Alan Borsuk:

He called Trump “despicable” and said, “This man and what he’s done is qualitatively different than anything else I’ve seen.”

“Not to take a stand is to co-sign on the injustice,” he said.

None of this was what prompted my visit to Fuller’s office at Marquette University, where he has held the title “distinguished professor” since he resigned as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools in 1995.

The Institute for the Transformation of Learning, which he heads, was for years a booming operation, with involvement in school-related initiatives and school choice advocacy in Milwaukee and nationwide. The organization is now pretty much just Fuller.

Dion J. Pierre:

Stewart maintains that the complaints against him are “exaggerated.” The embattled VP said that racial animus at the South Carolina school triggered the impeachment controversy. And that the report that detailed his alleged misconduct was leaked in retaliation for his refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at a meeting of student senate. In an interview with the Anderson Independent Mail Stewart was defiant:

“This is a social lynching…There’s a deeper systemic issue in which people are choosing what they want to hear, choosing what they want to believe exists and that’s why sitting for the pledge was so important,” he said.

But Clemson SGA senators said that the question before the governing body is one of fitness, not race. Stewart “abused his power” as an RA when he violated his female residents’ privacy.

aeon:

Why can we count to 152? OK, most of us don’t need to stop there, but that’s my point. Counting to 152, and far beyond, comes to us so naturally that it’s hard not to regard our ability to navigate indefinitely up the number line as something innate, hard-wired into us.

Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do. The hunter-gatherer who could tell which herd or flock of prey was the biggest, or which tree held the most fruit, had a survival advantage over the one who couldn’t. What’s more, other animals show a rudimentary capacity to distinguish differing small quantities of things: two bananas from three, say. Surely it stands to reason, then, that numeracy is adaptive.

But is it really? Being able to tell two things from three is useful, but being able to distinguish 152 from 153 must have been rather less urgent for our ancestors. More than about 100 sheep was too many for one shepherd to manage anyway in the ancient world, never mind millions or billions.

The cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez of the University of California at San Diego doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom that ‘number’ is a deep, evolved capacity. He thinks that it is a product of culture, like writing and architecture. ‘Some, perhaps most, scholars endorse a nativist view that numbers are biologically endowed,’ he said. ‘But I’d argue that, while there’s a biological grounding, language and cultural traits are necessary for the establishment of number itself.’

‘The idea of an inherited number sense as the unique building block of complex mathematical skill has had an unusual attraction,’ said the neuroscientist Wim Fias of the University of Gent in Belgium. ‘It fits the general enthusiasm and hope to expect solutions from biological explanations,’ in particular, by coupling ‘the mystery of human mind and behaviour with the promises offered by genetic research.’ But Fias agrees with Núñez that the available evidence – neuroscientific, cognitive, anthropological – just doesn’t support the idea.

If Núñez and Fias are right, though, where does our sense of number come from? If we aren’t born equipped with the neural capacity for counting, how do we learn to do it? Why do we have the concept of 152?

Tim Henderson:

Tyler and Alissa Hodge, two of the hundreds of young professionals who have moved here in recent years, noticed that despite the influx there was not a single city-style coffee shop downtown.
 
 So the couple opened one in May, with sofas, baked goods and local micro-roaster beans, adding a play area as a nod to the family-friendly culture of this southern Indiana city and their own three children.
 
 “The 18- to 35-year-olds expect something like that, but they just didn’t have it,” said Tyler Hodge, 32, who used crowdfunding to help finance the shop. The same tactic was used for a rock climbing gym opened in September by a group of young engineers who, like Hodge, spend their weekdays working at Cummins Inc., the diesel engine company that is the city’s largest employer.
 
 “There’s not that much to do here for the young people,” said Juan Valencia, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant who is one of the founders of the climbing gym. “We think this will help.”

Ben Myers and Brock Read:

In a sweeping plan to rework the tax code unveiled on Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives floated a new strategy for raising revenue: Tax college endowments.

Some college endowments, that is.

Deep within the plan — look here, on Page 75 — is the language that spells out which institutions would be affected. The bottom line: Only the most-affluent colleges need worry. Colleges would be subject to the tax, set at 1.4 percent of net investment income, only if their endowment assets total at least $100,000 per student.

Ian Sample:

It was the case of the missing PhD student.

As another academic year got under way at Imperial College London, a senior professor was bemused at the absence of one of her students. He had worked in her lab for three years and had one more left to complete his studies. But he had stopped coming in.

Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple.

“He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.”

It is not an isolated event. Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain’s top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a “missing generation” of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects.

Eric Kelderman:

In broad terms, the bill would eliminate or consolidate a number of tax deductions meant to offset the costs of higher education for individuals and companies, including the Lifetime Learning Credit, which provides a tax deduction of up to $2,000 for tuition, a credit for student-loan interest, and a $5,250 corporate deduction for education-assistance plans.
The bill proposes new taxes on some private-college endowments and on compensation for the highest-paid employees at nonprofit organizations, including colleges and nonprofit academic hospitals. The plan would also tax the tuition waivers that many graduate students receive when they work as teaching assistants or researchers.

Perhaps most significant, the bill would result in many fewer people itemizing their deductions for charitable gifts. Higher-education experts warned that that change could lead to a steep decline in donations to colleges.

Natasha Singer & Danielle Ivory:

Silicon Valley is going all out to own America’s school computer-and-software market, projected to reach $21 billion in sales by 2020. An industry has grown up around courting public-school decision makers, and tech companies are using a sophisticated playbook to reach them, The New York Times has found in a review of thousands of pages of Baltimore County school documents and in interviews with dozens of school officials, researchers, teachers, tech executives and parents.

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

Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Reading Recovery

Karen Rivedal:

“Kids aren’t going to be able to take risks and push themselves academically, without having a trusting support network there,” said Lindsay Maglio, principal of Lindbergh Elementary School, where some teachers improved on traditional get-to-know-you exercises in the first few weeks of school by adding more searching questions, and where all school staff are engaged in community-building lessons in small-group sessions with students taking place at set periods throughout the year.

While noting that getting to know their students is already “something we do feel strongly about,” fourth-grade teacher Beth Callies, now in her 11th year at Lindbergh, said she saw value in a districtwide strategy emphasizing it. “It’s a good push to remind us,” Callies said.

Beyond asking her students to describe themselves through traditional questions such as choosing what animal or what TV show they would like to be, and where they would like to take a vacation and why, Duernberger also invited them to free-associate this year by responding to the line: “I wish my teacher knew this about me.”

Common ground
The students’ answers, which they also read to each other in a follow-up exercise, were as varied as their life stories. Students said they liked to go camping, had two brothers, worked hard, could read-upside down, and had two dogs at home before mom gave one away.

Teachers have been encouraged to mine a book by educator Zaretta Hammond known as “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” for new techniques and deeper understanding of the issue. At Lindbergh, Maglio built time into the school day for all staff to meet once a week for 40 minutes with students in small groups “to build community and work on trust,” with possible lessons on topics such as resolving conflicts or bullying.

“It’s really based off the issues that kids are having, so there’s not a set structure (for the weekly sessions),” Maglio said. “We just need to think about being more purposeful in how we plan for all our students. It might be working for 80 percent of students, but we need to think more about the ones we may be struggling to reach.”

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most – now nearly $20,000 per student.

Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Reading Recovery

Steve Lohr:

The national priority in education can be summed up in a four-letter acronym: STEM. And that’s understandable. A country’s proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is vital in generating economic growth, advancing scientific innovation and creating good jobs.

The STEM campaign has been underway for years, championed by policymakers across the ideological spectrum, embraced in schools everywhere and by organizations ranging from the YWCA to the Boy Scouts. By now, the term — first popularized and promoted by the National Science Foundation — is used as a descriptive identifier. “She’s a STEM,” usually meant as a compliment, suggests someone who has a leg up in the college admissions sweepstakes.

Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data

Claire Wardle, PhD Hossein Derakhshan:

This report is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and its related challenges, such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content have been well documented, we argue that contemporary social technology means that we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers.

The direct and indirect impacts of information pollution are difficult to quantify. We’re only at the earliest of stages of understanding their implications. Since the results of the ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, Donald Trump’s victory in the US and Kenya’s recent decision to nullify its national election result, there has been much discussion of how information disorder is influencing democracies. More concerning, however, are the long-term implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing socio- cultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions.

Mike Antonucci:

Last month the Washington State Supreme Court held a hearing to determine the level of the state government’s compliance with the court’s 2012 McCleary ruling.

In that decision the court ruled the state had failed to meet its duty under the state constitution to provide school districts with enough resources to cover the costs of a basic education. Since 2014 the state government has been held in contempt of court for failing to come up with a legislative fix.

The state budget passed this year provided $7.3 billion in additional K-12 spending over the next four years. But public school interest groups say that’s not enough. The Washington Education Association has led the charge, lobbying for class sizes of 15-17 students in K-3, starting teacher salaries of $54,000 and annual cost of living increases.

Paul Glasteris:

Usually, when a demographic group is significantly underrepresented on elite college campuses, we consider it a problem. But there is one such problem that almost no one seems to notice or care much about. Nearly 30 percent of college undergraduates are adults, defined by the United States Department of Education as 25 years old or older. But at Stanford, the share of undergraduates who are adults is 1.2 percent; at Yale, 0.7 percent; at Princeton, 0.6 percent; at the University of Chicago, 0.2 percent.

This blatant discrepancy hasn’t drawn any sustained attention even from liberal elites who otherwise tend to notice these things. That’s a testament to the notion many of us carry around in our heads, often based on our own experience, that colleges are places filled with fresh-faced young people who recently graduated from high school. But outside of elite colleges that image is less and less accurate in higher education today.

The pool of graduating high school seniors is shrinking as the huge millennial generation ages. Meanwhile, more and more people who didn’t go to college, or who went but didn’t finish, are realizing that their lack of a degree is keeping them from getting ahead. Many of these adult students are veterans cycling out of the military after years of service.

:

Nikita Vladimirov:

“Cause is defined as conduct that demonstrates the faculty member lacks the willingness or ability to perform duties or responsibilities to the University,” the proposed policy reads, noting that tenured faculty can be disciplined or dismissed for eight core reasons, including “unsatisfactory performance” and demonstrating a “pattern of disruptive conduct or unwillingness to work productively with colleagues.”

University spokesman Nate Hinkel told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the proposed language is part of an effort to align the broader policy with “current law and best practices.”

Mike Antonucci:

Last week Union Report reported on a directive sent by the National Education Association listing “8 essentials” that should shape local collective bargaining agreements if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns agency fee laws in the coming Janus case. Such laws allow unions to collect payments from non-members, ostensibly to cover the costs of contract negotiation.

Oral arguments in the case may occur as early as January. Plaintiffs will argue that agency fees levied by public-sector unions are unconstitutional because bargaining with the government is a form of political advocacy with which they may not agree.

The unions will argue that engagements with the government as an employer are fundamentally different from those with the government as sovereign, and that workplace “coherence” makes it necessary for non-members to subsidize the majority position. They will claim that fee-payers are not supporting unions’ political speech in any meaningful way.

Related: Rachel Cohen:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten met one-on-one with then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon back in March, following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts and plan to craft a $1 trillion infrastructure package. The Intercept learned of the meeting, which has not been previously reported, independent of Weingarten or Bannon. It was instigated through a mutual friend and appeared to be part of Bannon’s effort to realign the parties, according to Weingarten.

“Look, I will meet with virtually anyone to make our case, and particularly in that moment, I was very, very concerned about the budget that would decimate public education,” Weingarten said. “I wanted it to be a real meeting, I didn’t want it to be a photo-op, so I insisted that the meeting didn’t happen at the White House.”

Weingarten didn’t take notes at the meeting, which was held at a Washington restaurant, but told The Intercept she and Bannon talked about “education, infrastructure, immigrants, bigotry and hate, budget cuts … [and] about a lot of different things.”

She came away a bit shook. “I came out of that conversation saying that this was a formidable adversary,” she said.

Kinga Wysienska-Di Carlo and Matthew Di Carlo::

A large and long-standing body of research documents the segregation of U.S. schools by race and income, but relatively few of these studies include private schools. This is partially because of the lack of data on private schools, and also because most desegregation efforts have focused on public schools.

That said, private schools serve roughly one in ten of the nation’s school children, with higher proportions in many big cities. Attempts to describe school segregation without including private schools may therefore be missing a significant part of the picture.

Greg Rosalsky:

Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn’t supposed to be this way—at least according to Norman Macrae.
 
 In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies—including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan—made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives.
 
 Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn’t stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces. As companies recognized how much cheaper remote employees would be, the computer would, in effect, kill the office—and with that our whole way of living would change.

David Brock:

With PowerPoint as well as its predecessors, the motif of the slide was, of course, lifted directly from the world of photography. Some presentation programs actually generated 35-mm slides for display with a slide projector. In most cases, though, the early programs created slides that were printed on paper for incorporation into reports, transferred to transparencies for use on overhead projectors, or saved as digital files to be displayed on computer monitors.

The upshot was that personal computer users of the 1980s, especially business users, had many options, and the market for business software was undergoing hypergrowth, with programs for generating spreadsheets, documents, databases, and business graphics each constituting a multimillion-dollar category. At the time, commentators saw the proliferation of business software as a new phase in office automation, in which computer use was spreading beyond the accounting department and the typing pool to the office elites. Both the imagined and actual users of the new business software were white-collar workers, from midlevel managers to Mahogany Row executives.

PowerPoint thus emerged during a period in which personal computing was taking over the American office. A major accelerant was the IBM Personal Computer, which Big Blue unveiled in 1981. By then, bureaucratic America—corporate and government alike—was well habituated to buying its computers from IBM. This new breed of machine, soon known simply as the PC, spread through offices like wildfire.

Frederick M. Hess and Grant Addison:

Almost every week brings a new campus controversy: a college speech code that goes too far, an invited speaker shouted down by students, a professor investigated for wrongthink. While lamentations abound for the state of free inquiry at American universities, few have suggested substantive proposals for redress.

Steve Kolowich:

n a Sunday afternoon in June, George S. Bridges, president of Evergreen State College, received an email from his police chief informing him that the campus was no longer safe, and should shut down for the rest of the year.

“I know this would be an unprecedented move,” wrote Stacy Brown, the police chief. “These are unprecedented times.”

Daniel Lattier:

Professors usually spend about 3-6 months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will therefore be read by…

Neuroscience news:

A new study in the journal Intelligence reports that highly intelligent people have a significantly increased risk of suffering from a variety of psychological and physiological disorders.

Lead author of the study, Ruth Karpinski, says the findings have implications both for the study of intelligence and for psychoneuroimmunology, which examines how stress responses to the environment influence communication between the brain and immune system.

“Our findings are relevant because a significant portion of these individuals are suffering on a daily basis as a result of their unique emotional and physical overexcitabilities. It is important for the scientific community to examine high IQ as being front and center within the system of mechanisms that may be at play in these dysregulations,” she says.

Krista Holtzmann:

Considering the consequential nature of the upcoming Douglas County school board election to our students, it is imperative that the public receives all the facts. As a member of the commUNITY candidate team, which includes Anthony Graziano, Kevin Leung, Chris Schor and myself, I can attest to our positions on several issues:
We fully support quality public school choice for all students, including charter, magnet, neighborhood, online and home schools.
We do not support vouchers. Using taxpayer dollars to pay private schools is irresponsible. The community loses oversight and accountability, and these schools can legally discriminate.
We support and value all Douglas County schools, including charter schools. It is time we stop pitting our schools against each other and operate as a healthy and strong community committed to serving all our students.
Voters have two clear choices this election — candidates who support public schools and those who want to continue the failed reforms. Students have been harmed by the drop in academic achievement, skyrocketing teacher turnover and infighting. We want to build back our district, while our opponents want to continue on its current destructive path.
Our opponents are supported by special interest groups and hidden outside money in excess of half a million dollars. Americans for Prosperity has admitted to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to advance their national pro-voucher agenda in Douglas County.

Joy Pullman:

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland. He followed this by detailing how U.S. education has essentially made little improvement in the years since he and his foundation — working so closely with the Obama administration that federal officials regularly consulted foundation employees and waived ethics laws to hire several — began redirecting trillions of public dollars towards programs he now admits haven’t accomplished much.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national. There wasn’t even a draft available to the public before the Obama administration hooked states into contracts, many of which were ghostwritten with Gates funds, pledging they’d buy that pig in a poke.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers. Failing with your kids and money for eight years is slowly getting billionaire visionaries to “evolve” and pledge to respect the hoi polloi a little more, though, so be grateful.

John Lloyd:

The University of Oxford is in constant need of money — and it takes an approach to raising it that oscillates between the severe and the relaxed. Those familiar with its procedures say many would-be donors have been turned away. No names are given, outside of senior common room gossip. “Oxford doesn’t need to compromise,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the independent Buckingham University. “People want to be associated with it.” But that confident sense that the great universities will do the right thing has been called into question by a Swedish academic who has thrown down the gauntlet to one of Oxford’s most prominent donors.

For many centuries the deal has been clear: donations buy gratitude and even a named chair or library, but no rights to influence the running of the institution. In return, barring evidence of illegality, the university will not probe the funder’s finances. “You don’t have to like sponsors,” says the Canadian scholar Margaret MacMillan, an admired contemporary historian and former warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. “But if they don’t interfere with your teaching and your choice of colleagues, then the rest is their own affair.”

Joel Kotkin:

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” — Arnold J. Toynbee

From the heart of Europe to North America, nativism, sometimes tinged by white nationalist extremism, is on the rise. In recent elections, parties identified, sometimes correctly, as alt-right have made serious gains in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, pushing even centrist parties in their direction. The election of Donald Trump can also be part of this movement.

Why is this occurring? There are economic causes to be sure, but perhaps the best explanation is cultural, reflecting a sense, not totally incorrect, that western civilization is on the decline, a movement as much self-inflicted as put upon.

Matthew DeFour:

Two of Wisconsin’s oldest nonpartisan research organizations — which combine for nearly 200 years of distilling state and local fiscal and policy issues — are joining forces at the end of the year.

The Madison-based Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, founded in 1932, and the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum, founded in 1913, plan to merge while maintaining offices in both cities.

Alliance president Todd Berry is retiring at the end of the year and forum president Rob Henken, 54, will lead the new, yet-to-be-named organization.

Civics require accuracy.

I’ve long appreciated The Wisconsin text pair alliances interest and ability and diving into local and state spending information.

Why should we care?

Our nearly $500,009,000 Madison school District enjoys discussing only part of their annual expenditures, that is their “operating budget”.

Taxpayers fund the entire budget.

Dave Gershgorn::

Three years ago, after an argument at a bar with some fellow artificial intelligence researchers, Ph.D student Ian Goodfellow cobbled together a new way for AI to think about creating images. The idea was simple: one algorithm tries to generate a realistic image of an object or a scene, while another algorithm tries to decide whether that image is real or fake.

The two algorithms are adversaries–each trying to beat the other in the interest of creating the final best image–and this technique, now called “generative adversarial networks” (GANs) has quickly become a cornerstone of AI research. Goodfellow is now building a group at Google dedicated to studying their use, while Facebook, Adobe, and others are figuring out how to use the technique for themselves. Uses for data generated this way span from healthcare to fake news: machines could generate their own realistic training data so private patient records don’t need to be used, while photo-realistic video could be used to falsify a presidential address.

Susan Shapiro:

I enjoyed going to college at the University of Michigan, an hour from home, but my secret humiliation is: I was the type of mediocre student I now disdain. As a freshman, I cared about my friends, my boyfriend and my poetry. Or, I cared about what my boyfriend thought of my friends, what my friends thought of him, and what they thought of my poetry about him. Here’s what I wish I’d known and done differently:

A’S ARE COOL AND COME WITH PERKS As a student, I saw myself as anti-establishment, and I hated tests; I barely maintained a B average. I thought only nerds spent weekends in the library studying. Recently I learned that my niece Dara, a sophomore at New York University with a 3.7 G.P.A. (and a boyfriend), was offered a week of travel in Buenos Aires as part of her honors seminar. I was retroactively envious to learn that a 3.5 G.P.A. or higher at many schools qualifies you for free trips, scholarships, grants, awards, private parties and top internships. At 20, I was too busy freaking out when said boyfriend disappeared (after sleeping with one of said friends). Students certainly don’t need to strive obsessively for perfection, but I should have prioritized grades, not guys.

Senator Graham.

Related: The Obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns and Facebook.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt and the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Eric Schmidt visits Julian Asange.

Alex Kantrowitz::

“We typically help marketers across all verticals understand audiences this way, and we briefly used this framework to help inform how a small number of marketers built their campaigns,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, adding the pitch had been removed as part of a “regular refresh.” Said the spokesperson, “these segments are no longer available.”

A senior Democratic operative who’s run extensive digital political campaigns suggested political targeting options of the sort Facebook offered might be particularly intriguing to people looking to sow discord in the political system. “Any legitimate, aboveboard organization that is trying to actually win an election is going to have a much higher set of standards,” the operative told BuzzFeed News. “This type of approach is almost exclusively designed for nonpolitical professional people who want to mix it up,” or cause chaos.

Amber Walker:

The Madison School Board’s ad-hoc committee on educational resource officers is about halfway through its 15-month process to review, evaluate and make recommendations about the use of police in schools.

At its most recent meeting last Wednesday, committee members heard about 40 minutes of public comments. Most of the remarks were from members of Freedom Inc., a Madison-based organization focused on socioeconomic and political change for communities of color.

The group’s Freedom Youth Squad, made up mostly of Madison Metropolitan School District students and recent graduates, reiterated their demands from previous ERO committee meetings: No police in schools, community control over school discipline and more resources poured into youth advocates, counselors and teachers to work with youth of color in a culturally-specific way.

Jeff Desjardins:

If you add up all the money that national governments have borrowed, it tallies to a hefty $63 trillion.

In an ideal situation, governments are just borrowing this money to cover short-term budget deficits or to finance mission critical projects. However, around the globe, countries have taken to the idea of running constant deficits as the normal course of business, and too much accumulation of debt is not healthy for countries or the global economy as a whole.

The U.S. is a prime example of “debt creep” – the country hasn’t posted an annual budget surplus since 2001, when the federal debt was only $6.9 trillion (54% of GDP). Fast forward to today, and the debt has ballooned to roughly $20 trillion (107% of GDP), which is equal to 31.8% of the world’s sovereign debt nominally.

J Oliver Conway:

The quiet suburb of New Brunswick, New Jersey, felt more like East Berlin, or Belfast, when I visited on the evening of October 2nd. The student center of Rutgers University had been transformed into a loose approximation of Checkpoint Charlie. After passing through the obligatory picket line (“Are you one of the speakers?” a student protester asked me suspiciously), visitors were screened by a gauntlet of police officers and security guards, who inspected our bags for weapons before allowing us into the building’s auditorium.

The occasion for this atmosphere of impending confrontation was a panel discussion – “Identity Politics: The New Racialism on Campus?” – sponsored by the left-libertarian British political website Spiked. As part of its “Unsafe Spaces” American tour, Spiked has convened a series of panels at American colleges this fall to discuss questions of identity politics, free speech, and viewpoint diversity on campus.

If panels of writers and tweedy intellectuals don’t strike terror into your heart, then you aren’t an administrator at American University, the Washington, D.C. college scheduled to host the first event a week earlier. It disinvited Spiked at the last minute after a campus women’s group claimed (with apparent seriousness) that the event on feminism and Title IX constituted hate speech and would incur “violence and trauma” on listeners. Evidently Rutgers has more spine.

Ryan Gallagher:

On the first day of the trial, Josh Walker wore a long navy jacket, a white shirt, beige pants, and black shoes. He stood outside the courthouse clutching a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cold morning air. “I’m beginning to feel nervous now,” he said, glancing toward the entrance of the court building.

Last summer, Walker traveled from London to Syria, where he joined the Kurdish-led YPG militia in its fight against the so-called Islamic State. After serving with the group for some six months, Walker returned to England, where he was charged under an anti-terrorism law.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, Christopher R. Walters :

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’ choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City’s centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants’ rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores and high school graduation. We also estimate impacts on college attendance and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. We find no relationship between preferences and school effectiveness after controlling for peer quality.

Lucía Martínez Valdivia:

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this. Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture. Instead of walking around or standing at the lectern, as I typically do, I sat as I tried to teach students how to read the poetry of Sappho. Inadvertently, I spoke more quietly, more timidly.

Soutik Biswas:

When Ganesh Devy, a former professor of English, embarked on a search for India’s languages, he expected to walk into a graveyard, littered with dead and dying mother tongues.

Instead, he says, he walked into a “dense forest of voices”, a noisy Tower of Babel in one of the world’s most populous nations.

He discovered that some 16 languages spoken in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh have 200 words for snow alone – some of them ornately descriptive like “flakes falling on water”, or “falling when the moon is up”.

He found that the nomadic communities in the desert state of Rajasthan used a large number of words to describe the barren landscape, including ones for how man and animal separately experience the sandy nothingness. And that nomads – who were once branded “criminal tribes” by British rulers and now hawk maps for a living at Delhi’s traffic crossings – spoke a “secret” language because of the stigma attached to their community.

Charles Clotfelter:

Over the last 40 years, no one has proposed that the guiding purpose of higher education should be to aggravate inequality. Indeed, policy makers and college leaders have declared the opposite aspiration. They have spoken of colleges as meritocratic…

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School Board adopted a $393 million operating budget for the 2017-18 school year Monday.

Board members voted unanimously on a budget that will increase the tax bill on the median value Madison home of $263,000 by $24.48. The budget relies on a $297 million tax levy, an increase of 3.52 percent compared to the last school year’s levy amount.

Board members added $1.6 million to the budget Monday evening: $1 million for special-education staffing and $600,000 for building maintenance.

Madison has long spent far more than most, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Amber Walker:

“We made some (strategic choices) that we were going to invest more in teachers and shift the balance from SEAs,” she said. “I wonder if that is the pain we may be experiencing and hearing about in the district.”

Cheatham told the board that the special education team has a process for evaluating staffing needs in classrooms beyond the beginning of the year and a reserve of money is available to hire more staff. Cheatham suggested that the board wait until its November conversation around staffing to make those decisions.

“My concern is we have one week before the levy has to get established,” she said. “We agreed as a group that we were going to take a big step back and (assess) what are our goals when it comes to staffing… inclusive of special education.

Darrell Huff:

Both charming and informative about how statistics are misused. Published long ago, but the tricks haven’t changed.

Dan Benson & Julie Grace:

Savings that Wisconsin taxpayers could have realized through implementation of Act 10 in 2011 — sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single district — were lost because federal regulations penalize school districts that find ways to spend less money.

The Oostburg School District in Sheboygan County, for example, experienced a “huge reduction in expenses for the special education fund” following the passage of Act 10, says Kristin DeBruine, the district’s business manager.

Special education programs, however, are funded with federal as well as local tax dollars — and full, ongoing federal funding continues only if local and state funding remains constant or increases from year to year.

In order to avoid a federal funding cut, the Oostburg district spent the Act 10 savings in other ways, including almost $60,000 to install an elevator in its middle school. At the time, and to this day, the school does not have any students who use wheelchairs. So the elevator sits largely unused, DeBruine says.

While installing the elevator also helped the district meet federal disability compliance rules, “We would not have put it in without the required use of the money, as it is only used for after-school activities, and the cost would not have allowed us to do it otherwise,” DeBruine says. “That simply just doesn’t make sense at all.”

John Crabb:

Divine visions, terrifying monsters, bizarre beasts. The intricate woodcut prints of the 16th and 17th centuries capture the fear and wonder of a world transfixed by invention and transformed by knowledge. Known as the early modern period or, more lavishly, the Age of Discovery, these years represent a temporal space that was a liminal world: transitional, ambiguous, straining against thresholds.

According to the philosopher A C Grayling writing in The Age of Genius (2016), this time was witness to ‘the greatest change in the mind of humanity than had occurred in all history beforehand’. Bloody battles – both intellectual and physical – were fought between the acolytes of science and magic, religion and mysticism, orthodoxy and heresy, democracy and monarchy. The path was violent and wending, but by the mid-17th century in Europe, humans had radically revised their place in the Universe, and were groping towards modernity.

John Naughton:

A new power is loose in the world. It is nowhere and yet it’s everywhere. It knows everything about us – our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained (and therefore passive). We engage with it 150 times or more every day, and with every moment of contact we add to the unfathomable wealth of its priesthood. And we worship it because we are, somehow, mesmerised by it.

In other words, we are all members of the Church of Technopoly, and what we worship is digital technology. Most of us are so happy in our obeisance to this new power that we spend an average of 50 minutes on our daily devotion to Facebook alone without a flicker of concern. It makes us feel modern, connected, empowered, sophisticated and informed.

Much more on Martin Luther and the Reformation.

Squeakland:

The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students. We share it for those who want to learn more about some of the writing that influenced him and the creation of Etoys.

Sophia Buono:

A recent national survey found that a genuine, well-rounded college education is a thing of the past at many colleges and universities. Instead, most institutions offer a patchwork of niche grad requirements that often skip over vital subjects such as history, government and economics.

Those are just some of the findings in “What Will They Learn? 2017-18” survey released this month. The ninth annual survey is conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit that promotes academic freedom, liberal arts and high academic standards.

The group evaluated more than 1,100 colleges and universities based on their requirements in seven “key areas of knowledge”: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics and science. The results showed that 66.5 percent of the schools required only three or fewer of those subjects.

Isabella VI Gomes::

When 14-year-old Kim Mitchell got in trouble for being a bystander in a fight at Miami Edison Senior High School two years ago, she was worried about getting suspended. But she says her punishment ended up being much worse: She was forced to spend three school days in a dingy office building without any classwork or instruction, whiling away time between restless naps and staring contests with a clock on the wall.

“[They] don’t teach us anything, and there are no guidance counselors,” Mitchell says. “It’s a waste of time. I might as well have been suspended and gone home.”

Sydney Johnson:

If Blade Runner had a classroom scene, it might look something like the promotional video by BrainCo, Inc. Students sit at desks wearing electronic headbands that report EEG data back to a teacher’s dashboard, and that information purports to measure students’ attention levels. The video’s narrator explains: “School administrators can use big data analysis to determine when students are better able to concentrate.”

BrainCo just scored $15 million in venture funding from Chinese investors, and has welcomed a prominent Harvard education dean, who will serve as an adviser. The company says it has a working prototype and is in conversations with a Long Island school to pilot the headset.

The headband raises questions from neuroscientists and psychologists, who say little evidence exists to support what the device-and-dashboard combination aims to do. It also raises legal questions, like what BrainCo will do with students’ biometric data.

Andre Stalz:

The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still depend on submarine internet cables (the “Backbone”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the internet will lose their relevance, and the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will. The concept of workplace network which gave birth to the internet infrastructure would migrate to a more abstract level: Facebook Groups, Google Hangouts, G Suite, and other competing services which can be acquired by a tech giant. Workplace networks are already today emulated in software as a service, not as traditional Local Area Networks. To improve user experience, the Trinet would be a technical evolution of the internet. These efforts are already happening today, at GOOG. In the long-term, supporting routing for the old internet and the old Web would be an overhead, so it could be beneficial to cut support for the diverse internet on the protocol and hardware level. Access to the old internet could be emulated on GOOG’s cloud accessed through the Trinet, much like how Windows 95 can be today emulated in your browser. ISPs would recognize the obsolence of the internet and support the Trinet only, driven by market demand for optimal user experience from GOOG-FB-AMZN.
 
 Perhaps a future with great user experience in AR, VR, hands-free commerce and knowledge sharing could evoke an optimistic perspective for what these tech giants are building. But 25 years of the Web has gotten us used to foundational freedoms that we take for granted. We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have. On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.

Mark Seidenberg:

An article about dyslexia appeared last week in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society B (“The [British] Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the fast publication and worldwide dissemination of high-quality research”). A week is a long time in blog-years, I know, but impact of the article is rippling far and wide. The authors claim to have identified a visual basis for dyslexia: an anomaly involving the distribution of a type of receptor in a part of the retina. This anomaly may provide “the biological and anatomical basis of reading and spelling disabilities”, with “important implications in both fundamental and biomedical sciences.” They also seemed to demonstrate that the anomaly could be easily eliminated by changing lighting conditions.

As might be expected, the media picked this up as scientists maybe having at long last found the cause of dyslexia.

Dyslexics, their families and teachers, reading researchers and treatment specialists, and the organizations that represent them are asking: did someone just discover the cause and cure for dyslexia? (I know this: I get email.) As someone who has conducted research in the area, my question is different: how did this terrible article get published and how can its harmful impact be counteracted?

Nothing whatever can be concluded about the causes of dyslexia from this study, as it is described in the article. Basic information about the methods and results are not provided; the procedures used in collecting the data raise numerous concerns; the link between the purported anomaly and dyslexia is conjectural; and the impairment does not explain other, better established facts about reading impairment. The study is based on some of the hoariest stereotypes about dyslexia—that it results from reading letters backwards and/or pathological persistence of visual images, that can be corrected by manipulations that affect color perception.

At first I was hesitant to evaluate the study because I’m not a vision scientist, but then I realized that hadn’t prevented the authors from publishing it. Albert Le Floch and Guy Ropars are affiliated with the Université de Rennes, France. Their primary area of expertise appears to be laser physics. The study does deal with some obscure aspects of the visual system that are well outside my expertise so caveat emptor, but the problems with the study are far more basic.

Here’s what they report, in brief.

Much more on Mark Seidenberg, here.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, annually.

Zaid Jilani :

The U.S. Senate waded into the debate about free speech on college campuses Thursday, as a panel of experts offered their views on what has emerged as an increasingly controversial issue on college campuses.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions convened the hearing amid a national debate on how to protect free speech on campuses, including by protecting the rights of those who may harbor hateful views. Chaos ensued at the University of Florida last week when white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke on campus, and protests against former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolous at the University of California, Berkeley earlier this year turned violent. In August, activist Heather Heyer was killed at a march protesting a white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia.

Michelle McQuigge:

A new law in Quebec banning face coverings for anyone who receives or provides public services has some Muslim students reconsidering the idea of pursuing their education in that province.

The passing of Bill 62, which would prohibit anyone wearing a face covering from receiving a provincial or municipal service such as public transit, has sparked a strong public backlash.

Amid criticisms that the controversial bill uniquely targets Muslim women, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has even opened the door to federal intervention.

Chris Rickert:

But Madison policy-makers might find they can help reduce police shootings if they spend more time urging their constituents to follow existing rules than by trying to force police to change theirs.

Related: Police Calls: Madison Schools 1996-2006.

James Tarmy:

On East 83rd Street there’s a squat brick walk-up that’s a viable contender for the least fancy apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But for the past 25 years, Wall Street machers and captains of industry have marched up to its gray-carpeted third floor to learn the secrets of attack and defense from Lev Alburt, a three-time U.S. chess champion and one of the most prominent Soviet defectors of the 1970s. Alburt has long been giving ­patter-filled private lessons to New Yorkers from all walks of life, encouraging, cajoling, and reprimanding men and women as they attempt to learn the so-called game of kings.

Wall Street has a fairly well-trodden history with games: During off-hours and downtime, games of chance and risk mitigation such as ­backgammon and bridge offer the opportunity for high-level betting, and chess, with its ­corollaries with game theory, occupies a prime position. In 2015 at the Sohn conference, hundreds of finance professionals such as Bill Ackman paid $5,000 to watch Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian grandmaster, play simultaneously against three people, blindfolded. George Soros is a well-known and aggressive chess player, as is Saba Capital founder Boaz Weinstein, a chess prodigy who reportedly got his start at Goldman Sachs & Co. when an executive at the bank who’d played him competitively set him up at the trading desk.

Mark Johnson:

“A dictionary is never done,” said George Goebel, the third and, it turns out, final editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, also known as DARE.

In January, 54 years after it was launched in an age of print and paper, America’s last national dialect dictionary and one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s signature humanities projects, will close its doors forever.

The university archivist has hauled away boxes. Many more remain, containing decades’ worth of research and fieldwork. The shelves are emptying of books, the files of their paper slips describing each word. Some of the words themselves have vanished from use.

In the end, it was a lack of funding that did in DARE.

But on Friday, the staff refrained from tears, choosing instead to go out with a farewell celebration in the Lowell Center dining room, not far from the dictionary offices.

Amber Walker:

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said the stories about shortages were “hard to hear” after the district continued investment in staffing.

“We made some (strategic choices) that we were going to invest more in teachers and shift the balance from SEAs,” she said. “I wonder if that is the pain we may be experiencing and hearing about in the district.”

Cheatham told the board that the special education team has a process for evaluating staffing needs in classrooms beyond the beginning of the year and a reserve of money is available to hire more staff. Cheatham suggested that the board wait until its November conversation around staffing to make those decisions.

“My concern is we have one week before the levy has to get established,” she said. “We agreed as a group that we were going to take a big step back and (assess) what are our goals when it comes to staffing… inclusive of special education.

Related links:

The Madison School District’s recent spending history

A District Administration 2017-2018 budget summary (PDF).

Enrollment history.

25,239 students were enrolled in the taxpayer supported Madison School District during 2016-2017. We plan to spend roughly $19,598 per student during the 2017-2018 school year.

This is far more than most K-12 organizations, and despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Ryan Osborne:

Kendall Walker did little to stand out Thursday night as the Paschal High School band performed on the turf of Farrington Field.

And that’s part of why her story is so inspiring.

Walker, a senior at Paschal, has Down syndrome. But on Thursday, as she has for several years now, Walker twirled her orange-and-black flag and danced as well as anyone else in the Paschal color guard.

“For a parent of a special-needs child, this is inclusion at its very best,” said Tracy Walker, her father. “I think we sell special-needs people short. We just make the assumption that she doesn’t have the intellect or she doesn’t have the capability.”

“What kind of society do you want to live in?”: Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing.

Julia Evans:

But! There actually is a skill to explaining technical concepts to people with drawings. And I think I’ve become pretty good at that skill! It is just a different skill than like “drawing an elephant that looks like an elephant”

This post is about a few patterns I use when illustrating ideas about computers. If you are interested in using drawings to teach people about your very favorite computer topics, hopefully this will help you!

Let’s talk about how to structure cartoons and how to translate computer concepts into pictures!

Stephen Eide::

Rust Belt cities have long been trying to respond to social and economic decline. Some officials continue to pursue a revival of manufacturing. Academics and, to a lesser extent, policymakers have tried to develop “shrinking city” agendas that start by recognizing that postindustrial cities are not likely to return soon to postwar economic health. But political necessity forces most city officials to focus more on revitalization than on how to manage decline.

Any policy designed to revive the Rust Belt must come to terms with the deep fiscal challenges faced by these city governments. Despite steadily weakening tax bases, Rust Belt local officials have continued to increase debt and retirement-benefit burdens. The result is tremendous strain on city budgets.

Alan Borsuk:

What if we’ve created an education landscape in Milwaukee where it is impossible to bring serious improvement?

There are many powerful and painful reasons why so many kids in the city aren’t doing well in school and aren’t on track for good futures. Start with the daily circumstances of their lives.

But with another school year underway with no big sign of improvement, and with a fresh round of test results from last spring that show the needle has (once again!) not really moved, I find myself looking at the bizarrely complex structure of Milwaukee schooling and wondering what it would take to change things.

I have company. Michael R. Ford, an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, worked previously for organizations that support the Milwaukee private school voucher program, School Choice Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (which changed its name recently to the Badger Institute). Ford got a Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee along the way.

He’s not an ideologue and he’s interested in the realities of how students, in all streams of schools in Milwaukee, are doing.

Tom Phillips::

Earnestly, resolutely, purposefully, consciously, conscientiously and, above all, constantly.

That is how China’s 89 million Communist party cadres are now expected to study and implement the thoughts of their leader, Xi Jinping, after his political ponderings were enshrined in its constitution earlier this week.

According to reports in China’s party-run media, they have already begun.

Two university departments dedicated to the examination of Xi Jinping Thought have this week been created while “study groups” are being promoted across the country as officials scramble to follow the zeitgeist of what Xi has dubbed his “new era”.

The first and most prominent of the Xi-related departments will be at Beijing’s Renmin or People’s University, one of China’s top institutions.

The Beijing Daily newspaper reported that following Xi’s elevation, the university had tasked top scholars with probing what is officially called Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era. They include Ai Silin, president of the School of Marxism at Tsinghua University, Xi’s alma mater, and Han Qingxiang, a senior academic from the Communist party’s Party School.

Paul Bedard:

Any tax cut for middle income earners will also provide a benefit for those further up the income scale, including the top 20 percent who now pay 95 percent of all income taxes, according to the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

In explaining the complicated tax system the administration and congressional Republicans are trying to simplify, Mick Mulvaney played the role of professor at Georgetown University Wednesday night and dished the eye-popping numbers and impact of a middle class tax cut.

Michael Shermer:

In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

The intellectual battlefields today are on college campuses, where students’ deep convictions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and their social justice antipathy toward capitalism, imperialism, racism, white privilege, misogyny and “cissexist heteropatriarchy” have bumped up against the reality of contradictory facts and opposing views, leading to campus chaos and even violence. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and outside agitators, for example, rioted at the mere mention that conservative firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter had been invited to speak (in the end, they never did). Demonstrators at Middlebury College physically attacked libertarian author Charles Murray and his liberal host, professor Allison Stanger, pulling her hair, twisting her neck and sending her to the ER.*

Casey Newton, Nick Statt, and Michael Zelenko :

This year marked a sea change in our attitude toward tech’s largest players — and not for the better. Facebook, with a user base twice the size of the Western Hemisphere, seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis: CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent much of 2017 on a national tour that The New York Times billed as a “real-world education.” Meanwhile, the platform has become embroiled in a national debate that started with fake news and has evolved into an investigation into how the Russian government weaponized the network to influence the 2016 presidential election. Next week, the company will be brought to testify in front of Congress on the matter.
 
 Amazon made considerable headway in its quest to serve every part of our lives, from acquiring Whole Foods this summer to rolling out a plan to get keys to our front doors just this week. Apple continues to amass a vast reserve last valued at $260 billion, but its top-tier devices have lost their luster, and it’s been years since the company released a truly game-changing product. Twitter has come under increased scrutiny for harassment and bot armies of nefarious origin, which may explain its tepid user base growth despite becoming the new unofficial platform for American politics. And there’s a growing sense, underlined by this summer’s $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling against Google, that the entire cabal of big tech companies have turned the corner from friendly giants to insidious monopolies.

Nature:

Most PhD students will have to look beyond academia for a career.

For his 2012 PhD thesis, the sociologist Chris Platts surveyed and interviewed more than 300 young footballers — aged 17 and 18 — at UK club academies who were hoping to pursue a career in the game. He told the newspaper The Guardian this month that just four of them currently have gained a professional contract. That’s a drop-out rate of 99%.

For our Careers section this week, Nature surveyed more than 5,700 early-career scientists worldwide who are working on PhDs. Three-quarters of them, they told us, think it’s likely that they will pursue an academic career when they graduate, just like Platts — now a senior lecturer in sport development and sport business management at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. How many will succeed?

Statistics say these young researchers will have a better chance of pursuing their chosen job than the young footballers. But not by much. Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.

Adam Pilarski:

The past few decades are the age of globalisation. The world is getting smaller and much more interconnected. Trade has been growing in line with regional specialisation. These developments have been welcomed worldwide by economists, who always believe globalisation and the resulting trade will lead to a better allocation of scarce resources, the holy grail of our science. All those movements of people and goods have been a boon to aviation.

The fact that globalisation is not necessarily good for everybody has been also recognised for a long time. The Luddites were smashing machines two-and-a-half centuries ago protesting against progress, which they saw reducing their welfare. Recently, anti-globalisation movements have been gaining strength, asserting their influence via the political mechanism. Ironically, the two countries which introduced the free-trade ideology to the world and benefited for a long time from globalisation (the UK and US) have turned recently against these principles at the ballot boxes.

The negatives of worldwide globalisation have been widely discussed. While few people argue for downright isolationism, the trade-offs between the overall improved welfare of the world as a whole versus the local costs experienced in some places have been more in focus in the past few years.

Caromah Townes:

In April, Chief Judge Lee H. Rosenthal decided in their favor, writing that it was unconstitutional to jail people because they can’t afford bail. Rosenthal ruled that Harris County would have to ask defendants about their financial backgrounds and release them if they didn’t have enough money to pay their bonds. The county challenged the decision, and the case now sits with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, known as one of the most conservative courts in the country. In light of this setback, the plaintiffs and their lawyers have been searching for allies to support their case. They now have a powerful group on their side: religious leaders that say they have a duty to fight for the poor.

Sarah Brown::

Over the past year, Wayne State University officials have been taking the rare step of trying to strip tenure from five medical-school professors. The transcript from one former professor’s hearing offers an inside view into how that process plays out.

Administrators argue the faculty members in question haven’t been doing their jobs well for years and are therefore abusing their tenure. Faculty union representatives dispute that, and argue that the attempt to revoke tenure is a result of a perverse shift in priorities among the university’s leadership. According to union leaders, M. Roy Wilson, the president, and several senior administrators drastically ramped up the pressure on medical-school faculty members to bring in outside grant funding a couple of years ago. Officials then deemed those who fell short “unproductive” and began trying to dismiss some of them.

Pumpkin Person:

How does this compare to their SAT scores? If all American late teens (not just the college bound elite) took the SAT in the 1970s, the average combined score would have been about 770 (see The Bell Curve, pg 422), suggesting 770 equated to IQ 100 (U.S. norms). Meanwhile, Mensa requires SAT scores obtained before 1974 to be at least 1300, suggesting 1300 = IQ 130 (U.S. norms). From these two data points, we might guess that 1357 before 1974 equaled IQ 133 (U.S. norms); 132 (U.S. white norms).

US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Alan Borsuk:

But the ice-breaker question was to name our favorite childhood book.

I said, “Horton Hears a Who,” by Dr. Seuss.

I’ve given that answer pretty often over the years. There are several reasons I think it’s a great book. One is that, in the end, the community of “Whos” is saved when all of them join together to raise their voices. And it’s not until the last, silent Who lets out a “yop” that the totality of their voices is heard, to great benefit.

What if that were true, at least in some way? What if we all raised our voices to insist on better things for Milwaukee and on better ways for meeting the needs of so many people here?

Lenore Skenazy:

When we keep our kids constantly supervised by an adult, we think we are keeping them safe. But in fact we are doing the opposite. Kids need some independence — and even a little risk.

A study on risky play published in Evolutionary Psychology found that kids ‘dose’ themselves with the level of risk they can handle. The thrill they feel when climbing ever higher on the monkey bars, for example, is their reward for being brave. The more they tiptoe to the edge of their comfort level, the braver they become. Facing your fears has what psychologists call an ‘anti-phobic effect’.

Children deprived of these opportunities can end up more anxious. They haven’t been able to build up their bravery, organise their own games or solve their own spats. They have never got lost and had to find their way home, scared and then triumphant. Their coping skills are stunted.

Washington Post:

A long-standing defect in U.S. suffrage law is the treatment of the electoral franchise as a privilege that is denied too easily and often because of an ugly prejudice or a convenient pretext. Let’s reimagine the democratic right of voting as a citizen’s obligation. In our doppelganger ally down under, Australia, voting is compulsory. They have far higher turnouts, and their elections boast greater legitimacy.

Courtney Brown:

Facts are friendly, the saying goes. And often, the friendliest ones are the facts you can easily look up yourself.
That’s the thought behind the new edition of Lumina Foundation’s report on educational attainment beyond high school, Stronger Nation.

The big picture: Just under 46 percent of Americans ages 25 to 64 have earned college degrees or workforce certificates. And while there’s good news — attainment is increasing among all races and ethnicities — large gaps persist.

Joel Kotkin:

But what has been good in the aggregate has not worked so well for most Californians. Despite all the constant complaining about inequality and racial injustice, California, notes progressive economist James Galbraith, has also become among the most economically unequal parts of the country, topped only by Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. Particularly damaged have been the prospects for the young and minorities, particularly in terms of achieving homeownership.

Texas and the red state alternative

Texas, California’s only real rival for national power and influence over the past 20 years, has out-performed its golden rival almost two to one in job growth, including in many high and middle-income sectors. It has also still managed to produce more jobs per capita since 2010. The Texas model is now being tested by the oil bust, and the controversy over Hurricane Harvey, both of which have intensified criticism of its development model.

One City Early Learning Centers:

A high quality preschool education, from birth to age 5, should be available and accessible to every child in the United States of America. Please join us on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 11:30am to 1:00pm for lunch and an important presentation and dialogue.

We would like to get your input and feedback about two significant steps One City is taking to make high quality preschool available and accessible all children. First, we are planning a major community fundraising event for 2018 that we hope to draw 7,000 to 8,000 people to attend. One City will be the host and organizer, but we plan to dedicate funds generated from the event to support tuition scholarships and teacher training at other high quality preschools so that more children have access, and more children are better prepared for school success.

Register to Attend

Mainz University:

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually y exist,” Christian Smorra, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?”

Publication

C. Smorra et al., A parts-per-billion measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment, Nature 550, 371-374, 19 October 2017,
DOI:10.1038/nature24048

Genesis.

A Barton Hinkle:

Some days, it can seem as if half the country has come down with rabies. A lot of people seem willing to tear your head off over the smallest thing.

Part of it probably comes from the disinhibiting effect of social media—where the lack of filters or personal contact makes it easy to fire off a nasty personal attack in the heat of the moment… which only encourages people to respond in kind.

Lauren Fitzpatrick:

Chicago Public Schools on Friday announced another five-figure enrollment drop, counting 371,000 students in the country’s third largest school district.

District officials also released school ratings, blaming the Cubs in part for a dip of schools with the top rating, and named four privately-managed schools that aren’t performing well enough to stay open past June.

CPS has lost about 21,000 students from its rolls in the last two years and now has just about 26,000 more students than the fourth largest, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida. District-run schools serve 289,506 students and privately-managed charter schools account for about 62,435 according to a count taken earlier this month, on the 20th day of school.

Max Brantley :

Much remains to be explored on this topic, but take note of a brewing debate in the University of Arkansas System, a proposal to change tenure policy.

The general counsel’s office of the University of Arkansas has drafted a proposal to “update” the promotion and tenure policy, a System spokesman confirms. It was sent to the campuses in mid-September for feedback. The spokesman characterizes this as part of an ongoing effort in recent years to update board policies to “align them with current law and practice.”

Alissa Widman Neese:

Five more Columbus school principals connected to the district’s data-manipulation scandal could lose their state-educator licenses.

The Ohio Department of Education sent the administrators letters Aug. 8 informing them that disciplinary action had been initiated against their licenses, according to public records The Dispatch obtained Monday.

Five years ago, The Dispatch first revealed that Columbus City Schools administrators were falsifying student data to make the district’s performance appear better on its state report cards. The most-recent notices accuse administrators of misconduct during the 2010-11 school year.

WBEZ:

Chicago Public Schools is criticizing a WBEZ investigation on the school district’s overhaul of special education. WBEZ stands firmly behind the quality of its reporting and its conclusions.

The investigation found that CPS last year scaled back special education funding and services after secretly instituting new rules. WBEZ also found wide disparities in special education spending per student based on race and income. In the year before the overhaul, schools with wealthier student populations spent the most per student while schools with mostly low-income students low-income spent the least.

In a letter to WBEZ, CPS CEO Forrest Claypool said the station presented “erroneous information and false conclusions.” He questioned information in WBEZ’s findings around special education staffing levels, reductions in student services, and demographic information on CPS’ special education population.

In our rigorous reporting and analysis, WBEZ relied on CPS data. In addition, most of our analyses and methodologies were vetted by school district officials before publishing. WBEZ listened to their concerns and incorporated them into the analyses. In his letter to WBEZ, Claypool presented different interpretations of the data, even though in some cases his own staff instructed WBEZ not to present the data in that way.

Annie Holmquist :

Camille Paglia recently revealed the answer to that question. Paglia, a long-time Democrat, feminist, and college professor, believes the problem started in the earliest stages of education in the nation’s public schools:

“It’s really started at the level of public school education. I’ve been teaching now for 46 years as a classroom teacher, and I have felt the slow devolution of the quality of public school education in the classroom.”

According to Paglia, teachers at elite institutions are unable to see this decline in knowledge because their students often come from private schools and wealthy homes, which presumably still retain some elements of rigorous education. The great majority of students, however, can be described in the following way:

“What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!”

There’s one exception to this, however. Even while today’s students have not been taught knowledge, they have also been taught not to bully a person on the basis of their race, class, gender, or any other trait.

Chris Rickert:

Allis Elementary currently has no active PTO and its fundraising when it did have one last year was “very, very little,” according to interim principal Sara Cutler. Allis’ percentage of economically disadvantaged students last year was 67.9, according to state Department of Public Instruction data, or higher than the district percentage of 46.1. Allis’ non-white population is 77 percent, higher than the district’s 57.1 percent.

The PTO for Huegel Elementary, with an economically disadvantaged population of 41.4 percent, has an annual budget of around $22,000 a year, according to PTO co-treasurer Tony Parisi. The PTO for Schenk Elementary, whose percentage of poor students is 63.5, has an annual budget of about $6,000, according to president Heather Daniels.

The Lowell Community Organization, the PTO-like group for Lowell Elementary, where I’ve had at least one child enrolled since 2009, has a proposed budget this year of about $14,500. Budgets over the past five years have been in the $8,000 to $14,000 range, according to LCO treasurer Kerry Martin. Lowell’s rate of economically disadvantaged students is 37.3 percent.

Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools (Van Hise Elementary and Hamilton Middle), while tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Valentina Zarya and Grace Donnelly:

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the University of Wisconsin is in the process of reviewing its graduate business degree programs, a process that may result in the discontinuation of its two-year full-time MBA program. (According to the Journal, the business school’s faculty will vote on the decision early next month.)

The Midwestern school’s program may become the latest casualty in a string of closures of MBA programs around the country. The University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business announced in August that it would end its full-time MBA program. In recent years, Wake Forest University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Virginia Tech, and Simmons College (the country’s only all-female business school) have shuttered their traditional two-year programs.

Glenn Reynolds:

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, we heard a lot about America’s division into two mutually hostile camps: A largely coastal, urban party run by educated elites, and a largely rural and suburban “Flyover Country” party composed of people who did not attend elite schools and who do not see themselves as dependent on those who do. This divide is more fundamental than mere partisan identification, as there are Democrats and Republicans in both groups.

One of the best formulations of this division comes from photographer Chris Arnade, who has spent years documenting the lives of America’s forgotten classes. In his characterization, America is split between the “Front Row Kids,” who did well in school, moved to managerial or financial or political jobs and see themselves as the natural rulers of their fellow citizens, and the “Back Row Kids,” who placed less emphasis on school and who resent the pretensions and bossiness of the Front Row Kids.

Liang Chenyu:

In the late ’70s, China was still steeped in poverty. So when the nation prepared to send students to the U.S., it had to make sure the delegation looked decent. The Ministry of Education provided each student with one tailored wool coat and two suits, all in gray or black. At a reception held by then-first lady Rosalynn Carter, the visiting scholars took off their coats and put them together, and afterward many could not identify their own from the pile.

More than 300,000 Chinese nationals now study at American universities, and most are millennials. But Liu Baicheng was 45 years old when he traveled to the U.S. to study in 1978 as part of that first group of state-sponsored students after the Cultural Revolution.

Earlier that year, the government had resolved to increase the number of Chinese students studying overseas to drive the country’s development, particularly in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. But after a decade of disrupted scholarship, there were few young people with the necessary qualifications. “The Cultural Revolution had devastated higher education,” Liu recalled. “It was impossible to send youth.”

Kathryn Hindrekaer:

Over the past few years, UCLA has lost four prominent scholars: James Enstrom, Keith Fink, Val Rust and Tim Groseclose.

Each incident is different, whether they left, resigned, or were forced out. But they all have a common thread: each professor took a stance against left-liberal principles at UCLA — and now they are no longer teaching there.

This attack on conservatism is not unique to UCLA, but the school has become the perfect case study for the phenomenon.

Mark Kim:

Just when it was looking like the underdog, classical computing is striking back. IBM has come up with a way to simulate quantum computers that have 56 quantum bits, or qubits, on a non-quantum supercomputer – a task previously thought to be impossible. The feat moves the goalposts in the fight for quantum supremacy, the effort to outstrip classical computers using quantum ones.

It used to be widely accepted that a classical computer cannot simulate more than 49 qubits because of memory limitations. The memory required for simulations increases exponentially with each additional qubit.

Jim Soland:

Achievement gaps are one of education’s most important policy metrics. Gaps between boys and girls, as well as white and racial minority students, are often used to measure the effectiveness and fairness of the education system at a given point in time, over the course of decades, and as children progress through school. Major policy initiatives related to accountability, assessment, and funding are partially motivated by a desire to close gaps.

As is so often the case, however, estimates of achievement gaps are not as straightforward as practitioners and policymakers might like. Gaps result from the sum total of students’ schooling, after-school activities, home life, and neighborhood experiences. Further, gaps are not measures of intelligence or ability, but of performance. Therefore, observed scores are impacted by factors that adults control (like what students are taught), and by factors that may be unrelated to achievement (like motivation to perform).

Ron Lieber:

Once upon a time, paying for college was a relatively simple task.

Parents who could often did. Teenagers with parents who lacked either the ability or the willingness to pay worked their way through school, which was easy enough to do at many schools before 1985 or so.

But then came rising costs and student loans, of which there are countless iterations, from the federal government and state agencies and private entities. Repayment plans proliferated, too, depending on your income and profession and the type of loan you had. And many colleges split their own grants and discounts into those based on financial need (where the aid offer is sometimes predictable) and ones based on academic merit (where the offers are often unpredictable).

Lauren Kirchner:

A federal judge this week unsealed the source code for a software program developed by New York City’s crime lab, exposing to public scrutiny a disputed technique for analyzing complex DNA evidence.

Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York lifted a protective order in response to a motion by ProPublica, which argued that there was a public interest in disclosing the code. ProPublica has obtained the source code, known as the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, and published it on GitHub; two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available.

“Everybody who has been the subject of an FST report now gets to find out to what extent that was inaccurate,” said Christopher Flood, a defense lawyer who has sought access to the code for several years. “And I mean everybody — whether they pleaded guilty before trial, or whether it was presented to a jury, or whether their case was dismissed. Everybody has a right to know, and the public has a right to know.”

Caproni’s ruling comes amid increased complaints by scientists and lawyers that flaws in the now-discontinued software program may have sent innocent people to prison. Similar legal fights for access to proprietary DNA analysis software are ongoing elsewhere in the U.S. At the same time, New York City policymakers are pushing for transparency for all of the city’s decision-making algorithms, from pre-trial risk assessments, to predictive policing systems, to methods of assigning students to high schools.

Simple Justice:

Michael Goodwin was weaned on Abe Rosenthal’s New York Times, rising to City Hall Bureau Chief before becoming Executive Editor of the Daily News and, now, chief political columnist for the New York Post. He’s been around, so when he says this, it comes from experience:

It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government—and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.

This is the sort of statement that really needs context, as the left-leaning of the Nixon era wasn’t the same left as today. There were similarities, of course, in that Nixon was viewed as inherently evil and must be taken down. The lives of young men in Viet Nam depended on it, so the platitudes were born.

Sheelah:

When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. He needed something stable. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. “Either I’ll be working at General Motors or I’ll be working at Steelcase by the end of the year,” he vowed in 1984. A few months later, he got a job at Steelcase, the world’s largest manufacturer of office furniture, and he’s been working at its Grand Rapids metal plant ever since.
Stinson is now fifty-eight. He has a full, reddish face, a thick head of silver hair, and a majestic midsection. His navy polo shirt displays his job title—“Zone Leader”—and, like everyone else in the plant, he always has a pair of protective earplugs on a neon string draped around his neck. His glasses have plastic shields on the sides that give him the air of a cranky scientist.
“I don’t regret coming here,” Stinson said. We were sitting in the plant’s cafeteria, and Stinson was unwrapping an Italian sub, supplied by a deli that every Thursday offers plant workers sandwiches for four dollars instead of eight. “There’s been times I’ve thought about leaving, but it’s just getting to be a much more comfortable atmosphere around here. The technology is really helping that kind of thing, too. Instead of taking responsibility away from you, it’s a big aid. It’s definitely the wave of the future here.”

Gerrit De Vynck , Nafeesa Syeed , and Chris Strohm::

Under siege for letting their platforms be co-opted by Russian hackers during the 2016 election, Silicon Valley companies are learning what many businesses with interests in Washington have long known: It pays to have staff with government security clearances.

Major players in technology are bolstering their workforces with former government employees holding top-secret and higher clearances needed to share classified information, as congressional probes and a federal investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller continue to unearth information about Russia’s meddling in last year’s election.

“We are starting to see platforms in the social-media arena being used by bad actors — in ways for which for they were never intended,” Ned Miller, chief technology strategist for the public sector for McAfee, said in an interview. “So the folks that build those newer platforms are now demonstrating interest in acquiring talent that has a lot more cybersecurity resources and background.”

Nicholas Tampio:

In early 2017, Scientific American published a symposium on the threat that ‘big nudging’ poses to democracy. Big Data is the phenomena whereby governments and corporations collect and analyse information provided by measuring sensors and internet searches. Nudging is the view that governments should build choice architectures that make it easier for people to pick, say, the more fuel-efficient car or the more sensible retirement plan. Big nudging is the combination of the two that enables public or private engineers to subtly influence the choices that people make, say, by autofilling internet searches in desirable ways. Big nudging is a ‘digital sceptre that allows one to govern the masses efficiently, without having to involve citizens in democratic processes’. The symposium’s authors take for granted that democracy – the political regime in which the people collectively determine its common way of life – is better than epistocracy, or rule by experts.

Remarkably, many social scientists today do not share the belief that democracy is better than epistocracy. On the contrary. In recent years, numerous political theorists and philosophers have argued that experts ought to be in charge of public policy and should manipulate, or contain, the policy preferences of the ignorant masses. This view has its roots Plato’s Republic, where philosophers who see the sun of truth should govern the masses who dwell in a cave of ignorance, and in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922), where expert social scientists rule behind the scenes and control the population with propaganda. While there are differences between the views of Christopher H Achen and Larry Bartels in Democracy for Realists (2016), Jason Brennan in Against Democracy (2017), Alexander Guerrero here in Aeon, and Tom Nichols in The Death of Expertise (2017), these social scientists share in common an elitist antipathy towards participatory democratic politics.

Emily Anthes:

Last year, entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun set out to augment his sales force with artificial intelligence. Thrun is the founder and president of Udacity, an education company that provides online courses and employs an armada of salespeople who answer questions from potential students through online chats. Thrun, who also runs a computer-science lab at Stanford University in California, worked with one of his students to collect the transcripts of these chats, noting which resulted in students signing up for a course. The pair fed the chats into a machine-learning system, which was able to glean the most effective responses to a variety of common questions.

Next, they put this digital sales assistant to work alongside human colleagues. When a query came in, the program would suggest an appropriate response, which a salesperson could tailor if necessary. It was an instantaneously reactive sales script with reams of data supporting every part of the pitch. And it worked; the team was able to handle twice as many prospects at once and convert a higher percentage of them into sales. The system, Thrun says, essentially packaged the skills of the company’s best salespeople and bequeathed them to the entire team — a process that he views as potentially revolutionary. “Just as much as the steam engine and the car have amplified our muscle power, this could amplify our brainpower and turn us into superhumans intellectually,” he says.

The past decade has seen remarkable advances in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, cloud computing, data analytics and mobile communications. Over the coming decades, these technologies will transform nearly every industry — from agriculture, medicine and manufacturing to sales, finance and transportation — and reshape the nature of work. “Millions of jobs will be eliminated, millions of new jobs will be created and needed, and far more jobs will be transformed,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, who directs the Initiative on the Digital Economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

One City Early Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

A high quality preschool education, from birth to age 5, should be available and accessible to every child in the United States of America. Please join us on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 11:30am to 1:00pm for lunch and an important presentation and dialogue.

We would like to get your input and feedback about two significant steps One City is taking to make high quality preschool available and accessible all children. First, we are planning a major community fundraising event for 2018 that we hope to draw 7,000 to 8,000 people to attend. One City will be the host and organizer, but we plan to dedicate funds generated from the event to support tuition scholarships and teacher training at other high quality preschools so that more children have access, and more children are better prepared for school success.

Second, we will also talk with you about our plans to establish a public charter school that would provide economically disadvantaged families greater access to high quality preschool, and potentially create a pathway to educational success for children beyond kindergarten.

These two initiatives will be central to our efforts to initiate an effective and impactful preschool movement in Dane County. It’s one that we hope will positively impact children all across Wisconsin in the future, as well. We truly hope that you will join us.

Madison has long tolerated a non diverse K-12 governance structure, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student.

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

Molly Ball:

Third Way, for its part, announced in January it would spend $20 million on what it called the “New Blue” campaign to “provide Democrats with a path out of the wilderness.” Like many of their peers, the think tank’s brain trust had been stunned by the election. On November 9, too devastated to work, its staff had simply sat together and cried.

For all intents and purposes, it was Third Way’s vision that had been on the ballot in 2016—and lost. The think tank, inspired by the New Democrat centrism of the 1990s, had advised Hillary Clinton on her 2016 policy platform. In debates within the Democratic Party, Third Way advocated for the sensible center. It argued that a left-wing platform could not win elections, and that what voters preferred was a pragmatic, moderate, technocratic philosophy, socially liberal but pro-business and wary of big government. It used research and data to demonstrate that these policies made good politics.

This was slightly disingenuous. Third Way, while not officially affiliated with a party, is an organization with a policy agenda, from gun control to entitlement reform, that it seeks to advance within the Democratic Party and with the broader public. Most of its funding comes from corporations and financial executives. Critics on the left call the group the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, and accuse it of advancing its donors’ interests over the greater political good. Third Way has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare and vehemently attacked the soak-the-rich economic populism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Voters, it claims, are not interested in a party that’s all about big government and tax-and-spend.