Category Archives: Uncategorized

Serving School Lunch Family Style

Anne Hoffman:

When Hannah was in fourth grade, she decided to skip her school’s free lunch every day. Even though it fit under the new National School Lunch program guidelines as a healthy meal, she still opted not to eat the chef’s salad with lite Italian dressing, the meatballs and sauce, or the serving of raw veggies or fruit. She didn’t like the way it tasted, and besides, the cafeteria was chaotic, with fights that broke out soon after lunch began.

Hannah, who is rail thin and sports a ponytail so flawless that other little girls stop her to comment on it, would arrive home around 3 o’clock with a rumbling stomach. She would typically ask her mom for an early supper.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: As America’s economic supremacy fades, the primacy of the dollar looks unsustainable

The Economist:

For decades, America’s economic might legitimised the dollar’s claims to reign supreme. But, as our special report this week explains, a faultline has opened between America’s economic clout and its financial muscle. The United States accounts for 23% of global GDP and 12% of merchandise trade. Yet about 60% of the world’s output, and a similar share of the planet’s people, lie within a de facto dollar zone, in which currencies are pegged to the dollar or move in some sympathy with it. American firms’ share of the stock of international corporate investment has fallen from 39% in 1999 to 24% today. But Wall Street sets the rhythm of markets globally more than it ever did. American fund managers run 55% of the world’s assets under management, up from 44% a decade ago.

Where Black Lives Don’t Matter A TV ad highlights the racial inequality of New York’s public school system.

William McGurn:

“The facts are the facts,” responds the executive director for Families for Excellent Schools, Jeremiah Kittredge. “A half million children, almost all of color, are being forced into failing schools with no escape.”

The United Federation of Teachers’ response was a feel-good video reminiscent of those old propaganda clips featuring happy, well-fed peasants talking about the blessings of Soviet collectives. In the UFT version, smiling teachers and students are filmed “celebrating the diversity and success of New York City public schools.”

In short, New Yorkers are being presented with two starkly different narratives.

The teachers-union narrative asks the city to celebrate the “success” of a school system in which there is no hint of any challenges. Families for Excellent Schools suggests that “success” is not the word for a school system in which half a million children—478,000 to be precise—languish in failure factories.

These are defined as schools where two-thirds of the students are failing, the city’s most rotten schools. Ninety percent of the kids in these schools are children of color. Families for Excellent Schools calls this system a “pipeline to failure,” noting that a child who starts in a failing elementary school has only a 1.6% chance of ever going on to a top-performing middle school.

Colleges Don’t Need to Pay Athletes Beyond Attendance Costs

Sharon Terlep:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the NCAA can keep a ban on compensating athletes beyond the cost of attending school, in effect nullifying last year’s landmark decision that such rules violate antitrust law.

The decision, by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, came despite the trio’s assertion that the National Collegiate Athletic Association is “not above antitrust laws” and that its rules “have been more restrictive than necessary to maintain its tradition of amateurism in support of the college sports market.”

MORE ON THE NCAA

Judge: NCAA Can’t Ban Pay for Players
NCAA Weighing Next Steps After Ruling
The NCAA’s Curious Move

Honesty is the Best Policy: Early Smarter Balanced Results Provide Insight into How States Compare

Marianne Lombardo:

The Hibsty Map-when you’re given information that paints a rosier picture than what is the actual case – might be humorous if we’re talking about Match.com, but it isn’t when we’re talking about our children’s education.

The Obama administration has fought hard, against extensive criticism, to address the discrepancies between what states have been calling proficient and what students need to know and be able to do in order to enter college or a career successfully. This discrepancy is devastating for the 60 percent of students who are deemed not ready for college, frustrates the 30 percent of high school graduates who enter a job market where 40 percent of employers rate new entrants with a high school diploma as “deficient” in their workforce preparation, and even disastrous for our nation’s security as a whole: Nearly one-fourth of all high school graduates don’t get the minimum score needed to join any branch of the military.

Moody’s downgrades Haverford College, PA to A1; outlook stable

Moody’s:

The downgrade to A1 is based on Haverford College’s relative weakening profile as very low revenue growth in recent years has contributed to ongoing operating deficits. As a result, financial resource growth has been stunted compared to peers and competitors. Operating deficits are expected to continue through at least 2017, albeit at lower levels as the college addresses current issues of fundamental financial imbalance. Financial reserves declined modestly in FY 2015 based on unaudited financial statements despite an ongoing fundraising campaign. Absent increased philanthropy and endowment growth, Haverford’s operating performance will continue to be challenged by its need-blind admissions policy.

The A1 rating positively acknowledges the college’s comparatively strong market position as an elite liberal arts institution in suburban Philadelphia. Liquidity remains ample, fundraising is good, and financial reserves still provide a strong cushion of debt and operations, providing Haverford with significant time to address its current financial imbalance.

Offsetting challenges include elevated financial leverage with minimal principal amortization until 2022 and modest cash flow providing thin debt service coverage.

“Most importantly, he appears willing to sacrifice minority children’s educational opportunities to stay within the good graces of UFT.” 

Laura Waters:

But you have to understand where I’m coming from. My parents were both UFT members (my dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a high school social worker) and we practically davened to Albert Shanker, AFT’s founder. I knew all the words to Woody Guthrie’s labor hymn, “There Once was a Union Maid” (who never was afraid of goons and ginks and company finks…). I sang it to my kids too. What do you expect from an education-obsessed New York Jew from a union household?

During the 1960’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s there was no divide between education reform and union fidelity. If you were a UFT member than you were devoted to improving student outcomes. Everyone, or almost everyone, was on the same side.

And now we’re here, fraught with division. De Blasio ran on a platform that explicitly opposed the “creation of new charter schools” or the “co-location of charter schools within public schools” despite a waiting list of 43,000 names. He’s made enemies of Gov. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, almost entirely through divergent education agendas, and Eva Moskowitz, who runs the most outstanding and popular group of charter schools in the city. Most importantly, he appears willing to sacrifice minority children’s educational opportunities to stay within the good graces of UFT.

We live in a political world of lobbyists and special interests, of PAC’s and Citizens United. But elected representatives, especially the leader of one of the most educationally-troubled cities, have an absolute obligation to separate politics from policy. I think de Blasio is a good man but I think he’s crossed that line.

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

Related: Madison’s schwerpunkt.

Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China’s Rich Kids

Christopher Beam:

Emerging from a nightclub near Workers’ Stadium in Beijing at 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in June, Mikael Hveem ordered an Uber. He selected the cheapest car option and was surprised when the vehicle that rolled up was a dark blue Maserati. The driver, a young, baby-faced Chinese man, introduced himself as Jason. Hveem asked him why he was driving an Uber—he obviously didn’t need the cash. Jason said he did it to meet people, especially girls. Driving around late at night in Beijing’s nightclub district, he figured he’d find the kind of woman who would be charmed by a clean-cut 22-year-old in a sports car.

Computer algorithm created to encode human memories

Clive Cookson:

Researchers in the US have developed an implant to help a disabled brain encode memories, giving new hope to Alzheimer’s sufferers and wounded soldiers who cannot remember the recent past.

The prosthetic, developed at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in a decade-long collaboration, includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain.

The key to the research is a computer algorithm that mimics the electrical signalling used by the brain to translate short-term into permanent memories.

This makes it possible to bypass a damaged or diseased region, even though there is no way of “reading” a memory — decoding its content or meaning from its electrical signal.

“It’s like being able to translate from Spanish to French without being able to understand either language,” said Ted Berger of USC, the project leader.

American education is ripe for a technology revolution to prepare students for the 21st century

Christopher Mims:

Whatever your measure—the reading and math proficiency of high-school graduates, the skills gap in the nation’s labor market, or the real value of college—there can be little argument that America’s schools, as a whole, are failing to prepare students for the 21st century.

There are countless explanations why, but here’s a significant contributing factor: Until recently, we simply didn’t know how to use technology to make teachers and students happier, better engaged and more successful.

Think about it: In every field of human endeavor, from manufacturing to knowledge work, we’re figuring out how to use technology to make humans more successful—to raise the quality of their work, if not their measured productivity.

How much do big education nonprofits pay their bosses? Quite a bit, it turns out.

Valerie Strauss:

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently finalized a rule forcing businesses to share data with workers that expose how much more their chief executives make than they do.

In that spirit, let’s take a look at the compensation of the chief executives of three very large education non-profit organizations heavily involved in standardized testing — the College Entrance Examination Board, known as the College Board, which owns the SAT college admissions exam and the Advanced Placement program; the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT and AP exams for the College Board as well as other assessments for other organizations); and ACT, Inc., which owns the ACT college admissions and also is responsible for other tests and programs.

It’s easy to mistake big non-profits such as these as for-profit companies, because they operate in similar fashion. They pay their top people a lot of money, charge fees for their services, make investments, market and lobby legislators. So how well do their executives do financially? Pretty darn well, it turns out. And many of their subordinates do just fine, too.

Life after MOOCs

Phillip Compeau, Pavel A. Pevzner:

Three years ago, Moshe Vardi published an editorial in Communications expressing concerns about the pedagogical quality of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and including the sentiment, “If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear.”9 His editorial was followed by studies highlighting various limitations of MOOCs (see Karsenti5 for a review).

We share the concerns about the quality of early primitive MOOCs, which have been hyped by many as a cure-all for education. At the same time, we feel much of the criticism of MOOCs stems from the fact that truly disruptive scalable educational resources have not yet been developed. For this reason, if we had a wand, we would not wish away MOOCs but rather transform them into a more effective educational product called a massive adaptive interactive text (MAIT) that can compete with a professor in a classroom. We further argue that computer science is a discipline in which this transition is about to happen.

“our collective failure to even try to measure the impact professional development has on teacher performance in the first place”

Dan Weisberg:

In other words, it would be great if the biggest challenge around professional development were the exact teacher performance measures we should use to evaluate it. But we’re not even there yet. We still need school systems to ask the basic questions that these measures could help answer: Is the professional development you’re providing actually helping teachers improve? How do you know?

The good news is that those questions suggest a very practical path forward. Surely we’d be in a better place if, for example, school systems got concrete about what great teaching looks like (as Andy suggests), and made sure teachers and school leaders bought into that vision. We’d be better off if we started setting measurable goals for teacher development, aligned toward that vision of excellence, and kept track of which initiatives actually meet them. And we would do well to shed the long-held assumption that we know how to help 3.5 million individual teachers become masters of their craft, and started considering some new ideas about what schools or the teaching profession itself could look like—ideas that could have a much broader impact on instructional quality.

New Mathematica Study on KIPP Charter Schools as They Scale Up; FYI, They Don’t “Cream Off” Top Students

Laura Waters:

KIPP elementary schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on three of four measures of reading and mathematics skills.

Consistent with prior research, KIPP middle schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement in math, reading, science, and social studies. Average impacts of middle schools were positive and statistically significant throughout the 10-year period covered by the study, though higher in earlier years than recent years.

KIPP high schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement for high school students new to the KIPP network. For students continuing to KIPP high schools from KIPP middle schools, impacts on achievement are not statistically significant. For this group of continuing KIPP students, KIPP high schools have positive impacts on a variety of college preparation activities and the likelihood of applying to college.

Understanding the Effect of KIPP as it Scales: Volume I, Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes.

Bubble Trouble for Standardized Testing

:

A few weeks ago, a new class of nearly 800 students arrived at Wesleyan University to begin their first year. Wesleyan is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top liberal-arts colleges, and admissions are competitive.

But those who have made it to the school’s leafy campus in Middletown, Conn., look pretty much like their newly minted peers at any other college in the U.S. The interesting difference is one that doesn’t show. Nearly one-third of Wesleyan’s incoming class was admitted without an SAT score. Last year, the school dropped its requirement that applicants submit a standardized-entrance-exam score, and hundreds of would-be Wesleyan students from a wide range of backgrounds took advantage of the option.

In abolishing the mandate, Wesleyan joined a growing cadre of selective schools that includes other recent defectors such as George Washington University and Wake Forest. Today, nearly 200 of the roughly 2,968 degree-granting four-year colleges in the U.S. no longer require the SAT or the ACT, while 600 more have diminished their role in the admission process, according to the antitesting organization Fair Test. Those ranks include not only elite and expensive colleges like Bates and Smith but also major state schools like the University of Arizona and regional campuses including Montclair State in New Jersey and Weber State in Utah.

NCTQ Unveils ‘Consumer’s Guide’ to Colleges of Education

Stephen Sawchuck:

The National Council on Teacher Quality has unveiled Path to Teach, an online website billed as a consumer’s guide to colleges of education.

Teacher-candidates-to-be can look up college programs and alternative programs from across the nation, comparing them by tuition costs, enrollment numbers, location, and by a quality snapshot that looks at criteria like admissions selectivity, preparation to teach in different content areas, and student-teaching quality.

Path to Teach’s A-F grades are based on the NCTQ’s project to assess elementary, secondary, and special education programs in every education school. The rankings are often fairly unsparing (“This program will not prepare you to teach young children to read,” says the typical warning for an F grade for early reading.)

The series of problems in al-Khwārizmī’s Algebra

Jeffrey Oaks:

There are two collections of problems in al-Khwārizmī’s Algebra. The first is part of what I call the “algebra proper”, and consists of the thirty-nine worked out arithmetic problems in the first half of the book. This set of problems is the object of my study. It is not to be confused with the collection of inheritance problems that make up the second half of the book, after the chapters on business arithmetic and mensuration.

I have written much more than I expected, so I will summarize my arguments here and give links to my longer study and to my translation of the whole corpus. First, the links:

“The series of problems in al-Khwārizmī’s Algebra”. 13 pages, plus bibliography. here

The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio

Laura McKenna:

Economists often calculate the income disparities between companies’ CEOs and their average workers with ratios, expressing concern when the gaps grow too wide. For example, a recent report from Glassdoor, a labor-market research firm, found that Chipotle CEO Steve Ellis earned $29 million total in 2014, while the median worker serving those yummy burrito bowls earned just $19,000. That would make the median CEO-to-worker pay ratio at Chipotle 1,522 to one.

The Riskiest Student Loans Are The Smallest Ones, Study Says

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

new analysis of student loan borrowers shows that, contrary to public perception, those who borrow the least are most likely to default on their loans.
The study, which examined borrowing by community college students in Iowa, found that 31% of those with loan balances of less than $5,000 defaulted, compared with 22% of those who owed between $10,000 and $15,000. The national average default rate across all educational institutions is less than 14%.

The study adds credence to a changing understanding of the $1 trillion student debt crisis, suggesting that the riskiest borrowers are not those who have taken out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to cover high tuition costs, but those who borrow in small amounts.

So far there has been little effort by the federal government to help such borrowers, according to the study, released Monday by the Association of Community College Trustees. But that could change: the Obama administration has recently made free community college a key part of its education agenda, proposing a national program and pushing states to adopt their own initiatives.

Is college worth the cost? Many recent graduates don’t think so.

Jeffrey Selingo:

In the coming weeks, tens of thousands of young adults who graduated from college last spring will get their first payment notice for their student loans. As they look at the bill — with an average monthly payment closing in on $400 and with a decade of payments ahead of them — they inevitably will ask the question: “Was my degree worth it?”

If the results of a national survey released on Tuesday are any indication, many of them will question their investment. Just 38 percent of students who have graduated college in the past decade strongly agree that their higher education was worth the cost, according to results of 30,000 alumni polled by Gallup-Purdue Index.

When Schools Overlook Introverts

Mchael Godsey:

When Susan Cain published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking nearly four years ago, it was immediately met with acclaim. The book criticizes schools and other key institutions for primarily accommodating extroverts and such individuals’ “need for lots of stimulation.” Much to introverts’ relief, it also seeks to raise awareness about the personality type, particularly among those who’ve struggled to understand it.

Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation review – hissy fits about apostrophes

Sam Leith:

A couple of weeks ago I saw David Crystal give an after-dinner speech at the august annual conference of the Society of Indexers and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. In it, he recalled having been an adviser on Lynne Truss’s radio programme about punctuation. She told him she was thinking of writing a book on the subject. He advised her not to: “Nobody buys books on punctuation.” “Three million books later,” he said, “I hate her.”

These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.

Susie Cagle:

Over the last few years, America’s for-profit college industry has come under increasing scrutiny, and in some cases, legal action. According to critics, programs offered by schools like Corinthian and its subsidiaries, scam students into expensive but ultimately worthless degree programs that leave them with high rates of loan default and low rates of graduate job placement. In the comic below, we meet some of these students — and the activists and organizers who support them — who, fed up with the slow response from the Department of Education, found one another online and decided to fight back against such loans…by refusing to pay them back.

Via Steve Crandall.

The Identity Crisis Under the Ink

Chris Weller:

Some weeks ago, during a bleary-eyed subway ride to work, I found myself staring at a young woman on the other side of the car. She wore business attire with a North Face jacket and flip-flops, and she had an infinity symbol tattooed along the outside of her left foot, only a portion of the loop had been left out to make room for the word Love. Next to her, a scruffy guy in t-shirt and jeans had ornate black and gray murals inked on each arm, one of which seemed to depict an alien fight scene, the other some sort of robot love story. To his left, squeezed in at the end of the bench, was a man thumbing his phone with quick, nervous jabs. When he turned his hand over, I saw the word Jasmine tattooed above his knuckles and a date printed beneath it.

The Woman Behind Latin America’s Literary Boom

Jonathan Bltzer:

One enterprising publisher in particular, Carlos Barral, who headed a press called Seix Barral, based in Barcelona, saw an opportunity. He presented a dense annual catalogue, with descriptions that were designed to anticipate the dictates of the censors while emphasizing—and exaggerating—his reach into international markets. He created a series of prizes to manufacture prestige for edgier contemporary works that otherwise might have piqued the regime’s censors, and he awarded the Latin Americans he hoped to publish (Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante) as a way of putting them in distinguished international company (Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett). He hired Balcells to round out his portfolio of foreign writers. Her special charge was to take care of foreign rights, which she diligently sold in the world’s major cultural capitals (Rome, New York, Paris, London). Before Balcells got to work, publishing houses in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Havana comprised a rough and disconnected patchwork of regional pockets short on scope and visibility. Her advocacy helped change that, bringing writers more fully into view.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Taxes And America’s Debt Binge

Tyler Cowen:

One point the authors emphasize is that, unlike after earlier episodes of American debt binges, America today has not reestablished a comparable primary surplus. The authors suggest taxes on labor or consumption can restore fiscal solvency, but higher taxes on capital won’t work, given dynamic and Laffer curve considerations. They do not devote comparable attention to changes in the trajectory of government spending.

Open library For The Humanities Launches

Open Library:

It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. Over two years in the planning and execution, the platform starts with seven journals, supported by 99 institutions. Our estimated publication volume for year one is 150 articles across these venues. The economics of this work out at approximately £4 ($6) per institution per open-access article.

You can read more about the platform in our editorial piece: “Opening the Open Library of Humanities”. Crucially, we will be publishing new material in the OLH Journal on a weekly rolling cycle, so do keep your eyes peeled for fresh articles.

This is, of course, only the beginning. What we have built should be understood as an economic, social and technological platform for a transition to open access, not just a publisher. Certainly, what we’ve built goes well beyond a proof of concept; at launch we are the same size as a small university press and have an underlying economic model with good levels of support and a path to sustainability. Our ambitions are much larger, though, and our plans for the next three years are:

Firm ‘hides’ university when recruits apply

Sean Coughlan:

Professional services firm Deloitte has changed its selection process so recruiters do not know where candidates went to school or university.
It hopes to prevent “unconscious bias” and tap a more diverse “talent pool”.
For next year’s recruitment round for 1,500 graduates and school leavers, an algorithm will consider “contextual” information alongside academic results.
It will take into account disadvantages such as attending an under-performing school or coming from a deprived area.

Court-ordered busing changed Denver forever

Nelson Garcia:

has partnered with iNews of Rocky Mountain PBS to look at data from the 20 largest school districts in Colorado to detect how race plays a role in the academic achievement. We’re looking at the demographics of schools before, during, and after efforts to desegregate schools in Colorado.

Students like Reves were bused away from their neighborhood schools to force racial integration.

“I don’t think people got the full aspect of how busing impacted our city,” Reves said.

She and Desmond say Manual High School thrived under busing. The school had a mix of race and students of different socio-economic backgrounds.

“It didn’t matter if you lived across the park or if you lived across town,” Reves said. “I mean we had kids whose families owned major corporations and nope that wasn’t important.”

The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your Mind

Technology Review:

One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all. The content itself cannot be the source of this difference. Instead, there must be some property of the network that changes to allow some ideas to spread but not others.

Today, we get an insight into why this happens thanks to the work of Kristina Lerman and pals at the University of Southern California. These people have discovered an extraordinary illusion associated with social networks which can play tricks on the mind and explain everything from why some ideas become popular quickly to how risky or antisocial behavior can spread so easily.

Network scientists have known about the paradoxical nature of social networks for some time. The most famous example is the friendship paradox: on average your friends will have more friends than you do.

This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these people skew the average.

Here’s an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends. you’ll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical notion of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you—say, one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

Fairfax County Budget Proposal tool

Fairfax County Schools:


Start by choosing and dragging items from the “Reductions and Fee Increases” section to the “Proposal” section. If an item has multiple dropdown options, you must drag the item to the “Proposal” area first, and then choose an option. Once you drag an item into the “Proposal” section, the “Budget Deficit” amount on the right side of the screen will be reduced.

To create your own option, click the “Create Option” button and follow the prompts. Your option will show in the “User Created Options” section. In order for your created option to be included in the proposal, it must be dragged into the “Proposal” section.

If you decide to remove an item from the “Proposal” section, drag the item back to “Reductions and Fee Increases” or the “User Created Options” section that the item came from.

Avoiding The Adjective Fallacy

Kalis Azad:

The Adjective Fallacy is trying to learn by mastering the formal rules. Just because a concept can be rigorously defined doesn’t mean we should study it that way.

We didn’t become good at English by studying a chart: we developed an ear for the language and know how it should sound. And “old little lady” sounds off.

Similarly, getting good at math doesn’t mean marching through a gauntlet of rules on every problem. It’s having a native speaker’s feeling about what works or doesn’t.

Are Japanese Humanities Faculties Really Being Shut Down?

Alex Usher:

You may have noticed stories in the press recently about the government of Japan asking national universities to shut down their humanities faculties. Such stories have appeared in the Times Higher Ed, Time, and Bloomberg. Most of these stories have been accompanied by commentary about how shortsighted this is: don’t the Japanese know that life is complex, and that we need humanities for synthesis, etc.? A lot of these stories are also tinged with a hint of early-1990s “these uncultured Asians only think about business and money” Japanophobia.

The problem is, the story is only partly accurate. A lot of background is needed to understand what’s going on here.

Some facts about higher education in Japan: First, “national universities” – that is, big public research universities – only account for about 20% of student enrolment in Japan; the remainder of students are enrolled in private universities. Second, the number of 18 year-olds has fallen from 2 million in 1990 to about 1.2 million; meanwhile the annual intake of students has stayed relatively constant at around 600,000. The problem is that the 18 year-old cohort is set to continue shrinking, and few think that a system with 86 national universities, about as many regional/municipal universities, and 600-odd private universities can make it through this demographic shift. Re-structuring is the name of the game these days.

Teachers Unions at Risk of Losing “Agency Fees”

Mike Antonucci:

Now a case awaits hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court that could dramatically change this picture. The Far Left periodical In These Times calls Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association the case “that could decimate American public sector unionism.” Perhaps that’s simply an ideological overstatement. Nonetheless, the case, if decided for the plaintiffs, could end the practice of “agency” fees—money paid to the union by nonmembers in exchange for collective bargaining services. Unions call them “fair-share” fees and assert that their elimination would create a class of free riders, workers who would pay nothing while still enjoying the higher salaries and other benefits negotiated by unions.

The stakes for teachers unions are high, as a 2011 Wisconsin law illustrates. Wisconsin Act 10, known as the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, eliminated agency fees there and reshaped the collective bargaining process. Since the law’s passage, membership in the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin has fallen by more than 50 percent, according to a 2015 report from the National Education Association (NEA). In 2014, NEA membership in agency fee states grew by 5,300. In states without agency fees, it fell by more than 47,000.

Accordingly, at a conference of the California Teachers Association (CTA), the union briefed its activists on the potential consequences should the unions lose in Friedrichs, citing loss of revenue; fewer resources; decline in membership; reduced staffing; increased pressure on the CTA pension and benefit system; and potential financial crises for some locals.

Related: Act 10 and Madison’s Schwerpunkt.

Civics: Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American Writing

William Maxwell:

Ellen Schrecker, liberalism’s semi-official chronicler of McCarthyism, hints that this dark episode of modern American history deserves a name change. “Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] opened the [FBI’s] files,” she speculates, “McCarthyism would probably have been called ‘Hooverism.’ ”[1] Schrecker’s case depends on a high regard for the functioning of J. Edgar Hoover’s charismatic bureaucracy—the FBI’s design, management, and marketing of a “machinery of political repression” able to install anticommunism as a touchstone of good government during the Cold War.[2] Providing undercover informers to Smith Act prosecutors set on jailing Communists was just one part of this machinery. Under a secret “Responsibilities Program,” established in 1951, the Bureau also dispatched file-based, not-for-attribution blind memoranda to governors and other “appropriate authorities,” warning of possible Reds on the payroll.[3] Well-honed Bureau techniques for indexing dissent directly fed the classic sin of the blacklist, fingering over 400 public employees for firing, most of them school and university teachers. The names the FBI could not legally communicate to state officials it delivered to the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and other wholesome quasi-publics. At least until 1953, when Hoover began to fear the senator’s sloppiness, the FBI supplied Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee with everything it could:

Pope Francis’s Graph of the Day

Ian Vásquez:

shows that in 1896, income per person in the United States and Argentina, two of the richest countries in the world, was about identical. Argentina subsequently eschewed the free market, replacing it with trade protectionism and other corporatist policies intended to help the poor by redistributing wealth. By 2010, Argentine income was a third of that of the United States.

Perhaps Pope Francis doesn’t endorse Argentine economic policies, but having just arrived from Cuba, he missed an opportunity to denounce the lack of freedoms that have kept that island and other Latin American countries poor and repressed. He met with none of the many admirable Cuban dissidents, in or out of prison, who have been peacefully advocating basic rights. Nor did he mention the plight of the Cuban people they represent, even as authorities arrested or detained 250 Cuban activists during his visit.

American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation

Eduardo Porter:

Those days are long gone. Today, laments Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, investment in innovation has been balkanized, split between government financed basic research, squeezed by skimpy budgets, and a corporate R&D effort constrained by its focus on the very short term.

What happened? The researchers at Duke and East Anglia reject the argument that tightening regulations have pushed companies to cut their research budgets. Corporate investment in basic research, they note, is waning in Europe, too. This is not exclusively an American dynamic.

They also doubt that science has somehow become less valuable, an argument proposed by prominent economists like Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. Citations of recent scientific research are as common in corporate patents today as they were in the 1980s, suggesting science remains critical to companies’ innovation.

Nix the Math Tricks

Nix the Tricks:

Do you Cringe when a student declares “cross multiply!“ as soon as they see a problem involving fractions?

It doesn’t matter whether you teach elementary or high school, whether you’re a parent or a tutor, having a student yell out a trick without stopping to think is painful.

This book is filled with alternatives to the shortcuts so prevalent in mathematics education and explains exactly why the tricks are so bad for understanding math.

Teachers & Governance: Delaware

Mike Antonucci:

Teachers should teach, and should be in charge of instructing and evaluating teachers. Principals should run schools and administer the operations therein. These should not be controversial notions, but decades of inertia and turf wars gave us the system we have now.

In Delaware, at least they are talking about shaking up that system, and the Delaware State Education Association is supporting those efforts. I am pessimistic about its chances of becoming a nationwide trend, but every little bit helps, and the union deserves credit for moving in this direction. This article has the details , and this video explains the reasons .

Meanwhile, in Madison.

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Charles Moore:

Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: “I explained,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that what I was trying to do was create a society of ‘haves,’ not a class of them.”

In the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, those words carried conviction. There was plenty of argument, of course, about whether the means they chose were the best and about the fate of those who got left behind. But even critics reluctantly had to agree about which way history was heading: The society of “haves” in the West was growing; state socialism was imploding.

Meet The Man Who Invents Languages For A Living

NPR:

If anyone has the credentials to write a book called The Art Of Language Invention, it’s David J. Peterson.

He has two degrees in linguistics. He’s comfortable speaking in eight languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Esperanto, Arabic and American Sign Language) — plus a long list of others he’s studied but just hasn’t tried speaking yet. He’s also familiar with fictional languages — both famous ones like Klingon and deep cuts like Pakuni (the caveman language from Land Of The Lost).

Education Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Growing Wider

Eduardo Porter:

The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites.

The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test-score deficit of black 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before.

Leading mathematician launches arXiv ‘overlay’ journal

Philip Ball:

New journals spring up with overwhelming, almost tiresome, frequency these days. But Discrete Analysis is different. This journal is online only — but it will contain no papers. Rather, it will provide links to mathematics papers hosted on the preprint server arXiv. Researchers will submit their papers directly from arXiv to the journal, which will evaluate them by conventional peer review.

With no charges for contributors or readers, Discrete Analysis will avoid the commercial pressures that some feel are distorting the scientific literature, in part by reducing its accessibility, says the journal’s managing editor Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a winner of the prestigious Fields Medal.

Madison’s Schwerpunkt: Government School District Power Play: The New Handbook Process is worth a look

Wisconsin’s stürm and drang over “Act 10” is somewhat manifested in Madison. Madison’s government schools are the only Wisconsin District, via extensive litigation, to still have a collective bargaining agreement with a teacher union, in this case, Madison Teachers, Inc.

The Madison School Board and Administration are working with the local teachers union on a new “Handbook”. The handbook will replace the collective bargaining agreement. Maneuvering over the terms of this very large document illuminates posturing and power structure(s) in our local government schools.

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham wrote recently (September 17, 2015 PDF):

The Oversight group was able to come to agreement on all of the handbook language with the exception of one item, job transfer in the support units. Pursuant to the handbook development process, this item was presented to me for review and recommendation to the Board. My preliminary recommendation is as follows:

Job Transfer for all support units
(See Pages 151, 181, 197, 240, 261)

Superintendent Recommendation
That the language in the Handbook with regard to transfer state as follows: Vacancies shall first be filled by employees in surplus. The District has the right to determine and select the most qualified applicant for any position. The term applicant refers to both internal and external candidates for the position.

The District retains the right to determine the job qualifications needed for any vacant position. Minimum qualifications shall be established by the District and equally applied to all persons.

Rationale/Employee Concern

Rationale:
It is essential that the District has the ability to hire the most qualified candidate for any vacant position—whether an internal candidate or an external candidate. This language is currently used for transfers in the teacher unit. Thus, it creates consistency across employee groups.
By providing the District with the flexibility of considering both internal and external candidates simultaneously the District can ensure that it is hiring the most qualified individual for any vacant position. It also gives the District opportunities to diversify the workforce by expanding the pool of applicants under consideration. This change would come with a commitment to provide stronger development opportunities for internal candidates who seek pathways to promotion.

Employee Concern:
The existing promotional system already grants a high degree of latitude in selecting candidates, including hiring from the outside where there are not qualified or interested internal applicants. It also helps to develop a cadre of dedicated, career-focused employees.

September 24, 2015 Memo to the Madison government schools board of education from Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham:

To: Board of Education
From: Jennifer Cheatham, Superintendent of Schools
RE: Update to Handbook following Operations Work Group

The Operations Work Group met on Monday September 21, 2015. Members of the Oversight Group for development of the Employee Handbook presented the draft Employee Handbook to the Board. There was one item on which the Oversight Group was unable to reach agreement, the hiring process for the support units. Pursuant to the handbook development process, this item was presented to me for review and recommendation to the Board. There was discussion around this item during the meeting and, the Board requested that members of the Oversight Group meet again in an attempt to reach consensus.

Per the Board’s direction, District and employee representatives on the Oversight Group came together to work on coming to consensus on the one remaining item in the Handbook. The group had a productive dialog and concluded that with more time, the group would be able to work together to resolve this issue. Given that the Handbook does not go into effect until July1, 2016, the group agreed to leave the issue regarding the hiring process for the support units unresolved at this point and to include in the Handbook the phrase “To Be Determined” in the applicable sections. As such, there is no longer an open item. When you vote on the Handbook on Monday, the section on the “Selection Process” in the various addenda for the applicable support units will state “To Be Determined” with an agreement on the part of the Oversight Group to continue to meet and develop final language that the Board will approve before the Handbook takes effect in the 2016-17 school year.

Current Collective Bargaining Agreement (160 page PDF) Wordcloud:

Madison government school district 2015-2016 Collective Bargaining Agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc. (160 page PDF) Wordcloud

Proposed Employee Handbook (304 Page PDF9.21.2015 slide presentation) Wordcloud:

Madison government school district

Background:

1. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has filed suit to vacate the Madison government schools collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc.

2. Attorney Lester Pines has spent considerable time litigating Act 10 on behalf of Madison Teachers, Inc. – with some success.

3. The collective bargaining agreement has been used to prevent the development of non-Madison Government school models, such as independent charter, virtual and voucher organizations. This one size fits all approach was manifested by the rejection [Kaleem Caire letter] of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

4. Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $15,000 per student annually. See also “What’s different, this time?

5. Comparing Madison, Long Beach and Boston government school teacher union contracts. Current Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has cited Boston and Long Beach government schools as Districts that have narrowed the achievement gap. Both government districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.

6. Nearby Oconomowoc is paying fewer teachers more.

7. Minneapolis teacher union approved to authorize charter schools.

8. Madison Teachers, Inc. commentary on the proposed handbook (Notes and links). Wordcloud:

9. A rather astonishing quote:

“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes.

10. 1,570,000 for four senators – WEAC.

11. Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Schwerpunkt via wikipedia.

Railing against college debt, Warren fires up Feingold event (Question free?)

Bill Glauber:

In travels across Wisconsin, Feingold said, people expressed great concern about the cost of higher education. Feingold said one student even told him that students talk about college loans on first dates.

“We need a better ice breaker for kids,” he said.

He said student debt nationally is “an economic crisis.”

“I believe it is our moral responsibility that you can get a start in life yourself,” he said. “I believe it is a denial of the American dream that you have to put up with this.”

After the speech, Warren waded into the crowd, posing for photos and talking with students.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Commentary on the Proposed “Handbook”

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

Of the grievance procedure, MTI Legal Counsel Lester Pines said:
“I congratulate MTI and its sister Unions of District employees (AFSCME and The Building Trades Council) for achieving an agreement that the Independent Hearing Officer will be mutually selected by the Union and the District (Act 10 would have enabled the Board of Education to unilaterally appoint the Hearing Officer), and that a grievance can be filed regarding extensive provisions included in the Handbook (Act 10 would limit grievances to termination, discipline and issues regarding work-place safety), and further achieving a limit on what the Board can consider should an appeal of the Hearing Officer’s ruling, enabled by the Statute, be made to the Board. That the Unions gained agreement that the Board cannot consider anything other than the evidence, testimony and decision by the Hearing Officer; i.e. the Board cannot consider any new claims, evidence or testimony, ONLY that on which the Hearing Officer based his/her decision. That provides anexceptionalsafeguardforDistrictemployees.MTI leads the way again.

Act 10 prohibits a Union from negotiating the binding arbitration of grievances. The law provides that every municipal employer, including school districts, must adopt a grievance procedure containing: (1) a written document specifying the process that a grievant and the employer must follow; (2) a hearing before an Independent Hearing Officer; and (3) an appeal process in which the highest level of appeal is to the governing body of the local unit of government (i.e., Board of Education). The law limits the grievance procedure to termination, discipline and issues regarding work-place safety and it enables the employer (Board of Education) to unilaterally select the Independent Hearing Officer. As noted, MTI was able to significantly improve the latter two categories to the benefit of Union members.”

Deep dive: Madison Government School District Power Play: The New Handbook Process is worth a look.

Madison Schools’ Annual Report

WORT-FM

How is the school year going? What about the behavior improvement plan, community schools, teacher diversity, racial equity, test scores, white flight, and school voucher schools? Today Carousel Bayrd talks with Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Cheatham today to discuss the upcoming year and her vision for the future.

Wisconsin Task force for urban education schedules first public hearing

Annysa Johnson:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ special Task Force on Urban Education will hold the first in a series of public hearings — this one on teacher recruitment, retention and training — at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the State Capitol, Room 412.

The panel will take testimony from the public after hearing from invited individuals and organizations. They include Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District; University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross; the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Teach for America; the Leadership for Educational Equity; and Pablo Muirhead, coordinator of teacher education for Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Vos created the task force in August to address numerous issues affecting urban schools, including retention and training, poor academic performance among some students and low graduation rates. Public school advocates have criticized the panel, saying it is dominated by Republicans with little or no experience with urban schools and, in some cases, have received significant campaign contributions from voucher- and charter-school proponents.

Task force Chairman, Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Franklin), who worked previously for Hispanics for School Choice, said those concerns had not come up in her discussions with educators and lawmakers.

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

Civics: How the American government is trying to control what you think

John Maxwell Hamilton and Kevin Kosar:

NASA tweeting that Congress should give it more money so our astronauts won’t have to ride on Russian rockets. Recovery.gov reporting overly optimistic statistics on jobs saved and created by stimulus funds. The Department of Health and Human Service Web site encouraging the public to “state your support for health care reform” during the congressional debate over Obamacare.

These are just some recent examples of the executive branch using our tax dollars to shape our opinions. Unlike the National Security Agency’s personal data collection or the overuse of “secret” stamps to withhold information, this government-produced propaganda receives almost no attention. But that doesn’t mean this “third dimension” of government information is not a problem. America becomes less democratic when the $3 trillion executive branch uses its resources to tilt the debate in its favor.

The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From Dianne Feinstein and her Military-Contractor Husband

Glenn Greenwald:

There is no shortage of American pundits who love to denounce “PC” speech codes which restrict and punish the expression of certain ideas on college campuses. What these self-styled campus-free-speech crusaders typically – and quite tellingly – fail to mention is that the most potent such campaigns are often devoted to outlawing or otherwise punishing criticisms of Israel. The firing by the University of Illinois of Professor Stephen Salatia for his “uncivil” denunciations of the Israeli war on Gaza – a termination that was privately condoned by Illinois’ Democratic Senator Dick Durbin – is merely illustrative of this long–growing trend.

One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the sprawling collection of 10 campuses which includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The University’s governing Board of Regents, with the support of University President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the State’s legislature, has been attempting to adopt new speech codes that – in the name of combating “anti-Semitism” – would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism and anti-Israel activism.

Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

Peter Gray:

A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services to join other faculty and administrators, at the university I’m associated with, for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.

Maths whizz solves a master’s riddle

Chris Cesare:

A mathematical puzzle that resisted solution for 80 years — including computerized attempts to crack it — seems to have yielded to a single mathematician.

Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a winner of the Fields Medal in 2006, submitted a paper1 to the arXiv preprint server on 17 September that claims to prove a number theory conjecture posed by mathematician Paul Erdős in the 1930s.

“Terry Tao just dropped a bomb,” tweeted Derrick Stolee, a mathematician at Iowa State University in Ames, the day the paper detailing the solution appeared online.

Khan Academy in your pocket — new apps available for iPhone and now Android!

blog:

“A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” This mission inspires us day in, day out, and we’ve seen over 30M students sign up on Khan Academy to learn almost anything for free. We know you love using Khan Academy more and more on your phones: in fact, over 30% of our sessions are now on mobile devices. We believe strongly that unlocking the potential for anyone, anywhere to learn on 2B+ smartphones worldwide is just getting started. Today, we’re excited to announce a couple steps toward a better Khan Academy in your pocket!

Khan Academy on Android and iPhones

Zimmer accuses Broad charter plan of strategy to ‘bring down’ LAUSD

Michael Janofsky:

It appears show how the organizations involved would be creating the equivalent of a parallel school district, one with a defined goal of serving half the number of students attending LA Unified schools within eight years.

The “Great Public Schools Now Initiative” says the expansion would cost nearly half a billion dollars by 2023, through 260 new charter schools to serve an additional 130,000 students “most in need — low-income students of color.” Currently, about 151,000 students now attend charters in LA Unified, which has more charter schools, 264, than any school district in the country.

The 54-page report, dated “June 2015,” omits the names of authors or sponsoring organizations. But Eli Broad’s name appears at the end of a cover letter accompanying the report that makes a case for charter schools as “the greatest hope for students in L.A.” And alluding to the number of students on waiting lists to get into existing charters, now about 42,000, the need for more charters, he says, is urgent.

Quebec gave all parents cheap day care — and their kids were worse off as a result

Matthew Yglesias:

Programs for young children — whether you call them day care or preschool or even third grade — serve two purposes. On the one hand, they are educational settings that are supposed to help foster the kids’ long-term development. On the other hand, they are safe places where parents can put their children so they can go do other things during the day — things like work for a living. In an ideal world, of course, they do both. The best preschool programs have been shown to have significant lifelong benefits for their students, and they’re doubtless a huge help to parents too. But a sobering new analysis by Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber (yes, that Jonathan Gruber), and Kevin Milligan of Quebec’s effort to expand access to child care on the cheap is a painful reminder that the two issues can come apart.

The typical male U.S. worker earned less in 2014 than in 1973

David Wessel:

read that right: The median male worker who was employed year-round and full time earned less in 2014 than a similarly situated worker earned four decades ago. And those are the ones who had jobs.

This one fact, tucked in Table A-4 of the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, is both a symptom of an economy that isn’t delivering for many ordinary Americans and at least one reason for the dissatisfaction, anger, and distrust that voters are displaying in the 2016 presidential campaign.

What about women? Well, they haven’t closed the pay gap with men, but the inflation-adjusted earnings of the median female worker increased more than 30% between 1973 and 2014, to $39,621 from $30,182, according to census data.

But back to men. Why are wages for the typical male worker stagnating? After all, the U.S. economy has grown substantially since 1973. Output per person in the U.S. has nearly doubled since 1973, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And output per hour of work (minus depreciation) has increased nearly 2.5 times, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that produces reliable statistical analyses.

Meanwhile, local property taxes continue their annual growth.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: US Debt Bombs Bursting

William Edstrom:

The severity of this debt collapse around in the USA, coupled with the impotence of the US government, the emperor has no clothes, their inability to mount a rescue of the US economy – because Fed Funds interest rates have been at 0% since December 2008, and cannot be lowered, and because the US Treasury already printed $4.5 trillion out of thin air (QE1, QE2 & QE3); more money printing on that scale will lead to hyper-inflation which will cause the US dollar to become worthless – will accelerate the economic collapse of the USA and worse. An example of worse is an increased likelihood of states such as Texas seceding from the Union.

Vast cultural differences between US regions – like the Rockies, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast and West Coast – will be exacerbated during the USA’s economic collapse 2016-2021, which will increase the likelihood of states or even entire regions seceding from the overly-indebted economically collapsing USA. State defiance of national laws (e.g. marijuana laws) coupled with the far right movement (e.g. Tea Party, Libertarian Party) has set the stage for secession fever to catch fire against the capitol district, Washington DC.

Happily, the USA enjoys the ability to print money, at least until others no longer accept the great game. History is always useful.

An innovative form of cheating emerges in MOOCs

Andrew Ho:

What if Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aren’t actually courses at all?

Our research teams at Harvard and MIT have shown over and over again that MOOC students look and act nothing like conventional students of either residential universities or online programs.

With a broader age distribution, a more diverse and international student body, wide variation in commitment, and a surprising number of teachers, the MOOC “classroom” looks like no physical classroom on earth.

Now, I and my colleagues, Curtis Northcutt and Ike Chuang of MIT, have discovered a different novel behavior on the MOOC frontier: a new form of cheating, that only MOOCs can enable.

Why Is College So Expensive if Professors Are Paid So Little?

Michelle Chen:

Faculty activists acknowledge the consumer concerns about higher education’s value today, including poor completion rates, but link these to a cycle of underinvestment on the teaching side: The “churning of the faculty workforce…low salaries and over-reliance on part-time appointments” erode the quality and attentiveness of instruction, with long-term impacts on public institutions that have historically served the most challenged populations—the poor, people of color and first-generation college students. And as disinvestment and declining academic outcomes deepen, the overall institutional integrity of higher- education systems erodes.

One example is the California State University system: Between 2004 and 2013, the number of faculty teaching full-time or the equivalent ticked up 8 percent, but the population of full-time-equivalent students simultaneously jumped by 20 percent. SEIU’s adjunct-organizing project estimates that as of 2013, “22 percent of part-time faculty live below the poverty line,” significantly higher than the overall poverty rate nationwide.

K-12 tax & spending climate: higher healthcare deductibles take toll on family incomes,

Guy Boulton:

The average premium for single coverage is $6,251 this year, with workers on average paying $1,071 of the cost. The average premium for family coverage is $17,545, with workers on average paying $4,955 of the cost.

Premiums have increased an average of 5% a year since 2005, compared with 11% a year between 1999 and 2005, according to the survey by Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research organization, and the Health Research & Educational Trust, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association.

However, premiums still have increased at a much faster pace than inflation and wages.

The relatively modest increase in premiums over the past decade also stems partly from an increase in deductibles for most health plans.

The annual survey found that 81% of workers who have health benefits this year are in plans with a deductible, compared with 55% in 2006.

Udacity Expands Services And Announces Scholarships In India

Cat Zakrrzewski:

Online computer programming educator Udacity announced on Monday it would expand on the ground in India, the country where the service is growing the fastest.

Udacity’s free and nanodegree services are available worldwide, but with Monday’s announcement, the company will begin accepting rupees for the service and expanding its staff in the country. Nanodegrees are credentials recognized by many companies, such as Google and Salesforce.

Courses will cost 9,800 rupees a month, which is about $50 less than the price in the United States of $200 per month.

“Udacity’s mission is to democratize education, and India is one of the world’s fastest growing economies,” said Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun in an interview with TechCrunch.

Google and Tata Trust will each offer 500 full Android nanodegree scholarships to students in India. Google will also host a job fair in India for standout nanodegree graduates and potential employers next year. Udacity said it is seeking to increase partnerships with more companies based in India.

The future of programmers

Zoltan Toth-Czifra:

The programmer is a species destined for extinction.

As I watched this excellent video from CGP Grey arguing that in the near future most jobs will be done by machines, I felt a little relieved. Many professions, from truck drivers to doctors, will disappear or change dramatically in the very near future, creating a whole new generation of Neo-Luddites. However, as it seems, future computer programs will spare their creators: programmers. After all, to create self-driving cars, medical diagnostic systems, butcher robots you need programmers, right?

Facebook’s Restrictions on User Data Cast a Long Shadow

DEEPA SEETHARAMAN and ELIZABETH DWOSKIN:

few months ago, social psychologist Benjamin Crosier was building an app to look for links between social-media activity and ills like drug addiction.

Then, he was stopped in his tracks after Facebook Inc. limited outsiders’ access to information about its roughly 1.5 billion users. Dr. Crosier, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College, is petitioning the company to get some of that data back.

His experience highlights how Facebook’s restrictions on its user data, which were announced last year and put into effect in May, are rippling through academia, business and presidential politics.

Dozens of startups that had been using Facebook data have shut down, been acquired or overhauled their businesses. Political consultants are racing to find new ways to tap voters’ social connections ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

“Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away,” said Nick Soman, who collected the locations of Facebook users’ friends to enhance his anonymous-chat app, Reveal. He later sold the app to music service Rhapsody International Inc. Mr. Soman said he admires Facebook, but learned a lesson about relying on third parties for a key component of his app.

Unsolved problems with the common core

Lior Pachter:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was intended to establish standards for the curriculum for K–12 students in order to universally elevate the the quality of education in the United States. Whether the initiative has succeeded, or not, is a matter of heated debate. In particular, the merits of the mathematics standards are a contentious matter to the extent that colleagues in my math department at UC Berkeley have penned opposing opinions on the pages of the Wall Street Journal (see Frenkel and Wu vs. Ratner). In this post I won’t opine on the merits of the standards, but rather wish to highlight a shortcoming in the almost universal perspective on education that the common core embodies:

The emphasis on what K–12 students ought to learn about what is known has sidelined an important discussion about what they should learn about what is not known.

Why is China Talking ‘Democracy’ and ‘Freedom’ in Schools?

Wall Street Journal:

Plastered on city walls and billboards in Chinese cities these days are posters depicting the words “Democracy” and “Freedom.”

Not from a dissident underground, the posters are part of a government campaign. Through billboards, rhymes, pop quizzes and newly penned songs, the effort aims to promote what the ruling Communist Party calls “core socialist values.” A dozen in all, the values include rule of law, patriotism, honesty and justice as well as democracy and freedom. Schools in particular are a focus of the push.

While it might seem incongruous for a government that recently detained scores of human rights lawyers and ranks 6.5 for freedom on the 7-point human rights index (7 is the worst) maintained by the nonprofit Freedom House, the campaign is part of a broader quest to diminish the attraction of Western values and revitalize party ideology by melding traditional Chinese culture with communist principles.

“No evidence’ that success at university is linked to achievement in professional assessments, accountancy firm Says”

Chris Havergal:

One of the UK’s biggest graduate recruiters is to remove degree classification from the entry criteria for its hiring programmes, having found “no evidence” that success at university was correlated with achievement in professional qualifications.

Accountancy firm Ernst and Young, known as EY, will no longer require students to have a 2:1 degree and the equivalent of three B grades at A level to be considered for its graduate programmes.

Instead, the company will use numerical tests and online “strength” assessments to assess the potential of applicants.

Maggie Stilwell, EY’s managing partner for talent, said the changes would “open up opportunities for talented individuals regardless of their background and provide greater access to the profession”.

“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door, she said. “Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment.

On American History

Joel Kotkin:

In contrast to the physical sciences, and even other social sciences, the study of history is, by nature, subjective. There is no real mathematical formula to assess the past. It is more an art, or artifice, than a science.

Yet how we present and think of the past can shape our future as much as the statistics-laden studies of economists and other social scientists. Throughout recorded time, historians have reflected on the past to show the way to the future and suggest those values that we should embrace or, at other times, reject.

Today we are going through, at both the college and high school levels, a major, largely negative, reassessment of the American past. In some ways, this suggests parallels to the strategy of the Bolsheviks about whom Serge wrote. Under the communists, particularly in the Stalinist epoch, the past was twisted into a tale suited to the needs of the state and socialist ideology. This extended even to Bolshevik history, as Josef Stalin literally airbrushed his most hated rivals – notably Leon Trotsky, founder and people’s commissar of the Red Army – into historical oblivion.

The Secret of Good Humanities Teaching

Julius Taranto and Kevin J.H. Dettmar

This past May, when a former student was back at Pomona College to see his sister graduate, he (Julius) and I (Kevin) managed to steal away amid all the commencement festivities for a bit of Scotch in my living room. There, unbidden and (he claims) accidentally, he explained what I’ve since come to think of as the hidden structure of effective humanities teaching.

He said that his best professors “took texts that seemed complicated, made them look simple, and then made them complex again.”

Something in that formulation rang true for me — this was what humanities teachers should do. In trying to explain it later to my wife, however, I felt like the idea was slipping away. (I blame the Scotch.) So I reverted to my role as professor and wrote Julius asking him to put the idea in writing — to clarify, please. What follows is our joint attempt at a more thorough explanation.

Wisconsin DPI “Rule Making” vs. Legislation in the Courts..

Molly Beck:

The conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a court filing this week asked the state Supreme Court to reverse an appeals court decision that upheld Evers’ rule-making authority related to education.

The brief was filed on behalf of the state’s largest business lobbying group Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, School Choice Wisconsin, former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and former Democratic Assembly member Jason Fields.

Department of Public Instruction spokesman John Johnson said every rule DPI makes faces legislative review and approval no matter what happens in this case.

“There’s really no impact on the legislature’s ability to do education reforms,” he said. Johnson also noted that the Legislature could act to remove a state law that allows school districts to adopt their own academic standards.

The Wisconsin DPI spent many millions on the oft criticized WKCE

College Degrees or College Education?

Johann Neem:

The much-awaited, much-debated Obama College Scorecard has just been released. Some reports have described it as a retreat by the administration, with President Obama caving to pressure from a chorus of college and university leaders. But if the failure to include a numerical ranking of the evaluated schools is a compromise, it is an insignificant one. Close examination shows that the Scorecard effectively supports the administration’s broader effort to redefine the purpose of higher education as the preparation of young Americans for high-paying jobs. The real question, of course, is whether we should be happy about this administration victory.

To be sure, the Scorecard provides Americans with some useful information on schools’ average annual costs, graduation rates, and graduates’ incomes. For example, despite posted tuitions, many private universities and colleges offer significant discounts and financial aid, making them much more affordable than their sticker price would suggest. Revealing this fact may inspire more applicants to consider schools that they thought were out of reach. It may even inspire more schools to devote resources to financial aid.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Life’s Most Important Dramas Are Being Disrupted

Charles Hugh Mith:

The End of Secure Work and the diminishing returns of financialization are disrupting these core human dramas and frustrating those who are unable to proceed to the next stage of life:

1. Teenagers are being pressured to focus their lives on achieving a conventional financial success that is becoming harder to achieve.

2. Young adults without secure full-time careers cannot afford marriage or children, so they extend the self-absorption of late adolescence into middle age.

3. The middle-aged are finding financial security elusive or out of reach as they struggle to fund their young adult children, aging parents and their own retirement.

4. Increasing longevity is pressuring the late-middle-aged’s stage of fulfillment, as elderly parents may require care even as their children reach their own retirement (65-70).

Reading Faster

Hacker News:

I’ve always been bothered by reading. I love reading, but I’m never proud of how much book I’ve read.
One problem is with reading speed. If average reading speed is 250wpm, then a average book of 200,000 words would take more than 10 hours, and you have to take into account the opportunity cost and the time for breaks between concentrations, and if the book is less interesting but is mandatory for you OR it requires more careful reading(i.e. College textbook), it would take more time.

Another problem is with how much you can remember after a while. I have a pretty bad memory, I often forget almost all of the stuff I read from a book as time goes. Which means that it’s a waste of time to even read it. This year I’m trying to take notes and write summary after I read a book. But that doesn’t help you to read faster.

How to read more? Can I increase my reading speed somehow? Or is there better ways to grasp the idea of the book faster? Is there a way to train your reading speed?

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Milwaukee: Still riding along in Madison’s wake

Tom Hefty:

The Twin Cities of Wisconsin are Madison, metro population 633,000, and Milwaukee, metro population 1.57 million. Both cities are dominated by Democratic politics, yet the economies of the two cities have taken decidedly different paths.

Madison is prospering; Milwaukee is not.

Madison has a median family income of $77,700; Milwaukee’s is $40,800. Fifty-three percent of Madison’s population has a bachelor’s degree or higher; it’s 22% in Milwaukee.

In the past 30 years, metro Madison grew 45%; metro Milwaukee grew just 11%.

What caused the difference in outcomes for two cities separated by only 75 miles? The answer lies in Wisconsin politics, particularly the politics of the Democratic Party. The post-World War II Democratic Party revival in Wisconsin was led by Democrats in Madison, not Milwaukee.

Madison was the seat of government; Milwaukee was the commercial capital of Wisconsin. Government won.

Three factors have driven overall growth: the impact of higher education and new technology; entrepreneurship and new businesses; and the expansion of government services since the Great Society and the Obama administration’s stimulus spending. For each factor, Madison won and Milwaukee lost.

More than 40 years ago, “The History of Wisconsin” noted that Milwaukee Democrats provided the votes to elect Madison Democrats to statewide office. Since World War II, five Democrats have been elected governor. None was from Milwaukee. (Lt. Gov. Martin Schreiber, a Milwaukee Democrat, became governor in 1977 after Patrick Lucey resigned.)

The numbers tell the story: 2014 was a watershed year for Wisconsin’s Twin Cities. For the first time in history, the average wages in Madison’s Dane County exceeded the average wages in Milwaukee County.

Let’s look at the three factors that drove the two cities apart.

Embracing Participatory Culture in Education

alexeya:

GitHub is on the brink of growing from a platform for software projects, and into a mainstream collaboration platform for other domains as well. An unexpected area where GitHub’s collaborative workflow holds the potential to bring groundbreaking changes is education and learning. In fact, educators have already begun to use GitHub to support teaching and learning. In some cases using it to replace certain aspects of the traditional learning management systems (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle), while in other cases gaining new benefits and capabilities.

Open data on campus

campus data:

Welcome to the Campus Data Guidebook!

We hope this can help you start your campus data project. This is a living document created by students from a variety of schools; we’d like to give you tips and share our stories. This book contains different experiences from various institutions, so we might not agree all the time, but we’re all striving towards the same goals. Figure out what works best for your school. As you work on campus data and overcome hurdles, send us a pull request to share your story. Help us fight for open data everywhere!

Average dissertation and thesis length, take two

R is my friend:

About a year ago I wrote a post describing average length of dissertations at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been meaning to expand that post by adding data from masters theses since the methods for gathering/parsing the records are transferable. This post provides some graphics and links to R code for evaluating dissertation (doctorate) and thesis (masters) data from an online database at the University of Minnesota. In addition to describing data from masters theses, I’ve collected the most recent data on dissertations to provide an update on my previous post. I’ve avoided presenting the R code for brevity, but I invite interested readers to have a look at my Github repository where all source code and data are stored. Also, please, please, please note that I’ve since tried to explain that dissertation length is a pretty pointless metric of quality (also noted here), so interpret the data only in the context that they’re potentially descriptive of the nature of each major.

A Message from MTI President Andrew Waity

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

The only guarantees in life are death, taxes and MTI’s powerful advocacy for Union members, public schools and education. That amended saying is one that holds true as much now as it ever has. We know that we are facing a year filled with many challenges, but with all the change comes the potential for MTI to emerge even stronger and more united. Challenges include another recertification election, and a Handbook to become effective next July.

Even after the passage of Act 10, which was designed to kill union representation, MTI is still here and still strong. MTI staff and elected leadership will continue to provide the high level of service and strong advocacy for Union members that it has provided over the last 50 years.

MTI and other public sector unions continue to face political and economic attacks designed to destroy us and public education. These attacks have been crafted by those interested in expanding their own political, social and economic power. MTI has resisted these attacks and continues to thrive. The success of our ongoing efforts rests on each of us. Each of us are the “I” in MTI. As we begin the new school year, MTI staff and leadership will continue to assist and support all members. We look forward to working with you to strengthen and build MTI for the future.

ELL Case Management in Oasys What You Need to Know

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

The process for establishing an Individual Plan of Service (IPS) for ELL Students is being converted to a more formalized online documentation system in Oasys for the 2015-16 school year. This will help bring the District into compliance with state and federal laws. Developing an IPS includes surveying parents and delivering a language assessment for all new students. The burden for completing these plans falls on ELL Case Managers who are typically BRT or ESL teachers. The deadline for completing these Individual Plans of Service (IPS) for all ELL students is October 16, 2015. Given the tight deadline and the significant workload increase, the Office of Multilingual and Global Education (OMGE) is offering additional support as follows:

Renew Your Commitment to MTI: Recertification Elections Again this Fall

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

The anti-union legislation passed in 2011 at Governor Walker’s request requires public sector unions to undergo an annual recertification election for the union to maintain its status as the representative of all workers covered by the union. MTI has again filed petitions with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) calling upon them to conduct the election for each of MTI’s five bargaining units (teachers, educational assistants, supportive educational employees, security assistants, and substitute teachers). The elections will be conducted November 4-24, 2015.

Unlike political elections that require the prevailing candidate win only the majority of votes cast, Act 10 requires public sector unions to win 51% of all eligible votes – in each unit – for the Union to remain the certified representative. If a person represented by MTI does not vote, it is considered a “no” vote. Last year, MTI employees in each of the five bargaining units voted overwhelmingly to recertify. Now, we have to do it again. Over the summer, MTI staff, elected leaders, and member organizers began developing this year’s election plans. Additional information will be distributed as this important election approaches. It is time once again to roll up our sleeves, reach out to each other, and renew our commitment to “Our Union”, MTI.

Educator Effectiveness Evaluation System

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

Educator Effectiveness is the new educator evaluation tool required of all teachers and principals throughout Wisconsin. This new system is a new culture for MTI members: it utilizes a new language (SLO, PPG, artifacts); a new set of values (students’ academic achievement is a part of the process); and a new calendar (it’s a year-long process). And all teachers, whether or not they are being formally evaluated in a given year, will be involved in parts of the process.

Educator Effectiveness has two main parts. It balances educator practice (using the Charlotte Danielson model) with student performance outcomes. Each year, all teachers are to develop a Professional Practice Goal (PPG) and a Student Learning Objective (SLO) which must be documented in the Teachscape Software module. One aligns their PPG with an area within the Danielson model framework that the teacher wishes to develop or focus upon. It could have to do with planning, instruction, assessment, or any professional responsibility (for example: communication or collaboration). One’s SLO focuses on developing content area skills for a particular group of students you are working with. Both the PPG and SLO must be completed by October (date uncertain). The District’s website has resources relating to Educator Effectiveness https://staffdevweb.madison.k12.wi.us/educatoreffectiveness.

Commentary on tenure change survey

Nico Savage:

University of Wisconsin faculty are raising concerns about a survey they received Tuesday that many said posed leading questions about changes to tenure and did not make clear it was funded by a conservative think tank.

The survey was the work of professor William Howell, who studies politics at the University of Chicago. It asked faculty a series of questions gauging how they would feel about replacing tenure with renewable contracts, and was sent to every professor in the UW System.

Since the survey went out, Secretary of the Faculty Steven Smith said he has heard from about 100 professors, each of whom expressed concerns about it.

The decline of the French intellectual

Sudhir Hazareesigh

One of the most characteristic inventions of modern French culture is the “intellectual.”

Intellectuals in France are not just experts in their particular fields, such as literature, art, philosophy and history. They also speak in universal terms, and are expected to provide moral guidance about general social and political issues. Indeed, the most eminent French intellectuals are almost sacred figures, who became global symbols of the causes they championed — thus Voltaire’s powerful denunciation of religious intolerance, Rousseau’s rousing defense of republican freedom, Victor Hugo’s eloquent tirade against Napoleonic despotism, Émile Zola’s passionate plea for justice during the Dreyfus Affair, and Simone de Beauvoir’s bold advocacy of women’s emancipation.

Above all, intellectuals have provided the French with a comforting sense of national pride. As the progressive thinker Edgar Quinet put it, with a big dollop of Gallic self-satisfaction: “France’s vocation is to consume herself for the glory of the world, for others as much as for herself, for an ideal which is yet to be attained of humanity and world civilization.”

Georgia opens first prison charter school

Greg Bluestein:

About 250 educators, administrators and other staffers have been hired to teach prisoners. Nearly 100 inmates have signed up for charter school courses. And 19 high school diplomas have already been awarded in a pilot program.

But the evolving program is about to face its biggest test. The first of what Gov. Nathan Deal envisions to be a statewide network of prison-based charter schools officially opened Thursday at the Burruss Correctional Training Center in Middle Georgia, and state policymakers and education analysts will carefully chart its progress.

Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent

John Markoff:

The achievement, in which the program answered math questions it had not previously seen, was reported in a paper presented by computer scientists from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington at a scientific conference in Lisbon on Sunday.

The software had to combine machine vision to understand diagrams with the ability to read and understand complete sentences; its success represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

The lowest taxed school districts in New Jersey

New Jersey Education Aid:

The following fifty districts have the lowest Local Tax Levies relative to their Local Fair Share.

As you can see, most of these districts are at the Shore. Thirty of the fifty are in Cape May, Atlantic, Ocean, or Monmouth Counties. These districts have very few students and large property valuations, hence no need to tax their residents very highly.

It isn’t something that gets a lot of attention, but Jersey Shore microdistricts districts are among the worst aid hoarders in New Jersey. In some cases they get tens of thousands of dollars per student when they need virtually nothing. Allenhurst, for instance, has four students and yet gets $47,475 in state aid! Allenhurst’s school tax rate is 0.0060! Cape May Point also has four students and yet gets $26,803. Cape May Point’s school tax rate is 0.0082.

The kids of today’s working class have it worse in so many ways that climbing the socioeconomic ladder has become dauntingly difficult.

Charles Murray:

Race is not a big deal in “Our Kids.” The voices include many whites along with Latinos and blacks, and the problems are similar across ethnicities. Nor do the Latinos and blacks treat discrimination as a decisive factor in their problems. Sometimes they explicitly discount the importance of discrimination.

Such observations are heartening, and they correspond to my own experience living in a part of rural Maryland with a Southern heritage and a significant black presence: race is not the angst-ridden issue in working-class America that you would assume if you based your expectations on the highly publicized problems in Ferguson or Baltimore. The same observations are disheartening insofar as “Our Kids” drives home how widely the problems it describes have spread throughout the working class. We’ve got a national affliction on our hands, not pockets of affliction.

California’s Upward-Mobility Machine

David Leonhardt:

Among the most notable patterns from this year’s College Access Index:

Economic diversity has stagnated. The median share of first-year students receiving Pell grants at these colleges was 17 percent last year. That was up marginally from 16 percent the previous academic year, but unchanged from 17 percent the prior two years.

This stagnation means that many elite colleges remain overwhelmingly well-off. For every student from the entire bottom half of the nation’s income distribution at Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Yale and more than a few other colleges, there appear to be roughly two students from just the top 5 percent (which means they come from families making at least $200,000).

How education lobbyists are schooling D.C. lawmakers

:

Among the biggest spenders on lobbying are the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, the two teachers’ unions.

The NEA spent $1.2 million during the first six months of 2015, second only among public employee unions to the $1.3 million lobbying bill paid by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group. AFT ranked fourth with $668,068.

Related: WEAC: $1,570,000 for four senators.

Commentary On Wisconsin’s State School Superintendent

Alan Borsuk:

Being superintendent was a pretty low profile matter for much of the last 166 years, but no more.

Here are three reasons why:

Vouchers: DPI oversees administration of the private school voucher program. Evers and his two predecessors were big advocates of the conventional public school system.

Voucher advocates generally regard all of them and the DPI as a whole as foes.

Common Core: In 2010, Evers signed up Wisconsin to be part of the Common Core effort to create consistent standards across the nation for what children should learn.

Didn’t seem like such a big deal then. Now, of course, it’s highly unpopular, especially among Republicans.

State tests: Evers signed Wisconsin up to be part of a multistate consortium developing tests aligned to the Common Core.

The resulting test had its first full run last spring. There were big problems with the launch and the Legislature killed that test. New tests are coming, but controversies over testing remain.

Every College Should Issue a Transparency Report About Government Requests for Student Data

April Glaser:

The University of California–Berkeley has become the first university in the United States to publish a set of transparency reports that detail government requests for student, faculty, and staff data.

In the tech world, transparency reporting has become an industry standard. After Snowden leaked the names of companies assisting with government surveillance in 2013, businesses eager to earn back public trust began a race to let users know as much as possible about how their personal information is handled. When companies release a transparency report, it’s always voluntary. In fact, the law actually limits what companies are allowed to disclose via a mix of gag orders and other burdensome restrictions.

Colleges aren’t exactly tech companies—but they aren’t so different, either. Like many higher-ed institutions, UC–Berkeley essentially functions like an Internet service provider unto itself. It has more than 37,000 students, 77,000 active university email accounts, and the potential for upward of 100,000 devices connected to the network at any one time. Unsurprisingly, the school occasionally fields requests from law enforcement for data.

A dangerous myth about who eats fast food is completely false

Roberto Ferdman:

But there’s a problem with saying that poor people like fast food better than others. It’s not true.

New data, released by the Centers for Disease Control, show that America’s love for fast food is surprisingly income blind. Well-off kids, poor kids, and all those in between tend to get about the same percentage of their calories from fast food, according to a survey of more than 5,000 people. More precisely, though, it’s the poorest kids that tend to get the smallest share of their daily energy intake from Big Macs, Whoppers, Chicken McNuggets, and french fries.

Do Angry Birds Make for Angry Children? A Meta-Analysis of Video Game Influences on Children’s and Adolescents’ Aggression, Mental Health, Prosocial Behavior, and Academic Performance

Christopher Ferguson:

The issue of whether video games—violent or nonviolent—“harm” children and adolescents continues to be hotly contested in the scientific community, among politicians, and in the general public. To date, researchers have focused on college student samples in most studies on video games, often with poorly standardized outcome measures. To answer questions about harm to minors, these studies are arguably not very illuminating. In the current analysis, I sought to address this gap by focusing on studies of video game influences on child and adolescent samples. The effects of overall video game use and exposure to violent video games specifically were considered, although this was not an analysis of pathological game use. Overall, results from 101 studies suggest that video game influences on increased aggression (r = .06), reduced prosocial behavior (r = .04), reduced academic performance (r = −.01), depressive symptoms (r = .04), and attention deficit symptoms (r = .03) are minimal. Issues related to researchers’ degrees of freedom and citation bias also continue to be common problems for the field. Publication bias remains a problem for studies of aggression. Recommendations are given on how research may be improved and how the psychological community should address video games from a public health perspective.

When not to enroll: U. of Louisville’s admissions chief gives straight talk

Nick Anderson

some of these cases, Sawyer said she wonders: “Why pay to be at a four-year institution?” Sometimes she will advise prospective freshmen to enroll elsewhere — especially at a low-priced community college — if the initial burden is too high. “You should not be going here,” she will tell some cash-strapped students. “This is a bad financial decision.”

That doesn’t mean giving up on a university diploma. “There are many ways to become a University of Louisville graduate,” she said, “and they don’t all begin with starting here.”

Sawyer spoke with The Washington Post as she was waiting to greet Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who stopped in Louisville Thursday to tour the campus and speak with college-bound students. Duncan was on a seven-state back-to-school bus tour that wraps up Friday in Pittsburgh.

Civics: 75% in U.S. See Widespread Government Corruption (contemplate Government Schools)

Gallup:

These figures are higher than some might expect, and while the lack of improvement is somewhat disconcerting, the positive takeaway is that Americans still feel fairly free to criticize their government. This is not the case in some parts of the world. Questions about corruption are so sensitive in some countries that even if Gallup is allowed to ask them, the results may reflect residents’ reluctance to disparage their government. This is particularly true in countries where media freedom is restricted.

This is why it is most appropriate to look at perceptions of corruption through such lenses as the Freedom House’s Press Freedom rankings. Ratings vary among countries with a “free press,” including the U.S., and range from a high of 90% in Lithuania to a low of 14% in Sweden. The U.S. does not make the top 10 list, but notably, it is not far from it.