Greg Stanley:

One proposal would allow the state to create a new body to license and govern charter schools. The amendment would allow charter schools to avoid getting approval from their district’s school board by potentially getting that approval and oversight from the state.

The problem is school districts often do not want charter schools and have no interest in overseeing their operations, Donalds said.

“There are school boards that do not want anything to do with authorizing a charter school,” she said. “In some cases, the districts do not want them to succeed because they want those students back in public school and there’s a conflict of interest.”

Claudia Rowe:

A longtime advocate for public education has taken the reins of the state’s charter-school association, weathering vigorous opposition and bitter legal challenges — all in his first seven months on the job.

After a long career advocating for traditional public education, Patrick D’Amelio recently stepped up to lead the Washington State Charter Schools Association, which aims to spread the word about this locally untested model.

Charters are public schools funded with state dollars but operated here by private nonprofits, and the longest-running in Washington has been open only since 2015.

D’Amelio’s association bills itself as dedicated to “systemically underserved students.” But nationally, charters have a spotty record on that score.

Education Lab caught up with D’Amelio over the holiday break to ask why things would be any different here, and who’s enrolling their children in charters, despite continuing challenges to their legality and the fact that Seattle’s school board vigorously opposes their presence.

Dan Gurley:

he call to Pittsburgh’s hotline for child abuse and neglect came in at 3:50 p.m. on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving 2016. Sitting in one of 12 cubicles, in a former factory now occupied by the Allegheny County Police Department and the back offices of the department of Children, Youth and Families, the call screener, Timothy Byrne, listened as a preschool teacher described what a 3-year-old child had told him. The little girl had said that a man, a friend of her mother’s, had been in her home when he “hurt their head and was bleeding and shaking on the floor and the bathtub.” The teacher said he had seen on the news that the mother’s boyfriend had overdosed and died in the home.

According to the case records, Byrne searched the department’s computer database for the family, finding allegations dating back to 2008: parental substance abuse, inadequate hygiene, domestic violence, inadequate provision of food and physical care, medical neglect and sexual abuse by an uncle involving one of the girl’s two older siblings. But none of those allegations had been substantiated. And while the current claim, of a man dying of an overdose in the child’s home, was shocking, it fell short of the minimal legal requirement for sending out a caseworker to knock on the family’s door and open an investigation.

Nikita Taniparti:

I checked the syllabus for the next topic in the undergraduate economics class I teach at Harvard, and I lit up. I was going to cover inequality and poverty in the US and across the world.

After a few dry lectures on market demand and supply and drawing graphs to understand taxes and subsidies, I sensed my students were ready for a change of scene. Finally, a practical topic we could discuss in class. I could even ask for examples and anecdotes.

The whole semester, the class had seemed to demand more rigor (contrary to stories about the Harvard “bubble”). One student asked for the multi-variable derivation of how to make an optimal decision, just “for fun.” Another came to every office hours to review practice questions that most students didn’t even know where to find. Yet another not only read the assigned reading for class every day, but also the textbook of a higher-level economics course.

Dennis Thompson::

Many parents still regularly risk their babies’ lives as they put them to bed, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Analyzing data from the states, the CDC found that parents continue to practice unsafe habits that have been associated with sleep-related infant deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. For instance:

Mike Antonucci The National Center for Education Statistics released its first look at the comprehensive public education revenue and expenditures figures for the 2014-15 school year.

Despite the usual complaints, our public schools seem to have put the aftermath of the recession behind them and have resumed spending at their traditional clip. Total expenditures grew by more than 3 percent nationwide to reach $652 billion. Student enrollment grew by 0.5 percent.

Employee wages and benefits accounted for 79.8 percent of all current spending in 2015, but we are now seeing quite a change in the rate of increase between those two categories.

Wages went up 3 percent, commensurate with overall spending, which is what you would expect. But spending on employee benefits rose 5.9 percent to total almost $131 billion.

The public is woefully uninformed about education spending and salaries, but at least the topic is constantly discussed. The level of benefit spending is the purview of a few brave souls whose warnings go unheeded.

Madison has long spent more than most, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Greg Piper:

combination served as catnip for Skyline College administrators who told Eric Corgas, president of its Young Americans for Liberty chapter, that not only did he have to remove a “small folding table” while he distributed America’s founding document Oct. 25, but he had to turn in a permit application before he did anything.

Following a warning letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education earlier this month, the member of the San Mateo County Community College District has junked its policies against permission-free “expressive activity.”

According to the letter, Student Services counselor Alberto Santellan told Corgas and his coterie they would “get in trouble” if they didn’t remove the table. Director of Student Development Amory Cariadus then chastised the group for not giving her sufficient notice that they would be publicly promoting civic education:

Elizabet Breunig:

To understand our difficulties with defining freedom, it’s helpful to consider our intellectual history. In a society that imagines itself to consist of free and equal people, the question of how laws and regulations come to have authority is explained by an imaginary “social contract” that the members of a society are said to consent to, exchanging unchecked liberty for some measure of peace, order and security. This way of thinking about how people get along — largely through informal, metaphorical, but sometimes literal contracts — strongly informs how we imagine ourselves getting along in society. It’s our origin story, and it has immense power to frame the way we think.

But before we can understand what makes for a fair contract between equals, we have to explain what constitutes a free choice. And the contract tradition has some serious problems in that vein. For instance, Thomas Hobbes, an early and influential contract theorist, wrote that “Fear and liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the sea for fear the ship should sink, he doth it nevertheless very willingly, and may refuse to do it if he will: it is therefore the action of one who was free.” In other words, calamitous circumstances don’t diminish a person’s ability to choose freely; they just change the available choices. In this mind-set, non-physical coercion may not be decent or seemly, but it doesn’t invalidate the freedom of the choice that follows.

BBC:

The multi-entry visas will be valid for between five and 10 years, according to state media.

Technology leaders, entrepreneurs and scientists from in-demand sectors are among those eligible to apply.

China has set out goals for its economic and social development, and sees recruiting experts from abroad as key to achieving that.

When plans for the scheme were first considered, China said at least 50,000 foreigners would benefit.

Eva Dou:

One night this September, construction supervisor Chen Shouli fired off a joke in a chat group.

“Haha,” he typed on his black iPhone 7, followed by an off-color wisecrack about a rumored love triangle involving a celebrity and one of China’s most senior government officials.

Four days later, he says, the police telephoned, ordering…

Molly Beck:

Nygren’s plan would allow school districts with the low-revenue caps to increase the amount they spend from the current $9,100 per student limit to $9,400 per student next school year. The limit would increase by $100 each school year until it reaches $9,800 per student by the 2022-23 school year.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, the proposal would apply to about 120 of the state’s 422 school districts, including Mount Horeb, Baraboo, Milton, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Watertown, Westfield, Sparta and Tomah.

If all of the eligible school boards voted to take full advantage of the increase, property tax levies would increase by at least $22.5 million next school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Seven school districts would not be able to take advantage of the proposal because of recent referendum rejections including Chilton, Darlington, Howard-Suamico and Southern Door school districts.

A spokesman for Nygren said he would begin seeking support from other lawmakers this week. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not respond to a request for comment.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite tolerating Molly Beck:

Nygren’s plan would allow school districts with the low-revenue caps to increase the amount they spend from the current $9,100 per student limit to $9,400 per student next school year. The limit would increase by $100 each school year until it reaches $9,800 per student by the 2022-23 school year.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, the proposal would apply to about 120 of the state’s 422 school districts, including Mount Horeb, Baraboo, Milton, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Watertown, Westfield, Sparta and Tomah.

If all of the eligible school boards voted to take full advantage of the increase, property tax levies would increase by at least $22.5 million next school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Seven school districts would not be able to take advantage of the proposal because of recent referendum rejections including Chilton, Darlington, Howard-Suamico and Southern Door school districts.

A spokesman for Nygren said he would begin seeking support from other lawmakers this week. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not respond to a request for comment.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results. long term, disastrous reading results.

John Ydstie :

The United States needs to create more manufacturing jobs: That has been a constant refrain of President Trump and was one of the goals of the corporate tax cut recently passed by Congress and signed into law. The loss of manufacturing jobs has been a problem for many countries, especially the U.S. It played a big role in Trump’s election.

Germany, however, continues to maintain manufacturing as a large share of its economy. It makes up nearly a quarter of the German economy, about twice the share that manufacturing has in the U.S. economy.

How do the Germans do it? Are there any lessons for the U.S.?

Alvin Chang:

Think about your elementary school.

If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school’s attendance zone. You probably didn’t think twice about it.

We tend to assume these are neutrally drawn, immutable borders. But if you take a step back and look at the demographics of who lives in each attendance zone, you’re faced with maps like this:

Madison recently expanded their least diverse schools.

Richard Bledsoe:

Mark Twain once observed ““The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” The same analogy can be applied to the almost right and right principles of “social justice” versus “justice.”

“Social Justice” claims to be about fairness, which is a highly desirable outcome. But the term is a manipulative Newspeak euphemism for envy, revenge and oppression. What social justice actually does is crush people into group identities which have been assigned favored and non-favored status by power hungry establishment elitists. Preemptively claiming group guilt or privilege is an abstraction which does not recognize the actuality that people are individuals, responsible and accountable for their own actions. It’s the opposite of real justice.

Jean Twenge:

Kevin and I sit down at two desks just outside his third period class at a high school in northern San Diego. He is 17 years old and Asian American, with spiky black hair, fashionable glasses, and a wan smile. He is the oldest of three children, with his parents expecting another child in a few months. Until recently, the family lived in an apartment, where the noise from his younger siblings was deafening. Perhaps as a result, he is unusually empathetic for a teenage boy. “Been doing this all day?” he asks as I take a drink of water before beginning our interview.

Kevin is not the most organized student: He initially neglects to have his dad sign the back of the permission slip, and when I talk to the class later, he forgets his question by the time I call on him. But when I ask him what makes his generation different, he doesn’t hesitate: “I feel like we don’t party as much. People stay in more often. My generation lost interest in socializing in person—they don’t have physical get-togethers, they just text together, and they can just stay at home.”

Samuel, Hardiman:

Tulsa Public Schools plans to begin pilot programs for what a reimagined high school experience would look like, starting with two schools in the 2019-20 school year.

Implementing and scaling the test programs is the goal of what will be the district’s early steps in the process of improving how students prepare for the 21st century economy.

The pilots could include a high degree of personalized, self-paced learning and a fundamental shift in how teachers offer instruction, TPS officials said.

The pilots will be designed through a community-wide process over the next 20 or so months, the officials said. Where they would be or what they would entail isn’t yet clear.

TPS has hired a national consultant, 2Revolutions LLC, to gather community feedback on what reimagined high school should look like, but the district stressed that it will develop its own model.

Related:

High School Redesign

English 10

TAG Complaint

Virginia Postrel:

This has driven economic development since the 19th century. It encouraged mass production, national distribution and labor mobility.

That calculus is changing as services, from home repair to hospitality to health care, make up a bigger chunk of personal spending and a higher proportion of jobs. You can still build a successful enterprise that spreads costs over a huge customer base — see Amazon.com Inc. or Alphabet Inc. (Google) — but many of today’s service jobs are done directly for consumers. They’re in-person and inherently local. Physical therapists and personal trainers can’t telecommute. That makes where people live all the more important to their incomes.

Economists worry that Americans are not moving to where their skills are most in demand. Migration rates have been dropping since the 1980s. The states with the highest incomes also used to have the fastest-growing populations, as Americans moved to places with better jobs. That’s no longer the case. Workers seem stuck.

Nils Gilman:

But what happened after the scandal ran its course is in some ways the most interesting part of the whole story.

Profumo himself was genuinely contrite. After resigning from the government, the Baron volunteered to work as a toilet cleaner at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London that aimed to bridge the class divide in Britain by encouraging rich and poor to live together. He continued to work there for the rest of his life, for forty years, though he later moved over to the fundraising department. His wife, likewise, dedicated her life to charity and good works.

In other words, Profumo took responsibility for his misbehavior. He agreed to abase himself from his class privileges in order to make amends for how he had wronged various people, as well as harmed the integrity of British political life.

Can anyone imagine one of today’s elites behaving in such a manner?

Enda Curran:

Global debt rose to a record $233 trillion in the third quarter of 2017, more than $16 trillion higher from end-2016, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance. Private non-financial sector debt hit all-time highs in Canada, France, Hong Kong, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey.

At the same time, though, the ratio of debt-to-gross domestic product fell for the fourth consecutive quarter as economic growth accelerated. The ratio is now around 318 percent, 3 percentage points below a high set in the third quarter of 2016, according to the IIF.

“A combination of factors including synchronized above-potential global growth, rising inflation (China, Turkey), and efforts to prevent a destabilizing build-up of debt (China, Canada) have all contributed to the decline,” IIF analysts wrote in a note.

Jim Vallandingham :

There are many types of maps that are used to display data. Choropleths and Cartograms provide two great examples. I gave a talk, long long ago, about some of these map varieties.

Most of these more common map types focus on a particular variable that is displayed. But what if you have multiple variables that you would like to present on a map at the same time?

Here is my attempt to collect examples of multivariate maps I’ve found and organize them into a loose categorization. Follow along, or dive into the references, to spur on your own investigations and inspirations!

Before we begin, certainly you’ve heard by now that, even for geo-related data, a map is not always the right answer. With this collection, I am just trying to enumerate the various methods that have been attempted, without too much judgement as to whether it is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ encoding. Ok? Ok!

Phil Plait:

If you’ve ever watched a bad movie about an asteroid hitting the Earth (and there are so many that if I have to see another one I swear I’m rooting for the asteroid) then you might have noticed that the asteroid itself always slams into the Earth’s surface, and it’s the impact itself that does all the damage.

Actually, you may not have noticed, because it happens so often and is such a trope that you might just take it for granted, like the air you breathe.

Oh, but that air is important. If the asteroid is small-ish, say a few dozen to a few hundred meters across, then air is critical. That becomes obvious if you turn away from the silver screen and instead watch an actual asteroid impact … like the one that happened on February 15, 2013, over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Michele Stacey:

Most universities today require their students to learn about diversity as a part of their degree. Research has examined the effectiveness of diversity courses at changing attitudes toward groups, focusing on sexism or racism, within psychology and women’s studies disciplines. Given the increasing concern over bias in policing, however, this diversity training may be of importance to the study of criminal justice. The current study aims to examine the effectiveness of a diversity course within a criminal justice program at changing perceptions of groups using a survey based on validated measures of attitudes toward women, homosexuality, and symbolic racism. Change in attitudes between the pre-test and post-test are examined. Results suggest that the course is effective at changing attitudes toward homosexuality, but not race or sex. The results also suggest that these perceptions are dependent on group characteristics.

Nicholas Zabaras :

Introduction to Statistical Computing and Probability and Statistics

Introduction to the course, books and references, objectives, organization; Fundamentals of probability and statistics, laws of probability, independency, covariance, correlation; The sum and product rules, marginal and conditional distributions; Random variables, moments, discrete and continuous distributions; The univariate Gaussian distribution.

American Economic Association:

We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces male earnings by $1,493 (or 2.75%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.52 hours per week. Estimates for women do not show consistent evidence of negative effects on these outcomes. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $149.6 billion in the US annually. Among men, we also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men, although white and Asian men also experience sizable negative impacts of collective bargaining exposure. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining law exposure leads to reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults, and these effects are larger for men.

The Hechinger:

If Domonique Crosby has her way, she will graduate from high school this spring at age 20. To her, earning her diploma, even two years late, feels like something of a miracle.

Held back in the fourth grade, Crosby was 16 years old when she entered George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans. As a freshman, she constantly got into fights and spent long hours in a disciplinary classroom. As a sophomore, she worked six hours a night at a burger joint in a shopping mall. She became chronically absent and lethargic when she was in class

“I got home at 9 o’clock and I’d do homework. It was hard to get up in the morning and go to school,” she said. “I wanted to give up. I thought I should get a job. I felt like I was already behind and I was too old to still be in high school.”

Administrators at Carver say students who enter high school overage feel like they’re wearing a scarlet letter, regardless of why they were retained. “There’s so much shame attached to it. Students constantly tell me, ‘I want to be at my right grade,'” said Jerel Bryant, Carver’s principal. “It’s a huge thing.”

Danielle Gilbert:

Did you spend any time at the Apple Store this holiday season? It was this week in 2007 that Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s first iPhone, what he called “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.” A decade later, Apple CEO Tim Cook reflected on the company’s most important product, stating that “today more than ever it is redefining the way we communicate, entertain, work and live.” Indeed, the iPhone changed what we expected our phones to do. It changed the way we eat, sleep, date, and play. It changed political protest, reporting on political protest, and political communication. From its minority share of the global smartphone market, the iPhone revolutionized the entire industry.

It has also handed a huge gift to hostage takers all over the world. Today’s smartphone, with its video camera and internet connection capabilities, is a political kidnapper’s perfect accomplice. It has enabled a subtle but seismic shift in global kidnapping, reshaping the costs of taking a person, with dramatic implications for victim safety, release negotiations, and terrorist recruitment. To understand the monumental change that technology has wrought on hostage-taking strategy, let’s first examine two other advances that changed global kidnapping: commercial airlines and the nightly news.

Amory Manuel:

Just over a year ago, the University of Michigan launched a new, five-year-long initiative named the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) plan. In an official statement by President Mark Schlissel, the plan’s primary goal is stated to be the creation of a “vibrant climate of inclusiveness” on campus.

In order to heighten campus diversity, the plan pledged to increase enrollment of students from underrepresented backgrounds. These targeted demographics include the usual race and gender groups, but also, notably, students with underrepresented “political perspective[s].”

As for equity, the plan pledged to rid campus of discrimination based on the aforementioned identities—although without mentioning “political perspective”—and for inclusion, the plan promised to foster a campus culture that welcomes different perspectives by “support[ing] innovative and inclusive scholarship and teaching.” DEI is designed to achieve “progress” through tangible actions, its administrators held accountable by measurable results.

New Criterion:

If you are thinking of building a bridge, be careful if your engineer went to Purdue University. Donna Riley, the head of the engineering department at Purdue, has put the world on notice that “rigor” is a dirty word. In an article for Engineering Education called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” Professor Riley, who is also the author of Engineering and Social Justice, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” Yes, really. “The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” There follows a truly surreal meditation on the existential and sexist depredations of slide rules—those hard, straight instruments that have traditionally been deployed by men—and periodic eructations like this:

Paul Frain:

Education this week voted to expand a performance-funding formula for public institutions, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
The state had performance funding in place during previous budget cycles, but the formula only applied to new money. The just-approved version would tie 10 percent of state funding to performance measures such as degree completion, job-placement rates and how colleges spend mon

Pamela Cotant:

The certification came with a 4.5 percent increase in pay and the satisfaction that she is doing more than “delivering some kind of curriculum you’ve been handed,” Folberg said. She said that is especially important because as a teacher of English language learners she is working with families who have to rely on blind faith in the educational system.

“I owe it to my students and families,” she said.

They learned in December she was among 12 staff members in the Verona Area School District who had passed the certification. Up until this year, the district had only eight teachers total who had gone through the process over the years. The 20 teachers still represent only about 4 percent of the district’s teaching staff, according to Jason Olson, human resources director for the district. But they are part of a growing trend for teachers to seek the certification.

National Board certification.

Kerry Howley:

Reality Winner grew up in a carefully kept manufactured home on the edge of a cattle farm 100 miles north of the Mexican border in a majority-Latino town where her mother, Billie, still lives. From the back porch, a carpet of green meets the horizon, and when a neighbor shoots a gun for target practice, a half-dozen local dogs run under the trailer to hide. Billie worked for Child Protective Services, and in Ricardo, Texas, the steady income made her daughters feel well-off; the fact that they had a dishwasher seemed evidence of elevated social standing. Billie, a chatty redhead with the high-pitched voice of a doll, supported the family while her husband, Ronald, she says, “collected degrees.” It was Ronald who named Reality. The deal had been that Billie got to name their first — Brittany — but their second was his to choose. He noticed, on a T-shirt at their Lamaze class, the words I COACHED A REAL WINNER. He wanted a success story and felt that an aspirational name would increase his chances of producing one. Billie did not object; a deal is a deal.

Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies.

Jon Christian :

Earlier this week, we wrote about how Google can highlight erroneous or unconfirmed reports in the immediate aftermath of breaking news. But these rapidly-shifting results are quickly lost in time as the search engine’s algorithms self-correct, making it difficult for outsiders — including journalists — to hold the search engine accountable for spreading potentially harmful information.

There is one group working on a concept for a system that would establish a record of search engine results. The idea is similar to the Internet Archive, which downloads periodic copies of websites, but more complicated since search engines display different results depending on the time as well as the location and history of the user. The solution for tracking such a complicated system is described in a prospectus for the Sunlight Society, founded by a group of 20 researchers under the banner of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a nonprofit in Vista, California that conducts research in psychology and tech.

Chris Stewart:

The story goes something like this: “corporate education reform” is a conspiracy to “privatize” public education and to turn a public good into a private cash cow for business profiteers.

With education spending topping $600 billion, we would be naive to believe this isn’t an irresistible target for “privatization.” And, this word, “privatization,” is supposed to have a powerfully negative connotation that we should avoid, somewhat like being an “ist” (racist, sexist, chauvinist, etc.).

But, I’m not that married to the negative conceptualization of “privatization.” I don’t favor or disfavor it as a concept. Could be bad. Could be amazing. Could be neither.

Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver and Sarah Frier:

Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald Trump accused Facebook of bias.

Zuckerberg’s social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.

The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team that’s neutral in that it works with nearly anyone seeking or securing power. The unit is led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since Facebook hired Harbath three years later, her team has traveled the globe helping political clients use the company’s powerful digital tools.

Chicago Tribune.

Margaret Sullivan:

The July email from Daniel Hastings, a Post reader who lives in Washington, was harsh: “You never have any intention of providing an unbiased or factual representation of the man or his policies,” he wrote. “Ergo, fake news! No one outside your liberal bubble at the Post or the general DC area can take you seriously.”

Hastings was responding to a column I had written about President Trump. I’d argued that Trump was wrong to insist, despite credible evidence to the contrary, that much of the reporting done by national news organizations was just lies. Hastings disagreed — and he had some advice for me: “Take a visit to the heart of the country. Go to a diner or a flea market. Strike up some conversations. Come back and report without malice or deceit.” He seemed sure that most people would back him up.

As the media columnist for The Washington Post, I had long ago become used to hostile mail and phone calls from some readers, mostly those supporting Trump, and to trolling on social media. While I have received a lot of appreciative feedback that practically demands to be printed and displayed on the fridge, I have also heard from someone who suggested that my breasts should be cut off with a butcher knife, and from someone who told me that he had a gun and people like me would soon be eliminated. I’ve often been called the “c-word,” a slut and a bitch. Some writers even signed their names to these venomous notes. One reader, John Hanna, was perfectly civil, but told me by phone that he and his wife — both Washington-area physicians — had voted for Trump (whom he nevertheless called “a buffoon”) because of the candidate’s opposition to the “terribly biased” media, particularly the New York Times and The Washington Post.

frbsf.

Benjamin Lee Whorf
:

Every normal person in the world, past infancy in years, can and does talk. By virtue of that fact, every person — civilized or uncivilized — carries through life certain naive but deeply rooted ideas about talking and its relation to thinking. Because of their firm connection with speech habits that have become unconscious and automatic, these notions tend to be rather intolerant of opposition. They are by no means entirely personal and haphazard; their basis is definitely systematic, so that we are justified in calling them a system of natural logic — a term that seems to me preferable to the term common sense, often used for the same thing.

Max Nisen, via a iind reader:

In many places around the U.S., low-income and minority children are significantly underrepresented in gifted-and-talented programs. This seems to be the case whether the process for identifying gifted children relies on teacher referrals for screening, or on evaluations arranged and paid for independently by parents.

So what happens when you give every student a chance?

For starters, according to a new NBER working paper, you get a massive increase in diversity. At least that was the case at public schools in one of the United States’ largest and most diverse urban school districts.

In the early 2000s, the gifted population in the district studied by the researchers was far less diverse than the student body overall. While blacks and Hispanics accounted for 60 percent of the student population, only 28 percent of third-graders who had been identified as gifted were black or Hispanic. (The district is not named in the paper, but the demographics, along with other details of the case study, match those of the Broward County Public Schools system in Florida, which the same researchers got grant money to study a few years ago.)

In 2005, the district adopted universal screening instead of using a referral program; all second-grade students took an ability test, and those who scored above a given threshold took an IQ test in order to qualify for a gifted-and-talented program.

Just passing the test didn’t guarantee a spot; there also was input from parents and teachers on whether the student possessed things like motivation, creativity, and adaptation. The threshold on the initial test was lowered slightly for disadvantaged “Plan B” students, who were either eligible for free or discounted lunches based on their family’s income, or were English-language learners.

Related: TAG complaint against the Madison School District and they’re all rich white kids and the will do just fine, NOT!

American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology :

It has come to light in recent years that emerging internet-based technologies have made possible new means of manipulating human opinions, beliefs, and behavior on a massive scale, often without people’s knowledge. Randomized, controlled research conducted in multiple countries by AIBRT researchers has shown, for example, that search rankings favoring one political candidate can rapidly shift the voting preferences of undecided voters toward that candidate by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. New research shows that opinions can also be shifted by manipulating search suggestions (“autocomplete”), and multiple concerns have been raised in recent months about how social media might have shifted large blocks of votes in the 2016 US presidential election by filtering news feeds, personalizing content, spreading fake news stories and other means.

Alan Borsuk:

Sadly, but probably inevitably, the debate over what to do about students behaving badly is polarized by race and politics.

Look at the controversy over suspending and expelling students from school. On a national level, in 2014, the Obama administration told school districts across the nation that the data showed there was racial discrimination — black students were being suspended disproportionately. Change this or face civil rights investigations, the administration said. Suspensions declined across the country.

Some say the Obama move backfired and climate in schools has gotten worse. Some say the Obama position was a step toward wiser policies because suspensions don’t help kids. Building their social and emotional abilities is what is needed.

No surprise: The Trump administration is heading toward reversing the direction Obama took.

Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education:

Harvard took the top spot in our rankings of U.S. colleges, followed by Columbia University. Analyze the data, compare schools and create your own customized rankings.

Vanessa Romo:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents need to have “reasonable suspicion” to carry out “advanced” searches on electronic devices, including smartphones and tablets, that belong to individuals entering or exiting the country, the agency announced Friday.

The updated rules allow agents to continue to inspect information that’s stored on a device, not in the cloud. But from now on, they can’t copy that information or connect to an external device to analyze the contents, unless they have reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior.

Lauren Fitzpatrick:

The new homegrown CEO of the Chicago Public Schools said Thursday that the sprawling school system she just inherited needs an independent inspector general, calling the one whose probes ousted two of her predecessors “an honest person.”

Janice Jackson — a former teacher and principal with children enrolled in the country’s third-largest district that educated her — ascended to CEO after last month’s resignation of Forrest Claypool, who replaced the currently imprisoned Barbara Byrd-Bennett. She is Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fifth appointed CEO since he took office in 2011, and the eighth schools leader CPS high schoolers have known since starting kindergarten. Her role as acting CEO is expected to become permanent pending school board approval later this month.

As she works to rebuild trust and instill stability in the troubled school system, Jackson said she met “early on” with Nicholas Schuler, the independent watchdog who caught Claypool lying repeatedly during an ethics probe sparked by the Chicago Sun-Times. He also is credited with handling the day-to-day investigation of Byrd-Bennett.

Stephanie Saul:

At Wright State University in Ohio, the French horn and tuba professors are out. So is the accomplished swimming team.

At Kansas State, Italian classes are going the way of the Roman Empire.

And at the University of Central Missouri, The Muleskinner, the biweekly campus newspaper, is publishing online-only this year, saving $35,000 in printing costs.

Just as many universities believed that the financial wreckage left by the 2008 recession was behind them, campuses across the country have been forced to make new rounds of cuts, this time brought on, in large part, by a loss of international students.

Jay Rosen:

It’s been eight years since the internet philosopher David Weinberger wrote, “Transparency is the new objectivity.” It’s been 16 years since Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel said, in their great book The Elements of Journalism, “The willingness of the journalist to be transparent about what he or she has done is at the heart of establishing that the journalist is concerned with the truth.”

So transparency is not a new idea in journalism. But we’re finally starting to see what it means to build a value proposition around it. For my final post in what has been a devastating — but also inspiring — year for the public service press, I will try to summarize what is involved when transparency becomes the primary means of trust production.

It means you show your work. And at least eleven other things:

Nathan VanderKlippe :

Liu Hu spent two decades pushing hard at the bounds of censorship in China. An accomplished journalist, he used a blog to accuse high-level officials of corruption and wrongdoing and to publish details of misconduct by authorities.

In late 2013, he was arrested and accused of “fabricating and spreading rumours.” Late in 2016, a court found him guilty of defamation and ordered him to apologize on his social-media account, which at the time had 740,000 followers. If he was unwilling to do that, the court said, he could pay $115 to publish the verdict on an authorized website. Mr. Liu paid the money.

Then, he said, the judge raised the fee to $2,900.

But in the midst of Mr. Liu’s attempt to seek legal redress early in 2017, he discovered that his life had abruptly changed: Without any notice, he had been caught up in the early reaches of a social-credit system that China is developing as a pervasive new tool for social control – one expected to one day tighten the state’s grip on its citizens. Critics have called it an Orwellian creation – a new kind of “thought police.”

Chad Calder:

Two advocacy groups have taken legal action in Orleans Parish Civil District Court against the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts over the expulsions of two students seen on campus surveillance video smoking what appeared to be — but what they say was not — marijuana.

The Louisiana Justice Institute has asked for an injunction against the school on behalf of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, alleging a state open meetings law violation, breach of contract and a violation of the students’ right to due process.

“My clients got pranked on Halloween,” Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute said. “Everyone knows it was a practical joke, but they (NOCCA) will not back down.”

Charisse A. Gulosino
Elif Şişli-Ciamarra:

This study provides the first systematic analysis of the composition of charter school governing boards. We assemble a dataset of charter school boards in Massachusetts between 2001 and 2013 and investigate the consequences of donor and founder representation on governing boards. We find that the presence of donors on the charter school boards is positively related to financial performance and attribute this result to the donors’ strong monitoring incentives due to their financial stakes in the school. We also show that financial outcomes are not generated at the expense of academic outcomes, as the presence of donors on the boards is also associated with higher student achievement. Founder representation on charter school boards, on the other hand, is associated with lower financial performance but higher academic achievement.

KC Johnson:

As more and more schools (currently 72 since the Dear Colleague letter, and counting) have found themselves on the losing end of due process decisions, a handful of institutions have resisted in a troubling manner. Rather than acknowledge that court decisions showed the need to reform their unfair procedures, schools instead have maneuvered to neuter an accused student’s efforts to go to court.

The trend started a few months ago at Penn State. After a temporary restraining order blocked the university from suspending a student, the university abruptly announced (without informing the court) that it was withdrawing the student’s guilty finding—but would re-try him, subject to eliminating some (but not all) of the procedural defects in the investigation identified by the court. The accused student’s lawyer filed a contempt motion; the day before the hearing on the motion, Penn State withdrew plans for a new disciplinary hearing for the student.

Then came Texas, where the university president overturned a not guilty finding after the accuser—whose father was a major donor to the school—had filed an appeal. The accused student sued; the judge in the case scheduled a hearing, at which the president was scheduled to testify. Less than a week before the hearing, Texas announced that the president had cancelled his guilty finding, and would submit the accuser’s appeal to another, unnamed Texas administrator. But the court called the university’s bluff, and refused to cancel the hearing. That morning, just before the president was to take the stand, the two sides settled, and the university permanently withdrew the guilty finding.

Dean Mosiman:

In Madison, for example, the total tax bill for a $200,000 home in the Madison School District assessed at 100 percent of its fair market value was $4,632, fourth highest in the county. The highest was $4,988 for a Madison home in the Verona School District, followed by $4,850 for a Madison home in the Monona Grove School District and $4,685 for a Fitchburg home in the Verona School District.

The lowest for a home of the same profile was $2,649 in the town of Bristol in the Columbus School District.

Tax bills began arriving in mailboxes in mid-December. The deadline for owners to pay at least the first installment of their property taxes is Jan. 31.

The initial deadline is the same in Madison, but the city has switched from two to four installments, with the second installment due March 31, the third May 31 and the final on July 31, the latter date the same as other municipalities in the county.

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

Bill Donahue:

the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow pota­toes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes in his 2007 memoir, The Snoring Bird, recalling the adventures he shared with the two eldest Adams kids, Jimmy and Billy. The boys built a raft out of barn wood and spent countless hours watching baby catfish and white-bellied dragonflies. The Adamses taught Bernd English. He killed a hummingbird with his slingshot. He ran around barefoot and shirtless.
Bernd Heinrich is now 77 years old and the author of 21 books. The vaunted biologist E. O. Wilson speaks of him as an equal, calling him “one of the most original and productive people I know” and “one of the best natural-history writers we have.” Runners also revere him, for his speed and for his 2002 book, Why We Run. “He was the first person of scientific stature to say that ultramarathoning is a natural pursuit for humans,” says Christopher McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller Born to Run. “He did the research himself, in 100-plus-mile races.”

But let’s set aside the literary plumage for a moment. In many ways, Bernd remains the same inquisitive kid who found bliss in his first American summer. He still runs, though no farther than about 12 miles at a time. He still watches wildlife, intently, and he still climbs trees. Sometimes he even climbs trees in snowshoes. In old age, he is embracing the joys of youth anew.

And he has returned to the Maine woods, to a 640-acre plot about 15 miles from that old farmhouse where he spent the summer of 1951. He owns a pickup truck and drives without compunction, but he does not have running water, phone service, or a refrigerator. He heats solely with wood and relies on a small solar panel to power his laptop and Wi-Fi router. He sometimes goes two months without ever leaving the property.
Bernd is hardly a hermit. For the past three years, he has shared the homestead with his partner, 57-year-old Lynn Jennings, a nine-time U.S. cross-country champion and the 10,000-meter bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It’s a happy and fruitful arrangement. Over the past five years, Bernd has staged a late-life creative tear that calls to mind Johnny Cash or Georgia O’Keeffe, churning out a steady stream of academic papers, columns for Natural History magazine, and four books, including The Naturalist’s Notebook, a just-published guide cowritten with Nathaniel Wheelwright, as well as 2016’s One Wild Bird at a Time, which renders certain jays and blackbirds on his property as unique individuals, as fully realized as Elaine and Kramer on Seinfeld.

Erin Richards:

In 2015-’16, Wisconsin was home to just over a million school-aged children. About 860,000 attended public schools. About 123,000 attended private schools: about 90,000 who paid tuition, and about 33,000 who used vouchers. About 20,000 children were home-schooled.

Vouchers are taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies that help children attend private schools, the vast majority of which are religious. In Wisconsin, the annual voucher payments will rise to about $7,500 per K-8 pupil and around $8,000 per high school student this fall.

To qualify for a voucher in the statewide program, students have to come from families earning no more than 185% of the federal poverty level, or about $45,000 for a family of four or about $52,000 if the parents are married. The income limit for the Racine and Milwaukee programs is 300% of the federal poverty level.
Vouchers are different than charter schools, which are fully public schools that are privately operated, often by nonprofits. Charter schools receive freedom from some state rules and school district oversight in exchange for demonstrating higher-than-average student achievement, the terms of which are outlined in their charters, or contracts.

“School choice” refers to vouchers and charters and other options parents can choose outside their assigned neighborhood school. But vouchers are the most controversial because they usually support religious schools that don’t have to follow all the same rules as public schools. Private schools that accept vouchers are not legally obligated to serve all children with special needs, and they do not have to disclose all the same data as public schools.

Voucher schools spend substantially less per student than traditional taxpayer funded school districts.

Locally, Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student annually, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results

Julia Angwin Noam Scheiber and Ariana Tobin:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

V. Joshua Adams:

IN 1979, the California poet Robert Hass published his now-famous poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass’s poem criticized poststructuralist literary theory (which he called “the new thinking”) for disregarding particulars in favor of “the luminous clarity of a general idea,” and for adopting a pathologically mournful philosophy of language in which “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” As a consequence of this sort of thinking, Hass wrote, “everything dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, you and I.” This eloquent lament did not stop the rise of literary theory (neither did Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s blistering essay “Against Theory,” published a few years later). And, although much has changed in the intervening years — theory is no longer all “about loss,” in Hass’s words — the place of theory in the academy seems secure. Fewer people may “do” theory now, but it survives as a kind of conventional wisdom, a default approach to how literary scholars treat language and read texts.

Nevertheless, if theory was as problematic as Hass’s poem intimated 40 years ago, shouldn’t we be more suspicious of the conventional wisdom that is its legacy? According to Toril Moi, the answer is yes. Her important new book, Revolution of the Ordinary, makes a case for rejecting the approach to language that the “theory project” produced. Like the speaker of Hass’s poem, Moi believes that the way literary theories think about language has corrosive ethical and political consequences. Unlike Hass, she does not counter theory with poetry. Nor does she offer a substitute theory to correct the problems of the old. Instead, she looks to philosophy, particularly to “ordinary language philosophy” — by which she means the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, J. L. Austin, as interpreted by Stanley Cavell. For Moi, this philosophical constellation promises to renovate literary studies by reconnecting our language to the world from which theory severed it.

Jordan Smith:

The state’s theory of the crime fell apart this past October, when Potkin and a team from the Innocence Project presented nearly a week’s worth of testimony from several renowned entomologists and a medical examiner, each of whom demonstrated why the state’s narrative never made any scientific sense. In short, had Bailey been slaughtered in the pre-dawn hours and his body left outside all day in the summer heat, as the state claimed, blowflies — nature’s swift and ubiquitous first responders to scenes of death — would have quickly colonized his remains, leaving visible clusters of eggs in his various wounds.

Still, the prosecution would not be bowed: At the October hearing, prosecutor Sandra DiGiacomo tried to peddle the notion that flies in Las Vegas behave unlike flies everywhere else in the world. It didn’t work. In a detailed opinion filed December 19, Judge Stefany Miley concluded that the testimony of Lobato’s experts was credible, and had a jury heard such evidence, she might have been acquitted. Miley granted Lobato a new trial.

Github:

Urban Pulse is a framework that uses computational topology techniques to capture the pulse of cities. This is accomplished by first modeling the urban data as a collection of time-varying scalar functions over different temporal resolutions, where the scalar function represents the distribution of the corresponding acitivy over the city. The topology of this collection is then used to identify the locations of prominent pulses in a city. The framework includes a visual interface that can be used to explore pulses within and across multiple cities.

Liam Mannix:

To tell the story of what sugar does to your brain, you have to start with the thought that triggers your need for a hit of sweetness.

It often happens in the afternoon when your brain, which runs on sugar, starts to get hungry.

To satiate the craving your brain activates a string of neurons, often referred to as the reward pathway, which pump the chemical dopamine into your brain.

All of a sudden you need a chocolate bar or that sweet pastry you saw at lunchtime.

If you act on that craving, the reward pathway then switches mode, pumping chemicals such as beta-endorphins into your brain, generating feelings of pleasure.

Megan McArdle:

In December, doctors at a VA hospital in Oregon decided to admit an 81-year-old patient. He was dehydrated, malnourished, plagued by skin ulcers and broken ribs — in the medical professionals’ opinion, he was unable to care for himself at home. Administrators, however, overruled them.

Was there no bed for this poor man? No, the facility had plenty of beds; in fact, on an average day, more than half of the beds are empty, awaiting patients. Was there no money or medicine to care for him? No, and no. Reporting by the New York Times suggests that Walter Savage was, perversely, turned away because he was too sick. Very sick patients tend to worsen the performance measures by which VA hospitals are judged.

Deri S and J Pers:

Although decades of research show that people tend to see themselves in the best possible light, we present evidence that people have a surprisingly grim outlook on their social lives. In 11 studies (N = 3,293; including 3 preregistered), we find that most people think that others lead richer and more active social lives than they do themselves. We show that this bias holds across multiple populations (college students, MTurk respondents, shoppers at a local mall, and participants from a large, income-stratified online panel), correlates strongly with well-being, and is particularly acute for social activities (e.g., the number of parties one attends or proximity to the “inner circle” of one’s social sphere). We argue that this pessimistic bias stems from the fact that trendsetters and socialites come most easily to mind as a standard of comparison and show that reducing the availability of extremely social people eliminates this bias. We conclude by discussing implications for research on social comparison and self-enhancement. (PsycINFO Database Record.

Mark Nuzzilo:

Not only is it possible, but it is becoming more and more likely to happen soon.

The reason it hasn’t happened yet is because nobody has applied the correct strategy yet. I do not think it would take heroic feats of execution, given the right strategy. In order to compete with Google’s strategy, or understand why it can be beaten in the first place, it is helpful to understand it:

Despite Google’s profits, talent, and maturity, the number of ways a user can possibly search for something is very limited. The way that Google Search presents results to the user, given an input query, is also out of the user’s hands. The user, no matter how savvy, cannot instruct Google to use a different kind of search algorithm. Nor can the user see the details of the algorithm that is chosen for them, as it is a highly guarded trade secret.

This is of course a deliberate choice on Google’s part. There are a few reasons, in my opinion, why Google’s strategy is successful:

Phillip:

Arvind, Hemanth and Marc actually only came to the United States to attend university. Arvind Thiruvengadam and Hemanth Kappanna are both from India, from Chennai and Bangalore, respectively, while Marc Besch is from Biel, Switzerland. They all ended up in West Virginia, not exactly the America you dream of when you come from Chennai or Bangalore. Probably not even when you come from Biel.
 
 Attached to West Virginia University is an institute for emissions research – also, perhaps, not the field of study you dream of when you’re around 30 and aspiring to a career in auto engineering. The institute is called the Center for Alternative Fuels Engines and Emissions (CAFEE), located in an unprepossessing corrugated iron structure in a clearing in the hills of West Virginia. In other words, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town is Morgantown, the nearest place you might have heard of, Pittsburgh.
 
 This is where Arvind, Hemanth and Marc began measuring emissions. First truck emissions and then passenger cars – until they accidentally uncovered a scandal that brought the world’s biggest carmaker at the time to its knees. The emissions tests carried out by Arvind, Hemanth and Marc have already cost the Volkswagen company around 25 billion euros, mainly in buybacks, fines and settlements, and that is by no means the end of it. Because of a study written by these three students, former VW managers are wanted by the FBI, one has been arrested in the U.S. and others are in custody in Germany. One German politician called the diesel scandal “the biggest industrial scandal since World War II.”

Logan Wroge:

Storch said, “We noticed behavior that (led) us to search the belongings of two students” that turned up individual BB guns on school property. The high school’s educational resource officer, a Madison police officer dedicated to each of the city’s four high schools, was notified, and the students were taken to offices, according to Storch.

Related: Police calls to Madison schools.

Michael Savage:

Ministers are being urged to fine schools that are informally excluding poorly performing pupils, amid mounting evidence that some institutions are attempting to game the exam system.

Hundreds of cases of children being removed from schools on tenuous and potentially illegal grounds have been reported to a charity offering legal advice to parents. Experts blame the rise of so-called “off-rolling” on schools that are under pressure to improve performance.

Children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) are thought to be the most affected by the informal methods designed to move them out of a school without recording their departure as an official exclusion. With pressure mounting on the Department for Education to act, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, said some schools were “abandoning their responsibility” to give a decent education to their children. She told the Observer it was “increasingly clear that some schools are gaming the system by taking children they think won’t get good results off their rolls before they sit their exams. Any school that does this is abandoning their responsibility to children, passing the buck to others who are often ill-equipped and don’t have the support they need to provide a good education. As a result, very vulnerable children are falling through the gaps in the education system, increasing the chances they will then go on to lead difficult adult lives.

Howard Blume:

Leilany Medina, 11, loves books so much that she’d like to become a librarian. But even she sometimes forgets to return books on time, especially if she hasn’t quite finished. And she’s racked up some late fines.

But local libraries are providing a way out for such book lovers, and creating new lures for other children, who haven’t caught the reading bug, by doing away with late fees, automatically signing up students for library cards through their schools and allowing them to “read away” their fines and fees.

The most recent move was a vote last week by Los Angeles County supervisors to end late fees for patrons under 21 at county-run libraries, effective immediately. That did not help Leilany because officials offered no amnesty for past fines.

So on Thursday, Leilany went to the East Los Angeles Library, a county facility, to read off $4 in late fees. Students can eliminate debt at a rate of $5 an hour under a program that took effect in June.

“You tell them you’ll read and they’ll sign you in and you start,” said Leilany, a fifth-grader at Morris K. Hamasaki Elementary in East L.A. “When your head starts losing the book you can stop reading and they tell you how much money they took away.”

She’s especially fond of fairy tales and Megan McDonald’s “Judy Moody” series, about a third-grader with many notable emotional states.

via reddit:

I manage the Linux labs at my college campus, but I also maintain the Windows and Distance Learning Center labs from time to time, especially during testing periods. During finals week, this can be incredibly frustrating, since sitting in a lab, watching students take a final is so much more boring than taking the final itself. I’m not even allowed to have a phone.

Most Finals are boring, unrestricted ones, but a few online professional certifications and placement tests are very strict in their requirements. How we set up for these tests is to boot the computer into a temporary Live OS, which does not save any settings, and automatically opens Firefox full screen in Incognito mode.

Firefox is the only thing that is allowed to run, and if the window closes, the computer reboots, resetting the OS back to defaults. If the user leaves the page set by the test taker, the browser closes. If they open a terminal or other program not allowed by that test (like a calculator) then the system is locked until a proctor (usually me) unlocks the screen.

Melissa Chadburn:

Last year I worked undercover at a temp agency in Los Angeles. While I took the assignment for an article I was working on, I’d also been unemployed for over a year. It seemed I was in that middling space of over-qualified for entry-level jobs, under-qualified for the jobs I most desired, and aged out or irrelevant as a labor union organizer, where I’d gained the bulk of my work experience.

One altered resume later I joined a temp agency and became the biggest ghost of them all, a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi. I’d found my squad, a cadre of screw-ups, felons, floozies, single moms, the differently abled, students, immigrants, the homeless and hungry, the overqualified and under-qualified, all of us ghosted by the traditional marketplace.

***

Peter Cook:

How could so many teachers, principals, and superintendents believe that minority students have equal educational opportunities, when study after study has shown that minority students are disproportionately suspended and expelled from school? How could they be unaware of the statistics that show clear racial disparities in graduation rates and college attendance? Although the achievement gap has been at the center of our national conversation on education for decades, many educators seem blissfully (or intentionally?) unaware of it. It’s dumbfounding.

At the same time, this may help explain why so many educators across the country take a dim view of charter schools, most of which enroll low-income students of color who have been underserved by the traditional public school system. If you have deluded yourself into believing that things in traditional district schools are fine for kids of color, then of course there isn’t any need for charter schools.

Sean Reardon:

I use standardized test scores from roughly 45 million students to describe the temporal structure of educational opportunity in over 11,000 school districts—almost every district in the US. For each school district, I construct two measures: the average academic performance of students in grade 3 and the within-cohort growth in test scores from grade 3 to 8. I argue that third grade average test scores can be thought of as measures of the average extent of educational opportunities available to students in a community prior to age 9. Growth rates in average scores from grade 3 to 8 can be thought of as reflecting educational opportunities available to children in a school district between the ages of 9 and 14.

I document considerable variation among school districts in both average third grade scores and test score growth rates. Importantly, the two measures are uncorrelated, indicating that the characteristics of communities that provide high levels of early childhood educational opportunity are not the same as those that provide high opportunities for growth from third to eighth grade. This suggests that the role of schools in shaping educational opportunity varies across school districts. Moreover, the variation among districts in the two temporal opportunity dimensions implies that strategies to improve educational opportunity may need to target different age groups in different places. One additional implication of the low correlation between growth rates and average third grade scores is that measures of average test scores are likely very poor measures of school effectiveness. The growth measure I construct does not isolate the contribution of schools to children’s academic skills, but is likely closer to a measure of school effectiveness than are measures of average test scores.

Locally, Madison spends far more than most, achieving average results.

Dave Maass:

As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “Hemisphere.”

We won our case and freed up tons of records. (So did the Electronic Privacy Information Center.) The government, on the other hand, only succeeded in dragging out the fake secrecy.

In late 2013, right as the world was already reeling from the Snowden revelations, the New York Times revealed that the AT&T gives federal and local drug enforcement investigators access to a phone records surveillance system that dwarfs the NSA’s. Through this program, code-named Hemisphere, police tap into trillions of of phone records going back decades.

It’s been five long years of privacy scandals, and Hemisphere has faded somewhat from the headlines since it was first revealed. That was long enough for officials to rebrand the program “Data Analytical Services,” making it even less likely to draw scrutiny or stick in the memory. Nevertheless Hemisphere remains a prime example of how private corporations and the government team up to help themselves to our digital lives, and the lengths they will go to to cover their tracks.

Amber Walker:

To determine where the most experienced teachers work in the Madison School District, the Cap Times analyzed staff data from the 2016-2017 school year collected by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. DPI’s all-staff report catalogs salary, position, experience level and demographic data of all faculty and staff in the state’s public schools.

The analysis found Madison’s most experienced teachers work at Metro High, the school housed inside the Dane County Jail. The five teachers at Metro High School have an average of 19.4 years of teaching experience. Badger Rock Middle School on Madison’s south side had the least experienced teachers with an average of 6.5 years in the classroom. Across the district, the average teacher has 12.18 years of experience. Statewide, the average is 14 years. The Cap Times excluded teachers who were not assigned to one school from our analysis.

Stackexchange:

I have noticed that I find it far easier to write down mathematical proofs without making any mistakes, than to write down a computer program without bugs.

It seems that this is something more widespread than just my experience. Most people make software bugs all the time in their programming, and they have the compiler to tell them what the mistake is all the time. I’ve never heard of someone who wrote a big computer program with no mistakes in it in one go, and had full confidence that it would be bugless. (In fact, hardly any programs are bugless, even many highly debugged ones).

Yet people can write entire papers or books of mathematical proofs without any compiler ever giving them feedback that they made a mistake, and sometimes without even getting feedback from others.

Laura Battle:

u see, I have this skipping rope, and I just wave it around, and I let my imagination go free,” says Alma Deutscher, trying to explain the inexplicable. “Before this I would pick up sticks and wave them around, and some sticks were better than others but this was the best.”

She brings a purple plastic skipping rope out from under the table, and strokes the silver tinsel tassels at either end. It’s the sort of toy favoured by children in playgrounds everywhere but for Deutscher this rope is also a tool — a kind of divining rod — that aids and inspires a quite astonishing flow of creativity. As well as being a talented pianist and violinist, this little girl has already composed two concertos, a symphonic piece and a full-length opera — and she is 12 years old.

We are seated in a corner of Café Rouge in Dorking, just south of London, a week before she flies out to San José to begin rehearsals for the US premiere of Cinderella, the opera she started composing at the age of eight.

Curtis Waltman:

Since the first documented use of an LRAD sound cannon on protesters by Pittsburgh Police during the 2009 G20 summit, LRAD use by police against activists appears to be on the rise. The Pittsburgh Police Bureau used it again in 2011 during the Super Bowl, the New York Police Department has used it several times including the Eric Garner protests and during Occupy, the Oakland Police Department also used it against Occupy protesters, and more recently and perhaps most prominently, an LRAD was deployed during the Ferguson unrest and the Standing Rock protests.

Stephen Downes:

From time to time people express amazement at how I can get so much done. I, of course, aware of the many hours I have idled away doing nothing, demur. It feels like nothing special; I don’t work harder, really, than most people. Nonetheless, these people do have a point. I am, in fact, a fairly prolific writer.

Part of it is tenacity. For example, I am writing this item as I wait for the internet to start working again in the Joburg airport departures area. But part of it is a simple strategy for writing your essays and articles quickly and expertly, a strategy that allows you to plan your entire essay as you write it, and thus to allow you to make your first draft your final draft. This article describes that strategy.

Begin by writing – in your head, at least – your second paragraph (that would be the one you just read, above). Your second paragraph will tell people what your essay says. Some people write abstracts or executive summaries in order to accomplish this task. But you don’t need to do this. You are stating your entire essay or article in one paragraph. If you were writing a news article, you would call this paragraph the ‘lede’. A person could read just the one paragraph and know what you had to say.

But how do you write this paragraph? Reporters will tell you that writing the lede is the hardest part of writing an article. Because if you don’t know what the story is, you cannot write it in a single paragraph. A reporter will sift through the different ways of writing the story – the different angles – and find a way to tell it. You, because you are writing an article or essay, have more options.

Hadiel Mohamed:

This research aims to answer how educators can incorporate ethnic/racial identity development in the classroom for youth of color who are driven to pursue Whiteness. This quest begins by understanding Whiteness and its role within ethnic/racial identity and educational systems. The societal avoidance of discussing race furthers the perpetuation of Whiteness as the norm and removes the value of marginalized histories and voices. We can witness the preservation of Whiteness through immigration laws, the void of ethnic/racial identity exploration in schools, and the mono-cultured representation in classrooms. Therefore, this research explores assimilation and the racialization of immigrants through a macro-, micro-, and meso-level analysis.

This qualitative research incorporates interviews from five educators in an attempt to capture their experiences with assimilation, their insights for classroom environment, and their reflections on the ethnic/racial identity journey of youth. Findings from these educators are categorized into three themes: 1- Assimilation, Shame, and Validation, 2- Exploration & Inclusion of Ethnic/Racial Identity, 3- Educators’ Identities and Reflections. This research emphasizes that positive ethnic/racial identity is not grounded in the belittlement of others or superiority of oneself, but the celebration of all. Implication for future professional practice is intentional ethnic/racial identity exploration in adults and youth to further empowerment and empathy.

Michael Phillips:

Quick and eager, she was labeled a gifted student, only to discover, she said, that meant receiving less attention from teachers. When she asked for challenging work or encouragement, she said, some teachers warned her about being too big for her britches.

Beginning in middle school, her parents sent her to summer academic programs at Purdue University, where she learned how other students could take advanced-placement classes for college-credit at their high schools.

Before her freshman year at Covington High School, she wrote in her diary: “I do want to get out of here as soon as possible, & everyone knows it.”

The teenager set her sights on the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, a state-sponsored boarding school for bright high school juniors and seniors. Her mother was immovably opposed.

Selena Hoy:

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as six or seven, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

Parents in Japan regularly send their kids out into the world at a very young age. A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.

Kevin Drum:

In other words, third-grade scores are probably strongly influenced by poverty and home life, while growth from third to eighth grade is probably more influenced by the quality of schooling. They have little to do with each other:

Growth rates better isolate the contribution to learning due to experiences during the schooling years. Grade 3 average scores are likely much more strongly influenced by early childhood experiences than the growth rates….Some caution is warranted in interpreting the average growth rates as pure measures of school effectiveness. Nonetheless, relative to average test scores (at grade 3 or any grade), the growth rates are closer to a measure of school effectiveness.

If we take the growth rates, then, as rough measures of school effectiveness, then neither socioeconomic conditions nor average test scores are very informative about school district effectiveness. Many districts with high average test scores have low growth rates, and vice versa. And many low-income districts have above average growth rates. This finding calls into question the use of average test scores as an accountability tool or a way of evaluating schools.

Locally, Madison spends far more than most, for average results.

Kate Lyons:

When Kevin Carrico landed back in Australia on Monday after spending a week in Hong Kong, his friend sent him a link to the front page of a Hong Kong tabloid.

It was covered with pictures of Carrico and details of his trip.

It seems reporters for the paper, Wen Wei Po, which is believed to have close ties to Beijing, had been following him all week, reporting details of who he met, where he went, even when he returned to his hotel to change his shirt.

There were photographs of the US-Australian academic, who works for Macquarie University in Sydney where he researches Chinese history and society, standing in the street. Another shows him at the airport about to leave the country and a third shows him in conversation with a friend in a restaurant, that was clearly taken by someone sitting a few tables away.

“Wen Wei Po is very, very closely linked with the Liaison Office, which is Beijing’s office in Hong Kong,” Carrico said. “I don’t know if this is an attempt to build up pressure to get me banned from Hong Kong, or to intimidate me from returning to Hong Kong.”

Carrico is a US citizen and Australian permanent resident and has just received a large research grant from the Australian government to undertake a project examining tensions between Beijing and Hong Kong.

Ann Hulbert:

In the fall of 1909, when two wonder boys converged on Harvard—among the first, and for a time the most famous, prodigies of the modern era—their parents proudly assumed a Pygmalion role. Norbert Wiener, the nearly 15-year-old son of the university’s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener, arrived as a graduate student in (at his father’s direction) zoology. William James Sidis (namesake and godson of the renowned Harvard psychologist who had been a mentor to his father, Boris Sidis) was admitted at 11 as a “special student” after strenuous lobbying by his father.

The two superprecocious sons of two very upwardly mobile Russian immigrants, outspoken men with accents and bushy mustaches, inspired suspense. The arrival of these brilliant boys with unusual pedigrees fit the mission of Harvard’s outgoing president, Charles William Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open the university’s doors to “men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains.” And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook “an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life” for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with “the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance.”

Steve Carr:

In a lot of ways, understanding quantum mechanical equations in an effort to predict what will happen between reactants such as atoms and molecules resulting in complex phenomena in chemistry can be exhausting, and mind boggling to many. Yet, without the theoretical insights, experimental chemists would largely be unable to understand what they are observing.

Researchers at The University of New Mexico, led by Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Hua Guo, have been working with experimentalists to help them gain an understanding by providing theoretical interpretations of experimental observations.

“When scientists probe molecules they see spectral features, but it is very difficult to interpret those features because they are just lines in the spectrum,” said Guo. “That’s where we come in and provide a theoretical interpretation of their experimental observations.”

Tim Shipman:

Internet giants face a multimillion-pound tax raid unless they agree to help combat the terrorist threat to ­Britain, which is at its worst “for 100 years”, the security minister revealed last night.

Ben Wallace accused internet firms of being “ruthless profiteers” that cost government a fortune by failing to assist the security ­ser­vices in identifying terrorists and stamping out extremism online.

Mark Skidmore and Andy Henion:

Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)

Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).

The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.

“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.

Steve Lopez:

You might ask why people of lesser means don’t head to less expensive areas than Santa Barbara — it’s a fair question, and I’ve written about people who eventually did make such a move. In Santa Barbara, the answers I got were the same ones I’ve heard elsewhere in coastal California. People hold open the option of leaving, but many are connected to specific places by history, family and employment connections, and they’re not quite ready to give up on a turnaround, move to a place they don’t know, and start over from scratch.

Besides that, local economies rely on those of lesser means, so where are they supposed to live?

Finn ̊Arup Nielsen :

A range of different Danish resources, datasets and tools, are presented. The focus is on resources for use in automated computational systems and free resources that can be redistributed and used in commercial applications.

Trevor Aaronson:

“The government intercepts Americans’ emails and phone calls in vast quantities using this spying law and stores them in databases for years,” said Patrick Toomey, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “FBI agents around the country then go searching through that trove of data as a matter of course, including in domestic criminal investigations. Yet, over almost a decade, only a handful of individuals have ever received notice.”

Scott Cleland:

First this white paper spotlights: the failure of America’s antitrust enforcement to “protect the process of competition,” from three enduring and extending, intermedia monopolies and four active market cartelizations; and the causes of this systemic failure, i.e. lax and asymmetric antitrust enforcement driven by an anticompetitive U.S. Government Internet-first industrial policy and law.
The U.S. Government is the problem here. America’s Internet-first industrial policy experiment and law in the bipartisan 1996 Telecom Act1 and in the bipartisan 1997 U.S. Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,2 has proven twenty years later to be an inherently pro-monopolization policy in heavily-favoring the economic and competitive interests of Internet intermediary platforms and technologists over non-Internet competition or consumer interests. This bipartisan Internet policy failure, calls for bipartisan solutions.
This paper summarizes the evidence of America’s three standard monopolizing distribution networks — Google Standard Data, Facebook Standard Social, and Amazon Standard Commerce — and how U.S. lax and asymmetric antitrust enforcement facilitated their respective dominances and consumer harms. Then this paper summarizes four ignored, derivative cartelization dynamics taking control of America’s information economy today: i.e. intermedia cartelization bottlenecking the economy; digital advertising cartelization; search ecosystem cartelization; and cartelization of U.S. Internet startup financing.
Second, this white paper spotlights how U.S. Internet-first industrial policy standards have conflicted with, undermined, and arbitraged U.S. antitrust enforcement, and the otherwise sound Chicago School antitrust consumer welfare standard, for online intermediary platforms. These competition-distorting, Internet-first industrial policy standards are: 1) Competition Double Standard, where the 1996 Telecom Act now regulates the same technologies oppositely, despite the full Internet convergence of communications and information technologies since 1996; 2) Wild West Standard, that makes it U.S. policy that Internet companies be unfettered by Federal or State regulations that apply to every other business; and 3) Tech Welfare Standard, that uniquely protects “interactive computer services” with immunity from responsibility for negligence or consumer endangerment. No surprise that standards designed to heavily-advantage Internet companies, succeed and spawn serial monopolizations and cartelizations. Inputs drive outputs.

Sarah Fischer:

Facebook announced that it will no longer use “Disputed Flags” — red flags next to fake news articles — to identify fake news for users. Instead it will use related articles to give people more context about a story.

Why it’s happening: The tech giant is doing this in response to academic research it conducted that shows the flags don’t work, and they often have the reverse effect of making people want to click even more. Related articles give people more context about what’s fake or not, according to Facebook.

Why it matters: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook is a technology company that doesn’t hire journalists. Without using editorial judgement to determine what’s real and what’s not, tackling fake news will forever be a technology experiment.

Lapham’s Quarterly:

To assist this weakness of our nature, many methods have been proposed, all of which may be justly suspected of being ineffectual; for no art of memory, however its effects have been boasted or admired, has been ever adopted into general use, nor have those who possessed it appeared to excel others in readiness of recollection or multiplicity of attainments.

There is another art of which all have felt the want, though Themistocles only confessed it. We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful; and it may be doubted whether we should be more benefited by the art of memory or the art of forgetfulness.

Anne Chapmen & Rob Henken:

In April 2016, the Public Policy Forum published Help Wanted: An analysis of the teacher pipeline in metro Milwaukee.2 This was the third in a series of reports on public school educators in the Milwaukee area. Help Wanted set out to better understand how the public teacher workforce in the Greater Milwaukee region had changed in recent years, whether the region faces a shortage of teachers, and how conditions are likely to trend in the future. Overall, the report found a challenging situation characterized by a shrinking supply of new teachers to replace a steady stream of existing teachers leaving the workforce.

Since the report’s release, national teacher workforce studies, local and national media reports, and anecdotal accounts from K-12 stakeholders have continued to point to teacher shortages as an ongoing reality of the K-12 landscape. That is the case in both public and private schools, and across both Greater Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin as a whole. While debate about this issue often focuses on its potential relationship to Wisconsin Act 10 – Wisconsin’s controversial 2011 law that restricted public employee collective bargaining – nationwide evidence of teacher shortages suggests Wisconsin’s struggles to maintain a stable teacher supply are related to a larger set of forces.
A key feature of Help Wanted was the use of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) data to analyze the pace at which teachers were moving in and out of the metro Milwaukee and Wisconsin teaching workforce, and how those teachers were distributed in terms of age and years of experience. With two additional years of data now available, this report provides an update on trends in these indicators that we hope will be useful to education leaders, policy makers, and stakeholders.

Whereas the first report spanned the 2009-10 through and 2013-14 school years, this updated analysis encompasses 2009-10 to 2015-16. We place particular emphasis on areas in which we observe considerable changes in trends over the two subsequent years. Our intent is to help inform policymakers and citizens about the dynamics of the teacher workforce in metro Milwaukee. We do acknowledge, however, that each district possesses its own distinct experiences, challenges, and successes with regard to teacher retention and recruitment.

Ryan Cox:

Strawn capped off an historic season with a dominating 78-42 win over Balmorhea to claim the Class 1A Six-Man Division II state championship Wednesday at AT&T Stadium.

The Greyhounds went 15-0 en route to the title — the second in school history — by compiling 488 yards of total offense. Strawn’s top-ranked defense held Balmorhea, the state’s top-ranked offense, to 394 yards and a season-low in points.

Strawn kicker K-Lani Nava not only made school history, but also state history as the senior became the first female to play and score in a championship football game. Nava converted 9 of 10 extra point attempts for the Greyhounds.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/sports/dfwvarsity/prep-football/article190908829.html#storylink=cpy

Susie Boyt:

Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study not just of a woman whose Little House books have sold more than 60m copies in 45 languages, but of a very particular way of life, the life of the American pioneer. Looking deeply at the circumstances of the small farmers of the Great Plains, it examines how intricately connected their existence was to popular ideas about the American character. Prairie Fires is also an investigation of the practice of writing: of myth-making versus truth-telling, of the art of consolation, and of a strange sort of hair-raising, unboundaried, literary interdependence that developed in later life between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her writer daughter Rose Wilder Lane.

Laura Ingalls was born in Wisconsin in 1867, two years after Abraham Lincoln died, living until 1957 when “All Shook Up” by Elvis topped the charts. The backdrop to her birth was one of extreme violence, race hatred and revenge played out in the US-Dakota (or Sioux) war of 1862, culminating in a massacre clearing the way for “thousands of white families to seek their fortunes on the Great Plains”. The Ingallses were one such family. Charles Ingalls, Laura’s father, was “charming, cheerful, and musical”. He was also “an incomparable storyteller”. Laura’s mother, Caroline, who grew up close to destitution with a widowed mother and five siblings, was serene by nature, “not passive but quietly powerful”.

During the many long journeys the Ingallses undertook in their basic wagon, continually seeking better conditions in which farming and family might somehow thrive, Caroline calmly fried corncakes and brewed coffee, keeping morale afloat against the stunning landscape.

Tawnell Hobbs:

Private schools are lowering tuition, ramping up marketing and targeting traditionally underrepresented communities to reverse a national enrollment decline.

Enrollment in private schools for grades pre-K to 12, including parochial schools, dropped by 14%—to 6.3 million in 2016 from 7.3 million in 2006, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall school enrollment was nearly flat during that time, with public schools educating 2% more students to reach almost 52 million in 2016, the data shows.

Researchers and private-school associations attribute the decline to a host of factors: more affordable Catholic schools have closed; traditional public schools provide better options; families cut their budgets after the 2007 recession; and charter schools and other alternatives have expanded. School voucher programs and tax-credit scholarship programs have spread to just over a dozen states and are believed to have helped private-school enrollment some, but not enough to make up losses dating back years.

Molly Beck:

Six years after Gov. Scott Walker and state Republicans made labor unions’ ability to retain members much more difficult, fewer than half of the state’s 422 school districts have certified unions.

In the latest certification election — held in November and required by Walker’s signature 2011 legislation known as Act 10 — staff and teachers in 199 school districts voted to remain in a bargaining unit, or 47 percent, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

Notes and links: Madison Teachers, Inc. and WEAC.

Dorsa Derakhshani:

Right now in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the World Chess Championships are underway. But some world champions are noticeably absent: The Israeli players were blocked from participating when Saudi Arabia denied them visas.

Chess — a game that I have loved since I first sat down at a board — is pure. It doesn’t care about gender, ethnicity, nationality, status or politics. But too often the countries, organizations and people who enforce the rules in the world of chess are anything but.

This is a subject I know something about.

I was the second-highest-ranked player for girls under 18 in the world in 2016. I am the second-highest-ranked female chess player in Iranian history. And yet my passion for the game has taken me thousands of miles away from my home in Tehran to seek citizenship here in the United States.

Ed Pilkington:

“You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.”

We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of America’s wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid Row streets, strides along, stepping over a dead rat without comment and skirting round a body wrapped in a worn orange blanket lying on the sidewalk.

The two men carry on for block after block after block of tatty tents and improvised tarpaulin shelters. Men and women are gathered outside the structures, squatting or sleeping, some in groups, most alone like extras in a low-budget dystopian movie.

We come to an intersection, which is when General Dogon stops and presents his guest with the choice. He points straight ahead to the end of the street, where the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA rise up in a promise of divine riches.

Heaven.

Then he turns to the right, revealing the “black power” tattoo on his neck, and leads our gaze back into Skid Row bang in the center of LA’s downtown. That way lies 50 blocks of concentrated human humiliation. A nightmare in plain view, in the city of dreams.

Alston turns right.

Longreads:

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

The Touch of Madness (David Dobbs, Pacific Standard)

A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobb’s piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It’s the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.

Larry Ferlazzo:

This is one of my last year-end “Best” lists and, as holds true for all my lists, I’m being pretty picky about what ends up here.

You might also be interested in:

Philissa Cramer:

Who should succeed Carmen Fariña as New York City schools chief? Eva Moskowitz, the charter school CEO who runs a small-district-sized network within the city, has some ideas.

Less than a day after news broke that Fariña would step down in early 2018, Moskowitz distributed a list of 14 people she sees as a strong fit to run the nation’s largest school system. They include Malika Anderson, the former leader of Tennessee’s state-run Achievement School District; Denver schools chief Tom Boasberg; and Indianapolis superintendent Lewis Ferebee.

She also gives a nod to Andres Alonso, who worked with Fariña in New York City more than a decade ago before running Baltimore’s schools and was rumored to be on de Blasio’s shortlist four years ago.

“I should note that not all all of the leaders highlighted below are charter school supporters,” Moskowitz wrote in a note accompanying the list, underlining those words. “Mayor de Blasio and I have had profound disagreements about how best to educate our children since I was the City Council’s Education Chair and he was a fellow City Councilman, but we share the deep belief that we need the best possible person leading our schools.”

The list underscores how present Moskowitz aims to be in the city’s education politics, even as she has said she is not currently considering a run for mayor. It also puts Mayor Bill de Blasio in potentially a difficult position: Some of the people on the list have New York City connections or good relationships with people on all sides of education debates, but Moskowitz’s imprimatur could work against them.