Will Flanders and Natalie Goodnow (PDF):

In response to allegations of bias in suspension rates in schools along racial lines, the Obama Administration increased federal involvement in discipline policy across the count

Through a ‘Dear Colleague’ memo, federal incentives and legal threats, the Department of Education and Department of Justice worked in concert to push forward a system of positive behavioral support that was designed to reduced suspension rates, particularly among minority students

While these policies may seem reasonable on their face, little research has examined the impact of these policies on the classroom. This study represents the first attempt to do so at the state level. We gathered data on the implementation of the Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) system from more than 2,000 schools throughout Wisconsin from 2009-2016.

We combined this with data on the number of suspensions and academic outcomes of most schools in the state over the same time frame. Along with a host of control variables, this represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to isolate the impact of PBIS on classroom climate.

Among our key findings:

1. Suspension rates have fallen in schools with large numbers of African American Students that implement PBIS.

To the extent that the goal of PBIS was to reduce suspensions for this demographic group, the system appears to be successful.

2. Suspension rates have increased in schools with small numbers of African American Students that implement PBIS.

In schools with fewer than 15% African American students, the implementation of PBIS is counterintuitively associated with an increase in the number of suspensions.

3. Mathematics and Reading Proficiency are lower in schools that implement PBIS. The implementation of PBIS is associated with a decline in proficiency of approximately 1% on state exams, controlling for a number of other factors that are known to impact proficiency.

4. Negative proficiency effects of PBIS are stronger in suburban and rural schools. With a significant exception discussed below, proficiency at urban schools does not suffer significantly when PBIS is implemented. However, performance in rural and suburban schools was found to decline.

Michelle Jamrisko and Wei Lu:

Score another one for Seoul while Silicon Valley slides.

The U.S. dropped out of the top 10 in the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index for the first time in the six years the gauge has been compiled. South Korea and Sweden retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings.

The index scores countries using seven criteria, including research and development spending and concentration of high-tech public companies.

Bret Stetka:

Every day our brains grapple with various last-minute decisions. We adjust our gait to avoid a patch of ice; we exit to hit the rest stop; we switch to our backhand before thwacking a tennis ball.
Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions. By studying other parts of the brain in both humans and monkeys, however, a team from Johns Hopkins University has now concluded that last-minute decision-making is a lot more complicated than previously known, involving complex neural coordination among multiple brain areas. The revelations may help scientists unravel certain aspects of addictive behaviors and understand why accidents like falls grow increasingly common as we age, according to the Johns Hopkins team.

Tao Xu, Pengchuan Zhang, Qiuyuan Huang, Han Zhang, Zhe Gan, Xiaolei Huang, Xiaodong He:

In this paper, we propose an Attentional Generative Ad- versarial Network (AttnGAN) that allows attention-driven, multi-stage refinement for fine-grained text-to-image gener- ation. With a novel attentional generative network, the At- tnGAN can synthesize fine-grained details at different sub- regions of the image by paying attentions to the relevant words in the natural language description. In addition, a deep attentional multimodal similarity model is proposed to compute a fine-grained image-text matching loss for train- ing the generator. The proposed AttnGAN significantly out- performs the previous state of the art, boosting the best re- ported inception score by 14.14% on the CUB dataset and 170.25% on the more challenging COCO dataset. A de- tailed analysis is also performed by visualizing the atten- tion layers of the AttnGAN. It for the first time shows that the layered attentional GAN is able to automatically select the condition at the word level for generating different parts of the image.

Emily Langhorne:

n November, NPR uncovered a graduation scandal at Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., where half the graduates missed more than 90 days of school. Administrators pressured teachers to pass failing students, including those whom teachers had barely seen.

Policy wonks have had a field day with the report, adding graduation scandals to their lists of top 2018 education stories to watch and questioning the value of a high school diploma.
The one group of people who were not surprised by the scandal: teachers.

George W. Bush once claimed that as president, he would challenge the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in our nation’s classrooms by raising the K-12 education standards for of all America’s children. But in the past two decades, the soft bigotry of low expectations hasn’t been challenged; it’s been masked by grade and graduation inflation. And these low expectations are not isolated in our nation’s most impoverished schools.
Four years ago, when I began my teacher training, a tenured teacher gave me some advice: “Just give them a D; it’ll be so much extra work for you to fail anyone.” At the time, I thought it was strange wisdom, but soon I learned that it’s part of the “common sense” of survival in the world of teachers.
I worked in Fairfax County Public Schools, a more affluent, higher-performing district near Washington, where pressure to inflate grades and ensure students pass was ingrained. These district-encouraged, sometimes administrator-enforced grading policies still make me cringe.

Related: When A stands for average.

Derek Hawkins:

Lisa and A.J. Demaree’s decade-long legal ordeal started with, by all accounts, an utterly innocent family moment.

In 2008, the couple took their three daughters, then ages 5, 4 and 1½, on a vacation to San Diego. They snapped more than 100 photos during the trip, like parents do, including several of the girls playing together during bath time. When they returned to their home in Peoria, Ariz., they dropped the camera’s memory stick off at a Walmart for developing.

Within a day, a police detective came knocking.

A Walmart employee had flagged the bath-time photos as pornographic, the detective told the parents. One showed the girls wrapped in towels with their arms around each other; another showed their exposed bottoms.

David Yanofsky:

Biking? Google probably knows you are. Up a mountain? It probably knows that, too.

The Alphabet subsidiary’s location-hungry tentacles are quietly lurking behind some of the most innovative features of its Android mobile operating system. Once those tentacles latch on, phones using Android begin silently transmitting data back to the servers of Google, including everything from GPS coordinates to nearby wifi networks, barometric pressure, and even a guess at the phone-holder’s current activity. Although the product behind those transmissions is opt-in, for Android users it can be hard to avoid and even harder to understand. Opting in is also required to use several of Android’s marquee features.

Sandy Baum & Victoria Lee:

Profiles of former students struggling to repay their education debt are compelling. Too many students enroll in college but leave school without completing a credential, making even small amounts of debt burdensome. Some students complete their programs only to discover that because of either the institutions they attended or the fields in which they earned their degrees, they can’t find jobs that reward their education. And when the overall unemployment rate is high, even graduates with a good education can struggle to find a well-paying job.

But these problems do not mean that most student loan borrowers are less well off than those without student debt—many of whom never went to college. In fact, most outstanding student debt is held by people with relatively high incomes.

According to the recently released Survey of Consumer Finances for 2016, households in the top quartile of the income distribution, with incomes above $81,140 in 2016, held about half of all outstanding education debt. The top 10 percent of households, with incomes of $144,720 or higher, held 24 percent of the debt. This debt represents a combination of students borrowing for their own education and parents or grandparents borrowing to help their children or grandchildren pay for college. Some of the loans supported students who are still in school, but other loans were taken out years ago.

Alex Hern:

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-old chief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deleting comments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a “handful” of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and a number of professional photographers who take perfectly stage-managed pictures of him meeting veterans in Kentucky, small-business owners in Missouri or cheesesteak vendors in Philadelphia.

Facebook’s locked-down nature means mere mortals can’t see the private posts on Zuckerberg’s timeline, but it is hard to imagine him getting into arguments about a racist relative’s post of an anti-immigration meme. And it is not just Zuckerberg. None of the company’s key executives has a “normal” Facebook presence. You can’t add them as friends, they rarely post publicly and they keep private some information that the platform suggests be made public by default, such as the number of friends they have.

Over at Twitter, the story is the same. Of the company’s nine most senior executives, only four tweet more than once a day on average. Ned Segal, its chief financial officer, has been on the site for more than six years and has sent fewer than two tweets a month. Co-founder Jack Dorsey, a relatively prolific tweeter, has sent about 23,000 since the site was launched, but that is a lot less than even halfway engaged users have sent over the same period. Dorsey rarely replies to strangers and avoids discussions or arguments on the site. He doesn’t live-tweet TV shows or sporting fixtures. In fact, he doesn’t really “use” Twitter; he just posts on it occasionally.

Shavar Jeffries:

With President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos driving the public dialogue toward their far-right, for-profit privatization agenda, an alien from another planet could be forgiven for landing here and assuming that “school choice” is the priority of only the Republican Party — or that Democrats are in retreat when it comes to expanding options for improved public education for all students.

That would be a nearsighted and incorrect view. As distinct from for-profit private schools with a flimsy track record of success, it was national progressive leaders from labor and civil rights who laid the foundation for public charter schools. These equity-focused leaders include Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers; the past two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; the late liberal icon Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone; and former Vermont governor and head of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean. Minnesota Democratic state Sen. Ember Reichgott Junge authored the nation’s first charter school law, and big-city mayors like Cory Booker, Antonio Villaraigosa, Adrian Fenty, Mitch Landrieu, and the late Tom Menino succeeded in creating some of the most vibrant and high-performing charter sectors in the country.

Madison has long tolerated a lack of K-12 diversity, despite spending more than most (about $20,000 per student) and long term, disastrous reading results.

Our World in Data:

The school life expectancy is the number of years a personof school entrance age can expect to spend in theeducation system. Since school life expectancy is anaverage based on participation in different levels ofeducation, the average may be pulled down by the numberof children who never go to school. Those children who arein school may benefit from many more years of educationthan the average. The data refers to both sexes.

KM Olejarz:

College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They’re asked it so often—and by so many people—that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is “What are you planning to do with your degree?” But it might as well be “What are the humanities good for?”

According to three new books, the answer is “Quite a lot.” From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.

European Bioinformatics Institute:

University of Antwerp PhD student Sander Wuyts has won the DNA Storage Bitcoin challenge, issued by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 2015. The value of the coin has risen rapidly in three years, while the value of scientific progress is inestimable.

The challenge
On 21 January 2015, Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute explained a new method for storing digital information in DNA to a packed audience at a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. At the end of his talk, he issued a challenge:

Goldman distributed test tubes containing samples of DNA encoding 1 Bitcoin to the audience (and subsequently posted samples to people who requested them). The first person to sequence (read) the DNA and decode the files it contained could take possession of the Bitcoin.

Karen Rivedal:

But to Cottage Grove parents Tujama and Jeannine Kameeta, whose son is a freshman at Monona Grove High School, the novel “provides no educational value” and is racist itself due to how themes are presented and because of its use of racial slurs — the Kameetas counted 48 — in character dialogue, they said in a statement.

“By mandating students read this book the school district is subjecting students of color to racial harassment,” the statement said. Tujama Kameeta also clarified in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal on Wednesday that he was OK with the book being available in the high school library but found it inappropriate as curriculum.

“The N-word is used so many times that it numbs the readers to its potency,” he said, also charging that the “novel reduces black people to passive, humble victims and ignores the reality of black agency in resistance.”

There are many newer books available that deal with “the same topics in more contemporary ways,” he noted, including those by minority authors who have “a different and more valid perspective when it comes to racism.”

Nick Bilton:

Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.
 
 Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took [potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.

Sarah K. S. Shannon, Christopher Uggen, Jason Schnittker, Melissa Thompson, Sara Wakefield and Michael Massoglia:

The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who serve their sentences on probation or in jail. This article develops state-level estimates based on demographic life tables and extends previous national estimates of the number of people with felony convictions to 2010. We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population. We discuss the far-reaching consequences of the spatial concentration and immense growth of these groups since 1980.

Josh Gerstein:

T he National Security Agency destroyed surveillance data it pledged to preserve in connection with pending lawsuits and apparently never took some of the steps it told a federal court it had taken to make sure the information wasn’t destroyed, according to recent court filings.

Word of the NSA’s foul-up is emerging just as Congress has extended for six years the legal authority the agency uses for much of its surveillance work conducted through U.S. internet providers and tech firms. President Donald Trump signed that measure into law Friday.

Perry Stein:

The science exam given annually to District students was so error-ridden that the superintendent announced Friday that she is throwing out scores for the past two years and canceling this year’s test.

The decision puts the city in violation of federal law, and the superintendent’s office said some federal funding could be in jeopardy.

Under the law, school districts must test students in science once during their elementary school years, once in middle school and once in high school. Tests vary by district, and state and local school leaders determine how exams are administered.

D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hanseul Kang said she had little choice but to cancel the District’s $370,000 contract with WestEd, a national education company that developed the citywide exam known as the DC Science Assessment. The two-hour, computerized test is not used to determine whether students can advance to the next grade.

David Patrick:

Most middle and high school math curricula follow a well-defined path:

Pre-algebra → Algebra 1 → Geometry → Algebra 2 → Trig / Precalculus → Calculus

Other middle and high schools prefer an “integrated” curriculum, wherein elements of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry are mixed together over a 3-year or 4-year sequence. However, both of these approaches generally lack a great deal of emphasis on discrete math: topics such as combinatorics, probability, number theory, set theory, logic, algorithms, and graph theory. Because discrete math does not figure prominently in most states’ middle or high school “high-stakes” progress exams, and because it also does not figure prominently on college-admissions exams such as the SAT, it is often overlooked.

Beth Hawkins:

Do you want to know what happens when you pull your child out of Minneapolis Public Schools?

Nothing. That’s what happens.

No first-week phone call from the school office or the enrollment center. No social worker wondering if things are okay. Not so much as a multiple-choice survey asking what prompted you to leave.

The bus cards continue to come. And good luck stopping the robo-calls, which are hardwired to survive death and taxes.

No, the vacuum you’re left with is to be filled only by your imagination. Which, if your departure involved any degree of tension between family and school, is likely to be a pretty shamey blamey place. –

Related: Open enrollment leavers.

FIRE:

Court to college: Despite your restrictive policies, the open areas of your campus are public forums for student speakers.Los Angeles Pierce College, part of the nation’s largest community college district, restricts speech to .003 percent of campus.Student Kevin Shaw sued administrators at Pierce College and the Los Angeles Community College District after he was prevented from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on campus.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 18, 2018 — In an order issued yesterday, a federal district court denied Los Angeles Community College District and Pierce College administrators’ motion to dismiss student Kevin Shaw’s First Amendment lawsuit. Finding that the open spaces of public colleges like Pierce College are traditional public forums — “regardless of Pierce’s regulations” — the court rejected the school’s argument that its tiny “free speech area” was constitutional.

Sandor Farkas:

As the pair took their seats, protesters with signs declaring “people over profit” hounded them for their evident political views. When the protesters began chanting the slogan, some audience members quietly booed, while Shaper retorted that “people need profit” and “profit makes people stronger.”

Taylor Lorenz:

When then-14-year-old Jonas Bridges ran down the stairs of his Atlanta home shouting, “Dad, I’ve got 1,000 fans!” his father, Rob Bridges, hardly took notice. A few days later Jonas barreled into the living room again, saying, “Dad, I’ve got 3,000 fans now.” Again, his father brushed him off. Several days later, Jonas told his father, “I have 5,000 fans now and if I get to 10,000 I’ll get paid for it.” Finally, Rob Bridges turned to his wife and said, “Denise, what the hell is he talking about?”

What Jonas Bridges was trying to tell his father was that he was rapidly becoming famous on YouNow, a social video platform where he had begun hosting live-streams from his bedroom under the pseudonym “woahits_jonas.” Before his parents knew what was happening, Jonas had amassed an army of online fans for his vlogs and prank videos. Before they could grasp quite what his newfound fame meant, Jonas had begun raking in serious cash.

Steve Coll:

On March 29th, in Pontiac, Michigan, Sergio Perez appeared in a county courtroom to seek sole custody of his son and two daughters, who were between eleven and seventeen years old. The children lived with Sergio’s estranged wife, Rose, and, he told me recently, he was concerned about them. His wife had taken out a yearlong protective order against her boyfriend in 2015, but, as far as Sergio knew, they now lived together. (Rose and the boyfriend could not be reached.) Perez paid the rent on the house where his children and Rose lived, he told me, although he had fallen thousands of dollars behind on child support. (He said that he spent other money on the children directly—for example, for their clothes.) Perez ran a small contracting business near Pontiac, installing carpets. He said that he wanted “to see my daughters do well, with modern lives.” He was “never rich at all,” but he was “working fourteen, sixteen hours a day,” he told me. “I was working three customers a day.”

Rose and the three children are all United States citizens, but Perez was undocumented. He had grown up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and crossed into the United States, without authorization, when he was nineteen. During the next twenty-one years, he and his attorney, Bethany McAllister, told me, he had moved back and forth to Mexico, and he had been deported several times before. But otherwise he had never been arrested or convicted of a crime, and had received only one ticket, for driving on an expired license. Amid the anti-immigrant fever created by the Trump Administration, he feared that pressing the custody case might lead to someone informing on him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in order to have him arrested and deported to Mexico. Perez decided to go to family court anyway. He said that he wanted to show his children that “no matter how hard or difficult it might be, you have to do what you have to do, no matter what.”

Jonathan Turley:

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper is about celebrate one of the most important anniversaries of his life. March 13th will be the fifth anniversary of his commission of open perjury before the Senate Intelligence Committee. More importantly, it also happens to be when the statute of limitations runs out — closing any possibility of prosecution for Clapper. As the clock runs out on the Clapper prosecution, Democrats like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have charged that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen committed perjury when she insisted that she could not recall if President Donald Trump called Haiti and African countries a vulgar term. The fact is that perjury is not simply tolerated, it is rewarded, in Washington. In a city of made men and women, nothing says loyalty quite as much as lying under oath.

Even in a city with a notoriously fluid notion of truth, Clapper’s false testimony was a standout. Clapper appeared before the Senate to discuss surveillance programs in the midst of a controversy over warrantless surveillance of the American public. He was asked directly, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?” There was no ambiguity or confusion and Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” That was a lie and Clapper knew it when he said it.

Christopher Demicoli:

In this new age of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), employees can bring personally owned devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc…) to their workplace, and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications. The intent of MDM is to optimize the functionality and security of these devices while minimizing cost and downtime.

MDM stands for Mobile Device Management, and is a way to ensure employees stay productive and do not breach corporate policies. There are various MDM solutions available, but the most common ones right now are:

Karen Rivedal:

The project, pegged for an early April start pending final approvals and some additional fundraising, also could be a boon for the community. A 17,500-square-foot theater addition is the project’s biggest piece, expanding opportunities not just for Edgewood students but also potentially for Madison-area youth theater groups that struggle now due to a “huge shortage” of performing spaces, Elliott said.

The high school plans to make the expanded theater available to those groups, similar to how East High School pledged to share its $4.7 million theater renovation with community theater groups in July.

“It’s going to be a very impressive theater,” Elliott said.

Alan Borsuk:

Don’t think this is a piece only about schools in Milwaukee, either public or private. I got responses from suburban schools where the same issues are seen, and from across the state. People working in affluent areas said behavior has gotten worse in their schools, as well.

​​​​​​English language arts begins. You pull out the engaging lesson. Some students are excited to learn. One student refuses to listen. She throws her notebook on the ground. Another student decides he does not like how his neighbor is talking to him, so he begins kicking him. Another student mocks another for no apparent reason. A fight breaks out… You keep on trying to put out fires all day long. The emotional trauma is overwhelming. This is only the first hour of a very long week.

Matthew Hutson:

Intelligence makes for better leaders—from undergraduates to executives to presidents—according to multiple studies. It certainly makes sense that handling a market shift or legislative logjam requires cognitive oomph. But new research on leadership suggests that, at a certain point, having a higher IQ stops helping and starts hurting.

Although previous research has shown that groups with smarter leaders perform better by objective measures, some studies have hinted that followers might subjectively view leaders with stratospheric intellect as less effective. Decades ago Dean Simonton, a psychologist the University of California, Davis, proposed that brilliant leaders’ words may simply go over people’s heads, their solutions could be more complicated to implement and followers might find it harder to relate to them. Now Simonton and two colleagues have finally tested that idea, publishing their results in the July 2017 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

James Pogue:

The west side of Columbus, Ohio, is a flat expanse of one-story houses, grimy convenience stores, and dark barrooms, and William Lager, in his business wear, cut an unusual figure at the Waffle House on Wilson Road. Every day, almost without fail, he took a seat in a booth, ordered his bottomless coffee, and set to work. Some days he sat for hours, so long that he’d outlast waitress Chandra Filichia’s seven-hour shift and stay on long into the night, making plans and scribbling them down on napkins.

The dreams on the napkins seemed impossibly grandiose: He wanted to create a school unlike anything that existed, a K-12 charter school where the learning and teaching would be done online, and which would give tens of thousands of students an alternative to traditional public schools across the state. It would offer them unheard of flexibility—a teen mom could stay with her child and study, while a kid worried about being bullied could complete lessons at home. And it would be radically cheaper than a traditional classroom, since there would be no buildings to maintain, no teachers’ unions to bargain with. At the time—the late 1990s—it was a revolutionary idea. Lager called it, in the heady days when the internet seemed to promise a solution to every problem, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

But back then—before Lager had his mansion and lake house, before he rose to become a hero of the school choice movement, before Jeb Bush flew in to give ECOT’s commencement speech and Betsy DeVos helped him and his cohort transform Ohio’s educational landscape—Filichia, the Waffle House waitress, could tell Lager seemed broke. Balding, round-faced, and concentrating intently as he scribbled, she even once caught him trying to pass off photocopies of discount coffee coupons. But he didn’t plan on using a Waffle House as his office forever. “One of these days I’m going to have a real big business,” she remembers him telling her, “and you can come work with me, and you won’t ever have to work anywhere else.”

Jessica Glenza:

Stella Apo Osae-Twum and her husband did everything by the book. They went to a hospital covered by insurance, saw an obstetrician in their plan, but when her three sons – triplets – were born prematurely, bills started rolling in.

The hospital charged her family $877,000 in total.

“When the bills started coming, to be very honest, I was an emotional wreck,” said Apo Osae-Twum. “And this is in the midst of trying to take care of three babies who were premature.”

America is the most expensive nation in the world to give birth. When things go wrong – from pre-eclampsia to premature birth – costs can quickly spiral into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the data is limited, experts in medical debt say the costs of childbirth factor into thousands of family bankruptcies in America each year.

It’s nearly impossible to put a price tag on giving birth in America, since costs vary dramatically by state and hospital. But one 2013 study by the the advocacy group Childbirth Connection found that, on average, hospitals charged $32,093 for an uncomplicated vaginal birth and newborn care, and $51,125 for a standard caesarean section and newborn care. Insurance typically covers a large chunk of those costs, but families are still often on the hook for thousands of dollars.

Tom Bartlett:

T hey’re waiting in the cold for Jordan Peterson, hands shoved in jacket pockets, serious books like The Gulag Archipelago and Modern Man in Search of a Soul tucked under arms. The crowd outside the University of Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre on a Tuesday evening in November is mostly male and mostly in their 20s. They’ve spent hours watching Peterson on YouTube, where he rails against the enervating evils of postmodernism, dissects the Bible at length, and offers fatherly advice about how to “change the world properly.” They recite his dictums on personal responsibility, like “Clean your room,” “Sort yourself out,” and “Don’t do things that you hate.” They devour the classics he deems must-reads — Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Orwell. When asked to describe him, they reach for superlatives: brilliant, breathtaking, wise. When asked to compare him, they turn to historical figures: Plato, Diogenes, Gandhi. They insist he’s changed their lives.

Soon the man himself will arrive and deliver an often dazzling, sometimes puzzling, rarely dull two-hour lecture on the symbolic and psychological underpinnings of the book of Genesis. Afterward he will field knotty questions from the audience on whether originality is really possible, the tension between honor and happiness, and the evolutionary upside of solitude. These questions seem designed to be difficult, as if the audience were engaged in a giant game of Stump the Guru. It’s during such sessions that Peterson is at his improvisational best, sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time. It’s a hearty intellectual stew ladled up by an intense 55-year-old psychology professor who gives the impression that he’s on the cusp of unraveling the deep secrets of human behavior — and maybe the mystery of God, too, while he’s at it.

You’d never guess from the reverential atmosphere in the 500-seat theater just how polarizing Peterson has become over the past year. Days before, fliers were tacked up around his neighborhood warning the community about the dangerous scholar in their midst, accusing him of “campaigning against the human rights” of minorities and associating with the alt-right. There have been several calls for his ouster from the University of Toronto — where he’s tenured — including a recent open letter to the dean of the faculty of arts and science signed by hundreds, including many of his fellow professors. Friends refuse to comment on him lest they be associated with his image. Critics hesitate, too, for fear that his supporters will unleash their online wrath. A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.

Oliver Burkeman:

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

Rick Seltzer:

When the American Bar Association posted a letter on its website in November saying Western Michigan University’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School was not in compliance with a standard about admissions, the school slapped its accreditor with a lawsuit.

Cooley argued the ABA had acted illegally in publishing the letter, which said the law school was not in compliance with accreditation standard 501(b). That standard says law schools should only admit students who appear capable of completing legal education programs and passing the bar.

The letter to Cooley was one of more than a dozen the ABA posted about different law schools in the last 18 months, almost all citing the issue of admitting students who were not likely to succeed. Some of the other law schools promised to address the ABA’s concerns while still pointing out that their accreditation remained intact. Cooley proved more bellicose, asking a federal judge to force the accreditor to pull the letter in question from its website and withdraw copies sent to the U.S. secretary of education, the Higher Learning Commission and state regulators in Michigan and in Florida, where Cooley also has a campus.
Cooley was clearly harmed, it argued in filings made in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The ABA harmed Cooley’s finances and reputation, the law school said.
Most sharply, though, the law school seemed to fear the reaction of students.

ParentsRightsinEd :

You entrust your child to the care of your district teachers and leaders each and every time they step into the halls of the school. Teaching is not an easy profession, but can be extremely rewarding; educators supporting the efforts of parents and guardians by teaching children skills and knowledge that will hopefully help them have a healthy and happy life.

But growing up can be difficult. It can be confusing. Children are impressionable and vulnerable. We all know this and that is why we expect adults to protect them.

Matthew DeFour:

“I’m glad to see at least last year there was pretty broad-based support,” Walker said.

Immediately after Walker’s speech, Evers came on stage to hand out an award and deadpanned, “How ironic,” before responding: “Any time any governor adopts my budget, it’s a good day.”

In an interview with the State Journal afterward, Evers said he’s happy that Walker added money for K-12 schools — some $649 million in new spending over the biennium — “but the fact is for the last five years he cut $1 billion out (and) not counting inflation we’re not back to where we should be.”

“We’re still running behind,” Evers said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m running (for governor). We haven’t made up that money they took from us in the past.”

Evers, who spoke at the convention on Wednesday, said school board members told him they saw the increased education funding as either not enough, given how many districts are still proposing referendums to exceed state-imposed revenue limits, or they see it as a political ploy.

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

Megan Mcardle:

Take a look at the cost schedule for American government services, and you are likely to walk away boggled. Who are all these people working for the government? Why are they getting paid so much? And why does it seem to take so many of them to get anything done?

Look, for example, at the recent construction of the Second Avenue subway line in New York City, recently highlighted by the New York Times as “the most expensive mile of subway track on earth.” The employees singled out in that article do not work for the city, but they might as well; it is a collection of consultants, contractors and union laborers who work largely on government infrastructure projects.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my father used to be the head of the trade association for the contractors who do this sort of work in New York City; my views were formed by this perspective. The current head of that association is interviewed in the Times article.

I have a slightly different perspective on why everything costs so much, which is that in New York, there is a collision of all the things that conspire to drive up costs. Other places may have eminent domain trouble, or politically influential labor unions, or somewhat challenging geography, or laws that let community groups delay work, or multiple layers of government and government review that pile up costs, or high costs of living that drive wages through the roof, or dysfunctional government bidding processes. … New York has all of these things in something close to their terminal form. It’s actually sort of a miracle that anything ever gets built there, or that it costs less than “all the money in the world, plus 50 cents.”

The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining1 .

Another link.

Eugene Volokh:

Now no-one can confuse the video with a thoughtful argument. If empty hostility like this vanished from American life (perhaps through some magical transfusion of decency and good judgment), the nation would be a better place.

But there’s a practical reason that the First Amendment forbids expelling university students for saying such things — or for that matter saying that they hate fucking Americans or Israelis, or love Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Che or whoever else. The last several years have made clear what the preceding decades should have shown as well: Attempts to punish people for their views aren’t going to be neatly cabined just to the extreme.

Condemnations of illegal immigration, of the Black Lives Matter movement, of affirmative action, of Israel, and of a wide range of other things are routinely excoriated as racist or anti-Semitic. Some such excoriation may be factually accurate in some instances; but it means that, if supposedly racist speech can be suppressed, then any expression of such views risks being suppressed as well.

Brian Sherwood-Jones:

Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?

The battle over the design and control of urban infrastructure pits two distinct ideas against each other. One narrative of “networked urbanism” envisages the city driven by data analytics and networks controlled in part by machines. In this “smart city”, technological solutionism is rampant, with everything connected and automated. This is Googleville: a posthuman urban laboratory.

Kelly Heyboer:

The percentage of New Jersey students attending “apartheid schools” — where only between 0 and 1 percent of the pupils are white — has nearly doubled from 4.8 percent to 8.3 percent since 1989, the report concluded.

“This report shows that New Jersey has moved another substantial step toward a segregated future with no racial majority but severe racial stratification and division,” said Gary Orfield, one of the report’s authors and co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

New Jersey ranks as the sixth most segregated state in the nation for black students and the seventh most segregated for Latino students, the report said.

Related: Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Richard Rubin and Andrea Fuller:

The Juilliard School, New York’s magnet for aspiring artists, is bracing for a 1.4% tax on income from its $1 billion endowment. Three miles away, Columbia University and its $10 billion endowment will remain untouched for now.

A college-endowment tax, enacted in December in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Donald Trump, is causing confusion and frustration at schools across the country, which rely on the previously tax free-earnings when setting their budgets.

Small liberal arts colleges will likely be hit disproportionately because many have sizable endowments but limited enrollment. The tax applies only to private schools with at least 500 students and at least $500,000 of investments per student.

The change was driven by congressional Republicans, who say colleges building up large, tax-favored endowments should use more of that money to reduce tuition and support low-income students.

Schools have protested the move, saying they often use endowment earnings to provide financial aid and warning that diverting funds to pay the new tax will only make it harder to do what GOP lawmakers want.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York hopes to eventually resume letting students attend without paying tuition, a century-old tradition it abandoned under financial stress in 2014. The college, which expects to pay the tax, currently covers half-tuition for all undergraduates.

Sarah Kliff:

A child born in the United States has a 70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than kids born into other wealthy, democratic countries, a new study has found.

The research, published in the journal Health Affairs on Monday, shows that the United States lags far behind peer countries on child health outcomes. It estimates that, since 1961, America’s poor performance accounts for more than 600,000 excess child deaths — deaths that wouldn’t have happened if these kids were born into other wealthy countries.

“In all the wealthy, democratic countries we studied children are dying less often then they were 50 years ago,” Ashish Thakrar, the study’s lead author, said. “But we found that children are dying more often in the United States than in any similar country.”

:

On an individual state basis, the biggest changes in a state’s poverty rate between the two measures in each direction are: a) California’s official poverty rate of 14.5% ranked it No. 16 but the state moved up to No. 1 at 20.4% (highest state poverty rate in the US) using the SPM ( a difference of +5.9%) and b) Mississippi’s poverty rate ranked it No. 1 at 20.8% using the official measure but No. 5 at 16.9% using the SPM (a difference of -3.9%). Overall, 18 states, including California showed a greater percentage of people in poverty using the SPM, 30 states, including Mississippi, showed a lower percentage of people in poverty and two states showed no change (North Dakota and Utah).

Obviously, the reason for the increase in California’s (and 17 other states) poverty rate using the SPM is because of the state’s high cost-of-living including sky-high housing costs (median home price of $519,100) and because of high taxes and energy costs. And the decrease in Mississippi’s SPM poverty rate (and 29 other states) is because of that state’s low cost-of-living, including low housing costs (median home price of $114,400).

Betsy DeVos:

To a casual observer, a classroom today looks scarcely different than what one looked like when I entered the public policy debate thirty years ago…The vast majority of learning environments have remained the same since the industrial revolution, because they were made in its image. Think of your own experience: sit down; don’t talk; eyes front. Wait for the bell. Walk to the next class. Repeat. Students were trained for the assembly line then, and they still are today.

Our societies and economies have moved beyond the industrial era. But the data tell us education hasn’t.

The most recent Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, report, with which you are all familiar, has the U.S. ranked 23rd in reading, 25th in science and 40th in math. And, you know this too: it’s not for a lack of funding. The fact is the United States spends more per pupil than most other developed countries, many of which perform better than us in the same surveys.

Of course there have been many attempts to change the status quo. We’ve seen valiant efforts to improve education from Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives and everyone in between.

The bottom line is simple: federal education reform efforts have not worked as hoped.

That’s not a point I make lightly or joyfully. Yes, there have been some minor improvements in a few areas. But we’re far from where we need to be. We need to be honest with ourselves. The purpose of today’s conversation is to look at the past with 20/20 hindsight, examine what we have done and where it has – or hasn’t – led us.

Federico Faggin:

Computers were, at first, a decidedly unintegrated technology. They were composed of vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, inductors and mercury delay lines, and as a result were huge, expensive and power hungry. The situation improved with developments in microelectronics based on solid-state germanium transistors and diodes, which began replacing vacuum tubes in radios and phonographs, and eventually led to the first commercial transistor-based computers in 1959. That same year, the development of the planar process at Fairchild Semiconductor allowed tens of silicon transistors to be fabricated at the same time on the surface of a single-crystal silicon wafer (ten years later it would be possible to fabricate thousands of transistors). This invention was quickly followed by the commercialization of the first bipolar digital integrated circuits (ICs) in 1962, and from that point on, progress in semiconductor ICs became exponential, with the maximum number of components integrated in a silicon chip doubling every year, at least initially. But what allowed all the functions of a general-purpose computer to be integrated together was a monolithic central processing unit (CPU) — a microprocessor — and the first commercial microprocessor was born nine years later in 1971 (Fig. 1).

Ethan Epstein:

Last year, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement to great fanfare: The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history. The Confucius Institute would “help students be better equipped to succeed in an increasingly globalized world,” says Nancy Gutierrez, UNC Charlotte’s dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and “broaden the University’s outreach and support for language instruction and cultural opportunities in the Charlotte community,” according to a press release.

But the Confucius Institutes’ goals are a little less wholesome and edifying than they sound—and this is by the Chinese government’s own account. A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: “The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad,” Li Changchun said. “It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”

Robby Soave:

Last week, babe.net published an anonymous woman’s account of her date with actor/comedian Aziz Ansari, who she says pressured her into uncomfortable and unwanted sex, failing to heed her “verbal and non-verbal cues.”

In response, the internet has produced wave after wave of takes. The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan said the article was “3,000 words of revenge porn” and unfit for publication. Vox’s Anna North characterized Ansari’s behavior as common among all-too-many men, and thus worth discussing. The New York Times’s Bari Weiss wrote that if Ansari was guilty of anything, it was “not being a mind reader,” and fretted that this incident could tarnish the #MeToo movement. Reason’s own Elizabeth Nolan Brown thought both parties—as well as men and women in general—could benefit from more communication about sexual desires.

These are wildly different takes, and there are dozens more perspectives offered in The Washington Post, National Review, Jezebel, on Twitter, and elsewhere. But most of the takes have one thing in common: they explicitly reject the original article’s assertion that Aziz Ansari committed sexual assault. Ansari behaved badly, and there is much to be said about how he ignored his date’s wishes, thought only of himself, and expected sexual gratification at every turn. But he is not a rapist, most people seem to agree.

US Department of Education:

The @usedgov is now publishing a database of ALL civil rights complaints against ALL the districts/ campuses.

Strategy Session VIII: Turning the Tide: Tools to Promote Charter School Growth. Recorded at the 2017 National Summit on Education Reform on Thursday, November 30 in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, only 329 new charter schools opened across the United States in 2016, down from 640 new charters in 2013. Charter schools are still growing, but at a much slower rate than just a few years ago. Why are we seeing fewer new charter schools? What can policymakers do to ensure that new high-quality charter schools are able to open and serve families? Join this session for a conversation with researchers and state lawmakers to learn what is behind this trend and how states can address the need for more quality schools in our communities. Moderator: Neerav Kingsland, Chief Executive Officer, Hastings Fund Panelists: — Richard Corcoran, Speaker, Florida State House of Representatives — Robin Lake, Director, Center on Reinventing Public Education — Michael McShane, Ph.D., Director of National Research, EdChoice — Angela Williams, Senator, Colorado State Senate

NPR:

What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids?

That’s a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new books that arrived over the holidays.

And it’s a question that inspired a team of researchers to set up a study. Specifically, they wondered how the lessons varied from storybooks of one country to another.

For a taste of their findings, take a typical book in China: The Cat That Eats Letters.

Ostensibly it’s about a cat that has an appetite for sloppy letters — “written too large or too small, or if the letter is missing a stroke,” explains one of the researchers, psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside. “So the only way children can stop their letters from being eaten is to write really carefully and practice every day.”

But the underlying point is clear: “This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level,” says Cheung. And that idea, she says, is a core tenet of Chinese culture.

Karen Rivedal:

A new initiative billed as bringing real-world context to high school learning is generating solid interest from eighth-graders in the Madison School District looking to join the program’s second year as freshmen next fall.

Through Thursday, 482 students had applied to be in the second cohort of the Personalized Pathways program, which is finishing its first semester Friday with 423 ninth-graders across all four main high schools.

Of the new applicants, 125 plan to attend East High School, 148 at La Follette, 124 at Memorial and 85 at West. Those numbers could change over the coming months, but interest appears to be similar to last January, when 518 initially applied, or about 24 percent to 34 percent of each school’s projected freshman class at that time.

Knight Foundation:

More than eight in 10 U.S. adults believe the news media are critical or very important to our democracy. They see the most important roles played by the media as making sure Americans have the knowledge they need to be informed about public affairs and holding leaders accountable for their actions.

At the same time, Americans are more likely to say the media perform these roles poorly than to say they are performing them well.
The public divides evenly on the question of who is primarily responsible for ensuring people have an accurate and politically balanced understanding of the news — 48% say the news media and 48% say individuals themselves.

Brandon Formby and Patrick Svitek:

Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday unveiled a plan to “rein in skyrocketing property taxes” in Texas, looking to lay down a marker in a debate that dominated the legislative sessions last year and promises to remain front and center through the 2018 primaries and his re-election campaign.

“Enough is enough,” Abbott said at a news conference flanked by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and several lawmakers. “Texans are fed up with property taxes being raised with impunity. They are tired of endless government spending while honest, hard-working people struggle just to keep up with paying their tax bills. We can no longer sit idly by while homeowners are reduced to tenants of their very own property with taxing authorities playing the role of landlord.”

A key tenet of Abbott’s proposal is to prevent cities, counties and school districts from collecting more than 2.5 percent more in property tax revenue than they did in the previous year without voter approval. That’s a far lower cap than controversial thresholds that twice failed to make it through the Legislature last year. And his plan would require that two-thirds of voters — well beyond a simple majority — approve any increase above that 2.5 percent threshold.

Jonathan Adler:

This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects the long-run outcomes of students. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data linked to each respondent’s state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds. Our estimates suggest that teacher collective bargaining worsens the future labor market outcomes of students: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces earnings by $800 (or 2%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.50 hours per week. The earnings estimate indicates that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $199.6 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation, as well as reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which workers sort. The effects are driven by men and nonwhites, who experience larger relative declines in long-run outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining leads to sizable reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults. Taken together, our results suggest laws that support collective bargaining for teachers have adverse long-term labor market consequences for students.

Related:

Act 10.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Peter Coy:

Last April, Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities for students from families that earn up to $125,000 per year. It would also make community college tuition-free for everyone. Good idea or bad?

Advocates of lowering the barriers to college say doing so helps both the students and the U.S. economy. Sanders, one of 21 co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate and House, noted that Germany, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden already have tuition-free public colleges and universities. The U.S. must do the same, he said in a statement, “if we are to succeed in a highly competitive global economy and have the best-educated workforce in the world.”

The evidence of the benefits of a higher education seems indisputable: People with a bachelor’s degree earn 73 percent more than those with a high school diploma on average, up from a 50 percent advantage in the late 1970s. It stands to reason that, as computers and robots get more powerful, humans will have to be more educated to master them.

Marissa Evans:

Letha Stokes has a “very, very heavy heart” since Medical Arts Hospital ended its labor and delivery services on Dec. 6.

The hospital CEO said it took three years of studying, penny pinching and what-ifs before she and the hospital board of directors decided the Lamesa-based facility in northwest Texas should not deliver babies anymore.

Until recently, Medical Arts Hospital delivered an average of 100 babies per year, the majority of them covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care insurer for the very poor. But the hospital also lost an estimated $500,000 a year due to the program’s low reimbursement rates. That wasn’t sustainable.

Stokes said ending deliveries means Medical Arts’ patients will have to drive 40 to 60 extra miles to hospitals in places like Seminole, Snyder or Lubbock.

“This was a very difficult decision,” Stokes said. “… There is a risk either way, if you deliver babies or if you don’t deliver babies.”

Zaria Gorvett:

It was the summer of 1860 and Eadweard Muybridge was running low on books. This was somewhat problematic, since he was a bookseller. He handed his San Francisco shop over to his brother and set off on a stagecoach to buy supplies. Little did he know, he was about to change the world forever.

He was some way into his journey, in north-eastern Texas, when the coach ran into trouble. The driver cracked his whip and the horses broke into a run, leading the coach surging down a steep mountain road. Eventually it veered off and into a tree. Muybridge was catapulted into the air and cracked his head on a boulder.

Garrett Epps:

If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can the citizen be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow?

Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional?

Deyshia Hargrave, meet Fane Lozman. You need to follow his case.

Hargrave is a language arts teacher in Kaplan, Louisana. She was arrested Monday after she questioned school-district policy during public comment at a school board meeting.

She asked why the superintendent of schools was receiving a five-figure raise when local teachers had not had a permanent pay increase in a decade. As she was speaking, the school-board president slammed his gavel, and a police officer told her to leave. She left, but once she went into the hall, the officer took her to the ground, handcuffed her, and arrested her for “remaining after having been forbidden” and “resisting an officer.”

Mallory Locklear:

India’s government Aadhaar database, which holds personal information of over one billion Indian citizens, was allegedly breached, BuzzFeed News reports. Along with demographic info, the database also contains biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans. Indian publication The Tribune reported earlier today that it was able to access any registered citizen’s demographics after it was granted admin access by an anonymous individual. In just 20 minutes, a reporter was given an administrator ID and a password after contacting the individual through WhatsApp and transferring what amounted to less than $8. Afterwards, the reporter was able to plug in anyone’s Aadhaar number and get their name, address, postal code, photo, phone number and email. For an additional $5, the reporter was also able to get software that allowed them to print an Aadhaar card with anyone’s number.

Zeynep Tufekci :

For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the news­paper, pressure the broad­cast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head.

This actually happened once in Turkey. It was the spring of 1960, and a group of military officers had just seized control of the government and the national media, imposing an information blackout to suppress the coordination of any threats to their coup. But inconveniently for the conspirators, a highly anticipated soccer game between Turkey and Scotland was scheduled to take place in the capital two weeks after their takeover. Matches like this were broadcast live on national radio, with an announcer calling the game, play by play. People all across Turkey would huddle around their sets, cheering on the national team.

Canceling the match was too risky for the junta; doing so might incite a protest. But what if the announcer said something political on live radio? A single remark could tip the country into chaos. So the officers came up with the obvious solution: They kept several guns trained on the announcer for the entire 2 hours and 45 minutes of the live broadcast.

Thales:

Many of my readers may be aware of the fact that, though I live in Florida, I’m pretty well-traveled. My father was in the military, and as a military brat I’ve lived in many different parts of the country, and been to almost all the lower 48 states at some point or another. We spent a couple years in Oregon when I was a teenager, and even back then the law prohibiting citizens from pumping their own gas was in effect. It was one of the stranger features of Oregon.

Now the partial repeal of this law, which only applies to rural areas, has some Oregon residents in a panic. Why, people may just have to get out and pump their own gas! The terror! The horror! I have to wonder if Democrats will get up on podium and tell us that people will die! This is another feature of that parallel (or is it orthagonal?) universe libs live in. Poe’s law may apply to the comments below, but it’s very hard to tell these days.

John McCarthy:

Florida Preparatory Academy has been sold to a Chinese education company making its first foray into the United States. Newopen USA, a subsidiary of the Chongqing, China-based Newopen Group, is the new owner of the private school, which opened as Florida Air Academy in Melbourne in 1961. Newopen is planning to create a network of schools throughout the country.

Morris P. Fiorina:

No election in recent decades has seen so much attention paid to the “working class.” Accelerating with the splintering of the Democratic Party in the mid-to-late 1960s, the importance of social class as an electoral cleavage slipped behind cleavages based on race and ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. But for many commentators, the 2016 election witnessed a revolt of the masses. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni writes, “The arc of this election has been one of disillusionment, bending toward disarray. Trump’s initial window of opportunity was so many Americans’ belief that Washington, Wall Street and the media had been irredeemably corrupted by self-interested elites.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes about those whom she calls the “protected”: “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully. . . . [The protected] are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers.”

Anti-elitism has a long history in the United States, of course, more so than in some European countries like Britain where the “upper” classes historically had been accorded “deference.” In the late nineteenth-century populist era, anti-elitism focused on economic elites—the trusts, the moneyed interests, those who, in presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan’s words, “would crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” And it was only a short move from there to an attack on the politicians who were controlled by the economic elites.

Richard Vedder:

Nearly a decade ago, my then colleague Andrew Gillen suggested that one could say that higher education was in a bit of a “bubble”: over-exuberant “investors” in human capital, better known as students, were potentially misallocating their resources, becoming increasingly underemployed after graduation, leading to adverse financial consequences. In the private sector, bubbles, like those in the housing or stock markets, usually lead to “crashes” and sharp falls in prices along with diminished volumes of activity. In higher education, massive government subsidies mute the decline in volume (enrollment) and prevent big price (tuition fee) crashes, but some sort of correction is nonetheless observable.

Lots of signs show the bursting of the bubble is underway. Enrollments are down, lower today than six years ago –a first decline of that duration in modern peacetime American history (including the Great Depression). Tuition increases are moderating and a few colleges are even starting to cut published tuition fees (sticker prices). Even some prestigious schools such as Oberlin College are having financial problems because their freshman class is smaller than anticipated. Student loan delinquency is high and rising, remarkable since the economy has been having the best performance in years, with real output growing at over a three percent annual rate and the unemployment rate at a very low 4.1 percent.

Lars Silberbauer:

Meitu was number 17 on Time Magazine’s list of ”Best apps in 2017”. Since then, they have grown their user base not just in China, but also in the US. Most recently, they did the largest IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange in the last 15 years, when they went public about a year ago.
 
 So what is Meitu and what unique value do they bring?
 I met with Peter Xu who’s Head of Branding at Meitu and his wording of the answer was:
 
 ”There’s an old Chinese saying that “Everyone has the heart of pursuing beautiful things & self-images!” The core essence of the Meitu company & its total portfolio has been consistently centered on “Beauty”.
 
 With its software/hardware, online/offline services, utility/social apps, Meitu aims to help various users become more beautiful from the digital to the real world, by leveraging beauty related technology (Visual A.I & A.R etc.) and cross-over partnership with beauty know-how.

Darius Foroux:

And waiting is one of the hardest things in life. But if you take a close look around you, you see many examples of people who waited for the right opportunity.

Take all the investors who bought stocks and real estate during the financial crisis that started in 2008. That recession lasted several years. Recently, I spoke to someone who invested a big chunk of his assets in the stock market between 2009 and 2011.

He saved most of his money in the years that led to the crisis. Not because he predicted the global financial crisis that was sparked by subprime mortgages, but because he simply didn’t know what to do. So he spent his time learning about investing.

He also didn’t follow the market. Instead, he saved his money — and wasn’t tempted to invest it just because “the economy is great.”

Steve Crandall:

By 1960 a program was developed that emphasized understanding rather than memorization and created films, inexpensive laboratory kit, experiments and teaching material to provide hands-on experience and thinking. Topics were organized to underscore overarching conservation principals. Almost overnight high school physics teaching had been revolutionized. Spurred by the success of the PSSC similar programs were created and successfully implemented for chemistry and biology. Mathematicians had their own approach, They’d focus on the beauty of math and get away from the mindless arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry and algebra that had been taught since the late 19th century. While the science programs succeeded, the new math failed – it made too much of a leap. Parents and teachers alike fought and quickly killed it.

Science teaching, if the metric is the supply of Ph.Ds. in science, is too successful. There simply aren’t enough research jobs to match supply and the number of posts in the US is shrinking. One might argue that a Ph.D. in physics is useful in other areas – I’ve been told physicists think differently and the same is probably true for all of the physical sciences – but if anything the pipeline is working .

Jack Schneider

Pat Schneider:

A home-schooled child who started community college at age 11, Nepper said she hopes people will take the example from science of being willing to fail and move on to the next strategy and apply it to other areas of their lives.

Nepper’s phenomenal academic progress was captured along the way by reporters in Wilmington, North Carolina, but news of the latest milestone quickly spread much more widely on the internet. “I’ve had hundreds of people following me on Twitter and Instagram,” she said.

At UW-Madison, her age kept her out the “microbrewery scene” the first two years she was on campus, but otherwise had little impact, Nepper said.

The Economist:

Harry Prevor :

In early 1959, John McCarthy wrote a little paper that defined one of the first ever programming languages, LISP. In just nine simple functions (QUOTE, ATOM, EQ, CAR, CDR, CONS, COND, LAMBDA, LABEL), he created the basis from which all LISP-like languages are still founded upon today, including Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, and (debatably) even JavaScript. The language was so succinct that modern-day programmer orlp was able to fully implement an interpreter for it in Python in just 770 bytes.

The Economist:

AT THE gates of Santa Monica College, in Los Angeles, a young man with a skateboard is hanging out near a group of people who are smoking marijuana in view of the campus police. His head is clouded, too—but with worry, not weed. He frets about his student loans and the difficulty of finding a job, even fearing that he might end up homeless. “Not to sound intense,” he adds, but robots are taking work from humans. He neither smokes nor drinks much. The stigma against such things is stronger than it was for his parents’ generation, he explains.

Young people are indeed behaving and thinking differently from previous cohorts at the same age. These shifts can be seen in almost every rich country, from America to the Netherlands to South Korea. Some have been under way for many years, but they have accelerated in the past few. Not all of them are benign.

Catherine Besteman and Stephanie Savell :

As we enter the 17th year of the United States’ “war on terror,” it is both appropriate, and necessary, to take stock of where our troops are located and for what purpose. The deaths of U.S. soldiers this fall in Niger were a stark reminder that much of the American public, and even many of our country’s lawmakers, aren’t exactly sure what the war on terror looks like, much less where many of our other military operations are located. According to a new map published this week by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the U.S. is waging this war on terror in 76 countries – or more simply put, 40 percent of the countries on this planet.

Stephanie Marsh:

Jody Day is giving a TEDx talk to a room full of people against a backdrop of signposts she has chosen for the occasion: “Crazy cat woman”, “Witch”, “Hag”, “Spinster”, “Career woman”. “What comes to mind when you see those words?” she asks the audience. They shift uneasily. Gently, she answers her own question: “All of them are terms used for childless women … I’m a childless woman. And I’m here to tell you about my tribe – those one in five women without children hidden in plain sight all around you.”

Day is involuntarily childless. She remembers the moment she realised she was definitely never going to be a mother. It was February 2009 and, at 44-and-a-half, she had left a bad long-term relationship and moved into a grotty London flat. “I was standing by the window, watching the rain make dusty tracks down the glass, when the traffic in the street below seemed to go silent, as if I’d put it on ‘mute’. In that moment, I became acutely aware of myself, almost as if I were an observer of the scene from outside my body. And then it came to me: it’s over. I’m never going to have a baby.”

We now know that 20% of British women born, like Day, in the 1960s, turned 45 without having a child. The number is double that of their mother’s generation – we’ll have to wait for the next census in 2021 to find out whether the numbers rose or fell for women born in the 70s and 80s (and whether or not government statisticians revise the fertility cutoff point – the age at which it is assumed women will stop having children – to extend beyond 45). And yet, on that February afternoon eight years ago, Day could find nothing on the internet or in books about her painful, irreversible situation. When she typed “childless woman” into any search engine, she was directed to sites run by women who had elected to be “child-free” – “some of them saying really hateful things about how awful kids were”. She knew no one like her, and felt alone and frightened. There followed “four years of hell”: “My personality completely changed. There were loads of things I couldn’t deal with. I withdrew from all my relationships. I saw doctors, therapists – nobody knew what the matter with me was.”

Adam Ashton:

Gov. Jerry Brown this week predicted that his 2012 pension law will survive union challenges in court and blow a hole in the so-called “California rule” that has restricted changes to public employee retirement plans for half a century.

“When the next recession comes around, the governor will have the option of considering pension cutbacks for the first time in a long time,” Brown said at a news conference this week where he unveiled his 2018-19 budget plan.

Brown has been working to strike out the California rule, a precedent dating back to the 1950s that holds public agencies cannot reduce pension promises without offering workers new incentives to offset the loss of retirement income.

His office in November replaced the attorney general’s office in defending his pension law against a challenge filed by the state firefighter union. The union argues that the pension law denied benefits to employees who were promised them, including the ability to purchase “air time” that they could use to enhance their pensions upon retirement.

Julian Assange:

Schmidt was a good foil. A late-fiftysomething, squint-eyed behind owlish spectacles, managerially dressed—Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows.
For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department microlanguage of his companions.9 He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.

I found Cohen a good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and Rhodes scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background, Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official Washington. Malcomson, older, was more pensive, his input thoughtful and generous. Shields was quiet for much of the conversation, taking notes, humoring the bigger egos around the table while she got on with the real work.

As the interviewee I was expected to do most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was out of my comfort zone and I liked it. We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work. That was the end of it, or so I thought.

Sam Anderson:

A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.

Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.

Christian Smith:

have had nearly enough bullshit. The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity.

Even worse, the accumulated effects of all the academic BS are contributing to this country’s disastrous political condition and, ultimately, putting at risk the very viability and character of decent civilization. What do I mean by BS?

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

Anders Kravis.

Sandor Farkar:

A former dean is suing the University of Missouri School of Medicine for wrongful termination, alleging that she was fired because of her race and skepticism of certain diversity initiatives.

Dr. Rachel Brown, former associate dean of recruitment, admission, and student life at MU’s medical school, filed a lawsuit against her former employer on December 18 in which she claims that race was a “contributing factor” in her termination.

Joel Kotkin:

The third tech turning, now in its infancy, promises greater dispersion to other markets, some with strong tech backgrounds, some with far less. In the last two years, according to numbers for the country’s 53 largest metros compiled by Praxis Strategy Group’s Mark Schill based on federal data and EMSI’s fourth-quarter 2017 data set, the STEM growth leader has been Orlando, at 8%, three times the national average. Next are San Francisco and Charlotte (each at 7%); Grand Rapids, Michigan (6%); and then Salt Lake City, Tampa, Seattle, Raleigh, Miami and Las Vegas (5%).

Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll:

Over all, the researchers found that American personal health spending grew by about $930 billion between 1996 and 2013, from $1.2 trillion to $2.1 trillion (amounts adjusted for inflation). This was a huge increase, far outpacing overall economic growth. The health sector grew at a 4 percent annual rate, while the overall economy grew at a 2.4 percent rate.

You’d expect some growth in health care spending over this span from the increase in population size and the aging of the population. But that explains less than half of the spending growth. After accounting for those kinds of demographic factors, which we can do very little about, health spending still grew by about $574 billion from 1996 to 2013.

Did the increasing sickness in the American population explain much of the rest of the growth in spending? Nope. Measured by how much we spend, we’ve actually gotten a bit healthier. Change in health status was associated with a decrease in health spending — 2.4 percent — not an increase. A great deal of this decrease can be attributed to factors related to cardiovascular diseases, which were associated with about a 20 percent reduction in spending.

This could be a result of greater use of statins for cholesterol or reduced smoking rates, though the study didn’t point to specific causes. On the other hand, increases in diabetes and low back and neck pain were associated with spending growth, but not enough to offset the decrease from cardiovascular and other diseases.

Abigail Becker:

On Tuesday, the Madison School Board and the City Council both voted to sign a contract approving the continued use of educational resource officers in the city’s four high schools.

The authorization approves a three-year contract for EROs, with a provision to opt-out after two years. Tuesday’s decision follows last week’s stalemate between the Board of Estimates and the Madison School Board over the length of the opt-out clause. The Madison School Board initially voted to approve an option to opt-out of the contract after 18 months, with the city preferring the two-year option.

School Board Treasurer TJ Mertz viewed the decision as a necessary compromise between the city and the School Board.

Related: Gangs and School Violence Forum.

Amber Walker:

Several groups assembled at the state Capitol on Thursday to speak out against a bill that would require police departments to inform school administrators if a student is taken into custody for a felony or violent misdemeanor.

The bill would also give teachers the right to appeal directly to the school board if school administrators refuse to suspend a student, and terminate their teaching contracts without penalty if they are physically assaulted on the job.

Students, parents and representatives from the Madison School Board, Wisconsin Family Ties, Disability Rights Wisconsin and Kids Forward organized a press conference before the public hearing on Assembly Bill 693.

Related: Gangs and School Violence forum.

Mike Scutar:

In a recent post looking at Kenneth Ricci’s $100 million gift to the University of Notre Dame, I argued that gifts like Ricci’s reward schools that have failed to control tuition costs, and that while more financial aid is nice, it doesn’t help students who are expected to pay full freight—roughly $300,000 at Notre Dame—or something close to it.

Then I read Matt Taibbi’s recent piece in Rolling Stone, titled “The Great College Loan Swindle.” In an article chock full of alarming facts and anecdotes, this nugget regarding the University of Wisconsin (UW) stood out:

UW raised tuition by 5.5 percent six years in a row after 2007. The school blamed stresses from the financial crisis and decreased state aid. But when pressed during a state committee hearing in 2013 about the university’s finances, UW system president Kevin Reilly admitted they held $648 million in reserve, including $414 million in tuition payments. This was excess hidey-hole cash the school was sitting on, separate and distinct from, say, an endowment fund.

Ni Dandan:

When Li Mengyuan walked out of the labor arbitration office on a Monday in October, the 32-year-old didn’t feel like a winner — even though the dispute with her former employer over maternity benefits had been decided in her favor.

Now with a 1-year-old in tow, Li belongs to a group that Chinese companies are increasingly reluctant to employ: new moms. “I have to look for another job, and potential employers might be concerned about my new mother status, and whether I’m considering a second child,” Li told Sixth Tone.

In the past two decades, China has strengthened its employment protections for new mothers, prohibiting companies from terminating contracts or reducing salaries of employees who take time off to get married or have children. Employers are also required to provide a maternity allowance that varies based on salary, as well as 98 days of maternity leave — in accordance with International Labor Organization (ILO) standards — though most local governments stipulate 128 days of leave.

Sarah Kliff:

A child born in the United States has a 70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than kids born into other wealthy, democratic countries, a new study has found.

The research, published in the journal Health Affairs on Monday, shows that the United States lags far behind peer countries on child health outcomes. It estimates that, since 1961, America’s poor performance accounts for more than 600,000 excess child deaths — deaths that wouldn’t have happened if these kids were born into other wealthy countries.

“In all the wealthy, democratic countries we studied children are dying less often then they were 50 years ago,” Ashish Thakrar, the study’s lead author, said. “But we found that children are dying more often in the United States than in any similar country.”

Andrew Dowd:

A pair of Eau Claire County supervisors want Wisconsin law changed so local governments can draw from state-run retirement accounts of public employees who are convicted of stealing taxpayer money.

Supervisors Mark Beckfield and Steve Chilson are drafting a resolution that will ask state legislators for the ability to put a lien on specific pensions run through the Wisconsin Retirement System in situations where public employees have been found guilty of embezzling.

Annysa Johnson:

The bill’s author, Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du Lac), defended the measure, saying he was open to amendments but that something has to be done about the rise in assaults and threats against teachers. He blamed what he described as the “social justice agenda” in some schools, saying it does not hold students accountable for their negative behavior.

“It’s an unfortunate reality that negative behavior without consequences promotes more negative behavior,” Thiesfeldt said. “What truly grows the school to prison pipeline is the current trend toward minimizing serious negative behavior and the coddling of children with no serious consequences,”

Thiesfeldt’s wide-ranging bill would, among other things:

Related: Gangs and school violence Forum.

Nanette Asimov:

California should create a public college entirely online to help millions of working adults gain the skills they need to work in the new economy and raise their pay, Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday as part of the $132 billion state budget he proposed for 2018-19.

Brown, who has long urged the California State University and University of California to rely more on online courses to reduce costs and raise graduation rates — and has often been frustrated in the process — has now turned to a method he believes will be more successful: a community college dedicated to helping adults without a college degree improve their job prospects that would even enable students to take classes t

Rod Dreher:

There’s another paradox in your analysis: that the more liberalism liberates us as individuals, the more dependent it makes us on the state. What do you mean?

The political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel once wrote that “state of nature” scenarios were obviously the imaginings of “childless men who had forgotten their own childhood.” He meant that the imaginary version of our true “nature” as radically individuated selves is in fact no-where to be found as our “natural” condition. We are first and foremost by nature relational creatures. And yet, we see a different reality now coming into being, not as the result of our “natural” condition, but through the efforts of a massive architecture that has been erected to make possible human lives increasingly lived in disconnection from permanent relations and absent constitutive cultural forms of membership and belonging.

The state becomes the main creator and supporter of this condition. A range of policies – economic, social and political – have as their aim the realization of this creature once only imagined in the state of nature, but now increasingly the default human of modern political and social world. The best representation of this phenomenon is probably found in the Obama campaign ad, “The Life of Julia,” which portrays the lifespan of a woman, from childhood to old age, whose complete independence was the result of a slew of government programs. She has no apparent relationships with other human beings (she seems to have a child for a brief span, but that nameless little person is taken away on a yellow school bus and never reappears), and the point of the ad is that her complete freedom is the result of the total lack of reliance upon any other particular human being.

The result of this liberation from particular people, as Tocqueville predicted, would be a growing reliance upon the state. This reliance, in fact, at first seems less oppressive than the bonds of more traditional societies, because we are freed from particular obligations. People expect not to take care of their elderly parents, and so we support health care that includes long-term elderly care that allows us the liberty not to assume the duty that had been the expectation of children in every civilization before ours. And the more the various constitutive institutions are weakened, the more the state becomes the only remedy for our various needs.

Thus, the irony: individualism and statism are not opposites, but grow together in tandem. In our daily partisan politics, we have tended to pit individualism against statism – Ayn Rand against Karl Marx – with conservatives claiming to be individualists and progressives claiming to support an expansive state. But what we have witnessed is the simultaneous growth of both the state and the rise of individualism, not as opposites, but as necessary partners. The world has never seen a more individualistic society nor a more encompassing state. The state has empowered itself by claiming to empower the individual. The practical effect is to leave the populace disempowered amid our liberty, along with a felt sense of inability to control or influence the state, the economy, and much of our own fates.

Joel Kotkin:

Propped up by media idolatry, California is moving from denial to delusion. Case in point: A recent AP story claimed that the state “flush with cash from an expanding economy” would consider spending an additional billion dollars on health care for the undocumented, as well as a raft of new subsidies for housing and the working poor.

All this wishful thinking and noble intentions ignores a slowing state economy, and a structural deficit, keyed largely to state worker pensions, that may now be headed towards a trillion dollars. Perhaps the widely celebrated, although poorly distributed “good times” of the past few years, have clouded Sacramento’s judgement.

Jerry Brown, repeatedly lionized in the national press, finally leaves office after next year, he will likely leave his successor both a totally out of control legislature and looming fiscal crisis. Brown’s replacement will also have to deal with a state that, according to the Social Science Research Council, suffers the greatest income inequality in the nation and the third worst economic environment for middle class families. Worse yet — upwards of one-third of the state population subsists near or in poverty.

C hris Lydgate, Nick Budnick:

It’s past midnight. Over the whump of the wipers and the screech of the fan belt, we lurch through the side streets of Southeast Portland in a battered white van, double-checking our toolkit: flashlight, binoculars, duct tape, scissors, watch caps, rawhide gloves, vinyl gloves, latex gloves, trash bags, 30-gallon can, tarpaulins, Sharpie, notebook–notebook?

Well, yes. Technically, this is a journalistic exercise–at least, that’s what we keep telling ourselves. We’re upholding our sacred trust as representatives of the Fourth Estate. Comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable.Pushing the reportorial envelope–by liberating the trash of Portland’s top brass.

We didn’t dream up this idea on our own. We got our inspiration from the Portland police.

Back in March, the police swiped the trash of fellow officer Gina Hoesly. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t ask for a search warrant. They just grabbed it. Their sordid haul, which included a bloody tampon, became the basis for drug charges against her (see “Gross Violation,” below).

Kristen Brown:

In Saudi Arabia, if you’re planning to tie the knot, there’s a step you must go through that doesn’t happen anywhere else: You have to get a test for genetic disease. Hereditary blood diseases like sickle cell and beta thalassemia are prevalent in this part of the world, where marriage between cousins is common. A new awareness campaign around genetic disorders aims to reduce the spread of these illnesses.

Saudi Arabia made premarital screening and genetic risk assessment mandatory over a decade ago, hoping that if a couple found out they were at high risk of passing on a hereditary disease to their offspring, they would reevaluate their match. Thousands of couples have called off marriages after finding they were “genetically incompatible.” But just knowing their test results, it turns out, has not been enough. Many couples at risk of passing on genetic diseases go ahead and get married, with the expectation that they will have children.

US Commission on Civil Rights:

On behalf of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (“the Commission”), I am pleased to transmit our briefing report, Public Education Funding Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation. The report is also available in full on the Commission’s website at www.usccr.gov.

The report examines the funding of K-12 education and how the inequitable distribution of these funds negatively impacts the educational opportunities of low-income students and students of color.

The majority of the Commission voted for key findings including that quality education is critical to prepare students to be contributing members of a democratic society and competitive workers in a global economy. The Commission majority also found that vast funding inequities in our state public education systems factor significantly in rendering the education available to millions of American public school students profoundly unequal.
The Commission majority found that many students in the U.S. living in segregated neighborhoods and concentrations of poverty do not have access to high-quality schools simply because of where they live, and that there is potential for housing policy to help provide better educational opportunities for these students. Low-income students and students of color are often relegated to low-quality school facilities that lack equitable access to teachers, instructional materials, technology and technology support, critical facilities, and physical maintenance. These absences can negatively impact a student’s health and ability to be attentive and can exacerbate existing inequities in student outcomes.
As data on school spending become more accurate, some scholars believe there is concrete empirical evidence that funding is critical to positive student outcomes.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student.

He Huifeng:

China’s online lending boom has sent a steady stream of new clients to Guangzhou lawyer Luo Aiping in recent months: the parents and siblings of young men trapped or ruined by usurious debts.

“These young men, the son or the brother in a family, are actually subprime borrowers with little in the way of savings and no assets,” Luo said. “They’ve recently been encouraged to access a dizzying array of online microcredit platforms to fund their own consumption and have cared little about the exorbitant interest rates.

Wall Street Journal:

Marquette is a Jesuit university in Milwaukee. Which is appropriate, because jesuitical is the word that fits its explanation for firing a tenured political science professor who defended a student who was badly treated by an intolerant graduate instructor.

The sacked professor is John McAdams, who in 2014 wrote a blog post criticizing by name Cheryl Abbate, who taught a course on ethics. Ms. Abbate had told a student he could not express his disagreement with same-sex marriage in her ethics class because it was “homophobic” and on that issue there could be no debate.

In his post on the incident, Mr. McAdams made no judgment on same-sex marriage. But he noted that liberals are inclined to deem views they disagree with as offensive and then use that to shut down debate. The story went national.

Marquette officials took action—against Mr. McAdams. He was blamed for the hate mail that Ms. Abbate received after he named her, even though there’s no evidence he was part of any of it. Marquette President Michael Lovell gave him an ultimatum: apologize or be suspended without pay indefinitely. Mr. McAdams refused to apologize and has been effectively fired.

He’s also suing, and last May a Wisconsin trial court backed the university’s dismissal. But Mr. McAdams has appealed and wants to go straight to the state Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Liberty and Law, which has taken his case, says the firing violates Mr. McAdams’s contract with Marquette, which promises freedom from threats of dismissal over constitutional rights such as free speech.

Merrit Kennedy:

A Louisiana teacher questioned whether the superintendent should receive a raise. Then, she was ushered out of a school board meeting and handcuffed.

The dramatic arrest on Monday — which was caught on video — has drawn outrage in the U.S. and beyond. The Vermilion Parish School Board offices were locked down on Tuesday after receiving threats, board president Anthony Fontana told The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La.

Mike Antonucci:

The financial analysts at DQYDJ.com specialize in examining personal income and net worth. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, they determined that for an individual to reside in the top 1% of pre-tax income, he or she needed to have earned $300,800 in 2016.

I reviewed 2016 salary information in U.S. Department of Labor financial disclosure reports for both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, taking care to include only gross wages and taxable allowances in my computations.

NEA President Lily Eskelsen García ($317,826) and Executive Director John Stocks ($355,721) easily cleared the threshold, as did AFT President Randi Weingarten ($472,197), Secretary-Treasurer Lorretta Johnson ($359,584), and Executive Vice President Mary Cathryn Ricker ($325,314).

Carolyn Johnson:

A landmark gene therapy to treat a rare, inherited form of blindness will cost $850,000 — a price tag so daunting that its maker will offer health insurers partial rebates if the drug doesn’t work and is seeking to pilot an installment payment option.

The drug, called Luxturna, is the realization of a long-sought scientific dream: The one-time treatment corrects a faulty gene to improve vision, allowing patients to see the stars or their parents’ faces. Only 1,000 to 2,000 people in the United States are thought to have deteriorating vision caused by this errant gene, called RPE65, but Luxturna is widely expected to be the first in a wave of cutting-edge treatments that are targeted at fixing the causes of a wide range of genetic diseases — while also raising difficult questions about how to pay for them.