Badger Institute:

When a van used for transporting special education students in the Pulaski School District near Green Bay had piled on the miles and was due to be replaced, district officials thought the common-sense thing to do would be to reuse the van for lower-priority purposes, such as hauling athletic equipment and making deliveries between buildings.

But because the van was purchased under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, regulations wouldn’t allow it to be used for any other purpose. So the district was forced to sell the van and replace it or else face a reduction in federal funding equal to the value of the van.

“It’s probably not the most efficient way if we have a piece of equipment that still has some useful life, but because of the complexities of those federal funds, it’s easier to sell them than repurpose them in the district,” says Bec Kurzynske, Pulaski superintendent.

“We rely on federal dollars, and we don’t want that money to go away,” she says. “But sometimes (the federal government) just creates operational inefficiencies.”

Pulaski’s experience isn’t uncommon. When it comes to dealing with federal funding for local schools, dollars from D.C. not only come with myriad regulations, increased bureaucracy and other hidden costs, they also force local school officials to make decisions they wouldn’t make otherwise.

Those actions sometimes come at the expense of students, teachers and staff, officials say. That has some wondering whether to take the money at all and questioning what the federal government is adding to the education of their students, a Wisconsin Policy Research Institute survey finds.

Related:

“Small Learning Communities“.

“English 10″

“High School Redesign”

Madison plans to spend nearly $20,000 per student during the 2017-2018 school year, far more than most.

Greg Stor:

To get the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention these days, try saying your speech rights are being violated.

Whether the underlying topic is abortion, elections, labor unions or wedding cakes, the First Amendment is starting to dominate the Supreme Court’s agenda.

The court on Monday granted three new speech cases, including a challenge to a California law that requires licensed pregnancy-counseling clinics to tell patients they might be eligible for free or discounted abortions. The nine-month term now features six cases, out of 44 total, that turn on the reach of the Constitution’s free speech guarantee.

Several will be among the term’s most closely watched. They include a high-profile fight over a Colorado baker who refuses to make cakes for same-sex weddings and a challenge to the requirement in some states that public-sector workers pay for the cost of union representation. Both of those cases offer the prospect of ideological divides that could put the court’s five Republican appointees in the majority, backing free speech rights.

Free speech also plays a central role in what could be a watershed case involving partisan voting districts. The court’s liberals could join with Justice Anthony Kennedy to allow legal challenges to partisan gerrymanders for the first time. During arguments in October, Kennedy suggested those challenges would be based on the First Amendment’s protections for speech and free association.

Julia A. Gwynne and Paul T. Moore :

This study—the Consortium’s first in-depth look at charter high schools—examines four key dimensions of charter high schools in Chicago Public Schools (CPS): school organization and policies; incoming skills and characteristics of charter high school enrollees; school transfers; and student performance. It expands the existing research base on charter schools in important ways by moving beyond test scores to look at a range of outcomes, and by examining variation among charter high schools.

This study finds differences between charter and non-charter high schools in CPS in terms of students’ incoming characteristics, performance in high school, and performance on post-secondary outcomes. It also finds variation on outcomes across charter schools. The study finds charter high schools in Chicago enroll students with higher eighth-grade attendance but similar or lower eighth-grade test scores than non-charter high schools. Once enrolled, students in charter high schools reported more challenging instruction, had higher attendance, and had higher test scores, on average, compared to students in non-charter high schools with similar attendance and test scores in the middle grades. Rates of four-year college enrollment and enrollment in more selective colleges were higher, on average, for students at charter schools than similar students at non-charter high schools. Using the five essentials framework to measure school climate, the study finds, on average, CPS charter high schools looked similar to non-charter, non-selective schools on some dimensions of organizational capacity, such as leadership, but looked quite different on other dimensions, such as preparation for post-secondary.

Lauren FitzPatrick:

Looking at data for students who attended high school between 2010 and 2013, researchers found that about one in every four ninth graders who started at a charter high school ended up at another Chicago school by 12th grade, compared to about one in six kids at a CPS-run school.

“I would say it’s a noteworthy difference and definitely something that should be investigated further,” lead author Julia A. Gwynne, said, adding that the transfers occurred not only for low-achieving students — whom charter critics suspected of being counseled out to keep numbers up — but also for high-achievers. The transfer rates were highest for students at charters with weak academic records — or ones too new to have any track record, where perhaps parents who opted into school choice continued to look for their child’s best option, Gwynne said.

Thomas Franck:

Additional trade schools, and not four-year college degrees, may be a better bet for U.S. workers, according to new economic research.

The amount of vocational training available relative to the size of a country’s manufacturing sector may reduce income inequality, and improve the fortunes of workers earning below the top 10 percent of household incomes, the data show.

“Pushing more students to B.A. granting colleges may no longer be the most efficient way to deal with the challenges caused by the decline in manufacturing employment,” wrote Joshua Aizenman, the economics chair at University of Southern California. He did the research with academics at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellingt

Ryota Matsuura:

Home to eminent mathematicians such as Paul Erdős, John von Neumann, and George Pólya, Hungary has a long tradition of excellence in mathematics education. In the Hungarian approach to learning and teaching, a strong and explicit emphasis is placed on problem solving, mathematical creativity, and communication. Students learn concepts by working on problems with complexity and structure that promote perseverance and deep reflection. These mathematically meaningful problems emphasize procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, logical thinking, and connections between various topics.

For each lesson, a teacher selects problems that embody the mathematical goals of the lesson and provide students with opportunities to struggle productively towards understanding. The teacher carefully sequences the problems to provide focus and coherence to the lesson. These problems do more than provide students with opportunities to learn the mathematical topics of a given lesson. Indeed, the teacher sees the problems she poses as vehicles for fostering students’ reasoning skills, problem solving, and proof writing, just to name a few. An overarching goal of every lesson is for students to learn what it means to engage in mathematics and to feel the excitement of mathematical discovery. Click here for a sample task from a 5th grade classroom at Fazekas Mihály School in Budapest.

Janet Lorin:

Yale University chief investment officer David Swensen, in a rare public appearance, spoke Tuesday to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin at the Council on Foreign Relations.

During the hour-long session, Swensen, 63, disclosed that annualized returns over his 32-year tenure have been 13.5 percent, higher than the endowment’s assumption of 8.25 percent a year.

Swensen said he favors private equity and doesn’t like quants, and talked about his efforts to get university officials to lower expectations for future returns. The endowment has swelled to a record $27.2 billion, the second-largest in U.S. higher education.

Nora Battelle:

“Bell Hooks,” as she is often referred to, reminds us, again and again, “No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much’. Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.” bell hooks is quite literally gone from her words by the time they reach most of their rebloggers. What’s left behind is a general idea about the historical silence of women that can be hashtagged “intersectional,” “feminism,” “creative writing.” Teenagers and the political left aren’t the only culprits in this kind of dissociation between author and language/association between name and buzzword, as the episode of the GOP’s fake Abraham Lincoln quote exemplifies. Tumblr exists in the midst of a system of Internet sharing that supports and privileges rapid-fire associations and quickly digestible words; it just happens to be a corner of that system were the teenagers lurk, and teenagers, more than any other demographic, are ready to absorb and adapt to their surroundings. While Tumblr has historically been the Internet space for the least “cool” teens, even the least cool kids want to fit into their in-group.

Tumblr and Instagram’s buzzwords create their own economy of social capital. With stars like Blanchard to give a stamp of approval to a socially conscious image, progressive views on racism and intersectional feminism have become status symbols on the platforms, even if little serious thought has gone into the cultivation of those views. An image of liberal wokeness is rewarded with reblogs and follows.

Oleg Kashin:

And yet the main problem with the allegations against Milner are his very accusers. Those writing that the Kremlin acted through him are the same outlets and individuals that have already demonstrated convincingly that anything they publish about Russia is, as a general rule, total garbage. The image of Putin’s Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia.

Maybe separately all the stories about Russia wouldn’t trigger this response, but it’s different when looking at the coverage combined: Moscow suburban “power broker” Natalia Veselniktskaya playing the part of Putin’s agent, Dr. Rodchenkov’s tales of test tubes for doped urine, singer Emin Agalarov acting in the Kremlin’s interests, and Russian ads on social media — bought for pennies compared to the millions spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns — that supposedly influenced American voters. There’s more, of course, and in this context the claims that Milner was working on behalf of the Kremlin become a joke by default — where there’s no need to refute or dispute anything, and the only thing Russians can do is laugh.

But what we ought to do is cry, of course, because for Russians everything that’s happening is a serious tragedy that has nothing to do with Yuri Milner or the other stars of Western investigative reporting, much less with America’s political infighting, which strictly speaking isn’t any of our business. Something else that’s important here is that Russia, compared to the United States, is a backward, small, and young country. Our political culture isn’t yet 30 years old, and what we’ve got is trampled by years of authoritarianism. Someday

Annysa Johnson:

“As our mission unfolds in Milwaukee, so does the vision for our school,” he said. “With this move we go from startup to sustainability … from our founding to our future.”

The move is being driven by enrollment. Cristo Rey has added a grade a year since opening, and it is fast outgrowing its 45,000 square feet of space in the former St. Florian Catholic School at 1215 S. 45th St. in West Milwaukee. Enrollment, now at 324, is expected to exceed 400 by next year and top out around 500, he said.

If those projections pan out, the local school would be only the fourth in the Cristo Rey network to exceed 400 students in its first four years, he said.

Rob Shimshock:

“Allowing attorneys to draft the fundamental rules that govern academic freedom in a university setting makes about as much sense as letting attorneys draft principles of medical ethics, or letting architects design the rules of evidence in court,” said Silverstein to TheDCNF.

Robert Steinbuch, another UA law professor, told his fellow faculty members that even UA’s own attorney described the proposed change as “limiting and may be controversial,” in electronic comments made on the policy document uncovered with a Freedom of Information Request filed by Silverstein and obtained by TheDCNF.

Via a kind Matthew Frankel email:

Broad Range of Small and Large Local Community Businesses Pledge their Support to Provide Students with Invaluable Work-Study Opportunity

Philadelphia, PA – October 8, 2017 – Young Scholars Charter School announced today that is has forged twenty-two strategic partnerships with local businesses from around the Philadelphia area to support “Experience Week,” which takes its full student body out of the classroom and into the workplace for a series of hands on learning experiences. The annual school event will be held this year during the week of November 13th with daily themes highlighting careers in areas such as “Vocational,” “Arts,” “Humanities, “Social Science,” and “Civic Engagement.”

“Experience Week provides real work-life perspective while directly connecting names, faces, and professionals to our student body,” stated John Amenda, Executive Director, Young Scholars Charter School. “Learning does not stop in the classroom and through the strong support of the Philadelphia area business and arts community, Young Scholars Charter students are provided with valuable hands-on opportunities. Most of all, ‘Experience Week’ is the first of ultimately many professional doors our students will open as they explore their interests and eventually build a career. We often forget how important a role model can be to a young adult. The businesses and people who support this effort provide example and inspiration for our students. We greatly appreciate the professionals who volunteer their time while our students travel around the city and we are grateful for their support.”

Some of the Philadelphia-based businesses and organizations who will participate in Young Scholars Charter School’s “Experience Week” include: Munroe Creative Partners, Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Keller-Williams Real Estate, The African American Museum, The National Museum of American Jewish History, Vetri Family Restaurants, Greater Philadelphia Health Action Inc., The Stephen Klein Wellness Center, the Castle Valley Flour Mill, CBS Radio and the Walnut Street Theatre.

Trips to these and other businesses and organizations will be scheduled throughout the week for the student body, with teachers monitoring and directing these out of classroom learning efforts. For each trip, students will meet with a diverse range of professionals, learn specifics about about each professional role, participate in onsite workshops and experiences and be provided with tours of each business, organization or arts institution.

WHAT: Young Scholars Charter School’s Experience Week

WHEN: Start Date – Monday, November 13th

WHERE: Trips Around Philadelphia will be Scheduled for Students Throughout the Week. Media wishing to Learn More about “Experience Week” and Review the Full Schedule of Off-Campus Visits May Contact the School at (215) 232-9727

Hasani Malone:

Many kids are given the gift of exploring new worlds through storytelling. Many parents join in on the nighttime ritual of reading to their children before they go to bed, and these books often provide important life lessons from characters that the children can relate to.

But representation of kids of color in children’s books is often hard to find. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, in 2012 of the 3,600 books reviewed by the CCBC, over 93 percent of children’s books were written about white children. As of 2016, 73.3 percent of children’s books were primarily about white children, while 12.5 percent featured non-humans and animals.

While children’s books are getting more diverse over the years, the truth is they’re still disproportionately white. But Geiszel Godoy — alongside her husband, Manuel Godoy, a veteran children’s book author of the “Kids 2 Kings” series, which follows four royal children with superpowers — hopes to add her name to that slow-growing list of writers of children’s books that feature characters of color.

Chris Bodenner, via a kind Will Fitzhugh email:>A required year-long course for freshmen, Hum 110 consists of lectures that everyone attends and small break-out classes “where students learn how to discuss, debate, and defend their readings.” It’s the heart of the academic experience at Reed, which ranks second for future Ph.D.s in the humanities and fourth in all subjects. (Reed famously shuns the U.S. News & World Report, as explained in a 2005 Atlantic article by a former Reed president.) As Professor Peter Steinberger details in a 2011 piece for Reed magazine, “What Hum 110 Is All About,” the course is intended to train students whose “primary goal” is “to engage in original, open-ended, critical inquiry.”

Beginning on boycott day, RAR protested every single Hum lecture that school year.

But for RAR, Hum 110 is all about oppression. “We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed,” according to a RAR statement delivered to all new freshmen. The texts that make up the Hum 110 syllabus—from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt regions—are “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid,” and thus “oppressive,” RAR leaders have stated. Hum 110 “feels like a cruel test for students of color,” one leader remarked on public radio. “It traumatized my peers.”

RAR was created on boycott day to mourn the deaths of black Americans at the hands of police nationwide. Speeches and open mics highlighted the angst that many students feel on a campus where African Americans account for just 5 percent of those enrolled. What’s more, the graduation rate among black students at the time was 65 percent, compared with 79 percent for all students. RAR has a sympathetic audience: Reed is home to the most liberal student body of any college, according to The Princeton Review. It’s also ranked the second most-studious—a rigor inculcated in Hum 110.

Meshed Society:

ten years, numerous new professions, jobs and ways to earn money have appeared. For many people, embracing these has been a necessity due to job loss. For others, new opportunities arose out of entrepreneurial foresight or the urge for independence and freedom from the constraints of traditional employments. Some of these new tasks can have concerning societal or psychological implications.

Let’s dive into the new jobs which didn’t exist ten years ago (without a claim for completeness). Overlaps are common.

Su Xinqi:

The findings were part of a report on DSE performance released on Tuesday by the Examinations and Assessment Authority.

Last week, officials announced the decision to make Chinese history an independent and compulsory subject for pupils from Form One to Form Three in 2018. For pupils from Form Four to Form Six, Chinese history has been an independent elective subject since 2009.

In April this year, 6,090 pupils – or about 10 per cent of all candidates – sat for the DSE Chinese history test, which includes ancient history and contemporary history. Some 89.6 per cent were graded level two or above, achieving the minimum mark for university admission.

But examiners said they found some answers by pupils in the compulsory part of the test to be “incomprehensible”, when candidates were asked to identify a woman depicted in a modern poem. Among the names given in answers were Mao Zedong, his right-hand man Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, once considered as Mao’s successor.

Christine Campbell, Georgia Heyward, and Betheny Gross, via a kind email:

As school choice evolves in cities across the country, the heated debate among advocates and critics is too often disconnected from the reality for families. CRPE’s new report goes beyond the rhetoric to provide evidence about how public school choice is playing out in 18 cities, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Oakland, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

Drawing on school performance data; interviews with district, charter, and community leaders; and a survey of parents, researchers looked across both district and charter schools to examine student and school outcomes and recent reform strategies. The cross-city analysis, Stepping Up: How Are American Cities Delivering on the Promise of Public School Choice? addresses three questions: Is the city’s education system continuously improving? Do all students have access to a high-quality education? Is the education strategy responsive to community needs?

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity, recently rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Via a kind Kaleem Caire email.

http://www.onecityearlylearning.org

Adi Robertson::

Alongside pushing Google to stop “fake news,” we should be looking for ways to limit trust in, and reliance on, search algorithms themselves. That might mean seeking handpicked video playlists instead of searching YouTube Kids, which recently drew criticism for surfacing inappropriate videos. It could mean focusing on reestablishing trust in human-led news curation, which has produced its own share of dangerous misinformation. It could mean pushing Google to kill, not improve, features that fail in predictable and damaging ways. At the very least, I’ve proposed that Google rename or abolish the Top Stories carousel, which offers legitimacy to certain pages without vetting their accuracy. Reducing the prominence of “Popular on Twitter” might make sense, too, unless Google clearly commits to strong human-led quality control.

Mario Boone:

Ford won a seat on the Middletown school board, the same district where he attended public schools. “When the results came in I was absolutely euphoric,” he remarked.

Ryan McMaken:

Needless to say, its hard to take advantage of economies of scale with an institution that has only a few hundred students. The overheard costs of old buildings alone must be enormous.

And from a student’s point of view, it’s hard to see why many of them would want to drop everything for 4 years and move to a small town in the middle of nowhere to attend a tiny college with few resources, and which few people have even heard of outside the surrounding region.

Even worse is the fact that these small private colleges tend to be incredibly expensive. Nowadays, few people have the resources and leisure time to pay $80,000 for an education at a small college in a small town where there are few opportunities for earning income to supplement one’s living expenses.

Indeed, many of these colleges have more the feel of a resort rather than a serious educational institution. Many of them are in bucolic settings with old-timey buildings that help one re-enact “the college experience” one sees in television shows and movies. And in the end, for those who earn degrees of little value, such as a women’s studies degree, this is essentially what an “education” at these institutions amounts to: a very costly four-year vacation from the realities of the world.

Nick Anderson and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

ouse Republicans have slashed the number of colleges they are targeting for a new tax on endowment income.

The GOP majority on the Ways and Means Committee voted Monday night to modify a tax bill that includes several provisions affecting higher education. Among them is a proposal that makes college presidents blanch: an excise tax on endowment income for certain private colleges.

Under the first version of the bill, made public last week, private colleges would have been subject to a 1.4 percent tax on net investment income if they had 500 or more students and an endowment of at least $100,000 per full-time student. A Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found that about 140 schools would have been affected. The American Council on Education estimated the number affected as 155.

Alan Borsuk:

Private schools, most of them religious, using vouchers. The total for voucher students this year (28,702) is up a few hundred from a year ago and is edging toward a quarter of all the Milwaukee kids who receive a publicly-funded education. What a huge change from a generation ago, when the number was zero.

Charter schools. In total, just over 15,000 students are in charters not run as part of conventional school systems. That’s 13% of all the publicly-funded kids. That percentage has stayed about the same in recent years and charter growth has slowed.

Open enrollment into suburban public schools. Wisconsin allows parents to enroll their children in schools in districts other than the one they live in. This year, about 5,600 Milwaukee kids (a bit under 5% of the city’s school kids) are going to public schools in other districts. But open enrollment has fallen since it hit 6,900 four years ago, in large part because suburban districts have made fewer seats available. Probably another reason MPS enrollment has stabilized.

Sarah Laskow:

One night in Tokyo, in the years before World War II, Hisako Koyama looked up, out into space, and saw a shooting star. It could have been passing moment, one that others would miss or quickly forget. For Koyama, the impression left by the streaking meteoroid was an inspiration. Without formal training, she would go on to become an astronomer, who observed just one star, the Sun, with a dedication shared by only in a handful of people in the past 400 years. Her daily observations of the Sun’s dark spots, drawn by hand, are one of the most rigorous and valuable records of solar activity ever made, and put her alongside Galileo as a careful, dedicated observer of celestial spheres.

“The great ordinariness of her work, applied over more than 40 years, became extraordinary,” says Delores Knipp, a research professor of aerospace engineering at University of Colorado at Boulder, the lead author of a new Space Weather paper on Koyama’s life and work.

Deb Britt, via a kind email:

Public school choice is the new normal in cities across the country, but it is still a hot-button issue for families, educators, and policymakers alike. To shed light on this debate, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has conducted research in 18 cities that are pursuing school choice reforms. CRPE researchers assessed the degree to which students have access to a quality education, school systems are continuously improving, and communities are part of the education strategy. They found encouraging signs coupled with evidence of persistent challenges.

On Nov. 14, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will partner with CRPE to convene a panel of education leaders and experts to discuss the current state of urban school choice. They will explore questions of what is—and is not—working well in cities that have pursued public school choice reforms, which cities are leading the way, and how today’s school choice initiatives can and must better meet the needs of students, families, and communities.

University of Minnesota:

The 2016 edition of Access Across America: Transit reports that 36 of the 49 largest metros showed increases in job accessibility by transit. Though rankings of the top 10 metro areas for job accessibility by transit remain unchanged from the previous year, new data comparing changes within each of the 49 largest U.S. metros over one year helped researchers identify the places with the greatest increases in access to jobs by transit. Cincinnati and Charlotte improved more than 11 percent. Seattle, which ranks 8th for job accessibility by transit, improved nearly 11 percent.

“This new data makes it possible to see the change from year to year in how well a metro area is facilitating access to jobs by transit,” said Andrew Owen, director of the Observatory. “Transit is an essential transportation service for many Americans, and we directly compare the accessibility performance of America’s largest metropolitan areas.”

Annalee Newitz:

To be more precise, it only takes three or more stories from small news outlets covering the same topic to make discussions of that topic go up by 62.7 percent on Twitter.

It took a group of Harvard researchers five years to reach this conclusion. They did it by tracking the effects of stories covered by 48 small media outlets, measuring how they affected conversations on Twitter. Harvard political scientist Gary King and his colleagues explain in the journal Science that they honed in on 11 broad topics in public policy, ranging from refugees and race to food policy and domestic energy production.

“If we’d been conducting this study 100 years ago, we would have gone into town squares and listened to what people said on soap boxes,” said King. “Today, it’s Twitter.”

edtrust.org:

Latino youth do not share a single identity or experience. They di er enormously by race, country of origin, languages spoken, cultural traditions, immigration status, and more. A teen who identi es as Black, of Dominican descent, bilingual in Spanish and English,
and third-generation American has a vastly di erent identity and life experience than one who identi es as Latino, recently immigrated from Mexico, and who speaks Mixteco. Yet, both these young people are Latino students in California’s schools and neighborhoods. And they are bound by a collective struggle to achieve a high-quality education that prepares them for good jobs and a rich, ful lling life.
Historically, our state and nation have treated this group of young people as a monolithic bloc, without recognizing the wide diversity of individuals within it. As a group, Latino students have been systemically denied equal opportunities in our communities and schools. When California became a state in 1850, Mexican Californians were treated as foreigners and denied access to education. Decades of segregation, political and economic oppression, and discrimination set the stage for Latino activists to signi cantly shape the Civil Rights Movements of the mid-20th century. Unfortunately, their stories and histories are often missing from history lessons and re ections on this era. For example, the lesser known Mendez v. Westminster struck down school segregation in California in 1947 and in uenced the monumental Brown v. Board of Education case that followed seven years later. (See policy timeline on p. 6-7.) Today, our Latino youth still experience forms of discrimination, and our schools are more segregated than in 1947. Yet, Latino individuals are also recognized as a collective political and economic force that wields enormous in uence on our country’s future and prosperity.

Adam Harris:

A trove of millions of leaked documents from a Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby, reflects some of the tax wizardry used by American colleges and universities. Schools have increasingly turned to secretive offshore investments, the files show, which let them swell their endowments with blocker corporations, and avoid scrutiny of ventures involving fossil fuels or other issues that could set off campus controversy.

Buoyed by lucrative tax breaks, college endowments have amassed more than $500 billion nationwide. The wealth is concentrated in a small group of schools, tilting toward private institutions like those in the Ivy League and other highly selective colleges. About 11 percent of higher-education institutions in the United States hold 74 percent of the money, according to an analysis in 2015 by the Congressional Research Service. …

Monica Disare:

New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School.

New York State wants to allow some students with disabilities to take below-grade-level exams — a plan that special-education advocates opposed and New York City officials questioned, arguing that would lower the standards for those students.

The state asked the federal education department in September for permission to give students with significant cognitive disabilities tests matched to their instructional level, rather than their age. State education department officials say this will provide schools with more useful information about what students have actually learned, while other supporters say it will spare those students from taking tests they have no chance of passing.

David Masciotra:

If the overwhelming majority of Americans cannot even identify the three branches of their own government, it should strike no one as a surprise that they are unaware of refugee policies in Europe. One of the fake news stories I saw circulate on Facebook in the months leading up to the presidential election described “millions” of refugees arriving in Germany, or sometimes Italy, and essentially “taking over” the country. The post often produced as photographic evidence, doctored images from the early 20th century. Apocalyptic updates on the refugee invasion of European nations served as warning against what would happen in America if Hillary Clinton became president.

The most consequential offenders in the dissemination, and success, of fake news are not the Russians or social-media company executives, but the American education system, and the parents who are content with raising children who know little about their country, much less about the rest of the world.

Only nine states require civics as part of the high school curriculum, and many colleges have reduced or eliminated requirements in history and political science. As unimaginable as it seems, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni published a report last year that only seven of the nation’s top 25 liberal arts colleges require their history majors — this is not a joke — to take a course in US history.

Eric Raymond:

I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systems-programming heap – Go and Rust, in particular. I reached a startling realization – I have 35 years of experience in C. I write C code pretty much every week, but I can no longer remember when I last started a new project in C!

If this seems completely un-startling to you, you’re not a systems programmer. Yes, I know there are a lot of you out there beavering away at much higher-level languages. But I spend most of my time down in the guts of things like NTPsec and GPSD and giflib. Mastery of C has been one of the defining skills of my specialty for decades. And now, not only do I not use C for new code, I can’t clearly remember when I stopped doing so. And…looking back, I don’t think it was in this century.

That’s a helluva thing to have sneak up on me when “C expert” is one of the things you’d be most likely to hear if you asked me for my five most central software technical skills. It prompts some thought, it does. What future does C have? Could we already be living in a COBOL-like aftermath of C’s greatest days?

Elizabeth Howcroft:

Queens’ has refused to condemn an email sent by Professor Eugene Terentjev to first-year students warning them not to have a “good time”, despite criticism from CUSU and Student Minds’ Cambridge.

Terentjev, a Director of Studies at Queens’, and the Queens’ Senior Tutor Dr James Kelly, have both declined Varsity’s requests for comment.

The email, which was sent to first-year Natural Sciences students at Queens’, sparked outrage when it was made public on social media by the student-run Facebook page Memebridge.

Terentjev writes: “There are things that need to be said, and these first few weeks of your Cambridge experience are quite critical in the way your path forms”

Greg Piper:

The letter basically accuses the administration of setting up the protesters by leaving the event after 10 minutes of constant disruptions – Schill was never able to even ascend the podium – and prerecording Schill’s speech (because protesters had promised to disrupt it).

Some of their concerns are legitimately procedural and factual.

Richard Eisenberg:

In her powerful new book, “Nomadland,” award-winning journalist Jessica Bruder reveals the dark, depressing and sometimes physically painful life of a tribe of men and women in their 50s and 60s who are — as the subtitle says — “surviving America in the twenty-first century.” Not quite homeless, they are “houseless,” living in secondhand RVs, trailers and vans and driving from one location to another to pick up seasonal low-wage jobs, if they can get them, with little or no benefits.
 
 The “workamper” jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s AMZN, -0.33% “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, “felt they’d spent too long losing a rigged game.” Some were laid off from high-paying professional jobs. Few have chosen this life. Few think they can find a way out of it. They’re downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.

Adie Robertson:

Last weekend, in the hours after a deadly Texas church shooting, Google search promoted false reports about the suspect, suggesting that he was a radical communist affiliated with the antifa movement. The claims popped up in Google’s “Popular on Twitter” module, which made them prominently visible — although not the top results — in a search for the alleged killer’s name. Of course, the was just the latest instance of a long-standing problem: it was the latest of multiple similar missteps. As usual, Google promised to improve its search results, while the offending tweets disappeared. But telling Google to retrain its algorithms, as appropriate as that demand is, doesn’t solve the bigger issue: the search engine’s monopoly on truth.
 
 Surveys suggest that, at least in theory, very few people unconditionally believe news from social media. But faith in search engines — a field long dominated by Google — appears consistently high. A 2017 Edelman survey found that 64 percent of respondents trusted search engines for news and information, a slight increase from the 61 percent who did in 2012, and notably more than the 57 percent who trusted traditional media. (Another 2012 survey, from Pew Research Center, found that 66 percent of people believed search engines were “fair and unbiased,” almost the same proportion that did in 2005.) Researcher danah boyd has suggested that media literacy training conflated doing independent research with using search engines. Instead of learning to evaluate sources, “[students] heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not.”

Joshua Brustein:

Donald Trump came into office promising a restrictive new approach to immigration and there has been little question about his intention to follow through — with one seeming exception. Despite its enthusiastic rhetoric about the H-1B program, which provides temporary visas to high-skilled workers, the administration failed to make significant changes in time to impact the program’s annual lottery this April, leaving some who had anticipated action fuming. It has also declined to take up any of the legislative proposals for H-1B overhaul.

But a crackdown has been in the works, albeit more quietly. Starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork. The number of challenges — officially known as “requests for evidence” or RFEs — are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to statistics from USCIS. The percentage of H-1B applications that have resulted in RFEs this year are at the highest level they’ve been since 2009, and by absolute number are considerably higher than any year for which the agency provided statistics.

The H-1B program is controversial largely because IT firms based in India have used it to hire for rote computer programming jobs. These firms, like Infosys Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., have been working to reduce their reliance on the program, in anticipation of a less receptive political landscape. The overall number of H-1B applications dropped this year for the first time in five years. The skeptical eye the government is taking to applications has extended to all types of employers, according to immigration lawyers. Many are rethinking their own use of H-1B as a result.

onathan Pearlman:

A series of research partnerships and collaborations between Chinese scientists and Australian universities have raised concerns that the universities are unwittingly assisting Beijing to develop and improve its military technology.

Many of the partnerships were reportedly developed by a leading Chinese military researcher, Lieutenant-General Yang Xuejun, who was recently made a member of the party’s 204-member Central Committee at the party’s 19th National Congress in Beijing.

Lieutenant-General Yang has collaborated with scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Technology Sydney, particularly on research into supercomputing – a field that he has labelled as central to developing China’s military technology, such as combat aircraft and tactical nuclear weapons.

Joanne Jaccobs:

Izumi also cites a recent YouGov survey funded by a group called Victims of Communism. “A larger proportion of millennials believe that more people were killed by George W. Bush’s administration than by Joseph Stalin,” he observes.

Some 23 percent of millennials had a favorable opinion of Lenin, while 19 percent thought Mao was cool. (Only 6 percent liked Stalin

Amber Walker:

Students also suggested that schools develop a system for students to share feedback about their teachers’ performance. Kayvion James-Ragland, a junior at La Follette High School who is a member of the African-American Youth Council, said that feedback is usually top down, with teachers being able to express how they feel about students, but not the other way around.

“We think it is important to ask us directly because we are in the classroom every day,” he said.

Janet Lorin:

A threat that U.S. private colleges and universities have dreaded for years just got closer to reality: Republicans in Congress want to tax rich endowments. The sweeping 400-page tax bill unveiled on Nov. 2 includes a 1.4 percent levy on private schools’ investment income. It’s one of many ways the bill is trying to raise money to partially pay for slashing corporate rates and other cuts. The tax could apply to private institutions with endowments of more than $250,000 per full-time student, according to a later amendment to the bill. That group includes about 70 colleges and universities.

Regardless of the final shape of the tax—or even whether it passes—it’s clear that Washington has its eyes on the pile of money that colleges have amassed. About 800 endowments together hold more than $500 billion, led by Harvard with $37.1 billion. Thanks to a strong market, many schools are richer than ever, and they don’t pay taxes on their investment earnings. Their funds have become major players in the financial markets, with investments in hedge funds, venture capital, and real estate.

This isn’t the first time Congress has looked at endowments. The focus has sometimes been less on taxing schools than on pushing them to use more of their money to help offset ever-rising tuitions. After a U.S. Senate Committee on Finance hearing in 2007, Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, merely mentioned the idea of requiring a 5 percent annual spending rate for colleges. That whiff of a threat seemed to spur changes. Within months, about three dozen colleges said they would spend more on financial aid. Schools including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pomona College adopted measures to replace loans with grants, which don’t need to be repaid. Still, the wealth at some schools remains a tempting target for lawmakers. “If we look at major universities, they haven’t done a very good job of explaining why they’ve accumulated this money,” says Henry Hansmann, a Yale Law School professor and economist.

The current proposal would tax large endowments regardless of an institution’s spending rate. It has its roots in a 2014 plan from Dave Camp, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Camp, a Republican, says he wanted to put endowments on the same footing as foundations. Depending on how much they spend annually on grants, charitable activities, or other qualifying purposes, foundations pay either 1 percent or 2 percent in tax. Under the new bill, both foundations and endowments would pay 1.4 percent. “When you have similar activities, why should they be treated differently under the tax code?” asks Camp, now a senior policy adviser with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s tax practice.

Frontpage:

Former Google software engineer James Damore shares his story.

Umberto Eco :

I recall, though my recollection may be faulty, a magnificent article by Giorgio Manganelli explaining how a sophisticated reader can know whether a book is worth reading even before he opens it. He wasn’t referring to the capacity often required of a professional reader, or a keen and discerning reader, to judge from an opening line, from two pages glanced at random, from the index, or often from the bibliography, whether or not a book is worth reading. This, I say, is simply experience. No, Manganelli was talking about a kind of illumination, a gift that he was evidently and paradoxically claiming to have.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, is not about how you might know not to read a book but how you can happily talk about a book you haven’t read, even to your students, even when it’s a book of extraordinary importance. His calculation is scientific. Good libraries hold several millions of books: even if we read a book a day, we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we’ll have read only 25,200. A trifle. On the other hand, any Italian who’s had a good secondary education knows perfectly well that they can participate in a discussion, let’s say, on Matteo Bandello, Francesco Guicciardini, Matteo Boiardo, on the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, or on Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, knowing only the name and something about the critical context, but without ever having read a word.

Mike Allen:

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, gave me a candid insider’s look at how social networks purposely hook and potentially hurt our brains.

Be smart: Parker’s I-was-there account provides priceless perspective in the rising debate about the power and effects of the social networks, which now have scale and reach unknown in human history. He’s worried enough that he’s sounding the alarm.

Parker, 38, now founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, spoke yesterday at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, about accelerating cancer innovation. In the green room, Parker mentioned that he has become “something of a conscientious objector” on social media.

Jennifer Rubin:

In a speech receiving the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain, had some wise words on the state of politics in the West, and specifically in the United States. He warned that we’ve come to “indulge in magical thinking. So you get the far right dreaming of a golden past that never was and the far left yearning for a utopian future that never will be. And then comes populism, the belief that a strong leader can solve all our problems for us. And that is the first step down the road to tyranny, whether of the right or of the left.” He continued, later observing, “We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free.”

There is a lot to unpack there. Sacks certainly has figured out the populists’ routine.

The “golden past” that the Trumpian populists long for today takes many forms. They sanitize, romanticize and elevate the “Lost Cause” of the antebellum South. They dream of a pre-Great Society, even pre-New Deal government. They pine for America’s industrial world domination of the 1950s and 1960s. They seem enamored of a pre-Brown v. Board of Education and pre-Warren Court legal system. This nostalgia allows them to treat everything since then — from globalism to minority activists to gay marriage to justice reform — as a deviation, an intrusion into “real America.”

Barry Adams:

Milton voters have rejected for a second time a plan for a new high school that would have addressed district-wide space needs but in Iowa County the Barneveld School District will get a major facilities upgrade.

The questions were among referendums put forth by eight school districts around the state on a day with few other items or races on the ballot.

China Digital Times:

On Monday, CDT Chinese reposted a letter circulating on Weibo which purportedly shows singer Katy Perry’s pledge to behave harmoniously during a prospective Chinese tour. “Fruit Sister” has performed in China in the past, but occasionally stumbled on moral or political sensitivities there. The letter includes promises to “observe the laws and regulations in China, comply with the management of the regulators,” and not to “add or change any content without authorization,” “do or say anything religious or political,” or “participate in any activities that jeopardize China’s unity and integrity.”

Choice Media:

Lodi, New Jersey, school board member Ryan Curioni posted an article on his personal blog informing teachers how they can opt out of the union. The next day “all hell broke loose.”

Lenore Skenazy & Jonathan Haidt:

One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.

Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”

Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. “It’s a safety issue,” explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.

And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: “Your child’s old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?” Absolutely not, the magazine averred: “Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time.” After all, “you want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

Our World in Data:

Average number of pupils per teacher, based on headcounts of both pupilsand teachers. When feasible, the number of part-time teachers is convertedto ‘full-time equivalent’ teachers; so that a double-shift teacher is countedtwice, etc.

Leonid Bershidsky:

The big problem with artificial intelligence right now isn’t that it’s taking over; it’s that it’s being entrusted with serious tasks with real-world consequences before it works properly. It’s the equivalent of letting self-driving cars operate in a city without lane markings.

A viral post published on Medium on Monday by artist James Bridle is the latest case in point. Bridle took a deep dive into a below-the-radar industry: children’s content on YouTube. Anyone who has ever given an iPad to a small kid knows the kind of thing children find on YouTube before they’re able to type: Toy unboxing and nursery rhyme videos, official and pirated cartoons featuring popular characters like Peppa Pig. It’s up to parents, of course, if they are okay with their child getting engrossed in these (we took the iPad away from our four-year-old daughter because we noticed consuming the content made her reluctant to learn to read and irritable when the tablet wasn’t within reach). But the stuff Bridle found was arguably worse than what I’d seen before my wife and I made the decision.

Olivia Solon:

Today’s workplace surveillance software is a digital panopticon that began with email and phone monitoring but now includes keeping track of web-browsing patterns, text messages, screenshots, keystrokes, social media posts, private messaging apps like WhatsApp and even face-to-face interactions with co-workers.

“If you are a parent and you have a teenage son or daughter coming home late and not doing their homework you might wonder what they are doing. It’s the same as employees,” said Brad Miller, CEO of Awareness Technologies which sells a package of employee monitoring tools under the brand Interguard.

Crossover’s Sanjeev Patni insists that workers get over the initial self-consciousness after a few days and accept the need for such monitoring as they do CCTV in shopping malls.

Viceland:

Ben Makuch travels the world to meet with hackers, government officials, and dissidents to investigate the ecosystem of cyberwarfare.

Emily Richmond:

From Georgia to California, school districts are facing a growing security threat: hackers. They target everything from employee payroll accounts to student records, and demand ransom in exchange for not taking advantage of sensitive information. Tawnell Hobbs of The Wall Street Journal discovered that school districts are surprisingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. And many are opting to pay the ransom and not reporting the crime to authorities. Is your school district a target? Listen in as she discusses what’s known about who’s doing the hacking and the FBI’s stance towards districts who negotiate with hackers instead of reporting them to authorities. What is the potential long-term harm to students if their personal information is compromised? And how has this trend turned into a big-profit boon for cyber-security experts? Hobbs also offers story suggestions and key questions to ask for local reporters covering school network security.

Kaitlin Lange:

Construction is beginning on more than 20 new and existing homes designed to lure and retain teaching talent in Indianapolis by offering them homes at below-market prices.

Megan McArdle:

It’s a nervous time to be a university. Forget the political activism that has been convulsing campuses over the past year; the Republican tax plan is now taking aim at the money that funds those campuses, particularly elite research universities. It proposes a tax on university endowments, an end to the tax deduction for student loans, and treating employer tuition reimbursement as income. This last would not only threaten a revenue stream for colleges and universities, but also make it much more expensive to run Ph.D. programs, where students normally get a tuition waiver as part of their package.

Universities are understandably concerned. And they’re not the only ones. Levying heavier taxes on education sounds perilously close to spitting on an American flag while denouncing motherhood, baseball and apple pie. So this might be a good time to ask whether we really ought to be subsidizing higher education — particularly elite higher education — as much as we are.

In theory, our nation’s elite educational system is supposed to be an engine of opportunity. And that was a very fine theory — in 1960, when America’s elite colleges transformed themselves into meritocratic institutions.

This remarkable moment in America’s past is underremarked upon; as far as I know, this peaceful and willing transfer of power is entirely without precedent in human history. In 1930, the Ivy League was basically a finishing school, a cocoon for the larval stage of a tweedy apex predator class. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the people running these schools (and the prep schools that fed them) decided to run admissions on a competitive basis of test scores and grades. 1 By 1970, the schools had diversified wildly, and the academics got better and better, while the football teams — formerly some of the most followed athletic programs in the country — declined precipitously.

Patrick Kulp:

Amid the distraction of Facebook’s blockbuster earnings this week, the company quietly admitted to hosting more phony accounts than previously revealed.

The social network upped its estimate of the portion of fake accounts from 2 to 3 percent and the number of duplicates from 6 to 10 percent, Business Insider first reported.

That means that as many as 270 million of the platform’s 2.1-billion-strong user base could be fraudulent or duplicated — a population verging on the size of the United States.

Facebook said the change was due to better tools for tracking illegitimate activity rather than a sudden spike in fishy sign-ups.

Jing Cao:

The U.K.’s biggest online grocer hit a milestone this year: Ocado Group Plc put together an order of 50 items, including produce, meat and dairy, in five minutes. Fulfilling a similar order at one of the company’s older facilities takes an average of about two hours. The secret: a fleet of 1,000 robots that scurry about a warehouse snatching up products and delivering them to human packers.

The breakthrough and ones like it could help propel the grocery business into the modern era. The industry wants to make buying food online as simple and commonplace as purchasing clothes or consumer electronics. But fulfilling fresh food orders quickly, reliably and profitably is devilishly hard. Even Amazon.com Inc., which recently acquired Whole Foods Market, hasn’t cracked the code and recently halted its Amazon Fresh service in several U.S. states.

Ocado, founded 17 years ago in the London exurb of Hatfield, says automation is the only way to handle individualized grocery orders in large volumes. The robots are the latest addition to Ocado’s automation arsenal; the company also sells software and hardware to other retailers.

Jon Baskin:

Samuel Moyn looks suspiciously like a teenager. The impression is momentarily belied by his impressive résumé: At the age of 45, Moyn is teaching his first semester as a professor of history and law at Yale University, following appointments at Harvard and Columbia. Moreover, even for an adult scholar, Moyn has well-informed views on a startling diversity of topics. Slumped across a chair in jeans and Converse in his Harvard law office last winter, he ricocheted from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (the topic of Moyn’s dissertation and first book) to theories of political economy — something Moyn has devoted more attention to since the 2008 financial crisis — to Jonathan Littell’s 2009 novel The Kindly Ones, which Moyn called “intentionally sickening and an unquestionably brilliant success” in a review for The Nation.

On the other hand, Moyn has a social-media habit rivaling that of most teenagers.

“It’s more important for you to see Moyn’s Facebook page than the interior of his house,” says Thomas Meaney, a former student of Moyn’s at Columbia. “He basically lives there. It’s like he publishes his own magazine.”

Kevin Stennard:

Who are the enemies of higher-order thinking? For a start, there’s Twitter, with its character limit, and before that there was PowerPoint, with its bullet-point format. Not to mention emojis. Digging further back, the indictment includes email and even – let’s show our age – telegrams. Stop.

Complex thinking is inextricably intertwined with writing. Discourage extended writing and you damage deeper thought. This is the premise of the “Writing Revolution”, a teaching programme pioneered by Judith Hochman and subject of an Atlantic magazine article in 2012. Now Hochman has co-authored a book setting out her programme, focusing on exercises that encourage sentence expansion in young writers. Conjunctions and dependent clauses enable writers to link, expand on and qualify simple ideas.

Psychologist Donald Olson argued, along similar lines, that writing is more than a tool for thinking – it actually creates the conditions for higher-order thinking. It is through reading and writing that we master the ability to link and qualify concepts, and apply the “rules” of logical argument.

Zak Slayback:

Two years in and I dropped out. And this started with asking myself, “Why haven’t I dropped out of college?”

A Quick Disclaimer
Before getting into my personal story of leaving school, I want to note that I love learning. Most discussions over the relative value of staying in versus leaving school focus on whether somebody truly values learning. Advocates of the latter allow themselves to be painted as anti-intellectuals, people opposed to the liberal arts, hyper-practical handymen just concerned with what will be marketable in the future. Get rid of that idea right now. Learning and schooling are not the same thing. Sometimes the best learning takes place in school, but that’s increasingly not the case when opportunity costs are taken into account. Even more, classroom learning and schooling don’t have to be the same thing. You can drop out of college and still enjoy classroom learning. (In fact, you can get the learning for free by auditing classes.)

If you love learning but aren’t crazy about school, this chapter is for you.

Irene Plagianos :

WeWork says its mission is to help people do what they love. Now the office-sharing giant is testing that ethos on a smaller clientele: kindergartners.

The $20 billion startup, built on a vast network of hip co-working spaces where entrepreneurs and freelancers rent desks, is making its move into children’s education, launching a private elementary school for “conscious entrepreneurship” inside a New York City WeWork next fall. A pilot program of seven students, including one of the five young children of WeWork Cos. founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann, is under way.

“In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” Rebekah Neumann said in an interview. She thinks kids should develop their passions and act on them early, instead of waiting to grow up to be “disruptive,” as the entrepreneurial set puts it.

Matt Taibbi:

On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted ’92 Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to end his life.

Beaten down after more than a decade of struggle with student debt, after years of taking false doors and slipping into various puddles of bureaucratic quicksand, he was giving up the fight. “This is it, I’m done,” he remembers thinking. “I sat there and just sort of felt like I’m going to take my life. I’m going to find a way to park this car in the garage, with it running or whatever.”

Nailor’s problems began at 19 years old, when he borrowed for tuition so that he could pursue a bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern Maine. He graduated summa cum laude four years later and immediately got a job in his field, as an English teacher.

But he graduated with $35,000 in debt, a big hill to climb on a part-time teacher’s $18,000 salary. He struggled with payments, and he and his wife then consolidated their student debt, which soon totaled more than $50,000. They declared bankruptcy and defaulted on the loans. From there he found himself in a loan “rehabilitation” program that added to his overall balance. “That’s when the noose began to tighten,” he says.

Harbinger China:

Starting your own business is about creating value for your customers. Technological advances will create massive value for users in every industry. Most of the past 2000 years were the agricultural era, and the development of technology and society was so low that it was impossible for the average person with life expectancy of 50 to 70 years to witness any significant advancement in technology, so it is only reasonable that there have been no waves of start-up in the past.
 
 Few events in history had as much an impact as the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution. So, it is no wonder that both eras witnessed a spate of innovations and start-ups. Right now, there is nothing as influential as the Internet. Artificial intelligence is dominating the second round of the Internet Revolution, and in the future we might see more advancements in life sciences and space technology.
 
 The Internet is meant to connect. Through connections, efficiency is improved, and value is created and distributed through the industries. Taobao stands for connecting people with products, Baidu for connecting people with information, and Tencent for connecting people with one another… And I hope when people talk about connecting people with cars, they will think of DiDi. Connections form platforms, which then collect big data, and as a result we look to artificial intelligence to be more efficient in utilizing these data. This is why AI is the second round of the Internet Revolution.

Dean Mosiman:

As Madison readies to make final budget decisions, new estimates have decreased the city’s tax base, meaning taxes on the average home will be higher than initially thought.

Mayor Paul Soglin proposed an operating budget in early October, and on Oct. 23 the city’s Finance Committee made amendments and approved a $314.3 million spending plan for next year.

But a lower-than-estimated tax base means the city must raise the tax rate to cover that spending, creating a higher-than-expected hit for the average home.

Madison’s taxpayer supported schools plan to spend nearly $20,000 per student during the 2017-2018 school, despite long term disastrous resding results.

Judy Newman:

He said he’s also committed to helping residents of lower-income areas nearby obtain skills to get jobs at Exact. The company has said it will conduct an internship, apprenticeship and training program aimed at disadvantaged youth and unskilled adults in the neighborhood, working with the Urban League of Greater Madison’s Park Edge/Park Ridge Employment and Training Center on Gammon Road, a few blocks away.

“We think, over time, there will be a lot of employees who will be able to work for Exact Sciences. We think we can have a strong impact on the community,” Conroy said.

Documents given to the Madison City Council in October show wages at the new lab will range from $31,200 a year to more than $100,000 a year. Three-fourths of the jobs will pay $15 to $25 an hour, or $31,200 to $52,000 a year.

The project will get $2.5 million in tax incremental financing from the city of Madison — with some conditions attached. The first $1.8 million will be provided when Exact shows it has spent at least that much on the project. The other $688,000 will be postponed until the lab is built and occupied and it has at least 125 full-time-equivalent employees.

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

Nick Wingfield:

The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study).

Many factors contribute to the gap, but a major one is the booming job market in technology. For the most part, Americans don’t see the need for an advanced degree when there are so many professional opportunities waiting for them. For some, the price is just too high when they have so much student debt already.

“You can believe that U.S. bachelor’s students, if they’re good, can go get a job at Microsoft or Google with a bachelor’s degree,” said Edward D. Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.

Kashmir Hill:

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them.

You might assume Facebook’s friend recommendations would work the same way: You tell the social network who you are, and it tells you who you might know in the online world. But Facebook’s machinery operates on a scale far beyond normal human interactions. And the results of its People You May Know algorithm are anything but obvious. In the months I’ve been writing about PYMK, as Facebook calls it, I’ve heard more than a hundred bewildering anecdotes:

Jacob Carpenter:

For more than a decade, the leaders of Accelerated Intermediate Academy have run their small Houston charter school on a lean budget, paying teachers below-average salaries and educating kids in modest facilities resembling portable trailers.

At the same time, the school’s superintendent, Kevin Hicks, has drawn an annual salary of about $250,000 – a seemingly outsized sum given its roughly 275 students and 20 employees. The school is also sitting on a condo appraised at $450,000 and recently reported $12.5 million in cash reserves, records show.

“Wow. He definitely could have put more into the school,” Kennessa Johnson, a former teacher at the charter, said of Hicks. “It was extremely basic in the school. There weren’t even any windows.”

The school’s spending has raised questions about the management of the southwest Houston charter, which has received more than $55 million in taxpayer dollars since opening in 2001, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.

Lionel Shriver:

The assignment of books for review has always been haphazard. Fellow fiction writers can be tempted either to undermine the competition, or to flatter colleagues who might later judge prizes or provide boosting blurbs. There are no clear qualifications for book reviewing — perhaps publication, but most of all, because reviewers are paid for their text but not for the many hours it takes to read the bleeding books, a willingness to work for atrocious wages.

Mitigating the gravity of this matter? Aside from the authors whose work is on the block, almost no one reads book reviews, and I say that as someone who writes a fair number. It’s a publishing truism that ‘reviews don’t sell books’ — although negative ones can un-sell books. With lose-lose odds like that, why books are ever shipped out for review is anyone’s guess.

The lofty New York Times seeks to prevent literary back-scratching by making reviewers swear on pain of excommunication that they are not friends with the author (the test being whether you’ve dined together). With young adult titles, Kirkus, an American trade journal that can influence library and bookshop orders, has raised the moral purity bar still further.

Caroline Crampton:

On 28 February 1972 at 5.50am, Frank Aycliffe recorded an important decision. “I think my uncertainty of whether to go to the hairdressers’ has been solved,” he wrote. “I have decided not to, but wait and see what things are like in another month’s time.”

Aycliffe put his deliberations in his diary. It was later transcribed by his daughter and, after his death, donated to the Great Diary Project, set up in 2007 to “provide a permanent home for unwanted diaries of any kind”. He wasn’t a famous or notable person, but this record of his life’s small, seemingly inconsequential details is now preserved at the Bishopsgate Institute in east London, alongside at least 7,500 other diaries and journals. They can be consulted by the public at any time, and a selection has recently been on display at Somerset House as part of an exhibition titled Dear Diary: A Celebration of Diaries and their Digital Descendants.

The impulse to create a personal narrative and record it can be traced back centuries – it is inextricably linked with how we think about life and existence. Marcus Aurelius, the second-century philosopher, is often credited as the author of the first example of what we would now call a diary. This work, today referred to as Meditations, originally had the Greek title Ta eis heauton, which translates roughly as “to himself”. It comprises personal notes on philosophical ideas, particularly in relation to Stoicism (a key tenet of which is self-knowledge). On the page, he plots thoughts about how to live a better life through maxims such as “put an end once and for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one”.

Camille Paglia:

For a quarter century, I have been calling for comparative religion to be made the core curriculum of higher education. (I am speaking as an atheist.) Knowledge of the great world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, Islam—is the true multiculturalism. Everyone should have a general familiarity with the beliefs, texts, rituals, art, and shrines of all the major religions. Only via a direct encounter with the Qu’ran and Hadith, for example, can anyone know what they say about jihad and how those strikingly numerous passages have been interpreted in different ways over time.

Right now, too many secular Western liberals treat Islam with paternalistic condescension—waving at it vaguely from a benevolent distance but making no effort to engage with its intricate mixed messages, which can inspire toward good or spur acts of devastating impact on the international stage.

Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood:

ver the past 15 years, the humanities have undergone dizzying changes. Scholars are now blogging, learning to code, writing collaboratively, and mining vast digital libraries. Many of these changes are bound up with computers, and observers often characterize them collectively as “digital humanities.” But so far, digital humanities hasn’t become a separate field or even a distinct school of thought. The term is a loose label for a series of social and intellectual changes taking place in humanistic disciplines.

Disciplinary change is always controversial, and the attack on DH has become a recognized genre. Timothy Brennan’s recent article, “The Digital-Humanities Bust,” is the latest of these pieces. What troubles him about DH, he says, is that it harbors “an epistemology.”

Brennan is willing to accept that computers can help with strictly linguistic problems: “compiling concordances,” for example, or “deciphering Mayan stelae.” But he dismisses the idea that they can help address the core questions of the humanities. He writes:

UW Center for European Studies:

Torsten Schimanski is Director of Open Enrollment Training for the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program (NJMEP), a non-profit organization dedicated to the improvement and success of manufacturing companies in New Jersey. Previously, Mr. Schimanski served as the Head of the Training and Learning Center for Festo Didactic, a global player in the field of industrial automation and education. His expertise is in the field of apprenticeship program development. He is an advocate for dual-education paid-apprenticeship concepts. He began his own career with an apprenticeship in banking and finance in Germany. Torsten Schimanksi offers to address such issues as the skills gap and talent development. He will deal with the challenges faced by industry in the U.S. when it comes to job training.

Gian-Carlo Rota

For several years, I have been teaching 18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students. The lectures have been good training in dealing with mass behavior. Every sentence must be perfectly enunciated, preferably twice. Examples on the board must be relevant, if not downright fascinating. Every 15 minutes or so, the lecturer is expected to come up with an interesting aside, joke, historical anecdote, or unusual application of the concept at hand. When a lecturer fails to conform to these inexorable requirements, the students will signify their displeasure by picking by their books and leaving the classroom.
Despite the lecturer’s best efforts, however, it becomes more difficult to hold the attention of the students as the term wears on, and they start falling asleep in class under those circumstances should be a source of satisfaction for a teacher, since it confirms that they have been doing their jobs. There students have been up half the night-maybe all night-finishing problem sets and preparing for their midterm exams.

Four courses in science and engineering each term is a heavy workload for anyone; very few students fail to learn, first and foremost, the discipline of intensive and constant work.

Garrett Dash Nelson:

The emergence in the United States of large-scale “megaregions” centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with “common sense” interpretations of geographic coherence. The results provide a new perspective on the functional economic geography of the United States from a megaregion perspective, and shed light on the old geographic problem of the division of space into areal units.

Chris Martin:

Alice Dreger is an historian of medicine and science, a sex researcher, and an advocate of academic freedom. She is the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice. In this episode, I talk to her about why she blames university brand management, and the corporatization of academia more broadly, for the policing of research, which has now become common in academic life. We talk about how the increasing reliance on external research funding has spurred attention to university brand management, and Alice also presents her recommendations for what to do if you are caught up in an academic controversy.

Miriam Mannak:

This meant that Ghanaians tried and, to a large extent, managed to hold on to certain valuable traditions. Some attempts were successful. “If you’d go to Kumasi [the capital city of the Ashanti region, in southern Ghana] people wear traditional clothing, which they will wear whilst at work and going to the shops.”

Kissi adds that most traditional dances are still performed in a traditional way, too. “Dance and music students at the University of Ghana need to be part of a traditional dance troupe and learn from master drummers,” he says. “They are trained by these master drummers, like in the past. It is a difficult training process.”

Kissi has recently organised workshops of African mask-making, dancing and drumming for World Cultures Festival 2017 – Vibrant Africa, organised by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

Bruce Robbins:

The lectures, diverging as they often do from the books that made Foucault famous, only added to the controversy. They are—along with various manifestos, unpublished drafts, interviews, and other miscellaneous writings—now also the subject of two fascinating new books by Stuart Elden: Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault’s Last Decade. In the former, Elden tries to soothe some of the long-standing tensions between Foucault and Marx, in part by displaying hidden continuities between Foucault’s early work on madness and knowledge and his later work on power. In the latter, Elden deals with the 10 years after Foucault finished the manuscript of Discipline and Punish and began (on the same day!) The History of Sexuality. He shows how much of Foucault’s interest in sexuality was actually an interest in governmentality, or technologies of rule. When Foucault talked about subjectivity, Elden argues, he was also talking about the formation of subjects in the political sense, or how human beings become subjected to power.

Elden doesn’t claim that his answers are definitive. He notes that more than half of the 110 boxes of Foucault’s papers, classified by France as a national treasure and held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, remain closed to researchers, thus leaving all interpretations provisional. But one collateral payoff of his close look at Foucault’s career is what he reveals of Foucault’s own confusions and uncertainties about his project and what he was really trying to do.

Reading Elden, one gets to watch one of the last century’s most celebrated thinkers in the unfamiliar role of a stumbling dissertation writer, hesitantly trying out different answers to that dreaded question: “What is your basic idea?”

Jonathan Kay:

On December 10, 1982, a then-obscure academic from the American Midwest took to the pages of National Review magazine with a lengthy indictment of America’s intellectual class. Though this was the height of the Reagan Revolution — a heady time for the Review’s conservative editors and readers — the author had nothing to say about tax cuts or defence policy. Instead, he peppered his argument with references to Socrates and Nietzsche. A typical applause line was: “The Bible and Plutarch have ceased to be a part of the soul’s furniture.”

Yet the piece hit a nerve. And in time, it grew into a bestselling book that made the author — Indianapolis-born philosopher and classicist Allan David Bloom — an academic celebrity.

Much of Bloom’s success no doubt was owed to his book’s inspired title, The Closing of the American Mind. But the timing was perfect, too, arriving on shelves in the fall of 1987, when political correctness was just becoming an acute force for censorship. I was a college student at the time. And reading Bloom’s book helped convince me that, no, it wasn’t just me: something really was wrong with the way my generation was being educated and politically programmed.

Bloom was especially repelled by relativism, which he described as “the consciousness that one loves one’s own way because it is one’s own, not because it is good.” Though he was hardly the first postwar critic to abhor the fragmenting of cultural life and the marginalisation of the Western canon, Bloom went deeper with his analysis, showing how the emerging obsession with identity politics (as we now call it) left students glum and aimless — brimming with grievances, while lacking the sense of common purpose that once animated higher learning.

The author died in 1992, just before the advent of the world wide web exacerbated many of the problems he described. Social media, in particular, has reduced attention spans — making it difficult to teach students classic texts that are not immediately relevant to modern forms of self-identification. At the same time, these networks allow activists to shame heterodox ideas on a peer-to-peer basis.

Graham W. Bishai:

More than a dozen handmade stickers reading “It’s okay to be white” surfaced around Harvard Square Wednesday, prompting Cambridge officials to remove them and a Harvard Law School Dean to denounce the signs as “provocations intended to divide us.”

The stickers appeared to be part of a campaign started on the forum website 4chan, which called upon followers to put up posters with the message in their area on Halloween night. The author of the original post on the site wrote that they hoped the “credibility of far left campuses and media gets nuked” as a result of the incident, adding that they could help achieve a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”

Similar stickers were spotted in a handful of places around the country Wednesday morning.

“It seems likely that these anonymous postings, made in the middle of the night, were provocations intended to divide us from one another,” Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in an email sent to Law students Wednesday after the stickers were spotted at Wasserstein and Hastings Halls.

Nanette Asimov:

UC Men’s Octet sing next to Sather Gate at UC Berkeley on Wednesday, November 1, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif.

The problem with California’s public colleges and universities is not in the quality of their academic offerings — it’s that the schools don’t do enough to help students find affordable places to live, according to a new statewide survey about higher education.

That’s the view of a large majority of Californians — 85 percent — who participated in the Public Policy Institute of California’s annual survey of attitudes on the state’s public higher-education systems.

Most of the 1,703 residents who answered questions in English or Spanish by phone last month said they like the quality of education provided by community colleges, California State University and the University of California — more than 63 percent in each case.

Stephen Chen:

During an epic naval battle between Chinese and local forces off the coast of Sri Lanka more than 600 years ago, a massive treasure ship laden with gold, precious gems and religious artefacts was scuppered and sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

According to the history books, the vessel (or vessels – no one knows for sure exactly how many ships might have sunk) was part of the fleet of Chinese admiral Zheng He, one of the greatest maritime adventurers of all time. But while stories of his exploits abound in Chinese texts, no hard evidence has ever been found to prove the existence of his ships.

That, however, could be about to change, as researchers are set to embark on an archaeological expedition that they believe could not only settle a centuries-old debate, but also yield a hoard of lost Ming dynasty (1368-1644) treasure.

Alan Borsuk:

He called Trump “despicable” and said, “This man and what he’s done is qualitatively different than anything else I’ve seen.”

“Not to take a stand is to co-sign on the injustice,” he said.

None of this was what prompted my visit to Fuller’s office at Marquette University, where he has held the title “distinguished professor” since he resigned as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools in 1995.

The Institute for the Transformation of Learning, which he heads, was for years a booming operation, with involvement in school-related initiatives and school choice advocacy in Milwaukee and nationwide. The organization is now pretty much just Fuller.

Dion J. Pierre:

Stewart maintains that the complaints against him are “exaggerated.” The embattled VP said that racial animus at the South Carolina school triggered the impeachment controversy. And that the report that detailed his alleged misconduct was leaked in retaliation for his refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at a meeting of student senate. In an interview with the Anderson Independent Mail Stewart was defiant:

“This is a social lynching…There’s a deeper systemic issue in which people are choosing what they want to hear, choosing what they want to believe exists and that’s why sitting for the pledge was so important,” he said.

But Clemson SGA senators said that the question before the governing body is one of fitness, not race. Stewart “abused his power” as an RA when he violated his female residents’ privacy.

aeon:

Why can we count to 152? OK, most of us don’t need to stop there, but that’s my point. Counting to 152, and far beyond, comes to us so naturally that it’s hard not to regard our ability to navigate indefinitely up the number line as something innate, hard-wired into us.

Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do. The hunter-gatherer who could tell which herd or flock of prey was the biggest, or which tree held the most fruit, had a survival advantage over the one who couldn’t. What’s more, other animals show a rudimentary capacity to distinguish differing small quantities of things: two bananas from three, say. Surely it stands to reason, then, that numeracy is adaptive.

But is it really? Being able to tell two things from three is useful, but being able to distinguish 152 from 153 must have been rather less urgent for our ancestors. More than about 100 sheep was too many for one shepherd to manage anyway in the ancient world, never mind millions or billions.

The cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez of the University of California at San Diego doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom that ‘number’ is a deep, evolved capacity. He thinks that it is a product of culture, like writing and architecture. ‘Some, perhaps most, scholars endorse a nativist view that numbers are biologically endowed,’ he said. ‘But I’d argue that, while there’s a biological grounding, language and cultural traits are necessary for the establishment of number itself.’

‘The idea of an inherited number sense as the unique building block of complex mathematical skill has had an unusual attraction,’ said the neuroscientist Wim Fias of the University of Gent in Belgium. ‘It fits the general enthusiasm and hope to expect solutions from biological explanations,’ in particular, by coupling ‘the mystery of human mind and behaviour with the promises offered by genetic research.’ But Fias agrees with Núñez that the available evidence – neuroscientific, cognitive, anthropological – just doesn’t support the idea.

If Núñez and Fias are right, though, where does our sense of number come from? If we aren’t born equipped with the neural capacity for counting, how do we learn to do it? Why do we have the concept of 152?

Tim Henderson:

Tyler and Alissa Hodge, two of the hundreds of young professionals who have moved here in recent years, noticed that despite the influx there was not a single city-style coffee shop downtown.
 
 So the couple opened one in May, with sofas, baked goods and local micro-roaster beans, adding a play area as a nod to the family-friendly culture of this southern Indiana city and their own three children.
 
 “The 18- to 35-year-olds expect something like that, but they just didn’t have it,” said Tyler Hodge, 32, who used crowdfunding to help finance the shop. The same tactic was used for a rock climbing gym opened in September by a group of young engineers who, like Hodge, spend their weekdays working at Cummins Inc., the diesel engine company that is the city’s largest employer.
 
 “There’s not that much to do here for the young people,” said Juan Valencia, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant who is one of the founders of the climbing gym. “We think this will help.”

Ben Myers and Brock Read:

In a sweeping plan to rework the tax code unveiled on Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives floated a new strategy for raising revenue: Tax college endowments.

Some college endowments, that is.

Deep within the plan — look here, on Page 75 — is the language that spells out which institutions would be affected. The bottom line: Only the most-affluent colleges need worry. Colleges would be subject to the tax, set at 1.4 percent of net investment income, only if their endowment assets total at least $100,000 per student.

Ian Sample:

It was the case of the missing PhD student.

As another academic year got under way at Imperial College London, a senior professor was bemused at the absence of one of her students. He had worked in her lab for three years and had one more left to complete his studies. But he had stopped coming in.

Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple.

“He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.”

It is not an isolated event. Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain’s top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a “missing generation” of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects.

Eric Kelderman:

In broad terms, the bill would eliminate or consolidate a number of tax deductions meant to offset the costs of higher education for individuals and companies, including the Lifetime Learning Credit, which provides a tax deduction of up to $2,000 for tuition, a credit for student-loan interest, and a $5,250 corporate deduction for education-assistance plans.
The bill proposes new taxes on some private-college endowments and on compensation for the highest-paid employees at nonprofit organizations, including colleges and nonprofit academic hospitals. The plan would also tax the tuition waivers that many graduate students receive when they work as teaching assistants or researchers.

Perhaps most significant, the bill would result in many fewer people itemizing their deductions for charitable gifts. Higher-education experts warned that that change could lead to a steep decline in donations to colleges.

Natasha Singer & Danielle Ivory:

Silicon Valley is going all out to own America’s school computer-and-software market, projected to reach $21 billion in sales by 2020. An industry has grown up around courting public-school decision makers, and tech companies are using a sophisticated playbook to reach them, The New York Times has found in a review of thousands of pages of Baltimore County school documents and in interviews with dozens of school officials, researchers, teachers, tech executives and parents.

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

Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Reading Recovery

Karen Rivedal:

“Kids aren’t going to be able to take risks and push themselves academically, without having a trusting support network there,” said Lindsay Maglio, principal of Lindbergh Elementary School, where some teachers improved on traditional get-to-know-you exercises in the first few weeks of school by adding more searching questions, and where all school staff are engaged in community-building lessons in small-group sessions with students taking place at set periods throughout the year.

While noting that getting to know their students is already “something we do feel strongly about,” fourth-grade teacher Beth Callies, now in her 11th year at Lindbergh, said she saw value in a districtwide strategy emphasizing it. “It’s a good push to remind us,” Callies said.

Beyond asking her students to describe themselves through traditional questions such as choosing what animal or what TV show they would like to be, and where they would like to take a vacation and why, Duernberger also invited them to free-associate this year by responding to the line: “I wish my teacher knew this about me.”

Common ground
The students’ answers, which they also read to each other in a follow-up exercise, were as varied as their life stories. Students said they liked to go camping, had two brothers, worked hard, could read-upside down, and had two dogs at home before mom gave one away.

Teachers have been encouraged to mine a book by educator Zaretta Hammond known as “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” for new techniques and deeper understanding of the issue. At Lindbergh, Maglio built time into the school day for all staff to meet once a week for 40 minutes with students in small groups “to build community and work on trust,” with possible lessons on topics such as resolving conflicts or bullying.

“It’s really based off the issues that kids are having, so there’s not a set structure (for the weekly sessions),” Maglio said. “We just need to think about being more purposeful in how we plan for all our students. It might be working for 80 percent of students, but we need to think more about the ones we may be struggling to reach.”

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

Math Forum

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Reading Recovery

Steve Lohr:

The national priority in education can be summed up in a four-letter acronym: STEM. And that’s understandable. A country’s proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is vital in generating economic growth, advancing scientific innovation and creating good jobs.

The STEM campaign has been underway for years, championed by policymakers across the ideological spectrum, embraced in schools everywhere and by organizations ranging from the YWCA to the Boy Scouts. By now, the term — first popularized and promoted by the National Science Foundation — is used as a descriptive identifier. “She’s a STEM,” usually meant as a compliment, suggests someone who has a leg up in the college admissions sweepstakes.

Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data

Claire Wardle, PhD Hossein Derakhshan:

This report is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and its related challenges, such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content have been well documented, we argue that contemporary social technology means that we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers.

The direct and indirect impacts of information pollution are difficult to quantify. We’re only at the earliest of stages of understanding their implications. Since the results of the ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, Donald Trump’s victory in the US and Kenya’s recent decision to nullify its national election result, there has been much discussion of how information disorder is influencing democracies. More concerning, however, are the long-term implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing socio- cultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions.

Mike Antonucci:

Last month the Washington State Supreme Court held a hearing to determine the level of the state government’s compliance with the court’s 2012 McCleary ruling.

In that decision the court ruled the state had failed to meet its duty under the state constitution to provide school districts with enough resources to cover the costs of a basic education. Since 2014 the state government has been held in contempt of court for failing to come up with a legislative fix.

The state budget passed this year provided $7.3 billion in additional K-12 spending over the next four years. But public school interest groups say that’s not enough. The Washington Education Association has led the charge, lobbying for class sizes of 15-17 students in K-3, starting teacher salaries of $54,000 and annual cost of living increases.

Paul Glasteris:

Usually, when a demographic group is significantly underrepresented on elite college campuses, we consider it a problem. But there is one such problem that almost no one seems to notice or care much about. Nearly 30 percent of college undergraduates are adults, defined by the United States Department of Education as 25 years old or older. But at Stanford, the share of undergraduates who are adults is 1.2 percent; at Yale, 0.7 percent; at Princeton, 0.6 percent; at the University of Chicago, 0.2 percent.

This blatant discrepancy hasn’t drawn any sustained attention even from liberal elites who otherwise tend to notice these things. That’s a testament to the notion many of us carry around in our heads, often based on our own experience, that colleges are places filled with fresh-faced young people who recently graduated from high school. But outside of elite colleges that image is less and less accurate in higher education today.

The pool of graduating high school seniors is shrinking as the huge millennial generation ages. Meanwhile, more and more people who didn’t go to college, or who went but didn’t finish, are realizing that their lack of a degree is keeping them from getting ahead. Many of these adult students are veterans cycling out of the military after years of service.

:

The Cato 2017 Free Speech and Tolerance Survey, a new national poll of 2,300 U.S. adults, finds that 71% Americans believe that political correctness has silenced important discussions our society needs to have. The consequences are personal—58% of Americans believe the political climate prevents them from sharing their own political beliefs.

Democrats are unique, however, in that a slim majority (53%) do not feel the need to self-censor. Conversely, strong majorities of Republicans (73%) and independents (58%) say they keep some political beliefs to themselves.

Nikita Vladimirov:

“Cause is defined as conduct that demonstrates the faculty member lacks the willingness or ability to perform duties or responsibilities to the University,” the proposed policy reads, noting that tenured faculty can be disciplined or dismissed for eight core reasons, including “unsatisfactory performance” and demonstrating a “pattern of disruptive conduct or unwillingness to work productively with colleagues.”

University spokesman Nate Hinkel told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the proposed language is part of an effort to align the broader policy with “current law and best practices.”

Mike Antonucci:

Last week Union Report reported on a directive sent by the National Education Association listing “8 essentials” that should shape local collective bargaining agreements if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns agency fee laws in the coming Janus case. Such laws allow unions to collect payments from non-members, ostensibly to cover the costs of contract negotiation.

Oral arguments in the case may occur as early as January. Plaintiffs will argue that agency fees levied by public-sector unions are unconstitutional because bargaining with the government is a form of political advocacy with which they may not agree.

The unions will argue that engagements with the government as an employer are fundamentally different from those with the government as sovereign, and that workplace “coherence” makes it necessary for non-members to subsidize the majority position. They will claim that fee-payers are not supporting unions’ political speech in any meaningful way.

Related: Rachel Cohen:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten met one-on-one with then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon back in March, following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts and plan to craft a $1 trillion infrastructure package. The Intercept learned of the meeting, which has not been previously reported, independent of Weingarten or Bannon. It was instigated through a mutual friend and appeared to be part of Bannon’s effort to realign the parties, according to Weingarten.

“Look, I will meet with virtually anyone to make our case, and particularly in that moment, I was very, very concerned about the budget that would decimate public education,” Weingarten said. “I wanted it to be a real meeting, I didn’t want it to be a photo-op, so I insisted that the meeting didn’t happen at the White House.”

Weingarten didn’t take notes at the meeting, which was held at a Washington restaurant, but told The Intercept she and Bannon talked about “education, infrastructure, immigrants, bigotry and hate, budget cuts … [and] about a lot of different things.”

She came away a bit shook. “I came out of that conversation saying that this was a formidable adversary,” she said.

Kinga Wysienska-Di Carlo and Matthew Di Carlo::

A large and long-standing body of research documents the segregation of U.S. schools by race and income, but relatively few of these studies include private schools. This is partially because of the lack of data on private schools, and also because most desegregation efforts have focused on public schools.

That said, private schools serve roughly one in ten of the nation’s school children, with higher proportions in many big cities. Attempts to describe school segregation without including private schools may therefore be missing a significant part of the picture.

Greg Rosalsky:

Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn’t supposed to be this way—at least according to Norman Macrae.
 
 In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies—including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan—made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives.
 
 Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn’t stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces. As companies recognized how much cheaper remote employees would be, the computer would, in effect, kill the office—and with that our whole way of living would change.