Matt Taibbi:

The admission comes by way of Andrew Bailey, head of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. He said recently (emphasis mine):
 “The absence of active underlying markets raises a serious question about the sustainability of the LIBOR benchmarks. If an active market does not exist, how can even the best run benchmark measure it?”
 
 As a few Wall Street analysts have quietly noted in the weeks since those comments, an “absence of underlying markets” is a fancy way of saying that LIBOR has not been based on real trading activity, which is a fancy way of saying that LIBOR is bullshit.
 
 LIBOR is generally understood as a measure of market confidence. If LIBOR rates are high, it means bankers are nervous about the future and charging a lot to lend. If rates are low, worries are fewer and borrowing is cheaper.
 
 It therefore makes sense in theory to use LIBOR as a benchmark for borrowing rates on car loans or mortgages or even credit cards. But that’s only true if LIBOR is actually measuring something.
 
 Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Every morning at 11 a.m. London time, twenty of the world’s biggest banks tell a committee in London how much they estimate they’d have to pay to borrow cash unsecured from other banks.
 
 The committee takes all 20 submissions, throws out the highest and lowest four numbers, and then averages out the remaining 12 to create LIBOR rates.
 
 Theoretically, a fine system. Measuring how scared banks are to lend to each other should be a good way to gauge market stability. Except for one thing: banks haven’t been lending to each other for decades.
 
 Up through the Eighties and early Nineties, as global banks grew bigger and had greater demand for dollars, trading between banks was heavy. That robust interbank lending market was why LIBOR became such a popular benchmark in the first place.
 
 But beginning in the mid-nineties, banks began to discover that other markets provided easier and cheaper sources of funding, like the commercial paper or treasury repurchase markets. Trading between banks fell off.
 
 Ironically, as trading between banks declined, the use of LIBOR as a benchmark for mortgages, credit cards, swaps, etc. skyrocketed. So as LIBOR reflected reality less and less, it became more and more ubiquitous, burying itself, tick-like, into the core of the financial system.

Pagan Kennedy:

“It’s 2:30 in the morning and my phone rings. My daughter says, ‘Daddy, you need to come to the hospital,’ ” Michael Bell told me, of the moment in 2004 when he learned that his son had been shot by a police officer in their hometown, Kenosha, Wis.

Twenty-one-year-old Michael Bell Jr. died that night from a bullet wound to the head. In the nightmarish hours that followed, his father expected independent investigators to arrive on the scene and find out what had gone wrong. A former Air Force pilot, he knew that when an accident happened in the military, a forensic team performed an exhaustive review. Above all, he wanted to make sure that if a mistake had contributed to his son’s death, it would be identified and fixed, so that nothing like it would happen again.

John McGinnis:

oogle and our elite universities appear to inhabit the same ideological bubble and intone the same diversity mantras. And that is not surprising, because almost everyone at Google is a product of the modern university and those at its HR department the likely product of its more PC inflected half—the humanities or soft social sciences. And Google must live within the world of mainstream media and government regulation, and these two sectors are also dominated by elite university graduates of the last quarter century.

But nevertheless the institutions and their employees operate under different constraints. Google is the elite university without tenure and the elite university is Google without market discipline. You might think that tenure is the more important obstacle to enforcing an orthodoxy like modern diversity policy. After all, a professor at an elite university would not be fired for making the largely accurate factual claims about the average differences in temperament between women and men that the Googler did in the memo that got him sacked. Nor would she be let go for arguing that it would be better to judge people as individuals and hire on merit alo

Greg McGinnis:

A state pension plan’s annual funded ratio gives an end-of-fiscal-year snapshot of the assets as a proportion of the accrued liabilities. In aggregate, the funded ratio of these plans dropped to 72 percent in 2015 from 75 percent in 2014. Across the country, funded ratios for plans reviewed by The Pew Charitable Trusts ranged from 37 percent in New Jersey to 104 percent in South Dakota.

The underlying funding differences among pension plans and states reflect policy choices, including plan design, contribution policies, and investment return assumptions, in addition to pension fund performance in the stock market. Pew’s issue brief “The State Pension Funding Gap: 2015,” published in April 2017, outlines these differences in detail.

Andy Kessler:

Many of the studies quoted in newspaper articles and pop-psychology books are one-offs anyway. In August 2015, the Center for Open Science published a study in which 270 researchers spent four years trying to reproduce 100 leading psychology experiments. They successfully replicated only 39. Yes, I see the irony of a study debunking a study, but add to this a Nature survey of 1,576 scientists published last year. “More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments,” the survey report concludes. “And more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”

Bunk medical studies are worrisome, but who really cares about pop behavioral science? It’s easy to write this off as trivial, except millions take these studies and their conclusions seriously. The 2008 book “Nudge,” from academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, called for “libertarian paternalism” to push people in the right direction. But who decides what’s the right direction? Turns out the answer is Mr. Sunstein. He was hired by the Obama administration in 2009 to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Call it psychobabble authoritarianism.

Ted Balaker:

No. The disturbing event was a campus screening of my documentary, Can We Take a Joke? The film examines the clash between comedy and outrage culture, and in it comedians ranging from newbie college jokesters to successful veterans such as Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette, Christina Pazsitzky, Adam Carolla, Lisa Lampanelli, and Jim Norton push back against the “Outrage Mob” and stand up for comedy and free speech.

The film includes a variety of free speech scholars, and pays special attention to the college scene. It explains how universities have taught generations of students that they can shut down opinions they don’t like simply by declaring they’re offended.

Being offended is much easier than formulating a persuasive argument for your point of view, and in the upside-down modern college environment, parading your offendedness actually confers an air of enlightenment. What’s worse is that students bring the muzzler mentality with them after they graduate, and make society at large less tolerant and less fun.

Economist:

To have an equal chance of admission as a black applicant, an Asian applicant to a top college needs as much as 450 additional points out of 1600 on the SAT (a whopping amount to those unaccustomed to American psychometrics). Encouragingly, research by David Card and Alan Krueger, two economists, shows that talented minority students apply at the same rate to leading universities with or without affirmative action.

Mike Antunucci:

Rachel M. Cohen has written a piece in The American Prospect titled “Under Trump, Liberals Rediscover School Segregation” that almost seems designed to rile both sides of the education policy debate.

These kinds of articles always get my attention, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to tell people exactly what they want to hear. The next easiest thing is to tell your opponents what they don’t want to hear.

Telling your allies what they don’t want to hear gets really awkward, at best.

Cohen applauds the newfound focus on school segregation, but thinks “the timing sometimes seems politically convenient.” She notes a previous lack of liberal interest in the segregation found not only in traditional schools, but in charters when supported by a charter-friendly Obama Administration.

Charter advocates aren’t going to love the notion that they, as well as voucher advocates, are contributing to segregation. But unions aren’t going to love Cohen’s implication that they tend to fight segregation only when they don’t have to sacrifice anything:

Stephen Machin and Tuomas Pekkarinen:

Do boys and girls differ in their intel- lectual and cognitive abilities and, if so, in what way? These questions have raised considerable debate, both in terms of average performance and in terms of variability around the average.
Empirical research on gen- der differences in achievements produces mixed conclusions, with some evidence that favors boys and some that favors girls (1–4). In many countries, girls show superior performance in school examinations, which is also reflected in higher rates of attendance in tertiary educa- tion. In addition, girls have been improving their position rela- tive to boys (5, 6). In countries with a more gender-equal cul- ture, the gender gap that is usu- ally in favor of boys in average mathematics test scores is erased or even reversed in favor of girls (7).

Alan Borsuk:

Every school on the south side is in fear of what Augustine Prep will mean, a leader of a different school told me recently. Some are at least expressing good wishes. Some are not, especially privately.

The biggest thing to watch over the next several years will be enrollment at a lot of the schools on the south side. Augustine, which is a private, Christian school where 100% of students will receive public voucher money, will debut with about 660 students in early elementary grades, sixth grade and ninth grade, said Ramirez and the school’s superintendent, Alfonso Carmona.

The plan is that it will fill out, grade by grade, to become a K-12, with 1,700 students. The intention is to build a second building immediately to the east and for enrollment to grow to 3,000 by a few years from now. If that comes to pass, Augustine most likely would be the largest school operation in Milwaukee, outside of MPS.

The population on Milwaukee’s south side and the population of Hispanics, the dominant portion of the Augustine enrollment, are growing. But it’s hard to envision so many kids going to Augustine without other schools losing enrollment.

St. Augustine Preparatory Academy.

Katie Martin:

Still, it rankles, because it’s hard to overstate just how much pressure mums are under to banish the bottle. The bottle bashers are just one part of an overbearing commercial, social and medical enterprise that tells mums that whatever they do, however hard they try, they’re doing it wrong.

I noticed the start of the bullying in my first pregnancy, when I did what many middle-class parents do: paid to make new friends by going to tree-huggy childbirth classes. There, I was told by a lady who’d had her babies in her bathroom that real mums didn’t need to go to hospital to give birth, didn’t need pain relief in childbirth (“epidurals are for wimps!”), that newborns didn’t need vitamin K injections (they absolutely definitely do) and you can make your own mind up about vaccinations but, really, if Baby needed those chemicals, then nature would provide them, don’t you think? Oh, and, no matter how hard it is, get that baby on that boob. Bottles are bad.

After the joy of childbirth, which the lady said would be a doddle but might well have killed me and/or my daughter without some heavy-handed intervention, the midwives and health visitors kick in. Are you breastfeeding? You must breastfeed. Finding it painful? Running a fever? Whatever. (I’m a farmer’s lass, from a cattle farm, but hadn’t realised that mastitis could affect humans.) Are you crying day and night because the baby’s screaming the house down, losing weight, can’t latch on? That’s just how it goes. No bottles. We won’t discharge you until we know you’re breastfeeding. Say hello to “the Breastapo”.

Linda Flanagan:

When Paula Gosal took over as principal of the Chilliwack Middle School, she walked smack into the middle of a long-standing debate among the staff over awards. It wasn’t exactly a rumble that Gosal was tossed into so abruptly in the fall of 2016. Most of the teachers at this school for seventh- through ninth-graders in British Columbia had read the literature on awards, and were looking for feedback and support from their new principal. The majority wanted to do away with the school’s awards and awards assemblies, and needed the backing of their principal to make it happen.

“I did not have to be persuaded,” Gosal said. She called for a vote, and the staff unanimously decided to stop handing out awards.

Though data on the extent of school award-giving is scarce, the practice of delivering them is so customary that the Common Application to U.S. colleges includes spaces to report honors and other forms of recognition. Alongside their ubiquity, however, is abundant research showing that awards, rewards and other external incentives undermine intrinsic motivation.

“This is one of the most robust findings in social science—and also one of the most ignored,” wrote Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pursuit of the trinket or prize extinguishes what might have been a flicker of internal interest in a subject, suffocating the genuine sources of motivation: mastery, autonomy and purpose. “To say ‘do this, and you’ll get that’ makes people lose interest in ‘this,’ ” said Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards. Awards are that much worse than rewards, Kohn added, because they are simply prizes made artificially limited.

The Chilliwack School District plans to spend C$153,673,539 during the 2017-2018 school year for about 14,000 students. (US$121,340,626). That’s $8,667 per student, or less than half of Madison’s nearly $20,000.

Sam Lessin:

The Not Too Distant Future: A World Awash of Fake Video, Audio and Photos

In the last several months videos have been floating around the web showing how video and audio can be easily manipulated to make it appear that almost anyone is saying almost anything. A good recent example, from University of Washington professors, uses former President Barack Obama’s speech patterns to demonstrate one form of the technology. Another good demonstration, from Stanford last year, shows face expression-matching research.

In a sense, this isn’t new. For a long time, Hollywood studios have been creating believable fakes, bringing back deceased actors or grafting live actors onto increasingly expressive cartoon scaffoldings.

Much like weapons proliferation, however, the ability to create believable fakes isn’t too scary when it is extremely time consuming and expensive to access. It is far more dangerous, however, when the technology gets good enough that almost anyone can generate believable fake media with access to the internet, hundreds of dollars of equipment, and a few hours. That’s the direction in which we are marching.

Charlie Martin:

Quite a long time ago now, I reviewed a book for IEEE Spectrum (I think) on the “Reification problem” in formal methods of software development. (“The what?”, you ask? “Reification” is to make something less abstract. This was a book on how to convert beautiful proven programs on paper into ugly proletarian real computer code.)

The contents were normal for this kind of book – I’d just had a chapter published in a similar book, so I was familiar with the process – a collection of chapters which were provided in typeset form to the publisher by the authors and printed using photo-offset printing. The book itself was the cheapest sort of academic hardcover binding: sewn signatures in a cloth spine, hardboard covers and the sort of cheap plastic surface that would break and peel off in a semester’s hard use.

What struck me was what the book cost: over $200. I no longer remember the exact price and page count, but the number burned into my memory was that it was 62.5¢ per page. Making Xerox copies of the book would have cost 10¢ a page. The actual production costs of the book were as low as they could possibly have been in hardback, with no design, no typesetting, and cheap binding.

Now, there are some reasons why it would be expensive, but the reason they could get away with it was that thousands of research libraries were buying this sort of book for $200+ each so they could maintain the currency of their library.

Formal journals were — and are — even worse. You needed to produce your paper in typeset form to match the journal’s standards, after which the journal would charge “page fees” or a “publication fee”. Those fees are pretty significant now: up to $3000 in some journals. The journals are also published online, but if you want access to more than the abstract, you need to pay a fee — $30–$40 usually. (Here’s an example.)

Karen Rivedal:

Lighthouse Christian School, which has operated since 2004 out of Lighthouse Church at 5202 Regent St., will gets its own building at 6400 Schroeder Road, with space for up to 260 elementary students. The $3.6 million, two-phase project will increase classrooms from eight to 19 and will add a cafeteria, a library with computer lab and a gymnasium, among other improvements such as broader hallways, more storage, a bigger playground and better equipment.

“This is the first time each grade level will have its own classroom,” said the Rev. Tia Sierra, the school’s principal and church co-pastor with her husband, the Rev. Marcio Sierra.

Madison’s government funded schools have long resisted governance diversity.

Judicial Watch (PDF).

Mark Lola:

The results of this shift are now plain to see. The classic Democratic goal of bringing people from different backgrounds together for a single common project has given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition. And what keeps this approach to politics alive is that it is cultivated in the colleges and universities where liberal elites are formed. Here again, we must look to the history of the New Left to understand how this happened.

After Reagan’s election in 1980, conservative activists hit the road to spread the new individualist gospel of small government and free markets and poured their energies into winning out-of-the-way county, state and congressional elections. Also on the road, though taking a different exit on the interstate, were former New Left activists heading for college towns all over America.

Conservatives concentrated on attracting working people once attached to the Democratic Party—a populist, bottom-up strategy. The left concentrated on transforming the outlook of professional and party elites—a top-down strategy. Both groups were successful, and both left their mark on the country.

Up until the 1960s, those active in the Democratic Party were largely drawn from the working class or farm communities and were formed in local political clubs or on union-dominated shop floors. That world is gone. Today they are formed primarily in our colleges and universities, as are members of the overwhelmingly liberal-dominated professions of law, journalism and education.

Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation than the realities of power politics today.

The experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things; the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.

These lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

John Hart:

Finnish education is rarely out of the news, whether it’s outstanding Pisa results, those same results slipping, the dropping of traditional subjects, not dropping subjects, or what makes Finnish teachers special.

I worked in England for two years as a teacher before moving to Finland eight years ago. My colleagues in the UK were supportive and the headteacher gave me subject leadership in my second year. I didn’t want to leave but the pull of home for my Finnish wife was too strong, so we upped sticks.

Finland’s education policies have been highly praised and the country has started to export its model around the world. Much of what has been written about this has, understandably, focused on policy, but it’s somewhat reductive to think in such narrow terms. The ethos of the schools and the society in which the policies are implemented are equally important.

No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system

Naysayers might argue that demographic differences between Finland and the UK (among other countries) make comparing education policies pointless. The population of Finland is homogeneous; just 5% of the population was born outside the country and don’t speak either Finnish or Swedish. This puts less strain on schools to plug linguistic and cultural gaps that exist elsewhere, but it only tells half the story. The economic homogeneity of the population, and the equity of society that is reflected in its schools, has contributed to Finland’s success. And this isn’t limited to education.

Rosanna Xia:

Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers.

In an executive order issued late Wednesday, Chancellor Timothy P. White directed the nation’s largest public university system to revamp its approach to remedial education and assess new freshmen for college readiness and course placement by using high school grades, ACT and SAT scores, previous classroom performance and other measures that administrators say provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of students’ knowledge.

Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the standardized entry-level mathematics (ELM) exam and the English placement test (EPT).

The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes. The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system’s priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.

PDF Flyer::

Need a backpack for school this fall? We have you covered.

On August 12th, 2017 at 9AM The 100 Black Men of Madison will be hosting the Back to School Celebration at Madison College where FREE backpacks filled with school supplies will be given away. All K-12 students are welcome and encouraged to attend. Please see below for additional details and a few FAQs.

9:00a.m. Saturday 12 August 2017

1701 Wright St.
Madison, WI 53704 (Map)

Paul Fanlund:

For example? “If you’re looking for the simplest examples, we weren’t consistently teaching students the fundamentals of reading in the earliest grades. We weren’t teaching phonics consistently in the early grades, and then you wonder why students aren’t attaining the skills, the basic skills … the foundational skills of reading. We still have some more work to do in that area, but boy, we have come a long way.”

With her background in California schools before she held senior-level jobs in the gigantic Chicago school district, one wonders whether a successful 45-year-old administrator might find appeal in returning to lead a big urban district. When she was hired, Cheatham talked about being here for the long haul. She still does.

She says she is excited that her son, Theo, is starting elementary school at Crestwood this fall and adds: “I am more committed and invested than ever. Like I said, I think we had this foundation-building phase that we’re going to be bringing to a close and I’m really excited about what comes next. I think we’re poised to do so much and especially for students who need and deserve more, students of color in particular.

“When I signed up I told the board that I was walking in the door thinking that I was here for a good 10 years, or as long as you guys will keep me, and I serve the community, and so that commitment remains, so I’m not planning on going anywhere.”

Notes and links:

“Plenty of resources“, now nearly $20k/student.

Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading results.

Jennifer Cheatham. Previous Superintendents.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory IB charter school.

Phonics.

Madison Teacher and Parent Jen Greenwald:

I have worked as a teacher in the Madison Metropolitan School District since 1997. I have raised my two biracial daughters in and out of Madison public schools. And, like many of the people who support Isthmus Montessori, I would like to see radical change in our district. A school system that truly honors children for who they are would be a much better place for all of us.

However, I disagree that Isthmus Montessori would create the change we want to see. It would provide change for the very small number of children (fewer than 1 percent of students in the district) who win the lottery to attend the charter school — but at the expense of other students in the district. It is neither logical nor equitable to provide such a small number of children with a learning environment focused on creativity, imagination and exploration while insisting on more rigidity and standardization in the regular public schools, which serve the vast majority of our students.

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

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results, while rejecting any sort of K-12 governance choice.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Wall Street Journal:

One microdrama last week came from a leaked document revealing that the Justice Department may staff up an investigation into “intentional race-based discrimination” in college admissions. The left is accusing Justice of dismantling racial preferences, though acceptance practices at elite universities deserve more scrutiny, particularly regarding Asian-American applicants.

In 2015 a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the Justice Department Civil Rights Division that alleges admissions discrimination at Harvard University, and the details are striking. In 1993 about 20% of Harvard students were Asian-American, and that figure has barely budged over two decades, even as the Asian-American share of the U.S. population has grown rapidly. Harvard’s admitted class of 2021 is 22% Asian-American, according to data on the university’s website, and the numbers are roughly consistent at Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools.

Robin Lake & Sivan Tuchman:

Many respected national groups have recently set their sights on school choice as the new battlefront for disability rights. They are anywhere from open to highly skeptical to adamantly opposed to charter schools and private school choice, often aligning with teachers unions to try to block new proposals or to re-regulate existing policies.

This opposition makes sense in many ways. Schools of choice, to varying degrees, are free of the hard-won regulations that these groups fought for over the last two decades: the right for access to, and inclusion in, general education classrooms, rather than isolated institutional settings; and the right to a defined set of supports and services to help students with special needs succeed in school.

Indeed, there are good reasons to be alert to issues like counseling out, disproportionate or inappropriate school discipline, and denial of services in public charter schools, which are required to comply with the same federal and state protections as district-run public schools. And when it comes to vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), and other forms of private school choice, the issues get more complex around student rights and school responsibilities.

Patrick Lawrence:

Three, regardless of what one may think about the investigations and conclusions I will now outline—and, as noted, these investigations continue—there is a bottom line attaching to them. We can even call it a red line. Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency—leave these new findings without reply. Not credibly, in any case. Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in these very institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty. Silence now, should it ensue, cannot be written down as an admission of duplicity, but it will come very close to one.

It requires no elaboration to apply the above point to the corporate media, which have been flaccidly satisfied with official explanations of the DNC matter from the start.

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

Presumably, citizens require reading and critical thinking skills.

Elaine Ou:

Suppressing intellectual debate on college campuses is bad enough. Doing the same in Silicon Valley, which has essentially become a finishing school for elite universities, compounds the problem. Its engineers build products that potentially shape our digital lives. At Google, they oversee a search algorithm that seeks to surface “authoritative” results and demote low-quality content. This algorithm is tuned by an internal team of evaluators. If the company silences dissent within its own ranks, why should we trust it to manage our access to information?

In a statement, Google’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Danielle Brown, refused to link to Damore’s memo, saying that “it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.” Companies don’t have viewpoints. Humans do — diverse ones. The swiftness with which Google removed an outspoken engineer demonstrates that Damore is exactly right: Google could use some diversity of ideas.

Cal Owings

Madison ranked #1 on CBRE’s list of tech talent momentum markets, a measurement of the change in tech job growth, as part of its fifth annual Scoring Tech Talent Report. Aided by the presence of large universities, the report also found Madison has the highest concentration of millennials compared to other tech cities, accounting for 26.5 percent of the urban population.
 
 The report, which can be viewed in detail by market in the interactive Tech Talent Analyzer, finds that tech job growth gained momentum in 28 of the 50 markets. This means job creation grew faster in the past two years (2015-2016) compared with the prior two-year period (2013-2014). Madison’s tech talent pool grew 30.2 percent from 2015 to 2016, an increase of 24.8 percentage points compared to the previous two years.

Diane Rado:

That foundation amount in Illinois has been $6,119 per student for several years now, and has been the basis of distributing state aid to districts, in a formula that combines with local funds. Districts also get federal dollars. And some property-rich districts have been getting a flat amount from the state instead of the formula-driven amount.

But to have that same foundation level, $6,119, apply to every district “never made sense because districts have different needs,” said Benjamin Boer, deputy director at Advance Illinois, an education reform group that has been active in revamping the school funding formula.

The unique adequacy targets could mean surprises for taxpayers.

For example, some affluent districts spend more than $20,000 per student. But there is no district with an adequacy target as high as $20,000 in the new formula, according to ISBE’s analysis in May.

The range of per-pupil adequacy targets goes from about $9,800 to $16,650 in that analysis, which could prompt questions by taxpayers in some districts about why spending is higher than what’s considered adequate.

“That becomes a conversation at the local level on whether they (taxpayers) want to tax themselves and pay that (larger) amount,” Boer said.

Madison spends nearly 20k per student, far more than most.

Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson:

Many experts say lack of trust will not be a barrier to increased public reliance on the internet. Those who are hopeful that trust will grow expect technical and regulatory change will combat users’ concerns about security and privacy. Those who have doubts about progress say people are inured to risk, addicted to convenience and will not be offered alternatives to online interaction. Some expect the very nature of trust will change.
 
 Moreover, the rise of the internet and social media has enabled entirely new kinds of relationships and communities in which trust must be negotiated with others whom users do not see, with faraway enterprises, under circumstances that are not wholly familiar, in a world exploding with information of uncertain provenance used by actors employing ever-proliferating strategies to capture users’ attention. In addition, the internet serves as a conduit for the public’s privacy to be compromised through surveillance and cyberattacks and additional techniques for them to fall victim to scams and bad actors.
 
 If that were not challenging enough, the emergence of trust-jarring digital interactions has also coincided with a sharp decline in trust for major institutions, such as government (and Congress and the presidency), the news media, public schools, the church and banks.
 
 The question arises, then: What will happen to online trust in the coming decade? In summer 2016, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large canvassing of technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and other leaders, asking them to react to this framing of the issue:

Peter Cook:

After spending eight long years at odds with the Obama Administration, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) viewed the 2016 elections as an opportunity to reassert themselves within the Democratic Party and to regain a measure of influence over federal education policy. As a result, the two unions spent massive amounts to get Democrats elected to office, threw their weight Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, and closely coordinated their efforts with national Democratic Party officials.

It goes without saying that things did work out as planned. While the two teachers unions spent tens of millions of dollars during the 2016 election cycle to get Clinton and other Democrats elected, in the end, they failed to deliver where it counts: the voting booth. As Greg Toppo at USA Today reported shortly after the elections, internal union figures revealed that one out of every three NEA members and one out of every five AFT members voted for Donald Trump.

Related: $1.57M for four senators (WEAC).

Wall Street Journal:

Betsy DeVos must be doing something right. Why else would Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, devote a speech late last week to blasting the Education Secretary for using the word “choice”—and then tying it to racism?

Sounding like Hillary Clinton in full deplorable mode, Ms. Weingarten says the movement to give parents more say over where their kids go to school has its roots in “racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia and homophobia.” Adapting the theology of the climate-change censors who seek to shut down debate, she goes on to call Mrs. DeVos a “public-school denier.”

What really frosts the AFT president is that she recognizes that the public-school monopoly her union backs is now under siege, morally and politically, for its failure to educate children, especially minority children.

Ben Domenech:

Space is the next frontier. Throughout the history of America, we have been a nation driven by the idea of the frontier—a place where law was slim and liberty was enormous, where you could make your way in the world based on your own ambition and abilities, not fenced in by the limitations of society. The idea of the frontier is a stand-in for the idea of liberty. The danger for the millennial generation today is that even as they inhabit an era providing utopian degrees of choices, they have become too fearful to actually make those choices and seize the future liberty allows. In so doing, they deny their inheritance as Americans.

Georgia Wells::

Simon Chiu has been wrestling with an unusual dilemma: how the Catholic high school he leads should spend one of the most extraordinary windfalls in Silicon Valley.

A $15,000 investment by Saint Francis High School five years ago turned into $34 million this past March when Snapchat parent Snap Inc. SNAP +4.56% went public.

Since the school hit the jackpot, Mr. Chiu has had to weigh competing ideas for what to do with the money. Students speculated they wouldn’t have to pay tuition next year. Parents asked whether annual fundraisers, including a Christmas boutique sale, were still necessary. Some advisers urged school officials to construct a new chapel and science laboratories.

Dennis Normile:

A massive peer-review fraud has triggered a tough response from the Chinese government. Officials last week announced that more than 400 researchers listed as authors on some 100 now-retracted papers will face disciplinary action because their misconduct has seriously damaged China’s scientific reputation.

Some institutions have barred the scientists linked to the fraud from pursuing their research—at least temporarily. And they have imposed other penalties, including canceling promotions, honors, and grants. Government ministries have also announced new “zero tolerance” policies aimed at stamping out research fraud. “We should eradicate the problem from its roots,” said He Defang, director of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s (MOST’s) regulatory division in Beijing.

Nico Savidge:

University of Wisconsin System campuses should beef up their engineering programs to train workers at a planned Foxconn facility in southeastern Wisconsin by cutting funding for less popular programs — not by asking the state for more money — a Republican senator said Monday.

Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Cedarburg, criticized UW System President Ray Cross’ request at a hearing last week for lawmakers to provide additional higher education funding so campuses can hire new faculty members and produce more engineers for Foxconn.

Stroebel said UW should use the state funding it already has to expand engineering programs.

Roger McNamee

I invested in Google and Facebook years before their first revenue and profited enormously. I was an early adviser to Facebook’s team, but I am terrified by the damage being done by these Internet monopolies.

Technology has transformed our lives in countless ways, mostly for the better. Thanks to the now ubiquitous smartphone, tech touches us from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. While the convenience of smartphones has many benefits, the unintended consequences of well-intentioned product choices have become a menace to public health and to democracy.

Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners.

Many school districts, including Madison, use Google’s tools.

Tina Posterli:

Recently, the results of two new studies prompted me to delve deeper into the complex world of how effectively our teachers are being evaluated in New York. Collectively, the studies show that despite states’ efforts to make evaluations tougher, principals continue to rate nearly all teachers as “effective,” and when principals are asked their opinions of teachers in confidence, with no stakes attached, they are much more likely to give harsh ratings.

This concerns me because, ever since Governor Andrew Cuomo adopted a moratorium on test-based teacher evaluations through the 2019-20 school year, teacher ratings are primarily based on principals’ evaluations.

The New York teachers union, an arm of the American Federation of Teachers, strongly opposed Cuomo’s initial proposal to increase the weight of standardized test scores to 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, stating that assuming a direct correlation among test scores, the effort of teachers, and success of children ignores all of the other factors that go into learning. Fifty percent may place too much weight on test scores that are aligned with course content, but isn’t zero percent — the result of Cuomo’s moratorium — too little?

Our educators still get annual “growth” scores from Albany based on results of state tests given during the moratorium, but the scores will not be used to decide which teachers and principals will be assigned improvement plans or fired. This means that roughly 60 percent of teachers’ evaluations are based on observations and 40 percent on local tests, depending on what is negotiated with local unions. Student learning objectives — locally-negotiated plans that outline how much students should learn over an academic year and how to measure growth — also factor into the equation.

Toni Airaksinen:

“The point and purpose is if you are a Latina and you are an engineering major, with a very specific specialization, you may not ever see anybody who looks like you,” Whittenburg explained. “But when you come home, here is your opportunity to get some support and to deal with some of the microaggressions you might have had to deal with throughout your entire day when you’ve been at class.”

While NC State already has two housing options for racial minorities—one exclusively for black males and another for Native American students—the school does not currently have one for female racial minority students, hence Whittenburg’s proposal.

Executive Director of University Relations Fred Hartman told Campus Reform that NC State has 16 different “living and learning villages” for students, and while he claimed that the applications for each one are “open to any student,” he did not answer whether an applicant’s race would factor into admission decisions.

Hartman also declined to explain to Campus Reform how the segregated housing options are funded.

Amber Walker:

The report also found that African-American students are 10.3 times more likely than white students to receive an out-of-school suspension, up from 8 times more likely before the BEP. The report indicated that the suspension risk ratio for African-American students outpaced the national average, where black students are 3 to 4 times more likely to be suspended than white students.

Might one might consider the District’s long term, disastrous reading results and our far above average spending, now nearly $20k per student?

Perhaps governance diversity might be worthwhile.

Shelby Webb and Andrea Zelinski:

The warning was issued during a meeting Monday between Texas Education Agency officials and Houston’s legislative delegation.

TEA officials told lawmakers that if even one of the district’s 13 schools that has struggled for at least the past three years receives failing accountability marks in 2017 and again in 2018, it could trigger state oversight of the entire district. Alternatively, the state agency could take over individual, chronically failing campuses.

Houston ISD is among 46 independent school districts that could face such sweeping changes thanks to a law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2015 that targets schools that have been in “improvement required” status for five or more years, as of the 2018-2019 school year.

While the state has taken over individual schools and smaller districts in the past, the law could overhaul how public education is provided in Texas. The Houston ISD is the seventh-largest district in the country, serving more than 210,000 students at over 280 schools and operating with a $2 billion annual budget.

Houston plans to spend $9,524 per student during the 2017-2018 school year, slightly less than half of Madison’s nearly 20K….

Madison’s far above average spending has not addressed its long standing, disastrous reading results.

Josh Katz:

YouTube has become a dominant force in the music industry in the last few years, particularly among younger people. With the help of YouTube’s geocoded streaming data, we set out to map the contours of music fandom and culture in the United States.
 
 Of the artists on the Billboard Top 100 this spring, we looked at the 50 that were most watched on YouTube in the United States between January 2016 and April 2017. Each map shows relative popularity in different parts of the country. If one part of a map is lighter, it doesn’t mean people there weren’t watching the artist’s videos; it just means fans were more likely to listen to a variety of other artists.
 
 See the complete set of fan maps below, listed in order of YouTube views in our data.

Nathan Robinson:

It’s so easy to lose track of the meaning of words. Say any word enough times and it becomes a mere sound, its semantic content steadily evaporating with each additional usage (“anthill…anthill…anthill…”) Some words, such as “democracy,” “justice,” and “fascism,” can eventually turn into little more than empty praise or pejorative, essentially the equivalent of declaring “Hooray for this thing!” or “Boo to that thing.”

But, and this should go without saying, if people are actually trying to communicate with one another their words need to have meaning, and we need to have relatively fixed and identifiable definitions for concepts and actions. That’s always going to be elusive, because the usages of words will change over time and vary among users, so it will be impossible for any definition to stay truly stable and universally agreed. Yet while their boundaries can be fuzzy and contested, words ultimately need to be something more than meaningless mouth-noises. When nobody agrees on the definition of a word, when it contains so many possible connotations that it’s impossible to know what anyone who uses it actually means by it, the word is no longer able to effectively communicate.

The use of words without fixed or clear meanings is a major part of what makes academic writing so terrible. People often complain that academic writing is “obscure” or overly convoluted and complex. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either complexity or obscurity in themselves; research papers in the sciences have to be complex and technical, and introducing people to obscure and unfamiliar words or concepts can be a key part of developing human knowledge. The problem largely comes when words are vague and unclear, admitting of many possible interpretations. Infamous academic terms like “phenomenological,” “intersubjectivity,” “embeddedness,” “hermeneutical,” and “discursive” are not bad because they describe complicated concepts, but because it’s often not clear just what an author means by them. It’s not that they’re meaningless, necessarily, but that they could mean lots of things, and people don’t seem to have a very precise shared idea of how to interpret them. (That’s one reason why Current Affairs mostly shies away from using the word “neoliberalism.” It’s not that it has no meaning, it’s that because people mean different things by it, it ends up being somewhat ineffective as a tool for communication.)

James Freeman:

At last there’s an encouraging message of intellectual independence—and from the Ivy League of all places. Just in time for school, a hardy band of professors has joined together to commit a flagrant micro-aggression. Scholars from various academic disciplines have signed a declaration urging college students to declare their independence. Specifically, the participating scholars warn about “the vice of conformism” and offer to each student headed off to college advice that is both simple and clear: “Think for yourself.”

Patrick Radden Keefe:

What Breuer delivered, however, was the sort of velvet accountability to which large banks have grown accustomed: no criminal charges were filed, and no executives or employees were prosecuted for trafficking in dirty money. Instead, HSBC pledged to clean up its institutional culture, and to pay a fine of nearly two billion dollars: a penalty that sounded hefty but was only the equivalent of four weeks’ profit for the bank. The U.S. criminal-justice system might be famously unyielding in its prosecution of retail drug crimes and terrorism, but a bank that facilitated such activity could get away with a rap on the knuckles. A headline in the Guardian tartly distilled the absurdity: “HSBC ‘Sorry’ for Aiding Mexican Drug Lords, Rogue States and Terrorists.”

In the years since the mortgage crisis of 2008, it has become common to observe that certain financial institutions and other large corporations may be “too big to jail.” The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the causes of the meltdown, concluded that the mortgage-lending industry was rife with “predatory and fraudulent practices.” In 2011, Ray Brescia, a professor at Albany Law School who had studied foreclosure procedures, told Reuters, “I think it’s difficult to find a fraud of this size . . . in U.S. history.” Yet federal prosecutors filed no criminal indictments against major banks or senior bankers related to the mortgage crisis. Even when the authorities uncovered less esoteric, easier-to-prosecute crimes—such as those committed by HSBC—they routinely declined to press charges.

Related:

They used their pull in the administration, including at the White House, and with a high-level friend at the Justice Department, going over the heads of staff prosecutors. And just days after the suit was announced, the airlines turned to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first White House chief of staff, to help push back against the Justice Department.

Sutton Travis:

Even without ASATR, Carthage might fare the best of Panola County’s three public school districts. The other two—Gary and Beckville—could be in worse shape. Todd Greer is the superintendent of Gary, a school district just fifteen miles or so from Carthage, depending which Farm-to-Market road you take. ASATR accounted for $1.3 million of Gary’s $5 million budget last school year. Greer says that Gary, a school district with less than 500 students enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade, would be essentially bankrupt in two years without the program. Still, he remains hopeful that legislators will extend ASATR funding during the special session. “It has such a simple fix, to such a huge, catastrophic problem,” Greer said. “I can’t fathom people in the state of Texas not fixing that problem.”

Madison spends far more per student, now nearly $20k, during the 2017-2018 budget.

Ryan Autullo and Ralph K.M. Haurwitz:

A University of Texas student claims in a lawsuit that UT President Gregory L. Fenves misapplied the school’s sexual assault policy and suspended him for five semesters even though his accuser agreed to have sex after a sorority formal in spring 2016.

The case, which raises questions about the rights of the accused, comes amid national and local concern over the prevalence of campus sexual assault.

According to the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Austin, Fenves on April 12 overruled a university hearing officer who determined that there had been no assault. In a letter informing the student of his suspension, Fenves asserted that the woman was highly intoxicated and “someone who is intoxicated cannot give consent to sexual activity because they are incapacitated.”

Fenves, citing testimony by a witness who attended the formal, added, “While parties may disagree as to whether intoxication and incapacitation are synonymous, certainly, someone described as: ‘incredibly intoxicated, no longer coherent, at a point where she needed to be taken home away from the event because she couldn’t form sentences,’ meets the definition of incapacitated.”

The lawsuit accuses Fenves of coming up with his own standard for incapacitation and ignoring the university’s standard, which defines it as “a state of being that prevents an individual from having the capacity to give consent” and “could result from the use of drugs or alcohol.”

Lauren Weinstein::

There’s a story going around currently about a group of researchers who claim to have de-anonymized a variety of browser users’ search data. The fact that proper anonymization of data is a nontrivial task is quite well known. Sloppy “anonymization” can be effectively as bad as no anonymization at all.

But the interested observer might wonder … where did these researchers get their search data in the first place?

It turns out that the main source of this data are the individuals or firms behind third-party browser extensions and apps, which provide or sell the user data that they collect to data brokers and to other entities.

And so we open up a very big can of worms.

The major browsers (e.g., Google’s Chrome) provide various means for users to install extensions and applications to extend browser functionalities. While the browser firms work extensively to build top-notch security and privacy controls into the browsers themselves, the unfortunate fact is that these can be undermined by such add-ons, some of which are downright crooked, many more of which are sloppily written and poorly maintained.

Liza Lin and Tim Higgins:

China is creating roadblocks for U.S. auto makers and tech companies to bringing self-driving cars to the world’s largest auto market.

Citing national security concerns, China is limiting the amount of mapping that can be done by foreign companies, as General Motors Co. , Ford Motor Co., Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc. rush to develop self-driving cars or the software behind them. High-definition maps are crucial for autonomous cars to help them discern their exact location, navigate tricky intersections and avoid fixed objects such as buildings.

Global car makers already need to form a partnership with a local company to open factories in China, but some are skeptical they will be able to find a way to operate their autonomous-car software in China because of the mapping restrictions.

Bruce Goldman:

“I wanted to find and explore neural circuits that regulate specific behaviors,” says Shah, then a newly minted Caltech PhD who was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. So, he zeroed in on sex-associated behavioral differences in mating, parenting and aggression.

“These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation,” says Shah, MD, PhD, now a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurobiology. “They’re innate rather than learned — at least in animals — so the circuitry involved ought to be developmentally hard-wired into the brain. These circuits should differ depending on which sex you’re looking at.”

His plan was to learn what he could about the activity of genes tied to behaviors that differ between the sexes, then use that knowledge to help identify the neuronal circuits — clusters of nerve cells in close communication with one another — underlying those behaviors.

At the time, this was not a universally popular idea. The neuroscience community had largely considered any observed sex-associated differences in cognition and behavior in humans to be due to the effects of cultural influences. Animal researchers, for their part, seldom even bothered to use female rodents in their experiments, figuring that the cyclical variations in their reproductive hormones would introduce confounding variability into the search for fundamental neurological insights.

But over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.

Nico Savidge:

A University of Wisconsin System group is expected to recommend changes later this year that would overhaul how UW chancellors are hired and aim to recruit more leaders from outside of higher education, officials said Monday.

The work group follows a call last month from John Behling, the new head of the UW Board of Regents, for the System to hire university leaders from the private sector or government — not just those who hold doctorates or are tenured professors.

“As the responsibilities of university leaders continue to evolve, universities across the country have benefited from being open to hiring individuals from non-academic backgrounds,” Behling said in a news release announcing the group.

Erin Richards and McKenna Oxenden and Kevin Crowe:

Under a law that Republicans might eliminate in the next budget, Wisconsin school districts raised more than $217 million in new taxes for energy-related projects since 2009 — all of it outside revenue caps and without going to referendum.

Chun Han Wong and Josh Chin

A Chinese activist who for years has documented worker unrest faced charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” on Friday, in a trial seen as a bellwether of Beijing’s approach to containing labor tensions.

A former migrant worker, Lu Yuyu roamed around China with his girlfriend, collecting information about public protests that he then tallied online. The detention of the couple last year closed a rare window on social unrest in China by putting a key provider of such data out of commission.

Mr. Lu’s one-day trial in the southwestern city of Dali concluded at 9 p.m. on Friday, with prosecutors recommending he be sentenced to between three and five years in prison, one of Mr. Lu’s lawyers, Xiao Yunyang, told The Wall Street Journal.

Glenn Greenwald:

During his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Thomas Bass:

Everything wrong with the new ten-part PBS documentary on the Vietnam War is apparent in the first five minutes. A voice from nowhere intones about a war “begun in good faith” that somehow ran off the rails and killed millions of people. We see a firefight and a dead soldier in a body bag being winched into a helicopter, as the rotor goes thump, thump, thump, like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Then we cut to a funeral on Main Street and a coffin covered in Stars and Stripes, which multiply, as the camera zooms out, into dozens and then hundreds of flags, waving like a hex against warmongers who might be inclined to think that this film is insufficiently patriotic.

Everything right with the documentary is apparent in the next few minutes, as the film rolls back (literally running several scenes backward) into a trove of archival footage and music from the times and introduces the voices — many of them Vietnamese — that will narrate this history. The film relies heavily on writers and poets, including Americans Tim O’Brien and Karl Marlantes and the Vietnamese writers Le Minh Khue, and Bao Ninh, whose Sorrow of War ranks as one of the great novels about Vietnam or any war.

Liz Stucke:

Is your daughter or son ready to head off to college? You (and they) may have conflicting feelings—relieved that the application process is over and yet somewhat apprehensive about whether they will thrive in college. After all, if the university mostly admits students in the top ten percent of their high school class, most of these students, once in college, will no longer be in the top ten percent. As Maurice’s former dean said to the entering law students, it is simple math. Only 10 percent can be in the top 10 percent.

So, what sets thrivers and divers apart in college? Fours economists sought to answer that question. Graham Beattie, Jean-William P. Laliberté, Catherine Michaud-Leclerc, and Philip Oreopoulos surveyed approximately 6,0000 first-year economics students at the University of Toronto in the 2016-2017 academic year. They then compared the top ten percent (the Thrivers) and bottom ten percent (the Divers) in terms of academic performance. How did they differ in terms of study habits, attitudes, and personal experiences?

Their study had some interesting findings.

First, as expected, the students’ high school grades were a strong predictor of their academic performance at college.

Art of the Problem
 
 Video

Madeline Will:

After their time in Finland, the U.S. teachers traveled to Milan, Italy, for Education First’s Global Leadership Summit, which was focused on the future of food and had celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain as one of the speakers. The teachers’ travels were funded through scholarships by EF, an international educational tours company, and the Council of Chief State Schools Officers—recipients were chosen for their essays on becoming globally minded educators.

I spoke to two teachers—Jitka Nelson from Indiana and Amber Vlasnik from Nebraska—about their takeaways from their trip. You can also read the lessons learned from last year’s cohort of teachers who traveled to Finland.

The Secret Key: Empowering Teachers

Nelson and Vlasnik said the teachers left with the impression that Finnish schools are doing a lot of the same things U.S. schools are: The major difference is that teachers are held in higher regard.

Teacher preparation programs are rigorous and selective, and there’s only about a 10 percent acceptance rate, Nelson said. Because of that, teachers are not evaluated through standardized test scores.

I asked Madison’s 2008 candidates if they preferred a top down approach to teachers or simply sought to hire the best and let them do their job (assuming we measure student and teacher content knowledge, of course).

Annysa Johnson:

Bennett said he has had some interest in the Madison, though he declined to identify schools or individuals. If a school is authorized there, it would be the first in the city not chartered by the Madison Metropolitan School District, and only one of three independent charters — those not authorized by a school district — outside of Milwaukee.

Bennett’s office and post were created by the Republican-led Legislature to authorize charter schools in districts with 25,000 students or more — Milwaukee and Madison, effectively. The 2015-’17 budget plan proposed by Senate Republicans last month would expand that authority beyond those two cities.

Charters are publicly funded schools that allow for greater flexibility in the way they operate in areas such as staffing and curriculum. As of January, Wisconsin had 237charter schools serving about 44,000 students, the vast majority of those authorized by local public school districts. Twenty-two others were independently chartered — all but two of those in Milwaukee — by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the UW-Parkside.

Though they are growing nationally, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, interest has waned in Wisconsin in recent years. Only one new school, Pathways High, is slated to open in Milwaukee this fall. And independent chartershave been slow to catch on outside of Milwaukee, in part because of a lack of funding and a push by parents for public school alternatives.

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

Megan McArdle:

Katherine Stewart doesn’t like Donald Trump’s language about “failing government schools.” School choice, she suggests, has some unsavory ancestors. Libertarianism, for one, “for which all government is big and bad.” And (presumably) even worse: “American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism.”

One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation 1 . But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

Jennifer Kabbany:

After a white Evergreen State College student filed a formal complaint citing claims of “racially driven violence and harassment” from peers of color, a campus official has pledged that future training topics for student leaders will include preventing bias based on race.

The complaint had been filed by student Steve Coffman*, a junior and history major at the embattled university, who stated that at a heated campus meeting in late May organized by students who claimed the campus is racist and attended by President George Bridges, Coffman was told to get out of the seat he was sitting in and move to the back of the room because he is white.

Velia Hawkins:

Parents, you know we’ve got all kinds of problems to worry about. But feeling judged for the kind of school we choose for our children shouldn’t be one of them.

Just last week I had an issue that sucked up my time and attention for the better part of the week.

It was the third day that week my eldest child claimed sickness so she didn’t have to go to her summer program. She is a talented actress, I should say—so good that I was doubting myself. Maybe she actually was sick? Maybe I should keep her home?

The program she is in seems like it should be perfect — academically stellar, beautiful setting. But for some reason that week she had been struggling and claiming to be sick for much of it.

By day 3 of this parenting fiasco I was enlisting help — asking the person I was meeting with at 10 am for his wisdom on the subject as the father of three. Should I make her go to school? How should we handle this?

Indrek Wichman:

We engineers like to solve technical problems. That’s the way we think, that’s why we chose our major, that’s why we got into and stayed in engineering.

There are several other reasons why we got into engineering. One of them was the absence of what I describe here as “social engineering,” where the professor/instructor is interested not so much in solving technical problems as in setting the world right—in his or her opinion.

A second and related reason is that engineering (and the sciences generally) should be, like the scales of justice, blind. Engineering does not care about your color, sexual orientation, or your other personal and private attributes. All it takes to succeed is to do the work well.

voxday:

An anonymous Googler is providing evidence at Gab that various employees at Google are openly attacking James Damore, the author of the document dissenting from the SJW diversity doctrine there, and actively lobbying the executives to fire him, despite the fact that more than one-third of Googlers surveyed tend to agree with his dissent.

From the document:

De-emphasize empathy.

I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

Yonitan Junger:

3. That brings us, however, to point (3), the most serious point of all. I’m going to be even blunter than usual here, because I’m not subject to the usual maze of HR laws right now, and so I can say openly what I would normally only be allowed to say in very restricted fora. And this is addressed specifically to the author of this manifesto.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”

I need to be very clear here: not only was nearly everything you said in that document wrong, the fact that you did that has caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function. And being aware of that kind of consequence is also part of your job, as in fact it would be at pretty much any other job. I am no longer even at the company and I’ve had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you’ve made. I can’t even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly.

Commentary: Cathy Young and Dan Eaton.

Just, wow: “…if you take five African-American children in this district, four of them are not proficient in reading in elementary school”

and

& if you take one hundred…ninety-three of them are not proficient in reading at the end of middle school:

Madison School District reading data 2012-2017.

Background on Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results, here, and, perhaps a bit of hope to address our lack of governance diversity.

Dan Williams:

Last week, colleague Laura Townsend wrote about the reality of white privilege. Her column relays the experiences of three college-age individuals who feel they have been affected by white privilege. This is an important topic that deserves a public discussion, because, as Townsend’s column illustrates, there’s some confusion about what white privilege is.

Not only is talking about race difficult, which makes talking about white privilege difficult, but it is necessary to understand the notion of privilege before we can understand the notion of white privilege. Therefore, when talking about white privilege, it is prudent to at least mention the wider concept contained therein: that of privilege itself.

The relevant notion of privilege I define as the receipt of certain benefits wholly through accident of birth. It is undeniable that privilege itself is a reality. Any of us could have been born the unluckiest person on the planet, which, by definition, picks out precisely one person. But we all have the privilege of not being that person. We are all privileged by comparison.

There are many kinds of privilege besides white privilege: cognitive privilege, for example. We now know that intelligence is not something we have significant control over but is something we are born with. We are living in a society in which success is increasingly linked to one’s intelligence. This is not to say that intelligence is the only factor that is important. All that is implied is that below a certain threshold of intelligence, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. These opportunities are being shifted upward to jobs that require heavier cognitive lifting or else are being replaced by robots. Thus, the accident of having been born smart enough to be able to be successful is a great benefit that you did absolutely nothing to earn. Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.

Haley Samsel:

Co-sponsored by the Student Press Law Center, which supports the First Amendment rights of student media and student journalists, the award spotlights stories that utilize open records laws and encourage public dialogue on campus. The award includes a $2,000 cash prize — $1,000 for Ares and $1,000 for the College Heights Herald, which published the story.

“I literally spent so many hours on this story that if you probably divided up all the money, I probably got paid like 10 cents an hour,” Ares tells USA TODAY College with a laugh. “So it wasn’t for the money.”

Ares first became interested in how universities handled faculty sexual misconduct cases in 2016, when the University of Kentucky sued its independent student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, over requests for documents involving a professor accused of sexual harassment.

Related: U Kentucky is suing its own student newspaper over a sexual assault investigation
As news editor of the Herald at the time, Ares was curious about what documents she could get if she asked for personnel records from universities across the state. In November, she requested Title IX investigation documents from eight public universities in Kentucky. Only two refused her request: Kentucky State and WKU.

Ares decided to pursue WKU’s denial a “little more vigourously,” she says, and wrote an appeal to Kentucky’s attorney general, Andy Beshear. He ultimately sided with Ares and the Herald, stating that WKU was responsible for releasing Title IX records about the university’s final actions in sexual harassment investigations involving university employees.

As Ares pored over Title IX investigation documents she had received from other universities, WKU filed a lawsuit against the Herald and the Kentucky Kernel, UK’s student newspaper, in efforts to turn over the attorney general’s decision.

Ares took a backseat to the lawsuit to focus on her larger project. “I’m not going to see the records anytime soon, I’ve already graduated,” she says. “But I would be interested to see them eventually.”

John Twenge:

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Paul Carron:

In 2016, only 63 percent of first-time test-takers from UNLV’s Boyd School of Law — the state’s only public law school — received a passing score. Aside from an uptick in 2015, the passage rate among Boyd graduates has steadily declined since 2011, when 83 percent of first-timers passed. …

Efforts to make the Nevada bar exam more user-friendly began with the decision in June to lower the “cut score,” the figure required to pass the multistate bar exam, from 140 to 138. …

Nevada’s legal community may take a cue from California on whether to further lower the bar. Hamilton, the Boyd Law School dean, said he is eagerly awaiting results of a study that California is conducting, which includes a review of state bar exam content and cut scores and an overall examination of the falling passage rates. “They’ve got the schools to do it, they’ve got the numbers to do it,” Hamilton said. “Based on that data, that will go a long way for us.” …

Greg Ip:

Whether truck drivers or marketing executives, all workers consider intelligence intrinsic to how they do their jobs. No wonder the rise of “artificial intelligence” is uniquely terrifying. From Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, we are told almost daily our jobs will soon be done more cheaply by AI.

Yet AI is too amorphous a label to actually convey anything useful about what, precisely, it’s supposed to displace. Instead, think of it as a technology that does one thing particularly well: predictions. Such as, will that mark on the X-ray prove to be a tumor? Is the object in the road a paper bag or a child? Which headline will get the most readers to click on an article?

Treating prediction as an input into an economic process makes it much easier to map AI’s impact. History and economics show that when an input such as energy, communication or calculation becomes cheaper, we find many more uses for it. Some jobs become superfluous, but others more valuable, and brand new ones spring into existence. Why should AI be different?

relinquishment

But journalists do have a duty to accurately cover the basic facts of the issue they are covering.

In her recent article on Japan’s education system, Alana Semuels included a throw away line about New Orleans education reforms; she writes:

Evan Ackerman

It’s very difficult, if not impossible, for us humans to understand how robots see the world. Their cameras work like our eyes do, but the space between the image that a camera captures and actionable information about that image is filled with a black box of machine learning algorithms that are trying to translate patterns of features into something that they’re familiar with. Training these algorithms usually involves showing them a set of different pictures of something (like a stop sign), and then seeing if they can extract enough common features from those pictures to reliably identify stop signs that aren’t in their training set.
 
 This works pretty well, but the common features that machine learning algorithms come up with generally are not “red octagons with the letters S-T-O-P on them.” Rather, they’re looking features that all stop signs share, but would not be in the least bit comprehensible to a human looking at them. If this seems hard to visualize, that’s because it reflects a fundamental disconnect between the way our brains and artificial neural networks interpret the world.

Linda Lutton:

Under the draft proposal reviewed by WBEZ, individual taxpayers could choose to send up to $1 million annually to scholarship organizations rather than to the state Department of Revenue. Those diverted taxpayer dollars would fund scholarships to pay tuition cost at private or parochial schools, or to pay the cost for a public school education in a district outside a child’s community.

All told, the state could dole out $100 million annually in tax credits to finance this scholarship program. If the scholarship fund attracts at least $90 million in donations in any year, it would grow to $125 million. It could continue to grow by 25 percent annually, with no cap, as long as taxpayers send at least 90 percent of the maximum allowed to the fund. Donors could direct their money to a specific school, rather than a specific student, and some eligible students could be turned away.

The proposal is striking in its reach. Any family of four earning up to $113,775 annually would be eligible. In Illinois, 67 percent of families of two or more people earn up to $100,000 a year, according to U.S. Census data.

Another 18 percent of Illinois families earn up to $150,000. The median income is $71,500 for an Illinois family of at least two people, which is how the federal government defines a family.

BBC

Mexicans are famous in the Spanish-speaking world for their extensive use of the diminutive. While in most Spanish-speaking countries the addition of the diminutive ‘ita’ to an adverb like ahora (meaning ‘now’) would strengthen it to indicate immediacy (i.e. ‘right now’), this is not the case in Mexico. Dr Company explained that Mexicans instead use the diminutive form to break down the space between the speaker and the listener and lessen formality. In this case of ‘ahorita’, the addition of the diminutive reduces urgency rather than increasing it – a difference that can be extremely confusing for foreigners.

Subtle adjustments to the pronunciation of the word also affect the way ‘ahorita’ is interpreted. “The stretch in the ‘i’ sound in the word ‘ahorita’ is a demonstration of the stretching of time,” Dr Company informed me, implying that the longer the sound, the longer one can expect to wait. Equally, “if you want to imply that you really mean right now, you would say ‘ahorititita’,” she explained, noting the short, sharp sounds represent the idea that something needs to happen at once.

Swati Khandelwal:

This time sensitive and personal data of millions of transporters in Sweden, along with the nation’s military secrets, have been exposed, putting every individual’s as well as national security at risk.

Who exposed the sensitive data? The Swedish government itself.

Swedish media is reporting of a massive data breach in the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) after the agency mishandled an outsourcing deal with IBM, which led to the leak of the private data about every vehicle in the country, including those used by both police and military.

Mike Antonucci:

In the past two weeks, both support and criticism of Weingarten have centered on whether or not school vouchers actually increase segregation. A different question is whether or not Weingarten’s broadsides against vouchers, privatization, and disinvestment have anything to do with fighting segregation.

Elsewhere in the speech Weingarten recounted her joint visit to the public schools in Van Wert, Ohio, with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Weingarten chose that particular district because “these are the schools I wanted Betsy DeVos to see — public schools in the heart of the heart of America.”

“The people of Van Wert are proud of their public schools,” she said. “They’ve invested in pre-K and project-based learning. They have a nationally recognized robotics team and a community school program that helps at-risk kids graduate. Ninety-six percent of students in the district graduate from high school.”

Those are things to be proud of. But in a speech condemning segregation, Weingarten failed to mention another facet of Van Wert public schools: Out of 1,991 students, just 18 are African Americans. Not 18 percent — 18 students.

Madison recently expanded its Least diverse school.

Robert Brauneis & Ellen P. Goodman

We set out to test the limits of transparency around governmental deployment of big data analytics, focusing our investigation on local and state government use of predictive algorithms. It is here, in local government, that algorithmically-determined decisions can be most directly impactful. And it is here that stretched agencies are most likely to hand over the analytics to private vendors, which may make design and policy choices out of the sight of the client agencies, the public, or both. To see just how impenetrable the resulting “black box” algorithms are, we filed 42 open records requests in 23 states seeking essential information about six predictive algorithm programs. We selected the most widely-used and well-reviewed programs, including those developed by for-profit companies, nonprofits, and academic/private sector partnerships. The goal was to see if, using the open records process, we could discover what policy judgments these algorithms embody, and could evaluate their utility and fairness.

Howard Fuller:

“A bad school is our common enemy.” Those words from Cristina de Jesus of Green Dot Public Schools rang true for me the first time I read them — and they obviously had an impact on the NAACP, too. Members of the NAACP’s public education task force included this phrase in their recent report calling for major reform in the charter school movement.

The report was the latest step in the NAACP’s journey to undermine and destabilize the same charter schools that serve so many students of color.

I was pleased to see that the report, debuted at the NAACP’s national convention in Baltimore, was somewhat more nuanced and, in fact, acknowledged that high-quality charter public schools have been successful for many students of color. This acknowledgement was long overdue but the substance of the report is, once again, waging the same senseless war on charter schools the NAACP started with its call for a charter school moratorium in 2016.

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 Governance diversity.

Much more on Howard Fuller.

Harry Minium:

If you grew up rooting for Virginia, North Carolina State or anyone else in the ACC, you may have despised the University of North Carolina.

But go ahead and admit it: Even if you hated the Tar Heels outwardly, deep down inside, you also admired them.

Carolina did things the right way. The Tar Heels played hard, respected opponents and adhered to high academic standards.

Longtime basketball coach Dean Smith called it “The Carolina Way” in a book he wrote a few years before he passed away.

Of course, we now have much different outlook on the Tar Heels, thanks largely to Raleigh News & Observer reporter Dan Kane, who used the Freedom of Information Act and plain old shoe leather journalism to shatter our illusions.

In 2011, the newspaper obtained a transcript of UNC football star Marvin Austin showing a B-plus grade in a senior level African studies class he took before his freshman year began. UNC officials were at a loss to explain how he got into a high-level course before his first football practice.

Paul Carron:

Today the State Bar of California released a standard setting study of the pass line for the California Bar Exam. The study, along with options presented by staff, will be discussed at a joint meeting of the Committee of Bar Examiners and Board of Trustees’ Admissions and Education Committee on Monday, July 31, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The public meeting will be held at the State Bar’s Los Angeles office, and will be webcast.

A memo from staff to the Committee of Bar Examiners presents two potential options, based on an analysis of a Standard Setting Study conducted by Chad Buckendahl, Ph.D. One option, drawing from findings in the study which validate the current pass line of 1440, is to make no change to the bar exam passing score at this time. A second option is to consider an interim passing score of 1414 (or 141.4 on the commonly-used 200-point scale) to be applied to grading the July 2017 bar exam.

Craig Smith

Now, I want to propose ten ways in which ARKit could be used by developers to create unprecedented opportunities for those on the spectrum, as well as their families and educators, to engage in the world with a completely new and different view as to what is possible.

Charlie Savage:

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

By Bryan Borzykowski 4 August 2017

Myth 5: CEOs should have a top-tier education
 Another myth is that you need to graduate from Harvard or Oxford to become a successful CEO. In fact, only 7% of the high-performing CEOs that The Genome Project studies had an Ivy League undergraduate education, while 8% didn’t even graduate from university.
 
 Only 7% of the high-performing CEOs in the studies had an Ivy League undergraduate education
 
 Jill Wight, a principal at private equity company The Carlyle Group, has hired many CEOs for the companies her firm invests in and agrees that a degree from a top school doesn’t by itself determine performance. “Strong intellectual horsepower” is a pre-requisite for success, she says, not the school you came from. “The presence of a degree is positive, but the absence of one isn’t by itself a negative,” she says.
 
 A degree from a top school is even less of an issue in the UK, says Ryan, where social class, not intelligence, would typically determine who went to the best universities. People know that where you graduate from doesn’t reflect how smart or savvy you may be.
 
 “It’s never a given in the UK that just because you have a certain level of intelligence that you would follow a particular route into higher education,” she says. “There a lot of other factors that determine where people go.”

Jim Schutze:

One way Price has won votes and loyalty over the decades has been by promising economic development and opportunity to his constituents. In April, Price and an aide-de-camp were acquitted of multiple charges of bribery and fraud in a long, locally high-profile federal trial.

During that trial, multiple executives from a company owned by a powerful Dallas family gave testimony, unchallenged by the defense, that they had sought Price’s help sabotaging an enormous economic development project in Price’s district. Interests associated with the Perot family of Dallas said under oath they had sought Price’s help slowing down a shipping and warehousing project that promised 65,000 new jobs.

The Perot people told the jury under oath they wanted to hobble the Southern Dallas Logistics Center, sometimes called the Inland Port, because they believed it would hurt their Alliance Global Logistics Hub, near Fort Worth in one of the nation’s fastest growing and most affluent new suburban areas, 35 miles northwest of Price’s district.

Price did what they asked. He opposed the Dallas project’s bid for a free trade zone. He threw a monkey wrench into a key bridge project. He demanded redundant and time-consuming studies. He got the job done. The Inland Port project went into bankruptcy.

When I read the Morning News editorial Friday, I wondered, “Where’s the paragraph about Price and the Perots? Where’s the part where the Morning News calls for rich, white Dallas families and black Dallas politicians to stop sticking big knives in poor people’s backs?”

Greg Evans:

Research has discovered that large amounts of young people are developing an entitlement complex.

The psychological trend comes from the belief that you are superior to others and are more deserving of certain things.

This form of narcissism has some significant consequences such as disappointment and a tendency to lash out.

Pschology Today reports that some examples of entitlement range from the disregard of rules, freeloading, causing inconveniences and like to assume the role of leader when working in groups.

So called Millennials, who were born roughly between 1988 and 1994, tend to have this characteristic as a 2016 study found.

The University of Hampshire found that youngsters who were studied on issues of entitlement scored 25 percent higher than people aged 40 to 60 and 50 per cent higher than those over that age bracket.

Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data… The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. – Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email: Dana Goldstein:

So far, however, six years after its rollout, the Core hasn’t led to much measurable improvement on the page. Students continue to arrive on college campuses needing remediation in basic writing skills.

The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.

A separate 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country, conducted by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University, found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, while fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject.

“Most teachers are great readers,” Dr. Troia said. “They’ve been successful in college, maybe even graduate school. But when you ask most teachers about their comfort with writing and their writing experiences, they don’t do very much or feel comfortable with it.”

There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called “process writing,” like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.

That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.

Clare Malone:

The FCC now defines broadband internet as the ability to download information at 25 megabits per second and to upload it at 3 megabits per second. This sort of connection enables a person to do the things that most Americans with home internet like to do — watch Netflix, play video games, and browse online without interruption even if a couple of devices are on the same connection. For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service. In Saguache County, such a connection is rare; if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.

This would be less of an issue if the internet weren’t so central to modern life. But taxes, job applications, payroll operations, banking, newspapers, shopping, college courses and video chats all are ubiquitous online. Saguache County’s students are expected to take their state assessments online even though an administrator at one school that houses K-12 students told me that until last year, the internet often went down for a couple of hours or even all day in the building.

We have spent hundreds of billions in tax dollars on broadband “subsidies”…..

Lindsay McKenzie:

There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading papers from Sci-Hub.) But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub.

Their findings, published in a preprint on the PeerJ journal site on 20 July, indicate that Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85% of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97% of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.

Christopher Matthews:

From the first, Americans have been on the move in “Great Migrations” for a better life, like those of the last century that saw poor blacks and whites go from the south for higher-paying work in northern cities. But no longer. Starting around 1980, working class Americans have largely stood still, and a primary reason is real estate prices, according to new research.

In a new paper, the University of Chicago’s Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag say high rent in America’s most economically vibrant areas make these moves a money loser for lower-skilled workers.

Tomek Kaczanowski:

Many people shared their ideas of such “lectures” – you can find some really interesting examples on Stack Overflow (e.g. here). Many of them are based on the idea of presenting how computers are stupid and that you need to tell them very precisely what and how to do things to succeed. Fun guaranteed, but I seriously doubt if afterward kids understand anything about programming.

My ideas for a successful presentation were:

Clive James

In Cambridge I began to learn that you can’t learn everything. Other people are clever too and some of them actually read the set books instead of sitting around writing poems. Attendance at a university can save you – or should save you: the prophylactic effect has grown less certain in recent times – from the tendency of the autodidact to overrate himself. As Camus argued, a functioning democracy depends on those people who know that they don’t know everything.

But I would probably have found that out even if I hadn’t gone back to school. I would have found it out in Florence, to which, in the vacations, I would fly in junkyard airliners on a continuous mission to disperse the scrum of suave Italian men that formed around the woman I would one day marry. I didn’t yet know that last part but I knew exactly how it felt when I had to listen to my lovely girlfriend being chatted up in a language that she spoke fluently and of which I spoke not a word. With no motivation other than screaming jealousy, I began to learn my first foreign language. French I am still learning now, but Italian I learned to make a fair fist of because I was fighting for my life.

Charlie Savage:

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

Mark Keierleber:

Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year in 2014, Rademacher had taught for six years at a Minnesota middle school before heading off to openings in other districts. He returned to that middle school last year, but his stay was short-lived. When budgets were cut and layoffs were announced, Rademacher was among the educators who were let go — a casualty of last in, first out (LIFO), which prioritizes seniority in teacher layoff decisions.

For Rademacher, things could’ve ended a lot differently had state lawmakers worked more swiftly. After years of debate, legislators approved new rules this spring that remove LIFO from state statute, effective July 2019. Current law requires LIFO as a fallback if teachers and school administrators cannot reach a consensus on how to conduct layoffs.

Quartz:

In this interview, Grant explains why it’s imperative for early-stage companies to hire originals. He shares how he singles them out and delves into recommended questions and exercises that can help startups find and hire them.

School Choice Wisconsin and Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty:

After 27 years of school choice in Milwaukee, the debate over private school vouchers has shifted away from their mere existence towards whether – and how – accountability provisions should impact the ability of private schools to participate in the program. The education community is divided over this question. Some argue that test-based accountability should sanction poor-performing schools of all types, others argue that parental school choice, fiscal, and market forces are the strongest forms of accountability and are the measures that should be utilized.
Yet despite the amount of ink spilled on the topic, there has been little quantifiable research conducted. This study addresses that research gap. It comprehensively reviews the extent and impact of accountability regulations affecting the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) and also analyzes the role of parental accountability. This pioneering report describes the scope of the accountability regime and presents a statistical analysis that estimates its impact. We find, through the use of a rigorous econometric model, that the accountability system culls poor- performing and unsafe schools from the program and allows high quality schools to grow. The system anticipates factors associated with poor-performing schools and their eventual failure. Specifically, we find:

Christopher Schroeder:

At the end of March, it was announced that the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East and North Africa, Souq.com, would be acquired by Amazon for nearly $600 million. This was unusual: when Amazon enters a new geographic market, it typically does so by launching its existing platform and investing a lot of money to grow it. Instead, Amazon—apparently impressed by Souq.com’s management team, its technology, and its ability to navigate a complicated region—decided on a different strategy.
 
 A week after the announcement, at the Step Conference in Dubai, one of the most popular startup gatherings in the region, it felt as if lightning had struck. Over 2,000 aspiring entrepreneurs filled the arena, standing room only, for a panel with Souq.com founder ­Ronaldo ­Mouchawar. Mouchawar, a native of Aleppo, Syria, spent over an hour onstage with his cofounders and lead investor, explaining in painstaking detail what it was like to build an e-commerce giant. In 2005, when Souq.com launched, few in the Arab world were shopping digitally, fewer still were willing to use a credit card online, and examples of successful tech startups were hard to find. Now, ­Mouchawar underscored to his rapt audience, things were different.

Dave Gershgorn:

“As a human you have senses, you have your eyes, you have your ears, and sometimes you have the sense of touch. You are feeling the road,” Nvidia self-driving car head Danny Shapiro told Business Insider. “So those are your inputs and then those senses feed into your brain and your brain makes a decision on how to control your feet and your hands in terms of braking and pressing the gas and steering. So on an autonomous car you have to replace those senses.”
 
 Both pursuits have their challenges. John Deere doesn’t need to contend with hundreds of other vehicles on its path, but a collision with other equipment or a misadjusted piece of equipment could mean disaster for an entire season. Cars and trucks carry precious cargo—humans—but benefit from signs, lines, and established infrastructure to help guide cars on the correct paths.
 
 A vexing problem that inhibits John Deere and self-driving carmakers from an easy path to autonomy is dust and other weather conditions. Not only does weather change how the vehicle should act in its environment, but it also reduces the accuracy of the sensors, Leibfried said. He says the solution might come in redundancy—more sensors that could be used as backup, or to infer information not directly able to be seen.
 

“Everyone always asks, ‘Why are you so small?’ Well, there are not very many teenagers who want to admit that they have a drug or alcohol problem, or mental health issues. Parents don’t want to brag about that (either),” she said.

“We are trying to break the stigma by having students feel good about themselves so they will want to get help and see that they are worthy of being happy and healthy.”

In order to break the stigma, Goll works hard to build close bonds with her students so they stay dedicated to recovery.

“Not only do our students struggle with alcohol and drug issues, they also have mental health issues. So, our school needs to be a safe and secure place where you can educate them,” she said. “We have to have a lot of trust, which takes time to build.”

Much more, here including RFP links for an independent Madison or Milwaukee Charter School.

Citizen Stewart

The NAACP report finally acknowledges the education nightmare many parents and their children face in our public education system. For far too long, low-income and working-class Black families have been ill-served by a system that, from the very beginning, was never created with the interest of Black children in mind. We also agree that all public schools—traditional district and charter—should be accountable and transparent to the communities they serve.

Still, I find it ironic and troubling that a storied organization like the NAACP, which led a powerful movement to tear down barriers for Black people, is working to create new ones in education. Working to develop “model legislation” to implement a 10-year moratorium on new charter schools and place existing ones under the control of traditional school districts is ill-advised and irrational at best, and does nothing to advance the educational interest of Black children.
We don’t see the NAACP pushing traditional school districts to innovate their curriculum; or hold teachers and administrators more accountable; or increase quality; or provide more flexibility to our most vulnerable families. These are all areas charter schools are currently engaged, and despite the tenor of the report, will continue to be.

Datavis.ca:

This Gallery of Data Visualization displays some examples of the Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics, with the view that the contrast may be useful, inform current practice, and provide some pointers to both historical and current work. We go from what is arguably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, to the current record-holder for the worst.

Wharton

Consumer debt rose to $12.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2017. That is more debt than at the height of the credit bubble in 2008. A study by researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California shows that while the amount of debt is increasing, what consumers are spending the money on is very different. More people are buying experiences rather than stuff. Eesha Sharma, a professor of business administration at Dartmouth, and Stephanie Tully, a professor of marketing at USC, are the authors of the study, “Drivers of Discretionary Debt Decisions: Explaining Willingness to Borrow for Experiential and Material Purchases,” which was recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research. They recently appeared on Knowledge@Wharton’s SiriusXM show to discuss what’s causing this shift in what consumers’ value. (Listen to the podcast using the player above.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s start with the research. Take us deeper into what you were trying to examine?

Eesha Sharma: Consumer debt levels have been increasing, and Stephanie and I were really interested in understanding what is contributing to why people are taking on more and more debt. We had known some about different characteristics of individuals, like their age and their income, that might contribute