Stephanie Cohen:

recently spent time with a class of fourteen-year-olds, talking about words, specifically words strung together to form speech. I started out by asking them whether they thought words could make people act in a particular way. “Can words lead to action?” I asked. There was some thinking and mulling over.

We spent several weeks discussing, reading, and studying many of the greatest (and infamous) words read aloud: the Gettysburg Address, Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Germany, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, a host of Winston Churchill speeches from World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speeches, and some of the best contemporary commencement addresses given in the US in recent years. Many of these speeches were written in reaction to events, and most of them called on their respective audiences to do something (be calm, have fortitude, ensure victory, reach for success). Whether or not the words we read actually shaped (or changed) history can be debated, but the more important question is whether words can shape conscience, which affects not just one action but a lifetime of actions. This is something teachers have long relied on the power of literature to do.

AJ Agrawal:

Disruption is happening more and more with the continuing dominance of the Internet and what’s going on in the online world. Online courses are on the edge of disrupting higher education in a number of ways. It will demonstrate that this is no longer the preserve of colleges and universities.

So why will your exam preparations soon happen from an online interface, rather than a college library?

Experience Over Education

The big problem with a lot of conventional education programs is that they are not sufficiently preparing people for the real world of work. There are so many organizations that are increasingly turning away from traditional degrees because they want candidates with real skills.

Via a kind email:

Dear German School Families and Friends,

Our German Summer Camp is open for registration! The camp cost will go up after April 15th!

All summer camp participants registered ON or BEFORE April 15th will receive GSoM summer camp t-shirts. We cannot guarantee t-shirts sizes for kids registered after April 15th.

1st Camp:
Monday-Friday, June 13th-17th from 9 am to 12 noon
at Bethany United Methodist Church
The cost for the entire week is only $150! ($175 after April 15th)

2nd Camp:
Monday-Friday, August 22nd-26th from 9 am to 12 noon
at Bethany United Methodist Church
The cost for the entire week is only $150! ($175 after April 15th)

To register you can click on the link below to go to the GSoM website and click on the link to our Google registration form:
http://germanschoolofmadison.org/classes/summer-camp-2016/

The registration is ONLY complete after we have received both the online registration and the payment for the camp.

More information on the attached flyer. Please contact us with any questions.

Best,

Chris Tabisz

German School of Madison-Deutsche Schule Madison, Inc.
Madison, Wisconsin
Email: GermanSchoolofMadison@gmail.com
Visit our website at: www.GermanSchoolofMadison.org
Themenlogo ZFA

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Our center has taken the first systematic look at what implementing personalized learning schools costs, how school leaders are spending their funds, and what it might take to make personalized learning financially sustainable with public dollars. We studied 16 charter elementary and secondary schools with a wide range of personalized learning models from across the country (we hoped to include district schools, but the data were not available). All of these schools received financial support through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Learning Challenges, the earliest and most significant philanthropic investment in personalized learning to date. (The Gates Foundation also funded our study.)

While we can’t make overly sweeping generalizations from our research (we looked at a particular set of schools with particular characteristics), this first analysis of personalized learning finances enables educators and policymakers to learn from these early frontrunners and, ideally, to more clearly understand potential fiscal implications.

Abby Scachter:

Last weekend, our five-year-old daughter yelled at an adult friend of ours. When I found out about it later that day, I made my daughter call and apologize for yelling. It was very hard for her to do (oh, the waterworks!). She has a strong personality and doesn’t like to say sorry—at all. But I also found it difficult because when I got back on the phone with our friend, he sounded more pained than my daughter about the exchange. His response led me to rethink the whole thing. Had I gone overboard? Trying to enforce rules for respecting others is tough and I started to think that it wasn’t worth it.

But an amazing thing happened just three days later. I got a call from a parent in my two-year-old son’s class telling me that his son needed to speak to my boy. Why? Because the son needed to apologize for biting my kid. It was cute to hear my boy’s little friend say sorry and my son say (distractedly, because he was watching TV), “It’s OK. Bye!” Beyond cute, it was also meaningful because I immediately felt validated for my own efforts to instill and demand respect for others. Turns out, I needed the reinforcement.

wral:

Ben Casselman:

The government’s release last week of income and poverty data for 2013 brought renewed attention to the apparent stagnation of the American middle class — not just since the financial crisis hit six years ago this month, but for much of the decade that preceded the crash. The report showed that the economic recovery has yet to translate into higher incomes for the typical American family. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999, and essentially unchanged since the end of the Reagan administration.

Megan McArdle:

people seem to save any money? The number of people scraping along from paycheck to paycheck is astonishing; surveys routinely find that somewhere between a third and half of all Americans don’t have the savings to fund ordinary emergencies — a moderately large repair, a month with no income. These are not the kind of astonishing runs of bad luck that no one could realistically expect to cover, like a $100,000 medical bill, or a multi-year illness that makes it impossible to work. They’re just the normal vicissitudes of regular life, and somehow, Americans are unprepared.

Geek and Nerd:

our lives without smartphones and laptops. They help us in solving various problems from getting up on time (alarm clocks) to checking grammar mistakes in our academic papers and business reports. We also use them as calculating tools to make our life less complicated. Besides, downloading the right app can make you forget about complicated math problems. If you need some help with difficult calculations or simply like playing math games and solving logical problems, these applications are exactly what you need.

By Alyssa Davis, Will Kimball, and Elise Gould • May 27, 2015:

The Great Recession has had lasting effects on employment prospects of young people entering the workforce after graduating from high school or college. Despite officially ending in June 2009, the recession left millions unemployed for prolonged spells, with recent workforce entrants such as young graduates being particularly vulnerable. The slow pace of the recovery means that seven classes of students have graduated into an acutely weak labor market and have had to compete with more-experienced workers for a limited number of job opportunities. This is on top of the fact that graduates since 2000 have confronted suboptimal labor market conditions, resulting in stagnant wages and limited job opportunities. While recent improvements in economic conditions have finally begun to brighten young graduates’ job prospects, the labor market is still far from recovered from the Great Recession.

Joe Pinsker:

There are three things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.

Te-Ping Chen:

Fear gripped parents across China this week after national media reported that hundreds of students in separate schools had fallen ill after classroom exposure to toxic fumes emitted from chemical plants.

The latest worries surfaced in eastern China, where scores of students at a primary school said they had begun to develop rashes, itching, nosebleeds and stomach pains. Their parents suspected a link to a nearby industrial park where they said chemical plants emitted a pungent odor.

“It’s such a good school, with great teachers,” said a mother whose 7-year-old son had recently broken out with spots on his face and itchy skin. “But now we just feel pained because of this issue. It’s like all the good has been offset.”

Investors

There is no incongruity in the fact that a new poll conducted by the Media Insight Project, a joint project of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, finds the American media’s popularity way down with that of Washington politicians. With 2,014 adults surveyed, only 6% expressed “a lot of confidence” in the press.

That’s because they correctly view the major media as virtually indistinguishable from that same political establishment. No wonder that when Woodward himself began turning critical of the Obama administration, and questioned the president’s trustworthiness, the same media filled with reporters who wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein turned on their once-idolized elder statesman.

The public knows very well that most of the leading political reporters are not the intrepid crusaders for truth they claim to be, and whom Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played in “All the President’s Men,” but rather ideological warriors devoted to one side winning and the other losing.

Fredrik deBoer:

ura McKenna’s piece is part of a perennial microgenre in the world of #Content: the “What Are They Thinking?” piece. It’s a type of essay that presents a certain group’s professional choices as daft and self-injurious, and asks (with more or less faux-sympathy, depending) why they persist. Don’t they know how deluded this is? Don’t they see? The secret sauce in this well-worn type of click-generation is that it provides people who don’t feel very good about their lives with some other group of people who, we are to imagine, feel even worse about theirs. I may never have written that novel; I may not have played past single-A ball; I may have never gotten further than Improv Olympic; but, by god, I’m not some sad French poetry PhD student. That person, that’s the real loser. The person set up as the object of greater scorn isn’t a gas station worker or someone on food stamps, because those people are seen as too lowly to be part of the competition in the first place. The targets have to be people who are seen as potential competition within aspirational culture. The ego-salving function of “What Are They Thinking?” pieces is what they call in the biz the “value added,” the click generator. It’s such a proven revenue generator that Slate hired Rebecca Schuman to do it full time.

,

Andrew Follett:

Lake Land College recently announced plans to tear down broken wind turbines on campus, after the school got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support for wind power.

The turbines were funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, but the turbines lasted for less than four years and were incredibly costly to maintain.

“Since the installation in 2012, the college has spent $240,000 in parts and labor to maintain the turbines,” Kelly Allee, Director of Public Relations at Lake Land College, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning and likely suffered electrical damage last summer. School officials’ original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated. Under the original optimistic scenario, the turbines would have to last for 22.5 years just to recoup the costs, not accounting for inflation. If viewed as an investment, the turbines had a return of negative 99.14 percent.

“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,” she said. “One of the reasons for the lower than expected energy power is that the turbines often need to be repaired. They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.”

James Ryan:

handful of states and cities around the country sponsor universal pre-K for four-year-olds, including Georgia, Oklahoma, and, most recently, New York City. Others, including Boston, are moving in that direction. Many believe, with justification, that these are wise investments, given the evidence that high-quality pre-K offers long-ranging benefits to students, which can more than make up for the cost of the programs. The nature and extent of these benefits are the subject of debate among scholars and advocates, but one fascinating aspect of these programs has gone largely unnoticed: the reliance on private providers who receive public funding.

Philip Cohen:

s we endure scandal after scandal concerning sexual assaults on college campuses—scandals that repeatedly show administrators failing to properly investigate, punish, or educate their way out of the problem—I fear that we are drawing the wrong conclusions. Colleges don’t have the ability to investigate sex crimes or the right to properly punish them any more than they can enforce the law regarding robbery or homicide. Those failures compromise colleges’ most important obligation and best hope for solving the problem: educating students to change the culture around sexual violence.

James Lacey:

Several years ago, as a new professor at the Marine Corps War College, I spent a huge amount of time putting together the best presentation on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War ever presented at any war college at any time. After accounting for the 125-page a night reading limit, I had selected the perfect set of readings. These were reinforced by an unbelievably entrancing and informative lecture, and a slideshow employing stunning period visuals. My plan even set aside copious amounts of time for critical thinking, and what I knew would be an intense Socratic dialogue.

Karen Turner:

The school system in Orange County, where Orlando is located, recently told the Orlando Sentinel that the program, which partners the school system with local police departments, has been successful in protecting students’ safety, saying that it led to 12 police investigations in the past year. The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends, the monitoring software used to check students’ activity. It’s the same software used by police in Racine, Wis., to track criminal activity and joins a slew of similar social media monitoring software used by law enforcement to keep an eye on the community.

Michael Trick:

I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.

And I can trust American Scientist to write articles that teach me science in an accessible, yet challenging, way. American Scientist is the magazine of the honor society Sigma Xi and is my favorite science magazine since the demise of The Sciences, my all-time favorite science magazine. Or it was.

–

Hank Reichman:

On March 5, I began a post on this blog entitled “Corporatizers Gone Wild!” with these words: “For those who don’t yet understand what academics mean when we talk about the ‘corporatization’ of the university, a good way to begin learning might be to take a look at recent events surrounding the University of California (UC) at Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, previously notorious for presiding over the pepper-spraying of her own students” in November 2011.

More than a month later the controversy surrounding Katehi continues. In case you missed it, Katehi initially came under fire for taking a board position with DeVry Education Group, a for-profit firm that offers college degrees online and on 55 campuses nationwide, including 13 in California, and is under federal scrutiny for allegedly exaggerating job placement and income statistics. She resigned that post and apologized soon after. Then it was revealed that Katehi had received a total of $420,000 in income and stock across the 2012-2014 fiscal years as a board member for John Wiley & Sons, a publisher of textbooks, college materials and scholarly journals. Her tenure came as students and state leaders sought to reduce the cost of textbooks and encouraged public colleges to use free, digital alternatives. Then it was revealed that Katehi had also moonlighted as a board member at a Saudi Arabian university that has been accused of buying its way to an impressive international ranking. Katehi served on the board of King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah at about the time the university came under fire for its aggressive global recruitment of highly cited researchers with offers of $6,000 or $7,000 a month and free stays at five-star hotels.

Rick Perlstein:

This past September, an award-winning Chicago Public Schools principal named Troy LaRaviere published a post on his blog that began, “Whenever I try to take a break from writing about CPS to focus on other aspects of my professional and personal life, CPS officials do something so profoundly unethical, incompetent and/or corrupt that my conscience calls me to pick up the pen once more.”

What had Principal LaRaviere going this time? We’ll get there eventually. But first we have to back up and survey what brought the Chicago Public Schools to this calamitous pass in the first place. It’s hard to know where to begin. Though when it comes to the failings of America’s institutions you can rarely go wrong by looking to the plutocrats.

Sheldon M. Stern, via Will Fitzhugh::

The AMISTAD America website stresses the need to educate the public about the history of slavery “through common experiences and dialogue.” By “confronting the past” and promoting “reconciliation and social healing” the Amistad’s Atlantic Freedom Tour aims to help all people work toward “transforming the future.”

However, confronting the history of the Atlantic slave trade requires more than a sentence acknowledging that the Amistad prisoners “had been captured in Africa by Africans who sold them to European slave traders.” Website readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been, as affirmed by the PBS Africans in America series, a joint venture: “During this era, Africans and Europeans stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit. Kings exchanged respectful letters across color lines and addressed each other as colleagues. Natives of the two continents were tied into a common economy.”2

Peter Fricke and Anthony Gockowski:

Several Clemson students got a hostile reception Thursday when they started asking questions about a possible conflict of interest in the school’s investigation of a racial bias incident.

The following day, the official in question declared that she had recused herself from the matter.

“It is also disturbing that there is a possibility of her own involvement in preventing the investigation of the arrested #Clemson5 under the student code of conduct.”

Students affiliated with an unofficial organization called “See The Stripes” began a sit-in last week at Sikes Hall, which houses the school’s administrative offices, demanding that the school take action in response to the discovery of a bunch of bananas hanging from a banner honoring African American history at Clemson. WYFF reports that they ended the occupation Thursday night, nine days and five arrests after it began, having determined that they had little prospect of securing additional concessions beyond those the school outlined that afternoon.

See The Stripes had issued a list of seven demands, including a commitment to prosecute “defamatory speech,” increased funding for minority student groups, and hiring more faculty of color.

:

the world today, there are two efforts to massively scale new school systems that are based on agile, technology focused learning systems. One has raised $133M and is currently educating about 750 students in six schools in three American cities; the other has raised $3M and is currently educating 7,500 students in 50 publicly (and privately) financed schools in three countries (The Netherlands, Spain and South Africa). You would be challenged to find out much about the latter, mainly because it hasn’t raised much money, which seems to have become the key metric for sexiness and media coverage.

There is nothing wrong with the grand vision of AltSchool, the company that has raised $133M. In fact, it really is a sexy story where the founder got frustrated looking for a school for his kids, so he started a new approach to schools. Fortunately, he had sold a company to Google so he had the money, experience and contacts to raise a huge amount of money and really go after the opportunity to transform education. Here are stories about AltSchool in The New Yorker, Huffington Post, The New York Times, and there are hundreds of others.

The Foretellix Blog:

Take, for instance, future assistive robots (which assist the disabled / elderly, as I described here). They will be able to take the customer downstairs, take her to the movies, help her with some medical procedures and so on. This covers the vast majority of the time.

However, in some cases (e.g. the customer faints, or some policeman across the street hollers incomprehensible stuff at the robot, etc.) this mostly-autonomous robot should alert an operator. The operator would probably take over remotely, using the robot’s sensors (e.g. vision, hearing) and actuators (e.g. locomotion, grabbing) to understand the situation and “do the right thing”.

Lionel Shriver:

From childhood, I experienced being female as an imposition. Growing up between two brothers, I was the one who had to wear stupid dresses, and worry about (the horror, in my day) letting my panties show on the swings. My brothers got to take off their shirts during sultry North Carolinian summers, while I wasn’t allowed to, even during the years my chest looked just like theirs.

Yet the impositions were just beginning. Periods were hideous. Did my brothers get puffy once a month, suffer terrible back aches and go back to wearing smelly de facto diapers? I was the one, too, who had the fear of God put in her about getting pregnant. In comparison to their sons, my parents clearly had reduced expectations for my career prospects. Ruefully, at 87, my father finally conceded last year: “You know, we may have underestimated you.” He still hasn’t quite brought himself to admit why: I was the girl.

c-span video

Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker talked about their book The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, in which they examine the next hot spots for global innovation.

#smartestplaces

David Kopel:

Texas appears poised to join the growing number of states allowing licensed, trained adults to carry concealed handguns for lawful protection on the campuses of public universities and colleges. In Texas, as elsewhere, opponents offer a parade of horribles about the supposed results: heated classroom discussion of Sophocles will result in gunfights; students will threaten to kill professors who gave them a bad grade, and so on. Since Colorado has had licensed guns on campus for over a decade, it may be helpful to look at the experience there.

For most of Colorado’s history, firearms were legal on public university campuses. That began to change in 1970, due to concerns about campus violence by terrorist organizations such as the Weather Underground.

Marc Eisen

The disharmony stems in part from the tensions of a generally liberal-minded university working with a decidedly conservative state government. Further exacerbating the relationship is the obliqueness of UW System bookkeeping and the Republican belief it hid a huge slush fund. (This became a key factor in the GOP-enforced tuition freeze and UW budget cut.) Add in the troubling geographic complaints that the UW System is Madison-centric and shorts the rest of the state and Milwaukee in particular.

UW advocates, in turn, are reeling from the $250 million UW budget cut, the four-year tuition freeze, the stripping of tenure protection from state statutes and Gov. Scott Walker’s surprise attempt in an earlier budget to bowdlerize the “Wisconsin Idea” that guides the UW’s mission to the citizenry.

All this makes for an unpleasant stew of missed signals, aggravation, suspicion and wheel spinning. Not to mention a nagging sense that the state as a whole is grievously hurt by the failure of the pols and profs to make nice.

Somewhat related: theriselinggroup.com/about-us

The Economist:

ALONE and in silence, Sören Schindler sits in a white-walled conference room in Munich for six hours a day. He is writing a program that will run an online service for HypoVereinsbank, one of Germany’s largest financial institutions.

The Economist:

A COLLEGE degree has never been more necessary: graduates earn, on average, 80% more than high-school graduates. Yet ever more Americans are taking on serious debt in exchange for that diploma.

Aim Collins:

Now that my girls are 10 (!) I look back and am so grateful and happy for the wonderful education they’ve received. I’ve been thinking about how important it is to share positive stories about my experience to counter the inaccurate and crazy-making rhetoric about how difficult it is to enroll in a “good” public school.

With this in mind, I recently posted some resources on NextDoor about the kindergarten enrollment process. I wanted to reassure parents who are just embarking on the kindergarten enrollment process that everything will work out great, and also share tips for any family (public or private) on how to ease the transition to kindergarten. In addition, I offered to be a resource to answer questions about local schools.

Initially, I got a few positive responses from local parents, chiming in on their great public school experiences. Unfortunately, as I have learned, you can’t get away posting anything on NextDoor without getting snarky comments from folks eagerly awaiting the chance to rain on your parade.

Jared Walzcak:

Individual income taxes are the single largest source of state tax revenue in the United States, accounting for 36.5 percent of all state revenue in fiscal year 2013 despite the fact that nine states forego a tax on wage and salary income. Among states (and the District of Columbia) imposing an individual income tax on wage income, the tax accounts for an average of 43.4 percent of all state collections.

Income taxes tend to be less important to local governments overall, accounting for 4.8 percent of local tax collections. Over 91 percent of all state and local income tax revenue flows to state governments. Low collections at the local level is at least partly due, however, to their lesser ubiquity. They represent 13.8 percent of collections in the thirteen states (and the District of Columbia) permitting local income taxes, ranging from de minimus collections in Oregon to 31.7 percent of local revenue in Maryland. Local governments in six states—Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—generate more than 10 percent of their revenue from individual income taxation, as does the District of Columbia.

American Academy of Arts & Sciences, via Richard Askey

Agreement (PDF):

The data listed below will be made available to Forward Madison researchers upon request. There are two types of data potentially needed – individual-level data and aggregate by school. Individual, student-level data

Student demographics, including: o Student ID #
Race/ethnicity
Special Education services required o ELL status
Advanced learner status
Student academic and behavior data, including:
Current school enrollment
PALS English and Espanol Grades 1-2 scores for Fall and Spring o MAP Grades 3-8 Reading and Math scores for Fall and Spring o ACT/Aspire Grades 9-11 scores
Out-of-School Suspensions
Attendance

Aggregate data

MMSD Climate Survey data for staff, students, and parents by school Staff data – Year 4 Educator Effectiveness scores

Number of TEEM Scholars hired by MMSD
Student demographics (school level), Including:
Race/ethnicity
Income
Special Education services required o ELL status
Advanced learner status

Student academic and behavior data (school level), including:
PALS English and Espanol Grades 1-2 scores for Fall and Spring o MAP Grades 3-8 Reading and Math scores for Fall and Spring o ACT/Aspire Grades 9-11 scores
Out-of-School Suspensions
Attendance

MMSD will provide this data to the Forward Madison research team at the end of each school year through 2022. See attached Forward Madison MOA for more details.

A plan for preventing others from viewing and using the data that addresses Confidentiality of Information and Security of the system:

Data will be stored in a University of Wisconsin-Madison Box account. Box adheres to the highest industry standards for security, including:

Content is stored on enterprise-grade servers that undergo regular audits and are monitored 24/7

Files are backed up daily to additional facilities

All files uploaded to Box are encrypted at rest using 256-bit AES encryption.

For files in transit, use RC4-128 encryption, currently considered safe and secure.

Name and contact Information of the researcher involved In day-to-day operation Involving use of data, and conducting the research and analysis.

Forward Madison is under the administrative lead of the Education Outreach and Partnerships Office (EOP), UW Madison School of Education, 264 Teacher Education Building, 225 N. Mills Street, Madison, WI 53706. Principal Investigator: Beth Giles-Klinkner; Project Coordinator: Ann Halbach. External evaluation will be conducted by Matthew Hora, Research Scientist, WI Center for Education Research, 960 Ed Sciences Bldg, Madison, WI 53706. Project Strand Evaluator – TBD

http://forward-madison.org/.

Conor Friedersdorf:

The student activists had occupied a small room outside Katehi’s office, planning to stay until their chancellor resigned or was removed from her post. By the time they left 36 days later, a petition that now bears roughly 100 signatures of UC Davis students and staff were demanding that they prematurely end their occupation, criticizing their tactics, and alleging a number of grave transgressions: The signatories accused the student activists of sexism, racism, bullying, abuse, and harassment, complaining that many who used the administration building “no longer feel safe.” The student activists say that those charges are unfair.

The conflict illustrates a pattern that campus observers are likely see more and more in coming years: Insofar as progressives succeed in remaking campuses into places unusually sensitive to psychological harms, where transgressing against “safe spaces” is both easy to do and verboten, confrontational activism will no longer be viable.

Too many people feel upset by it.

Tod Perry:

“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right,” is a famous quote often attributed to automaker Henry Ford. In many respects, he’s right. Far too many of us live with limitations we’ve unfairly placed on ourselves or accepted from other people. But 15-year-old pianist Alexey Romanov of Zelenodolsk, Russia has defied all expectations by becoming an excellent pianist even though he has no fingers, and only one leg.

Romanov was born with a terrible illness that left him without hands and a leg. After being adopted four years ago, he fell in love with Mozart and Vivaldi and decided to learn how to play the piano. He has prosthetic arms, though he prefers not to use them while playing because he finds them uncomfortable. Sadly, his prosthetic leg is broken, but he still walks o

Daniel Douglas-Gabriel:

Putting away money for your child’s education is a no-brainer in the era of five-figure student debt, but it can be a little tricky figuring out the best ways to save. While 529 plans are a go-to option for many families, Roth IRAs are emerging as a popular alternative investment vehicle to save for college.

Both accounts come with tax advantages and could grow your money, so which one is right for you? (Although investing is one of the best ways to increase your savings, be mindful of market volatility. You can lose as much as you gain.)

Named for a section of the U.S. tax code, 529 plans are designed specifically to save for college. The most popular plans function much like a 401k retirement account because the money you put in is invested in stocks, bonds or money market funds. Earnings on the plans are not subjected to federal taxes so long as you use the money for “qualified education” expenses — tuition, books, fees, room and board — at any accredited school. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else can contribute to these accounts. The plans can transfer to other members of a family, but the money must be used for education or withdrawals will come with tax consequences.

The Economist:

IN AMERICA in 1970 one child in 14,000 was reckoned to be autistic. The current estimate is one in 68—or one in 42 among boys. Similarly high numbers can be found in other rich countries: a study in South Korea found that one in 38 children was affected. Autism is a brain condition associated with poor social skills. It has a wide spectrum of symptoms, from obsessive behaviour to hypersensitivity to sound, light or other sensory stimulation, the severity of which ranges from mild to life-blighting. The range of consequences is also wide. At one end, the autism of a computer scientist may be barely noticeable; at the other, a quarter of autistic children do not speak.

Autism is a condition that defies simple generalisations. Except one: the potential of far too many autistic people is being squandered. Although around half of those with autism are of average intelligence or above, they do far worse than they should at school and at work. In France, almost 90% of autistic children attend primary school, but only 1% make it to high school. Figures from America, which works harder to include autistic pupils, suggest that less than half graduate from high school. In Britain, only 12% of higher-functioning autistic adults work full time. Globally, the United Nations reckons that 80% of those with autism are not in the workforce.

Philip Ball:

Have you heard the one about the biologist, the physicist, and the mathematician? They’re all sitting in a cafe watching people come and go from a house across the street. Two people enter, and then some time later, three emerge. The physicist says, “The measurement wasn’t accurate.” The biologist says, “They have reproduced.” The mathematician says, “If now exactly one person enters the house then it will be empty again.”

Hilarious, no? You can find plenty of jokes like this—many invoke the notion of a spherical cow—but I’ve yet to find one that makes me laugh. Still, that’s not what they’re for. They’re designed to show us that these academic disciplines look at the world in very different, perhaps incompatible ways.

Amy Wang:

Take pity on college admissions officers. Of the thousands of gushing essays from eager students that wash across their desks each year, a great number are virtually the same.

Per the Universities and College Admissions Service (UCAS), the UK organization that manages applications to British universities, far too many teenagers’ personal statements begin with “hackneyed phrases.” UCAS looked at submissions from 700,000 students who applied to British schools in the past year and found several opening lines being used again and again, which suggests that the subject matter is often drearily similar, too.

“The personal essay is supposed to be personal,” admonished UCAS chief executive Mary Curnock Cook. “Learning to write about yourself in a compelling way is a vital skill when applying for jobs.” Teens don’t seem to have gotten that message yet. Below are 10 most repeated first sentences from those 700,000 apps:

Alan Borsuk:

Nicolet High School serves students from Fox Point, Bayside, River Hills and Glendale. Nicolet is both a high-performing school and a high-spending one. This year’s budget works out to more than $18,000 per student.

On April 5, voters in those communities approved allowing Nicolet, for the next six years, to spend $3.15 million a year more than the revenue cap that the state imposes on public schools. A $2.15 million a year addition to school spending that has been in place for five years ends this year.

Without the voters’ approval in the referendum, Nicolet would have cut spending by 15%, cut a dozen teachers and increased class sizes from typically about 23 to about 30, Superintendent Robert Kobylski said. The approval means about $7 per $100,000 of home value in additional taxes annually for Nicolet-area residents.

Madison is spending more than $17k per student.

Dave Brat & Jeff Flake:

Today, many lack the recommended savings level of three to six months of income. In fact, according to a recent Federal Reserve survey, only 53 percent of adults would be able to cover an emergency expense of $400 without selling an asset or borrowing.

Part of the problem is the tax code being too complex, making it difficult for people to understand their options to invest and save for the future. A more streamlined and flexible saving account to enable and encourage savings is needed. To that end, we have introduced the Universal Savings Account Act, legislation that will empower all individuals to set aside money for all of life’s challenges and opportunities.

Sightline Institute:

What drew far less attention—and what is ultimately far more important—is the rest of HALA’s assertion. Those other 43 words point directly at local restrictions on housing construction in Seattle, prominently including its vast allocation of land to single-family lots as “among the largest obstacles to equity and affordability.”

Across North America, such statements are vanishingly rare in the official pronouncements of policymakers. Zoning, especially single-family zoning, is presumed sacrosanct. What may be surprising to those not steeped in land-use and urban economics, however, is that HALA’s words are not strong at all in light of the growing body of evidence that restrictive zoning undermines equity and social justice.

Much more, here.

Laura McKenna:

If you’re a grad student, it’s best to read the latest report from the National Science Foundation with a large glass of single-malt whiskey in hand. Scratch that: The top-shelf whiskey is probably out of your budget. Well, Trader Joe’s “Two Buck Chuck” is good, too!

Liquid courage is a necessity when examining the data on Ph.D.s in the latest NSF report, “The Survey of Earned Doctorates,” which utilized figures from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The report finds that many newly minted Ph.D.s complete school after nearly 10 years of studies with significant debt and without the promise of a job. Yet few people seem to be paying attention to these findings; graduate programs are producing more Ph.D.s than ever before.

Mathematical Association of America:

second place at the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO), an international math competition of 147 contestants representing 38 countries that competed in Busteni, Romania.

Annysa Johnson:

The much-anticipated proposal by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and his appointed school commissioner to take control of some of Milwaukee Public Schools’ poorest performing schools drew sharp rebukes from board members this week, with at least one suggesting he will not sign off on the deal.

MPS board Director Terry Falk likened the plan, in which Mequon-Thiensville Superintendent Demond Means would operate the schools as a consultant to MPS, to “a shotgun marriage.”

“It’s almost impossible for us to walk down the aisle with you and say ‘I do,'” Falk told Means during a school board working session Thursday night in which Means laid out the proposal as Abele’s Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program commissioner.

KurzweilAI:

Binghamton University researchers have developed a biometric identification method called Cognitive Event-RElated Biometric REcognition (CEREBRE) for identifying an individual’s unique “brainprint.” They recorded the brain activity of 50 subjects wearing an electroencephalograph (EEG) headset while looking at selected images from a set of 500 images.

The researchers found that participants’ brains reacted uniquely to each image — enough so that a computer system that analyzed the different reactions was able to identify each volunteer’s “brainprint” with 100 percent accuracy.

In their original brainprint study in 2015, published in Neurocomputing (see ‘Brainprints’ could replace passwords), the research team was able to identify one person out of a group of 32 by that person’s responses, with 97 percent accuracy. That study only used words. Switching to images made a huge difference.

John Daniel Davidson:

If you ever doubted that a single Craigslist ad could capture the decline and fall of Western civilization, doubt no more. A Craigslist ad posted over the weekend by a concerned helicopter parent in the upscale neighborhood of Bel Air, Los Angeles, seeks a tutor for his or her adult son, a 22-year-old student at the University of California-Los Angeles who is having trouble with his gender studies class.

Jonathan Zimmerman

In June 1962, 59 student activists met in Port Huron, Michigan to draft a manifesto of their core principles. They condemned racism in the United States and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Most of all, though, they indicted their own institution, the modern US university, for ignoring and suppressing their voice. Students needed to ‘wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy’, The Port Huron Statement declared. Otherwise, the empty suits who ran the university would drown its emancipatory potential in a sea of bland rituals and senseless rules.

Attracta Mooney:

The US public pension system has developed a $3.4tn funding hole that will pile pressure on cities and states to cut spending or raise taxes to avoid Detroit-style bankruptcies.

According to academic research shared exclusively with FTfm, the collective funding shortfall of US public pension funds is three times larger than official figures showed, and is getting bigger.

Devin Nunes, a US Republican congressman, said: “It has been clear for years that many cities and states are critically underfunding their pension programmes and hiding the fiscal holes with accounting tricks.”

Mr Nunes, who put forward a bill to the House of Representatives last month to overhaul how public pension plans report their figures, added: “When these pension funds go insolvent, they will create problems so disastrous that the fund officials assume the federal government will have to bail them out.”

Large pension shortfalls have already played a role in driving several US cities, including Detroit in Michigan and San Bernardino in California, to file for bankruptcy. The fear is other cities will soon become insolvent due to the size of their pension deficits.

Melissa Korn:

For more than 150 years, the “final clubs” at Harvard University have sat atop a rigid social hierarchy, the original all-male clubs at the country’s oldest college. Now, they are in a spat with school administrators, who want to address sexual assault on campus by forcing the clubs to welcome women members.

Undergraduate leaders of the clubs, whose members have included Roosevelts and Kennedys, were told at a meeting with Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana late last month that they had until April 15 to decide whether to go coed, or face unknown consequences, according to multiple students who attended the meeting. The request included the newer all-female clubs as well, they said.

Undergraduate and alumni representatives from all-male and all-female clubs met with Mr. Khurana again for nearly three hours Wednesday night, pressing him for details of potential sanctions against members of groups that don’t go coed, according to two attendees. One of those attendees said his responses were “noncommittal”; the other called them “nonspecific.”

Jillian Berman

Public higher education is often thought of as a way to help level the playing field between Americans of all stripes, but there’s evidence that flagship public colleges aren’t the engines of mobility we think.

These schools are often thought a way to provide students from a variety of backgrounds with a high-quality education at an affordable cost. But a new study adds to the growing body of evidence that these schools increasingly serve wealthier students.

Between 1972 and 2007, the share of applicants to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the bottom fifth of the income distribution stayed roughly the same at less than 5%, according to a study published last week in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. During the same period, the share of applicants from the second-lowest income quintile declined from at least 20% or more to just 11.5% in 2007. But the share of applicants from the top two highest income levels grew from 42.6% to 64.1%.

The university does make efforts to reach more low-income applicants, including through outreach, scholarship programs and transfer agreements with two-year colleges, whose classes typically include a large share of low-income students, according to Meredith McGlone, a University of Wisconsin-Madison spokeswoman. In addition, the school upped its need-based grant aid from $6.6 million during the 2007-2008 academic year to $31.3 million this past academic year, she said.

Alex Csiszar:

Referees are overworked. The problem of bias is intractable. The referee system has broken down and become an obstacle to scientific progress. Traditional refereeing is an antiquated form that might have been good for science in the past but it’s high time to put it out of its misery.

What is this familiar litany? It is a list of grievances aired by scientists a century ago.If complaining about the faults of referee systems is nothing new, such systems are not as old as historical accounts often claim. Investigators of nature communicated their findings without scientific referees for centuries. Deciding whom and what to trust usually depended on personal knowledge among close-knit groups of researchers. (Many might argue it still does.)

Neal Gabler:

Since 2013, the federal reserve board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Jonnelle Marte:

embers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and their supporters attend a rally outside the Capitol in Washington on April 14. The demonstrators protested a plan by the Central States Pension Fund to reduce payments to retirees. (Drew Angerer/Bloomberg)
More than a quarter of a million active and retired truckers and their families could soon see their pension benefits severely cut — even though their pension fund is still years away from running out of money.

Within the next few weeks, the Treasury Department is expected to announce a crucial decision on whether it will approve reductions to one of the country’s largest multi-employer pension plans.

David West:

Recent decades have seen a protracted attack and painstaking demolition of the traditional or ‘old’ university and an associated purging of academics. The rise of managers and ‘managerial’ doctrines were supposed to make universities more efficient and productive, more lean and transparent, and above all, more modern. In practice, managerial reforms have given rise to a range of pathologies and side effects. Bullying is widespread, many staff are unhappy. But the spread of managerialism is also threatening the university’s role as a centre of committed teaching scholarship and critical research. Examination of the actual effects – rather than stated aims – of the managerial experiment is long overdue.

Tim Harford:

This statistical capitulation was a dismaying read for anyone still wedded to the idea — apparently a quaint one — that gathering statistical information might help us understand and improve our world. But the Guardian’s cynicism can hardly be a surprise. It is a natural response to the rise of “statistical bullshit” — the casual slinging around of numbers not because they are true, or false, but to sell a message.

Politicians weren’t always so ready to use numbers as part of the sales pitch. Recall Ronald Reagan’s famous suggestion to voters on the eve of his landslide defeat of President Carter: “Ask yourself, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’” Reagan didn’t add any statistical garnish. He knew that voters would reach their own conclusions.

The British election campaign of spring last year, by contrast, was characterised by a relentless statistical crossfire. The shadow chancellor of the day, Ed Balls, declared that a couple with children (he didn’t say which couple) had lost £1,800 thanks to the government’s increase in value added tax. David Cameron, the prime minister, countered that 94 per cent of working households were better off thanks to recent tax changes, while the then deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was proud to say that 27 million people were £825 better off in terms of the income tax they paid.

Could any of this be true? Yes — all three claims were. But Ed Balls had reached his figure by summing up extra VAT payments over several years, a strange method. If you offer to hire someone for £100,000, and then later admit you meant £25,000 a year for a four-year contract, you haven’t really lied — but neither have you really told the truth. And Balls had looked only at one tax. Why not also consider income tax, which the government had cut? Clegg boasted about income-tax cuts but ignored the larger rise in VAT. And Cameron asked to be evaluated only on his pre-election giveaway budget rather than the tax rises he had introduced earlier in the parliament — the equivalent of punching someone on the nose, then giving them a bunch of flowers and pointing out that, in floral terms, they were ahead on the deal.

Each claim was narrowly true but broadly misleading. Not only did the clashing numbers confuse but none of them helped answer the crucial question of whether Cameron and Clegg had made good decisions in office.

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

Lawrence Summers:

It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity regarding prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity with respect to anti-Semitism.

At Bowdoin College, holding parties with sombreros and tequila is deemed to be an act of prejudice against Mexicans. At Emory, the chalking of an endorsement of the likely Republican presidential candidate on a sidewalk is deemed to require a review of security tapes. The existence of a college named after a widely admired former US president has under the duress of a student occupation been condemned at Princeton. At Yale, Halloween costumes are the subject of administrative edict. The dean of Harvard Law School has acknowledged that hers is a racist institution, while the freshman dean at Harvard College has used dinner placemats to propagandise the student body on aspects of diversity. Professors acquiesce as students insist that they not be exposed to views on issues like abortion that make them uncomfortable.

As I have discussed in the past, this is in my view inconsistent with basic American values of free speech and open debate. It fails to recognise that a proper liberal education should cause moments of acute discomfort as cherished beliefs are challenged.

Elaine Moore:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval romance composed by an unknown poet, a mishmash of religious allegory and folklore that has survived through a single copy to become a keystone of English literature.

It is also, according to academics at the University of Cambridge, the source of one of the earliest known examples of a rape joke, which is why this tale of Arthurian Britain, unintelligible to those not conversant in Middle English, has been dragged into a very modern debate about the phenomenon known as “triggering”.

At Cambridge, students who attend lectures on the poem are now issued with a warning — accompanied with a small exclamation mark — that what they are about to read contains potentially sensitive or upsetting material.

“Trigger warnings” have long been a mainstay of feminist websites, used to alert readers to graphic descriptions of abuse or violence, the sort of things that might stir up traumatic memories for those who had suffered similarly. They’ve also made an impression on US campuses. But even though there is no obligation for lecturers to apply the warnings, their introduction at one of Britain’s oldest universities is proving to be a source of contention.

Advocates of content warnings see them as a simple means for students to make informed decisions. Critics, meanwhile, see the debate as emblematic of millennial over-sensitivity and censoriousness, in line with their neurotic preoccupation with “safe spaces” and “micro-aggressions”. Academics have been caught in the middle: sympathetic to students who have had difficult personal experiences, but uneasy at the idea of warnings being imposed.

Charles Cooke:

In her harrowing 1892 treatise on the horrors of lynching in the post-bellum American South, the journalist, suffragist, and civil-rights champion Ida B. Wells established for her readers the value of bearing arms. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year,” Wells recorded, “the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves.” She went on to proffer some advice: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history.

“Do you really think that it could happen here?” remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding “Yes.” For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word “tyranny” for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? “It” did “happen here.” And “it” was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of “all men.”

When, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney buttoned his Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion with the panicked warning that if free blacks were permitted to become American citizens they might begin “to keep and carry arms wherever they went,” he was signaling his support for a disgraceful status quo within which suppression of the right to bear arms was depressingly quotidian. Indeed, until the late 1970s, the history of American gun control was largely inextricable from the history of American racism. Long before Louisiana was a glint in Thomas Jefferson’s eye, the French “Black Codes” mandated that any black person found with a “potential weapon” be not only deprived of that weapon but also beaten for his audacity. British colonies, both slaveholding and free, tended to restrict gun ownership to whites, with even the settlements at Massachusetts and Plymouth prohibiting Indians from purchasing or owning firearms. Throughout the South, blacks were denied weapons. The intention of these rules was clear: to remove the means by which undesirables might rebel or resist, and to ensure that the majority maintained its prerogatives. In 1834, alarmed by Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, Tennessee amended its state constitution to make this purpose unambiguous, clarifying that the “right to keep and to bear arms” applied not to “the freemen of this State” — as the 1794 version of the document had allowed — but to “the free white men of this State.”

In much of America, this principle would hold for another century, emancipation notwithstanding. As Adam Winkler of UCLA’s law school has noted, a movement comprising the Ku Klux Klan and those Democrats who sought to thwart the gains of the Civil War “began with gun control at the very top of its agenda.” In theory, by mandating that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” the 14th Amendment would bring an end to Dixie’s confiscatory schemes; in reality, its passage provoked white supremacists in the states of the former Confederacy to achieve their aims in a more subtle manner. Nowhere in Tennessee’s illustrative “Army and Navy” law (1879) was race so much as hinted at. Instead, the measure limited residents of that state to a few expensive firearms, thereby outlawing the small derringers and low-caliber revolvers that impoverished blacks could afford. Like the poll taxes and literacy tests that went along with them, such laws achieved their aims without telegraphing their intent.

Catey Hill:

Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.

An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)

Blake Neff:

A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education.

Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.

In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.

“Education is not about the mere reproduction of knowledge,” Hackman said. “Education is the practice of freedom. And as a result, we have to have [teaching] students becomes activists as well as teachers.”

Creating educators who are proper activists, Hackman continued, means training them to not only to encourage diversity but also to engage with the systemic oppression she says is pervasive in the entire educational system. In Hackman’s telling, virtually everything associated with being a good student in modern education is actually just a tool of racist white supremacy.

Janis Mackey Frayer:

Bereaved parents are demanding more compensation from China’s government, blaming the now-defunct one-child policy for robbing them of the chance to have more kids.

“I don’t have any hope anymore,” said Zhou Ru Xian, whose 24-year-old daughter died in 2013.

Image: Protest in Beijing, China
Parents seeking compensation after China axed its one-child policy attended a rally outside the Ministry of Health in Beijing on Tuesday.

Rudi Keller:

The Columbia campus is trying to cover $22 million of an expected $32.5 million shortfall because of declining enrollment and new commitments such as the new Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, spokesman Christian Basi said. The cuts do not take into account possible state budget reductions or increases.

Of the 50 positions in operations to be cut, 21.75 currently are vacant and will not be filled, and many others are in auxiliary departments such as campus catering or facilities, Basi said. Many are held by students, he said.

Yuan-ling Liang:

On April 17, Jonathan Bergmann, inventor of the “flipped classroom,” attended an educational conference in Taiwan held by UDN, sharing the spirit of the unconventional teaching method and his opinions on Taiwan’s education system. During the conference, Bergmann pointed out that teachers in Taiwan might be replaced by YouTube videos if they don’t change their teaching methods.

Teachers should promote problem-solving abilities
Bergmann is a high school chemistry teacher in the US and has more than 20 years of teaching experience. In 2007, he filmed his lectures in class for absent students, but was accused of encouraging them to not come to school. This urged him to contemplate on the real function and value of teachers.

Mareesa Nicosia:

Advocates and parents with the education reform group StudentsFirstNY are demanding that New York City release records of the roughly 1,100 public school teachers who are on its payroll indefinitely but don’t have a job to do.

The teachers are part of what’s known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, which costs taxpayers an estimated $100 million per year. Teachers end up in the reserve if their jobs have been eliminated due to a school closure or downsizing, or they may be placed there during misconduct hearings.
Regardless of the reason, teachers in the ATR receive full salaries and benefits while they wait to be assigned to a classroom or for disciplinary proceedings to proceed, sometimes languishing for months or years at a time.

T Rees Shapiro:

High schools in the Southwest dominate the 2016 U.S. News and World Report rankings of the country’s best high schools, taking six of the top 10 spots in the rankings released Tuesday.

Texas and Arizona high schools earned the top four rankings, and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology a Fairfax County, Va. magnet school, was in the fifth spot nationally.

The news magazine collected data on more than 21,500 schools for the report, which for the first time included graduation rates as a factor in the rankings.

Wisconsin high schools.

Middleton appears to be the highest ranked Madison area high school (#656 nationally).

Jeff Guo:

The latest research from Autor and his colleagues shows that early-life adversity causes boys to struggle much more than girls. It’s not yet clear why girls are so tough, but they seem much better suited to the challenges of modern childhood. The gender differences are minimal in households with resources — but among poorer families, boys systematically fall short of their sisters and female peers. This pattern implies that if income inequality continues to worsen, the gender inequalities will worsen, too.

Now, in a new paper released Monday, the economists have found additional evidence that bad schools exacerbate the differences in academic achievement between boys and girls. The phenomenon is illustrated in a stunning chart, seen below.

The economists plotted the average test scores of boys and girls at various middle schools in Florida. The schools are ranked by quality, based on how good they are at improving kids’ test scores. At the far left are the worst schools. At the far right are the best schools.

:

Last spring, 9-year-old Derrick Fields sat in his social studies classroom at Sherman Elementary School, learning about the creation of the telegraph. The machine was invented so that “someone can connect to someone who is far away,” he said.

This was pretty normal stuff for a fourth grade history lesson, except for one thing: The entire lesson — from the textbooks to the teacher’s instructions to the students’ short essays — was in Spanish.

In fact, half of Derrick’s time is spent learning in Spanish and the other half in English in what’s known as a dual language immersion program.
Teaching academic subjects in Spanish, or any foreign language, has been widely understood to be illegal in California since 1998. [Proposition 227](https://ballotpedia.org/CaliforniaProposition227,theEnglishinPublicSchoolsInitiative_(1998))
appeared on the June ballot that year, offering voters a chance to weigh in on whether or not students should be taught primarily in English in public schools. While opponents saw the measure as racist, it was loudly championed by Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire with political aspirations, as the best way to integrate the state’s booming immigrant population.

Eric Hoover:

Alexander W. Astin has something to say — a lot to say, really — about smartness. He knows some people won’t want to hear it, especially if they happen to teach college students for a living.

Mr. Astin, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes that too many faculty members “have come to value merely being smart more than developing smartness.” That line comes from his new book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession With Smartness Shortchanges Students.

In the short yet provocative text, Mr. Astin peers into the faculty lounge as well as the admissions office. There he finds more concern with “acquiring” smart students, as defined by conventional metrics, than with helping students improve after they enroll.

“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”

Abilash Gopal:

Overparenting is widely recognized as a problematic approach to raising kids. For nearly a decade, studies have shown how the rise of the “helicopter parent” has been worsening children’s anxiety and school performance in the K-12 years. Now we’re witnessing what happens when the overparented child grows up, and it’s a trainwreck that is painful to watch, but impossible to ignore.

As an inpatient adolescent psychiatrist, I see the most severe cases. Oftentimes, the overly-involved parents have been impeding the development of autonomy in their child for years. The child comes to the hospital anxious and depressed but doesn’t have the tools to make a change. So the parents become even more involved, and the child becomes more dependent and emotionally stunted. It’s a vicious cycle laced with the best intentions.

I try to help these adolescents become more well-adjusted adults by teaching them how to develop an authentic identity that is separate from their parents. I encourage them not to slip into the victim role and blame their parents and the world, because that is both counterproductive and psychologically harmful. If they can be open to taking responsibility for their choices and are willing to develop insight into their strengths and limitations, they will be on the path to self-empowerment and confidence.

Eric Banks:

I can’t remember the last time I used an electric typewriter. It most likely would have been in the course of typing out an address on an envelope—but then again, I can’t readily call to mind the last time I did that with anything other than that old-fashioned technology, the ballpoint pen, which itself is not really all that old school. The mass commercial distribution of the ballpoint pen in the United States dates only to about 1945, which means its triumphal appearance in the writing market occurred just under twenty years before that of the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, IBM’s radically rethought typewriting device. Released in 1964, the MT/ST was the first machine of its kind, equipped with a magnetic-tape memory component that allowed you to edit text before it was actually printed on the page. Corporations were considered the primary beneficiaries of the new technology, a wrinkle on the electric typewriter that arrived with considerable media enthusiasm. The makers of the MT/ST saw the contemporary office groaning under the weight of metastasizing paperwork and envisioned making money off companies hoping to streamline the costs of secretarial labor and increase productivity. Writers were something of an afterthought: Whatever effect IBM’s product would have on authors—high or low, commercial or experimental—was collateral.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Creative products, by definition, are the antithesis of expertise. This is because creativity must be original, meaningful, and surprising. Original in the sense that the creator is rewarded for transcending expertise, and going beyond the standard repertoire. Meaningful in the sense that the creator must satisfy some utility function, or provide a new interpretation. This constantly raises the bar of what is considered useful, and puts immense pressure on creators to find new meanings. Finally, creative products must be surprising in that the original and meaningful creative product must be surprising not only to oneself, but to everyone. This is exactly how the United States Patent Office evaluates new applications. Original and meaningful ideas that could have been created by any expert in the field are considered “obvious” and are therefore unpatentable. Creative products– such as the discoveries of Galileo and Leeuwenhoek– are surprising to everyone, novices and experts alike.

Roberto Ferdman:

A team of researchers, led by Sarah Hill, who teaches psychology at Texas Christian University, believe they have uncovered evidence of one such lingering effect. Specifically, Hill and her colleagues found that people who grow up poor seem to have a significantly harder time regulating their food intake, even when they aren’t hungry.

Danny Boyle:

A-level students have been told to wear their target grades on ID cards around their necks, leading to pupils complaining of suffering from “unnecessary pressure”.

Sixth-formers at a Bedfordshire school have been given lanyards bearing their predicted exam marks, along with their names and photographs.

But pupils have described the scheme as “alienating” and “stressful”, with some teachers who do not approve of the move reportedly referring to the badges as “the noose”.

Some students at Sharnbrook Upper School, near Bedford, were so upset by the request that they began crossing out their target grades, which are based on their GCSE results.

udayj:

We are developing an app to let you search and find tutors, institutes, online courses, videos, articles, books, etc. for anything you want to learn – from physics & deep learning to dance & guitar.
While similar services exist, they restrict users in what they can search for (only offline tutors or just online courses or just academic subjects) and are mostly listing based services where they charge tutors to list their names. We want to keep it free for the users, including people who list as a teacher, and earn through advertising, affiliate marketing.

We already have a working product at www.tutorack.com – however, it still needs a lot of data.

Laura Waters:

Today at The 74 Bill Bennett suggests that the opt-out movement in New York is driven solely by teacher union leaders and allies who have spent millions of dollars on robocalls, emails, forums, and other tactics. Their motivation to increase test refusals this year is engineered to undermine “tough, high-quality standardized exams” that “will hold their members accountable and make the possibility of grade inflation more difficult.” It’s “a move by teachers unions and far-left policy leaders to completely abolish any serious accountability within student assessments.”

Certainly, the union campaign to eliminate links between student outcomes on benchmarked tests and teacher evaluations is a major driver in New York. But it’s not the only one, nor the only reason why this year’s opt-out rates appear as high as last year’s, at least in white suburbs. (Best estimates, still preliminary, are that students are opting out in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties at about the same rate as last year while other regions — school districts around Rochester and Albany, for example — are showing lower rates. Minority and lower-class students throughout the state are mostly opting in.)

Elahe Izadi:

Teachers and students scribbled the lessons — multiplication tables, pilgrim history, how to be clean — nearly 100 years ago. And they haven’t been touched since.

This week, contractors removing old chalkboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City made a startling discovery: Underneath them rested another set of chalkboards, untouched since 1917.

“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the Oklahoman. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”

Rachel Pells

Students have reacted to claims from university professors that they struggle to read books from cover to cover by admitting it is true – but insisting it’s because universities don’t give them enough time to finish them.

University academics caused a furore this week by claiming many students found the thought of reading books all the way to the end “daunting”, due to shorter attention spans and an inability to focus on complex philosophies.

Jenny Pickerill, a professor in environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, told Times Higher Education magazine: “Students struggle with set texts, saying the language or concepts are too hard”.

Sharif El-Mekki:

Recently, Philadelphia Superintendent William R. Hite announced that North Philadelphia school E.W. Rhodes Elementary would be among four schools undergoing a district-run turnaround plan—requiring staff to reapply for their jobs, with only half able to remain.

In opposition, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, stood with other union leaders and politicians in defense of this persistently failing school. After an hour-long tour of the school Weingarten had this to say:

,

Martin Wolf:

In this way, better accounting might lead to better policy and improved management of assets and liabilities. This is not only important for the UK. It could make a big difference to the eurozone where the accounting is quite poor.

Eric Hand:

Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, has struggled with the logistics of evaluating a rising number of grant proposals that has propelled funding rates to historic lows. Annual or semiannual grant deadlines lead to enormous spikes in submissions, which in turn cause headaches for the program managers who have to organize merit review panels. Now, one piece of the agency has found a potentially powerful new tool to flatten the spikes and cut the number of proposals: It can simply eliminate deadlines.

This week, at an NSF geosciences advisory committee meeting, Assistant Director for Geosciences Roger Wakimoto revealed the preliminary results from a pilot program that got rid of grant proposal deadlines in favor of an anytime submission. The numbers were staggering. Across four grant programs, proposals dropped by 59% after deadlines were eliminated. “We’ve found something that many programs around the foundation can use,” Wakimoto told the advisory committee on 13 April.

Jeffrey Sparshott:

anything good come of cheating?

A 2011 analysis by The Wall Street Journal showed a bulge in New York City students’ test scores right over the passing mark. The evidence strongly suggested teachers were manipulating grades on statewide Regents Exams and helped spur changes to testing procedures.

Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University, updated the numbers from the initial analysis after the state took steps to eliminate grade inflation. The findings: Teachers who manipulated scores appear to have been motivated by altruism, score manipulation was eliminated by 2012, and the graduation gap between black and white students is about 5% larger in its absence.

Neerav Kingsland:

Not that America needs anything greater than a picture of a flag with *both* an eagle and some unnamed founding document superimposed across it.

But in case you’re hungry for more goodness, one of the great parts of my job is I get to travel the country and see innovative work, much of which doesn’t get a lot of national press.

So here’s some highlights, most of which are early stage, none of which are proven, but all of which give me a lot of hope.

Innovation Schools in Indianapolis

Indianapolis has built broad community support for a model that gives great educators autonomy, allow for new school entrepreneurship, and, perhaps most importantly, provides non-profit governance – all within a district construct that is still accountable to a publicly elected school board.

I once wrote a parable about this re: blacksmiths. What’s happening in Indianapolis is even better. This could be a breakthrough in both school site governance (a non-charter path for sustained entrepreneurship and autonomy) and system level governance (how a district reinvents itself as a public steward of great schools).

Tim Whewell:

The case of a young couple in Norway whose five children were taken away by the state has fuelled mounting concern within the country and abroad over its child protection practices. Protesters around the world – and leading Norwegian professionals – say social workers are often too quick to separate children from their families, with too little justification, particularly when parents are immigrants.

Ruth and Marius’s life was torn apart without warning one Monday afternoon last November when two black cars approached the farm where they live in a remote Norwegian valley.

Their two little boys, aged five and two, and their three-month-old baby son, were in their big, bright, modern living room overlooking the steel-grey fjord.
Ruth was waiting as usual for the school bus that would bring back their two daughters, aged eight and 10.

Norway view
But that Monday, it never came. Instead, Ruth saw the two unknown cars. One continued along the main road; the other turned up the farm track – and a woman from the local child protection service knocked at the door.

She told Ruth to come to the police station for interrogation.

“We know best” is hardly perfect.

Alan Borsuk:

So many schools have come and gone from the Milwaukee scene. For many, their departure was more of a public service than their opening.

The Urban Day School story is different. The school is a significant and honorable part of Milwaukee history. For many, including me, feelings about its impending departure include a strong element of sadness.

About 10 days ago, school leaders announced Urban Day would close at the end of this school year. By the end of last week, it was not resolved what was really going to happen at the building at W. Vliet and N. 24th streets, the school’s principal facility, after June. At least one school organization and possibly more are considering taking over in a way that could be seen as carrying on the mission of Urban Day.

Jana Kasperkevic

Los Angeles city council will hear a proposal on Tuesday to exempt union members from a $15 an hour minimum wage that the unions themselves have spent years fighting for.

The proposal for the exemption was first introduced last year, after the Los Angeles city council passed a bill that would see the city’s minimum wage increase to $15 by 2020. After drawing criticism last year, the proposed amendment was put on hold but is now up for consideration once again.

Union leaders argue the amendment would give businesses and unions the freedom to negotiate better agreements, which might include lower wages but could make up the difference in other benefits such as healthcare. They argue that such exemptions might make businesses more open to unionization.

Annysa Johnson:

The city’s decision to move forward with the state-mandated sale of vacant or surplus Milwaukee Public School buildings to competing operators will hinder the district’s own reform efforts and its ability to serve returning students when private voucher and charter schools go belly-up, an MPS spokesman said Saturday.

The common council on Friday — acting under a threat of a lawsuit by school choice proponents — set the stage for the sale of as many as seven buildings, under a procedure dictated by a new state law.

“We are disappointed and concerned that this latest development may limit our ability to continue to grow programs with a track record of success that families in our community are seeking,” MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said in an email to the Journal Sentinel.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm that had threatened to sue the city if it did not comply with the statute, issued a statement lauding the vote.

John Keilman:

Rain had fallen steadily for hours, the kind of shower that turns grass fields to mush and forces young athletes to take the day off. But there they were, a squad of 9- and 10-year-old Oak Park soccer players practicing their skills on a damp but playable surface made of plastic and rubber.

“I got here and was super excited because any other field, there would be standing water,” said Todd Hover, the team’s coach.

Rain-or-shine playability is a big reason why thousands of schools and park districts around the country have turned to artificial turf, but increasingly, some parents worry that the convenience has come with a trade-off.

Sonya Ellen Man:

Skipping college is almost middle-class mainstream at this point. For example, not graduating is an oddly inverted rite of passage in the world of tech startups. Of course, working-class people have been going straight from high school to full-time jobs forever. For as long as there have been universities, educated middle-class or wealthy parents — who are disproportionately white and otherwise privileged — have looked down their noses at the less-rich “unwashed masses”.

However, lacking a bachelor’s degree doesn’t incur the same amount of disapproval as being a high-school dropout. Dropping out of high school is like getting an MFA — it guarantees you’ll end up at McDonald’s (if you can believe the snide, faux-pitying comments). Unlike skipping college, dropping out of high school is reserved for losers and astonishing child geniuses who get admitted to Stanford at twelve. If you can believe the widespread perception.

Marti Leimbac:

I don’t know what it would be like to grow up in a derelict building in a dangerous neighbourhood, to have drug addicts for parents, to fear for my safety Nonetheless, this whole notion of “privilege” vexes me.

We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.

Greg Hurst:

Men who studied at any of 23 of the lowest-performing British universities went on to earn less than those who did not enter further education, research has revealed.

The findings will fuel debate about the cost to the taxpayer of universities with the worst employment records, because a large proportion of graduates do not repay their student loans.

The study, the first to match tax data with student loan records, also highlighted the big differences in earnings of graduates depending on their choice of degree.

Raul Carrillo:

As the presidential primaries rumble on, the candidates — especially Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton — have debated college affordability and Wall Street greed. Unfortunately, no one is confronting the links between the two.

More than 40 million Americans have student debt, totaling at least $1.2 trillion. On average, borrowers out of school owe $36,000, with a monthly payment of $680. Roughly 11 percent of borrowers are in default. Overall, indebtedness discourages people from starting degrees, families and businesses, dragging everyone down.

Or almost everyone. One person’s debt is another person’s asset. What some owe, others own. And student debtors don’t just cut checks to lenders. Our money flows to third parties — including investors.

One rarely discussed feature of the “student loan industrial complex” is the $200 billion market for student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS). This is a circular business, involving lenders like Sallie Mae and big banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Like mortgages, student loans get pooled and repackaged into new financial products (securities). The lenders then sell the securities to investors. Investors receive the reward of monthly loan payments, plus interest. They can hold the securities themselves, trade them or bet on them. In turn, lenders receive quick cash, including fees and commissions, and push the risk of the underlying loans onto investors. This shift allows lenders to make more, and larger, loans.

Melia Robinson:

Whether you come from the California coastline or the snowy forests of Maine, reading a book set in your home state can make you feel a warm nostalgia for that beloved place.

After scouring the internet and surveying our colleagues on their picks, we rounded up the most famous book set in every state in America.

Did we get your state right? Let us know in the comments if you have another pick.

Xeni Jardin:

Looks like the geniuses who run UC Davis never Googled the words “Streisand Effect.”

After a police officer pepper-sprayed UC Davis students in a widely reported 2011 incident, the California university contracted with SEO consultants for $175,000 (or maybe more) to scrub unfavorable online items about the incident and boost online reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.

The Sacramento Bee reported on the SEO scandal, and based their story on documents newly released in response to requests filed last month under the California Public Records Act.

In January 2013, UC Davis contracted a Maryland firm, Nevins & Associates, for a six-month contract that paid $15,000 a month. Nevins was the first of many “reputation management firms” paid off by the university administrators. And that payment was just the start.

Doyin Oyeniyi:

Tests can already induce anxiety in students, especially one they need to pass in order to graduate. That’s when testing administration errors are the least welcome, but last week during the administration of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, answers on 14,220 of the tests across the state were lost due to a computer glitch.

The affected students—who’d been inactive for 30 minutes, who’d momentarily lost internet connection, or who’d logged out to take a break—tried to submit online tests, they would instead receive an error message, only to log back in to find that their answers were missing. Additionally, some visually impaired students, who had also been prepared to take their braille STAAR tests last week, never got a chance to take the tests because their tests never arrived.

The Texas Education Agency is investigating both of these mishaps. For districts where students lost the answers, TEA announced that individual districts could determine for themselves whether students needed to retake the exam. The agency also ensured “that there are no adverse consequences for students who do not resume testing and for districts that elect not to have students resume testing.” TEA emailed an apology to families of visually impaired students who never received their tests:

Anita Chabria:

Students pepper-sprayed by campus police at the University of California at Davis have reacted in anger at the “vastly inappropriate” and “insulting” decision by their university to contract firms to systematically scrub mentions of the story on the internet.

The university is being accused of censorship after quietly seeking to hide web references to a widely reported incident in which police sprayed student activists from the then-nascent Occupy movement four years ago.

The photograph and video went viral across the world, prompting a major backlash against the California university and its chancellor Linda PB Katehi, who was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful activists Students are once again calling for Katehi’s resignation.

Alexa Tsoulis-Reay:

For a long time, it was thought that people with autism spectrum disorder lacked emotion, that even the higher-functioning among them navigated the world like logical robots oblivious to “real” feelings. More recently, research has shown their social issues are more likely to stem from difficulty expressing emotion or reading the emotions of others.

Though he wasn’t diagnosed with autism until he was 40, John Elder Robison felt isolated and disconnected throughout his entire youth and early adulthood. But in 2008, at 50, he took part in what became a three-year research project looking at brain function in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and exploring the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to help them.

Robby Soave:

A Maryland high school student who obeyed the parameters of the assignment he was given is now facing widespread outrage because it wasn’t politically correct—even though the point of the assignment was to write something inflammatory.

Here’s a modest proposal: in order to protect students’ rights and encourage their imaginations, let’s murder all teachers and administrators. Of course, no one actually advocates such a policy (not even me—keep it civil, commenters). It’s an idea inspired by satirist Jonathan Swift’s famous 18th century essay, “A Modest Proposal,” in which he jokingly suggested that poor Irish folk should sell their children to be eaten.