The Economist:

PITY the poor pineal gland, tucked behind the thalamus in a gap between the brain’s hemispheres. It has a simple task—to make melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep. In days gone by, it would start doing so after sunset, ramp up to a maximum in the middle of the night, and then taper off toward the morning. The result was regular, dependable periods of sleep and wakefulness.

Modern life, though, is confusing for the pineal because its signal to start work is the absence of light—specifically, of blue light. This part of the spectrum radiates by the bucketful from light-emitting diodes in the screens of phones, tablets and laptop computers. As far as the gland is concerned, that turns night into day. Study after study has suggested night-time use of screen-based gadgets has a bad effect on peoples’ sleep. Indeed, things are getting worse as screens get smaller and are thus held closer to the eyes. As a consequence there is a tidy market in devices and apps which regulate the amount of blue light a screen emits.

Laura Waters:

Education News looks at the first results of N.J.’s value-added teacher evaluations, which “found that overall, 23.4% of teachers received “highly effective ratings; 73.9% of teachers were rated “effective”; 2.5% were rated “partially effective”, a rating which can affect tenure; and .02%, about 200 total teachers in the state, were rated “ineffective.” Also see NJ Spotlight, the Record, Here’s the DOE report.

Chris Rickert:

But there’s still little doubt vouchers mean taxpayers are going to be on the hook for educating some indeterminate number of additional kids than they would be in the absence of vouchers.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Jim Bender, president of the pro-voucher School Choice Wisconsin. He notes that government doesn’t force citizens to prove they’ve been unable to pay for other basics in order to be eligible for taxpayer help. People applying for food stamps, for example, don’t have to prove starvation or that they haven’t visited a grocery store in the prior year.

Are vouchers a good deal financially?

The answer to that is about as muddled as the answer to whether voucher schools provide an educational product that is any better, on the whole, than the one provided by public schools.

Ultimately, it probably comes down to whether you think parents should be able to choose their kids’ schools when taxpayers are flipping the educational bill.

Madison spends more than $15,000 per student.

Voucher schools operate on substantially smaller budgets.

Mr Rickert neglects to mention and compare total Wisconsin K-12 spending.

The Economist:

Each year 122,000 pupils—17% of the total—leave school with no high-school diploma. Last year the French army evaluated national levels of reading and comprehension during a compulsory day of military and civic service for 17-year-olds. It found that one in ten attendees could not understand basic French. Such difficulties are concentrated in the outer-city banlieues, where family support is minimal and schools tend to get the least experienced teachers. But even the average is dropping. According to PISA, an international comparison of education standards run by the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, French 15-year-olds’ standards of written comprehension and mathematics have fallen since 2000.

Christian Schneider:

It’s not nearly as funny, however, when real-world students demand a substandard education. Last week, students from South Division High School walked out of class to protest a legislative plan that would allow private school operators to take over five of the worst-performing schools in Milwaukee Public Schools. The protest combined two of teenagers’ favorite things — demonstrating unearned self-righteousness and getting a day off school.

In opposing the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program, the South Division students were sticking up for a status quo in which a scant 10.8% of them tested “proficient” or above in reading last year. If Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts had forced the school to eliminate the use of verbs, the reading scores could hardly be worse.

Of course, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association would have us believe that the student walkout was a spontaneous demonstration — as if students at a school where 4.3% of students are proficient in math are intimately attuned to the arcane school finance details passed by the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee. Perhaps it was just coincidence that the kids just happened to be carrying around the same union signs that have popped up at other recent demonstrations around the city.

And the details of the OSPP plan are important. Under the proposal, the Milwaukee County executive would pick a commissioner to oversee the takeover of the city’s five worst-performing schools. Control of those schools would be transferred to current operators of either high-performing private schools or certain types of charter schools. The new operators would put in place systems that have proved effective in their existing schools.

Robby Soave:

A candid admission from an anonymous academic in Vox—“I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”—has higher ed spectators on all sides of the ideological spectrum concerned that students’ increasing aversion to offended-ness is forcing academics to dumb down their courses.

But while just about everybody agrees there’s a problem, sheer outrage is incapable of solving it. That’s because federal bureaucrats have declared war on campus free speech and universities would be crazy to defy them, short of a Congressional mandate to do so.

Watch what you say didn’t become the unofficial motto of American campuses by accident, and hyper-offended students don’t strike fear into the hearts of the professoriate because they are physically imposing. Rather, it’s the explicit threat of formal, government-backed sanction that gives a minority of easily-agitated agitators veto power over all aspects of campus life, from the classroom to the dorm room to the rec room. (Not even movie night is safe.)

Vox’s fearful professor has a lot of company these days—many of his colleagues also feel the pressure to self-censor. “we’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers—adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on,” he wrote.

Since students have tremendous authority to make life hell for professors, academics are increasingly unwilling to risk irritating them. This can mean ejecting Mark Twain (racially problematic), Greek literature (sexually problematic), and even Shakespeare (racially and sexually problematic) from the lesson plan, just to be on the safe side.

Lyndsey Layton:

The Obama administration handed out more than $3 billion to the states and the District of Columbia to help them turn around their worst-performing schools as part of the federal stimulus spending that took place after the 2008 recession.

But most states lacked the capacity to improve those schools, according to a new analysis by federal researchers.

Although turning around the worst schools was a priority for nearly every state, most did not have the staff, technology and expertise to pull those schools out of the bottom rankings, according to a brief released Tuesday by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Education Department.

With funds allocated by Congress under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Obama administration spent $3.5 million on School Improvement Grants to states, directing them to focus the money on their lowest-performing schools.

School Improvement Grants had been part of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law. But stimulus spending increased the budget for the grants sixfold.

Possible de-regulation of Wisconsin charter school authorizations has lead to a bit of rhetoric on the state of Madison’s schools, their ability to compete and whether the District’s long term, disastrous reading results are being addressed. We begin with Chris Rickert:

Madison school officials not eager to cede control of ‘progress’:

Still, Department of Public Instruction student achievement data suggest independent charter schools overseen by UW-Milwaukee since 1999 provide better educations than Milwaukee public schools.

And if the UW System gets the authority to create a new office for approving charter schools in Madison, it wouldn’t be the first time a local or state government function was usurped by unelected and allegedly unaccountable people at higher levels of government who are aiming to eliminate injustice. U.S. presidents sent federal authorities to the South during the civil rights era. Appointed state and federal judges have been asked to overturn local and state abortion-related ordinances and laws. Last year, a federal judge struck down Wisconsin’s voter-approved gay marriage ban.

The injustice in the Madison School District is, of course, its decades-long failure to close achievement gaps between white students and students of color and between middle class and poor students.

Cheatham told this newspaper that “we are making progress on behalf of all children.”

Apparently, the district feels it should be the only educational organization in Madison with the opportunity to make such progress.

That’s because control over education might be as high a priority for the district as improving education.

David Blaska:

It is a worthy debate, for there is little doubt that the full school board, its superintendent, its teachers union, the Democratic Party, Mayor Soglin, and probably the majority of Madisonians share Ed’s sentiments. For the festive rest of us, the white lab coats at the Blaska Policy Research Werkes have developed an alternative Top Ten, dedicated to the late Larry “Bud” Melman.

1) Attack the motives of your adversaries. “What’s tougher is buying into [the] interpretation that the Joint Finance Committee Republicans are the good guys here, struggling mightily to do what’s right for our kids,” Ed Hughes says. “My much different interpretation is that the Joint Finance proposal is simply another cynical attack on our neighborhood public schools and is motivated both by animus for Madison and by an unseemly obsession with privatizing public education, particularly in the urban areas of our state.”

Unseemly! Particularly in urban Milwaukee, where the public school district as a whole has received a failing grade from the Department of Public Instruction, and in Madison, with a yawning chasm between black and white student achievement.

2) Nobody asked our permission. Ed complains that nobody consulted MMSD about its “strategies for enhancing student achievement, promising practices, charter school philosophy, or anything else.” Um, sometimes results speak louder than pretty words on paper, Ed.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

So we have two contrasting interpretations of the proposal. As it happens, I am right and Rickert is wrong. To help Rickert see the error of his ways, here’s a Letterman-like list of the top ten reasons why the Joint Finance proposal to establish a so-called “Office of Educational Opportunity” within the office of the UW System President is a cynical ploy to stuff Madison with charter schools for the sake of having more charter schools rather than a noble effort to combat injustice:

Mr. Hughes, in 2005:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

Finally, then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, in 2009:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.

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

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Georgi Boorman:

Recently I discussed how the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, pushed and sponsored by big government, fails at preparing high school students for college, much less earning them college credit that might reduce their college spending.

Well, federal legislators are at it again, this time with a bipartisan bill called the “Go to High School, Go to College Act.” It would allow Pell Grants to fund college coursework in low-income high schools. Theoretically, such courses would provide students transferable credits to college, “if and when they do attend.”

Sen. Rob Portman, a bill cosponsor, said “This, in our view, is one way not just to get kids college-bound but to keep them in high school.” Does helicopter-dropping college-track programs into poor, struggling schools sound familiar? Does it sound an awful lot like Advanced Placement (AP), but with a different source of funding? Yes. Yes, it does.

I’m not opposed to dual-credit programs or ones aimed at jump-starting college education. They can be quite useful for students who might, for instance, write at a college level but do algebra at a high-school level. I personally benefited from a Washington State program called Running Start, which allowed me to attend community college full time during my junior and senior years of high school, allowing me to graduate two years early with nearly half the debt of a traditional college attendee.

Alan Borsuk:

Voucher students in schools statewide will do better than voucher students in Milwaukee. Why do I say that? Not for the reasons you might guess. The statewide program has a requirement that a participating private school had to be in operation on May 1, 2013. That means there will not be a rush of start-up schools. The list of participating schools outstate will look a lot like a roster of Catholic, Lutheran and other well-grounded schools, I bet. The large majority of problems in Milwaukee’s voucher program, including both poor academic results and financial messes, have involved schools that opened after the program was launched.

The standardized testing program statewide is in a mess. We pretty much killed off our old tests. We’re killing off the one we tried this spring. So what’s next? That’s not set yet and, among other things, you have to wonder who’s going to take the results seriously when there are different tests every year.

Accountability overall is in a mess.Beyond the budget process, the Legislature was unable to agree on how to revise the system for rating schools and for doing something about low-rated schools. Which means not much will be done about those schools in the foreseeable future — including, low-performing voucher schools in Milwaukee. Some Republican legislative leaders have said doing something about those schools is a high priority. Nothing in the budget or other legislative action backs that up.

Suddenly, county executives are important. As the budget stands, both the Milwaukee and Waukesha county executives will be given unprecedented and hefty powers to deal with schools. Who knew they were qualified to be school system leaders? Wow.

Kate Bachelor:

Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.

“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”

Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions.

First, a few facts. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the share of college-age Asian-Americans climbed to 5.1% in 2011 from 3% in 1990. Yet according to independent research cited in the complaint, members of this 5% make up roughly 30% of National Merit semifinalists, a distinction earned by high-school students based on PSAT scores. Asian-American students seem to win a similar share of the Education Department’s Presidential Scholar awards, “one of the nation’s highest honors for high-school students,” as the website puts it. By any standard, Asian-Americans have made remarkable gains since 1950. They constituted 0.2% of the U.S. population then, due in part to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Te-Ping Chen & Abby Schultz:

Worries over cheating on the SAT college-entrance exam by students in Asia are raising fresh questions about the test’s security as the number of foreign applicants to American universities surges.

Students and test-prep advisers say it is becoming easier than ever for foreign students to game the test, with answers becoming available ahead of the exams, especially in Asia. The nonprofit College Board, which runs the SAT, has delayed thousands of scores in Asia this school year as it investigates.

All the students who took the SAT in May at two major international schools in China—including the Western Academy of Beijing—had their scores withheld by the College Board pending investigation. Scores were also held back at several other international schools in China, which are typically attended by foreign passport holders.

Alison Gopnik:

A fifth or more of American children grow up in poverty, with the situation worsening since 2000, according to census data. At the same time, as education researcher Sean Reardon has pointed out, an “income achievement gap” is widening: Low-income children do much worse in school than higher-income children.

Since education plays an ever bigger role in how much we earn, a cycle of poverty is trapping more American children. It’s hard to think of a more important project than understanding how this cycle works and trying to end it.

Neuroscience can contribute to this project. In a new study in Psychological Science, John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues used imaging techniques to measure the brains of 58 14-year-old public school students. Twenty-three of the children qualified for free or reduced-price lunch; the other 35 were middle-class.

The scientists found consistent brain differences between the two groups. The researchers measured the thickness of the cortex—the brain’s outer layer—in different brain areas. The low-income children had developed thinner cortices than the high-income children.

Michael Schwalbe:

Twenty-eight years ago Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals that the post-WWII expansion of higher education in the U.S. absorbed a generation of radicals who opted to become professors rather than freelance intellectual troublemakers. The constraints and rewards of academic life, according to Jacoby, effectively depoliticized many professors of leftist inclinations. Instead of writing in the common tongue for the educated public, they were carrot and sticked into writing in jargon for tiny academic audiences. As a result, their political force was largely spent in the pursuit of academic careers.

Jacoby acknowledges that universities gave refuge to dissident thinkers who had few other ways to make a decent living. He also grants that careerism did not make it impossible to publish radical work or to teach students to think critically about capitalist society. The problem is that the demands of academic careers made it harder to reach the heights achieved by public intellectuals of the previous generation. We thus ended up with, to paraphrase Jacoby, a thousand leftist sociologists but no C. Wright Mills.

The Electric Typewriter.

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI:

Near the end of his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ari Weinstein was offered $100,000 to drop out of school.

Mr. Weinstein, now 20, had grown up immersed in technology. He created a website at age 7, started a software company in high school and released an iPhone app his first week at MIT. The rest of his freshman year, he juggled classwork along with tending to the app.

REAP:

Rozelle also compared vocational training in China and Germany. He believes that German vocational training emphasizes building foundational knowledge and cultivating learning ability as the best way to prepare individuals for future technology and skills. “Chinese vocational training focuses excessively on training for a single occupation, training workers in only in skills that currently in demand but can be outdated in the blink of an eye.”

In December 2014, the Ministry of Education finally issued a document setting forth strict rules declaring that in addition to teaching technical skills, vocational schools also have to teach language, mathematics, English, computer skills, physical education, history, and other common fundamental courses. In vocational middle schools these basic classes should take up one third of total instruction time, and in vocational high schools these courses must make up no less than one quarter of total instruction.

After having worked with people on the ground in China for the last three decades, Rozelle does not begrudge praise for Chinese officials, especially basic-level cadres; “many of them are hard-working, intelligent, and eager to do good.” However, Rozelle is occasionally dismayed by the excessive misgivings of officials in some areas. In Qinghai province, while carrying out an experiment to test the effectiveness of computer-assisted learning software in helping Tibetan students to learn Mandarin. Although “the local governor liked it very much,” due to his American citizenship and the foreign background of those in the Rural Education Action Program team, his research was temporarily halted. “Let’s take a break for a semester, then see if we can start again.” In the next two days, Rozelle rushed to Shangluo, in Shaanxi province. There, he and the National Health and Family Planning Commission started a new experiment. This experiment prepares for the future transformation and training of rural cadres responsible for enforcing the One Child Policy, and enable them to become trainers in charge of educating village families–especially grandparents raising migrant children–in accurate information about child development and skills for raising babies.

Rozelle said, “I have heard too many grandparents in rural China ask me in surprise, ‘why should we talk to an infant? Why should we sing to them? Why should we give them toys to play with?’” He found that by the age of four, a significant IQ gap had already appeared between rural children–who in the first four months after birth lack sufficient stimuli–and urban children–whose parents interacted with them from a young age.

“We all say that we cannot let children lose before they get to the starting line. This starting line begins much earlier than we thought,” Rozelle said.

Ebony McGee:

The answer is complicated.

Increasing school resegregation – the renewal of segregation – and the continuing inequality of black students is resulting in lower achievement and graduation rates, signalling a reversal of civil rights gains.

Achievement disparities, referred to widely as the black-white achievement gap or test-score gap, frequently position black students at the low end of the scale and white (and Asian) students at the top.

This situation often engenders simplistic individual and group explanations for the gap, which frequently frame the lives and educational experiences of black children in ways that involve a deficit of some sort.

However, there are enormous variations in these students’ social, economic, historic, political and educational opportunities.

When gaps in achievement are addressed without a deliberate investigation of racial inequities, students, parents, teachers and neighbourhoods tend to be blamed for the poor educational outcomes of black students.

I contend that inquiries into how black students perform in school must include investigation of the harsh disciplinary sanctions in public schools for black students, the disinvestment in black neighbourhoods and why the least prepared teachers are those most likely to serve black students.

Anne Quito:

Since cursive writing was omitted when the Common Core academic standards was drafted in the US in 2010, the debate on the value of learning penmanship has raged.

Some argue that the skill is obsolete, akin to learning how to use an abacus in the age of supercomputers. “[The] time kids spend learning to write curvy, connected words, is time kids could be spending learning the basics of programming and any number of other technology skills they’ll need in our increasingly connected world,” wrote blogger and podcast host Justin Pot in a spirited editorial rejecting the utility of such “anachronistic skill.”

Eric Kelderman:

Faculty members at the University of Wisconsin were disheartened on Friday after a state legislative committee approved proposals that would limit the faculty’s role in shared governance and eliminate laws protecting tenure.

The proposed changes, which some see as an attack on academic freedom, came from the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, which is working to finalize the state budget. Both chambers will still have to approve the budget before it goes to the governor, who could alter the document further with his line-item veto power.

The university system’s president and Board of Regents have promised to adopt new tenure protections in the university’s policies. But some faculty members have lost trust in the system’s leaders, whom they blame for leading a misguided attempt to free the system from many state regulations as a “public authority.”

Jason Bedrick:

On Tuesday, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed into law the nation’s fifth education savings account (ESA) program, and the first to offer ESAs to all students who previously attended a public school. Earlier this year, Sandoval signed the state’s first educational choice law, a very limited scholarship tax credit. Despite their limitations, both programs greatly expand educational freedom, and will serve as much-needed pressure-release valves for the state’s overcrowding challenge.

Pamela Druckerman:

Your first attempt will be terrible. A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind, and the sad thing you’ve just made. Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else’s bad first draft. Version No. 20 of your work may still not be brilliant. But version No. 1 almost definitely won’t be. And if you think it is, look again. Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, “It just flowed out of me,” I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

Everything that happens is potential inspiration. Or as Nora Ephron reminded us, “Everything is copy.” When someone tells you a story, you notice a recurring theme in conversations, or you turn a corner and see something that moves you — use it. In fact, when you’re deep into a project, information about it will pour into your life. Write your thoughts down immediately. One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren’t lost forever; they live in your work.

Lauren FitzPatrick:

Embattled Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett has resigned in the wake of the federal probe of a $20.5 million no-bid contract CPS handed her former employer, the mayor’s office announced Sunday night.

Byrd-Bennett went on paid leave in mid-April, days after federal investigators sent subpoenas to CPS seeking records about her, top aides she brought to Chicago and three companies owned by her former employers, Gary Solomon and Thomas Vranas.

Appointed to the city’s top schools job by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the wake of a historic 2012 teachers’ strike, Byrd-Bennett was once employed by two of Solomon and Vranas’ firms, SUPES and Synesi. Had she not resigned, her contract with CPS would have allowed her to remain CPS’s $250,000-a-year CEO through June 30, 2016.

Lance Lambert

More than six years after the 2008 financial crisis, American families have reduced household debt by about $900 billion.

But one type of debt has been difficult to clear: student loans. That debt continued to grow during and after the downturn, and is now greater than both auto-loan and credit-card debt.

As of the end of 2014, outstanding student-loan debt topped $1.3 trillion. About $1.1 trillion of the total came from federal student-loan programs; the remainder was from private lenders.

Those figures, however, don’t include other means of financing a college education. For example, students whose parents take out home-equity loans, or students who use credit cards to foot tuition bills, are not included in the student-loan-debt total.

How much of the pie is missing?

No data have been gathered on alternative methods of financing college, so “it’s a hard market to gauge,” says Eric Pajonk, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. New research is underway to grasp the scale of alternative financing, he says, but there’s no timetable for when the results might be available.

Ben Mathis-Lilly:

Later in the piece, she argued that students “so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life” will struggle to deal with the problems and conflicts of the real world.

On Friday, Kipnis published another piece in the Chronicle, revealing that, in a twist that’s ironic on more than one level, she is now the subject of an investigation into graduate student complaints that her earlier column and a subsequent tweet violated Title IX, the law that prohibits sex descrimination in education. Her piece, in addition to pointing out the absurdity of being charged with discriminatory behavior because of an essay, alleges an investigatory process that’s ridiculously opaque for the accused:

Eliane Glaser:

Time allocation forms, research excellence framework documentation, module monitoring, and research funding applications: these Gradgrindian horrors are the subject of many a senior common room rant, and they have been extensively documented in these pages. Academics are spending less and less time thinking, reading and writing, and ever more time filling out forms. It seems clear that bureaucracy is somehow intertwined with the transformation of what were once institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge into commercial enterprises. Yet for me, two conundrums remain. If the “modernisation” of higher education is supposedly all about efficiency and productivity, why are managers imposing tasks that are by any common-sense measure a complete waste of time? And if academics are so demonstrably fed up with demands to fill out yet another piece of pointless paperwork, why do we continue to consent?

As part of a knowledge exchange project at my university – itself arguably a product of the bureaucratic imperative to measure “impact” – I organised a modest survey of academic bureaucracy: first, to identify the bureaucratic activities carried out by colleagues at my institution and beyond; second, to attempt to identify their source and apparent motivation; and third – crucially – to probe the underlying factors that might explain the curious fact of academic compliance.

John Quiggin:

What accounts for the remarkable stability of university rankings in comparison to the instability of big business, and for that matter, other nonprofits? More important, what implications does this have for university management and higher-education policy?

Several features of universities are important in explaining these outcomes. First, unlike other enterprises, universities almost never die and rarely merge. The 14 universities that formed the Association of American Universities, in 1900, are all still in existence, as are all those admitted since then.

Second, and directly related, universities are what are called, in the literature on industrial organization, “single-plant firms.” The vast majority have one (or at most two) main campuses, with a few peripheral offshoots. Apparent exceptions like the University of California system are in reality a set of distinct universities, linked only by notionally shared governance.

David Wahlberg:

Madison Teachers Inc. and five other Madison-based unions are so concerned about significant financial losses at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, they’re urging members to vote for particular candidates in Group Health’s board election Thursday.

“MTI cannot stand idly by and watch GHC disappear,” John Matthews, the teacher union’s executive director, wrote in a letter last month to members.

Group Health lost $18.7 million last year after losing $15.7 million in 2013 and $5.5 million in 2012, according to financial statements filed with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Kevin Hayden, Group Health’s CEO, is on leave for reasons the HMO won’t explain.

Group Health made $364,000 the first quarter of this year and expects a “substantial improvement over 2014,” a statement by board president Ken Machtan said.

The losses were covered by “substantial reserves so no debt was accumulated,” Machtan said. Group Health “continues to maintain a healthy reserve,” he said.

Details.

Healthcare costs have long been a significant issue in the Madison School District’s budget.

Gillian Tett:

This month, some Brooklyn-based friends have been touring New York’s top selective public high schools to assess whether their kids should take the ultra-competitive entry tests. It has left them grappling with unease — and some subtle guilt.

On the one hand, they explained, they were dazzled by the schools’ academic environment. Competition to get into these free institutions is so fierce that the schools are veritable intellectual hothouses — not least because many kids come from poorer, immigrant backgrounds and are exceptionally motivated to succeed.

But the experience also prompted my friends to wonder if academic success is the only thing that children need to succeed. “It’s the extracurricular stuff, the social things, I wonder about,” one mother said. More specifically, what worried her about these ultra-competitive high schools was that they seemed to provide fewer of the diversions that middle-class children might find in elite — private — schools, such as sport, trips to France, extra music lessons and so on. “I don’t know if that matters,” she murmured. “But it worries me.”

On one level, that quibble might seem ridiculous: after all, academic excellence and strong competitive skills are supposed to be the keys to success in modern-day America. (And I suspect that if my friend’s children do combat the odds to get into one of these schools, they will not turn it down.) But on another level, her comment is revealing; doubly so if you look at an intriguing new book, Pedigree; How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by Lauren Rivera, a US sociologist.

Hiroku Maeda:

After modest movement toward universal primary education in the poorest countries during the 1990s, progress has accelerated considerably since 2000. Achieving the MDG 2 target appeared within reach only a few years ago, but the primary school completion rate has been stalled at 91 percent for developing countries since 2009.

Only two regions, East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, have reached or are close to reaching universal primary education. The Middle East and North Africa has steadily improved, to 95 percent in 2012, the same rate as Latin America and the Caribbean. South Asia reached 91 percent in 2009, but progress since has been slow. The real challenge remains in Sub-Saharan Africa, which lags behind with a 70 percent primary completion rate as of 2012.

Joe Quennan:

Once their children are all grown up and have moved away for good, parents are supposed to suffer from profound melancholy and sometimes even outright depression. This is the phenomenon widely known by the horrid term “empty nest syndrome.”

“It all went by too fast.” “We didn’t really enjoy those precious little moments as much as we should have.” “The future now looks so bleak.” These are the sorts of things that rueful empty nesters—nostalgic for the glorious, halcyon days when their children were young and innocent and still nesting—say to themselves. Or so runs the popular mythology.

Sam Schaefer:

Thursday morning, the Board of Governors educational planning committee voted to discontinue 46 degree programs across the UNC-System, including one at UNC-Chapel Hill: human biology. Some of the programs will be reformatted as concentrations or consolidated into other majors. The entire Board voted Friday to adopt the recommendations voted on by the committee Thursday.

Other schools saw more programs discontinued than UNC-CH. East Carolina University and UNC-Greensboro saw eight programs discontinued each.

Junius Gonzales, senior vice president for academic affairs for the UNC-System, led the review of program productivity, which refers to the number of degrees granted in programs annually.

Gonzales said the process was inexact and that it was essential to listen to the thoughts of campus-level officials. He said the frequency of education programs being classified as low productivity due to few majors was an example of a situation where the processes of the UNC system and the interests of the state did not always align.

Yet, citizens have nearly unlimited online learning options today.

news from underground:

“The Art of the Gouge”: Shocking New Report by NYU Faculty Details How NYU Bilks Millions from Its Students to Finance Real Estate and Pay for Top Executives; Renew Call for Full Financial Transparency

Members of New York University’s faculty have issued a blistering 14,000 word report on how NYU has been gouging its own students (and their families) to raise billions for gratuitous real estate transactions and lavish compensation packages for NYU’s own top executives.

Concerned about their students’ ever worsening financial plight and wild spending by NYU’s Board of Trustees, the professors, many of them members of NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (NYUFASP), spent this past academic year researching NYU’s financial practices. Interviewing scores of students, both undergraduate and graduate, and studying the fine print in NYU’s own documents, the professors “followed the money” to reveal:

Students Going Hungry Regularly, Becoming Homeless, Signing Up for “Dating Services” to Pay Tuition, Fees, Insurance

NYU students pay the highest tuition in the United States, currently $71,000 per year. They are also socked with thousands more in phantom fees, health care, insurance and other costs. Most of the students interviewed preferred anonymity, for obvious reasons, but were happy to have their tales finally told in public. “It was frightening to hear these stories, and to know that our students are suffering in ways and numbers that even we didn’t imagine,” said Jeff Goodwin, NYU Professor of Sociology.

Daniel:

This is a post I’ve been planning to write for a while, with various other CT members alternately encouraging me to do so, and sternly reminding me that the consequences will be entirely on my own head ;-). It’s based on a point I’ve been making over the last few years to all sorts of friends when they’ve been trying to bait me on the subject of LIBOR, forex and the various scandals of the financial profession.

The point is quite simple. Bankers have had their day under scrutiny. But so have Members of Parliament (expenses scandal). So have journalists (phone hacking). So has the Church (paedophilia cover-ups). So has the BBC (ditto). This isn’t a specific issue about financial sector corruption. It’s a general trend, one of gradual social re-assessment of whether the fiddles and skeletons of the past are going to be tolerated in the future. It’s not that these sectors are especially dirty and the rest are especially clean – it’s just that politics, finance, religion, journalism and broadcasting have, so far, had their day under the microscope. One day, it’s going to point somewhere else. Particularly (because a lot of my friends are academics), one day it’s going to point at the universities. How confident are we that when it does, that they’ll be found pure?

Astra Taylor and Jathan Sadowski
M

Nicole Keplinger, 22, had long seen ads on Facebook promising financial relief, but she always ignored them and assumed that they were scams. Keplinger was drowning in student debt after obtaining a worthless degree from the for-profit Everest College, whose parent corporation, Corinthian Colleges Inc., had recently collapsed under accusations of fraud and predatory lending. But when an offer arrived in her e-mail inbox in April—“Cut your student loan payment or even forgive it completely!”—she thought it seemed more legitimate than the rest, so she called the number.

The person on the other end was aggressive. “They wanted my banking information, my Social Security number, my parents’ number and their information. I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Keplinger recalled. Even after she said that she lived on a fixed income (on disability due to a kidney transplant), the telemarketer kept up the pressure. “They said I needed to get a credit card. I don’t know if they were going to take money off it or what… but why do I need to get a credit card if I’m trying to reduce my student loans?”

Keplinger lied and said she’d call back, but not everyone gets away. If she disclosed her bank information, her loans most certainly would not have been cut or forgiven. At best, she would have been charged a large fee for something she could do herself: get on government repayment programs such as forbearance or deferment. At worst, she might have had the money debited each month from her bank account without any benefit provided in return, or been ensnared by a “phantom-debt collector”—a distressingly common racket that involves telling people they owe phony debts and scaring them into paying. It’s the perfect ploy to attempt on people who have already been preyed upon by unscrupulous outfits like Corinthian and who, having been misled and overcharged, are understandably confused about how much money they owe. At the same time, the fact that Keplinger was e-mailed in addition to seeing ads on Facebook suggests that her information was in the hands of a “lead generator,” a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to compiling and selling lists of prospective customers online.

Andrea Peterson:

When Myrna Arias discovered that her employer could track her movements even when she was off duty, she disabled the GPS-enabled app on her company-issued smartphone. That got her fired, according a suit filed by Arias.

In the lawsuit, Arias, a former sales executive for international wire-transfer service Intermex, claims that her boss “admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty” and even bragged about being able to track her driving speeds. She was “scolded” for disabling the app and fired not long after despite strong performance in other parts of her job, according to the lawsuit, which was first reported on by Ars Technica.

May Wong:

Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out “C-A-T” sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word “cat.” And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better-designed interventions to help struggling readers.

“This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research,” said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva, a researcher at New York University, and Jessica Wise, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Jerry Useek:

If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain.

But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed.

The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?

Laura McKenna:

Imagine meeting your English professor by the trunk of her car for office hours, where she doles out information like a taco vendor in a food truck. Or getting an e-mail error message when you write your former biology professor asking for a recommendation because she is no longer employed at the same college. Or attending an afternoon lecture in which your anthropology professor seems a little distracted because he doesn’t have enough money for bus fare. This is an increasingly widespread reality of college education.

Many students—and parents who foot the bills—may assume that all college professors are adequately compensated professionals with a distinct arrangement in which they have a job for life. In actuality those are just tenured professors, who represent less than a quarter of all college faculty. Odds are that students will be taught by professors with less job security and lower pay than those tenured employees, which research shows results in diminished services for students.

Rebecca Schuman:

Last week, Lower Saxony made itself the final state in Germany to do away with any public university tuition whatsoever. You read that right. As of now, all state-run universities in the Federal Republic—legendary institutions that put the Bildung in Bildungsroman, like the Universität Heidelberg, the Universität München, or the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin—cost exactly nichts. (By the way, they weren’t exactly breaking the bank before, with semester fees of about EUR 500, or $630, which is often less than an American student spends on books—but even that amount was considered “unjust” by Hamburg senator Dorothee Stapelfeldt.)
Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman

Well, you might be thinking, isn’t that just wunderbar for the damn Germans, with their excellent supermarket commercials and their spectacular beach nudity and their pragmatically dressed Chancellor. Now with their free college they’re just showing off. Well, here’s the kicker: Germany didn’t just abolish tuition for Germans. The tuition ban goes for international students, too. You heard me right, parents of Amerika: You want a real higher-education bargain? Get your kids to learn German and then pack them off to the Vaterland.

ReclaimU

One the most important debates about the crisis of public higher education these days has to do with understanding the reasons for the restructuring of the public university, which is tied to everything from skyrocketing tuition and student debt to administrative corporatization. In very schematic terms, there are two answers: one focuses on state governments and budget cuts to public higher education, the other on university administrations and their profit-seeking protagonism. The way we choose to answer the question is politically important because it is part of what shapes our strategic and tactical response. If the state government is the primary actor, interventions will generally operate at the level of electoral politics, either through supporting candidates, lobbying, or more generally “making a case” for supporting public education. In contrast, if university administrations are the primary actors, interventions will generally occur more locally, at the level of the campus or system, through actions like rallies, walkouts, strikes, occupations, and so on. Of course, things aren’t always as clear cut as this dichotomy suggests. But in a context where austerity is so visible and “politics” is largely seen as something politicians do, it’s important to remember the active role of administrators in restructuring their universities into the ground.

These debates are organized in part by how the numbers are calculated. Take the recent and controversial New York Times essay by Paul Campos, which argued counterintuitively that government support for higher education has actually increased, not declined, since the 1960s. He claimed that the real reason tuition has gone up so much is not budget cuts but the skyrocketing expenditures that channel money into administrative bloat and building construction. Not surprisingly, the piece generated a quick response from folks who see state funding as the key. A number of these critiques turned on the claim that he was using the wrong metric—rather than aggregate support for higher education, he should instead be using per-student funding:

James Taranto:

“There are many ways to look at the minimum wage increase in Los Angeles from the current $9 an hour [under California law] to $15 by 2020—some hopeful, some cautionary, all good,” the New York Times editorialized last week.

The reader who alerted us to this editorial was incredulous: “ ‘All good’?! There are no downsides to a 67% increase in the minimum wage, according to the Times? Does the Times editorial board really believe this?”

Apparently not. The editorial spends two paragraphs acknowledging that higher wages do impose costs:

Douglas Belkin & Melissa Korn:

As U.S. universities search farther afield for international students, they are boosting not just their cash flow and their campus diversity, but also the likelihood of admissions fraud, experts say.

On Thursday, a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh announced indictments against 15 Chinese nationals on charges that they cheated on college-entrance exams by hiring impostors to take the tests for them. Several of the students ended up at schools across the U.S.

“This is a group of Chinese, but I believe the problem of protecting the integrity of [college admission tests] is bigger than that,” U.S. Attorney David Hickton said.

Doug Henwood:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is out with it latest household debt report, covering the first quarter of 2015. Its parent in DC, the Federal Reserve Board, publishes lots of similar data, but the New York Fed is the first source to publish rigorous numbers on student debt. The latest report is here; you can get the numbers behind it here.

Since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, households have been borrowing very cautiously (how much it’s their decision, their lenders’ decision, or a combination of the two, isn’t fully clear). The glaring exception is student debt. Here are just a few numbers to make the point:

Alberta Darling & Dale Kooyenga, via a kind reader (PDF):

2014 marked the 50-year anniversary of the war on poverty. Since 1964, taxpayers spent over $22 trillion to combat poverty.1 Little, if any, progress has been achieved. The trajectory is not favorable towards the poor and lower middle class and few would argue the federal government has made significant progress to win the war on poverty. The same 50-year-old programs are inflated with additional spending and new programs are consistently introduced, but the effectiveness of the original programs are rarely evaluated. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the buildup of a military industrial complex – for good reason – but few have foreseen a poverty industrial complex. There is a presumption in this nation that all we have to do is appropriate more money to address a problem, but over time we see no correlation between government money spending and the alleviation of poverty. Unfortunately, and ironically, areas that have received the most federal and state funding in the form of welfare have eroded relative to the areas that have received less attention from government.
Two-thirds of the incarcerated African-American men came from six zip codes in Milwaukee and it is no coincidence that those zip codes are also home to the greatest density of failing schools and the highest unemployment in the state.2 The policies we are advocating for seek to provide new tools to deal with a reality no one should accept. From new and innovative educational models, to free market policies that will allow for greater economic gains, the residents of Milwaukee County deserve better and more opportunities.

There is always a danger of oversimplifying a complicated problem, but there is also value in breaking down a 50-year-old paradigm and questioning the approach from a fresh perspective. We know the current expensive, overly complicated web of government programs are not working. The success stories predominately come from individual members of the community and not-for-profits that are entrenched in these communities that are more judicious with the limited resources they have.

The ideas put forth in this report are about new opportunities. The initiatives in this paper will not cost any taxpayer, at any level of government, a single cent. The ideas represent unleashing individuals, not unleashing government spending. The policies introduced are based on the belief that individuals want to work, as work is part of our human DNA. No one wants to be in poverty and no one wants to be dependent on the government. Race, sex, income, handicap, age or a litany of other characteristics does not change our belief that we were all created equal and that everyone has the ability to contribute something to our community.

Mitch Henck (video). Related: When A stands for average.

Madison Teachers, Inc.

The Joint MTI/MMSD Safety Committee is charged with evaluating the “implementation of and compliance with the District’s Behavior Education Plan(s) (BEP)” and periodically reporting to the Superintendent and MTI Board of Directors. Over the course of the 2014-15 school year, the Committee met multiple times and designed, conducted and analyzed a Survey of all school-based District staff. 1,589 employees (42% of District employees) completed the Survey, and over 600 took the time to add personal comments. A summary of the Survey findings, as well as policy recommendations (not comments), are included in the Joint Committee’s Report which can be reviewed on MTI’s website (www.madisonteachers.org).
In summary, the Report highlights significant challenges with the BEP.

While a majority of respondents (78%) understand the approach to behavior set forth in the BEP, only 18% agreed that the practices aligned with it have had a positive impact on student behavior. These results are even more pronounced among teachers at the secondary level where only 10% of middle school teachers and 9% of high school teachers agree that it has had a positive impact on student behavior. Also of major concern is that only 17% of respondents agreed that “when a student is returned to class following a behavior incident, he or she is ready to re-engage in learning”. Only 40% of respondents agreed that their school has a clear behavior support system when a student is struggling. The Survey findings reinforce employee concerns that there is insufficient staffing to support students with significant behavioral needs, and there is insufficient behavioral consequences, and insufficient training to ensure that ALL staff provide a consistent and coherent application of the BEP. Survey results also indicate that District staff believe safety in school and student behavior is at a critical stage.

Madison Teachers, Inc.

It’s that time of year when Administrators send emails, memos and letters outlining “required” trainings, professional development, and other meetings during the summer months. Often, staff are encouraged to attend meetings and trainings wherein administrators use language that does not clearly indicate that any attendance during the summer or the voluntary days for returning staff is entirely voluntary.

Addendum G of the Collective Bargaining Agreement is clear and provides that attendance at any District offered staff development opportunities during the summer recess be compensated, either with Professional Advancement Credit (PAC), extended employment salary, or payment for graduate credits (if such is offered). Addendum G also requires that such communications “clearly convey the fact that teachers will not be penalized or suffer harm for choosing not to volunteer .”

Anyone with concerns about a memo or notice from administration that seems to indicate your attendance is compulsory on a non-contract or voluntary day should contact Jeff Knight (knightj@madisonteachers.org) at MTI. MTI does not discourage voluntary participation; however, it is out of respect for MTI-represented individuals that the Collective Bargaining Agreement is clear and direct regarding one’s participation or lack thereof.
For the 20

Madison Teachers, Inc.

MTI’s Election Committee has tallied the ballots cast in last week’s MTI teacher bargaining unit general election and has certified the election of MTI officers: Andrew Waity (Crestwood) as President Elect; and the re-election of incumbents Art Camosy (Memorial) as Vice-President; Greg Vallee (Thoreau) as Treasurer; and Elizabeth Donnelly (Elvehjem) as Secretary. Officers will be installed at the May 19 meeting of the MTI Faculty Representative Council. The MTI Board of Directors consists of ten members – six officers who are elected by the general membership and four at-large representatives elected by the MTI Faculty Representative Council.

Elected to the MTI Bargaining Committee are: High School Representative – Larry Iles (West); Middle School Representative – incumbent Michael Hay-Chapman (Spring Harbor); Elementary School Representative – incumbent Emily Pease-Clem (Schenk); At-Large Representative – incumbent Susan Covarrubias (Stephens); and Educational Services Representative-High School – Karyn Chacon (East). The MTI Bargaining Committee consists of 15 members. One from each of the referenced areas is elected each year.

Liz Moyer:

You have graduated from college and landed a job. Planning for retirement may seem like a distant concern, and paying off your debts may feel like a monumental task. But now is the time to make some crucial financial moves that could pay off handsomely in years to come.

“You need to have time work in your favor,” says Annamaria Lusardi, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in personal finance. “The trick is really to start early.”

Karl
Straumshein:

The key to making online students focus on their course work may be making procrastination as unenjoyable as possible, according to a study out of Cornell University.

It’s a familiar problem to anyone with a deadline and a computer: the assignment is open on the screen, half-finished, but is quickly lost in a stack of web browser tabs. Upon rediscovery (with an accompanying pang of guilt), the procrastinator resolves to buckle down and type out the last few paragraphs — right after clearing the notification that just popped up and checking just one more website.

Richard W. Patterson, a Ph.D. student in policy analysis and management at Cornell, wanted to see if software could reduce procrastination and, as a result, improve students’ grades.

Meredith DeLiso:

Since October, a class of 26 sixth graders at PS 86 in the Bronx have been using the iPad app to make art — from exercises in drawing eyes to capturing their own self-portrait.
“Equipping students with creative reasoning and critical thinking is crucial,” said FiftyThree co-founder Georg Petschnigg, whose app turns iPads into a sketchpad with tools for coloring, drawing and more. “Our mission is to make creative thinking more accessible.”

The class is part of the Guggenheim Museum program Learning Through Art, which places teaching artists in public elementary schools throughout the city for the school year. At PS 86, one classroom developed both analog and digital skills, marking the first time the program incorporated the digital arts.

Valerie Strauss:

Robinson’s work is based on a belief that schools can and should do everything they can to nurture creativity in kids through instruction that is personalized and customized for the communities in which students live. Unfortunately, he says, this is pretty much the opposite of what school reform has done to U.S. public schools. You can read more about Robinson’s views on education and school reform in a Q&A posted in Answer Sheet.

The book is “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Changing Education,” by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica (published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Ken Robinson, 2015).

.

Molly Beck:

“We are confident the proposal can fundamentally transform the educational opportunities that are available to students in Wisconsin’s two largest school districts,” he said.

Delaporte pointed to Department of Public Instruction data that shows less than 40 percent of Madison students have tested proficient in reading in recent years — slightly higher than the statewide average.
But Madison School District superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the proposal, saying in a statement: “We are incredibly determined, and we are making progress on behalf of all children. But at every step of the way, the Legislature puts more barriers in our way and makes our jobs more difficult.”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes called the proposal “breathtaking.”

“It looks like the UW President is required to appoint someone who could then authorize as many publicly funded but potentially for-profit charter schools in Madison as that unelected and unaccountable person wanted,” he said.

The proposal requires DPI to reduce a school district’s funding by the same amount that is paid per student to independent charter schools, currently about $8,000.

Cheatham also said independent charter schools have no consistent record of improving education and drain school districts’ funding.

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

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

The Secret Teacher:

I can honestly say I never thought I would make it. I’m nine years into a teaching career and the mental exhaustion at times is overwhelming. But this year has been the worst by far. I’ve been constantly under scrutiny and made to feel like nothing I ever do is good enough.

Around this time last year, my headteacher announced our classes for the year; once again, I had the class that other teachers spoke of with much disdain and damnation, as if they were almost feral. Having been at the school for two years, I knew that this wasn’t the case – the children just needed a firm set of consistent boundaries and expectations. I was up for the challenge. Looking back, I would not change my students for the world. I would change their parents, however.

In September, we took the year group on an outward-bound activity day. The weather, rather predictably, took a turn for the worst, with gale-force winds and torrential downpours. Nevertheless, the children had a great time. Back at school the next day, I was asked to call a particular parent who had reported he was unhappy with the trip. Somewhat curious, I called to hear his complaint, which was about the weather. He had already called the activity centre complaining for 45 minutes to them. When I asked what he would like me to do, he stated that I needed to guarantee there would be better conditions when we returned to the centre. I said I had no control over this, but was rather fiercely told it “was not good enough”. I placated him as much as possible then, shaking my head in disbelief, I returned to class thinking little of it. He has since complained about the weather again; this time it was too hot at lunchtime.

Dave Eggers:

One of the greatest challenges faced by cyber scholars and policymakers is how to predict the undesired social consequences of technological developments and to design the best policies to address them. Digital technology makes this challenge even harder: change is swift and getting swifter, and is often formulated in technical terms.

This is where legal scholarship and policymaking could benefit from a novel. The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian novel about the digital era. Many legal scholars have written over the past decade on the surveillance society, big data, contextual privacy, the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, transparency and accountability. However, the analysis of these issues in the legal literature remains abstract. The Circle offers a mirror image of our daily digital experiences, helping us to imagine what it would be like to live in a society of total transparency, and to experience the gradual loss of autonomy. The Circle tells a story about the human condition in the info era, the ideology of the digital culture, and the political structure which serves it. It could help us see in real time the social implications of digital technology, identify the forces that come into play, and design more concrete strategies to address them.

The book tells the story of Mae Holland, a young middle-class woman, who has accepted a coveted position at the digital corporation—The Circle. The Circle is everything you might expect of a typical multinational internet company, such as Facebook, Google or Twitter: young, innovative, professional, and exciting. Mae is drawn into the work and social life at The Circle which quickly becomes her entire world. It takes over her relationships with her parents, friends and lovers, as the outside world fades around her. Like her fellow employees, she becomes a living example of the services, the life style and the values that the Circle generates, and eventually becomes an object of the service she provides.

Gilbert Sewall:

Parents often think fate has singled their children out for poorly chosen school reading assignments. It hasn’t. A distressed father recently told me about seeing his high-school-age daughter’s summer reading list and realizing that it was devoted exclusively to contemporary writers such as David Eggers, Malcolm Gladwell and Barbara Ehrenreich. “This Boy’s Life,” Tobias Wolff’s highly regarded autobiography, published in 1989, was the oldest book assigned.

Whatever the list’s merits—and this is an ambitious set of books for 16- and 17-year-olds—the choices added up to a melancholy landscape of contemporary injustice, distress and dysfunction. The student’s father, a Thomas Hardy admirer, mourned the opportunity cost. I told him that summer-reading assignments are often a lot worse—at least there was no Young Adult dreck or Hobbit Lit here—but he asked if I could come up with an alternative reading list.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

In the pursuit of prestige, revenue, and rankings, more public universities have turned to dangling merit-based scholarships to attract more out-of-state students, according to a report by the New America Foundation released earlier this week. The result: shortchanging both poor students, who are less likely to receive such aid, and students in the states the universities are funded to serve.

Public colleges once devoted the biggest chunk of their financial aid money, some 34%, to students in the bottom income quartile, giving just 16% to the wealthiest students, the report says. That has now shifted dramatically: Financial aid at public colleges now goes equally to the top and bottom quartile of students, with wealthy students receiving 23% of financial aid. The poorest students now receive only 25%.

The push toward funneling aid to privileged out-of-state students reflects a change in the nature of public higher education. “By bringing in more and more wealthy nonresident students, these colleges are increasingly becoming bastions of privilege,” the report says.

Schools that provide merit aid, it found, tend to enroll far more students from out of state, who typically pick up more merit-based scholarships than in-state students. They also tend to enroll fewer poor students — and charge those poor students more money.

<A href=”https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/22/u-texas-systems-new-chief-gets-work“>Doug Lederman</a>: <blockquote><i>Not that he thinks he’ll be tested, mind you: the University of Texas System’s new chancellordoesn’t expect to face the same pressures his predecessor faced from some regents to dump the president of its flagship campus, among other things. 

But as he takes the reins of the university after several years of turmoil in governance, McRaven is persuasive when he says nonchalantly, “I’m not somebody who is easily pressured when it comes to making decisions.”

He’s persuasive in part because of his background — 37 years in the military, the final 10 or so in special operations, where, among other things, he designed and executed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And, in part, because he speaks with a mix of confidence and self-awareness about what he knows and still needs to learn just three months into his new role.</i></blockquote> 

Mike akin zeal:

[T]hese stories tell us what is likely to happen as the public university system weakens: nothing. No one will step in to fill this crucial role of providing quality, mass higher education. In the first case, resources will go to bidding wars over whose name will go on a fancy building – vanity projects perfect for this age of inequality that will do nothing to provide education. In the second case, resources are extracted out to shareholders and executives in imploding Ponzi schemes, leaving behind nothing but students with poor educations saddled up to their eyeballs in debt.

Mass higher education – starting with the land-grant schools in the Nineteenth Century, and continuing through the GI Bill and the mid-century expansion – has always been a public project. And we need to embrace it.

This is why the recent proposals to expand and solidify public free higher education are essential.

We are no longer living in the 19th century….

Robin Lake, via
a kind Deb Britt email:

Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. In the near future, cancer treatment plans will be customized to each patient based on sophisticated genetic data and personal health histories. If all goes well, education is headed in the same direction. Personalized learning and globally benchmarked academic standards (a.k.a. Common Core) are the focus of most major school districts and charter school networks. Educators and parents know students must be better prepared to think deeply about complex problems and to have skills that are relevant for jobs that haven’t yet been created.

Molly Beck

Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems.

Rep. Sondy Pope, D-Cross Plains, said the proposed state budget further harms already financially struggling public school districts. Barca characterized the estimated cost as funds “stolen” from public schools and diverted to the “private voucher school experiment.”

“We simply cannot afford to build two parallel school systems in this state,” said Barca.

Jim Bender, president of voucher lobbying group School Choice Wisconsin, said he could not respond to the memo because it was speculative. He added the memo was created to grab headlines. “Without seeing how they came up with the calculation, it’s very difficult to respond to,” he said.

More from Erin Richards.

It is useful to see an article with complete spending perspective data!

Much more on vouchers, here.

Joss Winn:

n the last 12 months, I have attended three conferences that have provided academics from all disciplines with the space to talk about these issues: Governing Academic Life at the LSE; Academic Identities at Durham; and Universities in the Knowledge Economy in Auckland. There is no doubt that academics are pissed off. Sometimes the blame is individualised: there are too many managers and administrators! When it’s not individualised, it’s politicised: the problem lies with neo-liberalism, or even ‘extreme neo-liberalism’. The concluding response to “what then should be done?” is often along the lines of a manifesto or collection of essays, a mailing list or web site to continue the conversation, or even to treat the misery of our condition as research data, effectively documenting the decline of our vocation.

Students are more viscerally outspoken about the need for fundamental changes in the governance of their universities. In occupation – most recently at UCL, Goldsmiths, KCL, LSE, UAL, and in Amsterdam – they too demand democracy as a basic requisite for a free university.

Meghna Sridhar

A character in some obscure British film I watched once said something that really stuck with me: the best way to forget something, he said, is to commemorate it.

What does it mean to go out into the world with the experiences of four years at Amherst — and what does it mean to hold an Amherst degree? Graduation should be a time where that question presses against us with all its weight and force; where the implications of that question burn within us with constant, raw, energy. Graduation is a time where the meaning of our place in the world must unsettle us — not just personally, but collectively, as a graduating class, as a body of students representative of Amherst and its supposed values. Graduation is a time to ask ourselves what these four years have meant to us, how they have changed us, broken us, questioned us and made us question Amherst; how much our education may have coopted us in structures of power, and how much it has enabled us to challenge these structures when we face “the real world.” (And what does that mean, too? Why is Amherst unreal, isolated, distant? Why is it that our education and experiences here must count for nothing except a degree credential and a leg up to the capitalist job network?)

Yet, too often, we let the institution answer this question for us — we let these answers be foreclosed, predetermined. What does graduation from Amherst mean? Easy. We’re all in this together. Best four years of our lives. Lives of consequences, investment banking jobs, the ability to talk about Plato over drinks in a meeting with a client or at a dinner party, to rave about your “diverse” classmates and “free curriculum,” terras irradiant. We’ve won. We did it.

Guillermo Lastarria:

On Thursday, April 16th more than 150,000 students, teachers, workers and citizens marched down Santiago’s main thoroughfare under the slogan “Less Corruption, More Democracy”. The protest had been called by the national roundtable of student federations, known as the CONFECH, as the first in a promised series of renewed mobilizations. The turnout was impressive and marked an upsurge in social agitation, reversing the trend of demobilization seen since the election of Michelle Bachelet in November of 2013. The strength of the march testifies to two significant developments in the relationship between society and politics. First is the denuding of the intimate relationship between the economic and political elite and second the ability of social forces to mobilize against a government that at least in rhetoric backs their demands.

Efucation News:

A federal investigation concerning a $20.5 million no-bid contract Chicago Public Schools awarded to a training academy where CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett once worked as a consultant has caused her to take a paid leave of absence.

Federal corruption investigators are now asking for additional records related to the Wilmette-based SUPES Academy. The scandal has focused on Byrd-Bennett, who once worked for the nonprofit education group who won the no-bid contract to train school principals. She announced her leave of absence late last week at the same time as school officials announced the federal subpoenas to look for records such as contracts, invoices and emails. She will remain on leave as long as the investigation is ongoing.

:

Phil S. Baran, an organic chemist, was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2013. His first higher education credential was an associate’s degree from what was then known as Lake-Sumter Community College in Florida.

You can find genius almost anywhere.

Kentaro Toyama:

Sadly, what we found was that even when technology tested well in experiments, the attempt to scale up its impact was limited by the availability of strong leadership, good teachers, and involved parents — all elements that are unfortunately in short supply in India’s vast but woefully underfunded government school system. In other words, the technology’s value was in direct proportion to the instructor’s capability.

Over time, I came to think of this as technology’s Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm.

When I returned to the United States and took an academic post, I saw that the idea applies as much to higher education in America as it does to general education in India. This past semester, I taught an undergraduate course called “IT and Global Society.” The students read about high-profile projects like One Laptop Per Child and the TED-Prize-winning Hole-in-the-Wall program. Proponents argue that students can overcome educational hurdles with low-cost digital devices, but rigorous research fails to show much educational impact of technology in and of itself, even when offered free.

Eugene Volokh:

But government-run K-12 schools can’t just restrict speech because they think it “depict[s] negative stereotypes.” Speech that is likely to cause substantial disruption can be restricted, as can speech that contains vulgarities, or promotes drug use or other dangerous conduct that’s illegal for minors. But speech that simply expresses views that some see as negative toward particular races, sexes, religions, sexual orientations, and so on cannot be restricted. As the Seventh Circuit (the federal appeals court that is in charge of federal cases from Wisconsin) held in Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie School Dist. #204,

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Houman Harouni:

Nothing in the public debate on schooling suggests that education matters. Whether test scores do or don’t measure learning; whether schools should be privatized; whether Wikipedia will replace the teacher; whether we will ever escape Algebra; whether we can measure the ways in which kids of color “fail” or “succeed” on exams; whether to teach like a “champion”, a “guide”, or a “pirate”; whether the arts are a right or a privilege: all these questions owe their importance to the system of schooling that turned them into questions in the first place. The entire debate keeps folding back onto itself. It takes its own parameters for granted. The more one asks such self-referential questions (without, say, asking what on earth sets “success” apart from “failure”), the more one contributes to the education system as is—a system that has stagnated for seven generations.

Matthew Ladner:

Balanced piece on Ohio’s reading policies. Interesting that opponents make complaints about retention happening at all and then about the bar being set too low. The firm but incremental approach advocated by Senator Lehner demonstrates both wisdom and resolve in m

Conor Friedersorf:

“If you want to know how Cooke ended up on her back, screaming in pain as the barbs from a stun gun delivered incapacitating electricity into her body, there are several possible answers,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes. “You could say this indignity was caused by her own stubbornness, her refusal to comply with the seemingly arbitrary dictates of a Border Patrol agent who was detaining her … Or you could blame the agent’s insistence on obeisance to his authority, which led him to assault an unarmed 21-year-old woman who posed no threat to anyone. But the ultimate responsibility lies with the Supreme Court, which has invited this sort of confrontation by carving out a disturbing and dangerous exception to the Fourth Amendment.”

Jonathan Rees:

In other words, the little fish (a.k.a all-online start-ups) will eventually eat the big fish (or all the big fish’s fish food) and the strategy will fail. The disruptors will in turn be disrupted themselves. This is indeed a very slippery slope

In the meantime, we will all have to cope with the fact that education technology has just become weaponized. Arizona State is now the first predator university. They are willing to re-define what education is so that they can get more students from anywhere. If they don’t kill other universities by taking all their students with a cheap freshmen year, they’ll just steal their fish food by underselling 25% of the education that those schools provide and leaving them a quarter malnourished. The result is that schools which stick to reasonable standards with respect to the frequency and possibility of teacher/student interaction now have to fear for their very existence.

While this is good for nobody, it is especially bad for faculty at all levels. Remember the good old days of MOOCs when the only people teaching those courses were going to be the best of the best – the superprofessors? Well, now that edX sees deflected tuition money on the table, they’ve thrown out that particular aspiration. No disrespect to the faculty of Arizona State University (which I’m sure has more than a few really outstanding professors on it), but I find it hard to believe that students are gonna say to themselves, “I need to take all my MOOCs from ASU because they have the best professors in every field.”

What we have here then are mostly ordinary faculty agreeing to participate in a scheme to steal the bread and butter of other ordinary faculty so that they won’t have their bread and butter stolen first. While I understand that the first rule of academia is every man and woman for themselves, in the long run the only folks who will benefit from this kind of inter-professional death match will be (to use a name coined by my old friend Historiann) the Lords of MOOC Creation…and whoever controls the endowments of Harvard and MIT.

Vanessa Romo:

LA Unified’s ability to pay for a new teacher contract that gives the union’s 35,000 members a 10.4 percent raise — their first in eight years — relies on two factors: One, a stronger than expected boost in tax revenues from the state. And two, a solution to the systemic problem of declining enrollment.

That, or the district faces program cuts and budget deficits.

If approved, the new deal will cost a total of $633 million over three years, plus an additional $31.6 million for three labor groups with “me too” clauses, also over three years, according to LA Unified officials.

The district had initially allocated $353 million for UTLA, which means the additional money from the state and from enrollment increases could be crucial to forestalling deficits in the years to come. Superintendent Ramon Cortines told board members that the district faces potential deficits as much as $559 million over two years through 2016-2017 if the additional state money is only a one-time occurrence.

Erin Richards:

The proposal comes amid continuing discussion over the rigor and selectivity of university teacher education programs.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said there are issues in Wisconsin around the recruitment of would-be teachers and the quality of their preparation. But he said the provision championed by Czaja is shortsighted and wouldn’t solve the problem.

“This is characteristic of bad and ineffective policy,” Bales said. “We think this puts all kids at risk.”

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the state teachers union, said teaching requires more than subject-matter expertise. Licensure, she said, provides some assurance that the person has received training in how to teach children.

“Children all across the state deserve to have teachers who have proven they can do the job,” Brey said.

In a 4-page letter this week to Assembly and Senate lawmakers, the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education said the changes would compromise the quality of adolescent education.

The association urged lawmakers to amend the budget, saying that putting unprepared teachers into classrooms was not only unwise and unfair, but “threatens the very foundation of a strong, competitive workforce.”

The state budget proposal is not final. It must be passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker. Walker had proposed easing teacher certification provisions in his original budget request.

The quality of Wisconsin teacher licensing schools has been in question recently.

When “A” stands for average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education receive sky high grades. How smart is that?

David Hookstead, via a kind reader:

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda.

“Undercommoning: A workshop on becoming a thief in the university,” was the exact wording of the subject line in a recent group email sent to University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars and others announcing the event, set for June 4.

The symposium, which will also be transmitted to a wider audience via Google Hangout, is described as a chance for campus radicals – students and scholars alike – to brainstorm ideas among their “newly formed Undercommoning Collective” on how to influence university resources and advance their socialist agenda and provocative causes.

Organizers did not respond to repeated requests for comment by The College Fix.

Their promotional literature – although rife with esoteric jargon, victimization claptrap, and academic gobbledygook – essentially explains that the daylong conference aims to equip participants with ideas on how to attack and exploit the American university from within.

One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.”

Details, here.

Jeremiah:

The idea of Manchu Sinicization is a hobgoblin unlikely to die anytime soon in China. Historians affiliated with what has become known as the “New Qing History” have been attempting to complicate this narrative for nearly three decades, and while scholars overseas — and even a few within China — are starting to come around, the dominant narrative inside China remains that the Manchus succeeded in ruling because, unlike earlier non-Han dynasties, they assimilated and adopted Chinese styles of rule and other cultural values. Indeed, according to the most strident adherents of “Sinicization”, the Manchus couldn’t help but assimilate once they encountered the vastly superior civilization of China.

Earlier this month, I came across an article in the China Daily on the study of Manchu language in China today and how this “archaic language is helping historians to solve Qing mysteries.” Sadly, after a few mentions of Manchu-language sources on the architectural and material culture of the Forbidden City and other imperial sites, the article descends into hoary and outdated old tropes:

Adeline Koh:

I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment.

Well, the reality is this: what has until recently been commonly understood as real “Digital Humanities” is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments from ever bigger budget cuts and potential dissolution.

Yes, of course, everyone will tell you that there are multiple debates over what actually defines Digital Humanities as a field, whether it is a field or not, yadda yadda yadda. But the projects which have until very recently dominated the federal digital humanities grants — the NEH grants, the ACLS grants, among others — are by default, the definition of the field, or the “best” the field has to offer. This means that until very recently and with few exceptions, the list of awardees rarely includes digital work that focuses more on culture than computation, projects that focus on digital pedagogy, or digital recovery efforts for works by people of color.

Lisa Friedman:

When educators blame low test scores on the high number of special-needs students in their school, or exempt special education kids from having to meet the same standards as their general-education peers, it makes me angry.

These actions are grounded in an educational approach that gives up on children with disabilities. As someone who was written off mistakenly as having a learning disability when I was a child, I know how damaging that attitude can be to the self-esteem and educational future of these children.

Disparities in expectations yield disparate results; lowering the bar for students rather than helping them reach the higher one denies them the learning all children are entitled to and robs them of their potential.

Mitch Henck.

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

Robert Kelchen:

Since Michael Crow became the president of Arizona State University in 2002, he has worked to reorganize and grow the institution into his vision of a `New American University.’ ASU has grown to over 80,000 students during his time as president through a commitment to admit all students who meet a relatively modest set of academic qualifications. At the same time, the university has embarked upon a number of significant academic reorganizations that have gotten rid of many traditional academic departments and replacing them with larger interdisciplinary schools. Crow has also attracted his fair share of criticism over the years, including for alleged micromanaging and his willingness to venture into online education. (I’ve previously critiqued ASU Online’s program with Starbucks, although many of my concerns have since been alleviated.)

Crow partnered with William Dabars, an ASU professor, to write Designing the New American University (Johns Hopkins Press, $34.95 hardcover) to more fully explain how the ASU model works. The first several chapters of the book, although rather verbose, focus on the development of the American research university. A key concept that the authors raise is isomorphism—the tendency of organizations to resemble a leading organization in the market. Crow and Dabars contend that research universities have largely followed the lead of elite private universities such as Harvard and the big Midwestern land-grant universities that developed following the Civil War. Much has changed since then, so they argue that a new structure is needed.

Pat Schneider:

“Usually the first quarter is a honeymoon period when students are excited to be in school and behaviors are good. So when things were already deteriorating rapidly, it was a sign to me that this was not going in a good direction,” said Bush, 50, who has taught at Jefferson Middle School on Madison’s west side her whole career.

It wasn’t a specific incident, but the piling on of several serious incidents so early in the school year that troubled her.

“I’m seeing behaviors on a regular basis that I haven’t seen in 20 years of teaching,” Bush said. Some of this alarming conduct included students swearing at teachers, kicking trash cans, walking out of class, and kids wandering the hallways and in and out of classrooms, she said.

The behavior policy, implemented at the start of this school year, requires teachers to ask for outside help if they can’t control a misbehaving student. But Bush says such calls for help often go unanswered by overwhelmed support staff, who are supposed to walk an out-of-control student out of the classroom and “intervene” to get a sense of the causes of the misbehavior.

Related:

Madison’s disastrous long term reading results.

Deja vu: 2005: Gangs and school violence audio/video. More, here.

Police calls: 1996-2006.

Commentary from David Blaska

Vicki Ruiz:

In a recent article on migratory, temporary employment, Leonard Cassuto, who writes a monthly column on graduate-school issues for The Chronicle, wrote: “The problem is not limited to historians, of course. They just have the best data.” In their 2013 report to the association, called “The Many Careers of History Ph.D.’s,” L. Maren Wood and Robert B. Townsend provided a benchmark survey of the career paths of historians who received their doctorates from 1998 to 2009. Based on a sample of 2,500 out of a universe of almost 11,000, Wood and Townsend found that 51 percent of the respondents had secured tenure-track jobs at four-year institutions with an additional 2 percent on the tenure track at community colleges. To make a finer point, only a sixth of recent Ph.D.’s secured employment at major public and private research universities.

Does the academic job crisis for historians vary according to subfield?

According to Wood and Townsend, only 44 percent of both North American and world historians find tenure-track jobs at four-year institutions, compared with 52 percent of Europeanists and “65 percent or more of specialists in the histories of Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East and Islamic World.” And time-from-degree does matter when on the job market, with five years as a mark of diminishing marketability.

Mark Ponterelli:

Part 1: People not pixels, experiences not exposures

Articulating the value of any new experience through a problem statement is difficult. Potential users often don’t value what they can’t see. And ‘ideating’ use cases was simply not data driven enough to motivate the company to trust the opinions of the venture team. How could we deviate from the company’s traditional sustaining innovation processes (see Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma) to quickly and cheaply test whether people would embrace this technology?

We knew that ‘computational photography’ was a mouthful for most people. We also knew that any discussion of disparity algorithms and depth maps was beyond the target user who just want to focus on people, not pixels and experiences, not exposures. (Having a tagline doesn’t hurt the cause, by the way). We started by using tools like storyboards and animations to test what people might expect from this new camera. You could call this stage exploring the value of “better” – would people value better dynamic range in photos? Would they like better slow motion video? Would they like better sharpness? Of course. But it should not have been a surprise that we had limited success describing the real potential of something disruptive with usages that are much more sustaining in nature. Using these traditional practices, we learned that better was indeed better but better wasn’t ‘Wow!’

Alan Borsuk:

The content of the 100-question quiz I found on the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service is not like a college admission test. Some of the questions were easy.

(Who was the first president? What ocean is on the west coast of the United States?)

Others were not so easy.

(Name the chief justice. What did Susan B. Anthony do? What are the first three words of the Constitution? (“We the people…”) Quite a few involved provisions in the Constitution.

But, hey, you’d only need to get 60 out of 100 correct. And Edming said students could take the test as many times as they needed to.

Is the test so easy as to be no real problem? Or is the lack of civics knowledge so compelling that it calls for a graduation requirement? Advocates seem to argue both.

There is ample evidence of ignorance of civics. The National Assessment of Educational Progress released fresh results a few days ago from testing of samples of eighth-graders nationwide, concluding that only 23% were proficient or better in civics and 18% proficient or better in American history.

Wisconsin now has a set of requirements for graduation from public high schools, mostly relating to what courses are taken and total credits. But there is no requirement that students pass any test to graduate. There was a big controversy over a broader high school graduation test 15 years ago, but the idea died.

As far as private schools, this would be the first time there would be a state-imposed graduation requirement.

As much as any of us would like students to know about American government, would you want to stop someone from going to college or getting a job because they didn’t have a diploma due to a shaky grasp on the Constitution?

Scott Rank:

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

Susanne Ault:

That’s the surprising result of a survey Variety commissioned in July that found the five most influential figures among Americans ages 13-18 are all YouTube faves, eclipsing mainstream celebs including Jennifer Lawrence and Seth Rogen. The highest-ranking figures were Smosh, the online comedy team of Ian Andrew Hecox and Anthony Padilla, both 26.

Despite having minimal exposure in the mainstream media, another comedy duo, known as the Fine Bros., Benny and Rafi, finished a close second, followed by the Swedish videogamer who has the most subscribers on all of YouTube, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg — otherwise known as PewDiePie. Interestingly, the highest-ranking non-YouTuber is Paul Walker, who tragically died in a car accident late in 2013.

Jillian Berman:

But everywhere I go, I’m followed by a constant reminder that I haven’t completely left the financial nest: My cell phone.

This makes me part of the 40% of millennials who are still getting help from their parents, according to a survey published this week by USA Today and Bank of America Better Money Habits. The survey asked 1,000 adults aged 18-34 whether their parents pitch in on things like rent, credit card and cell phone bills or just regularly send them a check.

Jenny Turner:

ike contemplating Hamlet without the ghost: that’s what one historian calls anything about education in England that doesn’t mention the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. Before it, England had no such thing as a secondary-education system. If you were rich you might go to Eton or Rugby or Winchester or Harrow; if you were lucky you might live near a city merchant’s charitable foundation. But for most people there was nothing much at all. The 1869 act changed that by seizing the endowments that had been left, over the centuries, to the ancient grammar schools and distributing the money in what was, in some ways, a more sensible fashion: for example, by funding schools for girls. But the act also abolished provisions made for educating poor scholars completely free – this wasn’t the something-for-nothing society, this was Victorian England. And it helped split schools into three basic types, for working-class, middle-class and upper-class children – a divide, buried though governments have tried to make it, that continues to distort and disfigure the education system today.

There’s something else people need to know about the 1869 act. The heads of the endowed schools hated it, and set up a club, the Headmasters’ Conference, to defend themselves against it. It is now called the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, but it’s still the main body representing the elite education providers in Britain, the schools that, even now, can promise pupils a much better chance than average of gaining wealth, power, Ucas points, and membership of the mysterious old boys’ networks that continue to gird the globe. “More than half of the top medics, civil servants, lawyers, media figures and Conservative MPs” in Britain attended an HMC school, says David Turner, not to mention “pop stars – 22% of them, according to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission”. Worse, the very fact such privilege exists causes many people to feel that state schools, no matter how good they are, are never good enough. Academies, free schools and grammar schools, and church places, music places and places for whatever else: all spring from a sense of inadequacy that goes back decades.

Kendall Taggert & Alex Campbell:

The 11th-grader in the courtroom wore braces, loved Harry Potter movies, and posted Katy Perry lyrics on Facebook. She also had a bad habit of cutting school, and now, a judge informed her, she owed $2,700 in truancy-related fines. But Serena Vela, who lived in a trailer with her unemployed mother, couldn’t afford to pay.

Serena was offered “jail credit” at a rate of $300 per day. She was patted down, touched “everywhere,” and dispatched to adult lockup, where she would stay for nine days, missing a week and a half of classes. The first school day after she was released, administrators kicked her out.

She had gone to jail because of a law intended to keep kids on the path to graduation. Instead, her high school career was over.

Serena is one of more than 1,000 Texas teenagers who have been ordered to jail in the last three years on charges stemming from missing school, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. The students get locked up with adults, sometimes inmates charged with assault, robbery and other violent crimes.

Todd Gitlin:

Are we living through a plague of hypersensivity?

Alec MacGillis

The Obama administration is set to achieve one of its top domestic policy goals after years of wrangling. For-profit colleges, which absorb tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants and loans yet often leave their students with little beyond crushing debt, will need to meet new standards or risk losing taxpayer dollars.

But as the July 1 deadline approaches, the troubled industry has been mounting a last-ditch effort to avert or roll back the new rules. And suddenly it’s getting a lift from a set of unlikely allies: traditional colleges and universities.

For years, the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business as both a rival and an unsavory relation — the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance. Yet in a striking but little-noticed shift, nearly all of the college establishment’s representatives in Washington are siding with for-profit colleges in opposing the government’s crackdown.

Most of the traditional higher education lobbying groups signed onto a recent letter to Congress stating their support for Republican legislation that would block the new restrictions on for-profit colleges, as well as undo or weaken other accountability rules for colleges. And a new report on higher education regulation commissioned by the Senate and overseen by the American Council on Education, the leading lobby group for traditional schools, slammed the rules on for-profit colleges as part of a broader critique of the administration’s approach.

Kayleb Moon-Robinson is a 12-year-old boy who lives in Virginia. One day at school, he kicked a trash can and was charged with disorderly conduct in juvenile court. A few weeks later, he disobeyed a new rule (made just for him) that he stay behind in the classroom while his peers left. When the school resource officer (SRO) arrived to take him to the principal’s office for disobedience, Kayleb reportedly struggled and swore. The officer allegedly slammed the boy down on a desk and handcuffed him. Kayleb is now being charged with felony assault on a police officer, and his future is very much in doubt.

Kayleb is autistic and African-American. The state of Virginia wants to brand him a criminal. The Center for Public Integrity names it as the state most likely to send students to jail. Virginia was also home to the Reginald “Neil” Latson case, in which a young man with autism encountered a police officer, didn’t comply with orders, started walking away and ended up in a brutal fight. He spent years in solitary confinement as a result before finally being pardoned.

Helen Wright:

Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set. For example, consider a “student” who runs the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm. Imagine a teacher who wants to teach the student a specific target hyperplane in some feature space (never mind how the teacher got this hyperplane in the first place). The teacher constructs a training set D=(x1,y1) … (xn, yn), where xi is a feature vector and yi a class label, to train the student. What is the smallest training set that will make the student learn the target hyperplane? It is not hard to see that n=2 is sufficient with the two training items straddling the target hyperplane. Machine teaching mathematically formalizes this idea and generalizes it to many kinds of learning algorithms and teaching targets. Solving the machine teaching problem in general can be intricate and is an open mathematical question, though for a large family of learners the resulting bilevel optimization problem can be approximated.

Alex & Seth

If you’re trying to build a self-driving car or detect whether a picture has a cat in it, big data is amazing. But here’s a secret: If you’re trying to make important decisions about your health, wealth or happiness, big data is not enough.

The problem is this: The things we can measure are never exactly what we care about. Just trying to get a single, easy-to-measure number higher and higher (or lower and lower) doesn’t actually help us make the right choice. For this reason, the key question isn’t “What did I measure?” but “What did I miss?”

To see the dangers of big data untethered to any other kind of analysis, consider the story of Zoë Chance, a marketing professor at Yale. In a TEDx talk that has been watched hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, she discusses her experience with a pedometer. She became so obsessed with increasing the count of her steps that she lost all proportion, taking walks at all hours and in all places. She told us that she even put the pedometer on her daughter so that her daughter’s steps would contribute to her number. She was able to “detox,” as she put it to us, only after she suffered an injury while walking in the basement, exhausted, in the wee hours of the night.

JBN:

I want to be a computational social scientist. Not all aspects of my work are subject to simplification. In some cases, the right mathematical or computational abstraction expresses an idea perfectly. It’s almost magical. And, some branches of knowledge really are unreachable without abstraction. That is why we painstakingly learn to think with and manipulate these abstractions. It’s not (always) fun. But, it is the price of admission.

In formal academia, writing papers and submitting them to journals is also part of being a scientist (TM).[1] These papers are constraining in many ways, mostly because of how the journals work. Sometimes, constraints are liberating. But, I’ve started to question one particular constraint — the academic style of writing. What happened? When I finished my previous ‘final’ draft proposal, I sent it to my father. A few days later, he told me he couldn’t read it. It was “above his head.” This made me proud.

David Perry:

They are the problem, not a bureaucratizing corporate system that extracts wealth from students in exchange for the lowest possible standard of education that for-profits like ASU Online can provide. Yes, there are lots of problems with our system. Yes, I think the ways in which our prestige economy rewards research over teaching is an issue. But I am quite sure that faculty members pursuing grants is not what’s threatening higher education in America today.

Moreover, the forces driving the kind of quantitative assessment of scholarly productivity, where all that counts is what can be counted, are the same forces that create massive over-bureacratization, the for-profit wings of ASU, drive college costs ever higher, and otherwise contribute to a world in which StarbucksU looks like a solution. It may be, but it’s coming out of the same world that created the problems in the first place.

Carole Beal:

You’ve tried screen reading software but it hasn’t worked very well. Your teacher has tried to help but no one in the school really knows how to set up, maintain and trouble-shoot assistive technologies.

The program isn’t available in braille, so you end up doing some basic worksheets instead of participating with your classmates.

The growth of online learning has thrown up new challenges for those with visual impairment as the learning tools are often not available. It’s also been a challenge for those working on making websites accessible to the visually impaired. It takes extra work and testing.

Verna Yu:

The newly released draft of China’s national security law, which covers a range of topics including stressing the preservation of the Communist Party’s political regime, has stoked fears citizens’ freedoms will be further eroded under the pretext of state security.

The full text of the sweeping draft law, which underwent its second reading during a session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee last month, was revealed for the first time late Wednesday after being posted on the legislature’s website for public consultation.

The first clause of the law stated that the purpose of the law was to “safeguard national security, defend the people’s democratic dictatorship and the socialist system with Chinese characteristics”, to protect the people’s fundamental interests, the smooth-running of economic reforms, the modernisation of socialism, as well as the “realisation of the great rejuvenation of the nation”.

Netflix

Cindy Holland, VP of Original Content for Netflix
threw her quote into the mix:

“We think this will be a hit
Green Eggs and Ham is a perfect fit
for our growing slate of amazing stories
available exclusively in all Netflix territories.

You can stream it on a phone.
You can stream it on your own.
You can stream it on TV.
You can stream it globally.”

Leo Kozachkov

In his three recent and awesome posts on intelligence, Scott Alexander describes what it’s like to grow up intellectually lopsided (high verbal IQ and a low-ish math IQ, in his case). I’ve always been interested in intelligence (who isn’t), and I was struck by how similar Scott’s experience with lopsidedness is to mine. So that’s where this post is coming from. Note: whenever I say “IQ” hereafter I’m referring to math IQ. Let’s get started.

Doris Fuller:

I lost my darling daughter Natalie to mental illness last month. She killed herself a few weeks short of her 29th birthday by stepping in front of a train in Baltimore.

Natalie and I wrote a book together when she was 16: “Promise You Won’t Freak Out: A Teenager Tells Her Mother the Truth About Boys, Booze, Body Piercing, and Other Touchy Topics (and Mom Responds).” The idea of a teenager telling the truth about her secrets was such a startling concept that we were feature-page headliners in the Baltimore Sun and about two dozen other newspapers, went on TV coast to coast, including on one of the morning shows, and got paid to give speeches. “Oprah” called.

In the book, we used a device to signal whenever a wild turn was about to take place: And then . . . . In the introduction, I defined an And then . . . moment as “one of those critical junctures when my cheerful sense that all was right in the world collided with inescapable proof that it wasn’t.”