BBC:

All the times we’ve predicted, wrongly, how technology will change our lives.

Matthew Hansen:

Roy Jones says he got no training on how to handle issues that might inflame the Chinese government. “My job isn’t to decide whether Tibet is a country. I’m a customer care rep in Omaha, Nebraska,” he said.

Emily Richmond:

School choice is one of the most contentious issues in K-12 education today. But it’s hardly an American invention. Sarah Butrymowicz of The Hechinger Report recently traveled to New Zealand, Sweden, and France to look at how school choice plays out, and whether there are lessons for the U.S. system. Why is New Zealand considered a “school choice utopia,” and how is its open enrollment policy driving programming and competition among local campuses? Sweden’s “free schools” are similar to what U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has said she envisions in a voucher program — but is that contributing to the Scandinavian country’s steady slide on international assessments? And in France, a longstanding reliance on funneling public dollars to private schools offers insights into the challenge of providing equitable education to less-affluent families. Butrymowicz, an EWA Reporting Fellow, discusses the research on school choice programs abroad, as well as tips and questions for covering the issue stateside.

Lindsay Whitehurst:

So-called free-range parenting will soon be the law of the land in Utah after the governor signed what appears to be the country’s first measure to formally legalize allowing kids to do things on their own to foster self-sufficiency.

The bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert announced Friday that he’d signed, specifies that it isn’t neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car. The law takes effect May 8.

Utah’s law is the first in the country, said Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term free-range parent. A records search by the National Conference of State Legislatures didn’t turn up any similar legislation in other states.

Utah lawmakers said they were prompted to pass the law after seeing other states where parents had been investigated and in some cases had their children temporarily removed when people reported seeing kids p

Andy Devine:

A group of Milwaukee Public School students marched into Thursday night’s school board meeting demanding racial equity.

These students want to call attention to a report from the Department of Education that revealed racial disparities when it comes to discipline at Milwaukee public schools.

MPS junior Joya Headley led the march at the MPS administration building and says she’s witnessed what she calls discriminatory discipline first hand within MPS schools.

“I have seen many students get suspended for minor offenses like talking back or even security guards called to the classroom because a teacher can’t handle a situation in the classroom,” Headley said.

Karen D’Souza:

California dreamin’? Flying in the face of traditional wisdom that we live on the best coast comes a stinging new U.S. News & World Report study that says we have the worst quality of life in the nation.

The coveted Best States ranking is part of an annual study that scores all 50 states on eight categories — health care, education, economy, opportunity, infrastructure, crime and corrections, fiscal stability and the most important of all for most of us, quality of life.

Sadly, Californians are in the pits by this life-quality metric, with the Golden State taking last place at No. 50. North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and South Dakota all kicked our butt in that category, according to this study.

Kashmir Hill:

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mars, you’ve likely heard about a little scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica got its hands on millions of people’s Facebook likes in 2014 by getting an academic, Aleksander Kogan, to design an app with a personality test that hoovered up data from the 250,000 or so Facebook users that took it, as well as from their millions of friends. Cambridge Analytica supposedly used all those likes combined with the magic of big data to put Donald Trump in the White House.

Now that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced in response to this a plan to “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014,” it’s a good time to look more closely at the project that inspired Kogan and Cambridge Analytica. This whole thing wasn’t their idea, after all; they copied it from the University of Cambridge, where Kogan had been a lecturer. The U.K. university’s psychometrics department had its own personality test which had been hoovering up Facebook users’ data since 2007, but, as the New York Times reported, and Kogan recently confirmed in an email, it refused to sell the dataset to the entity that became Cambridge Analytica (inspiring them to replicate the experiment).

Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin:

In a little-noticed paper issued in 2006 by the London office of one of the company’s consulting arms, executives praised boomers’ experience, but described them as “gray hairs” and “old heads.” While recognizing that older workers were important to high-tech employers such as IBM, it concluded that “successor generations … are generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
The paper was subsequently cited in an age discrimination lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania. Before the complaint was settled last year, the plaintiffs alleged in a filing: “IBM’s Boomer employees — being labeled by IBM’s own research as uncollaborative, skeptical of leadership, technologically unsophisticated, less innovative and generally out of touch with IBM’s brand, customers and objectives — were shown the door in droves.”
By the time IBM’s current CEO, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, took over in 2012, the company had shifted its personnel focus to millennials.
Rometty launched a major overhaul that aimed to make IBM a major player in the emerging technologies of cloud services, big data analytics, mobile, security and social media, or what came to be known inside as CAMS.
At the same time, she sought to sharply increase hiring of people born after 1980.

OSEP Ideas that Work:

Welcome to the 2018 OSEP Symposia Series. This year, we are discussing the importance of individualized education programs (IEPs) and the important role that high-quality IEPs play in ensuring that each child with a disability can be successful. The three symposia are interconnected. First, we will lay the policy and research foundation to establish a common understanding and set of principles. Then, we will explore what high-quality IEPs mean in practice. Specifically, we will delve into what teachers and leaders need to develop and implement high-quality IEPs, and how we can support these needs. Finally, we will learn about how education agencies, families, and other stakeholders are working together to develop and implement high-quality IEPs.

The first symposium, scheduled for April 9, 2018, is titled High Expectations and Appropriate Supports: The Importance of IEPs. During this presentation you will hear from experts, including current OSEP grantees, on what we know about:

Karen Rivedal:

A tendency by staff to let the small stuff slide — perhaps due to fears of appearing racist — is only contributing to bigger disciplinary problems down the line in Madison public high schools, Superintendent Jen Cheatham said.

As the Madison School District grapples with a rise in suspensions, fights and classroom disruption that officials say is caused disproportionately by minority students, this “failure to warn,” she said, can be the first step on a slippery slope of escalating bad behavior that ultimately harms misbehaving students as much as anyone else.

“We’ve got this issue of students being able to kind of get away with some of the small things and then all of a sudden they escalate into things that will result in suspendable behaviors,” Cheatham said. “I hear everyone (citing concerns about) the bigger behaviors, the students who desperately need our intervention. But we also have to figure out how to address the smaller behaviors.”

Related:

Gangs and school violence forum.

Madison spends more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Terrence Jeffrey:

State and local governments collected a record $404,509,000,000 in individual income taxes in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. Before 2017, the greatest level of individual income tax revenues collected by state and local governments occurred in 2015, when those governments collected $399,933,270,000 in individual income taxes (in constant 2017 dollars converted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator).

Kevin Drum:

So what do the authors conclude?

The black-white gap is almost entirely among men. On a wide variety of measures—wages, college education, etc.—black and white women have similar levels of intergenerational mobility.

Among families with similar incomes, family characteristics such as marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap.

The same is true for differences in ability.

The gap is mostly environmental:

Boys who grow up in certain neighborhoods—those with low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias among whites, and high rates of father presence among low-income blacks—show much smaller gaps. Black boys who move to such areas at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrating that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in environment.

As a result of this research, the authors suggest that interventions aimed at improving the conditions of a single generation won’t be very effective. The same is true of policies that focus on reducing patterns of residential segregation. The key is achieving racial integration within neighborhoods:

Related: They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine, not!

Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Private schools and charter schools that educate more than a third of the city’s children are showing general stability and, in notable cases, growth, even as they are having increased problems dealing positively with MPS.

Both the charter schools (publicly funded but operating outside of the conventional MPS system) and the private schools that participate in the publicly-funded voucher program have issues to deal with. But their ships are sailing forward.

Elliot Harmon:

In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad Law

Today was a dark day for the Internet.

The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. As lobbyists and members of Congress applaud themselves for enacting a law tackling the problem of trafficking, let’s be clear: Congress just made trafficking victims less safe, not more.

The version of FOSTA that just passed the Senate combined an earlier version of FOSTA (what we call FOSTA 2.0) with the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693). The history of SESTA/FOSTA—a bad bill that turned into a worse bill and then was rushed through votes in both houses of Congress—is a story about Congress’ failure to see that its good intentions can result in bad law. It’s a story of Congress’ failure to listen to the constituents who’d be most affected by the laws it passed. It’s also the story of some players in the tech sector choosing to settle for compromises and half-wins that will put ordinary people in danger.

William Davies:

There is at least one certainty where Cambridge Analytica is concerned. If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.

The villains of the piece would no doubt agree with this assessment, but not for very plausible reasons. The exposé conducted by Channel 4 News, with the support of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered to Trump thanks to micro-targeted advertising and some especially persuasive messaging. ‘Our data informed all the strategy,’ Nix says, with the swagger of an estate agent reporting that demand for period features is red-hot right now.

Related: Obama, Facebook (& Google) and Trump.

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association is a big business, with market advantages that are the envy of other big businesses. It has a jurisdictional agreement with its only potential rival, the American Federation of Teachers, which keeps competition for members at a bare minimum. It is exempt from antitrust laws, and in 22 states can compel payments from customers who never asked for its services.

Oh, and almost all of its income is tax-exempt.

That tax exemption does come with obligations, one of which is to file an annual financial disclosure report with the Internal Revenue Service detailing its income and expenditures. According to those filings, NEA and its state affiliates collected a combined $1.6 billion in revenue during the 2015-16 school year, an $8.4 million increase over the previous year.

More money would normally be good news for the union, but it comes with more problems. As revenues have increased, NEA and its affiliates have promised its own employees more and better benefits. Now those future obligations are devouring an increasingly larger share of their current revenue.

Daniel Willingham:

I’m the father of a child who has a rare chromosomal disorder, trisomy-18. It affects about one in 5,000 births and leaves children with profound mental and physical disabilities. Life expectancy is harrowingly brief; some 90% of affected infants don’t see their first birthday.

There are many reasons why it’s important for people to know about this syndrome — to encourage more research, advance better policies for families coping with it, to “raise awareness.” But when I consider my daughter Esprit, I’m interested in a specific kind of awareness, the kind that helps people feel comfortable interacting with her. Medical details and statistics don’t put anyone at ease around a severely disabled child. But a parent’s perspective might.

Chances are, you and your children will encounter Esprit or a child who is similarly disabled at a store, or in a park. Your child will be struck by Esprit’s appearance. Typical for trisomy-18 kids, her head is small, her eyelids droop and her ears are low-set. Add the wheelchair and the braces on her feet and midsection, and you’ve got quite a sight. Older children pointedly refrain from staring (usually with a furtive peek or two), but younger children gape uninhibitedly. Embarrassed parents will try to distract their child, or drag him away, probably delivering a “don’t stare” lecture once out of sight. But you can’t blame a 4-year-old for staring at a child who looks different. His curiosity is natural.

Andrew Zimbalist:

The FBI has been investigating a subterranean recruiting scandal in college basketball for the past two years. The most successful teams in the country are in the agency’s cross hairs, and Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, is shocked that there is gambling in his establishment.

Mr. Emmert says that if the claims of underground recruiting networks and impermissible benefits to athletes are true, he will initiate systemic change. The NCAA is, he says, wedded to the principle of amateurism. Say what?

More than any other organization, the NCAA has confused and obfuscated the meaning of amateurism. In its early years, the NCAA, which was founded in 1906, averred that amateurism in college sports meant athletes could get no remuneration or material benefit from playing.

Amy Wax:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms – all the furor and clamor of institutional politics

Related: A ‘Dubious Expediency’: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students :

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors. If, as the evidence indicates, the effects of race-preferential admissions policies are exactly the opposite of what was originally intended, it is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to support them.

Cori O’Connor Petersen and Libby Sobic:

This is shocking and should send chills down the spines of state lawmakers in Madison. Republicans in Madison have worked tirelessly to roll back the administrative state. Yet, as DPI indicates, at least one state agency is finding a way to work around state law by relying on federal law. This raises significant federalism concerns.

If the education agency can get away with reporting to the federal government, what will prevent other agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources or the Department of Transportation from circumventing Wisconsin state law?

The Wisconsin agency also overstepped the rulemaking process in other ways. The guidelines for promulgating a rule require the agency to compare its rule to similar ones in its four neighboring states. Instead, DPI simply provided a paragraph explaining state requirements to comply with federal law.

A plain language analysis of what the rule-change means is another requirement. Presumably, this requirement is meant to provide curious legislators and voters with an understanding of the rule, and the tasks their tax dollars go to support. But in place of the analysis, DPI only provides a one-sentence explanation on the changes to the current administrative rule.

DPI is the agency responsible for overseeing K-12 education in Wisconsin. Everything from educator licensing to school lunches and programs such as English learners and school choice are in the agency’s wheelhouse. The agency holds vast responsibility and in a democratic government, responsibility must come with checks and balances, which the rule-making process is designed to ensure.

So why does DPI think it can exercise this authority? Perhaps it’s that DPI is directed by a state superintendent who is elected every four years in an off election year in the spring. And this has produced superintendents, such as Tony Evers, who has a track record of being hostile to education reform and the rule of law. All other agencies are led by governor-appointed officials. But a difference in agency leadership doesn’t excuse DPI from the rule-making process to which other agencies adhere very closely. Like other agencies, DPI is subject to laws passed by the state legislature.

Diane Ravitch:

He writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.

:

Michael C. Zwaagstra March 13, 2018

Walk into an elementary school classroom and you will probably see a lot of books on the shelf. Take a closer look and you will often find a coloured dot, a number, or a letter on each book’s spine. Those dots, numbers, and letters show the reading level of each book.

Books are assigned these levels so students choose books that will challenge them without being too difficult for them. Instead of having the entire class read the same book, students pick books from their designated reading levels. Levelled libraries make it possible for students to find the best books to read. At least that is the theory, but the reality may be somewhat different.

In order for students to read a text effectively they must be able to do two things—decode the individual words and comprehend the sentences and paragraphs. Too often we focus on how students decode words (the ongoing phonics vs. whole language debate), but in that debate we neglect the importance of reading comprehension. A student may be able to “read” every word on a page and yet not understand what the text actually means.

I used to be an elementary school teacher so I remember doing running records with my students to assess their reading levels. However, it didn’t take long before I noticed that my students performed much better on the comprehension questions after reading an article about a sports game than after reading an article about Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian medical doctor who went to China in the early twentieth century, even though both articles were officially at the same reading level. The question is “Why?”

The problem with reading levels is they focus on quantitative factors such as word complexity and sentence length but fail to account for the important connection between specific content knowledge and reading comprehension. A student may be able to decode every single word in an article about Dr. Norman Bethune, but still be clueless about the article’s meaning since they know virtually nothing about Communism, the Second Sino-Japanese War, or blood transfusions.

In contrast, most students will breeze through an article about a hockey game because they already know how the game works. They have no difficulty understanding phrases like “high-sticking,” “pulling the goalie,” and “killing a penalty.” However, imagine how hard it would be for someone who had never heard of ice hockey before to understand an article that used these phrases. Prior knowledge about this Canadian game is actually more important to reading comprehension than the length and complexity of the words and sentences in the article.

Thus, it is clear that reading levels by themselves do a very poor job of matching students with the proper books to read. In fact, that was the finding of a recent peer-reviewed research study that appeared in the April 2018 edition of Reading and Writing. In this study, James W. Cunningham, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, and Heidi Anne Mesmer examined two of the most widely used reading level classification systems, the Lexile Framework and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level Formula.

Both of these systems have the aura of precision because it is relatively easy to calculate the average number of syllables in words, mean sentence length, and word frequencies. However, precision does not guarantee validity, particularly when it comes to reading comprehension. Cunningham, Hiebert, and Mesmer, in fact, found that “these two text tools may lack adequate validity for their current uses in educational settings.”

By placing reading level stickers on their classroom library books, teachers may be inadvertently preventing students from reading the books that would benefit them the most. Students who know a lot about a particular topic can read almost any book about it, no matter its assigned reading level. Conversely, students who know little about a topic will struggle with books at even the simplest reading levels.

This means that schools must place a much stronger emphasis on the acquisition of subject-specific content knowledge, particularly in the early grades when students are building up their general knowledge base. Instead of spending hours working on generic reading comprehension “strategies”, students should learn as many facts as possible about science, history, and the world we live in today. Time spent classifying books into reading levels would be much better spent building up the students’ background knowledge.

The more knowledge students acquire, the more they will be able to learn in the future. This is how we can help our students become stronger readers and gain a better understanding of the world in which we live.

Will Fitzhugh is founder and editor of The Concord Review, which publishes outstanding historical essays by high school students. I have long been an admirer of the publication and of Will for sustaining it without support from any major foundations, which are too engaged in reinventing the schools rather than supporting the work of excellent history students and teachers. You can subscribe by contacting him at fitzhugh@tcr.org.

He writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.

The dominance of English teachers over reading and writing in our schools has long meant that the great majority of our high school graduates have never been asked to read one complete History book in their academic careers.

Good English teachers do a fine job of teaching novels and personal and creative writing, but it is a Common Core mistake to expect them to teach the History in which they have little or no academic background. Treating History as contextless “text” is not a solution to this problem.

The ignorance of History among our high school graduates is a standing joke to those who think it is funny, and NAEP has found that only about 18% know enough to pass the U.S. citizenship exam.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch writes that: “In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors in History: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon [Anabasis], Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin.”

We may no longer imagine that many of our high school students will read their History in Latin, but we should expect that somehow they may be liberated from the deeply irresponsible Common Core curriculum that, in restricting the study of the past to the literary analysis of “texts,” essentially removes as much actual History from our schools as it possibly can.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Joanne Jacobs:

Who’s that man? Why is the crowd gathered? Teachers aren’t supposed to say.

Studying texts, without context, is no way to learn history, writes Will Fitzhugh on Diane Ravitch’s blog. But it’s the Common Core way.

A notorious lesson called for teaching the Gettysburg Address without discussing the Civil War. Teachers were told:

Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset. It may make sense to notify students that the short text is thought to be difficult and they are not expected to understand it fully on a first reading—that they can expect to struggle. Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.

Fitzhugh created The Concord Review, which publishes historical essays by high school students. Increasingly, he sees history being taught as a literacy exercise, often by English teachers who don’t know much history.

Sandra Stotsky recently spoke to California English teachers, who were frustrated by the Common Core requirement to teach historical documents. They didn’t think they had the background to do it well. Meanwhile, history teachers are asked to teach informational texts that aren’t historical, writes Stotsky.

In the comments, Bill Honig, former superintendent of public instruction in California, praises the state’s history framework.

Another commenter, “Ponderosa,” disagrees, calling the framework “an indigestible mishmash of high-falutin’ gobbledygook” that “most teachers probably ignore.”

From the county-sponsored training workshop I’ve been to, it seems the dominant interpretation is have kids do “inquiry.” What this boils down to is: sage off the stage. Give kids a question and have them try to answer it using texts you give them. Gaining historical knowledge is not the object. The aim is to have kids “grapple” (this word was used over and over) with the text. The aim is to have kids talk to each other (the presenter called student talk “sacred”). Somehow all this grappling and talking is supposed to be beneficial, and of course there is probably some benefit. But I can tell you that if the aim is to get kids to learn history, this is not the best approach. Nothing beats lucid direct instruction for that. I guarantee you that this approach will LOWER the already low level of historical literacy among our students.

I remember learning in Sunday school that the Israelites were forced by Pharoah to make bricks, but not given straw. You need straw to hold the bricks together. Our text-grappling students, unprivileged by background knowledge, are going to have trouble building anything with those soggy lumps of clay.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Andrew Van Dam:

The decrease of birthrates in countries where we operate could negatively affect our business. Most of our end-customers are newborns and children and, as a result, our revenue are dependent on the birthrates in countries where we operate. In recent years, many countries’ birthrates have dropped or stagnated as their population ages, and education and income levels increase. A continued and significant decline in the number of newborns and children in these countries could have a material adverse effect on our operating results.

It may not have been the biggest existential threat confronting Geoffrey the Giraffe (the store’s mascot), but it’s the one with the broadest implications outside of the worlds of toys and malls.

Measured as a share of overall population, U.S. births have fallen steadily since the Great Recession. They hit their lowest point on record in 2016 — the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has comparable data.

Even adjusted for the aging population and declining share of women of childbearing age, U.S. fertility rates are at all-time lows.

That’s problematic for Toys R Us, which also operates the Babies R Us stores. The company claims in its annual report that its income is linked to birthrates, and it appears to be right.

Eva Moskovitz:

Success Academy is reinventing the American high school. Expanding on our proven approach to elementary and middle school, we provide rigorous and exciting academics, specialized opportunities for talent and leadership development, and comprehensive support for college admissions and persistence.

John Davis:

Some educators in western Wisconsin aren’t completely sold yet on changes to the state’s teacher licensing, implemented in part to address a shortage of teachers.

But one rural school superintendent said the new system should work if schools maintain control over personnel decisions.

Whitehall School Superintendent Mike Beighley said he generally supports the licensing changes because of the flexibility they could provide to rural school districts.

“I can think of a small handful of folks I’ve interacted with in the past few years that don’t have education backgrounds, but they would make wonderful educators based on their knowledge, compassion, ability to learn and willingness to engage,” he said. “I can think of some folks who’ve been through teacher training programs that don’t have those skills, but (they’ve) met the requirements.”

Michael J. Petrilli:

Since 2002, federal law has conditioned Title I funding on states’ participation in the biannual administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math and reading in grades four and eight. This is a boon to us policy wonks because we can study the progress (or lack thereof) of individual states and use sophisticated research methodologies to relate score changes to differences in education policies or practices. That’s the approach that allowed Tom Dee and Brian Jacob, for example, to inform us that NCLB-style accountability likely boosted math achievement in the 2000s.

Over the years, NAEP has also made stars out of leading states and their governors or education leaders, and has galvanized reformers to try to learn from their successes. It started with North Carolina and Texas, which saw stratospheric increases in the 1990s, especially in math, and across all racial groups. Then it was Jeb Bush’s moment in the sun, as Florida’s scores climbed quickly from the late-1990s through the 2000s, with particular progress for black and Hispanic youngsters. Delaware, Minnesota, and even New York have also produced some big improvements at various times. And let us not forget the Massachusetts Miracle.

Andy Kroll:

One of Brown’s favorite sayings is Age quod agis, a Latin phrase he learned while training to be a Jesuit priest. It means: Do what you’re doing. Don’t traffic in nostalgia. Don’t fantasize about what’s next. For a man who has heeded these rules, it is striking how much he has devoted his last days to leaving his mark on California. He, of course, wouldn’t put it that way.

“I’ve probably thought more about this than almost anybody you’ve ever met,” Brown tells me. We’re back to talking about legacy. “It’s a term that journalists use because you can’t say you’re doing this to do good — that sounds too Pollyanna-ish. You can’t say you’re doing it because you’re going to enrich your friends, because that would sound illegal. You can’t say you derive pleasure from it, because that wouldn’t fit the norms of our political culture.” Legacy, to him, is simple. “It’s a way to make people feel they’re a little more important than they are and their life is not as empty as it actually is.”

In his first stretch as governor, Brown’s unorthodox approach was viewed less charitably. He was erratic and undisciplined, enthralled with the maxim (coined by the British thinker Gregory Bateson) that the new comes from the random. He kept strange hours, staying up until 3 a.m., and stranger company. His aide-de-camp was Jacques Barzaghi, a French filmmaker who famously said of Brown’s 1992 presidential run: “We are not disorganized. Our campaign transcends understanding.”
Brown preached the virtues of “creative inaction” and would put off decisions until the last moment. Or he would fixate on issues of small importance and leave larger ones to fester. Tony Kline, who served as Brown’s legal affairs secretary in those days, tells the story of a bill landing on Brown’s desk that would ban the sale of meat from a certain species of Caribbean turtle. Kline, who remains good friends with the governor, says Brown spent half a day immersed, researching turtle meat, while other bills went untouched. “It would drive us a little crazy,” Kline says.

After a decade and a half away from elected office, Brown ran for Oakland mayor in 1998 and won. It was here that friends say his political education began in earnest. He spent the next eight years learning firsthand what it was government did. He read the police reports, spoke at funerals, and wrestled with Oakland’s underperforming public schools, later opening two charter schools of his own. “He’d say that as the governor, you’re flying at 35,000 feet,” Gil Durán, Brown’s former press secretary, says, “but as mayor, you’re right in the street.”

At his final state budget press conference, Brown told a room full of reporters: “The next governor is going to be on the cliff. What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline, and recession.”

Pat Schneider:

News that faculty at the school had given preliminary endorsement to such a plan spread.

“The word was out there, and it went far,” said Stabio, a first-year MBA student from Texas. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it next day.

Speculation about the future of the two-year MBA at Wisconsin spawned news stories and social media posts, leading to anger and angst among donors, alumni and students. Business school officials struggled to gain control of the story on the eve of Oct. 20 homecoming festivities. Scheduled events included a reception for the school’s most prestigious benefactors.

Eric Ferreri:

You mean, what you want to be true?

Not necessarily. You almost never have control over the process of filling up or reconstructing your memories. Unbeknownst to you, the process operates probabilistically. Given your past experiences and knowledge, your memory system gives you the most likely thing that could have happened to help you fill any gaps at the time of retrieval. Most of the time the final product coincides with what actually happened, so it is true. But sometimes it does not, in which case we talk about false memories. I think most of our memories are reconstructed in this way, and many of them are false, we just don’t notice.

All of this made me think that when we imagine things, we also imagine how things could have occurred in the past. Say you were crossing the street and almost got hit by a car. You can’t help but imagine what would have happened if you did get hit by the car. We just slip into that kind of imagination.

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussein:

So it’s far from clear that no matter how much the prosecutor’s case falls apart, Salman will be acquitted. But whatever the ultimate verdict is, it is now clear that the Justice Department knew that one of its primary claims against Salman was utterly false and yet concealed that discovery from everyone – not just the public but also Salman’s lawyers and the judge, who cited that false evidence to justify keeping Salman imprisoned for the last year without any possibility of bail.

Logan Wroge:

A Madison West High School student was found with a BB gun Thursday, principal Karen Boran said in an email to parents.

Police received information in the morning that a student might be in possession of a BB gun, Boran said. The student was found by police off school property, and a search turned up the weapon, she said.

doc searls:

Giant Irony Alert: the same is true for the Times, along with every other publication that lives off adtech: surveillance-based advertising. These pubs don’t just open the kimonos of their readers. They treat them as naked beings whose necks are bared to vampires ravenous for the blood of personal data, all ostensibly so those persons can be served with “interest-based” advertising.
 
 With no control by readers (beyond tracking protection which relatively few know how to use), and damn little care or control by the publishers who bare those readers’ necks to the vampires, who knows what the hell actually happens to the data? No one entity, that’s for sure.
 
 For one among many views of what’s going on, here’s a screen shot of what RedMorph, a privacy monitoring and protection extention in Chrome showed going on behind Zeynep’s op-ed in the Times:

Rafia Zakaria:

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

THE drill is well known: every time the results of some sort of worldwide survey are released, women in the Muslim world are towards the bottom. Afghan women usually occupy the lowest rungs of political participation, women in Somalia and Sudan have the lowest access to healthcare facilities, women in Iraq and Syria are forced into marriages at astoundingly young ages, and Pakistani women along with Egyptian women experience high levels of domestic violence and general misogyny.

Years of these sorts of surveys, products of complexities reduced to variables and relationship to regression, have taught those who read them to approach with caution, a degree of warranted criticism, a degree of preparedness for the disappointments to follow.

It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to encounter a study that upended all others. In her book titled Fifty Million Rising, social scientist Saadia Zahidi found that women in many Muslim countries have a higher number of graduates in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) fields than their counterparts in other nations. The percentages are impressive: in Iran, 70 per cent of university graduates in STEM fields are women; in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, 60pc of graduates are women, and over 40pc of science graduates in Algeria are women. According to Zahidi, the reason for the advance is that many of these Muslim countries have invested heavily in improving women’s access and education in these fields.

It’s not that they do not encounter gender stereotypes or the sort of constraints that come from being a woman in conservative and male-dominated societies, it is that women are genuinely ambitious and want to excel. In some countries, like the UAE and Jordan, girls actually expressed greater confidence in their math skills than boys at the same age and grade level. In contrast to these percentages, only 18pc of all computer science degrees at American universities are awarded to women. At the high school level, only 27pc of those who sit for the Advanced Placement Computer Science Exam are female.

Women in many Muslim countries have a higher number of graduates in STEM fields than their counterparts in other nations.

Steve Strunsky:

Angered by word of the disciplining of two Lacey High School students for a gun-related social media post, 200 parents, community members and other supporters of the Second Amendment on Monday let the Board of Education know they don’t want the district trampling on their rights or meddling in their home lives.

“You guys are reaching into our private life, the private life of our children,” said one parent, Lewis Fiordimondo, who has twins in pre-kindergarten and a daughter at the high school. “It’s not your place. It’s not the school’s place.”

Another dad, Frank Horvath, whose son is a senior at Lacey High, put things in blunter terms.

“It’s none of your damn business what our children do outside of school,” Horvath told the seven board members toward the end of a four-hour meeting, most of it occupied by speaker after speaker venting anger and frustration at school officials largely unable to respond due to confidentiality rules.

Ugo Bardi:

In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.

Ian Bogost:

And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void.

Much more, here.

Sarah Holder:

“For most of human history, maps have been very exclusive,” said Marie Price, the first woman president of the American Geographical Society, appointed 165 years into its 167-year history. “Only a few people got to make maps, and they were carefully guarded, and they were not participatory.” That’s slowly changing, she said, thanks to democratizing projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM).

OSM is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps: It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowd-sources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. Armed with satellite images, GPS coordinates, local community insights and map “tasks,” volunteer cartographers identify roads, paths, and buildings in remote areas and their own backyards. Then, experienced editors verify each element. Chances are, you use an OSM-sourced map every day without realizing it: Foursquare, Craigslist, Pinterest, Etsy, and Uber all use it in their direction services.

When commercial companies like Google decide to map the not-yet-mapped, they use “The Starbucks Test,” as OSMers like to call it. If you’re within a certain radius of a chain coffee shop, Google will invest in maps to make it easy to find. Everywhere else, especially in the developing world, other virtual cartographers have to fill in the gaps.

Jason Grotto and Sandhya Kambhampati:

Amid the most tumultuous real estate market since the Great Depression, Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios produced valuations for thousands of commercial and industrial properties in Chicago that did not change from one reassessment to the next, not even by a single dollar.

That fact, one finding in an unprecedented ProPublica Illinois-Chicago Tribune analysis of tens of thousands of property records, points to a conclusion that experts say defies any logical explanation except one:

Berrios failed at one of his most important responsibilities — estimating the value of commercial and industrial properties.

What’s more, a separate analysis reveals commercial and industrial property assessments throughout Cook County were so riddled with errors that they created deep inequities, punishing small businesses while cutting a break to owners of high-value properties and helping fuel a cottage industry of politically powerful tax attorneys.

And because commercial and industrial properties as a group were not assessed properly, residential homeowners across the county were forced to carry an additional and unnecessary burden, paying more in property taxes than they would have otherwise.

State law says the assessor must revalue property every three years. Yet Berrios, using methods hidden from the public, repeatedly produced initial valuations of commercial and industrial properties — known as first-pass values — that did not change.

Bloomberg:

Chinese companies are taking advantage of America’s financially strapped higher-education system to buy schools, and the latest deal for a classical music conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey, is striking chords of dissonance on campus.

Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Co. agreed in February to pay $40 million for Westminster Choir College, an affiliate of Rider University that trains students for careers as singers, conductors and music teachers. The announcement came just weeks after the government-controlled Chinese company changed its name from Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Co.

The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school whose choirs sang with maestros Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini and Seiji Ozawa. Alumni are among those suing in New York federal court to block the sale, saying it violates Westminster’s 1991 merger agreement with Rider and will trigger the choir college’s demise.

“There’s a lot of fear among people associated with the college,” said Chris Bonanni, 20, an undergraduate student.

Elizabeth Bruenig:

But, speaking as a member of the “Bernie Sanders wing,” I don’t actually view the two focal points — opportunity and inequality — as fully separable. The impact of inequality on the overall economy and political climate means that, unless inequality itself is reduced, individual initiative won’t have much impact and conditions for ordinary people in America will continue, in key ways, to worsen.

Sanders himself agrees. “You have an economic situation where a tiny number of people have enormous amounts of wealth,” Sanders told me at his Senate office Wednesday morning, “and politically, you have the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires buying elections.” Sanders pointed out that the top 1 percent of earners would rake in roughly 83 percent of the benefits of President Trump’s tax cuts, a series of policies for which Koch-led groups spent more than $20 million. As Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker pointed out in The Post, the decision to supply a generous tax cut to the rich — greatly encouraged by the vast wealth of billionaire donors — is a de facto decision to reduce expenditures that help ordinary Americans, “like public investments in infrastructure, education, research and development, and the regulation of labor and financial markets.” Put simply, inequality allows the wealthiest Americans to exert undue control over politics, thereby maintaining the conditions that made them rich in the first place, and hamstringing government efforts that could increase opportunities for the rest of us.

Shelby Webb:

#15 Aldine ISD

Percent of students receiving special education services: 7.22 percent

Number of students receiving special education services: 5,039
Total enrollment in 2016-2017: 69,768

Robert Gebeloff:

Hunterdon County, N.J., is rich. It ranks sixth nationally among counties in median household income, and has for decades exemplified the American outer-ring suburb.

But in one crucial measure, this exurban enclave 60 miles west of Manhattan resembles old mill communities in northern New England or impoverished regions of Appalachia. The measure is death as compared to birth, otherwise known by demographers as “natural increase.” In this case, it’s negative.

Hunterdon County residents gave birth to 3,590 babies between 2013 and 2016. But even more residents — 3,647 — died. Go back to a four-year period two decades earlier: 5,882 births, 2,947 deaths.

Google:

For various reasons described in the following sections, some software is available only under license terms that make it unsuitable for use at Google. Exceptions may exist in some rare circumstances; contact emailremoved@ if in doubt.

Michael Hansen :

Many education policymakers and practitioners across the country recognize the need to recruit and retain more racial and ethnic minorities into the teaching profession. As we’ve previously discussed in our ongoing teacher diversity series, there is credible evidence that minority teachers can boost a range of minority student outcomes, yet minorities are underrepresented among the population of public school teachers.

In light of the scarcity of minority teachers, many states and districts have begun trying ways to somehow bring more minorities into the classroom. To our knowledge, most of these methods have taken the form of targeted outreach, whether to minority communities or teacher preparation programs in universities serving high concentrations of minority students. Though it may be too soon to know whether these different strategies ultimately pan out, we ask if another type of strategy might be effective. That is, could financial incentives help diversify the teacher workforce?

In this installment, we use school- and district-level data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) to examine this question.[1] We explore whether districts that offer different types of financial incentives to teachers tend to have greater diversity among teachers within their schools. Based on our analysis, we see a strong association between workforce diversity and four incentive policies that may be particularly attractive for minority teachers. Though we cannot say whether these relationships are causal, the results suggest these policies are worth exploring as strategies for diversifying the teacher workforce.

ACM:

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Hennessy and Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors. Their approach led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects have used for many projects in academia and industry. Today, 99% of the more than 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors, and are found in nearly all smartphones, tablets, and the billions of embedded devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT).

Hennessy and Patterson codified their insights in a very influential book, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, now in its sixth edition, reaching generations of engineers and scientists who have adopted and further developed their ideas. Their work underpins our ability to model and analyze the architectures of new processors, greatly accelerating advances in microprocessor design.

The ACM Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Hennessy and Patterson will formally receive the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award at the ACM’s annual awards banquet on Saturday, June 23, 2018 in San Francisco, California.

Jay Greene::

A 7-year veteran teacher teaching in Arizona’s Paradise Valley Unified School District has created a social media firestorm by posting her pay stub on social media- $35,621. Before writing anything else, I like anyone else want to pay dedicated teachers much better than this. Teacher compensation decisions however are made at the district/campus level, and an examination of PVUSD finances just makes things look worse. Much worse.

The Arizona Auditor General reports on district finances. Paradise Valley received total revenue of $10,143 per pupil in 2017. This figure is above the state-wide average. A class of 30 students produces over $300,000 in revenue. Even with benefit costs included, teacher compensation will not even sniff 20% of the revenue generated by this class of 30. Where did the rest of the money go?

Madison has long spent more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

This, despite long standing, disastrous reading results.

Lemor Abrams:

This week, Rocklin High School students are using social media to organize a pro-life walkout using the hashtag #life.

“To honor all the lives of aborted babies pretty much. All the millions of aborted babies every year,” said organizer Brandon Gillespie.

He says his history teacher inspired the idea.

As thousands of students across the country walked out of class demanding strict gun laws, in honor of the Parkland shooting victims, Benzel was placed on paid administrative leave when she asked students to consider whether there’s a double standard in the national school walkout.

“I would like a conversation about when is too much? And are we going allow this on the other side?” said Julianne Benzel

Global abortion data (duckduckgo.com | Pew)

The Capital Times:

So where do we see a difference? One area is safety. Both candidates stress the need for school safety, but we give the nod here to Reyes, the former police officer, who brings experience and insight to discussions of preventing violence in our schools.

We are also impressed with the life experience that Reyes would bring to the board. Reyes has faced barriers and overcome them. She says she’s running to give back to a community that never gave up on her, and we’re impressed with her passion in this regard.

Finally, as a Latina and the mother of biracial children, Reyes would bring another voice of diversity to a school board that serves a district with a large number of minority students. Reyes believes that the entire community must be involved in making our schools successful for all students, and points out that it is natural for her to reach out to minority members in our community because of her background and experience. That’s a vital recommendation for a board that must always strive to represent of the whole of the population it serves. We endorse Gloria Reyes for the School Board on April 3.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

Budget Design Parameters:

Enrollment – slight decrease

Level total staffing (budget neutral)

Narrowing priority actions

Compensation options – first phase

Tax levy updated with 2x charter estimate built in

Using less than full levy authority ($5MM of $8MM) to manage the tax levy increase, preserve state aid eligibility, and maintain budget flexibility for 2019-20

.

PDF Slides:

Overall behavior incidents increased by 14%

Suspension events increased by 26%

James Marson in Chelyabinsk and Thomas Grove:

Russia’s young adults are mostly disengaged from politics, broadly supportive of Mr. Putin and primarily focused on their own lives. They are largely satisfied with their lot and aware that they are living better than their parents.

“No one’s bothering me, no one is confiscating my apartment, my bread, so everything’s fine,” said Mr. Ivlev, who lives in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk east of the Ural mountains. “Politics doesn’t interest me.”

Sarah Turberville:

Over 200 years ago, our Founding Fathers faced a question: How could they build a democracy to withstand the trials of time and survive the pressures that destroyed those that came before?

Ultimately, the reasoned voice of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” prevailed. So how is our republic holding up? Would Madison recognize our elected representatives as the guardians against factional governance that he had imagined? The short answer is no.

Madison advocated for a country led by representatives whose “wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country,” and whose “patriotism and love of justice” would moderate the passions and whims of the public. Elected representatives should be above the influence of “factions” — special interests and rival parties — whose interests are often adverse to the common good.

Kyree Leary:

It’s hard to ignore the ways artificial intelligence (AI) has already bested humans, from making incredibly convincing internet videos to beating humanity’s best Go players. AI is expected to outpace humans in a number of occupations; some of which might be a little unexpected.

A new study released this week from LawGeex, a leading AI contract review platform, has revealed a new area in which AI outperforms us: Law. Specifically, reviewing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and accurately spotting risks within the legal documentation.

For the study, 20 human attorneys were pitted against LawGeex’s AI in reviewing 5 NDAs. The controlled conditions of the study were designed to resemble how lawyers would typically review and approve everyday contracts.

US Census Bureau:

Total state tax revenue increased 9.5% to $242.8B in Q4 2017, from $221.7B reported in the same quarter of the prior year. Individual income tax, at $92.5B, is up 14.4% from $80.9B in Q4 2016. See the latest report here: go.usa.gov/xQcnV

John Faithful Hamer:

Prophet (2018), Charles C. Mann maintains that intellectual life in the 21st century is defined by a civil war between Wizards, who believe that technology will save us, and Prophets, who see various kinds of disaster on the horizon: “Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.” Steven Pinker, the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), is a Wizard. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), is a Prophet.

Keith Collins and Gabrielle JX Dance:

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you’ve told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star’s posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her.

What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you’ve indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones.

As The New York Times reported

Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quealy:

Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.

White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.

Most white boys raised in wealthy families will stay rich or upper middle class as adults, but black boys raised in similarly rich households will not.

Related: They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine, not!

Shannon Najmabadi:

Attending college is set to become slightly more expensive for undergraduates at all eight of the University of Texas System’s academic institutions.

With few questions, the system’s Board of Regents voted unanimously Monday to up the cost of tuition and fees at each college they oversee by up to 8.5 percent for in-state undergraduates. Most schools will see increases in the 1 percent to 7 percent range – adding hundreds of additional dollars to students’ tuition bills each year.

The hikes range from 0.1 percent for in-state undergraduates at the University of Texas at San Antonio to 8.5 percent for students at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. The new rates will be in place for the fall 2018 semester, with another increase set to take effect the following academic year.

Sean O’Kane:

Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

Kevin Hartnett:

Robert Langlands, who developed one of the most original insights of 20th-century mathematics, was named the winner of the 2018 Abel Prize at a ceremony in Norway this morning. The prize, which is modeled on the Nobel, is one of the highest honors in mathematics.

Langlands, 81, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is the progenitor of the “Langlands program,” which explores a deep connection between two pillars of modern mathematics: number theory, which studies arithmetic relationships between numbers, and analysis, which is an advanced form of calculus. The link has far-reaching consequences that mathematicians have used to answer centuries-old questions about the properties of prime numbers.

Langlands first articulated his vision for the program in 1967 — when he was 30 — in a letter to the famed mathematician André Weil. He opened the 17-page missive with a now-legendary stroke of modesty: “If you are willing to read it as pure speculation, I would appreciate that,” he wrote. “If not — I am sure you have a waste basket handy.”

Since then, generations of mathematicians have taken up and expanded upon his vision. The Langlands program now ranges over so many different fields that it is often referred to as the search for a “grand unified theory” of mathematics.

Deplorable clomate science blog:

Most of these adjustments are due to simply making up data. Every month, a certain percentage of the 1,218 United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations fail to report their data, and the temperature gets estimated by NOAA using a computer model. Missing data is marked in the USHCN database with an “E” – meaning “estimated.” In 1970, about 10% of the data was missing, but that number has increased to almost 50%, meaning that almost half of the current adjusted data is fake.

Steve Friess:

It was the board’s first regularly scheduled meeting following the criminal-sentencing hearings of the former sports-medicine doctor Larry Nassar. And Brian Breslin, facing an overwhelming vote of no confidence from the university’s faculty, had already indicated he would not step down. But then he struck a different tone. Breslin’s “conscience would bother [him],” he said, if he didn’t speak his mind.

The crowd of hundreds gathered there—already quivering with anger over the Nassar debacle—seemed to perk up in anticipation of some further statement on the scandal.

Amy Wang:

At the University of Arizona, school officials know when students are going to drop out before they do.

The public college in Tucson has been quietly collecting data on its first-year students’ ID card swipes around campus for the last few years. The ID cards are given to every enrolled student and can be used at nearly 700 campus locations including vending machines, libraries, labs, residence halls, the student union center, and movie theaters.

They also have an embedded sensor that can be used to track geographic history whenever the card is swiped. These data are fed into an analytics system that finds “highly accurate indicators” of potential dropouts, according to a press release last week from the university. “By getting [student’s] digital traces, you can explore their patterns of movement, behavior and interactions, and that tells you a great deal about them,” Sudha Ram, a professor of management systems, and director of the program, said in the release. “It’s really not designed to track their social interactions, but you can, because you have a timestamp and location information,” Ram added.

For an example of how granular those data points can get, take Ram’s explanation of social tracking: “There are several quantitative measures you can extract from these networks, like the size of [students’] social circle, and we can analyze changes in these networks to see if their social circle is shrinking or growing, and if the strength of their connections is increasing or decreasing over time.”

Poynter:

The Poynter Institute will lead a project funded by Google.org called MediaWise, a groundbreaking endeavor aimed at helping middle and high school students be smarter consumers of news and information online.

Google is investing $3 million over two years in MediaWise, which will bring together experts from the Local Media Association, the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Poynter. MediaWise will feature a curriculum to be taught in classrooms and a first-of-its-kind teen fact-checking initiative online. The project aims to reach a million students, with at least 50 percent coming from underserved or low-income communities.

“Democracy works best when citizens can make decisions for themselves based on accurate, independent and honest information,” said Poynter Institute president Neil Brown. “Poynter is honored to be part of MediaWise, which aims to help the next generation of voters have that power, and to reduce the spread of misinformation, which is polluting our civic life.”

Erica Klarreich:

Paul Erdős, the famously eccentric, peripatetic and prolific 20th-century mathematician, was fond of the idea that God has a celestial volume containing the perfect proof of every mathematical theorem. “This one is from The Book,” he would declare when he wanted to bestow his highest praise on a beautiful proof.

Never mind that Erdős doubted God’s very existence. “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book,” Erdős explained to other mathematicians.

In 1994, during conversations with Erdős at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in Germany, the mathematician Martin Aigner came up with an idea: Why not actually try to make God’s Book — or at least an earthly shadow of it? Aigner enlisted fellow mathematician Günter Ziegler, and the two started collecting examples of exceptionally beautiful proofs, with enthusiastic contributions from Erdős himself. The resulting volume, Proofs from THE BOOK, was published in 1998, sadly too late for Erdős to see it — he had died about two years after the project commenced, at age 83.

“Many of the proofs trace directly back to him, or were initiated by his supreme insight in asking the right question or in making the right conjecture,” Aigner and Ziegler, who are now both professors at the Free University of Berlin, write in the preface.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Gloria Reyes has a clear position on keeping police officers in Madison’s high schools.

“I support EROs in school,” Reyes told the State Journal editorial board this week. “I don’t need a committee to tell me that.”

That’s different from the view of her opponent, Anna Moffit, in the April 3 election for Madison School Board. Moffit, who has served on the board for three years, initiated a district committee to study “educational resource officers” and whether they should stay in city schools.

Moffit told our editorial board she’s not comfortable removing the officers “at this point,” meaning a contract with the city for police services won’t be terminated next month. Yet Moffit is vague on her intentions beyond that. She sits on the committee studying officers in schools and sounds like she’ll support whatever recommendations it makes to the School Board in May.

Much more on the April 3, 2018 election, here.

Karen Rivedal:

Participation would be voluntary, with staff spending this week with students and parents in recruitment efforts. A family orientation is to be held April 3, with a launch on April 5 and a review of how it’s going as soon as May 11.

Program staff are to include a full-time teacher and social worker and a part-time special education caseworker and restorative justice coordinator, Jara said.

A sample day, according to a staff presentation, would offer “community building and soft skills development,” tailored and flexible academics, and a class called Hip Hop Architecture 101, in which students could learn applied math and science skills from industry professionals.

Staff members envision up to 40 percent of the initial enrollment would be special education students. Enrollment also would trend male and African-American.

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

Mark Suster:

Everybody knew 3rd party apps had access to data on you, your friends & family. I’ve been highlighting this publicly for years. Nobody cared because every app company benefited. My presentation to Caltech nearly 8 years ago slideshare.net/msuster/social…

Michael Eisen:

Humans first began collecting and growing edible grains, fruits and roots, and corralling wild animals for meat, milk, and material goods thousands of years ago. Ever since, we have been shaping these plants and animals to meet our needs and desires. Compare corn to its ancestor, teosinte, cattle to the aurochs from which they were derived — or any other crops and livestock on which we rely to their wild relatives — and you’ll find the remarkable story of human agriculture and the transformative power of artificial selection.

The success our ancestors had in creating the modern cornucopia of domesticated plants and animals is all the more remarkable for their near-complete lack of understanding of where new traits come from or how they pass from one generation to the next. They didn’t know that every trait they favored arose through one or more random alterations — mutations — to a species’ genetic code, passed on from parents to their offspring in the form of DNA.

Paul Sperry:

At the same time the Broward County school system was dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline” under policies that failed to stop accused shooter Nikolas Cruz, it was building another pipeline, funneling back into regular classrooms thousands of other potentially dangerous students released from local jails, county and school district records reveal.

Through a little-known “re-engagement” program for serious juvenile offenders, the Florida district has “transitioned” back to school almost 2,000 incarcerated students, a number comparable to student bodies at many high schools, according to district data obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Local probation officers warn that these offenders have a high risk of reoffending.

Another initiative, the Behavior Intervention Program, attempts to mainstream a smaller number of “students who exhibit severe, unmanageable behavior,” according to a 2017-2018 program handbook, including those who are “convicted of a serious crime such as rape, murder, attempted murder, sexual battery or firearm related [offense].”

Sydney Fussell:

Google was served at least four sweeping search warrants by Raleigh, North Carolina police last year, requesting anonymized location data on all users within areas surrounding crime scenes. In one case, Raleigh police requested information on all Google accounts within 17 acres of a murder, overlapping residences, and businesses. Google did not confirm or deny whether it handed over the requested data to police.

WRAL reporter Tyler Dukes found four investigations in 2017 where police issued these uniquely extensive warrants: two murder cases, one sexual battery case, and an arson case that destroyed two apartment complexes and displaced 41 people. Police routinely request information from technology companies—Google says it shares data with law enforcement about 81% of the time—but these specific cases are remarkable: Instead of finding a suspect, and then searching that person’s data, police are searching enormous amounts of data to pinpoint a potential suspect.

Tim Alberta:

Indeed, the senator has spent plenty of time lately at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. When the unified Republican government made tax reform its top priority—after failing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act—he emerged as a star player, one of four senators who crafted the legislation and worked alongside the administration to win over holdouts. Scott’s repeat visits to the White House were punctuated by a victory lap on the South Lawn after Congress passed the GOP tax plan. It should have been a crowning moment in his career—not only for the role he played in writing and passing the law, but because he had triumphed in securing bipartisan language in the final product that accomplished a longtime goal: creating “Opportunity Zones” across America, with tax incentives offered for investing in poor communities. (He makes a point of noting that both urban and rural areas will benefit.) When Scott took his place at the ceremony on the afternoon of December 20—flanking President Donald Trump, right next to Speaker Paul Ryan—the extent of his influence was on full display.

But that’s not what everyone saw. Just minutes before Trump invited Scott to speak at the lectern, Andy Ostroy, a HuffPost blogger, tweeted: “What a shocker … there’s ONE black person there and sure enough they have him standing right next to the mic like a manipulated prop. Way to go @SenatorTimScott.” When the event ended, Scott opened Twitter and spotted the comment. He responded: “Uh probably because I helped write the bill for the past year, have multiple provisions included, got multiple Senators on board over the last week and have worked on tax reform my entire time in Congress. But if you’d rather just see my skin color, pls feel free.”

The exchange crystallized the central dilemma of Scott’s political existence. Concerned about narrowing his brand, the senator long has tried to downplay his ethnic exceptionalism and avoid the role of race-relations ambassador for the GOP. And yet Scott, now more than ever, cannot seem to escape being perceived as such. He is not just a generic black Republican in a generic period of history; he is the most powerful and prominent black elected official in America, serving at a time of heightened racial tension and widespread accusations of xenophobia against his own party and the president who leads it. This ensures that Scott wears a target on his back regardless of the issue or crisis at hand. When race is involved, the stakes are even higher, forcing upon him decisions of personal and political identity: Scott can choose to stay silent and be accused of selling out his heritage, or speak out and be defined by his blackness.

Darwin BondGraham:

Berkeley’s police and other city departments hoping to acquire new surveillance technologies will now have to disclose publicly the equipment or software they’re seeking to acquire and justify the acquisition before gaining approval.

The Berkeley City Council approved a new law last night that subjects surveillance technologies to sweeping civilian oversight, making Berkeley the first city in California to do so.

“Last night’s unanimous vote by the Berkeley City Council was another strong indicator that citizens are demanding input into how powerful surveillance equipment is used in their community and who gets access to the data,” said Brian Hofer, a member of the civil liberties group Oakland Privacy.

Under the new law, city departments must show that the benefits of a new surveillance technology outweigh possible harms to privacy and civil liberties, before gaining permission to buy and use these tools.

Beth Hawkins:

During one family engagement night last year, my son’s ninth-grade class competed in a contest called a policy slam. Working in teams of three, students were given two sets of data that, analyzed together, revealed a social issue. Students then created policy prescriptions to address the problem they found, detailed in short PowerPoints.

The numbers revealed that as educational attainment rose, crime rates fell. Reasoning that curbing dropout rates was crucial, the winning team proposed combating institutional racism in schools so kids would stay enrolled.

The kids at this public charter school in Minneapolis, Venture Academy, know way too much about systemic racism. The schools they opted out of struggle with nation-leading racial achievement gaps. There are mainline district schools in my city where you can count on one hand the number of black and brown students and kids, like mine, with disabilities who can read and compute proficiently.

As a consequence, many of my son’s classmates started high school several grade levels behind in math and reading. More than 90 percent qualify for free or discounted lunch, 26 percent are learning English, 26 percent receive special education services, and 6 percent are homeless.

Robert Wright:

Academics at scores of UK universities are expected to return to work on Wednesday after their union and an employers’ group reached agreement on a pension dispute that has caused days of strike action.

The agreement between the University and College Union and Universities UK was announced on Monday evening after a week of negotiations at Acas, the conciliation service.

The settlement, which will have to be approved by UCU members, means the union will now almost certainly not go ahead with plans, announced last week, to disrupt final exams with a series of strikes between April and June.

Members of the UCU at 64 institutions including Oxford and Cambridge Universities and Imperial College London had been striking over UUK’s plans to end the defined benefit element of their pension scheme. UUK had said that was necessary to eliminate the £6.1bn deficit in the Universities Superannuation Scheme, one of the UK’s biggest pension funds.

The two sides agreed to a three-year “transitional arrangement”, starting in April next year, during which both sides will make higher contributions to pensions. They will also seek a new valuation of the pension scheme to inform their options once the transition period expires in 2022.

Tim Carmody:

Tony DeRose wanders between rows at New York’s Museum of Mathematics. In a brightly-colored button-up T-shirt that may be Pixar standard issue, he doesn’t look like the stereotype of a scientist. He greets throngs of squirrely, nerdy children and their handlers — parents and grandparents, math and science teachers — as well as their grown-up math nerd counterparts, who came alone or with their friends. One twentysomething has a credit for crowd animation on Cars 2; he’s brought his mom. She wants to meet the pioneer whose work lets her son do what he does.

“It’s wonderful to see such a diverse crowd,” he says. “How many of you have seen a Pixar film?” he asks after taking the podium. The entire room’s hands go up. “How many of you have seen three? Five?” He pauses. “How many of you have seen all of them?” Dozens of people raise their hands, maybe a quarter of the room. “Wow,” he says. He smiles, to himself and the crowd. This gig is not one bit bad.

VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal:

Investment is shifting from tangible physical assets to intangible goods like software, data, and R&D. This column analyses the impact of this shift on the structure of firm financing. The financial system’s shift from public to private equity is, on the whole, an encouraging reflection of its response to the changing needs of the economy.

“Because the financier risks losing his money to uncertainty, adverse selection, or moral hazard, he hesitates to lend when the financial infrastructure is not adequate to resolve these problems. But he can still protect himself by requiring collateral-valuable assets that the financier can keep in case the borrower defaults.”
Rajan and Zingales (2003).

When most people think of investment, what comes to mind is the purchase of new equipment and structures. A restaurant might start with construction, and then fill its new building with tables, chairs, stoves, and the like. This is the world of tangible capital.

Elsy Boglioli and Magali Richard:

Advances in genetics – that began in the early 1960s – have led to continuous improvements in our understanding of DNAʼs central role in the determination of biological attributes. These advances led to numerous innovations in medicine and agriculture, such as large-scale production of insulin by bacteria for diabetic patients and plants made tolerant to herbicide to improve yield while reducing environmental footprint. This marked the entry into a new period like the first industrial revolution marked the entry into the 19th century. A second revolution began in 2000 with breakthrough advances in DNA sequencing technologies that read the information contained in DNA. This led to vast sequencing programs with the aim of sequencing the entire tree of life. It opened new areas such as personalized medicine, taking into account the genomic peculiarities of each individual.

With this easier access to DNA sequences, today we are on the verge of a third revolution that will deeply impact our lives, to the extent that computers have changed society: we are entering the era of “gene editing”, following the era of “gene reading”. Gene editing is the rational and precise modification of DNA sequences program in living cells and organisms. Why edit genes? For everything: from designing pathogen-resistant crops or therapeutic correction of defective genes responsible for diseases to rewriting the program of organisms to produce new sophisticated biologicals. The application possibilities are beyond imagination.

Not surprisingly, this new revolution has already sparked the enthusiasm of scientists and investors, with over $1 billion USD of venture-capital financing invested in emerging gene- editing technologies within the past two years.

Two recently developed technologies, Transcription Activator-Like Effector (TALE) nucleases and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) nucleases, make it possible to edit genes within a few weeks, as opposed to several months or years. Once a fully dedicated research subject, gene editing is becoming a routine manipulation in life science laboratories.

Combining accessibility with powerful potential, these technologies have already triggered ethical and legal debates. We face the usual switch from “Can we do it?” to “Should we do it?”, similar to current and past debates on other groundbreaking innovations such as human genome sequencing today or the printing press in the fifteenth century. Still we can assume that the possibilities introduced by advances in this field will drive overall acceleration and enthusiasm rather than slowdown and reluctance.
The pace of development is indeed already accelerating, driven by the amount of money invested in these technologies. The unanswered question is what will be the next safer, more efficient and more precise gene editing technology? What is certain is that gene editing is about to change our lives in many ways.

Annie Waldman:

Be Prepared Before Filing a Data Request

First, find out if the data exists. Look online or phone the government entity and ask for data schemas, dictionaries and repositories (specifically discussing with a records officer which “limited use” data sets may be available). If you plan to file a request with a particular state, familiarize yourself with the state’s data reporting requirements. Ask a public affairs officer for the data before filing a formal request. Explain to the records officers that you don’t want to waste their time or yours.
Track down the internal data wizard. Try to speak with data custodians, or the people responsible for maintaining the databases, instead of, or in addition to, a public affairs or records officer. They know the data best and can help you tailor your request.

Always request an itemized cost estimate. Government agencies sometimes calculate exorbitant cost estimates for fulfilling your request. Make sure you seek an itemized estimate to see if they are over-charging you.

William A. Galston:

I have recently finished reading what may be the most important book of the decade on the contemporary economy. It is not Thomas Piketty’s controversial “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” or Robert Gordon’s magisterial “Rise and Fall of American Growth.” It is Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti’s short, lucid, nontechnical volume, “The New Geography of Jobs,” published in 2012.

Mr. Moretti’s book offers a compelling and simple explanation of the most fundamental economic trend of our time—the widening split between dynamic…

Clare Scott:

There are a lot of different things you can do with sushi. There are about as many varieties of sushi as there are edible sea creatures – and then some. I’m rather fond of the vegetarian kind – I’ve had sweet potato, pickle, even cherry. (I think. Is my memory malfunctioning? Cherry sushi seems weird.) But for the most part, sushi has the same basic structure – seaweed wrap, rice filling, seafood or vegetables in the middle. It is generally round in shape. There’s nothing pixelated about it. And if that seems like a weird thing to say, then actual pixelated sushi is even weirder.

Open Meals is a company that aims to digitize all of the world’s foods – and then 3D print them. They’re creating a digital, patent-pending Food Base that stores information such as flavor, color, shape, texture, and nutrients of different kinds of foods. A user would select the food they wanted from the database, and then the company’s Pixel Food Printer would 3D print small pixel cubes in the shape of that food and injected with the flavors, colors and nutrients of the food.

George Joseph and Murtaza Hussain:

At the height of 2014’s Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, FBI agents tracked the movements of an activist flying in from New York, and appear to have surveilled the homes and cars of individuals somehow tied to the protests, according to recently released documents provided to The Intercept.

The documents, which include FBI emails and intelligence reports from November 2014, suggest that federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests went far beyond the online intelligence-gathering first reported on by The Intercept in 2015. That intelligence-gathering by the federal government had employed open-source information, such as social media, to profile and keep track of activists. The newly released documents suggest the FBI put resources toward running informants, as well as physical surveillance of antiracist activists.

The heavily redacted records were obtained by two civil rights groups, Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and are being published here for the first time. Internal communications from Department of Homeland Security officials, released through this lawsuit, also revealed the existence of a document described by DHS officials as the “Race Paper,” which was the subject of a filing by the civil rights groups on Monday.

Quality Magazine:

The North American robotics, machine vision and motion control markets continue to set new records, according to the Association for Advancing Automation’s annual report on automation and robotics market statistics.

“What I find most telling about these results is not simply that the automation market continues to grow, but that it is growing in such a wide variety of industries,” according to Jeff Burnstein, president of A3 . “New industries continue to embrace robotics, vision, and motion, reaping the benefits of automation.”

Melanie Asmar:

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against the educators, who sued Denver Public Schools in 2014 alleging that the state’s largest district violated their rights to due process. Some of the teachers had lost their positions in schools and failed to get re-hired by a principal within a set period of time, which led the district to put them on unpaid leave — a move the teachers argued amounted to getting rid of them without cause or a hearing.

The district argued it was simply following a 2010 state law, known as Senate Bill 191, that changed the rules for teacher evaluations and assignments. The law allows teachers who lose their positions because of circumstances such as student enrollment declines to be put on unpaid leave if they don’t find new positions within 12 months or two hiring cycles.

MIT Open Courseware.

2018 – Kansas City Star Editorial:

Taylor was blunt in linking educational attainment with dollars spent.

“The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded. She also said a 1 percentage point increase in graduation rates is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in costs in lower grades and a 1.9 percent increase in costs at the high school level.

That amounts to a breathtaking repudiation of the long-standing conservative argument that there’s no link between outcomes and spending.

“It’s a validation of what I have been working on with a lot of colleagues and advocates and parents for many years.” said state Rep. Melissa Rooker, a moderate Republican from Fairway who has worked for years to boost school funding.

1998: Money and school Performance, Paul Ciotti:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its support-
ers have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they
did try. To improve the education of black students and
encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas
City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-
object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers
to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more
money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any
other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money
bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such
amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwa-
ter viewing room, television and animation studios, a robot-
ics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United
Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field
trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was
12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the
country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the
black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not
greater, integration.

More, here.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported school districts, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Josh Mitchell and Melissa Korn:

China sends more students to the U.S. than any other nation, accounting for roughly one-third of the 1.1 million international students enrolled at American universities in the 2016-2017 academic year. China has long valued access to U.S. colleges and universities, which consistently rank among the best in the world.

When international students and their families spend money at American colleges, it is considered an export for the U.S. because money flows from a foreign country to the U.S.

Foreign students attending American educational institutions accounted for $39.4 billion in U.S. exports in 2016, Commerce Department data show. That figure mainly reflects the tuition students pay and excludes spending on many other goods and services, such as rent, clothing or food.

By contrast, Americans studying abroad bought $7.6 billion in education imports that year. That means the U.S. ran a trade surplus of nearly $32 billion in education, one of the largest of any industry. It is close to the U.S. civilian aircraft industry’s $43 billion surplus in trade last year.

The anti-China package is part of a broader push by President Donald Trump to reduce the nation’s overall trade deficit, which reached $568.4 billion in 2017. Some economists say the effort to crack down on China—along with a separate U.S. push to reduce immigration—could inadvertently hurt the U.S. where it has a comparative trade advantage.

Elizabeth Catte:

In 1940, West Virginia governor Homer Holt ordered Bruce Crawford, the director of the West Virginia Writer’s Project—a division of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration—to remove an image of a Mexican coal miner from the official state guidebook, soon to be published as West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. The directive came through an assistant, who summarized the confrontational meeting: “The picture of a Mexican miner was vetoed because Mexican miners are few and far between in West Virginia, which is proud of its Anglo-Saxon origins. I need not labor the point.” The skirmish, in which Crawford emerged mostly victorious (the image of a Mexican miner remained absent in the final publication), was part of a larger struggle over who controlled West Virginia’s history—its industry or its people.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan J. Ashford and Amy Wrzesniewski:

“Have you ever been on a trapeze?” That’s how Martha, an independent consultant, responded when we asked her to describe her work in the five years since she’d left a global consulting firm to set out on her own. She had recently tried the art, which she saw as a good metaphor for her life: the void she felt when between assignments; the exhilaration of landing the next engagement; the discipline, concentration, and grace that mastering her profession required. Trapeze artists seem to take huge risks, she explained, but a safety system—including nets, equipment, and fellow performers—supports them: “They appear to be on their own, but they’re not.”

Martha (whose name, like others in this article, has been changed) is part of a burgeoning segment of the workforce loosely known as the gig economy. Approximately 150 million workers in North America and Western Europe have left the relatively stable confines of organizational life—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—to work as independent contractors. Some of this growth reflects the emergence of ride-hailing and task-oriented service platforms, but a recent report by McKinsey found that knowledge-intensive industries and creative occupations are the largest and fastest-growing segments of the freelance economy.

To learn what it takes to be successful in independent work, we recently completed an in-depth study of 65 gig workers. We found remarkably similar sentiments across generations and occupations: All those we studied acknowledged that they felt a host of personal, social, and economic anxieties without the cover and support of a traditional employer—but they also claimed that their independence was a choice and that they would not give up the benefits that came with it. Although they worried about unpredictable schedules and finances, they also felt they had mustered more courage and were leading richer lives than their corporate counterparts.

Katherine Sellgren :

A quarter of adults struggle to work out how much change they should get in a shop and half cannot read a simple financial line graph, a study suggests.

The study, from Cambridge University and University College London, found “striking weaknesses” in adults’ financial skills across 31 countries.

It says financial literacy is essential if consumers are to avoid getting into debt or being misled on money matters.

The report says the findings point to a need for “urgent policy intervention”.

The researchers analysed more than 100,000 results from 16- to 65-year-olds from 31 countries (listed below) who had completed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies test in 2011.

Related: Math Forum.

Sidney Fussell:

Advanced surveillance technologies once reserved for international airports and high-security prisons are coming to schools across America. From New York to Arkansas, schools are spending millions to outfit their campuses with some of the most advanced surveillance technology available: face recognition to deter predators, object recognition to detect weapons, and license plate tracking to deter criminals. Privacy experts are still debating the usefulness of these tools, whom they should be used on, and whom they should not, but school officials are embracing them as a way to save lives in times of crisis.

On Monday, the Magnolia School Board in Magnolia, Arkansas approved $287,217 for over 200 cameras at two schools. According to the Magnolia Reporter, the camera system will be capable of “facial recognition and tracking, live coverage, the ability to let local local law enforcement tap into the system in the event of a school situation, infrared capability and motion detection.”

And they aren’t the only ones. Earlier this month, the Lockport City School District announced it was installing new cameras outfitted with both face recognition and object recognition software. According to the software’s maker, faces can be matched against a database of gang members, fired employees, and sex offenders, while the object recognition tech can look for weapons and other prohibited objects.

Sarah Jones:

Education, Betsy DeVos once said, is an “industry.” “It’s a battle of Industrial Age versus the Digital Age. It’s the Model T versus the Tesla. It’s old factory model versus the new internet model. It’s the Luddites versus the future,” she told a SXSWEdu audience in 2015. Three years later, she’s the secretary of education, and the so-called industry she presides over is undergoing a period of mass activism. Teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona are threatening to emulate their West Virginia peers, who staged a historic strike earlier in March. Students, too, have grievances: On March 14, students in over 2,500 high schools and colleges, most of them public, will walk out of class to call for gun regulation.

DeVos’ belief—that education is an industry, improved by competition—is shared by other school choice advocates. But it also pits her against the very idea of public education, one of the bedrock principles of the American project to provide equality to all. The Constitution may not recognize a right to an education, but some states do, and each state constitution includes language requiring the creation of a public school system. That language can vary widely, but there are commonalities; the words “free,” “common,” and “efficient” frequently appear.

Free, common, and efficient. These words tell us that public schools should be accessible and ubiquitous, and that they should function. The teachers’ strikes may be clouded in the language of fiscal austerity, and current student walkouts may react to the different threat of gun violence, but they both stand against those who would undermine the pillars of the public school system. If there is a unifying theory linking student walkouts to teacher strikes, it’s this: Public schools are some of the most democratic institutions in America. At a time when public welfare, another democratic principle, looks shakier than ever, it’s nearly a miracle that entry is still free, and that schools are, theoretically at least, open to all.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported school systems, nearly $20,000 per student.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison:

It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data.

Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform while it carried out its investigation, despite his role as a whistleblower.

At the time of the data breach, Wylie was a Cambridge Analytica employee, but Facebook described him as working for Eunoia Technologies, a firm he set up on his own after leaving his former employer in late 2014.

The evidence he supplied to authorities in the UK and US includes a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers sent to him in August 2016, asking him to destroy any data he held that had been collected by GSR, the company set up by Kogan to harvest the profiles.

Related: “strip mining humanity”

The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and Facebook.

Dan Ball (2013): How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data.

Former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s role in the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Eric Schmidt and Wikileaks.

Aggregating Data.

Obama, Facebook and 2012.

Ex-Obama Campaign Director Drops Bombshell Claim on Facebook: ‘They Were on Our Side’:

A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.

Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters:

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown: Brendan Nyhan.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Yep. Facebook non-users get profiled, too. This is our online infrastructure: dossiers are accumulated whatever you do.

How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters:

In the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s targeters had assigned every voter in the country a pair of scores based on the probability that the individual would perform two distinct actions that mattered to the campaign: casting a ballot and supporting Obama. These scores were derived from an unprecedented volume of ongoing survey work. For each battleground state every week, the campaign’s call centers conducted 5,000 to 10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voter’s preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts.

Mea Culpa formulas.

Facebook Data of 1.2 Million Users from 2005 Released: Limited Exposure, but Very Problematic by Michael Zimmer

The Flight of the Zuckerberg:

20 Quick Thoughts About The Facebook Scandal

Seb Joseph:

“Barack Obama was the one that made data targeting in political advertising cool. When he did it, people said he was smart. Now, we’re pissed off at Cambridge Analytica for doing the same thing because Donald Trump got elected.”

“Governments have been trying to find agencies that can do what Cambridge Analytica did for Donald Trump for years. There have been briefs in the past from both Labour and Conservative [political parties] saying, ‘Can you help us win an election?’ I’ve seen them, so the governments have known what’s possible.”

A republic requires interested and engaged citizens.

The long term Madison K-12 reading disaster has a very steep price, far beyond our $20,000 per student annual expenditures.

Josh Kenworthy:

—In many ways, George Pla is the embodiment of the American dream.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Mr. Pla moved to Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood at 5 years old. One of five children growing up on the $100 a month his father earned doing construction work in the 1950s, Pla says he always dreamed of attending “the college on the hill.”

That college was California State University, Los Angeles, a mid-tier public university that he credits with his rapid ascent up the income ladder.

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“Without Cal State L.A., I’m nowhere,” says Pla, who initially got his foot in the door at an East Los Angeles community college. After two years he transferred to Cal State, where he graduated in 1972 before going on to get a graduate degree in public finance from the University of Southern California.

Today, Pla is the founder and CEO of a nationally recognized civil engineering firm, Cordoba Corp. He employs more than 200 people and builds major infrastructure projects for California’s transportation, education, water, and energy sectors. With a base salary of more than $1 million a year, Pla’s story and others like it are held up as the pinnacle of the American Dream. His alma mater, Cal State, Los Angeles, launches more low-income kids into the top income bracket than Harvard, according to a new study by a group of high-level academics working under the title The Equality of Opportunity Project.

Amber Walker:

Allison: The amount of principal and administrative support we got was astonishing.

Social media played a significant role in organizing this movement. Did you all communicate with the young people in Parkland during your planning process?

As Madison as it gets: Get Cap Times’ highlights sent daily to your inbox

Allison: As much as we would have liked to, I imagine they are swamped. We were swamped, so I can’t imagine what they’ve been dealing with. It would be awesome to meet and reach out to them in the future to try and organize national marches and events. For now, we’ve just been following their lead.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Also *ahem*. A good number of us had been objecting and pointing out the broader harms of the interaction between Facebook’s business model and politics even when it appeared to benefit Obama/Democrats.

Related: “strip mining humanity”

The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and Facebook.

Dan Ball (2013): How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data.

Former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s role in the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Eric Schmidt and Wikileaks.

Aggregating Data.

Obama, Facebook and 2012.

Ex-Obama Campaign Director Drops Bombshell Claim on Facebook: ‘They Were on Our Side’:

A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.

Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters:

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown: Brendan Nyhan.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Yep. Facebook non-users get profiled, too. This is our online infrastructure: dossiers are accumulated whatever you do.

How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters:

In the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s targeters had assigned every voter in the country a pair of scores based on the probability that the individual would perform two distinct actions that mattered to the campaign: casting a ballot and supporting Obama. These scores were derived from an unprecedented volume of ongoing survey work. For each battleground state every week, the campaign’s call centers conducted 5,000 to 10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voter’s preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts.

Mea Culpa formulas.

Facebook Data of 1.2 Million Users from 2005 Released: Limited Exposure, but Very Problematic by Michael Zimmer

The Flight of the Zuckerberg:

20 Quick Thoughts About The Facebook Scandal

Seb Joseph:

“Barack Obama was the one that made data targeting in political advertising cool. When he did it, people said he was smart. Now, we’re pissed off at Cambridge Analytica for doing the same thing because Donald Trump got elected.”

“Governments have been trying to find agencies that can do what Cambridge Analytica did for Donald Trump for years. There have been briefs in the past from both Labour and Conservative [political parties] saying, ‘Can you help us win an election?’ I’ve seen them, so the governments have known what’s possible.”

A republic requires interested and engaged citizens.

The long term Madison K-12 reading disaster has a very steep price, far beyond our $20,000 per student annual expenditures.

Gloria Orrigi:

The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
 
 Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? Such questions will help us to get a better grip on reality than trying to check directly the reliability of the information at issue. In a hyper-specialised system of the production of knowledge, it makes no sense to try to investigate on our own, for example, the possible correlation between vaccines and autism. It would be a waste of time, and probably our conclusions would not be accurate. In the reputation age, our critical appraisals should be directed not at the content of information but rather at the social network of relations that has shaped that content and given it a certain deserved or undeserved ‘rank’ in our system of knowledge.
 
 These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source, something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations.

Nathan Heller:

It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.