of the individuals within them.

Alan Borsuk:

Don’t want excuses about why things aren’t going better on Milwaukee’s education scene? Well, meet the people who don’t want schools that demand no excuses.

A significant number of the latter are on the Milwaukee School Board. How significant the number is will become clear in coming months.

But it looks like they make up a growing force in deciding what kind of change there will be (or not be).

One of the interesting questions raised by School Board actions in the last two weeks is whether resisting a proposal to open a school will have an impact on Republican legislators in Madison who are considering ideas for taking some power, some schools, or both away from the board.

First, let’s describe “no excuses.” That is a label applied, sometimes in praise, sometimes in criticism, to schools nationwide that pursue ambitious goals with highly structured and strong (sometimes very) discipline. They strongly push, even down to kindergarten, a message that every student, most of them low-income minority kids, will get a college degree.

Basically, the schools stand for accepting no excuses for kids not succeeding. That includes downplaying or dismissing poverty as an explanation for low success rates.

In many instances, the “no excuses” schools have had notably higher rates of graduation and better test scores than nearby conventional schools. But in places such as New Orleans, there has been a lot of blowback against schools that are too demanding and too strict on discipline. Some schools have moderated their practices.

Adam Penenberg:

The essence of affection. The cuddle chemical. In other words, oxytocin.

This hormone, produced daily by your brain and mine, is the reason I’m on my back, trying to remain perfectly still inside a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine secreted in the basement of a cheerless building at the California Institute of Technology. Even though I am cocooned by earplugs and noise-cancellation headphones, it’s freakishly loud in here, a mix of jackhammer pulses and a hurricane whoosh of air. In other words, it’s your typical MRI experience — save for the Apple laptop bolted a couple of feet above my head, the mouse on my chest, and the unbearably sad video playing on the MacBook screen.

I have volunteered for this, signing up to be a test subject for Dr. Love, aka Paul J. Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University who popularized “neuroeconomics,” an emerging field that combines economics with biology, neuroscience, and psychology. In this first of three experiments, I’m helping Zak’s researchers gauge the relationship between empathy and generosity. While best-selling behavioral economists such as Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Steven D. Levitt (half of the Freakonomics duo) ponder how we make economic decisions, Zak wants to figure out why we do what we do.

Richard Goldberg:

A “Saturday Night Live” skit about a male student having sex with his female high school teacher painted the relationship as every teen boy’s dream, but drew a firestorm of criticism on social media.

The reaction to the comedy sketch reflected a growing view among law enforcement and victims’ advocacy groups that it is no laughing matter when a woman educator preys on her male students.

In U.S. schools last year, almost 800 school employees were prosecuted for sexual assault, nearly a third of them women. The proportion of women facing charges seems to be higher than in years past, when female teachers often got a pass, said Terry Abbott, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, who tracked the cases.

This year’s numbers are already slightly ahead of last year with 26 cases of female school employees accused of inappropriate relationships with male students in January compared to 19 cases the previous January.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

Don’t tell Natalie Anderson that she is better off without Everest College.

Until Sunday, Anderson was a student in medical assisting at Everest College in Phoenix. That day, she saw a message on Facebook: “This campus has been permanently closed.”

Anderson is unemployed, supporting two children on disability payments, and living in a Budget Suites of America, the only place she could find that came fully furnished. She’s “barely surviving,” she said, but dreams of becoming a nurse: “I want to get my kids off of the system.”

When she saw that Everest had closed, stranding her partway through her nine-month certificate, Anderson said, “I cried. Seriously, I did, because this was my chance.” Her voice broke: “Now I’m going to cry again.”

The saga of America’s largest for-profit college shutdown began last June and ended last week, when Corinthian Colleges abruptly shuttered 28 of its Everest and Heald college campuses. Since the beginning, when Corinthian began to teeter on the verge of collapse, there has been a tug between those who say Corinthian’s students are better off with their campuses closed — eligible to have their students loans forgiven — and those who say students should be allowed to finish their educations.

Andrew Pilsch:

There is a lot of talk of the “weird” in today’s humanities. From Karen Gregory’s “Weird Solidarities” to Graham Harman’s Weird Realism, we are going through a “weird” moment in humanities (we’re also going through a weird moment, if you catch my drift). “Weird” is, as you probably know, entering our academic lexicon not only through our own perplexity at emerging digital culture but also specifically through an engagement with the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft as a possible guide to that perplexed state of affairs.

A term I want to consider in this post, though, is another term in the horror lexicon: “creepy.” “Creepy,” according to the OED, comes from the “chill shuddering feeling caused by horror or repugnance,” a “creeping of the skin.” Recently, I’ve been thinking about creepy scholarship, as a possible related discourse to weird scholarship, sharing some of the same antecedents, though arriving at different results and deploying different methods.

Michael Schonhardt:

Some days ago a number of articles and blogposts appeared in my twitter timeline criticizing “twitter streams that do nothing more than post ‘old’ pictures and little tidbits of captions for them”1 , e.g. https://twitter.com/medievalreacts

Sarah Werner (whose blogpost I highly recommend!) and others rightly criticized these accounts for using unattributed and unidentified historical pictures for their own commercial purpose, making it impossible to access the underlying historical context of those pictures.

Following the debate on twitter, however, I stumbled across a few tweets (quoted below) that prompted me to scrutinize my own social media practice as a historian, especially the limitations and potential of scientific work using social media, and twitter in particular.

An increasing number of scholars not only employs the microblogging network for channeling private messages, but also to provide glimpses into their professional work and expertise. I have characterized this as a revival of the so called context of discovery (Reichenberg)2 .

Following both the logic of social media and the nature of historical research on the Middle Ages, a good deal of this information shared on twitter consists of digitized images of medieval manuscripts, to which sometimes additional information is added.

Fast Company:

A few years before Queens elementary school PS 244 became the first public school in the nation to go vegetarian, it decided to stop serving chocolate milk. That had never been done before in New York City’s school meals program. Robert Groff, the school’s principal, says even that first simple step took a lot of time and effort.

Groff, whose grandfathers both died of heart attacks in their 50s, co-founded PS 244 in 2008 on the premise that health and wellness is closely tied to academic performance. The chocolate milk removal, suggested at first by a third grader who was learning about nutrition labels, was followed by other menu changes that maximized healthy eating.

It soon became apparent that meat-free meals were the way to go, given that the city—which serves 850,000 meals a day—can’t necessarily afford top-of-the-line lean meat. “We had no focus on vegetarianism specifically,” says Groff. “If we were presented with a free-range, organic chicken, that’s something we would talk about.”

Motoko Rich:

In this small suburb outside Milwaukee, no one in the Menomonee Falls School District escapes the rigorous demands of data.

Custodians monitor dirt under bathroom sinks, while the high school cafeteria supervisor tracks parent and student surveys of lunchroom food preferences. Administrators record monthly tallies of student disciplinary actions, and teachers post scatter plot diagrams of quiz scores on classroom walls. Even kindergartners use brightly colored dots on charts to show how many letters or short words they can recognize.

Data has become a dirty word in some education circles, seen as a proxy for an obsessive focus on tracking standardized test scores. But some school districts, taking a cue from the business world, are fully embracing metrics, recording and analyzing every scrap of information related to school operations. Their goal is to help improve everything from school bus routes and classroom cleanliness to reading comprehension and knowledge of algebraic equations.
On a recent morning at Riverside Elementary School, Alyssa Walter, 7, opened her first-grade “data binder,” in which she recorded progress on reading and math tasks throughout the year. On one page, she showed a visitor six colored circles pasted into a drawing of a gumball machine, each dot representing her successful completion of a three-minute addition quiz.

Joshua Enpmerson Smith:

When Highland Park resident Liz Martinez talks about charter schools, she speaks with the same kind of pride she reserves for her children’s accomplishments. Her youngest daughter graduated from PUC Cals Charter Early College High School in 2010 and then Brown University. Her son graduated from another PUC charter school and was accepted to Notre Dame.

“They care about the kids,” Martinez says of the neighborhood charter schools where she opted to send them. “They know the kids by name. They know us by name, too. When you come to the high school, you feel welcome.”

The 46-year-old mother of three wasn’t as pleased with Franklin High School, a traditional LAUSD school her older daughter attended while the other children went to charter schools.

The public school is just five minutes down the street from Cals High School, but Martinez’s assessment of the two couldn’t be further apart.

“There’s a big difference,” she says. “At the charter schools, they told them they had to go to university. In Franklin High School, they don’t even care about the kids

Spencer Hsu:

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

Ilya Somin

By Ilya Somin April 21 at 8:13 PM

In a recent post on the notorious Maryland case where authorities have repeatedly detained two children in order to force the Meitiv family to stop them from walking home alone, I noted that the parents have the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent on their side. At Above the Law, experienced public interest lawyer Sam Wright agrees that the parents have the Constitution on their side, but cautions that bureaucrats and lower court judges routinely ignore such petty issues as constitutional rights when it comes to enforcing the their conceptions of “the best interests of the child”:

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Ilya Somin notes that the application of child welfare laws is subject to some (seemingly) robust constitutional constraints: there’s case law providing that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit and that it also, in the words of Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion in Troxel v. Granville, creates a “presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children.”

But the reality facing most parents in court is that that “presumption” isn’t actually a thing. Take the experience documented in a well-publicized essay on Salon last year: the author left her four-year-old unattended in a car for a few minutes on a mild day, the police were called, she found herself charged with a crime…. [Her lawyer] warned her that “juvenile courts are notorious for erring on the side of protecting the child” and suggested that fighting the case might lead her to lose her child. Faced with that possibility she, of course, folded. Anyone would…

And that’s been my experience as an advocate too. When I worked for a legal aid organization, one of my tasks was to represent parents in child welfare proceedings. No one in those sad, sequestered courtrooms cited Supreme Court cases; everyone just argued over what was in the best interest of the child….

So parents, be cautious: yes, there’s Supreme Court precedent on your side, but if you find yourself in court then the system’s conception of the “best interests of the child” will likely overrule yours.

Wright also notes that vaguely worded child welfare statutes give bureaucrats wide discretion that they sometimes exert in ways that punish perfectly reasonable and safe parenting practices, a problem I wrote about in this 2012 post.

Wright’s note of caution is well-taken. When I wrote that the Maryland situation “should be a relatively case,” I meant that applicable precedent clearly supports the parents, and that they should ultimately prevail if the constitutional issue is raised and courts take Supreme Court precedent seriously. However, achieving such a victory against determined bureaucrats could require prolonged and costly litigation. Sometimes, seemingly novel constitutional issues won’t be taken seriously until a case reaches the appellate level, where judges are more used to addressing constitutional questions. Many parents understandably lack the time, resources, and emotional stamina for a lengthy legal battle. And even a small risk of defeat might be unacceptable if it could mean losing custody of your children or suffering continued official harassment. I don’t blame parents who decide that such a fight isn’t worth it. The purpose of my earlier post was to analyze the relevant constitutional issue, not give advice to parents facing a potentially difficult legal battle with child welfare bureaucrats.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that, in the cases Wright cites, the constitutional issue mostly wasn’t even raised, much less decided. Anxious parents generally give in without putting up a fight. If the issue were raised in a sufficiently egregious case, and effectively pursued by determined parents with strong legal representation, the chances of ultimate victory might well be good. And such a victory could create an important precedent that helps deter similar official misconduct in the future, especially if the government agency is forced to pay damages as well as cease its harassment of the parents.

socialist worker.org

That night, the Warren school district’s testing coordinator received a call from a state official informing her about the “breach” and requesting that the student be suspended. The next morning, Warren school superintendent Elizabeth Jewett e-mailed her colleagues about the incident:

The DOE informed us that Pearson is monitoring all social media during PARCC testing. I have to say that I find that a bit disturbing–and if our parents were concerned before about a conspiracy with all of the student data, I am sure I will be receiving more letters of refusal once this gets out.

At the time, the Jewett didn’t even know that Pearson was doing far more than “monitoring” social media. Because the student’s Twitter handle didn’t involve her name, Pearson got Twitter to turn over her private personal information, on the grounds that she had violated the testing company’s “intellectual property.”

As Jewett predicted, the spying revelations added fuel to the fire for parents and educators who were already upset at the state’s cozy relationship with Pearson, and their joint agenda to implement a mandatory testing regime in line with the Common Core standards that have reshaped schools across the country with virtually no democratic discussion about their educational merits.

Amanda Ann Klein:

Maybe I’m biased, but I was always under the impression that the most important commodity at a university is the quality of its teaching staff, not the quality of its administrators. When I graduated from college in 1999 I didn’t think back fondly on all the administrators I had encountered along the way. So what explanation could possibly be given for proposing that university administrators deserve “competitive salaries” but the university’s teachers don’t? Why is the Board of Governors only concerned with attracting and retaining top administrative talent, not top teaching or research talent?

What, exactly, is going on? My university, you see, is very slowly being converted from an institution of education into a business. “Can’t it be both?” some of you might be thinking? “Wouldn’t academia, that dying giant, benefit from trimming the fat and keeping an eye towards pleasing the customer?” The answer, as someone who has slowly watched her university transition from a university into a Wal Mart over the last 8 years, is a resounding no.

Nick Timiraos:

Last week’s WSJ/NBC poll found that Americans, by more than two to one, are more worried about their ability to get ahead financially than they are about the widening income gap.

A new book by Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist, delivers some detailed insights into what’s behind those worries. Mr. Putnam joins President Barack Obama and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, for a discussion on poverty at Georgetown University on Tuesday.

Mr. Putnam drew attention to the growing segregation of America along class lines at a conference hosted last month by the Federal Reserve on economic mobility in which he outlined key themes from the book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”

Even as Americans have become less segregated across racial and religious lines than they were a generation ago, they have grown more segregated along class lines. Americans are much less likely to go to school, live with, or marry people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, Mr. Putnam said.

GERELATEERDE ARTIKELEN

The regulations were announced last year, but have attracted almost no attention thus far in China and abroad. This week Rogier Creemers, a Belgian China-specialist at Oxford University, published a comprehensive translation of the regulations regarding the Social Credit System, which clarifies the scope of the system. In an interview with Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant he says: ‘With the help of the latest internet technologies the government wants to exercise individual surveillance’.

In his view this surveillance will have a wider scope than was the case under the former East German system: ‘The German aim was limited to avoiding a revolt against the regime. The Chinese aim is far more ambitious: it is clearly an attempt to create a new citizen.’

The intentions of the new system are not only economical, fighting fraudulent practices, but also moral. ‘This is a deliberate effort by the Chinese government to promote among its citizens “socialist core values” such as patriotism, respecting the elderly, working hard and avoiding extravagant consumption’, says Creemers. A bad ‘credit code’ can result in being not eligible for certain jobs, housing or credit to start a company. ‘On the labour market you might need a certain score to get a specific job.’

Anya Kamanetz:

“Welcome to Iowa State University. May I take your paper, please?”

A bill circulating in the Iowa state Senate would rate professors’ performance based on student evaluations. Just student evaluations.

Low-rated professors would be automatically fired — no tenure, no appeals.

The bill’s author, state Sen. Mark Chelgren, a Republican, argues that too many students are taking on student loan debt but not getting their money’s worth in the classroom. “Professors need to understand that their customers are those students,” Chelgren told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Though the bill appears unlikely to pass, it has made national news because of the broader debate around student debt, the cost of college and what, exactly, students are getting for their money.

Kaitlyn Schallhorn:

An Indiana public school district segregated elementary field trips last week when administrators included only African-Americans on the college introduction tour.

According to ABC 57, South Bend Community Schools Corporation has planned a series of field trips to three local colleges for black third-graders in seven school districts. The excursions began last week with a trip to Ivy Tech Community College.

“I feel like all kids should be going.” Tweet This

Dr. G. David Moss, the director for the African-American student-parent services with the South Bend Community Schools Corporation, told ABC 57 that he wanted the third-grade students to begin to think of themselves attending college.

“I was hired to look at the issues facing African-American kids in the South Bend Community Schools Corporation and my job specifically says that I need to develop programs and develop strategies to help these kids and their families become more successful academically,” Moss said.

Kevin:

I was having a really good day today; recovering from post-semester burnout, recharging the batteries–all in all, getting to my Happy Place. But then I read Mark Bauerlein’s Op-ed in today’s New York Times, and now I’m all irritated. “What’s the Point of a Professor?” Bauerlein asks; he then goes on to tell us, basically, “not much.” And who’s responsible for this lamentable state of affairs, you might wonder? Well–there’s students, for one. In today’s consumerist and career-over-true-education society, they just don’t engage with professors outside of the classroom transaction. “They have no urge to become disciples,” according to Bauerlein. Why don’t they want to become disciples? Well, colleagues, there’s where it becomes our fault, too:

Sadly, professors pressed for research time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with a role model

Who even realizes they want to become an acolyte of a rock-star professor if they never get to the right “stage of development?” College seems to be reduced, in this view, to a several-year series of rote careerist transactions between infantilized students and disinterested professors. Gone are the halcyon days of yore when professors dispensed wisdom to adoring throngs of geek-groupies, never to return. O THE POOR CHILDREN.

Sam Blumenfeld:

Most Americans assume that we’ve always had public schools, that they came with the Constitution and are an indispensable part of our democratic system. But nothing could be farther from the truth as I discovered when I wrote my book, Is Public Education Necessary?, published in 1981. In writing that book I wanted to find out why the American people put education in the hands of government so early in their history. I was quite surprised to find that it had nothing to do with economics or the lack of literacy. It was the result of a philosophical change in the minds of the academic elite.

The U.S. Constitution does not mention education anywhere. It was left up to the states, parents, religious denominations, and school proprietors to deal with. True, in the early days of New England, towns were required to maintain common schools supported and controlled by the local citizenry. This had been done to make sure that children learned to read so that they could read the Bible and go on to higher education. But there was much homeschooling, private tutoring, private academies, church schools, and dames’ schools for very young children. There were no compulsory school attendance laws, and no centralized state control over the curriculum.

This system, or lack of it, produced a highly literate population that could read the Federalist Papers, the King James Version of the Bible, and everything else that was published. All one has to do is read a Farmer’s Journal of those early days to realize the high level of literacy that was enjoyed by the general population in America prior to the advent of the public schools.

Resaerch Digest:

For adults, let alone children, time is a tricky concept to comprehend. In our culture, we carve it up into somewhat arbitrary chunks and attribute words to those durations: 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 of those in an hour and so on. We also have a sense of what these durations feel like. Children start using these time-related words at around the age of two or three years, even though they won’t master clocks until eight or nine. This raises the question – what do young children really understand about duration words?

Katharine Tillman and David Barner began by asking dozens of three- to six-year-olds to compare several pairs of durations (e.g. Farmer Brown jumped for a minute. Captain Blue jumped for an hour. Who jumped more?). As well as minutes and hours, other durations used were seconds, days, weeks, months and years. This test showed that by age four, the children were tending to get more of these questions right than would be expected if they were just guessing. With increasing age, the children got better at the task. In other words, from age four and up, children have a sense of the rank order of different duration terms.

What young children don’t have, according to the findings from further experiments, is a sense of the actual lengths of time that these terms refer to. When the comparison test was repeated, but with different amounts of each duration, the children were flummoxed. Take, for example, the question “Farmer Brown jumped for three minutes. Captain Brown jumped for two hours. Who jumped more?”As adults, we aren’t thrown by the minutes outnumbering the hours by three to two, because we know that an hour is 60 times longer than a minute, and that an hour feels much longer than minute. However, even five-year-olds, who know well the principle that an hour is longer than a minute, were thrown by these kinds of comparisons. This suggests they don’t yet have a very good understanding of the formal definitions of duration words, nor what the different durations feel like.

Todd Milewski:

“There should be some room for inflationary increases, and our schools have been really constrained for several biennia now. So zero is not a win. Certainly, it’s better than what it was but, frankly, nothing has changed over the last six months so maybe the budget should have been put in place as 0 percent to begin with and we could have worked from there. Now we’re working from a place of disadvantage.”

Some school districts have responded to state cuts by asking voters to approve referenda for funding. Last month, Madison voters approved a $41 million referendum that will pay for upgrades and expansions in 16 schools.

Evers said districts have a success rate of 60 to 70 percent when they go to referendum, but that kind of arrangement could lead to legal challenges.

Much more on Wisconsin’s K-12 tax & spending climate, here.

Betsy Thatcher:

@hat a difference a year makes in the world of Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law.

Last year, the Oakfield School District needed a small painting job done as part of a refurbishing project at one of the small district’s two schools. The project fell within the state’s prevailing wage law – which meant the Fond du Lac County District had to pay painters $22.53 per hour in wages and benefits, according to Jackie Hungerford, administrative assistant with the district.

The work won’t take place until this year, but because the district signed the contract with a local painter in 2014, it was able to lock in that year’s rate, Hungerford says. That’s a good thing. This year, she said, the state’s prevailing wage and benefits package

for that painter in Fond du Lac County is $42.35 per hour, nearly double the cost. “You never know from year to year what the dollar amount is,” says Hungerford. “It makes it hard to bid a job.”

While the painting job will be done, other projects affected by the prevailing wage law will not.

Vipal Monga:

Five years ago, 80 clerks and salespeople at Pilot Travel Centers LLC spent a combined 3,200 hours a week tracking and paying for orders for thousands of goods, ranging from candy bars to diesel fuel.

They typed the orders into an accounts-payable database, and printed out thousands of checks to pay suppliers. After slipping them into envelopes and adding postage, they put the checks in the mail.

“It was just awful,” said David Clothier, treasurer of the Knoxville, Tenn., company, which operates more than 500 Pilot Flying J truck stops nationwide. “There were humans everywhere.”

Today, a computer “robot”—basically software—automates these tasks. Suppliers send their invoices to Pilot Travel electronically. Its software sends out payments and records every transaction. As a result, the company needs just 10 clerks working a weekly total of 400 hours to pay suppliers.

Robots are taking over corporate finance departments, performing work that often required whole teams of people. Big companies such as Pilot Travel, New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and GameStop Corp., of Grapevine, Texas, are among those using software to automate many corporate bookkeeping and accounting tasks.

Elizabeth Redden:

A recent investigative news program combined with a report from a governmental anticorruption commission have stirred up a debate in Australia about the prevalence of fraud in international student recruitment and the alleged slippage of academic standards as the country’s universities have grown increasingly dependent on the tuition these students bring. The debate in Australia — where international students account for more than a fifth of university enrollments, compared to just about 4 percent in the U.S. — arguably has implications for American universities as they seek to grow international student enrollments and increasingly embrace the use of commissioned agents in recruiting, a practice widely accepted in Australia.

Alan Borsuk:

Everyone was awaiting word from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau on revenue projections for the next two years. The hope was that the estimates would be raised from earlier figures, which would allow more money to be put into play and allow Republicans to get out from under some Walker proposals that have been highly unpopular. That included his idea of dropping state aid to schools for 2015-’16 by $127 million.

Public schools leaders around the state knew months ago not to expect much, if any, new money in the state budget, either in terms of state aid or in terms of permission from the state to spend more (using property tax increases, primarily).

In general, school officials wanted a funding increase that would take into account rising costs in some areas, especially given the spending lids schools have lived under and the reductions that have been made in recent years.

The school people were surprised when, instead of staying flat, they found themselves facing cuts under Walker’s proposal. Including in many Republican-oriented communities, a lot of opposition arose to cuts that would result.

In April, a Marquette Law School Poll (disclosure: I do some work on the polling effort) found 78% opposition to the $127 million cut. Other poll results also indicated a shift in sentiment toward supporting spending on public schools. Politicians noticed this.

But when the revenue estimate came out on Wednesday, it didn’t change prior projections. There would be no new money. That means big problems for a variety of parties, including the University of Wisconsin System.

But the main item to get attention was the $127 million K-12 problem. Republican leaders, including the governor himself, said they were not going to make that cut. Some said doing something about kindergarten through 12th-grade funding was their first priority.

Fine, but all that really was done was to go back to a flatline budget for state aid to schools, which was where the conversation stood in January. An inflation adjustment? Not much momentum behind that currently. Money is too tight, and there’s still that UW issue, among other things.

Related: Madison spends 16% of its $413,700,000 budget on healthcare.

Madison School District (PDF):

Annual Advanced Learning Department report in the fall

Parent Meeting and Listening sessions are providing valuable

Systematic communication plan is a priority for families and schools

Development of a year-at-a-glance calendar for enrichment opportunities and identification based on testing schedule

Greater focus on systems supporting underrepresented populations

Coaching and professional development for AL-IRTs

Train AL-IRTs to use OASYS and STAT Reports

Work with MTSS and C&I to develop guidance and options for schools within a more comprehensive system

Provide increased online Intervention Resources

Develop and implement Honors Guidance Document

Work collaboratively with Fine Arts and the Arts Rich Schools Blueprint to identify options for Advanced Learners

Madison School District

Why is it important for all of our children in Madison to have equitable access to a comprehensive arts education and to thrive in an arts rich school? Through creating, presenting, responding, and connecting in multiple art forms, students can come to recognize and celebrate their own unique ways of seeing, doing, and communicating. With access to a comprehensive arts education, our students can explore and problem-solve through productivity and teamwork. Skill development through an art form teaches students to describe, analyze, and interpret visual, aural, and kinesthetic images. This strengthens skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening within text and language of that art form, and contributes to their comprehensive literacy skills.

The arts also impact our local economy by creating a sense of place, developing skilled creative workers for non-arts related careers, helping to revitalize neighborhoods and giving communities a competitive edge in attracting businesses and talent. We believe that arts rich schools are a foundational piece of our community fabric that cultivate the creative thinking, innovation, and attractive community that will fuel our economic future. Students trained in the arts as part of their K-12 education will have the opportunity to contribute to one of our city’s major economic engines. The local abundance of cultural offerings and the arts are cited frequently as attributes that support Madison being listed as a top place to live in the United States.

The Arts Rich Schools Blueprint will also build on a long history of arts education support between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the community.

The Madison School District administration tried, a number of years ago, to kill the popular strings program.

View a longer version of the Arts Rich School Blueprint (PDF).

Arts Rich School Continnum Rubric – 2015-16 (PDF).

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Work continues on the creation of an Employee Handbook to take effect once the Collective Bargaining Agreements expire in June, 2016. MTI-represented employees continue to be covered by Collective Bargaining Agreements through June 30, 2016. The Board of Education has approved a process for the development of the Employee Handbook which includes a joint Oversight Group composed of five (5) appointees by MTI, two (2) by AFSCME, one (1) by the Building Trades Council, three (3) building principals and up to five (5) other administrators. It was agreed in negotiations for the 2015-16 Contracts that the Collective Bargaining Agreements will serve as the foundation of the Handbook.

Madison School District (PDF):

MMSD will spend $61 million on health insurance this year.

One of Every Six Dollars is Spent on Health Insurance in the MMSD budget.

Health Insurance premiums account for 16% of the MMSD budget.

Over 3,900 employees are enrolled in the MMSD plan

The MMSD plan design lacks common features that promote efficient utilization – the plan has no deductibles, no co-insurance requirements, and no employee premium contribution

Our multi-year claims experience (medical loss ratio) does not suggest that MMSD should expect less-than-market pricing

Medical trend (inflation) continues to grow at 7-8% annual increases (including 3-4% ACA fees)

Health insurance costs have long been an issue in the Madison Schools.

Drew DeSilver:

Scientists and the general public have markedly different views on any number of topics, from evolution to climate change to genetically modified foods. But one thing both groups agree on is that science and math education in the U.S. leaves much to be desired.

In a new Pew Research Center report, only 29% of Americans rated their country’s K-12 education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM) as above average or the best in the world. Scientists were even more critical: A companion survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that just 16% called U.S. K-12 STEM education the best or above average; 46%, in contrast, said K-12 STEM in the U.S. was below average.

Standardized test results appear to largely bear out those perceptions. While U.S. students are scoring higher on national math assessments than they did two decades ago (data from science tests are sketchier), they still rank around the middle of the pack in international comparisons, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.

Related: connected math.

Math task force.

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement

Ben Schmidt:

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

You can enter any other word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here.

Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.

Siobhan Roberts:

Vladimir Voevodsky had no sooner sat himself down at the sparkling table, set for a dinner party at the illustrious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, than he overturned his empty wine glass, flipping bowl over stem and standing the glass on its rim—a signal to waiters that he would not be imbibing. He is not always so abstemious, but Voevodsky, that fall of 2013, was in the midst of some serious work.

Founded in 1930, the Institute has been called “the earthly temple of mathematical and theoretical physics,” and is a hub for all manner of rigorous intellectual inquiry. Einstein’s old house is around the corner. In the parking lot a car sports a nerdy bumper sticker reading, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”—which might very well be aimed directly at Voevodsky. Because during the course of some professional soul-searching over the last decade or so, he’d come to the realization that a mathematician’s work is 5 percent creative insight and 95 percent self-verification. And this was only reinforced by a recent discovery around the time of the dinner party: He’d made a big mistake.

Amy Kazmin:

Yet in their zeal to build schools, and to encourage attendance with incentives such as free lunches, Indian policy makers have paid scant attention to what is taking place inside the new classrooms. There has been little serious national debate over how to teach fundamental skills effectively to millions of first-generation students.

“The government said let’s get children into school, we’ll worry about quality later, and we’ll worry about content of teaching later,” says Vimala Ramachandran, a professor at New Delhi’s National University of Educational Planning and Administration. “They separated the quantitative goals from what is happening inside the school.”

Ms Aiyar echoes that view: “The government focused entirely on getting schools to children and getting children into schools. It assumed the teaching-learning story would take care of itself.”

Some argue India’s low learning levels are the result of an “overambitious” national curriculum, which assumes all students will master reading in their first year of school, even if they come from “text-scarce” environments, with little or no prior exposure to written material. “By the end of grade 1, they are supposed to be done with reading,” says Ms Duflo. “It’s a complete fantasy.”

Madison, too, has long dealt with disastrous reading results.

.

Gillian Tett:

But there is one glaring exception to this trend: student debt. Over the past decade, the level of outstanding student debt has almost tripled to $1.3tn.

And although the law makes it relatively hard to walk away from student debt, defaults are also strikingly high. There are many ways to measure this figure but the Department of Education reports that Americans who were due to start repaying their student debts in 2011 had a 13.7 per cent default rate last year. This is a touch lower than the previous year (14.7 per cent) but dramatically higher than it had been since the mid-1990s; and it is higher than the credit card default rate.

This figure may understate the problem, however. The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee released a report late last year which suggests that actual defaults (using its data) were just 9 per cent but the “shadow” default rate — the debt “delinquencies” that are not fully reported — could be 23 per cent. Other economists have similar estimates.

Nations Report Card:

Nationally, eighth graders’ average scores on the NAEP U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments showed no significant change in 2014, compared to 2010—the last assessment year. However, several student groups have made gains. In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in geography, and 23 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in civics. Students performing at or above the Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.

This interactive report presents average score and achievement level results of the nation’s eighth-grade students by gender, race/ethnicity, parental education levels, and other student groups. The report also describes classroom practices and students’ attitudes regarding these subjects, and features sample questions and student performance on those questions. Below is an overview of the results and the assessment content for the 2014 U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments.

Eva Moskowitz:

Teaching is everything. You build relationships, you inspire, you draw out human potential. There is no more important job or work than teaching and learning!
While this week is Teacher Appreciation Week, in my mind, every day is teacher appreciation day.
As the leader of this organization, I appreciate you; as a parent and as a Success Academy parent, as an educator, I appreciate all that you do!

I appreciate your hard work. I appreciate your high expectations. I appreciate the demands you make of our scholars. I appreciate the joy you infuse into your classrooms and how nurturing you are. I appreciate your willingness to collaborate and be school teachers rather than classroom teachers. I appreciate how invested you are in the whole child, in discovery-oriented science, conceptual math, and great critical and creative thinking!

Laura Waters:

I’ve been really good about not quoting Diane Ravitch, but I’m off the wagon. In a recent blog post she demeans national civil and human rights groups who are working hard to help the U.S. Senate understand the necessity of maintaining ESEA’s mandate of annual standardized testing. As these groups explained in a press release today, “we cannot fix what we cannot measure.”

We all know this. We know that the achievement gap between poor children and wealthier children, between whites and blacks, between children with and without disabilities, was only revealed through states’ analyses of disaggregated data from annual standardized tests.

Peter Schmidt:

College administrations react to hate crimes, hate speech, and other high-profile incidents of bias by focusing mainly on repairing their institution’s reputation, two new studies conclude.

The administrations’ responses generally paper over underlying prejudices in the campus culture, leaving the victims at risk of further harm in the future, argue the researchers, who presented the studies’ findings on Monday in Chicago, at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

“College presidents are willing to address the racist but rarely the racism,” says a paper summarizing one of the studies, based on a rhetorical analysis of presidents’ statements in response to bias incidents.

Bull Market

When the subprime crisis hit, Congress agreed to bailout the financial industry only after they were promised homeowners would see relief, too. But in the years since, it’s become clear even to Tim Geithner, the architect of the bailouts, that while the Administration went out of its way to save the arsonists of the crisis, the people burned by it were left without an Emergency Room.

Today, history risks repeating itself, as students scammed by a predatory for-profit school have yet to see meaningful relief — even as the school itself was bailed out by the government. And just as in the foreclosure crisis, the very entity in charge of providing relief to victimized borrowers has a financial incentive to leave them screwed.

Steve Denning:

There was considerable interest in the Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (Free Press, 2011) about the possibility of a “Montessori Mafia”, given that the Montessori approach has spawned a creative elite, including Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, cook Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.

The Montessori learning method establishes a collaborative environment without grades or tests, multi-aged classrooms, as well as self-directed learning and discovery for long blocks of time.

Montessori methods go against the grain of traditional educational methods but they have uncanny parallels in the success of their alumni:

Richard Atkinson & Saul Geiser:

AT first glance, the College Board’s revised SAT seems a radical departure from the test’s original focus on students’ general ability or aptitude. Set to debut a year from now, in the spring of 2016, the exam will require students to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of subjects they study in school.

The revised SAT takes some important, if partial, steps toward becoming a test of curriculum mastery. In place of the infamously tricky, puzzle-type items, the exam will be a more straightforward test of material that students encounter in the classroom. The essay, rather than rewarding sheer verbosity, will require students to provide evidence in support of their arguments and will be graded on both analysis and writing. Vocabulary will move away from the obscure language for which the SAT is noted, instead emphasizing words commonly used in college and the workplace.

Reddit:

The distance of Maltese and Arabic seems greatly overestimated. The distance between Italian and Maltese is certainly underestimated, and the lack of correlation with English is baffling considering that almost a third of words in every day speech of the Maltese are English loanwords (that are now fully incorporated into the language).

The lexical distance between Polish and Ukrainian seems overestimated, but then I am no expert so I cannot confirm this. Also as was mentioned in the previous thread, I find it very unusual that the correlation between West Slavic (Polish, Czech) and German languages was not explored, especially considering how many common words in these languages are of full German origin.

Jonathan Rees:

Now that it’s in Arizona State’s financial interest to accept as much MOOC credit as possible, all prior restraint will disappear. Indeed, now that the cat is out of the bag, look for more schools to become predator universities any day now.

What this means for you superprofessors is that your time to “experiment” is now over. Whether you like it or not, people will soon be giving credit for your MOOCs to the exclusion of courses taught by living, breathing faculty all around the world. I think this gives you two options:

a) Explain exactly why your video lectures and computer algorithms are pedagogically superior to actual human beings with PhDs. Or

b) Get out of the MOOC business altogether.

Molly Knefel:

When he was young, Cadeem Gibbs was really into school. Bright, curious, and naturally rebellious, he enjoyed arguing the opposing point of view in a classroom discussion just to see how well he could do it. “I was always academically inclined,” says the Harlem native, now 24. “I always wanted to learn.”

But there were plenty of stressors in his young life—a violent upbringing, a household in poverty—and the struggle to navigate them pulled him away from his education. He started getting into trouble and ended up in the juvenile justice system at the age of 12. That first contact with “the system” began a 10-year cycle of incarceration that ended only when Gibbs was released from an upstate New York prison two years ago, at the age of 22. He was just a sixth grader when first arrested, but he would never complete a school year as a free child again.

Americans believe that education is the great equalizer, the key that opens the door to a better future and lifts young people out of poverty. And this is true, to an extent—those who finish high school or college have lower unemployment rates and higher incomes than those who don’t. But while people who don’t complete their education are more likely to stay in poverty, they’re also more likely to come from poverty. In the 21st century, so-called reformers have emerged to prescribe everything from charter schools to iPads in order to boost poor students’ educational achievements.

Sarah Brown Weisling:

Dear Evan, Lauren, and Zachary,

Many (many) years ago, there was this little girl who spent her summer afternoons creating neighborhood schools for all of the children on her block. She mimicked what school looked like to her: rows of desks, questions and answers, praise and encouragement from the teacher, stickers and stars on the top of “assignments.” She imagined what it would be like to free an idea in someone else’s mind. She was crestfallen when the game of tag pulled her “students” away all too soon in the afternoon. She would wake up early and try to think about how to make learning fun.

What I want you to know is that there are things in this world that you will choose, and there are things in this world that will choose you. That little girl was meant to be a teacher. Although it would take her years to recognize it, that meant you would, by default, know the life of a teacher.

Sometimes I wonder how you feel about this. Sure, there are parts of it you love: hanging out in mom’s classroom, feeling like little celebrities when my students see you at the grocery store. But there’s also the Saturday afternoons I’ve spent grading papers when you’re outside playing, or the dry cereal in to-go bags some mornings when I’ve already been up for hours trying to finish responding to that stack of papers.