Tom Coburn:

Yet despite their numbers, none of them is addressing in a meaningful way the greatest threat to our republic: our gigantic and rapidly growing national debt. America’s cumulative borrowing is rapidly approaching $20 trillion, while the federal government’s unfunded liabilities (future expenditures minus future tax revenue) now exceed a whopping $127 trillion — better than $1.1 million per taxpayer.

That’s not merely unsustainable; it’s suicidal.

Following a similarly risky path, Greece has now defaulted on its obligations, sending a shock wave through financial markets around the world. This was a crisis that could have been avoided through sound fiscal policy, but the Greek government has for years lacked the political will to do what it takes to secure that nation’s financial health. The nightly news showcases the unfolding Greek tragedy as though it were another TV reality show. A country on the verge of collapse, full steam ahead on a similar trajectory as the American economy — and journalists are largely silent.

Jeff Gerth:

At issue in the court case is a rule established at the program’s inception that requires providers to set rates for schools and libraries at the lowest prices offered to comparable customers. The theory was that bargain rates would help schools in less-wealthy areas provide their students with access to the Web.

An investigation in 2012 by ProPublica found that the preferential pricing rule had been widely neglected by AT&T and the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program. The result was that many schools were paying more than the program’s framers envisioned, draining the federal fund and limiting the reach of the subsidies.

AT&T said then, and reaffirmed in a recent email to ProPublica, that it complies with the requirement that it charge such customers what is known as the “lowest corresponding price.”

Heath, whose consulting work involves helping school districts obtain refunds from telecom overcharges, first sued Wisconsin Bell, a unit of AT&T, in 2008, alleging that the company routinely withheld information about the available lower rates from public school and library customers and billed them at higher levels. He filed it as a whistleblower case, meaning he would secure a percentage of any damages if Wisconsin Bell were found liable or reached a monetary settlement.

While that case made its way through the court system, Heath in 2011 filed another whistleblower lawsuit in Washington against AT&T and 19 of its subsidiaries for allegedly defrauding E-Rate from 1997 to 2009.

Jessy Irwin:

The story mentions that this a reaction to the industry’s attempt to self-regulate with a privacy pledge this past October, and that the legislation which will be similar to California’s SOPIPA, which prohibits targeting students with online marketing and advertising, selling student information, profiling students based on data collected, and requiring companies to put security measures in place to protect student data. (While security measures are required to protect student data, SOPIPA set no bare minimum security standards for education technology companies, and did not require companies to disclose their security measures to users.)

Jane Ford-Stewart:

Fewer than half of underclassmen at the two high schools here said they felt safe at school in their responses to voluntary annual youth risk behavior surveys taken during the school year that just ended.

The 48.4 percent who said they feel safe is significantly lower than the 58.4 percent from the year before who responded that they felt safe.

The survey results also show that more than 28 percent of respondents said violence is a problem at their schools, and nearly 14 percent reported being in a physical fight at school. The percentage of respondents in fights is up a bit from the year before while far fewer students than the previous year felt that violence is a problem.
Suspensions up, too

In addition to the survey, district information shows that two of the four intermediate schools reported many more suspensions for all causes last year than the year before. Fighting and threatening behavior were the two major reasons for the increases, Daniel Weast, director of student services, told the West Allis-West Milwaukee School Board last week.

The intermediate schools seeing the signficant increases were Frank Lloyd Wright and West Milwaukee, with both still well below their 10-year highs in the number of suspensions.

John K. Wilson:

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of educational policy and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is under fire for tweeting to some incoming freshman an article about the budget cuts and attacks on tenure at her institution. The campus College Republicans started a campaign denouncing her tweets as “disgusting and repulsive” and declared, “The College Republicans of UW-Madison call on the University of Wisconsin-Madison to address the harassment of these future Badgers on Twitter.”

This is a disturbing reaction: engaging in a conversation or political debate on Twitter is not even remotely close to harassment. The fact that the College Republicans describe it as “harassment” (they replace this with the term “out-of-line actions” in their formal press release) indicates that they think it is deserving of punishment. We need to reject the very stupid notion that being exposed to an idea you disagree with is a form of “harassment.”

Katharine Hall, Dubravka Kapa:

In the fall of 2012, Concordia University Libraries started planning for renovations which would result in the increase of study spaces in one of its two libraries and the reduction at the other. In order to maximize the functionality of the reduced study space footprint, a survey and focus groups were used to better understand the specific space needs of the library’s campus community. The study revealed differences in the use of the library among the respondents from different programs of study. Respondents enrolled in science programs visit the library more often but seek assistance less than the respondents in social sciences programs. The survey comments and focus groups pointed to students’ dissatisfaction with the quality of study spaces the library offers, either for individual or group study. Library users wanted larger table space, comfortable furniture, and more desktop computers. The overall ambience of study spaces proved to be rather important and a large point of dissatisfaction. The findings from the study have provided valuable information on how to prioritize targeted improvements and which aspects of the library’s space and services to highlight when promoting library services to different departments.

Elizabeth Harrington, via Will Fitzhugh:

The federal government has invested nearly $100,000 to bring Shakespeare to the stage—only without the legendary playwright’s words.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its state agency the Virginia Commission for the Arts has funded numerous shows from the Crystal City-based Synetic Theater, including a production of Hamlet without words, making the title character’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy slightly less potent.

The Wall Street Journal bemoaned the dumbing down of Shakespeare, noting Shakespeare’s plays “without puns is like French cooking without butter,” in a recent review of Synetic’s adaptations.

“The latest Shakespeare fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces and grins—with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert,” James Bovard wrote on Monday.

John McWhorter:

At street level and in popular culture, Americans are freer with profanity now than ever before—or so it might seem to judge by how often people throw around the “F-bomb” or use a certain S-word of scatological meaning as a synonym for “stuff.” Or consider the millions of fans who adore the cartoon series “South Park,” with its pint-size, raucously foul-mouthed characters.

But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?

Ben Branstetter:

While not so concernng on its own, this means PowerSchool — and all the student data it owns — is now in the hands of a company that has failed to join the 153 education companies that have pledged to not sell student data or use targeted advertising toward students.

The slow creep of private software companies into public education has accelerated enormously since PowerSchool was first founded in 2000. According to Education Week, public schools in the U.S. spend over $3 billion providing digital services to their students. Some, like Code.org and Kahn Academy, offer individualized tutoring to help take the load off of overpopulated schools. Others, like Google, have offered their own free versions of expensive digital tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word.

Jeffrey Sellingo:

Even so, American higher education remains the envy of the world. But that respect really only extends to a few hundred universities at the most. At too many colleges attended by the vast majority of American students, costs are spiraling out of control and quality is declining. And the very worst of the institutions suffer from low graduation rates, high debt loads for students, and poor placement rates into jobs.

Last week, on a panel I moderated about the future of higher education at a conference in Nashville, Tom Angelo, an expert in teaching and learning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called these bottom-feeder institutions a “cancer on American higher education.” In most markets, such bad players would simply go away, driven out by more-efficient and less-expensive options.

Kids Count (PDF)

An Uneven Recovery for Low-Income Families
Let’s start with the good news. With 2.95 million jobs created, 2014 was the best year of job growth in the United States since 1999.1 For 12 consecutive months, from March 2014 through February 2015, the economy added more than 200,000 jobs per month.2 Although there was a drop in jobs created in March 2015, the numbers have since rebounded.3 At 5.4 percent, April’s national unemployment rate was at its lowest level since April 2008.

But there are some worrisome economic indicators for families in the bottom half of the income scale, particularly African Americans and Latinos. Although new job growth has occurred at all wage levels, it has been disproportionate in low-wage sectors, such as retail and food services, and in some of the lower-wage positions within health care and home care.5 And, a stagnating federal minimum wage has exacerbated low wages.

Ben Mclannahan:

Navient Corp, the largest student loan servicing company in the US, gave a glimpse into worsening trends in the $1.2tn market as it reported a 40 per cent drop in profits due to a big rise in provisions and a squeeze on interest margins.

Student loans have been the only consumer debt segment to grow in the US since the Lehman crisis, with the total outstanding more than doubling since 2008. At the same time, fears have risen that the jobs market is not strong enough to support such towering amounts of debt.

Ever lane

We’re raising $50,000 to help school kids eat better. Introducing the limited-edition Chef Totes.

abhishek:

Somehow I became the canonical undergraduate source for bibliographical references, so I thought I would leave a list behind before I graduated. I list the books I have found useful in my wanderings through mathematics (in a few cases, those I found especially unuseful), and give short descriptions and comparisons within each category. I hope that this list may serve as a useful “road map” to other undergraduates picking their way through Eckhart Library. In the end, of course, you must explore on your own; but the list may save you a few days wasted reading books at the wrong level or with the wrong emphasis.

The list is biased in two senses. One, it is light on foundations and applied areas, and heavy (especially in the advanced section) on geometry and topology; this is a consequence of my interests. I welcome additions from people interested in other fields. Two, and more seriously, I am an honors-track student and the list reflects that. I don’t list any “regular” analysis or algebra texts, for instance, because I really dislike the ones I’ve seen. If you are a 203 student looking for an alternative to the awful pink book (Marsden/Hoffman), you will find a few here; they are all much clearer, better books, but none are nearly as gentle. I know that banging one’s head against a more difficult text is not a realistic option for most students in this position. On the other hand, reading mathematics can’t be taught, and it has to be learned sometime. Maybe it’s better to get used to frustration as a way of life sooner, rather than later. I don’t know.

Karen Herzog:

“While our share of the overall UW System budget cut was eventually reduced, the nearly $5 million cut that we are left with is the largest in our history,” the chancellor, who has been in the job since December, said Tuesday. “The challenge we face is not new, but it is now acute. We can no longer avoid taking significant action.”

Only $100,000 (0.25%) will be cut from the instructional budget. No faculty positions will be eliminated, and there will be no campus closures, she said.

“The reforms we are developing, with extensive and valuable input from our internal and external stakeholders, will help UW Colleges position itself for the future,” Sandeen said in a prepared statement.

Under the new model, the 13 UW Colleges campuses will be grouped into four regions, with a single executive officer/dean for each region. One associate dean will be located on each campus and will oversee day-to-day operational needs. The four regions are:

Maura Smale and Mariana Regalado:

Information and communications technology (ICT) has become indispensable in the twenty-first century and is integral to the undergraduate student experience. From standard productivity software to specialized multimedia applications, from online research to course management systems, undergraduates use technology throughout their academic experience. Despite the persistence of the digital native image in the media, however, not all college students own and use these technologies to the same extent, which can hamper their ability to use ICT effectively for academic purposes. At the same time, budget pressures and restructuring discussions mean that colleges increasingly adopt academic technologies to help address some of the challenges facing higher education. How does this rising use of academic ICT change students’ experiences?

Academic institutions and higher education research organizations use data to make decisions about student services and academic technologies, yet much of the data collected is quantitative. Although surveys can show how many students own a smartphone or how long each student commutes to campus, they tell us little about the lived experiences of our students. In contrast, qualitative research lets us hear student voices and can add valuable detail about the college experience; that, in turn, can inform and guide faculty and administrative decisions about instructional technologies for student use.

Jennifer Ruth:

Bowen and Tobin argue that universities must rewrite their rules so as to meet the demands of the twenty-first century. If they intend to reclaim their role as “engines of mobility,” institutions of higher education need to feature strong leadership at the presidential level, to use technology aggressively, and to implement what they call a “professional teaching staff.” About this last, they write:

Jon Marcus:

In the intensifying debate over whether to reduce federal government regulations on universities and colleges, one number has been at the forefront: $150 million.

That’s what Vanderbilt University says a study found it spends each year complying with government red tape: 11 percent of the university’s entire budget.

The figure was in a report drafted by the principal higher education lobbying organization, the American Council on Education, or ACE, at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. It was the headline of a news release from the committee’s chairman, Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Alexander cited it again in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And other advocates for easing rules on colleges and universities have repeated it, adding that it averages out to $11,000 per year in additional tuition for each of Vanderbilt’s 12,757 students.

Russell Sage Foundation:

During her time in residence at the Foundation, Elizabeth Shermer (Loyola) has worked on a book that examines the origins of the contemporary crisis in public higher education. She argues that contrary to popular belief, state universities have always been subject to market forces. Shermer finds that there was never enough government funding to create a geographically-uniform system of mass higher education, and that as a result, public universities have long been influenced by private sector interests.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Shermer discussed the complex history of the rise of public education in the U.S. and recommended policies for expanding access to higher education for low-income students.

Navneet Alang:

Sylvia’s handwriting was looping and crisp and clean. Though she was my girlfriend, I was, as with most girls I knew in high school, intensely jealous of her penmanship—of what seemed, at the time, like its unreachable, feminine perfection. My handwriting was, by comparison, a mess: the hand of a drunken man trying to scrawl down gibberish while riding on the back of a motorcycle, a different script every time. It wasn’t neatness or clarity on their own that I envied, though—it was the solidity and consistency of someone who wrote the same way each time, could reliably and assuredly express themselves. In the same manner, day after day, manifested on the page, they seemed to be saying: I know who I am—here, let me show you.

Gary Saul Morson

Go to just about any English department at any university, gather round the coffee pot, and listen to what one of my colleagues calls the Great Kvetch. It is perfectly summarized by the opening sentence of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book: “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” She is not speaking of looming environmental disaster or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. You see, those are threats we can discern. The danger Nussbaum is highlighting “goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government.”

When a writer invokes the insidious progress of a cancer, you know she hopes to forestall the objection that there is little visible evidence to support her argument. What is this cancer threatening democracy and the world? Declining enrollments in literature courses. Her book is titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

Jude Webber:

The move, co-ordinated with Mr Peña Nieto’s government, was equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet to a union that has paralysed implementation of the education reform in Oaxaca and three other states. “They will not take what is ours,” Rubén Nuñez, a leader of the Oaxaca chapter of the union, vowed at a rally in the city’smain square as the union prepared to define its full response on Wednesday.

“This is a really important, even brave announcement,” said Marco Fernández, a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey and researcher at the México Evalúa and Wilson Center think-tanks. “Unavoidably there will be conflict in the coming days.”

Although investors have given more attention to the government’s energy reform, lifting education standards is considered vital to Mexico’s ambitions to boost productivity and vault into the advanced, high-income economy bracket.

The biggest obstacle to achieving that was the CNTE. Though it has only about 200,000 of Mexico’s 900,000 teachers — the rest belong to the SNTE that backs the reform — about 60 per cent of CNTE members are in Oaxaca. Victory over opponents there, the government reasons, will ensure the education reform is unstoppable.

Alona King:

As a Black female CS major at Stanford, I hate walking around the halls of the Gates Computer Science Building.

It’s not because the Gates interior reminds me of 1970 even though it was built in the 1990s. It’s not because of the memories I have of CS107’s Heap Allocator turning me into a nocturnal Gates inhabitant. It’s because inevitably, whenever I walk into Gates, I always get hit with the four words every non-tech minority thinks whenever they see an unfamiliar minority in a tech space:

Sarah Laskow:

Nearly a century ago, just after World War I had ended, there was a groundswell of linguistic patriotism in America. All of a sudden, scholars, writers and politicians were interested in studying, defining and promoting a distinctly “American” version of English.

In 1919, H.L. Mencken published the first edition of what would become one of his more popular books, The American Language. In the early 1920s, some of the country’s leading linguists started work on the “Linguistic Atlas of New England”, one of the first attempts to systematically document a regional dialect; in 1925, the journal American Speech published its first issue.

The Economist:

“I CAN speak Chinese, I’m so awesome!” reads a sign on the wall of the Mingde primary school in Shufu, a town near the oasis city of Kashgar in the far western province of Xinjiang. Nearby, children’s artworks hang beneath another banner which proclaims: “The motherland is in my heart.” Though every pupil at the school is Uighur, one of China’s ethnic minority peoples, most lessons here are taught in Mandarin—a very different language from their Turkic one. It is the same at ever more schools across the region. Educating young Uighurs in Mandarin may one day help them find work—but it is also a means by which the government hopes to subdue Xinjiang and its many inhabitants who chafe at rule from Beijing.

Xinjiang began to fall under China’s control in the mid-18th century. It was then mainly populated by ethnic Uighurs, whose culture and Muslim faith set them apart from much of the rest of China; Kashgar is far closer to Kabul and Islamabad than it is to Beijing. Despite the migration into Xinjiang of Hans, China’s ethnic majority, minorities (mainly Uighurs) still make up 60% of its residents, compared with less than 10% in China overall.

Donny Crichton:

College has failed, or so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs believe. Not only are tuition costs spiraling out of control, but students are leaving college without the ability to produce … anything. We are living in the era of code, and yet, college students are graduating barely able to read or write an essay – let alone make an app.

Make School hopes to change this sordid state of affairs. Through a rigorous and lengthy two-year curriculum, the school hopes to instill deeper critical thinking skills while also providing students engineering and product skills that will allow them to be highly productive at startups and large tech companies.

Nick Anderson:

The explosion of free online education, known mainly for targeting adults, is reaching ever further into high schools.

On Wednesday, a new sequence of lessons for high school Advanced Placement courses in calculus, physics and macroeconomics went live on a free Web site founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The lessons, developed by Davidson College for the site called edX, represent a new step in the evolution of ties between the popular AP college-level program and the “massive open online courses” known as MOOCs.

Other MOOCs in recent months have targeted AP students in subjects such as biology, computer science and chemistry. They aim to prepare students for exams that offer potential college credit for high scores. One philanthropist, Steven B. Klinsky, has even suggested that these MOOCs can help create a pathway for students to obtain a full freshman year of college credit for free.

Oxford Research:

‘I used to be a pessimist,’ Max tells me, ‘but the data shows the world improving.’

By way of illustration, Max shows me one of his visualisers — it shows the global rise of education over time. You can see vast advances in the average number of years spent in education worldwide, with most notable increases in the east and more recently, Africa. This Good News message is not unique.

Omar Javed.

Issie Lapowsky:

YOU REMEMBER BLACKBOARD, don’t you? It’s that not-so-sleek site you used to submit assignments to your college professors—the one you cursed to death when it failed to save that paper on Plato’s Republic you spent hours working on.

Blackboard was at turns frustrating, migraine-inducing, and burdensome. Which isn’t to say Blackboard wasn’t innovative. It was, back in the day. Unfortunately, that day was around 2004. Since then, the overgrown education technology giant has somehow managed to infiltrate most of the nation’s colleges and about half its schools. Meanwhile, Blackboard Learn—the portal where students access and turn in assignments, find their grades, and communicate with teachers and fellow classmates—has stagnated.

Rachel Feltman:

One portion of the study presented 100 subjects — all of whom had been asked to rate their knowledge of personal finances — with 15 specific finance terms. They were then asked to rate their understanding of each term, not knowing that three of them (pre-rated stocks, fixed-rate deduction, annualized credit) were totally made up.

“The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to overclaim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms,” lead study author Stav Atir of Cornell said in a statement. “The same pattern emerged for other domains, including biology, literature, philosophy and geography.”

Richard Taylor:

The world is changing at a faster rate than we have ever witnessed. The education sector is benefiting from increasing advances in technology and the barriers to entry are lower than ever, as more people look to cash in on this growing global market.

We are not yet at the tipping point, where the old will meet the new, and I don’t believe that traditional institutional education providers are fully aware of the tsunami of competition that’s about to hit them. I am not sure whether it is a case of the old brigade burying their heads in the sand or whether they simply do not know how to become again relevant to their students.

Jennifer Howard:

A lot has changed in those two-plus decades, and Mr. Barnds’s job has expanded remarkably. Like other administrators and faculty and staff members on campuses around the country, he is learning to live in a world of tighter budgets, swelling regulations, and ever more assessment and competition.

“The pressure’s greater on enrollment officers for a whole host of reasons, but we’re not alone,” he says. “There’s increased pressure on every senior leader on a college campus.”

The Economist:

IT BEGAN with some marshmallows. In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started a series of experiments on young children. A child was left alone for 15 minutes with a marshmallow or similar treat, with the promise that, if it remained uneaten at the end of this period, a second would be added. Some of the children, who were aged four or five at the time, succumbed to temptation before time was up. Others resisted, and held out for the reward.
Then, it was Dr Mischel’s turn to wait. He followed the children’s progress as they grew up. Those who had resisted, he found, did better at school than those who had given in. As adults they got better jobs, were less likely to use drugs and got into trouble with the law less frequently. Moreover, children’s family circumstances suggested that impulsive behaviour was as much learned as inherited. This suggested that it could be unlearned—improving the child in question’s chances in life.

Mike Antonucci:

changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States.

In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.”

That day is here. WEAC’s 2015 membership numbers show an organization with fewer than 50,000 total members, and fewer than 40,000 who are currently employed in Wisconsin’s public school system. The downward spiral is so pronounced the union cut dues by $60 , but it does not seem to have reversed its fortunes.

Despite the rosy picture NEA attempted to paint earlier this month , the union still faces enormous membership problems, with only a handful of state affiliates slowly returning to health. I will have the full story in today’s communiqué.

Related: $1.57m for four senators.

Economist

Taken as a whole, Ms Clinton’s plan is an eclectic grab-bag. It is as if her advisors brainstormed every possible policy to boost wages, and then kept them all. Some—such as greater investment in skills and infrastructure—are welcome. Wages, ultimately, reflect workers’ productivity. Ms Clinton is also right that the impact of technology on the labour market presents a huge and perplexing challenge for policymakers. But greater union power and more protectionism are comfort-blanket polices for which the economy—and most Americans—would pay a price in the long-run. Ms Clinton’s speech contained plenty of ideas. Perhaps when Mr Sanders exits the stage, some of the duds will be dropped.

Madison, which spends double the national average per student, plans to increase property taxes by 5% this fall.

Michael Miller:

Thirty-five years later, America pulled off another stunning upset this week.

But this victory involved integers, not ice skates, and was waged not by hulking Cold Warriors but by teens.

Team America has finally retaken the International Mathematical Olympiad crown. The victory this week was a historic comeback.

If winning a youth math competition seems less important than vanquishing the Soviets back in 1980, consider this: the last time America won the IMO was 1994. Back then, Bill Clinton was president and Ace of Base was top of the pop charts.

The Conversation:

If you ask most people what goes on in business schools, they would probably assume that a bunch of pointy heads tell other pointy heads how to read spreadsheets. Push a bit further and you might get some stories about foreign students, shiny buildings and courses that teach people how to be bastards and make lots of money. The financial crisis has often enough been blamed on business schools too for the ways that they spread the gospel of selfishness. But an odd thing is happening beneath the glass atrium – the academics are rebelling.

All around the world, the business school is now the fastest growing part of higher education. In many countries, particularly the UK, its expanding revenues are compensating for a decline in state funding and ensuring that the history department stays open.

Sonali Kohli:

But the reach of the Queens Library extends beyond the walls of its 65 physical branches. Dotting the borough are thousands of New Yorkers logged into their own mini-libraries, using the library’s mobile app to do research for homework, or the WiFi hotspots they checked out to fill in the holes in broadband access at home, or accessing e-books on one of the libraries’ tablets they can take home.

Throughout the country, library initiatives are emerging to keep up with technological advances. And libraries are finding that one population they can serve better than anyone else is low-income Americans.

Jonathan Chait:

In 2010, Diane Ravitch, an activist for the most militantly anti-reform wing of the teachers-union movement, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing that Republicans use their newfound control of the House of Representatives to roll back the Obama administration’s education reforms. Since then, the union backlash against the Obama administration’s agenda has gained force. Yesterday, it manifested itself in a Senate vote in which Republicans and the unions worked in more open cooperation – against the Obama administration and civil-rights groups allied with it – than at any time in the past.

You should read Libby Nelson’s terrific explanation of the dynamics behind the vote. The gist of the alliance is that both the Republicans and the unions want to reduce the federal government’s ability to direct the course of education policy. Nelson detected an interesting rhetorical confluence:

Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who now leads the Senate education committee, has a favorite epithet for how Duncan has used his power. Alexander is fond of saying that Duncan created a “national school board.”
Eskelen García echoed Alexander, hardly an ideological ally, in a Thursday interview. “Nobody elected the education secretary to be the national superintendent of schools or the national school board,” she said.

Erin Richards:

In an interview Monday at St. Marcus School, a voucher school at 2215 Palmer St., Johnson said a staffer brought the investigation to his attention, which prompted him to write letters to U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch this summer, asking for evidence of the basis of their investigation.

The department has declined to comment, saying the investigation is ongoing.

Johnson, who was the only member of his committee at the hearing, said he invited other members to attend and bring witnesses, but all declined.

The official speaker list, then, included pro-voucher witnesses chosen by Johnson, including two former students of voucher schools: Justice Shorter, a graduate of Messmer High School who’s now in graduate school, and Diana Lopez, a graduate of St. Anthony High School who is headed to Yale. It also included Bob Smith, former principal of Messmer; John Witte, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Richard Komer, senior attorney at the Institute of Justice.

“While participating in the parental choice program, I received the same voucher as all students, which didn’t account for the extra costs of my visual impairment,” said Shorter.

Komer said the justice department held on to the disability rights complaint in 2011 instead of referring it to the Department of Education, as is custom.

Hacker Rank:

If statisticians have historically been leaders of data, why was there a need for a brand new breed of data scientists? While the world is exploding with bounties of valuable data, statisticians are strangely working quietly in the shadows. Statistics is the science of learning from data, so why aren’t statisticians reigning as kings of today’s Big Data revolution?

In 2009, when Google was still fine tuning its PageRank algorithm based on the statistical innovation Markov Chain, Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian declared statistician as the sexiest job of the decade. We’re about halfway through, and it seems that Varian missed the target.

“Professional statisticians are milling at the back of the church, mesmerized by the gaudy spectacle of [Big Data] before them.” – David Walker, statistician, Aug 2013.

Kathy Bell:

For most of us, our voices emanate from our own vocal chords. For Kevin, our 20-year-old son with Mowat Wilson Syndrome – a developmental disability – his words are battery-charged, delivered by an app and wrapped protectively in royal blue silicone. And we love his voice.

By the age of two, we knew that Kevin had severe language issues. We held onto the hope that, by age 10 – an important milestone in speech development – he would have words with which to communicate. Perhaps it was naïve on our part; it didn’t happen. When he was 13, we accepted what limited progress he had made, stopped thinking about what he could not do and focused on the everyday things he could achieve.

Sofia Barbarani:

A number of them were recently involved in the retaking of Tel Abyad on 15 June – an Arab-majority border town in northern Syria. The move, which was seen as a setback for IS, was hailed as a major victory for the Kurds, who were able to open a corridor through the town and connect two of their three autonomous cantons: Jazeera and war-torn Kobani.

John Reitmeyer:

Gov. Chris Christie has taken an aggressive approach to dealing with public workers and their unions since taking office in early 2010. He’s encouraged voters to reject school budgets in communities where teachers weren’t accepting pay freezes, pushed to change civil-service rules, and signed legislation that forced employees to pay more toward to their pensions and health benefits.

Now that Christie has joined the 2016 GOP presidential primary field, his administration is taking another tough stance. It recently told thousands of union members whose contracts expired June 30 that they won’t be receiving annual incremental pay increases while there’s no new deal in place.

In the past, the unions say workers have generally received their annual increases if their performance merited the bump — even without a contract in place.

Christie’s freeze affects state office workers, college professors, corrections officers, and other groups of public workers who haven’t yet reached the top of their pay scales.

Public-worker unions have been responding to the Christie administration’s new position on pay increments — something many view as a pressure tactic — by filing administrative grievances and at least one union, Policemen’s Benevolent Association Local 105, has filed suit in Superior Court.

Lance Lopez, the president of PBA Local 105, said the Christie administration’s freeze affects 3,700 members of his union. The prior agreement with the state said that the rules established under a contract that expired on June 30 would be extended for a year if no new agreement was reached, he said. And the union would have had to have been informed in writing by February 1, 2015 of any change, which didn’t occur, he added.

Michelle Diamont:

their obligations under special education law.

The U.S. Department of Education says that just 19 states qualified for the “meets requirements” designation for the 2013-2014 school year. The rest of states were classified as “needs assistance” or “needs intervention.”

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Education Department must evaluate states annually on their efforts to implement special education programs.

The ratings carry significant weight. If a state fails to meet requirements for two or more years, the Department of Education must take enforcement action, which can include a corrective action plan or withholding funds, among other steps.

This is the second year that the Education Department has relied on stricter measures to assess compliance.

Alex Scharaschkin:

The exams are finished and GCSE and A-level students are heading off for summer. But there are 12 weeks – and a lot of work – from “pens down” to results day

Did you hear that noise? It’s the sound of thousands of students collectively breathing a sigh of relief. If April is the cruellest month, then July is the most anticipated. The end of GCSE and A-level exams marks a rite of passage, a time for reflection, celebration – and, for some, panic. After candidates have put down their pens, examiners – usually teachers by day – remain holed up in studies, marking.

Related: WKCE.

Laura Waters:

Marianne Lombardo at Education Reform Now looks at the recent report on NAEP scores from the National Center for Education Statistics. Results show that many states have standards that are less ambitious than the concepts tested, especially in 4th grade reading. While, she says, “NAEP frameworks and benchmarks are established by the National Assessment Governing Board and are based on the collaborative input of a wide range of experts and participants in the United States government, education, business, and public sectors,” states set their own standards when creating course objectives.

These standards range across a spectrum from “Basic” to “Proficient.” Remember, most, if not all, of the data derives from pre-Common Core days. So, for instance, while New York State consistently sets its standards on the high end of proficient for all areas – 4th grade reading and math; 8th grade reading and math – “most states set standards equivalent to the “Basic” range in the national assessment. “

Lenore Skenazy:

Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a supporter of the Free-Range Kids movement, has proposed groundbreaking federal legislation to protect the rights of kids who want to walk to school on their own.

That’s right: a Free-Range Kids provision made its way into the Every Child Achieves Act, a reauthorization of major federal law that governs funding and regulation of elementary education in the United States. The Free-Range Kids portion of the law would permit kids to walk or ride their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate, without the threat of civil or criminal action.

Laws like this one could prevent—or at least deter—local officials from waging harassment campaigns against parents who want give their kids some autonomy. If this had been the law of the land when the Meitivs allowed their kids to walk home by themselves in Maryland, it might have forestalled the whole shebang. (Though, admittedly, the kids were coming back from the park, not school.)

A rather sad commentary on the nanny state.

Aaron Taylor:

The ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education recently released its report identifying factors driving the high costs of legal education. One factor cited by the task force was law school scholarship policies based on high Law School Admis­sion Test scores, instead of financial need. These policies contribute in large part to high levels of law student debt, particularly among first-generation students. Worse yet, they result in the neediest students paying a tuition premium — a “merit surtax,” if you will — that subsidizes the attendance of their wealthier peers.

An analysis of data from the 2014 administration of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement charts how this phenomenon unfolds. The purpose of the analysis was to identify trends relating to the law school experience that were attributable to socioeconomic factors. … We found that average LSAT scores increased as parental education increased.

Jack Grieve:

New words are regularly identified by lexicographers, linguists, and the media, but very little is known about how new words spread across time and space.

This is primarily because we haven’t had access to sufficiently large geo-coded and time-stamped corpora to identify and map words as they spread (although see Eisenstein et al., 2014).

Alex Woods:

It’s important to know what goes on inside a machine learning algorithm. But it’s hard. There is some pretty intense math happening, much of which is linear algebra. When I took Andrew Ng’s course on machine learning, I found the hardest part was the linear algebra. I’m writing this for myself as much as you.

So here is a quick review, so next time you look under the hood of an algorithm, you’re more confident. You can view the iPython notebook (usually easier to code with) on my github.

Privacy SOS:

The Department of Justice’s National Institute for Justice funds law enforcement research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year. The full list of grants, posted each year, is a valuable insight into future of law enforcement trends in the United States. NIJ funding for 2014 appears to have primarily focused on two issue areas: school safety and clearing DNA backlogs at police departments across the country.

Among the dozens of projects that focus on school safety, there are some that appear progressive, at least judging from the limited amount of information available online. But while a slice of the funding explicitly aims to examine and interrupt the school to prison pipeline using restorative justice methodologies, a lot of the money is going toward research that will probably further entrench disparate outcomes based on race in the criminalizing trend in school discipline.

One of those projects is a City of Chicago Board of Education program called “Connect and Redirect to Respect (CRR),” which aims “to use social media monitoring to identify and connect youth to behavioral interventions.” In other words, the DOJ is giving $2.1 million dollars to the Chicago public schools to conduct research on how spying on student social media can impact school discipline. In New York, police spying on youth social media has resulted in the criminalization of speech.

Doug Erickson:

A math team coached by a Madison Memorial High School graduate is getting praise from President Barack Obama and many others following its David-vs.-Goliath victory over China this week in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

The team of six teenagers, led by coach Po-Shen Loh, 33, topped more than 100 countries during the 10-day competition in Thailand.

The U.S. had not won the competition in 21 years, leading the White House to tweet celebratory congratulations and a “Go Team USA!”

As a high school math whiz, Loh attained considerable acclaim and won numerous state and national honors.

He twice represented Wisconsin in the national MathCounts competition and competed on Team USA in the 1999 International Math Olympiad.

He is now an associate professor of math at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Kelli Woodhouse:

The 2015 Survey of College and University Business Officers, Inside Higher Ed and Gallup’s fifth such study, reveals that as institutions deal with financial concerns, they are using some strategies, like increasing enrollment, more widely than more unpopular methods of trimming the budget. And that’s not necessarily to the benefit of struggling colleges, analysts interviewed for this article say.

In the survey, 64 percent of business officers this year strongly agreed or agreed that their financial model is sustainable over the next five years, compared to 62 percent last year. That confidence drops to 42 percent over 10 years, roughly similar to last year’s response of 40 percent.

Bing blog:

If you have kids, we don’t have to tell you that the quality and accessibility of schools near your new home can be just as important as the home itself. Found the perfect home on Bing? Click on one of the local schools in the answer to see key information. You’ll see the GreatSchools rating and community score at the top, and details including contact information, student-to-faculty ratios, enrollment, as well as rankings and academic indicators for high schools.

The Onion:

In an effort to provide sanctuary for Lynnfield College students exposed to perspectives different from their own, a new campus safe space was dedicated Wednesday in honor of Alexis Stigmore, a 2009 graduate who felt kind of weird in class one time.

Addressing students at the dedication ceremony, parents Arnold and Cassie Stigmore noted that while the college had adequate facilities to assist victims of discrimination, abuse, and post-traumatic stress, it had until now offered no comparable safe space for students, like their beloved daughter, who encounter an academic viewpoint that gives them an uncomfortable feeling.

“When our Alexis felt weird after hearing someone discuss an idea that did not conform to her personally held beliefs, she had no place to turn,” said Arnold Stigmore, standing outside the $2 million space that reportedly features soothing music, neutral-colored walls, oversized floor cushions, fun board games, and a variety of snacks. “God forbid any of you, in your years at this institution, are ever confronted with an opinion you do not share. But if you are, you will have a refuge on this campus.”

Leslie Brody & Jennifer Maloney:

The release Tuesday of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” gave English teachers some tricky summer homework: how to reframe their lessons on “To Kill a Mockingbird” now that its moral center, Atticus Finch, has been depicted as a racist.

Many teachers said they are excited that this twist adds a thought-provoking dimension to the classic and will lead to valuable classroom discussions of flawed heroes, bigotry and the fact that Ms. Lee’s father, the model for Atticus, abandoned his segregationist views later in life, as the author worked on revising “Mockingbird.”

Some said these issues would be especially resonant after a year of protests around the country against police killings in confrontations with unarmed black men, South Carolina’s Confederate flag controversy and other racially charged news.

Chris Cook:

Home Secretary Theresa May is looking into tougher rules for visas for overseas university students, BBC Newsnight has learned.

The proposals would require students to have more financial savings on arrival.
In a confidential letter to other ministers, she argues that universities should “develop sustainable funding models that are not so dependent on international students”.

The Home Office refuses to comment on leaked documents.

Student migration is a significant political problem for the government, which has a target of reducing net immigration to below 100,000 people per year.

Melissa Kearney & Phillip Levine:

Early childhood education has important effects on the academic readiness and ultimate life chances of children. This column examines how the introduction of the educational television show Sesame Street in the US affected primary school outcomes for disadvantaged children. Those from counties that had better access to the broadcast had superior educational outcomes through their early school years. These effects were particularly pronounced for black, non-Hispanic children, and those living in economically disadvantaged areas. The extremely low cost per child of such interventions make them ideal for addressing educational inequality in childhood.

Danny Yadron:

In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned the enmity of government officials for writing software.

Mr. Marlinspike created an encryption program that scrambles messages until they reach the intended reader. It’s so simple that Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp made it a standard feature for many of the app’s 800 million users.

The software is effective enough to alarm governments. Earlier this year, shortly after WhatsApp adopted it, British Prime Minister David Cameron called protected-messaging apps a “safe space” for terrorists. The following week, President Barack Obama called them “a problem.”

Peter Berkowitz:

American universities are enjoying boom times abroad. Many of the most prestigious have established branch campuses overseas and launched collaborations with foreign governments and institutions of higher education, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. While numerous programs deal with science and technology, of special interest are undertakings to bring the advantages of liberal education to countries that do not protect liberty of thought and discussion.

The tension is real and the stakes large. In an age in which developments in transportation and communication have intertwined national economies to an unprecedented extent, it is to be expected that American educators would seek to disseminate liberal education around the world—to enhance their reputations, improve their bottom lines, and benefit America by fostering knowledge of the principles, and cultivating the spirit, of freedom.

C. Bradley Thompson:

America’s universities are collapsing into a miasma of nihilism, postmodernism, political correctness, multiculturalism, affirmative action, bureaucratization, and skyrocketing costs—and no one seems able to do anything about it. With the exception of a few “Great Books” colleges, the overarching vision of higher education that once sustained the West for centuries seems all but dead.

American higher education is now defined by an aimless mish-mash of courses on trivial topics that present no clear view of what a human being must know in order to be considered liberally educated. The result: the liberal arts have been gutted and repackaged to serve various ideological and political interests.

Michelle Hackman & Mark Peters:

The death of a 7-year-old boy during another Fourth of July weekend marred by multiple murders and dozens of shootings here is bringing renewed attention to the difficulty of curbing street violence in the nation’s third-largest city.

Amari Brown was shot shortly before midnight on July 4 as he watched fireworks on Chicago’s West Side, one of seven homicides and 34 shooting incidents here from Friday evening through Sunday, according to city officials.

His family is preparing for the funeral of a boy who they say loved cars and candy and would have started second grade this fall, while police say they suspect that his father’s alleged gang ties may have been a factor in the shooting.

“Something good’s got to come out of Amari dying on the street like a dog,” said Vedia Hailey, the boy’s maternal grandmother.

Karen Herzog:

An outspoken University Wisconsin-Madison professor has tweeted herself into a world of controversy.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is under fire for finding future Badgers on Twitter and essentially encouraging them to take their money elsewhere — as well as for comparing Gov. Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler.

College Republicans blasted her on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Goldrick-Rab was rebuked by UW-Madison’s faculty governing group in a withering statement that said she hurt both academic freedom and the university “with inaccurate statements and misrepresentations.”

Goldrick-Rab is a tenured professor of educational policy studies and sociology with a national profile in both her field of research and the ongoing debate over faculty tenure at Wisconsin public universities. She has openly that said she’s looking for another job because she believes academic freedom is in jeopardy in Wisconsin.

Goldrick-Rab acknowledges that she searched Twitter for future Badgers. The prolific Twitter-user says she just wanted to inform them of changes to faculty tenure and shared governance that were about to become part of state law — changes that she believes would hurt the quality of their education, but that the university wasn’t telling them about.

While some future Badgers thanked her, a group who had just graduated from a Kenosha high school took exception. One of them contacted the College Republicans of UW-Madison, who called on the university Wednesday to address it — more than a month after the Twitter contact occurred.

It’s fine to engage those with different viewpoints in a respectful way, when they are interested in having a discussion, Anthony Birch, chairman of the young Republicans group, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Elizabeth Bradley:

Guardian,

We are pleased to offer your child a pre-kindergarten placement for the 2015-2016 school year at:

Digester Eggs, Newtown Creek, Brooklyn

To accept this placement, please gather proofs of identification and immunization and proceed to the corner of Greenpoint and Humboldt Streets. There you will be met by Anubis, jackal-headed guide of souls and Guardian of the Scales. He will weigh the heart of each student: those deemed lighter than an ostrich feather may continue on to registration at the Eggs. Those deemed heavier or in possession of non-organic cheddar bunnies will be eaten by Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, at the nearby Lake of Fire.

Jay Bullock:

MPS and the legislature can’t fix this, as the problem is much larger than this city or this state. And it goes against the grain of what I and much of the rest of the district believes, that there’s a benefit of going through the application and admission process and going through the rigors of university life. Though I know many of my students would be better suited by a two-year degree or other post-high school training program, I want to see them apply to a real college because it’s a good experience for them.

Second, a D is still passing. MPS hasn’t released recent data that I’ve found, but before the state report card system, the district put out its own report cards. These always showed that the mean grade point average for high school students was around 1.0. D students can pass classes, accumulate credits and graduate just fine while remaining demonstrably below average.

The state – thankfully – does not have a high-stakes graduation exam that students must pass before earning their diplomas, or for that matter any other specific set of standards that must be met before the end of high school. The exception is the mandatory civics test that goes into effect this coming school year, but that is hardly going to be a barrier to graduation the way it’s written into law. In any case, it wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether students will need math or English remediation in college.

Without such standards, schools are able to send below average, D students on into their adult lives. Which is good for those of us who would rather not be teaching 40-year-old high school students who never passed English 10, but bad for universities who enroll them into their programs.

Remains of the day:

It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.

If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. “Contributors have a tremendous amount of control over their decisions—for example, when to perform a task, when to complete it, and even if they want to complete it at all,” said Jeffrey H. Newhouse, an employment lawyer at Hirschler Fleischer, by email. “That means the contributor isn’t an employee and, as a result, employee protections like the minimum wage don’t apply.”

Brian Meager:

Last week we dove into the data to help explain where out-of-state students come from. We found that the number of out-of-state and international students attending elite public institutions is on the rise, and that at some public institutions, the number of out-of-state students outnumbers in-state students.

A comment on that post got us thinking. The comment came from a parent whose son is from California and decided to attend a university in Alabama. She mentioned how happy she is with his college choice and that he’s having a wonderful experience there, which is great, considering how few students from California study in Alabama. We know that in California, the number of students that stay in the state versus those that leave is about 8 to 1, according to the latest year of available data. In fact, in the state of Alabama, only 393 of the freshmen students are from California.

Kati Haycock:

If there has been unanimous agreement on anything during the process for renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act it is this: School ratings systems should no longer be just about performance on standardized tests.

Indeed, every version of the new law in both the House and Senate has required states to broaden the measures on which schools are evaluated. In looking at high schools, for example, states might also consider the proportions of students completing a full college- and career-preparatory curriculum; the numbers successfully completing Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses; and even results from surveys of parents, educators, and students.

So imagine the surprise of the broad coalition of national civil rights, disabilities, and business organizations when their proposal to require schools to act whenever any group of children is not progressing on a combination of those measures was immediately labeled by the National Education Association as a “preservation of the test and punish culture of No Child Left Behind through a backdoor Adequate Yearly Progress-type (AYP) approach.”

John Morgan:

England will not take part in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s project to measure learning outcomes of graduates around the world, delivering a blow to the plan.

The OECD had described the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project, seen as a potential university-level equivalent of the organisation’s Pisa tests in schools, as having the potential to transform the hierarchy of world higher education.

Earlier this year, the OECD asked member nations to indicate whether they wished to take part in a full “main study”, following a pilot of the project.

But the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has declined the chance of taking part and will instead prioritise work in England to develop measures of learning gain, likely to figure in the teaching excellence framework.

David Willetts, the former universities and science minister, had previously suggested that Ahelo could potentially be used by government as a metric to help judge teaching quality at universities.

A BIS spokesman said: “We have responded [to the OECD] and won’t be taking part in the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project.

Philippe Desjardins-Proulx:

Statistical relational learning is a branch of machine learning (A.I.) devoted to unify probability theory and logic. I’ll write another post later to explain the motivation and a bit of history of this fascinating branch of study, but here I want to focus on a concrete example, with detailed maths and code.

The approach to statistical relational learning explained here is called Markov logic network (MLN), discovered in 2006 by Richardson and Domingos. Their paper has a nice simple example of MLN applied to the relationship between smoking and cancer. However, it’s a bit hard to follow unless you’re used to read papers on both logic and probabilistic graphical models. In this post, I will mostly follow their smoking/cancer example, but I will try to be much more explicit. I’ll also do a demonstration with Manticore, a small implementation I wrote for playing with statistical relational models.

Sylvia By Sylvia Pagan Westphal:

JENN MCNARY KNOWS ANGER. It has overcome her often, and with the ravaging might that only a mother knows when her child is dying. Except in her case, it’s not one son but two who face a death sentence.

At 34, McNary’s face still has the glow of youth, and it lights up when she talks about all four of her kids, although she knows she has given most of her life, her energy, and all of her fight to her two oldest. As McNary sits in the kitchen of her modest apartment in Pembroke, her eyes harden as she remembers the moment a few years back when she realized there was something worse than knowing both of her children would die — knowing there was something out there that could help them, but that only one of them could have.

Richard Adams:

A private school education may be a poor investment, according to research commissioned by a firm of stockbrokers that shows rapid growth in independent school fees outstripping the incomes of middle class professionals. The research, published by investment advisers Killik & Co, says the £236,000 paid by parents of a day pupil would, if invested, return nearly £800,000 over the child’s lifetime – enough to pay for university, put down a substantial deposit on a house and leave £500,000 for retirement.

Imaginary:

IMAGINARY is your place for open and interactive mathematics. Join a worldwide community of math enthusiasts!

Bo Peng:

1. Tuition
Tuition is easily the largest incurred expense. The costs varies across programs, schools, and location in Canada. The average undergraduate tuition increases by about 3% each year for domestic students and 6% for international students.

View undergrad tuition costs spreadsheet here: https://goo.gl/aKML14
I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of undergraduate tuition costs (thanks to Stats Canada). These numbers give you a pretty accurate amount that you should expect to pay. All of these numbers assume you are a domestic student enrolled in a full course load. International students should expect to pay between $20,000 to $40,000 for tuition per year.

Programs like arts, humanities and science are regulated, which means all schools in Ontario charge a similar amount of $6,000 – $6,500. Engineering, math and computer science programs should be very close as well, though some schools attract higher fees. For example, York Engineering charges $8,800, whereas Waterloo & U of T Engineering charges about $13,000 (the average in Ontario is $10,500).

Wall Street Journal:

While the media chase the Bernie Sanders rallies, keep your eye on the political crowds that matter. On Saturday the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton—16 months before Election Day.

This counts in the fight for the Democratic Party nomination because the 1.6 million member union boasts it can make a million phone calls and knock on 500,000 doors. Bernie’s Birkenstock irregulars can’t match that political…

Nelson Schwartz:

With its gleaming classrooms, sports teams and even a pep squad, the Apprentice School that serves the enormous Navy shipyard here bears little resemblance to a traditional vocational education program.

And that is exactly the point. While the cheerleaders may double as trainee pipe fitters, electricians and insulators, on weekends they’re no different from college students anywhere as they shout for the Apprentice School Builders on the sidelines.

But instead of accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, Apprentice School students are paid an annual salary of $54,000 by the final year of the four-year program, and upon graduation are guaranteed a job with Huntington Ingalls Industries, the military contractor that owns Newport News Shipbuilding.

“There’s a hunger among young people for good, well-paying jobs that don’t require an expensive four-year degree,” said Sarah Steinberg, vice president for global philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase. “The Apprentice School is the gold standard of what a high-quality apprenticeship program can be.”

Moriah Bollingit

But at Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School this year, there were 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457. At Long Beach Polytechnic in California, there were 30. And at some schools — including North Hills High outside of Pittsburgh and high schools in Miami — there were none.

The nation’s high schools are changing the way they recognize top students, struggling to balance praise for them while also quelling unhealthy competition among classmates as the college application process grows more cutthroat.

The result? Some say schools have deflated the meaning of a well-earned and time-honored accolade while also vexing college admissions officers, who don’t know if a student finished first or 100th in the class. Others say getting rid of valedictorians entirely allows students to focus on their achievements without worrying about where they fall in the pecking order.

Joanne Weiss & Frederick Hess:

Race to the Top was the Obama administration’s signature education initiative. Initially greeted with bipartisan acclaim, it has figured in debates about issues ranging from the Common Core to teacher evaluation to data privacy. Five years have passed since the U.S. Department of Education announced the winners in the $4 billion contest. What can the competition and its aftermath teach us about federal efforts to spur changes in schooling?

Joanne Weiss, former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and director of the federal Race to the Top program, argues that the initiative spurred comprehensive improvements nationwide and in numerous policy areas, among them standards and assessments, teacher evaluation methods, and public school choice. Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, whose books include Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools, contends that the competition rewarded mainly grant-writing prowess and that policymakers should be wary of top-down efforts to spur innovation.

Ramesh Ponnuru

In particular, progressives want to use increased federal funding as leverage to get schools to act the way federal policymakers want them to. Thus President Barack Obama’s proposal to spend $60 billion to eliminate tuition at community colleges that “adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes.” A related idea is to have the government publish ratings for colleges, the better to make them responsive to the desires of Washington. The progressive approach exposes newer players, such as for-profit schools, to special scrutiny.

Conservatives, on the other hand, increasingly favor policies that provide new options for students: new educational institutions, new financing methods and new information for evaluating them. Rubio wants to liberalize accreditation rules to break up what he calls the higher-education “cartel.” He wants to make it easier for private institutions to extend student loans in return for a share of students’ future income. He thinks vocational education should get a greater share of federal funds. He thinks prospective students should have access to data about how well graduates of specific college programs fare at getting jobs. And he wants higher-education institutions, whether new or old, for-profit or not, to be accountable to customers rather than to the government.

Joel Kotkin:

Some suggest that the trends of the first decade of this century already are passé, and that more Americans are becoming born-again urbanistas. Yet after a brief period of slightly more rapid urban growth immediately following the recession, U.S. suburban growth rates began to again surpass those of urban cores. An analysis by Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate website Trulia, reports that between 2011 and 2012 less-dense-than-average Zip codes grew at double the rate of more-dense-than-average Zip codes in the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Americans, he wrote, “still love the suburbs.”

What is also missed by the Obama administration and its allies is the suburbs’ growing diversity. If HUD wants to start attacking these communities, many of their targets will not be whites, but minorities, particularly successful ones, who have been flocking to suburbs for well over a decade.

This undermines absurd claims that the suburbs need to be changed in order to challenge the much detested reign of “white privilege.” In reality, African-Americans have been deserting core cities for years, largely of their own accord and through their own efforts: Today, only 16 percent of the Detroit area’s blacks live within the city limits.

These trends can also be seen in the largely immigrant ethnic groups. Roughly 60 percent of Hispanics and Asians, notes the Brooking Institution, already live in suburbs. Between the years 2000 and 2012, the Asian population in suburban areas of the nation’s 52 biggest metro areas grew by 66 percent, while that in the core cities expanded by 35 percent. Of the top 20 areas with over 50,000 in Asian population, all but two are suburbs.

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Chad Aldeman:

As the Senate continues its debate on the Every Child Achieves Act, a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, I took some time to sort through winners and losers under the bill. Here are my top 5 winners and losers:

Winners:

State bureaucrats, legislatures, education chiefs, and governors: This bill is fundamentally about giving more power to states. The various state actors would have pretty much an unfettered reign over how they spent billions of federal dollars.

Teachers unions: The bill includes no requirements on teacher or principal evaluation systems, a win for teachers unions that have campaigned against them. And, although the bill does not reduce the number of federally required assessments, it puts decisions about what to do (or not) about low-performing schools in the hands of states, where unions have more political clout.

State policy organizations like PIE-Net members and ALEC: As states decide what to do on education policy, state-based policy organizations on both the Left and the Right will take on an outsized role in driving their preferred reforms.

Matt Kullig:

Ramirez has not said whether his proposed St. Augustine Preparatory Academy would participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but opponents have predicted the school would elect to educate students using taxpayer-funded vouchers and compete directly with the public schools for state education dollars.

Ramirez said the goal of the school is to change the outlying community.

“Our main goal is to change Milwaukee,” Ramirez said. “We want to make (the south side) a better place to live.”

Ramirez, executive chairman of Waukesha-based Husco International, said the legacy of the school, if built, will be graduates who can positively impact the community for years to come. He said he is “very confident” the area will be rezoned when a city committee meets Thursday.

Ramirez, who has financially supported private voucher schools and charter schools, noted an extensive waitlist at two other south side schools, Ronald Reagan High School and Carmen High School of Science and Technology. Reagan is a high-performing Milwaukee public school. Carmen is an independent charter authorized by MPS.

Union critical of plan

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the teacher’s union, criticized Ramirez’s efforts by saying the school would be a drain on public schools. MTEA president Kim Schroeder said the school wouldn’t be beneficial to the community.

“No taxpayer dollars should be used to build another private voucher or charter school in our city,” Schroeder said in a statement. “Taxpayer-funded private schools drain opportunities and resources from the public schools that students and families depend upon.”

John Engler & Thomas Donahue:

The government can also exercise accountability without the federal mandates of NCLB that were disliked by many school systems—and those mandates must go. But it remains in the national interest for progress to be measured for all students. The results should be released, and parents and taxpayers should be told the truth about our education system. Finally, schools must take action to help students and groups of students that are falling behind the academic goals set by states.

Despite the progress both the House and Senate bills make in a number of areas, lawmakers can do more in supporting students who need the most academic help. The House and Senate bills do not do enough to direct funding to schools and students—and groups of students, including minorities and disabled children—that have not met state academic goals. In both bills, schools could fail to meet their own state’s goals for their students year after year, after year, and never be required to take any action. To us, that is simply unacceptable.

The Economist:

THE REBECCA SCHOOL for autistic children occupies all five floors of a building in midtown Manhattan. Its rooftop playground has a fine view of the Empire State Building. It features colourful classrooms and lots of places for children to lie down and recover from the sensory overload often suffered by autistic people. “My body doesn’t feel safe,” says one boy curled up in a corridor, asking to be left alone.

Kat Devlin:

Studying a second foreign language for at least one year is compulsory in more than 20 European countries. In most European countries, students begin studying their first foreign language as a compulsory school subject between the ages of 6 and 9, according to a 2012 report from Eurostat, the statistics arm of the European Commission. This varies by country and sometimes within a country, with the German-speaking Community of Belgium – one of the three federal communities of Belgium– starting its 3-year-olds on a foreign language, but parts of the United Kingdom (excluding Scotland) waiting until age 11.

Flowing Data:

By way of Chris Volinsky, a quiz dilemma for students who want extra credit. It’s a variation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a popular game theory example that uses two criminals instead of students and lesser jail time instead of extra credit.

What’s your answer? I take the two.

What can or should be done?

Jagler is a Republican member of the state Assembly from Watertown. He said he got interested in this when he heard about students who graduated from high school in good standing, enrolled at a UW campus, took placement tests and were assigned to remedial courses. He said one parent asked him, “What happened? My kid has to take remedial math?”

Yup. In December 2013, UW officials released a report that showed that almost a quarter of students systemwide were required to take remedial courses. About 20% were assigned to math remediation and a bit under 10% to English remediation (the numbers overlap because some need both).

The math figure was at 20% in 1990, but it trended down to about 10% by 2000 before heading back up to the one-in-five mark by 2007. It stayed there in following years.

At some campuses, and for graduates of some high schools, the remedial percentage is surely lower. And for some it is much higher. The 2013 report showed the remedial rate at UW-Madison was less than 1%.For UW-Milwaukee, it was almost 37% and for UW-Parkside, it was over 65%.

Jagler has an additional question: How come so little is known about this? UW officials have compiled reports on remediation, and they have detailed their work dealing with it. But the issue gets little attention, the data is not widely known and results haven’t improved much. What this means and what can be done have been rather quiet issues.

Jagler became the lead sponsor of a little-noted bill that was approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed a few days ago by Gov. Scott Walker that calls for UW administrators to determine which public high schools (including charter schools, but not private schools) send into the UW system more than six graduates in any given year who need remedial math and/or English.

The new law calls for UW to send a report on what schools make that list to appropriate legislative committees and to the state superintendent of public instruction. (Department of Public Instruction officials asked during the legislative process to be included in the law since they, too, wanted to see the list.)

Discover Society:

There has been much public and media commentary on the financial crisis of 2008, the subsequent years of austerity, and the current banking system’s dubious practices, with discussions of how to tackle these issues continuing to dominate political discourse during the run up to May’s General Election. Yet, despite all this, financial elites continue to thrive in the City of London, reproducing their privilege while others struggle with the impact of austerity cuts and the reduced economic value of less valued forms of employment.

It is widely acknowledged that inequalities within UK society are increasing, with fewer people appropriating a greater proportion of the wealth and a widening chasm forming between the financial elite and the rest of society. A piece by Lisa McKenzie in April’s Discover Society illustrated powerfully how this growing inequality is experienced by those at the bottom of the income distribution and living in and around the City of London, with some facing forced eviction to make way for luxury housing for the wealthy, and others forced to use ‘poor doors’ to access their social housing within these opulent new developments.

Erin Richards:

Education issues have been some of the most controversial elements of the 2015-’17 state budget. The proposal calls for allowing much more public money to flow to private, mostly religious schools while keeping public school funding mostly flat. Public schools would see a modest increase in funding in the second year of the budget, but it’s under the rate of inflation.

Walker indicated in a radio address Thursday that the budget would lower property taxes and provide more money for K-12 education.

Some of the measures Evers is recommending Walker veto include:

■The Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program. That’s the Milwaukee “takeover” plan, which would allow Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to appoint a person to oversee up to five failing Milwaukee public schools each year. The schools would answer to that individual, instead of the Milwaukee School Board, and would likely result in more independent, nonunion charter school management companies running the schools.

Advocates say it’s time for undertaking a dramatically different strategy to address performance at the underachieving schools. Critics argue for local control, saying the measure would take power away from the elected Milwaukee School Board to address and resolve issues.

“Every other district in the state enjoys that privilege — this proposal would rob the MPS community of that right,” Evers wrote, adding that authority to close or reorganize schools would be placed in the hands of a single individual who would not have to answer to the MPS community.

Rather ironic. The DPI presided over decades of mediocrity via the WKCE…

James Poulous:

Just a few years ago, a huge vogue erupted among higher-ed administrators for MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Anant Agarwal, president of the online education company edX, at the time made a bold vow: “Online education will change the world.”

After the educational elite launched these seemingly visionary programs, however, their enthusiasm was swiftly curbed. As Stephanie Garlock observes in the new issue of Harvard Magazine, The New York Times dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” but before 2013 was out, The Washington Post was asking if MOOCs were “already over.”

Andy Thomason:

A literature course including four graphic novels that one student found offensive won’t get a disclaimer after all. The Redland Daily Facts reports that the professor at Crafton Hills College has decided not to add a warning to the syllabus about the graphic novels’ content.

Complaints from a student and her parents last month prompted the community college’s president to announce that the professor, Ryan Bartlett, had agreed to alter the syllabus in an effort to “avoid this situation in the future.” The student, Tara Shultz, took issue with four books: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1, by Brian Vaughan; The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House, by Neil Gaiman; and Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

Shawn Donnan and Sam Fleming in Washington:

The Pew researchers, however, found that even taking its broadest definition and counting those living on between $10 and $100 a day, just 1.7bn people could be considered middle class at the end of the first decade of this century.

“The global middle class is smaller than we think, it is less well off than we think, and it is more regionally concentrated than we think,” said Rakesh Kochhar, the lead author.

Globally, Pew said, 71 per cent of the world’s population still ranked as poor or low-income in 2011, the latest year for which all global data are available, compared with 79 per cent in 2001.

The Economist:

INSIDE the red-lacquered door of No. 39 Wenhua Lane in central Beijing is an old-style single-storey home built around a small courtyard. Its owner, an elderly man in a vest, sits on an upturned bucket near a jumble of cooking pots; a pile of old cardboard rests atop a nearby shed. Next to the man, two estate agents hover at the entrance to a room just big enough for a bed, a wardrobe and a rickety desk. They say it costs 3.9m yuan ($630,000). At 353,990 yuan per square metre, this makes it pricier than posh digs around New York’s Central Park—and it does not even have its own bathroom and kitchen. It is, however, close to the state-run Beijing No. 2 Experimental Primary School, one of the best in the city.

Michael Makowsky & Stephen Miller:

Education and general intelligence both serve to inform opinions, but do they lead to greater attitude extremity? We use questions on economic policy, social issues, and environmental issues from the General Social Survey to test the impact of education and intelligence on attitude extremity, as measured by deviation from centrist or neutral positions. Using quantile regression modeling, we find that intelligence is a moderating force across the entire distribution in economic, social, and environmental policy beliefs. Completing high school strongly correlates to reduced extremity, particularly in the upper quantiles. College education increases attitude extremity in the lower tail of environmental beliefs. The relevance of the low extremity tail (lower quantiles) to potential swing-voters and the high extremity tail (upper quantiles) to a political party’s core are discussed.

Joss Winn:

The body of work discussed here provides a substantial and original contribution to knowledge in the following ways: By subjecting ‘open education’ to a negative critique based on Marx’s categories of the commodity, value and labour, I reveal fundamental features of the ‘academic commons’ that have not been identified through critiques that neglect the materiality of openness and technology. In order to illustrate this, I examine how ‘hacking’ (out of which the Open Education movement developed) was not only a cultural phenomenon but a form of academic labour that emerged out of the intensification and valorisation of scientific research. I develop this by exploring how ‘value’ is an underlying and mediating imperative in higher education, and illustrate how using a ‘form-analytic’ approach helps us reconceive the social form of knowledge and the roles of teacher and student in a way that most treatments of academic labour fail to do. I also demonstrate how it is possible to go beyond this critique by adopting a position of methodological negativity, against labour rather than from the standpoint of labour, to construct a theory for an alternative to the capitalist university: co-operative higher education. By combining this theoretical and practical work with emerging ideas on ‘open co-operatives’ in other areas, I show how new forms of higher education cannot be based on existing practices of reciprocity based on the production of value, as is often assumed, but rather on a new and directly social form of knowledge production that emerges out of the free association between individuals who recognise that we have much to learn from each other.

Quentin Hardy:

But if the human race is at peril from killer robots, the problem is probably not artificial intelligence. It is more likely to be artificial stupidity. The difference between those two ideas says much about how we think about computers.

In the kind of artificial intelligence, or A.I., that most people seem to worry about, computers decide people are a bad idea, so they kill them. That is undeniably bad for the human race, but it is a potentially smart move by the computers.

But the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.

In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.

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

Richard Adams:

Philosophical discussions about truth, fairness or kindness appear to give a small but significant boost to the maths and literacy progress of primary school pupils, although experts remain puzzled as to why.

More than 3,000 pupils in 48 state primary schools across England took part in a year-long trial as part of a study named “philosophy for children”, and found that their maths and reading levels benefited by the equivalent of two months’ worth of teaching.

A Durham University evaluation said the results showed faster rates of progress for pupils eligible for free school meals, suggesting that the technique could “be used to reduce the attainment gap in terms of poverty in the short term”.

Eric Geller:

The Crypto Wars

A technological backdoor is a secret portal giving someone access to a secure product, be it a smartphone app, a computer program, or a Web connection. Pure software backdoors let the government directly access systems like Gmail, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and read unencrypted communications. A more complex form of backdoor access involves the government using special keys to decipher encrypted data that it gathered through conventional interception.

Backdoors that rely on encryption keys can either involve a master key for all data flowing across a particular product or keys for individual users that can be plugged into a law-enforcement system to wiretap those people. When a company sets up its system to generate keys for law enforcement—whether for its entire product or for individual users—it holds onto those keys until it is compelled to produce them. This is called key escrow. Here, there is no portal for direct access. Instead, the software code that is written to create the encryption is designed to be able to spit out keys for the government.