Melissa Korn and Nicole Hong:

A closely watched lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants is approaching a critical juncture, as court filings later this week are expected to reveal new details about how the school’s undergraduate admissions process affects different ethnic and racial groups.

Both sides are due to submit lengthy documents Friday in Boston federal court that will serve as a preview for an October bench trial, in which a federal judge will decide whether the school’s affirmative-action practices are unconstitutional or illegal under federal civil-rights law.

The lawsuit against Harvard was filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit whose members include Asian-American students who were denied admission to Harvard.

The plaintiffs allege Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian-American students who are admitted and holding them to a higher standard than students of other races.

Friday’s motions are likely to include thousands of pages of supporting documents both sides have gathered over the past two years, including dozens of depositions and statistical analyses of detailed admissions data covering six years, during which roughly 200,000 people applied to Harvard.

Tom Bartlett:

Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.

Then just, like, see what happens.

The cover of the program for the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising from?) a black hole. That seems about right: After a week of listening to eye-crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny-tiny cell structures known as microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.

Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you’re bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves — as the name suggests — doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, “boy-yoi-yoing.”

Stephen Chen:

On the surface, the production lines at Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric look like any other.

Workers outfitted in uniforms staff lines producing sophisticated equipment for telecommunication and other industrial sectors.

But there’s one big difference – the workers wear caps to monitor their brainwaves, data that management then uses to adjust the pace of production and redesign workflows, according to the company.

The company said it could increase the overall efficiency of the workers by manipulating the frequency and length of break times to reduce mental stress.

Chris Rickert:

Foreman, who did not respond to requests for comment, says in a letter to Sherman staff earlier this week that she will be making “some key changes in my leadership approach” in the coming school year, which she coins the “year of renewal.” Among them are meeting with teachers union officials to discuss more regular communication, and being more accessible to staff and families and more visible in the building.

In her statement, Cheatham said district officials take feedback from Sherman staff and parents seriously and met with them last semester to “understand the concerns and to create a plan to address them.

“We also understand that, for some, this progress has not been fast enough,” she said.

Related: Madison teacher Karen Vieth.

Sherman Middle School.

Jonny Thakkar:

“THE STAKES OF politics have become existential,” writes Yascha Mounk in The People vs. Democracy, pitched as a bracing call to arms for all those who fear that the foundations of liberal democracy are being rapidly eroded. “In the years to come, it may take more and more courage to stand up for what we hold dear.”

Apocalyptic visions are in vogue, it seems: Mounk’s book on contemporary threats to liberal democracy, subtitled “Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It,” might easily be sold as part of a millenarian package deal with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West.

What distinguishes Mounk’s contribution to the genre, for good and ill, is what we might call its fundamental Voxiness — its currency in the cafe society of liberal Washington. At the level of form, Voxiness combines a seemingly insatiable desire to convey the latest social science with a correspondingly steadfast refusal of wide-ranging normative argument. This is what generates its astonishing capacity, at the level of content, to somehow both overturn conventional wisdom and affirm the preexisting beliefs of reasonable people.

Peter Thonemann:

The first date in English History, according to 1066 and All That, is 55 BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s memorable landing at Thanet. “The Ancient Britons”, Sellar and Yeatman remind us, “were by no means savages before the Conquest, and had already made great strides in civilisation, e.g. they buried each other in long round wheelbarrows (agriculture) and burnt each other alive (religion) under the guidance of even older Britons called Druids or Eisteddfods . . . . The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.”

Anya Kamenetz:

To find out, NPR Ed enlisted the help of 14 reporters at member stations around the country. We identified three major ways that states and districts try to improve their graduation rates.

1 Stepping in early to keep kids on track.

2 Lowering the bar by offering alternate and easier routes when students falter.

3 Gaming the system by moving likely dropouts off the books, transferring or misclassifying them.

Commentary on Madison’s recent graduation rate rhetoric.

Simpson Street Free Press:

Open records watchdogs and clean government advocates call responses by Madison school officials to open records inquires “ugly.”

A recent report distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and published in the Wisconsin State Journal says the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) would not fulfill a request for information about public records without payment. Responding to a specific request, filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), the Madison district required a payment of more than $1,000 to provide the requested information.

WILL attorneys Tom Kamenick and Libby Sobic say large school districts like Madison and Milwaukee “need to devote more resources to complying with open records law.”

According to an attorney representing MMSD, the Madison district does not have a system in place for tracking open records requests, hence its extremely high price in this case.

Writing in the Wisconsin State Journal, Kamenick says that while records custodians are allowed to charge fees for locating records, schools districts that need so much time to locate records are apparently not doing a good job of tracking requests.

“It should not be so hard to find out how well any government entity complies with the law,” Kamenick said.

Dambisa Moyo:

I have been examining electoral systems across the world. In many democracies, including the US and UK, migrants are required to pass government-sanctioned civic tests in order to gain citizenship. So, in this vein, why not give all voters a test of their knowledge? This would ensure minimum standards that should lead to higher-quality decision-making by the electorate. The message this would send is that voting is not just a right, but one that has to be earned. Such testing would not only lead to a better-informed electorate, but also to voters who are more actively engaged.

Of course, such a system would be truly democratic only if everybody had a fair chance of casting their vote. It is vital that those with fewer life opportunities have their say, and we cannot have a system that is skewed against the worst educated, which would leave poorer people even more marginalised and unrepresented than they already are. To that end, the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum, with young people tested in their final year of secondary education. Governments could also organise tests for those over school age.

But if we raise the bar for voters, we must also do so for politicians. Improving the quality and credibility of political leaders is essential to enhancing democracy’s legitimacy. One approach is to move away from the career politician model by setting minimum experience requirements for politicians.

Ayten Tartici:

IN AN 1885 letter to Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé grumbled that all the thousands of bits, shreds, and fragments he had written over the years “make up an album, but not a book” [composent un album, mais pas un livre]. In 19th-century France, the album, echoing its Latin root albus (white), was an actual notebook of blank pages to which one’s friends and acquaintances contributed drawings, poems, and even musical scores (think of it as a yearbook on steroids, assembled just for your enjoyment). In the last course he ever offered at the Collège de France before his untimely death, Roland Barthes revived Mallarmé’s distinction, pitting the album and the book against one another as literary forms: if the album is circumstantial, discontinuous, and lacking in structure, the book is an ordered totality basking in its own architectural design. Mallarmé’s Divagations is an album, he readily agrees; Dante’s The Divine Comedy, a book.

Tim Maudlin:

People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.

Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one’s own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.

A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.

The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the “new” quantum physics up through the present day. Morris’s tale is more picaresque. Anecdotes, cameos, interviews, historical digressions, sly sidenotes, and striking illustrations hang off a central spine that recounts critical episodes in the history of analytic philosophy.

Reuters:

The “Big Brother” strategy underscores how AI and facial recognition tools are increasingly being used in China for a host of tasks, from verifying payments and catching criminals to checking the audience at big entertainment events and customers at fast-food joints.

The ubiquitous cameras – part of daily life in most big Chinese cities – are part of an array of surveillance technologies that have raised worries about privacy.

“The system only collects students’ facial expressions and behavior information,” the school’s vice principal, Zhang Guanqun, told news outlet the Paper.

Megan Molteni:

In some ways, Synthego looks like any other Silicon Valley startup. Inside its beige business park facilities, a five-minute drive from Facebook HQ, rows of nondescript black server racks whir and blink and vent. But inside the metal shelving, the company isn’t pushing around ones and zeros to keep the internet running. It’s making molecules to rewrite the code of life.

Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering. And Inscripta, which wants to be the Apple. And Twist Bioscience, which could be the Intel.

AJ Dellinger:

Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system. There’s just one problem: the software used to run the lottery isn’t actually random.

The Globe and Mail reported the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) uses Microsoft Excel to run the immigration lottery to select 10,000 people for permanent resident status from a field of about 100,000 applications received each year. Experts warned that the random number generating function in Excel isn’t actually random and may put some applicants at a disadvantage.

First, it’s best to understand just how the lottery system works. An Access to Information request filed by The Globe and Mail shows that IRCC inputs the application number for every person entering the lottery into Excel, then assigns them a random number to each using a variation of the program’s RAND command. They then sort the list from smallest to largest based on the random number assigned and take the first 10,000 applications with the lowest numbers.

The system puts a lot of faith in Excel’s random function, which it might not deserve. According to Université de Montréal computer science professor Pierre L’Ecuyer, Excel is “very bad” at generating random numbers because it relies on an old generator that is out of date. He also warned that Excel doesn’t pass statistical tests and is less random than it appears, which means some people in the lottery may actually have a lower chance of being selected than others.

Valerie Strauss & Will Fitzhugh:

Will Fitzhugh is the founder and editor of The Concord Review, believed to be the world’s only English-language quarterly review for history academic papers by high school students. The Review, founded in Massachusetts in March 1987, comes out four times a year and has published more than 1,000 history research papers—with an average of 6,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography—from secondary student authors in 44 states and 39 other countries. The latest edition, Winter 2013, includes research papers on Jackie Robinson, the Proclamation of 1763 and the German Navy in World War I.

It should come as no surprise that Fitzhugh has long called for a requirement that no high school student be permitted to graduate without having produced at least one serious research paper in history. As it is today, most students graduate from high school without having written one in any subject.

Fitzhugh is also a strong advocate for holding students responsible for their own work, noting in an e-mail, correctly, that if teachers are the only “moving part” in the classroom, then “there is no room, literally, for the agency of students.” In the current school reform era in which the focus has been on the effectiveness of teachers and to a lesser extent principals, his message has special resonance.

Here’s a piece that Fitzhugh wrote on the subject:

It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality, but I have regularly pointed out that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.

Now, however, a small number of other dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance…” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning…”

This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.

In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail:

“Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.”

More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System:

“One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.

In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…(but) It’s a teacher’s job…to give students the motivation to learn.” (sic)

It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our systems of schools and Funderpundits stick with their wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.

While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote:

“For an education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”

As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be—namely the students.

Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, math, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.

This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.

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valerie11
7:50 AM EST

YES! YES! YES! YES!

My high school senior has done very little writing, short essays at best and absolutely no research paper. And this is with 6 humanities type AP classes. He did far more writing and research in the middle school humanities program.

Students at our high school aren’t asked to do any work of substance. From talking with parents, students in high school magnet or IB programs, and maybe a few others, are the only ones who learn how to do research and write.

MCPS does not hold high expectations and standards equally for all its high school students.

Heefner
7:31 AM EST

Thank you, Valerie. I had planned to rail against Common Core Curriculum at tonight’s school board meeting, but intend to read your column during public comment instead.

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TrinityPrez
7:23 AM EST

Fitzhugh is quite right. The consequences of the “blame the teacher” emphasis in K-12 become even clearer in college when students must become self-directed learners and produce a great deal of original research and writing. Many struggle with the basic academic work-products like short term papers and essays that have no plagiarism. Some students even say that plagiarism is not a problem because their job is simply to assemble other people’s knowledge. When students grow up taking zero ownership for their own learning, they learn almost nothing. Standardized tests measure only one narrow band of knowledge. For students to develop and manifest broad and deep talents in critical reasoning and synthesis, research, writing and quantitative analysis, they must learn to produce substantial amounts of their own work for critical assessment. For students to know how to do this kind of work, they must learn from first grade that their engagement is central to the learning contract.

Nick Anderson, via Will Fitzhugh:

Few schools now require applicants to take the tests with essays. Among those that do are the University of California and Stanford, Princeton, Duke and Brown universities. Most of the Ivy League has dropped the requirement. Many admission professionals say that while they highly value writing skills, the essay scores obtained from the two tests are not useful. Selective colleges typically require students to submit one or more essays with their applications, and they also look closely at performance in English classes.

The SAT essay has a complicated history. For years, students were able to submit essay scores from the College Board, which oversees the SAT, through what are now known as SAT Subject tests (a program separate from the main SAT). In 2005, the main SAT was revised to include a required essay section, and the scale for the total test changed to a maximum score of 2400. In 2016, the main SAT was overhauled again. The maximum score reverted to 1600, and the 50-minute essay section was made separate and optional from the three-hour main test.

In the high school Class of 2017, about 1.7 million students took the SAT. Seventy percent of them — 1.2 million — took it with the essay.

The essay version of the ACT — officially known as ACT with Writing — debuted in 2005. A little more than half of the 2 million ACT takers in the Class of 2017 used this option. The writing section adds 40 minutes to a test that otherwise takes about three hours.

The essay option often means added expense for students. The main SAT fee is $46 without the essay and $60 with it. The ACT fee is also $46, or $62.50 with the writing portion. Both tests provide fee waivers to students in financial need.

The College Board had no immediate comment on Yale’s action.

ACT, asked about Yale’s action, said through a spokesman: “We encourage institutions to determine which factors to emphasize and utilize in admissions decisions based on rigorous scientific research.” The spokesman noted that the English test, part of the core ACT, also assesses writing skills.

Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid, Richard Shaw, said he is reviewing the issue. “However, we should treasure writing as an important skill in life and it should be a major focus [of] K-12,” Shaw wrote in an email. “So the question becomes what is the alternative to assessing writing competency in the admissions process.”

Alan Borsuk:

It’s a much different world for pretty much every school and school district in Wisconsin, both public and private. A few aspects of that, in thumbnail form:

Without vouchers, a lot of current private schools would have closed or would never have opened.

Competition for enrollment in Milwaukee and Racine — and increasingly elsewhere — is intense. Kids equal vitality and money for every school. After all these years, too little is known about how and why parents pick schools, but choice is, in general, popular, and just about every school pushes hard to get students in the door.
The rules of the voucher programs have changed a lot over the years. The good news is that there are fewer really terrible private schools than there used to be and more is posted publicly about the private schools’ performance than there used to be. Income caps on participating families have changed so that a much larger number of kids qualify for vouchers.

Choice is almost everywhere. Even within public systems such as MPS, there are a lot of options for schooling. It is a choice world for parents.

The voucher-public divide remains a polarizing, partisan source of division and disunity in education advocacy.

And most important, in my book: Overall academic outcomes in Milwaukee or Racine have not really improved and are deeply concerning. (The statewide picture is less troubling.)

In every stream of schools, there are good schools — and ones where students chronically do poorly. Overall, only about one in five Milwaukee kids rates as proficient or better in reading, and that is true for both MPS and voucher schools. Charter schools are somewhat better.

Yet, the traditional education establishment continues to resist essential improvements, such as the Foundations of Reading elementary teacher content knowledge requirements.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Main takeaways from the 2017 NAEP 4th grade reading exam:

Wisconsin’s score was 220, below the national average of 222

Wisconsin score statistically declined from 2015

Wisconsin scores have been statistically flat since 1992

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, compared to 25th in 2015

All Wisconsin racial, economic status, and disability status sub-groups perform below the national average for that sub-group

Michael McGowan:

More than 100 academics from the University of Sydney have signed an open letter opposing any push to introduce a western civilisation degree funded by the John Howard-backed Ramsay Centre.

The university has confirmed it is in conversations with the Ramsay Centre about the possibility of running the degree following the Australian National University’s decision to pull out of negotiations.

Published on Friday, the letter states the academics’ strong opposition to the Ramsay Centre proposal, describing it as “European supremacism writ large”.

They argue that the “cultural and intellectual legacies” of the west are already “intensively studied” at the university, and that the late Paul Ramsay’s $3.3bn bequest could have been made to existing humanities programs.

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“The fact he chose not to do so shows that his intention was more than simply fostering university study of Western intellectual and cultural traditions, within the standing norms of academic independence,” the letter states.

On Friday a University of Sydney spokeswoman confirmed that the vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, had been in discussions with the Ramsay Centre about “the possibility of financial support for teaching at the university”.

Mandy Zuo:

China’s make-or-break national college entrance exams start on Thursday and will take place across the mainland through Saturday.

This will be the most important exam in many students’ lives, an assessment that can set the course for their future.

But while millions will cope with the test by studying, studying and studying some more, others will be trying to cheat their way to success.

Even though cheating carries a punishment of up to seven years in jail under Chinese law, there’s no end to the schemes some will use to gain an edge.

But even as the methods of cheating change, the authorities, too, are updating their technologies and tactics to keep up.

Verna Yu:

Indeed, promoting Mandarin Chinese among Hong Kong students has been a political task for the Hong Kong government since 1997, when control of the former British colony was returned to China. The Hong Kong government launched a scheme 10 years ago to incentivize schools to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese in Chinese language classes and has spent 180 million in Hong Kong dollars ($23 million in U.S. currency) in assistance to schools since the effort began.

According to official figures, over 70 percent of Hong Kong’s primary schools now use Mandarin in Chinese-language classes.

Simmering resentment over the promotion of Mandarin over Cantonese recently came to a boil when an article by a mainland Chinese scholar asserted that Cantonese could not be considered a mother tongue. The claim, seen as an attack on Hong Kong’s sense of identity, sparked an outcry.

According to official figures, over 70 percent of Hong Kong’s primary schools now use Mandarin in Chinese-language classes.

Sixth Tone:

By Adam Goldman, Nicholas Fandos and Katie Benner:

The seizure — disclosed in a letter to the reporter, Ali Watkins — suggested that prosecutors under the Trump administration will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump has complained bitterly about leaks and demanded that law enforcement officials seek criminal charges against government officials involved in illegal and sometimes embarrassing disclosures of national security secrets.

Zheping Huang:

This morning in China more than 9 million students across the country took the notoriously grueling college-entrance exam that will, for many, set the course of their lives. The first part, anyway—part two of the gaokao, as it’s known in Chinese, comes tomorrow.

The morning session was about Chinese language and literature and entailed writing an 800-character essay—a test of one’s writing and argument skills. In recent years, topics have ranged from choosing a life path to describing one’s feelings about a buzzword. Politics have not been front and center.

The big topic this year? The philosophy of Xi Jinping. Of the nine essay questions asked across the nation—there are some regional variations—five were directly related to propaganda terms put forward by the Chinese president. The questions were published today by state media (link in Chinese), shortly after the test. The ideology-oriented themes echoed those from the era of Mao Zedong, who once terminated the gaokao for a decade as part of a movement against intellectuals.

Charles Rollet :

China’s social credit system was launched in 2014 and is supposed to be nationwide by 2020. As well as tracking and rating individuals, it also encompasses businesses and government officials. When it is complete, every Chinese citizen will have a searchable file of amalgamated data from public and private sources tracking their social credit. Currently, the system is still under development and authorities are trying to centralise local databases.

Given the Chinese government’s authoritarian nature, some portray the system as a single, all-knowing Orwellian surveillance machine that will ensure every single citizen’s strict loyalty to the Communist Party. But for now, that’s not quite the case. Rogier Creemers, a researcher in the law and governance of China at Leiden University, has described the social credit setup as an “ecosystem” of fragmented initiatives. The main goal, he says, is not stifling dissent – something the Chinese state already has many tools for at its disposal – but better managing social order while leaving the Party firmly in charge.

Spencer Woodman:

In 2009, you told ProPublica: “I am a reader of documents. There’s no substitute for reading every line of every page.” For all our skills in acquiring documents, could reporters stand to improve how closely we read the documents we obtain?

I have to confess that I read for details and clues more than the general meaning. I obsessively analyze the footnotes. On a big document, I start at the end and read backwards because I know everyone else is starting from the beginning and often stops before the end. I try to find within a document what can be counted, aggregated, analyzed.

Mitch Daniels:

So another congressional session is half over and, we’re told, is likely to go by without a mention of the moose on the American table, our preposterously out-of-control federal debt. It’s not as though the stakes are high: just our standard of living, national security, all the discretionary activities of government, and literally our future as an autonomous, self-governing people. Every honest observer knows what will cause the coming crunch, so aptly termed by Erskine Bowles as “the most predictable crisis in history”: the runaway autopilot programs we call “entitlements.” Without changes there, no combination of other measures can come close to preventing the reckoning.

We all understand the silence. Our political class was long ago scared witless by the career-killing cheap shots aimed at anyone daring to commit candor about the topic.

So far, no one has fashioned a vocabulary that an elected official can use to level with voters about Social Security and Medicare and live to tell about it politically. Everyone believes, and polls confirm, the fabled third rail is as electrified as ever.

A well-functioning democracy would, by now, have had a mature national discussion marked by a recognition of the need to set priorities among finite resources, as well as the intergenerational unfairness of the status quo, the ethical wrongness of borrowing for current consumption instead of investing in the future, the feasibility of alternative remedies if only we would start now, and so on. Regrettably, but realistically, our republic at this point doesn’t seem capable of discussions like that. Meanwhile, action really can’t wait much longer; the can is getting heavier, and we’re running out of road.

Elizabeth K Ruzzo, Laura Perez-Cano, Jae-Yoon Jung, Lee-kai Wang, Dorna Kashef-Haghighi, Chris Hartl, Jackson Hoekstra, Olivia Leventhal, Michael J. Gandal, Kelley Paskov, Nate Stockham, Damon Polioudakis, Jennifer K. Lowe, Daniel H. Geschwind, Dennis P Wall :

Genetic studies of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have revealed a complex, heterogeneous architecture, in which the contribution of rare inherited variation remains relatively un-explored. We performed whole-genome sequencing (WGS) in 2,308 individuals from families containing multiple affected children, including analysis of single nucleotide variants (SNV) and structural variants (SV). We identified 16 new ASD-risk genes, including many supported by inherited variation, and provide statistical support for 69 genes in total, including previously implicated genes. These risk genes are enriched in pathways involving negative regulation of synaptic transmission and organelle organization. We identify a significant protein-protein interaction (PPI) network seeded by inherited, predicted damaging variants disrupting highly constrained genes, including members of the BAF complex and established ASD risk genes. Analysis of WGS also identified SVs effecting non-coding regulatory regions in developing human brain, implicating NR3C2 and a recurrent 2.5Kb deletion within the promoter of DLG2. These data lend support to studying multiplex families for identifying inherited risk for ASD. We provide these data through the Hartwell Autism Research and Technology Initiative (iHART), an open access cloud-computing repository for ASD genetics research.

Amber Walker:

Reese’s experience raises broader questions about what information is shared between MMSD and the Dane County Juvenile Court when it comes to youth in their care. While the district insists it was an isolated incident, juvenile court staff, like Smedema and her supervisor, Suzanne Stute, said collecting statements from school staff is a routine part of their work.

The case also illuminates communication issues and a lack of standardized procedures between MMSD and Dane County Juvenile Court employees. Such communication happens on an ad-hoc basis and varies from school-to-school, largely unmonitored by the district’s central office. A task force of both groups of employees has been working to correct this, and Madison schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham proposed adding $120,000 to next year’s budget to establish an office dedicated to court-involved and other “at-risk” youth.

After spending over a week in the Dane County Juvenile Detention Center, Reese’s son was ready to go.

“I want to go home,” he wailed as the court commissioner ruled to extend his stay for the second time, in an audio recording of a custody hearing reviewed by the Cap Times. The Cap Times is not identifying the student by name because juvenile court records are sealed.

The county’s Juvenile Court uses custody hearings to determine the best environment for a child before a delinquency hearing or trial. Custody hearings usually happen within 24 hours of a child’s apprehension by authorities. Options typically include secure detention, non-secure shelter, or returning home with a parent or other stable adult. If a child is not released after the initial hearing, they can request follow-up hearings. Custody hearings are not used to determine a child’s innocence or guilt when accused of a delinquent act.

Shortly before the commissioner made his decision in late February, the student’s public defender argued that he’d been doing well in his classes during detention, and both parents were committed to helping him stay in school and out of trouble.

Despite the student’s and his parents’ request for monitored release, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Miller and Melissa Tanner, a Dane County social worker assigned to the student, did not think it was the best option. Along with concerns about the student running away again, Tanner and Miller spoke about their perception of his experience at West.

When asked by the court commissioner whether or not they believed the student should be released from custody that day, both mentioned Pryor’s letter as a reason to think twice.

“I haven’t gotten confirmation about how West would feel about him coming back, but we do have this letter that was submitted to the court about their concern,” Tanner told the court.

“I strongly believe that if he stays at West or any of the large MMSD schools, his behavior will not change and he will progress to even more serious behaviors,” said Miller, reading a line from Pryor’s letter to the court.

“Returning (to West) is not a sure thing, it is by no means certain,” Miller told the commissioner.

An impressive piece of local journalism…

Gangs and School Violence Forum

They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine – Not!

Adam Harris:

Maybe higher education has reached its peak. Not the Harvards and Yales of the world, but the institutions that make up the rest of the industry—the regional public schools who saw decades of growth and are now facing major budget cuts and the smaller, less-selective private colleges that have exorbitant sticker prices while the number of students enrolling in them declines.

Higher ed is often described as a bubble—and much like the housing market in 2008, the thought goes, it will ultimately burst. But what if it’s less of a sudden pop and more of a long, slow slide, and we are already on the way down?

Bryan Alexander started grappling with the idea of “peak higher education” in 2013—inspired by the notion of “peak car,” “peak oil,” and other so-called “peaks.” At the time, there were signs that the industry was already struggling. The number of students enrolled in higher education had dropped by a little over 450,000 after years of booming growth, the proportion of part-time faculty—more commonly referred to as adjuncts—had steadily become a more significant part of the professorship, and there was a general skepticism about the skyrocketing costs of college and concerns over whether a degree was worth it. Taken individually, he said, each sign was troubling enough. But when looked at together, they represented the outlines of a bleak future for higher education. Alexander, a self-described higher-education futurist and a former English professor, came to the conclusion that after nearly a half century of growth, higher education might be as big as it could get. It would, he reasoned, only get smaller from there.

Caitlin Flanagan:

Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? This is the question—rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities—to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a brief moment, but that just as quickly entered the realm of eternal return. The one important thing you need to know about the case is that according to the lawsuit, a woman has been indefinitely suspended from college because she let a man touch her vagina. What kind of sexually repressive madness could have allowed for this to happen? Answer that question and you will go a long way toward answering the question, “What the hell is happening on American college campuses?”

The substantive facts of the case come to us only through a lawsuit, one that has thus far implicated everything from Title IX, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Constitution to “slut shaming” and good old-fashioned horniness. But not super horniness, because—as with many high profile cases involving the infinitely expandable concept of “college sexual assault”—the actual encounter exists as merest prologue to the massive novel of ideas that followed it.

David E Bernstein:

Since the early twentieth century, labor unions have lobbied federal and state governments to enact and enforce laws requiring government contractors to pay “prevailing wages” to employees on public works projects. These laws, currently active at the federal level and in approximately thirty states, typically in practice require that contractors pay according to the local union wage scale. The laws also require employers to adhere to union work rules. The combination of these rules makes it extremely difficult for nonunion contractors to compete for public works contracts.

Meanwhile, construction unions have been among the most persistently exclusionary institutions in American society. Not surprisingly, in many cases, the history of prevailing wage legislation has been intertwined with the history of racial discrimination. Economists and others argue that prevailing wage legislation continues to have discriminatory effects on minorities today. Union advocates, not surprisingly, deny that prevailing wage laws have discriminatory effects. More surprisingly, they deny that the granddaddy of modern prevailing wage legislation, the federal Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had discriminatory intent.

Evan Bush:

Nearly eight years later, Mackenzie is a 21-year-old brimming with success. Soon, she will graduate with two University of Washington degrees: one in neurobiology, and another in bioengineering. She was nominated for the engineering school’s Dean’s medal. She’s a powerlifting champion and a budding entrepreneur. University lecturers rave; classmates can’t understand how she makes it all fit. Next year, she’ll pursue a masters at UW.

All the while, Mackenzie’s been searching.

She couldn’t have known it at the time. But her father’s arrest would send her on a yearslong quest, both academic and personal, to understand his stumbles and why her family fell apart. The pain of her family’s fracture would propel and shape her college career.

Addiction is a disease, her mother, Karina Andrews, told her at the time.

“I wanted proof,” Mackenzie says.

JUST WHY Mackenzie’s family unraveled is something of a debate.

All agree they began as a happy bunch, with a math-whiz daughter who favored playing in the dirt to Barbies.

As a youngster, Mackenzie climbed everything. On playgrounds, she walked across the monkey bars.

“It was important to teach her how to fall,” Karina says.

Sometimes, she wore her parents out with her energy. Her first time on a gymnastics mat, she refused to leave. On a road trip, Mackenzie, just 6 years old, demanded math problems — square roots, no less — from the back seat.

Mackenzie spent hours wiring an electronics kit, a gift from her father. She first put him in checkmate in second grade. She loved sitting on his lap amid the jungle of wires ensnaring his office.

Karina, an artist, taught her daughter to shape clay figurines. Mark brought her to job sites and taught her how to splice wires into connectors.

She was so mature, her parents called her an “old soul.

John Robb:

For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.

Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.

Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.

Cities played a vital defensive role in the last major evolution of conventional state-versus-state warfare. Between the world wars, the refinement of technologies—particularly the combustion engine, when combined with armor—made it possible for armies to move at much higher speeds than in the past, so new methods of warfare emphasized armored motorized maneuver as a way to pierce the opposition’s solid defensive lines and range deep into soft, undefended rear areas. These incursions, the armored thrusts of blitzkrieg, turned an army’s size against itself: even the smallest armored vanguard could easily disrupt the supply of ammunition, fuel, and rations necessary to maintain the huge armies of the twentieth century in the field.

To defend against these thrusts, the theoretician J. F. C. Fuller wrote in the 1930s, cities could be used as anchor or pivot points to engage armored forces in attacks on static positions, bogging down the offensive. Tanks couldn’t move quickly through cities, and if they bypassed them and struck too deeply into enemy territory, their supply lines—in particular, of the gasoline they drank greedily—would become vulnerable. The city, Fuller anticipated, could serve as a vast fortress, requiring the fast new armor to revert to the ancient tactic of the siege. That’s exactly what happened in practice during World War II, when the defenses mounted in Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad played a major role in the Allied victory.

But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.

Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene:

Tom Shack has an unusual background for his job. Most state comptrollers have worked exclusively in finance and accounting. Before becoming comptroller of Massachusetts in 2015, Shack went to law school, taught college courses in entrepreneurship, and became an assistant district attorney.

When Shack took over the comptroller’s office, which has administrative and audit oversight over every state government agency, he quickly recognized an issue that he’s been trying to address ever since.

“One of the things I noticed right away, when working for government, is that there’s complete risk-aversion,” he says. “You have to be able to manage risk and avoid it when necessary.”

That tendency, he says, holds back innovation and progress. He and his staff have even made up a word for the phenomenon: “innovocracy, which in our vernacular means that though the government has come up with great innovative ideas, it then imposes a bureaucratic framework, thus crushing any entrepreneurial spirit associated with the idea.”

The Economist:

THEY’RE watching you. When you walk to work, CCTV cameras film you and, increasingly, recognise your face. Drive out of town, and number-plate-reading cameras capture your journey. The smartphone in your pocket leaves a constant digital trail. Browse the web in the privacy of your home, and your actions are logged and analysed. The resulting data can be crunched to create a minute-by-minute record of your life.

Under an authoritarian government such as China’s, digital monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, China is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and mass surveillance to create a 21st-century panopticon and impose total control over millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-language Muslim minority (see Briefing). In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.

Between freedom and oppression stands a system to seek the consent of citizens, maintain checks and balances on governments and, when it comes to surveillance, set rules to restrain those who collect and process information. But with data so plentiful and easy to gather, these protections are being eroded. Privacy rules designed for the landline phone, postbox and filing cabinet urgently need to be strengthened for the age of the smartphone, e-mail and cloud computing.

Cambly:

English learners can now access seemingly unlimited free content and software for learning vocabulary and grammar. As with any subject, it’s also important to complement that learning with practice to exercise those new skills. For language education, that means having actual conversations with real English speakers.

At Cambly our mission is to provide students with an easy and affordable way to practice and improve their English skills. The Cambly app gives English learners instant 1-on-1 access to friendly native speakers over video chat 24/7. Cambly students speak over 30 languages and live in over 130 countries. English isn’t just a hobby for Cambly students. It’s a critical skill that can change their lives.

Jason Wordie::

Opium – for numerous economic and political reasons – has loomed large in Asia for more than three centuries. Importation from India to China and the wider balance-of-trade dynamics, regional power struggles and eventual international conflicts that surrounded the trade have generated entire libraries of historical research.

Young American’s first-hand account of second opium war: bloody battles and ‘hospitable’ Chinese

Less acknowledged – especially by inter­net trolls who, like Pavlov’s dogs, salivate and bark at the slightest mention of the so-called opium wars – is the basic historical fact that virtually everyone involved in 18th- and 19th-century commerce on the China coast was connected with the trade. Individuals or firms were either directly involved or they brokered deals, banked or arranged letters of credit, or were tangled up in the shipping, refining and warehousing of opium, or its retail sale.

Senator Steve Nass:

Senator Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) was outraged today by the most recent example of the radical politicization of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). The DPI is currently seeking applicants for a career executive for the Assistant Director for Teacher Education/Professional Development/Licensing position.

The position is supervised by Sheila Briggs an Assistant State Superintendent and key advisor to State Superintendent Tony Evers. On April 19th, Ms. Briggs issued a Tweet announcing the position on her team and requested that “Social Justice Equity Warriors” please apply.

“This is just another example of how radical the Department of Public Instruction has become under Superintendent Tony Evers. Sheila Briggs, an Assistant State Superintendent, makes it abundantly clear that the person she wants for this job must be a ‘Social Justice Equity Warrior’. Sheila Briggs wants this key employee to promote liberal indoctrination instead of sound educational practices,” Nass said.

Meanwhile, reading…

Tony Evers, currently runnng for Governor, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?

Drew Wilson:

Public education will only improve when people buy in, Step Up for Students President Doug Tuthill said Thursday at the Florida Chamber of Commerce Summit on Prosperity & Economic Opportunity.

“I’m going to start with the good news: public education today is in the best shape that it’s ever been in,” Tuthill said, citing the teaching quality and a National Assessment of Education Progress “report card,” which showed some progress.

“The bad news is the beneficiaries of progress tend to be people of privilege. It tends to be people with resources who come to school with a lot of social capital, and they’re able to benefit from our public education system.

“Unfortunately, this system isn’t capable of really addressing this issue of generational poverty the way that it needs to be — and that’s our challenge. It’s not a people problem; it’s a systemic problem.”

Tuthill said the root of that problem is the undermining of a sense of “ownership” for a majority of people — be they teachers, parents or students — in public education.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Wisconsin Reading Coalition has alerted you over the past 6 months to DPI’s intentions to change PI-34, the administrative rule that governs teacher licensing in Wisconsin. We consider those changes to allow overly-broad exemptions from the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test for new teachers. The revised PI-34 has gone through DPI public hearings and was sent to the education committees of the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate, where no action was taken.

PI-34 is now sitting with the Wisconsin Legislature Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, which is the last stop before it becomes a permanent rule. Because of concerns it has heard from Wisconsin Reading Coalition and other groups and individuals, the committee will hold a public hearing on Thursday, June 7th, at 10:00 AM in the State Capitol. We urge you to attend this hearing and make a statement. If you cannot attend, please consider sending an e-mail comment to the committee members prior to the hearing. A list of committee members follows. As always, it is a good idea to copy your own legislators. If you copy Wisconsin Reading Coalition, we will make sure your comments are delivered in hard copy.

To refresh your memory of the issues involved, please see this WRC memo to the Committee on Administrative Rules.

Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (contact information provided in links):

Representative Ballweg (Co-Chair)

Senator Nass (Co-Chair)

Senator LeMahieu

Senator Stroebel

Senator Larson

Senator Wirch

Representative Neylon

Representative Ott

Representative Hebl

Representative Anderson

Teachers and more than 180,000 non-proficient, struggling readers* in Wisconsin schools need our support:

*There are currently over 358,000 K-5 students in Wisconsin public schools alone.
51.7% of Wisconsin 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the 2016-17 state Forward exam. Non-proficient percentages varied among student sub-groups, as shown below in red and black, and ranged from approximately 70-80% in the lower-performing districts to 20-35% in higher-performing districts.

While we appreciate DPI’s concerns with a possible shortage of teacher candidates in some subject and geographical areas, we feel it is important to maintain teacher quality standards while moving to expand pathways to teaching.
• Statute section 118.19(14) currently requires new K-5 teachers, reading teachers, reading specialists, and special education teachers to pass the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (WI-FORT) before getting an initial license to teach. The intent of this statute, passed in 2012 on a bipartisan vote following a recommendation of the non-partisan Read to Lead task force, was to enhance teacher quality by encouraging robust reading courses in educator preparation programs, and to ensure that beginning and struggling readers had an effective teacher. The WI-FORT is the same test given in Massachusetts, which has the highest 4th grade reading performance in the country. It covers basic content knowledge and application skills in the five components of foundational reading that are necessary for successfully teaching all students.
• The annual state Forward exam and the newly-released results of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) highlight the importance of having high-quality teachers in Wisconsin classrooms. 65% of our 4th graders were not proficient in reading on the NAEP. Our national ranking has slipped to 34th, and all sub-groups of students perform below their national averages. Our black students rank 49th among black students in the country, and our white students rank 41st.
• The revised teacher licensure rules that DPI has presented to the legislature in the re-written administrative rule PI 34, create a new Tier I license that provides broad exemptions from the WI- FORT.
• We encourage the education committees to table the adoption of this permanent rule until it is amended to better support teacher quality standards and align with the intent of statute 118.19(14).
• We favor limiting the instances where the WI-FORT is waived to those in which a district proves it cannot find a fully-qualified teacher to hire, and limiting the duration of those licenses to one year, with reading taught under the supervision of an individual who has passed the WI-FORT. Renewals should not be permitted except in case of proven emergency.
• We favor having DPI set out standards for reading instruction in educator preparation programs that encompass both the Standards for Reading Professionals (International Literacy Association) and the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (International Dyslexia Association). This will enable aspiring teachers to pass the WI-FORT and enter the classroom prepared to teach reading.
• We favor having DPI implement a corrective action plan for educator preparation programs where fewer than 85% of students pass the WI-FORT on the first attempt in any year. Students putting in four years of tuition and effort should be able to expect to pass the WI-FORT.

Foundations of Reading: Wisconsin’ only teacher content knowledge requirement…

Compare with MTEL

Mark Seidenberg on Reading:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Tony Evers, currently runnng for Governor, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?

An emphasis on adult employment, also Zimman.

Alan Borsuk:

“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …

“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?

Alan Borsuk:

“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …

“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?

“I feel that people have become very numb to our data and numb to poor performance. I can appreciate that it is frustrating. I have been in education my whole life and it is frustrating, you do feel like the work that we’re doing isn’t getting us where we want to be. But we can’t give up.”

She said, “Look, the data are telling us that what we’re doing isn’t working. Arguing hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Being polarized in our education beliefs has not gotten us anywhere.”

Madison spends more per student than Milwaukee, yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Charlie Warzel:

It took just hours after the surprise result of the 2016 presidential election for the Facebook narrative to turn sour. Technologists, researchers, and the media quickly drew a connection between 2016’s sharp increase in ideological division, fake news, and harassment and the mammoth social network. In the ensuing months, discussion about Facebook’s culpability in everything from misinformation and election meddling to illicit harvesting of user data has erupted in a full-fledged media backlash.

New sentiment analysis data provided to BuzzFeed News puts that backlash in stark relief: In the aftermath of the 2016 election, media coverage of Facebook turned negative almost overnight. And it has largely stayed that way.

Using publicly available information pulled from the APIs of USA Today, the New York Times, the Guardian, and BuzzFeed, researcher Joe Hovde compiled over 87,000 articles about Facebook published by the four outlets between 2006 and 2018. Then he ran a sentiment analysis on them, scoring words on a positive-to-negative scale of -5 to +5 — for example, a negative word like “fake” was scored -3, while a more positive word like “growth” was scored +2. The results were grim.

John Rolfe::

THE ACCC is investigating accusations Google is using as much as $580 million worth of Australians’ phone plan data annually to secretly track their movements.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said he was briefed recently by US experts who had intercepted, copied and decrypted messages sent back to Google from mobiles running on the company’s Android operating system.

The experts, from computer and software corporation Oracle, claim Google is draining roughly one gigabyte of mobile data monthly from Android phone users’ accounts as it snoops in the background, collecting information to help advertisers.

The Conversation:

The advice to use your head, not your heart, might not be helpful after all.

We all make tough decisions, but choices relating to money send many of us running in the other direction. Unfortunately, ample evidence indicates that aversion toward financial decisions leads many of us to put off things like funding a 401(k), saving at a sufficient rate, or just doing a better job managing our credit card debt. All of these things can hurt our long-term financial health.

Economists and behavioral scientists have proposed several explanations for this phenomenon. For example, financial products are often quite complicated, and we may feel we lack the necessary expertise. We may be overwhelmed by too many choices – such as when picking mutual funds to put in our 401(k) portfolio.

But as valid as these reasons may be, my co-author Jane Jeongin Park and I felt that there was more to the story.

Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn and Ruth Igielnik:

Large demographic shifts are reshaping America. The country is growing in numbers, it’s becoming more racially and ethnically diverse and the population is aging. But according to a new analysis by Pew Research Center, these trends are playing out differently across community types.

Urban areas are at the leading edge of racial and ethnic change, with nonwhites now a clear majority of the population in urban counties while solid majorities in suburban and rural areas are white. Urban and suburban counties are gaining population due to an influx of immigrants in both types of counties, as well as domestic migration into suburban areas. In contrast, rural counties have made only minimal gains since 2000 as the number of people leaving for urban or suburban areas has outpaced the number moving in. And while the population is graying in all three types of communities, this is happening more rapidly in the suburbs than in urban and rural counties.

Bill Glauber:

On the verge of retirement, Bill Abt is now a big man on a small campus.

For years, this former beer company executive quietly guided Carthage College’s endowment. He didn’t run with the large-college crowd and pour cash into hedge funds or hard assets.

He stuck to the simplicity of using mostly low-cost index funds.

And somebody finally took notice.

In early May, the 71-year-old Abt and his strategy were featured by Bloomberg Businessweek. The article noted that Carthage’s returns “beat Harvard’s $37 billion endowment and most others.”

In 10 years through June 30, 2017, Carthage reported a 6.2% average annual return. During the same period, the article said, Harvard had a 4.4% average annual return, with results weighed down by losses in timber and farmland.

Carthage’s performance was in the top 10% nationwide, according to National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Since the article appeared, Abt has been overwhelmed.

“It’s been crazy,” he said. “Half the people on campus here have emailed me, which is great. I’ve gotten calls from TV stations, wealth managers. I had a wealth manager ask me if I wanted to go into partnership with him.”

Diana Dombrowski:

The Milwaukee Public Schools Board passed the 2018-’19 budget at a special meeting Tuesday night, slashing millions of dollars from the central office and returning $11.6 million to classrooms.

Interim Superintendent Keith Posley made changes to former superintendent Darienne Driver’s proposed budget just three days after assuming the office last week.

The vote was unanimous. The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, which protested Driver’s 5% per pupil reduction in school budgets, cheered the board’s move.

“I feel this is a golden opportunity for the young people in the city of Milwaukee to receive a support that’s needed in the classrooms,” Posley said in an interview.

The $1.17 billion budget makes cuts to areas including operations, finance and human resources departments. The cuts to the central office will eliminate more than 32 full-time positions, some of which could be reassigned as school-based jobs.

Mark McGreal:

Don’t believe the latest study you read in the headlines, chances are, it could be wrong, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars that delves into what it calls the “use and abuse of statistics in the sciences.”

The report broke down the issue of irreproducibility, or the problem that a lot of scientific research cannot be reproduced. The report took aim at unverifiable climate science, but also critiqued medical studies, behavioral research and other fields.

The 72-page report took the matter a step further in calling the issue a politicization of science.

“Not all irreproducible research is progressive advocacy; not all progressive advocacy is irreproducible; but the intersection between the two is very large. The intersection between the two is a map of much that is wrong with modern science,” the report states.

Co-authored by David Randall and Christopher Wesler, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform” focused on the irreproducibility of recent scientific studies.

Kate Conger:

It’s been nearly three months since many Google employees—and the public—learned about the company’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images of objects and people. Now, about a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the company’s continued involvement in Maven.

The resigning employees’ frustrations range from particular ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare to broader worries about Google’s political decisions—and the erosion of user trust that could result from these actions. Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo.

The employees who are resigning in protest, several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions and seem less interested in listening to workers’ objections than they once did. In the case of Maven, Google is helping the Defense Department implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones. But some employees believe humans, not algorithms, should be responsible for this sensitive and potentially lethal work—and that Google shouldn’t be involved in military work at all.

Fran Spielman and Lauren FitzPatrick :

“All adults offer apology. I offer my apology. But the question is, what are we gonna do now besides words? What are the deeds to fix this up?” Emanuel said.

“I take responsibility. … I’m accountable for me,” he said. But Emanuel was quick to note that the sexual violence uncovered in Tribune reporting “goes back 10 years” and probably “way back” further than that.

“That doesn’t excuse what happened here. … All of us –– from principal to teacher to colleagues to the CEO, the bureaucracy, the mayor — we’re all responsible. We’re also then therefore … responsible for fixing it. From hiring to investigating to prosecuting and making sure that nobody ever is hired again anywhere — not just in CPS. All of that has to be tightened up,” he said.

His words were not enough to satisfy mayoral challenger Lori Lightfoot.

Lightfoot convened a news conference outside Walter Payton College Prep, a top-rated selective high school often praised by Emanuel as among the state’s best, and home to one of the alleged victims.

There, she argued that parents should have been notified five months ago, when the Tribune filed its first Freedom of Information requests, setting off “alarm bells” at City Hall.

Bianca Quilantan:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has combined liberal-arts majors with computer science, while Assumption College has cut shrinking majors as it gambles on new career-focused programs.

Curt Stager:

Fifty-six years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” warned of bird die-offs from pesticides, a new biocrisis may be emerging. A study published last fall documented a 76 percent decline in the total seasonal biomass of flying insects netted at 63 locations in Germany over the last three decades. Losses in midsummer, when these insects are most numerous, exceeded 80 percent.

This alarming discovery, made by mostly amateur naturalists who make up the volunteer-run Entomological Society Krefeld, raised an obvious question: Was this happening elsewhere? Unfortunately, that question is hard to answer because of another problem: a global decline of field naturalists who study these phenomena.

CBS13:

West Sacramento is the first city to launch a controversial new program that watches what people post about it online.

The pilot project gives city leaders a look at what’s trending in the city, whether it’s good or bad. It’s also creating privacy concerns around how the data is being used.

When a wave of mailbox thefts hit the city last year, people complained about it on social media, and West Sacramento was watching. City leaders were alerted to the community concerns by a new system.

“We saw the thing that most people were talking about were mailbox thefts,” said West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon. “That’s something that we might not have noticed just by waiting for people to come to city hall or filing a complaint.”

India Mandlekern:

Every pizza display case tells a story. The strategist knew that very well. From the signage to the slicers to the arrangement of the Parmesan and red pepper flake shakers, no visual cue could be left to chance, especially for this client: a 20-unit New York style pizza chain headquartered in San Diego. The CEO was very proud of the organic nature of his restaurants’ interiors, and the lack of “chaininess” to them.

Six different pizzas now rested on burnished metal stands, intermittently punctuated with an assortment of calzones, stromboli, salads, and beverages. It had taken three weeks of recipe testing to bake pizzas this good. For every perfect, client-ready pizza, there were at least six that missed the mark­­—crusts that weren’t crispy, mozzarella that didn’t stretch, pepperoni that curled when cast in the oven, pockmarking the pie with tiny buckets of grease. (I was a beneficiary of the process. An arsenal of failed recipe prototypes was accumulating in my freezer.)

The strategist carefully removed a stack of miniature chalkboards from her desk. On each one, she inscribed the name of a different pie: The Triboro (meat lover’s). The Whitestone (white pie). The Bronx (everything but the kitchen sink). New York’s exalted status in the pizza universe was essential to this client’s identity, so much that the client had even implemented a reverse osmosis system in the dough-making process to replicate the pH balance of New York water.

When the set up was complete, the strategist called over the head of the agency to evaluate her work.

Madhvi Ramani:

he German city of Mainz lies on the banks of the River Rhine. It is most notable for its wine, its cathedral and for being the home of Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe. Although these things may seem unconnected at first, here they overlap, merging and influencing one another.

The three elements converge on market days, when local producers and winemakers sell their goods in the main square surrounding the sprawling St Martin’s Cathedral. Diagonally opposite is the Gutenberg Museum, named after the city’s most famous inhabitant, who was born in Mainz around 1399 and died here 550 years ago in 1468.

The printing press marks the turning point from medieval times to modernity in the Western world

It was Gutenberg who invented Europe’s first movable metal type printing press, which started the printing revolution and marks the turning point from medieval times to modernity in the Western world. Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in 868, found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters. Gutenberg’s press, however, was well suited to the European writing system, and its development was heavily influenced by the area from which it came.

Bria Krebs:

But according to Xiao, a PhD candidate at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, this same service failed to perform basic checks to prevent anonymous and unauthorized queries. Translation: Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how Web sites work could abuse the LocationSmart demo site to figure out how to conduct mobile number location lookups at will, all without ever having to supply a password or other credentials.

“I stumbled upon this almost by accident, and it wasn’t terribly hard to do,” Xiao said. “This is something anyone could discover with minimal effort. And the gist of it is I can track most peoples’ cell phone without their consent.”

Xiao said his tests showed he could reliably query LocationSmart’s service to ping the cell phone tower closest to a subscriber’s mobile device. Xiao said he checked the mobile number of a friend several times over a few minutes while that friend was moving. By pinging the friend’s mobile network multiple times over several minutes, he was then able to plug the coordinates into Google Maps and track the friend’s directional movement.

Darrow Montgomery:

That’s a D.C. charter school administrator’s assessment of TenSquare, one of the city’s most connected, lucrative, and controversial charter consulting companies. And true to his word, he was talking anonymously. Not many people feel comfortable discussing TenSquare publicly.

Even in education circles, most people have never heard of TenSquare, a national for-profit consulting firm that currently operates in seven states and the District. It markets itself as a universal fixer for troubled charters—a one-stop shop for facility financing, staff recruitment, back-end operations, teacher training, and academic turnarounds. The company has kept a remarkably low profile since its founding in 2011, in one case even contracting to work with a charter unbeknownst to the school’s own principal.

TenSquare has powerful allies in D.C., most notable among them the Public Charter School Board, or PCSB, which governs the city’s charters. “I would characterize their results as remarkably strong,” says Scott Pearson, executive director of the PCSB. “In every case where TenSquare has done a full turnaround with a D.C. charter school, their results have improved significantly.”

But a five-month City Paper investigation has raised a host of questions about TenSquare’s work. Available data do not show consistent improvements across the D.C. schools that hired TenSquare, and several schools got worse. Its business dealings reveal a criss-crossing web of repeat players, potential conflicts of interest, and in one instance the recurring appearance of an alleged far-right activist. Yet it’s not a coincidence that TenSquare has landed some of the most remunerative charter contracts in the city: While not every school leader disparages TenSquare, a number have said they felt real pressure from the PCSB to hire the company.

National Graphic:

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru’s northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.

More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.

Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, are ongoing. The work is supported by grants from the National Geographic Society.

DW:

The 37-year-old Karl had filed a lawsuit after he became legally obliged to provide child support following the birth of his son by his 42-year-old ex-wife.

A regional court in the southern German city of Munich ruled on Wednesday that he must provide financial support for his child who had been born without his explicit consent.

Biol Casselman:

This manual has been available on this site since about 1996, with improvements taking place frequently. The current version has been published as a book of about 350 pages by Cambridge University Press. By agreement with the Press, however, it will remain posted on this web site. Many improvements in the current version over previous ones are due to the (anonymous) referees of the Press, whom I wish to thank heartily. I also wish to thank Lauren Cowles, of the New York office of the Press, for much help with preparing the original version for publication. The paper edition appears also in Duotone red and black. For information on obtaining the paper edition, take a look at the Cambridge Press catalogue.

From January 1, 2004 on, no changes except simple error corrections will be made to the main body of the text here — at least for a while. Corrections to both paper and web editions will be found below.

I am grateful to all those who have pointed out errors or lacunae in older versions of this manual, and I hope readers will continue to send me mail about what they find – both good and bad – at cass@math.ubc.ca.

Bill Chappell:

The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1987, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 — “down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years,” the CDC said.

The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 — a 3 percent drop from 2016, the CDC said in its tally of provisional data for the year.

The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate – the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers.

Martin Parker:

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.

Patrick Marley:

The Democrats running for governor are pledging to end GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s union restrictions, while Walker is promising to veto any changes to Act 10 if he wins re-election and Democrats take control of the Legislature.

Act 10 — adopted amid massive protests shortly after Walker took office in 2011 — brought the governor national attention and helped fuel his brief presidential run.

The measure all but ended collective bargaining for most public workers and required them to pay at least 12% of their insurance premiums and half the contributions to their pensions. The changes saved state and local taxpayers — and cost public workers — billions of dollars.

Democrats view the law as a move by Walker to hobble organizations that have long backed Democrats in elections.

The nine Democrats seeking their party’s nomination in the Aug. 14 primary said they would seek to reverse Act 10, while Walker touted the savings it has brought to taxpayers.

“The far-left Democrats who want to undo it will open the door to massive property tax increases or reductions in school staffing — or both,” Walker spokesman Austin Altenburg said in a statement. “Scott Walker will not let that happen and will continue to support reforms that put more resources in the classroom to improve the education of our students.”

Walker would veto any attempt to change Act 10, Altenburg said.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Jochen Bittner:

To claim we are living through a new Cold War is both an understatement and a category mistake. The 20th-century face-off between the Communist East and the Capitalist West was, ideology aside, about two superpowers trying to contain each other. The global conflict of today is far less static.

What we are witnessing instead is a new Great Game, a collision of great powers that are trying to roll back one another’s spheres of influence. Unlike the Great Game of the 19th century between the British and the Russian Empire that culminated in the fight for dominance over Afghanistan, today’s Great Game is global, more complex and much more dangerous.

Call it the Game of Threes. It involves three prime players, Russia, China and the West, which are competing in three ways: geographically, intellectually and economically. And there are three places where the different claims to power clash: Syria, Ukraine and the Pacific. Many of the defining conflicts of our time can be defined through some combination of those three sets.

To differing degrees, governments and citizens from Cairo to Copenhagen have grown skeptical about whether liberal democracy and postwar internationalism have been, or will be, the right choice for them. To all those doubters, China and Russia stand ready as alternative models and protective powers, offering new arrangements for bilateral and multilateral alignments. You don’t want to follow international law, European integration or anti-corruption schemes? Follow us!

Grace Curtis:

A Canadian university that investigated a graduate student for showing a debate in class is now imposing “health and safety” requirements on her student club, requiring it to move its next event to a different university.

“As far as I know, no other clubs are subject to this review,” Lindsay Shepherd told The College Fix in an email, describing the “increasingly complicated” measures that Wilfrid Laurier University is taking to regulate the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry.

Shepherd serves as president of the club, which was forced to move its April 30 event featuring the “Catholic nationalist” Faith Goldy and a professor skeptical of immigration to the University of Waterloo.

It has to charge attendees for the relocated event because the club is not getting the venue and security for free, as it would at WLU.

Shepherd said she does not have much information about why the club is facing new requirements, as “the administration is not being transparent and seems to avoid putting much in writing.”

Elie Dolgin:

Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness by the end of this decade. “We are going down the path of having a myopia epidemic,” says Padmaja Sankaridurg, head of the myopia programme at the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Sydney, Australia.

The condition is more than an inconvenience. Glasses, contact lenses and surgery can help to correct it, but they do not address the underlying defect: a slightly elongated eyeball, which means that the lens focuses light from far objects slightly in front of the retina, rather than directly on it. In severe cases, the deformation stretches and thins the inner parts of the eye, which increases the risk of retinal detachment, cataracts, glaucoma and even blindness. Because the eye grows throughout childhood, myopia generally develops in school-age children and adolescents. About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.

This threat has prompted a rise in research to try to understand the causes of the disorder — and scientists are beginning to find answers. They are challenging old ideas that myopia is the domain of the bookish child and are instead coalescing around a new notion: that spending too long indoors is placing children at risk. “We’re really trying to give this message now that children need to spend more time outside,” says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Nathan Myhrvold:

Whenever an impressive new technology comes along, people rush to imagine the havoc it could wreak on society, and they overreact. Today we see this happening with artificial intelligence (AI). I was at South by Southwest last month, where crowds were buzzing about Elon Musk’s latest hyperbolic claim that AI poses a far greater danger to humanity than nuclear weapons. Some economists have similarly sounded alarms that automation will put nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. at risk by 2030. The drumbeat of doomsaying has people spooked: a Gallup/Northeastern study published in March found that about three out of four Americans are convinced that AI will destroy more jobs than it creates.

My reading of the history of technology and my decades of work on its frontiers make me skeptical of such claims. Major shifts in technology—and AI does have the potential to be that—inevitably take longer than people typically imagine to transform our jobs and lives. So societies have time to apply regulations, cultural pressures and market forces that shape how that transformation happens. We’re making those kinds of adjustments today with social media technology, for example.

Celia Chen and Sarah Dai:

A group of alumni invested 5 million yuan (US$780,000) in his start-up “without hesitation”, which allowed him to continue to pursue research and development, according to Li Zhu, head of the 3,000-member Tsinghua Alumni TMT Association. “I don’t think he need worry about a shortage of capital with the support of alumni.”

Li, an angel investor, set up the group in 2011 so that Tsinghua alumni in the technology, media and telecommunications industries can get together and network. Such connections have helped establish the university as an influential kingmaker in the country’s technology industry.

“Entrepreneurs have to take advantage of guanxi (relationships in English), and Tsinghua alumni are more likely to help each other [compared with other universities], I think, ” Li said in a recent interview at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Some funding deals were done directly within the association because it’s a very good place to connect entrepreneurs and investors.”

Vlad Savov:

Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future.

The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X), and shared internally within Google. It imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

Dan Bauman and Chris Quintana:

Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn’t respond to additional inquiries.

And on Monday, as The Chronicle continued to seek comment, Cloud suddenly evaporated. His once-prominent placement on The Student Loan Report had been removed. His bylines were replaced with “SLR Editor.” Matherson confirmed on Tuesday that Cloud was an invention.

Pressed on whether he regretted deceiving news organizations with a fake source, Matherson said Cloud “was created as a way to connect with our readers (ex. people struggling to repay student debt) and give us the technical ability to post content to the WordPress website.”

Anas Sabbar:

Around a millennium ago, monks and priests started taking record of the immense catalog of chants they were composing. They came up with a notation system to help others learn the music faster: Sheet music. This system allows for keeping track of more elaborate ideas, that would have been possible relying on the human brain alone. Consequently, these sheets gave way to the growth of a much more extensive and complex music all the way to Classical music.

The Middle Ages

Composers like Perotin and Machaut explored ways of writing multiple vocal lines that went together. Choral music was the art music of the times. Instruments were common, of course, but since they generally weren’t allowed in houses of worship, there is scarcely any notated music including them from the time.

Joun Baker:

In fact, South San Francisco has almost 3,500 fewer school-aged kids than it did when I was born, despite the city’s population increasing by more than 20,000 in that time (Note, I’m talking the physical existence of children, not just enrollment in our public schools). Families increasingly cannot afford to stay in this city.

Alexander Osipovich:

He later told the Journal that this article wouldn’t be “accurate except within your understanding of the crisis. Basically you don’t understand the crisis.”

Many economists consider Mr. Gorton a top expert on financial crises. His fans include former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who praised the professor’s insights in 2010.

Mr. Gorton has likened the 2008 crisis to an old-fashioned bank run. But instead of anxious depositors emptying their bank accounts, Mr. Gorton has said the bank run of a decade ago played out in the so-called repo market.

This is where banks like Lehman Brothers raised short-term cash by selling securities and repurchasing them later at a slightly higher price. When investors questioned the value of those securities, the repo market froze up.

Some critics say Mr. Gorton’s work plays down other explanations for the crisis, such as the U.S. housing bubble—or wrongdoing on Wall Street.

Thomas Burish::

In a world increasingly driven by science and technology, it came as no surprise to read in The Chronicle recently that only a small fraction of the research funding at the nation’s top universities is directed toward the humanities. After all, the vast majority of breakthroughs that benefit society come from the scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines; these also are the areas with the most expensive space, infrastructure, equipment, and program costs. No one argues that the humanities require as much funding as these other disciplines. Even so, I found the numbers disappointing.

According to The Chronicle’s summary of its survey:

“Only two of the top 50 public institutions for research-and-development spending in the humanities in the 2016 fiscal year devoted more than 5 percent of their overall R&D spending to the humanities, while 19 of the top 50 private nonprofit institutions did. Median R&D spending on the humanities among the 388 academic research institutions that reported such spending that year was $224,000.”

This is simply not enough as we look to a future that will be heavily influenced, if not largely determined, by technology, including autonomous systems, big-data analytics, and artificial intelligence. The need to understand the human dimensions and impacts of those advances, as well as the basis for making many of the ethical decisions that should guide their use, has never been greater. We are beginning to face basic questions about what it means to be human and may soon face questions of whether some of the technologies of the future will have human rights.

Michelle Howsworth 3h :

Elsevier, the publisher of top magazines Cell, The Lancet and many others, enjoys billions of dollars in yearly revenue at a high profit margin (37%).

Sweden, like many other European countries, is aiming for full scientific “open access” (free article reading) by 2026. In 2017, Swedish universities paid Elsevier €1.3M ($1.5M) for article publications and €12M ($14.1M) for access to articles.

Now Sweden is demanding that Elsevier make Swedish research content fully available to the public and make its 1,900 journals fully available to Swedish researchers, all at a reasonable price to Swedish universities.

Gerry Shih:

Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese _ even foreign citizens _ in mass internment camps.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. “I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

Ian Sample:

Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe.

The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US.

Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research.

In an open letter that urges governments to act, the scientists describe how Europe has not kept up with the US and China, where the vast majority of leading AI firms and universities are based. The letter adds that while a few “research hotspots” still exist in Europe, “virtually all of the top people in those places are continuously being pursued for recruitment by US companies.”

Charlotte Salle:

Patricia Hampl’s new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, is so delightfully nebulous—dangling somewhere between travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, and love letter, with a couple of philosophical deadlifts thrown in—that it’s worth summarizing her argument right from the get-go: reveries and daydreams are not throwaway instances that we should shrug off or snap out of. Times when we are lost in thought, far away from quotidian woes, are moments to seek out and cultivate. The central concern of her book is to show us how to do just that—how to live a life of the mind in a humdrum world.

We begin with Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, who in 1778 abandoned their duties, routines, and familes in Ireland for a long life of what they called “delicious seclusion” in the Welsh countryside. For the next 50 years, they lived in solitude, savoring each other’s quiet company. Well, almost.

Having become “famous for wishing to be left alone,” as Hampl puts it, they were soon visited by the whole literary kingdom. Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, and Byron all stopped by, as did Sir Walter Scott and Caroline Lamb. All were enchanted by the two “chatelaines of serenity” who had voluntarily rusticated themselves, eschewing the pleasures and vices of urban society. Instead, the Ladies organized their days around self-improvement activities, clocking everything by what they termed “our System”: hours for language studies, transcription, sketching, long walks, and letter writing. Reading was the centerpiece of each day. A full life, but “so still,” as Eleanor records in her journal. “So silent.”

David Pierce:

About 10 minutes after I decided to try temporarily removing Google from my life—an experiment I hoped would illuminate how much Alphabet’s giant dominates online existence—I messed it all up.

I spotted a video of Donald Glover, co-star of “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” giving a Millennium Falcon tour. Even on my most careful guard, I still clicked the red play button. A few seconds in, I realized I was watching YouTube—Google’s YouTube.

Google is so woven into the fabric of the internet it’s all but impossible to avoid. It’s where billions of users find, create and store important information, where they work and distract themselves from working. You can quit Facebook or take a Twitter break and barely notice, save for an increased sense of boredom in the Starbucks line. Google, you’d miss.

But even more than other companies offering free services, Google collects astounding amounts of data about you and uses it to sell ads. I’m happy with Google, because to date there haven’t been reports of catastrophic breaches or data-sharing scandals on the level of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica nightmare. If Google springs a leak, it could be disastrous.

That’s why I set out to leave Google’s planet of intertwined products and services. And when I did, I was surprised to find how many strong alternatives had survived its gravitational pull.

Lionel Shriver:

Paperchase caused a kerfuffle in March by marketing British greeting cards printed, “World’s Greatest Mom”. It was bad enough that Mothering Sunday was morphing ominously into the more commercial “Mother’s Day” from across the pond. Now those wretched Americans were attacking the very institution of motherhood itself. “Mom” indeed! The Telegraph’s leader despaired, “Hollywood is corrupting the language”. Surely the American “slow occupation of British culture” was bound to reach its peak when “football games are rebranded as ‘soccer’”. The leader called drolly for a tariff on American English as a response to President Trump’s tariff on steel.

Yet the online comments section was full of sniffy Birmingham natives who call their mothers “Mom”, not “Mum”. A letter to the Editor objected that the Telegraph’s leader writers “betrayed their youthful age”; in the letter writer’s childhood, football was routinely called “soccer”, a British term that derives from “association football”. On the sidelines, the linguist Lynne Murphy must have been chortling. These excitable exchanges are the meat and potatoes – or mince and mash – of her work.

Alexei Kos3ff:

Only a quarter of applicants passed the California bar exam in its most recent sitting, the State Bar of California announced this week, a record low for the test that lawyers must successfully complete to practice in the state.

The pass rate for the February exam sank to just 27.3 percent, about 7 percentage points lower than last year and the first time since 1986 that it has fallen below 30 percent. The previous low, according to a summary of results since 1951, came in the spring of 1983, when 27.7 percent of applicants passed.

In a statement Friday, executive director Leah T. Wilson said the State Bar recently launched an intervention program to “improve performance on the bar exam” and “better understand the downward trend of the bar exam pass rates.” It is also preparing to complete a study about the needs of entry-level lawyers, in order to evaluate the exam standards.

“Over the long term, we need to be sure that we are testing for the skills and content that new attorneys need, and that we are doing so in the right format,” Wilson said.

California sets a higher cutoff score for its bar exam than any state except Delaware, and it frequently has the lowest pass rate in the country. Critics have long contended that it is unnecessarily restrictive, keeping otherwise qualified individuals out of the legal profession, particularly women and minorities.

Toni Airaksinen:

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into Yale University amid allegations that the institution offers educational programs and scholarship opportunities that exclude men.

According to a letter dated April 26, the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is investigating seven Yale initiatives, including the Yale Women Faculty Forum, the Working Women’s Network, the Yale University Women’s Organization, and the Yale Women’s Campaign School.

“Yale University violates Title IX by funding/sustaining programs which practice discrimination in their admission/election practices.”

These initiatives allegedly provide, to varying degrees, scholarships, professional development, academic opportunities, and summer programs exclusively to female students and professors, the complaint alleges.

The investigation was launched after Kursat Christoff Pekgoz, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, alleged in a February 18 complaint that the Yale initiatives provide unfair advantages to women.

“Yale University violates Title IX by funding/sustaining programs which practice discrimination in their admission/election practices,” Pekgoz wrote in a complaint to the OCR, a copy of which was obtained by Campus Reform.

His complaint also pointed out that male students are increasingly a minority on college campuses, and that, from an ethical perspective, they deserve equal access to academic opportunities.

“Men are a minority at Yale University (48%) and nationwide enrollment rates for men are even lower (42.8%),” his letter asserted, adding that “men are even less likely to graduate from college after initial enrollment.”

“Therefore, affirmative action for women in colleges is irrational: indeed, it would only stand to reason to implement affirmative action for male students,” he argued, though he noted that he only hopes these opportunities will become gender-neutral instead.

James Freeman:

That headline arrives via email from a money manager in northern New Jersey. The Garden State already has the third largest overall tax burden and the country’s highest property tax collections per capita. Now that federal reform has limited the deduction for state and local taxes, the price of government is surging again among high-income earners in New Jersey and other blue states. Taxpayers are searching for the exits.

Jonathan Kay:

In a development that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago, when video games were poised to take over living rooms, board games are thriving. Overall, the latest available data shows that U.S. sales grew by 28 percent between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Revenues are expected to rise at a similar rate into the early 2020s—largely, says one analyst, because the target audience “has changed from children to adults,” particularly younger ones.

Much of this success is traceable to the rise of games that, well, get those adults acting somewhat more like children. Clever, low-overhead card games such as Cards Against Humanity, Secret Hitler, and Exploding Kittens (“A card game for people who are into kittens and explosions”) have sold exceptionally well. Games like these have proliferated on Kickstarter, where anyone with a great idea and a contact at an industrial printing company can circumvent the usual toy-and-retail gatekeepers who green-light new concepts. (The largest project category on Kickstarter is “Games,” and board games make up about three-quarters of those projects.)

James Hamblin:

This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.

One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.

The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”

Future of Getting Old:

What defines an “old” person? As it turns out, the answer varies depending on your age. If you’re under 30, studies show you’re likely to say old age begins at 60. If you’re in your 40s and 50s, you might say 70. If you are 60 or 70, your definition of “old” might be 74 or above. Turns out we tend to feel younger the older we get-many people in their 80s report feeling 70.

Lifestyle markers of old age change as we age too. While most 18-29 year olds say forgetting names is a sign of old age, less than 50 percent of those older than 29 consider it a sign of aging. Having grandchildren is also something that younger people see as an “old” characteristic, but older individuals may not. The number of years we’ve lived, it seems, isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator for how we’ve aged.

Today, our perception of age is changing more than ever. Thanks to advancements in science, medicine and technology, we may be living longer – well into our 70s, 80s and even 90s – and accordingly we will need to continue to redefine what it means to be “old.” These advances also present an opportunity to start thinking about a not-too-distant future where aging may not mean losing vitality and functionality physically, mentally and emotionally but maintaining or even gaining it as members of a new generation making meaningful contributions to society.

Lyman Stone:

The United States just hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, according to numbers just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2017 provisional estimate of fertility for the entire U.S. indicates about 3.85 million births in 2017 and a total fertility rate of about 1.76 births per women. These are low numbers: births were as high as 4.31 million in 2007, and the total fertility rate was 2.08 kids back then. The United States has experienced a remarkable slump in fertility over the last several years, as I’ve explained elsewhere.

Ben Jojo:

The internet is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the /22 you got as a LIR was big, but that’s just peanuts to the internet.

Well, actually, it wasn’t in the long run, that’s why we need IPv6. But that is a different story.

The point is, IPv4 (the most common deployed version of the IP protocol) sets its address limits at 2³² addresses. This means you have roughly 4.2 billion IP addresses to work with, except you don’t really, because large sections are not usable:

Henry Kissinger:

As I listened to the speaker celebrate this technical progress, my experience as a historian and occasional practicing statesman gave me pause. What would be the impact on history of self-learning machines—machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and applied that knowledge to ends for which there may be no category of human understanding? Would these machines learn to communicate with one another? How would choices be made among emerging options? Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?

Aware of my lack of technical competence in this field, I organized a number of informal dialogues on the subject, with the advice and cooperation of acquaintances in technology and the humanities. These discussions have caused my concerns to grow.

Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order.

Smithsonian:

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked.

The first sentence set the tone: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And humanity had lost. In the 1970s, the book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” No matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Published at a time of tremendous conflict and social upheaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the day’s most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: Too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth. Unless humanity cut down its numbers—soon—all of us would face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”

Ehrlich, now 85, told me recently that the book’s main contribution was to make population control “acceptable” as “a topic to debate.” But the book did far more than that. It gave a huge jolt to the nascent environmental movement and fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/#Oq5qLoqO05ACvDbj.99
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Steve Hashem and Douglas Satterfield:

To address these challenges, we must start early. Children’s earliest years are a critical time during which the most rapid brain development happens. This foundation informs their cognition, health, and behavior throughout life.

Research shows that high-quality early education programs deliver real, measurable results in improving outcomes for kids. Such programs can prepare children to start school with critical early math and reading skills, improve student performance, boost graduation rates, deter youth from crime, and even reduce obesity rates by instilling healthy eating and exercise habits at a young age.

For example, a long-term study of the Perry Preschool Program in Michigan found that children who participated in the program were 44 percent more likely to graduate from high school than children left out of the program. A similar study of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers showed that children who did not participate in the program were 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by age 18.

A growing body of research also shows that state early education programs, if they are of high enough quality, can deliver solid results.

A new, national study from the Upjohn Institute analyzes thousands of public school district pre-K programs and finds that in states with high-quality programs, there are benefits persisting to at least fourth grade, with significant boosts to math scores.

Here in New Jersey, our state-funded preschool program has followed children through the fourth and fifth grades and found that, compared with a control group, the children served were three-fourths of a year ahead in math and two-thirds of a year ahead in literacy. They were also 31 percent less likely to be placed in special education and were held back 40 percent less often.

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

Valerie Bauerlein:

North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and teachers typically must request permission to take a personal day off for this type of action, and be willing to cover the cost of hiring a substitute. The state’s big school boards canceled classes after more teachers requested personal time off than there were substitutes available.

Keith Poston, executive director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, which isn’t affiliated with the march but advocates increased state spending, said he sees the rally as teachers reacting to a decade of declining overall spending, from fewer school nurses and teaching assistants to less money for supplies and professional development.

“They have a front-row seat for the disinvestment in public education,” Mr. Poston said. “Our elected officials, whatever party they’re in, should listen to what they’re saying.”

The one-day rally is expected to tie up traffic in downtown Raleigh for most of the day, as teachers and other protesters travel from the North Carolina Association of Educators headquarters to the General Assembly on its opening legislative day.

Terry Stoops, a former public-school teacher who researches education for Raleigh’s libertarian-leaning John Locke Foundation, said the North Carolina rally is different from those in other states because it is unlikely to change public policy.

“People will harden their positions,” Mr. Stoops said. “The real motive here is to replace the Republican majority in the General Assembly.”

Sarah Karp:

Chicago Public Schools — the nation’s third largest school system — must turn over control of nearly every aspect of its special education program to the state, the Illinois State Board of Education said Wednesday. The board voted to appoint a monitor who will have final say on all policies and budget plans related to special education.

It’s a major blow to CPS’ autonomy and a rare and aggressive move by the state. CPS spends $900 million, or more than 16 percent of its total budget, on special education annually to serve more than 52,000 children with a broad range of special needs, including learning issues and behavioral and physical disabilities.

The board voted to appoint the monitor for at least three years and 40 other “corrective actions” for CPS after accepting the findings of a state investigation that found CPS had violated federal special education laws when it made sweeping changes to its program for disabled students two years ago.

The investigation found “systemic problems” with special education in CPS that “delayed and denied” services to children. That inquiry was prompted by complaints from advocates and a WBEZ report that mirrored the state’s findings.

Patrick Marley:

Attorneys for Evers contended Schimel and his aides were violating ethics rules for lawyers because they were not pursuing the case in the way Evers wanted, were not conferring with him and did not honor his decision to fire them.

Past court rulings have determined the schools superintendent has broad authority and that includes the ability to direct litigation strategy, Evers attorney Ben Jones contended.

But Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin argued decisions about litigation belong to the attorney general, not Evers.

“With respect, independent litigation is not the supervision of education,” he said.

Both sides heard comments from the justices they liked.

“There’s nothing specific in Article 10 (of the state constitution) that says you have the power to litigate,” conservative Justice Daniel Kelly told Evers’ attorney.

But Justice Annette Ziegler, also a conservative, noted a recent high court ruling concluded Evers has vast powers. Ziegler dissented in that case, but acknowledged what her colleagues had ruled.

“Coyne set forth fairly strongly that Mr. Evers … is a constitutional officer and certain things cannot be taken away from him by the Legislature or elsewhere because it’s given to him by the constitution,” Zeigler said

She was referring to Coyne v. Walker, the 2016 state Supreme Court decision that handed a victory to Evers’ allies after a yearslong legal fight. That legal battle is being revived with the latest lawsuit.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Edward Feser:

In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein, Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy.” It has since become well-known as a defense of the possibility in principle of time travel in a relativistic universe. But in fact that is not exactly what Gödel was trying to show. He was trying to show instead that time is illusory. He was using Einstein to revive the timeless conception of reality defended historically by thinkers like Parmenides and McTaggart.

Gödel had discovered solutions for the field equations of the general theory of relativity (GTR) that allow for the possibility of closed causal chains in a rotating universe, where the “backward” part of such a chain can be interpreted as an object’s revisiting its earlier self. As Einstein acknowledged in his response to Gödel in the festschrift, in such a causal chain – in which an apparently earlier event E leads to an apparently later event L, but where L in turn leads back to E – you may with equal justice regard L as the earlier event and E the later. The relations “earlier than” and “later than” cease to be objective features of the situation. Now, as even the B-theory of time acknowledges, the objective reality of the relations “earlier than” and “later than” is essential to the reality of time. Hence Gödel concluded that in a universe of the sort he describes, time is illusory.

Christian Schneider:

The last line of the Sentinel article added one final bullet point, almost as an afterthought. The day before, Thompson had signed a “parental choice” program which would soon allow 930 Milwaukee students to attend a private, non-sectarian school for free.

In the ensuing 28 years, Milwaukee’s school choice program has been fiercely debated both statewide and nationally. In 1995, the voucher program was extended to private, religious schools; during Gov. Scott Walker’s tenure, vouchers have been expanded statewide, drawing harsh criticism from Democrats sympathetic to teachers’ unions.

In a story by the Wisconsin State Journal’s Molly Beck on Sunday, seven of the top nine Democratic candidates said they would eliminate all four private school voucher programs in Wisconsin, with most vowing to phase the program out over a period of time.

Clearly, the days of bipartisan support for choice are a remnant of history. The program that passed in 1990 was part of a bill introduced by Democrats (choice was most notably championed by Milwaukee Assemblywoman Annette “Polly” Williams) and passed each Democrat-controlled house of the Legislature overwhelmingly (26-7 in the Senate, 86-8 in the Assembly.)

At the time, Williams thought the program would help low-income blacks break free from the paternalistic liberals who wanted to run their lives. “At some point, we want to make our own decisions, whether our friends like it or not,” said Williams, who the Wisconsin chair for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

But now, promising to end school choice in Wisconsin has become to state Democrats what Donald’s Trump’s Mexican border wall became to Republicans — an impossible task that nonetheless allows a candidate to signal false bravado in order to pacify the party’s base.

Neal McCluskey:

Polling reveals that parents, especially African Americans, want school choice. Studies show choice students pulling even with public school kids even in laggard programs, and often surpassing them. And states keep expanding choice initiatives as families flock to them.

Perhaps because of all this good news, opponents of expanding the options available to parents and their children have launched a new strategy, one employing grossly cherry-picked history to imply that school choice is fueled by bigotry. It is both hugely inaccurate history, and hugely ironic, because if any education system has been shot-through with bigotry, it is public schooling.

The new assault started with “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers,” a report from the leftist Center for American Progress, focused on southern districts that, after Brown v. Board of Education,implemented school choice plans to dodge integration. Soon after the report’s release, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten declared in a speech to her union’s annual convention that choice and proposed federal education budget cuts were the “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” And just this week, TheNew York Times ran a piece by journalist Katherine Stewart stating that choice supporters’ objections to “government schools” have their lineage in racism and anti-Catholicism.

The most glaring omission in these choice-smearing histories is that Jim Crow laws segregated African Americans in public schools for decades
These are not totally without historical bases. Some segregationists, for instance, did try to employ choice to escape integration. But just because some people had ugly motives does not mean most supporters of school choice do. And these hyper-politicized versions of history have ignored that the far bigger, much more devastating story of bigotry has been in the public schools that were supposed to serve everyone.

The most glaring omission in these choice-smearing histories is that Jim Crow laws segregated African Americans in public schools for decades. Meanwhile, private schools sometimes integrated in open defiance of the law. And segregation did not occur only with African Americans or in the South. It was practiced in Boston through the mid-1850s, and Asians and Mexican Americans were segregated in other parts of the country.

Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson:

In March 2007, Nick Pearce was running the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research. That month, one of his young interns, Amelia Zollner, was killed by a lorry while cycling in London. Amelia was a bright, energetic Cambridge graduate, who worked at University College London. She was waiting at traffic lights when a lorry crushed her against a fence and dragged her under its wheels.

Two years later, in March 2009, Pearce was head of prime minister Gordon Brown’s Number 10 policy unit. He had not forgotten Amelia and wondered to a colleague if the publication of raw data on bicycle accidents would help. Perhaps someone might then build a website that would help cyclists stay safe?

The first dataset was put up on 10 March. Events then moved quickly. The file was promptly translated by helpful web users who came across it online, making it compatible with mapping applications.

A day later, a developer emailed to say that he had “mashed up” the data on Google Maps. (Mashing means the mixing together of two or more sets of data.) The resulting website allowed anyone to look up a journey and instantly see any accident spots along the way.

Within 48 hours, the data had been turned from a pile of figures into a resource that could save lives and that could help people to pressure government to deal with black spots.

Now, imagine if the government had produced a bicycle accident website in the conventional way. Progress would have been glacial. The government would have drawn up requirements, put it out to tender and eventually gone for the lowest bidder. Instead, within two days, raw data had been transformed into a powerful public service.

Politicians, entrepreneurs, academics, even bureaucrats spend an awful lot of time these days lecturing each other about data. There is big data, personal data, open data, aggregate data and anonymised data. Each variety has issues: where does it originate? Who owns it? What it is worth?

Gail Heriot:

In January of 2018, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report entitled Public Education Inequity in an Era of Increasing concentration of Poverty and Resegregation. This Statement was part of that report. It critiques the report on the ground that, contrary to the what the report attempts to establish, the evidence shows that, while pockets of underfunding exist, on average, school districts that serve large numbers of minority or low-income students get somewhat more money than average. That shouldn’t end the matter though. As Commissioner Heriot’s dissent states, the biggest problem is that schools serving low-income students arguable need more money. She asks, “Is there some reason the Commission can’t be more clear and upfront about that?”

Keywords: education finance, school finance, civil rights

Cyrus Farivar:

The digital privacy world was rocked late Thursday evening when The New York Times reported on Securus, a prison telecom company that has a service enabling law enforcement officers to locate most American cell phones within seconds. The company does this via a basic Web interface leveraging a location API—creating a way to effectively access a massive real-time database of cell-site records.
Securus’ location ability relies on other data brokers and location aggregators that obtain that information directly from mobile providers, usually for the purposes of providing some commercial service like an opt-in product discount triggered by being near a certain location. (“You’re near a Carl’s Jr.! Stop in now for a free order of fries with purchase!”)