Jennifer Wang:

Last November, the citizens of Madison supported a referendum to offset the drastic budget cuts forced upon our schools in recent years. The Madison Metropolitan School District has let class sizes expand for the past few years to cope with funding shortfalls. In this first budget cycle after the referendum, I ask the Madison School Board to use this money to reduce class sizes at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

The advantages of small class size are unassailable. Over the last decade, my three children have benefited enormously from the small classes at Midvale and Lincoln elementary schools. In 2007, when my daughter started kindergarten, she flourished in a class of 14 with enough additional support staff to produce a teacher/student ratio that rivaled any private school in the area. My children have spent their formative years in classrooms of between 15 and 18 with dedicated teachers who knew them well, who could assess their learning styles and differentiate lesson plans to meet their needs. These small classes allowed my children to thrive and set them up for success in middle and high school. Unfortunately, today many children in Madison’s schools, including some of our highest-poverty schools, are in classrooms that are much too large.

Madison’s budget and long term, disastrous reading results.

Midvale Lincoln.

MAP assessment results.

Real Clear Investigations:

This practice – known as “official time” – is coming under renewed attack by Republicans in Congress who see it as wasteful and inefficient, and who have undoubtedly noticed that unionized federal workers tend to align with Democrats. They argue that if employees like McDargh did the work they were hired to do, the federal government would do a better job too.

One bill, which passed the House on May 24, would require an annual report to Congress on the use of official time by federal employees. The second piece of legislation, awaiting a floor vote, would disincentivize union work by curbing time credited toward retirement for those who work on union matters more than 80 percent of the time.

“Federal employees are free to engage in union activities on their own time, and they are free to use union resources and dues to fund those activities,” that bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican, told RealClearInvestigations. “However, taxpayer dollars should be used for public, not private, needs. Simply put, paying federal employees to do union work interferes with providing the services that taxpayers deserve.”

Union official time on the job has been allowed since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. And government workers do not consider it a boondoggle. If taxpayers feel abused by an imperious federal bureaucracy, how do you think they feel working at the whims of a sprawling, 2.7-million-strong Leviathan? Because federal employees need representation, they say, official time may be the best way to handle union matters expertly and efficiently.

Lee Stone, a scientist at NASA and vice president for the Western Federal Area of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, calls Hice’s bill “mean-spirited” because it punishes workers for engaging in government-approved activity.

Kathleen Gray

Lawmakers in the House and Senate forged ahead today with a plan to cut new teachers out of pensions and switch them to a 401(k)-type plan, despite a lack of progress between the Republican leadership in the Legislature and Gov. Rick Snyder on how to reform Michigan’s teacher pension system.

Rep. Thomas Albert, R-Lowell and Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair, introduced bills that would close off the Michigan Public Schools Employee Retirement System – or MPSERS – to new teachers, beginning on Sept. 30 and put them into a defined contribution plan in which the state would contribute 4% of a teacher’s wages toward the retirement fund.

The employee could then contribute up to another 3%, which would be matched by the employer — for a total of up to 10% each year. The employer match would be covered by the state. Teachers currently in the MPSERS system would continue to get their pension benefits.

Preston Cooper:

A typical student in an American public college pays thousands of dollars more in tuition than just a decade ago. Students and parents are worried and frustrated, and many point the finger at state legislators, who have cut funds to state schools. During last year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton blamed “state disinvestment” in higher education for soaring tuition and declared her support for “free college.”

While the “disinvestment” narrative is simple and appealing, it collapses under scrutiny. If state funding to public colleges falls by $100 per student, it seems logical to conclude that tuition must go up by $100 to compensate. But that isn’t what happens. When the Great Recession began in 2008, funding at public colleges fell, as declining tax revenue forced states to make budget cuts. Tuition went up. In the mid-2000s, when the economy was strong, state funding to public colleges rose. Tuition went up then, too.

John Tierney:

Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.

Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.” ​

Indeed: Mission vs organization.

Jordan Pearson:

Lawrence, in an op-ed explaining your presidential run , you wrote that democracy is not a utopia. There are concrete antagonisms to address and steps to be taken in order to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in. Is Seed a game about political utopias, or political fantasies?
LL: I don’t think it’s utopian in any sense. The effort in creating and maintaining communities in Seed is real effort—it’s not a simple gift. But I think we can learn a lot about what sorts of governance structures help people to flourish in these spaces. Maybe that doesn’t translate to the real world, but maybe it does. I think that the opportunity to have this massive experiment in different forms of governance, simultaneous and real, is pushing us in the direction of improving our forms of governance or at least giving us a map of how to improve them. That’s what’s most interesting to me.

Kevin Coughlin:

Morristown High School junior Liam Shea got called into the principal’s office on Thursday.

His offense: Political satire.

School officials removed Shea’s five-foot graphic depicting a porcine President Trump clutching a snarling pussycat from the annual MHS Art & Design Show.

Also removed was a painting of Trump on a missile, taking a selfie. Students were given an hour at Wednesday’s opening reception to whip up something for the theme “America Takes a Selfie.”

Peter Cook:

When Arsement claims education reform supporters “demonize” teachers, what he means is that they actually expect teachers to do the work they’re paid to do. While this may seem draconian to someone who can apparently skip entire days of work and get away with it, this is not a radical concept to most of us. When taxpayers hand over their hard-earned money to pay for public education, they expect teachers to teach. When parents send their children off to school, they expect their kids will actually spend the day learning. When Arsement instead takes a bunch of sick days to lobby lawmakers for lower standards and less accountability, he’s breaking the social contract and possibly the law. Worst of all, he’s doing a tremendous disservice to the young people in his classroom – kids who need the most help.

Peter Wood:

Dennis Gouws again. You remember him: the English professor at Springfield College who got into trouble with campus feminists because he taught a course titled “Men in Literature.” I’ve been tracking his travails for over a year, and summarized them for The Federalist in March.

Gouws stands as a near-perfect example of feminist-inspired tyranny in American higher education. Even at a small New England college of modest reputation, one voice of dissent is one too many, and the entire apparatus of the college administration moves to silence him.

The end of the semester provides a good moment to bring the story up to date. When last we heard, Springfield’s dean of arts, sciences, and professional studies had placed Gouws on “Official Warning Status.” This was a preliminary step towards firing the tenured professor. Of course, the dean, Anne Herzog, had her reasons—all of them procedural irregularities stemming from Gouws’ refusal to be steamrolled.

He was accused of denying “the Department Chairperson” admittance to his classroom.(Actually she arrived uninvited and walked out). He was accused of refusing to meet with the dean herself. (Actually he said yes, but wanted to bring a witness, which she refused to allow.) And he was accused of failing to provide a doctor’s note to verify an illness that prevented him from attending a meeting. (Gouws dutifully provided the doctor’s note.)

I repeat the petty details just to capture their sheer pettiness. This is what academic deans do? Well, this is what academic deans do when faced with a renegade professor who keeps trying to slip “men in literature” into his English courses.

Richard Vedder & Justin Strehle:

In the 375 years between 1636, when Harvard College was founded, and 2011, college enrollments in the United States rose almost continuously, rarely undergoing even a temporary decline. When the American Revolution began in 1775, only 721 students attended the nine colonial colleges. By 2010 enrollments had surpassed 20 million.

Yet from 2011 to 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse reports, total higher education enrollments declined every fall, falling to 19 million from 20.6 million. Although the declines were concentrated in community colleges and for-profit institutions, even many traditional four-year schools saw previously steady enrollment growth come to an end. Many smaller schools have even missed their annual enrollment goals.

Karen Rivedal:

Fourth-graders at Marquette Elementary ended the school year Thursday with a call to kindness enabled through a rock-painting project suggested by a student’s mom.

As part of a school celebration day spent mostly doing crafts, sports and games over a beautiful morning in Orton Park, parent Michelle Weber’s offering let students be “creative, helpful and kind” by decorating small, colored rocks with words, designs and images of happiness and good cheer, Weber said. The students planned to later hide the finished rocks in plain sight around town to hopefully improve the mood of anyone who found them.

Karen Rivedal:

Cherokee Middle School yearbooks will be reprinted to remove racial slurs and other offensive material, district officials confirmed Thursday.

In addition, the school’s one-person approach to putting out the book will change when future editions are produced, officials said.

“We had a process that worked for us and then we came upon a situation this year that was really unfortunate,” school Principal Sarah Chaja-Clardy said in an interview. “We are definitely making changes for the future. Our yearbook is a reflection of our school and it absolutely has to reflect the values of the school.”

Dave Urbanski:

Kate Hall — who last year won the girls 100-meter dash Class M state title as a sophomore — came in second to Yearwood at this year’s 100-meter race and was tearful in the aftermath, the Hartford Courant reported.

“It’s frustrating,” Hall of Stonington High School told the Courant. “But that’s just the way it is now.”

David Dayen:

Karen Rivedal:

As executive director of the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, Melinda Heinritz leads a staff of five committed to increasing material resources and community support for local public education.

Since its creation in 2001 by a group of community leaders and former educators, the foundation has awarded $1.28 million in grants to schools and individual teachers for innovative projects that would not otherwise be supported by the Madison School District’s core budget.

The foundation has also set up endowment funds for each of the district’s 50 schools, and most schools have one or more community partners paired up with them under the foundation’s signature Adopt-A-School program.

Much more on Madison’s approximately $460M budget, herehttps://mmsdbudget.wordpress.com/.

Alan Tomer:

Google’s approach contrasts starkly with Apple’s. Apple’s browser, Safari, will use a method called intelligent tracking prevention to prevent tracking by third parties—that is, sites that are rarely visited intentionally but are incorporated on many other sites for advertising purposes—that use cookies and other techniques to track us as we move through the web. Safari will use machine learning in the browser (which means the data never leaves your computer) to learn which cookies represent a tracking threat and disarm them. This approach is similar to that used in EFF’s Privacy Badger, and we are excited to see it in Safari.
 
 Users Can Opt In to Publisher Payments—But Not Out of Tracking
 In tandem with their Better Ads enforcement, Google will also launch a companion program, Funding Choices, that will enable CBA-compliant sites to ask Chrome users with content blockers to whitelist their site and unblock their ads. Should the user refuse, they can either pay for an “ad-free experience” or be locked out by a publisher’s adblock wall. Payment is to be made using a Google product called Contributor, first deployed in 2015. Contributor lets people pay sites to avoid being simply shown Google ads, but does not prevent Google, the site, or any other advertisers from continuing to track people who pay into the Contributor program. This approach is consistent with the ad industry’s dogged defense of tracking, and its refusal to honor user signals such as Do Not Track. The industry’s sole response has been to create a system called AdChoices, which offers users a complicated and inefficient opt-out from targeted ads, but not from the data collection and the behavioral tracking behind the targeting. By that logic, it is okay to track and spy on people who opt out—as long as you don’t remind them that they are being tracked!

Daniel DiSalvo and Jeffrey Kucik:

To pay for rising pension costs and obligations in other areas, states deem higher education to be expendable. How did we get to this point? Because it is easier – and more politically expedient – to cut higher education than it is to cut other areas.

First, states have strong incentives to increase expenditures on certain programs. Take Medicaid, which consumes one of the largest slices of states budgets. Medicaid operates on a federal-state matching formula, which means that any state funding cuts result in less federal money.

The same can’t be said of higher education. Unlike Medicaid, states do not incur a direct cost when cutting higher education funding. Instead, they can shift costs to the federal government, incentivizing states to reduce higher education spending. Since the 1990s, federal aid per student has risen from roughly $2,000 to $6,000 in loans; $1,000 to $3,000 in grants; and $0 to $1,000 in tax credits. Rather than bearing the financial burden, state governments transfer the costs to the federal government and to students and their families.

Second, several areas of states spending – notably public pensions – enjoy strong legal protections. Public sector unions, which have a vested interest in expanded benefits, can fight pension plan retrenchment as a violation of personal property rights codified in the 5th and 14th Amendments. This deters state governments from targeting areas of the budget insulated by legal barriers.

Kate Taylor:

In answering critics of his efforts on school integration, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has largely blamed New York City’s residential patterns for the problem, because most children go to elementary school near their homes.

But District 1, which includes parts of the Lower East Side and the East Village, is different. There, families choose where their children will go to elementary school, and in 2016, 84 percent of families got one of their top three choices for kindergarten.

But their choices still added up to segregation.

Corey Alexander:

Social media. The time wasting, addictive drugs that let us subliminally express our deepest narcissistic thoughts.

At least, that’s how I saw them. Maybe your situation is different.

Like any powerful tool, social media can be used for good, as well as bad — and in my particular case, it was bad.

Let me tell you this, social media is a whole different monster for a 17-year-old. Everyone my age is spending hours every day snapchatting, instagraming, facebooking — and whatever else.

NASA.

St Andrews:

Palaeolithic peoples in central Europe and France record numbers on bones.
About 25000BC
Early geometric designs used.

About 5000BC
A decimal number system is in use in Egypt.

About 4000BC
Babylonian and Egyptian calendars in use.

About 3400BC
The first symbols for numbers, simple straight lines, are used in Egypt.

About 3000BC
The abacus is developed in the Middle East and in areas around the Mediterranean.

Open courseware:.

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Jacques Berlinerblau:

Crisis” is a word you hear a lot these days in conversations about American higher education. There’s a crisis of the humanities — English majors are way down. Rising tuition is a crisis of such magnitude that Republicans and Democrats concur…

Stephen Eide:

Aetna, one of Connecticut’s largest employers, confirmed this week that it is leaving the state. Though rumors of an exit have swirled since last year, the news still comes as a shock. It extends a long run of bad news coming out of the Nutmeg State, including General Electric’s January 2016 announcement that it will relocate its headquarters from Fairfield to Boston, mounting population losses, and enormous fiscal challenges at the state and city level, which, in Hartford’s case, have prompted open discussion of bankruptcy.

Aetna has been in Hartford for over 150 years. It’s the city’s fourth-largest taxpayer and a major source of corporate philanthropy. Many details remain unclear regarding the insurer’s exodus, including how many of its Connecticut-based 5,800 employees will remain in-state. But the departure will do nothing to ameliorate the dire fiscal problems facing Connecticut and its capital city.

Sebastian Anthony:

While AFR tech has been trialled by a number of UK police forces, this appears to be the first time it has led to an arrest.

South Wales Police didn’t provide details about the nature of the arrest, presumably because it’s an ongoing case.

Back in April, it emerged that South Wales Police planned to scan the faces “of people at strategic locations in and around the city centre” ahead of the UEFA Champions League final, which was played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on June 3.

On May 31, though, a man was arrested via AFR. “It was a local man and unconnected to the Champions League,” a South Wales Police spokesperson told Ars. It’s not clear whether this was due to the technology being tested ahead of the match.

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp:

In the ninth in our weekly series on the ten most important languages for the UK’s future, as identified by the British Council’s Languages the Future report, we turn to the fifth most commonly spoken language in the world, Arabic. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is an Arabic translator and teacher and co-founder of Babel Babies, a company promoting language-learning in families.

Arabic is in great demand and there’s a shortage of well-qualified speakers

Ten years ago last week, I started my first graduate job in the UK civil service, where I began studying Arabic on a 15-month intensive course for translators. This was my dream job: studying another language full-time and being paid a decent salary, too. Now, in my freelance work translating and teaching Arabic, I aim to give English speakers access to an unfamiliar world, a vibrant culture, and a perspective on history and politics that we rarely see in our western media.

Peter Wood:

Several days ago I published an essay about a new policy on sexual harassment issued by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. The policy, which expands the definition of sexual harassment and removes various procedural protections for those accused, was presented in a letter to the president of the University of Montana. The authors, however, declare that the rules imposed on Montana are meant to be a “blueprint” for colleges and universities nationwide.

The Montana letter has prompted an outpouring of scathing criticism from nearly all points on the political spectrum, and very little in the way of public support, though there is this from ThinkProgress.

Douglas Belkin:

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of…

Amber Walker:

“It always feels like we are starting over instead of building. Where do you feel we are at in terms of preparing our kids now who are in K-5?” he said.

“It seems as though the pool (for advanced learners) will shrink if we haven’t prepared them early on.”

Cheatham pointed to the academic growth of elementary school students and the use of universal assessments that test all kids for advanced learning in second and fifth grades. She agreed with Howard’s sentiments, but believed developing accountability plans for individual schools will help the district better showcase progress.

“I do feel like we have made progress, but we are having a hard time capturing the progress,” she said. “The school-based plan seems like a small thing, but it does feel like an essential missing piece that has made it hard for us to measure where we are and capture our growth.”

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“They’re all rich white kids and they will do just fine, not!”

Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results.

edumom:

This morning I made the call.

My five-year-old, Miles, is on the waitlist for a charter school. And according to the data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the district school he has been assigned to for kindergarten doesn’t work well for Latino little boys.

So I picked up the phone this morning and called Saint Catherine’s of Genoa school and asked if they have a spot for him next year. And they do. It will cost me about $4300 plus the cost of uniforms.

I’m a single parent. My ex-husband has stomach cancer. Maybe I start a GoFundMe page or — I can sell Lularoe and those nail sticker things on Facebook. But I’ll tell you this much: I’m not losing this kid in the system. NOT.

And, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Nico Savidge

A popular UW-Madison outreach initiative will cut back programs that help disadvantaged students in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison prepare for college, while ramping up services for students within Wisconsin’s two largest cities, campus officials said Monday.

The result, administrators say, will be a Precollege Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence, or PEOPLE program, that better supports students.

The revamp comes one year after a critical evaluation found the initiative was falling short of several goals.

Milwaukee students will be the biggest beneficiaries of the changes. They will be able to join the program earlier and will have access to new after-school tutoring sites UW-Madison plans to launch in the city.

Natasha Singer:

In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.

In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors.

In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education.

Retort, from Laura Waters:

But it is not. It is Luddism parading as progressivism. It is technophobia that uses images of innocent children — subjected to terrors like math programs that make them love math! — as an excuse to bash educational innovation. It is so off-key that Arnold Schoenberg couldn’t listen to it without earmuffs.

Read it yourself. But for me this article hits a nerve because it undermines the goals of public education reform through either ignorance or duplicity. It’s hard enough advocating for access to equity in resources, high-quality instruction, and meaningful oversight in a laissez-faire age. And the vocation gets that much harder when the nation’s paper of record prints an article marred by personal politics.

The article pretends to examine “Silicon Valley billionaires” Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings. The writer unveils nefarious misdeeds and craven schemes by these con men to infiltrate the minds of shiny-eyed babes and the pockets of their parents. This duplicity is accomplished through introducing and paying for technological innovations in needy schools. The writer doesn’t appear to consider that they could genuinely be trying to offer help to an adult-centered monopoly trapped in the industrial age. She doesn’t even appear to read her own quotes: Benioff asking the San Francisco superintendent to imagine the best possible schools “if money were no object”; a math program offered by Hastings to Baltimore County schools that children found so compelling that “some had begged their parents to let them play DreamBox even during trips to the supermarket”; Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan offering a district in Sunnyvale, CA a team of Facebook engineers to further develop software for personalized learning “and make it available free to schools nationwide.”

Alissa Quart:

“Eco-warriors” are celebrated in one video. In another, a message flashes across the screen: “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong.” Yet another ad champions the theme of girls and Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and celebrates a girl-centered technology organization.

Despite all appearances, these videos are not public-service campaigns. Instead, they are advertisements for some of the most blockbuster brands around: for the car company Kia, for Airbnb, and for the phone carrier Verizon, whose ad campaign involves partnering with Girls who Code. These companies are now gesturing at liberal values through their messaging. If television is waking up politically, with shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, advertisements seem to be far ahead.

erratasec:

Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named “Reality Winner” was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn’t the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

In this post, I show how.

You can download the document from the original article here. You can then open it in a PDF viewer, such as the normal “Preview” app on macOS. Zoom into some whitespace on the document, and take a screenshot of this. On macOS, hit [Command-Shift-3] to take a screenshot of a window. There are yellow dots in this image, but you can barely see them, especially if your screen is dirty.

Erik Rood:

College is obviously expensive, but is it still a wise investment?

We’ve all heard how expensive college is getting, along with plenty of criticism surrounding its value in a changing job market. Of course, there are many benefits beyond the monetary ones that should be considered when exploring college options, but for the purpose of this post I’m going to limit the scope and purely assess the financial benefit of attending college.

The main financial benefit of attending college is the earnings differential received by a college graduate over a high school graduate; Payscale provides 20-year return on investment (ROI) figures for exactly that. The website compares the gain in median pay from graduating over a high school graduate across ~1,250 4 and 5-year educational institutions in the United States.

Below I’ll compare the ROI of college to the return generated from simply joining the workforce after high school, but investing college tuition costs* into the stock market (using S&P 500 as a proxy).

lendedu:

The data LendEDU gathered for this report was licensed from polling company Whatsgoodly. In total, 1,659 current college students were asked to answer the following question truthfully: “Do you agree with college campuses establishing safe spaces?” This poll was conducted from May 5th, 2017 to May 11th, 2017. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that there are 20.5 million current college students in the United States. We estimate that our sample is representative of the population of college students with a margin of error of +-2.00%.

Olivia Goldhill:

Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity. Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.

One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Research in Personality goes so far as to suggest that openness to experience changes what people see in the world. It makes them more likely to experience certain visual perceptions. In the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia recruited 123 volunteers and gave them the big five personality test, which measures extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. That last personality trait involves creativity, imagination, and a willingness to try new things.

Claudio Sanchez:

The school doesn’t offer transportation, so Henry Tyson, the man who runs St. Marcus, is known to shuttle kids to and from school whenever their parents can’t. This morning, he is on his way to pick up a little boy named Jeremiah. Tyson says Jeremiah is a talented child who lives in a rough neighborhood where kids often get lost.

“It’s one of the great tragedies in a city like this,” says Tyson. “How do you give kids a vision for their future especially when they’re growing up in these tough, tough neighborhoods.”

Margaret Katherine has a grandson at St. Marcus. The voucher that he uses was an opportunity she says she couldn’t pass up.

“You better grab it while you can,” she says, “because once it’s gone, you’re gonna be like me.”

Katherine says not a day goes by that she doesn’t regret dropping out of school, not learning how to read or write properly. “I don’t want my child to be lost.”

Much more on Henry Tyson.

One City Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

Tonight, One City Early Learning Centers, a high quality preschool located in the heart of South Madison, is hosting its first graduation ceremony and community barbecue, in honor of its first cohort of children to transition from its preschool to local kindergartens in the city. Nine children will be celebrated for their growth, success and individual potential as they prepare to enter local elementary schools this fall. More than 150 people are expected to attend.

One City is a nonprofit preschool located in South Madison that opened in September 2015. It was established to help parents and young children overcome Madison’s persistent achievement gap, to cultivate a broader community of support among children and families, and to give the community a high quality and affordable place to educate and make a difference in the lives of children, together.

One City Founder and CEO, Kaleem Caire, said, “If you are tired of bad news filling your news feeds in your email box, and on your televisions, hand-held devices and social media accounts, join us tonight. We are filling the room with nothing but great news this evening. We are going to celebrate nine outstanding children who are poised to succeed in grade school and beyond.”

Caire further stated, “Our children have the knowledge and skills to make it happen. They will know tonight that not only do they have the support of their parents and family members, they have the support of the Greater Madison community at-large. The Village will be clapping and shouting nothing but love for our kids tonight, and we will continue to be a major part of their support base as they get older.”

Tonight’s graduation ceremony will take place from 5:30pm to 6pm at Mount Zion Baptist Church, 2019 Fisher Street, on Madison’s South Side. It will be followed by an an anniversary celebration and barbecue from 6pm to 7:30pm at One City’s learning center, located directly across the street from the church. One City is located at 2012 Fisher Street.

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez and Srikanth Sundaresan:

Our mobile phones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. With all the information stored on them, it isn’t surprising that mobile device users take steps to protect their privacy, like using PINs or passcodes to unlock their phones.

The research that we and our colleagues are doing identifies and explores a significant threat that most people miss: More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics.

When people install a new Android or iOS app, it asks the user’s permission before accessing personal information. Generally speaking, this is positive. And some of the information these apps are collecting are necessary for them to work properly: A map app wouldn’t be nearly as useful if it couldn’t use GPS data to get a location.

Zheping Huang:

This week, more than 9 million Chinese students will sit roughly nine hours over a period of two days for the gaokao, the high-stakes exam for admission to a Chinese college. Notoriously grueling, it can determine a student’s entire career path, and ultimately the kind of life one leads. At least 2 million of the test-takers won’t pass.

That’s why the gaokao, to be held on June 7-8, never falls short of cheaters. Exam halls have used metal detectors and drones to prevent cheating via high-tech gadgets. But what about hiring a surrogate to take the exam for you?

For this, verification via ID cards is a must, but hardly enough. Surrogates can use their own photos on forged IDs, and admission tickets with the real test-takers’ information on them. Fingerprint checks have become common in many test centers, but surrogates have responded by wearing special fingerprint films of the candidates.

ABC:

Carolina Williams of Brentwood, Tennessee received a letter from the prestigious school’s admission committee in March announcing the good news. More surprisingly, the letter highlighted one of the ten essays she had written for the application as a stand out.

“It really tickled me that they specifically commented on that one because there were a ton of essays,” William told ABC News. “I think it stood out because it was just very genuine and reflective of me and it was kind of taking a risk, I guess.”

Jennifer Doleac:

recent investigation by Reuters found that lead exposure affects kids in communities across the country — not just in high-profile cities like Flint, Michigan. This is worrisome, because elevated blood lead levels in kids have been linked to an array of developmental delays and behavioral problems. More ominously, this could also increase crime. Kevin Drum and others have argued that lead exposure caused the high crime rates during the 1980s and early 1990s. There has been suggestive evidence of such a link for decades, though it hasn’t gained much traction in research or policy circles. But the case that lead exposure causes crime recently became much stronger.

Tim Harford:

It was free!” announces Bob the Dinosaur, an adorable moron from the Dilbert cartoon. Bob is driving a bright red convertible. “They just make you sign papers!”, he elaborates. That cartoon is a quarter of a century old, but some things never change. The suspicion lingers that too many people are buying cars using financial products they do not fully understand.

In the UK, the finger of suspicion is pointing at personal contract purchase agreements, or PCPs, which account for 80 per cent of new cars sold. The Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority are looking into the car finance sector (the FCA is supposed to prevent us being ripped off; the PRA is supposed to prevent banks accidentally ripping themselves off — thankless tasks).

Mark Musser:

The student antics at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington have recently garnered some national media attention – but not nearly enough. Tucker Carlson interviewed progressive biology professor Bret Weinstein, who had the moral dexterity to show up to teach his own class as contracted by the college in spite of the fact that students had decided to impose on the campus an anti-white imperialism day. The point of the student protest was that any white person who came to the college on that particular day was demonstrating that he is not in alliance with their anti-racist crusade. Blaming Trump’s election, such a proposal was a reversal of a long standing practice at the college where students gave themselves a day of absence to protest racism.

Charles Murray:

The case for the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since it came into being. Let us consider these in order.

(1) Is the Department of Education constitutional?

At the time the Constitution was written, education was not even considered a function of local government, let alone the federal government. But the shakiness of the Department of Education’s constitutionality goes beyond that. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the things over which Congress has the power to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce clause. I’m sure the Supreme Court found a rationale, but it cannot have been plausible.

On a more philosophical level, the framers of America’s limited government had a broad allegiance to what Catholics call the principle of subsidiarity. In the secular world, the principle of subsidiarity means that local government should do only those things that individuals cannot do for themselves, state government should do only those things that local governments cannot do, and the federal government should do only those things that the individual states cannot do. Education is something that individuals acting alone and cooperatively can do, let alone something local or state governments can do.

Monte Whaley:

John Maxwell is curious about the world and freely shares, in casual conversation, tidbits of English history. Yet he says he’ll never again set foot in a college classroom.

“I consider myself mostly self-taught and I just believe I should cut my own path in life,” said the 24-year-old Maxwell, who dropped out of Littleton’s Araphoe Community College after one semester.

Maxwell said he didn’t want to waste his parents’ money on college work that held little or no interest to him.

“I just wanted to see what I wanted to do with my life and college was never a part of that,” said Maxwell, currently an employee at a Parker liquor store. “It might cost me financially down the road, but I never really saw myself as getting rich anyway. So I don’t see it as much of a loss.”

Find Lectures.

AEI

One reason this problem is hard to tackle is that the Left and Right disagree on the ultimate cause of the bloat. Many progressives see it as a product of the free market: If students and parents select colleges based on the quality of student spas and diversity centers and other amenities, then of course colleges will tailor their offerings to meet that demand. The real question is how to make access to college even more universal. Conservatives, meanwhile, are more likely to point to overweening government, including unnecessary regulations, which require more staff to implement, and to federal student loan programs, which pay the salaries of well-organized bureaucrats and end up funding superfluous services that colleges might otherwise forego.

There is some truth to both of these analyses, but neither side is offering a realistic program for how to address the underlying problem. “Free college” programs, now popular among Democrats, will simply make the underlying cost even higher, even if they shift it to taxpayers rather than consumers. And GOP slash-and-burn efforts at state universities often extract theatrical budget cuts without actually excising the source of the rot. Student tuitions go up and faculty salaries are frozen, but the bureaucratic bloat isn’t actually rolled back.

France 24:

Brazil, with a ‘z’ or an ‘s’?” asks a girl. “In Spanish, it’s with an ‘s,’ in English with a ‘z,'” another kid answers. Just another day in a bilingual class at a Los Angeles school.

A sign that proclaims “Bienvenido/Welcome” is pinned above the blackboard of this class in a bilingual program at Franklin High School.

It’s Thursday morning, and in history class, teacher Blanca Claudio asks her 11- and 12- year old students to find Mesoamerica — an area stretching from southern Mexico through Central America — on the map.

Half of the population of Los Angeles — the second most populous US city after New York — is of Hispanic origin, and Latinos make up 16 percent of the US population, making them the largest single ethnic minority group in the country.

George Will:

One reason many Americans are becoming “cord cutters,” abandoning cable and satellite television, is that they want an a la carte world. One reason ESPN has lost 12 million subscribers in six years is that it is an expensive component of cable and satellite packages and many of those paying for the packages rarely watch ESPN.

Compelling taxpayers to finance government-subsidized broadcasting is discordant with today’s a la carte impulse and raises a point: If it has a loyal constituency, those viewers and listeners, who are disproportionately financially upscale, can afford voluntary contributions to replace the government money. And advertisers would pay handsomely to address this constituency.

Often the last, and sometimes the first, recourse of constituencies whose subsidies are in jeopardy is: “It’s for the children.” Big Bird, however, is more a corporate conglomerate than an endangered species. If “Sesame Street” programming were put up for auction, the danger would be of getting trampled by the stampede of potential bidders.

The argument for government-subsidized broadcasting is perversely circular: If the public were enlightened, there would be no need for government subsidies. But, by definition, an enlightened public would understand the inherent merits of subsidies by which the government picks more deserving winners than the market does.

Locally, Madison’s schools spend more annually (now around $18k/student) yet.

Jay Matthews:

In a compelling piece for the Washington City Paper, D.C. high school teacher Rob Barnett has confessed his anguish at passing students who haven’t mastered the content of his math courses and described his radical solution.

It’s called mastery learning. Barnett recorded all of his lessons, put them online and let each student move through them at his or her own pace. “They must show they understand one topic before advancing to the next,” he said. “I think of myself not so much as a teacher but as a facilitator of inquiry.”

This method is not new. I remember a Virginia high school that tried it 20 years ago. Barnett identified charter schools in Yuma, Ariz., and Chicago that are having success with it. It is a logical way to deepen the education of our children and, as Barnett discovered in his classes, inspire initiative. “They learn to assess their own understanding, to ask for help when they need it, and to teach themselves and their peers without my guidance,” he said.

But mastery learning is almost completely at odds with American school traditions. Barnett had difficulty, for instance, dealing with the required annual D.C. tests that assume everyone learns at the same pace.

A parent I know in Michigan found his public school system helpful at first, but it eventually reacted to his daughter’s fast pace under a makeshift mastery program as though the child had violated the dress code.

Related:

English 10

TAG Complaint

credit for non MMSD courses

website and app/play store links:

Poke, throw, roll and watch as they disappear into a dimension you can’t see.

Get an intuitive feel for how four-dimensional objects behave:

Become a child of the fourth dimension.
In this case the 4th dimension is not time but a 4th dimension of space that works just like the first three dimensions we are familiar with. If you count time these toys are 5D.

It turns out that the rules of how objects bounce, slide and roll around can be generalized to any number of dimensions, and this toy lets you experience what that would look like.

College Board:

The College Board’s test developers and the online learning experts at Khan Academy® worked together to bring you Official SAT Practice.

Don’t miss out on these practice tools:

Personalized recommendations for practice on the skills you need the most help with
Thousands of questions, reviewed and approved by the people who develop the SAT
Video lessons that explain problems step-by-step

Full-length practice tests

Revenue Share?

Drew:

They will also be joining the millions of other graduates working to pay off the student debt they accumulated throughout college.

According to The Student Loan Report, there are 44,179,100 current student loan borrowers, or 70% of the students in the U.S. Collectively, they contribute to a national student loan debt total of $1.41 trillion. Additionally, the average student debt per borrower is an intimidating $27,857.

We wanted to find out how prepared the college graduates of 2017 were to tackle their student debt. To do this, Student Loan Report has commissioned a survey of 400 four year college graduates from the Class of 2017 that have student loan debt.

Peter Vanham:

The world’s six largest pension saving systems – the US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia – are expected to reach a $224 trillion gap by 2050, a new study by the World Economic Forum shows

Adding in China and India, which have the world’s largest populations, the combined savings gap for the eight countries reaches a total of $400 trillion by 2050, a sum five times the size of the current global economy

Jill Filopovic:

(Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha)
When I was 21, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew I was headed to law school, so I assumed I would be a lawyer for the rest of my life. I didn’t know that life is long enough to allow for reinvention, do-overs, and big errors—that very few decisions ever have to be final, or are ever as monumental as they feel when you’re at a crossroads.

Now, at 33, I’m a lawyer who doesn’t practice law, a feminist who has turned writing about women into a job, and a journalist who covers US politics from Nairobi and travels the globe covering health, development, and women’s rights. Sometimes, my parents and friends and colleagues and random acquaintances still ask me where I see myself in five years, or in ten. What is my dream job?

Drew DeSilver:

It’s springtime, which means the start of the budgeting process for Congress and a mad dash for many Americans to file their income taxes. That makes it a good time to look at the federal government’s spending habits in a broader context than just this year’s battles.

When thinking about federal spending, it’s worth remembering that, as former Treasury official Peter Fisher once said, the federal government is basically “a gigantic insurance company,” albeit one with “a sideline business in national defense and homeland security.” In fiscal year 2016, which ended this past Sept. 30, the federal government spent just under $4 trillion, and about $2.7 trillion – more than two-thirds of the total – went for various kinds of social insurance (Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment compensation, veterans benefits and the like). Another $604 billion, or 15.3% of total spending, went for national defense; net interest payments on government debt was about $240 billion, or 6.1%. Education aid and related social services were about $114 billion, or less than 3% of all federal spending. Everything else – crop subsidies, space travel, highway repairs, national parks, foreign aid and much, much more – accounted for the remaining 6%.

Joseph Stromberg:

You likely don’t give a ton of thought to the sounds and patterns that make up the language you speak everyday. But the human voice is capable making of a tremendous variety of noises, and no language includes all of them.

About 20 percent of the world’s languages, for example, make use of a type of sound called an ejective consonant, in which an intense burst of air is released suddenly. (Listen to all the ejectives here.) English, however—along with most European languages—does not include this noise.

Claudia Wallis:

At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Terence Jeffrey:

Real federal taxes per capita have more than doubled since John F. Kennedy served as president — and argued for lower taxes.

In 1961, the fiscal year Kennedy was elected, the federal government collected about $94.388 billion in taxes, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The population that year was about 183,691,481, according to the Census Bureau. That meant federal tax revenues equaled about $514 per capita — or $4,121 in 2016 dollars.

By 1965, the fiscal year Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater, the federal government collected about $116.817 billion in taxes from a population of about 194,302,963. That year federal taxes equaled about $601 per capita — or $4,578 in 2016 dollars.

Lauren Camera:

Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, was blown away upon reading a college application essay from a student in rural Texas who described how he spent evenings writing computer code in pencil because he didn’t have a computer at home. He’d head to school the next morning to try the codes out on the school’s computers.

“That is awesome,” Moore said. “That is so much a Carnegie Mellon person.”

The Pittsburgh-based school has one of the best and most rigorous tracts in the country for computer science majors, and as such, requires students who plan to pursue that field of study to have a strong foundation in math.

“Rightly or wrongly,” Moore said, “we have not done a good job serving students who come in without enough of a mathematics background. And this particular applicant did not have that background.”

Roger Bowen:

wenty years ago, several New York State legislators, a member of the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees, and members of the New Paltz College Council (an advisory board) publicly and privately pressured the then-president of SUNY New Paltz — me — to cancel a long-planned conference about women’s sexuality hosted by the women’s-studies program. When I demurred, the SUNY chancellor ordered an investigation, and the governor decried the waste of taxpayer dollars. The New York Post repeatedly attacked me, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed about the conference by a right-wing ideologue, and The New York Times supported me for defending academic freedom.

Truth in public education:

Teachers unions loudly insist that collective bargaining agreements are necessary to ensure that teachers receive fair wages and benefits for the important work they do educating children. However, they fail to mention that many unions use those legally-binding contracts to compel school districts to underwrite the salaries and benefits of their own employees — i.e., tax dollars meant for the classroom are instead being used to pay full-time union officials.

For obvious reasons, school districts and teachers unions don’t advertise these arrangements, but there are efforts underway in several states to end the practice. Below are three recent examples…

Syracuse, New York

Syracuse resident Michael Hunter filed a lawsuit last month over a clause in the Syracuse Teachers Association’s current contract that requires the school district to pay the salary of the union president. Hunter and his lawyers estimate the arrangement has cost the Syracuse City School District approximately $1.1 million over the past nine years.

Matt Levin:

Three of four African-American boys in California classrooms failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing, according to data obtained from the state Department of Education and analyzed by CALmatters.
 
 More than half of black boys scored in the lowest category on the English portion of the test, trailing their female counterparts. The disparity reflects a stubbornly persistent gender gap in reading and writing scores that stretches across ethnic groups.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Elizabeth Campbell:

Illinois had its bond rating downgraded to one step above junk by Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings, the lowest ranking on record for a U.S. state, as the long-running political stalemate over the budget shows no signs of ending.
 
 S&P warned that Illinois will likely lose its investment-grade status, an unprecedented step for a state, around July 1 if leaders haven’t agreed on a budget that chips away at the government’s chronic deficits. Moody’s followed S&P’s downgrade Thursday, citing Illinois’s underfunded pensions and the record backlog of bills that are equivalent to about 40 percent of its operating budget.

Kelly Weill:

On the night of Jan. 25, members of the University of California’s Board of Regents piled into San Francisco’s lavish Intercontinental Hotel for a dinner party. By the end of the night, the 65-person party had racked up a $17,600 bill, or roughly $271 per diner—which they charged to the university. The next day, the same Regents voted to raise tuition by 2.5 percent or $336 for each in-state student.
From 2012 until May 17, 2017, the UC Board of Regents expensed luxury banquets totalling over $225,000, the San Francisco Chronicle first reported Sunday. University President Janet Napolitano’s office reimbursed the dinners in full, using UC funding. The news comes in the wake of a damning state audit that revealed $175 million in undisclosed funds belonging to Napolitano’s office. UC students say they’re not going to stomach the costs any more.
On Tuesday, the Board of Regents defended their dinner expenses, but said the board would have to buy their own meals going forward.

Middleberry College alums:

As university professors and administrators, we are deeply concerned with escalating attacks on free speech and inquiry all across American higher education – and we believe that lessons of national import can be learned from the situation at our alma mater in Vermont. Middlebury College recently completed its public response to the physical intimidation and assault visited upon Charles Murray and Middlebury Professor Allison Stanger on March 2. Last week it issued a press release stating that 67 students had received sanctions “ranging from probation to official College discipline.” Middlebury also has appointed a special committee to “explore and discuss issues relating to” the incident.

Tyler Cowen:

We’re all for higher productivity growth, yet such growth depends on a lot of little things rather than a single major lever. One of those things is how we fund science.

There’s been plenty of coverage of proposed cuts to the budget of the National Institutes of Health, but little noticed is a proposal to significantly reduce how federal grants pay overhead to universities through the category of “indirect costs.” 1 These payments to research institutions, both public and private, pay for labs, equipment, data storage and basic support services, among other background functions.

To give you an idea of the stakes, respected historian of science Peter A. Shulman tweeted in response to President Donald Trump’s budget last week:

Rick Wartzman:

In 1958, America found itself in the midst of its worst economic slump since the Great Depression. There had been other recessions, from 1948 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1954, but they were less severe. The latest downturn, which began in the summer of 1957, turned serious by winter. In January 1958, Life magazine visited Peoria, Illinois, and found the mood there to be gloomy. Caterpillar, the heavy equipment maker and the big provider of jobs in town, had already laid off 6,000 workers and cut back to a 4-day week. “Trouble is already here for some people,” said one Caterpillar worker. “But it’s under the surface for everybody.”

In Peoria and across the nation, things got steadily worse. By July, the national unemployment rate hit 7.5 percent. General Electric alone had sent home some 25,000 production workers by the summer of ’58; General Motors, 28,000. Things got so bad for Studebaker-Packard, the automaker, that it made a shocking announcement: It would no longer honor its pension obligations for more than 3,000 workers, handing an “I told you so” moment to those who’d been warning about the fragility of retirement promises.

:

Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) tried to grill Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Wednesday about the performance of the Milwaukee voucher program, at one point asking her if she’d send her own children to one of the city’s lowest-performing voucher schools.

DeVos demurred on that question during a House subcommittee hearing. Later, she suggested that it would be up to states to figure out how to hold private schools accountable for the millions of public dollars they would receive under the Trump administration’s proposed budget.

In their sprightly exchange, Pocan, who supports public schools, and DeVos, a longtime advocate of private schools, managed to do something remarkable: Explain the entire history and controversy over school vouchers in Wisconsin in under six minutes.

Here are some highlights from the house subcommittee meeting, plus a few fact checks:

Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg:

At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as baptisms.

In tiny communities like Kenton, an unprecedented shift is under way. Federal and other data show that in 2013, in the majority of sparsely populated U.S. counties, more people died than were born — the first time that’s happened since the dawn of universal birth registration in the 1930s.

For more than a century, rural towns sustained themselves, and often thrived, through a mix of agriculture and light manufacturing. Until recently, programs funded by counties and townships, combined with the charitable efforts of churches and community groups, provided a viable social safety net in lean times.

Teens in Gardendale are in for a rude awakening this summer when it comes to cutting grass. According to the city’s ordinance, you must have a business license.

Teenagers have been threatened by officials and other lawn services to show their city issued license before cutting a person’s lawn for extra summer cash.

Cutting grass is often one of the first jobs many have in the summer. But a business license in Gardendale costs $110. And for a job, just for a couple of months, that can be a bit extreme.

“I have never heard of a child cutting grass had to have a business license,” said Elton Campbell.

Collin Roth and Will Flanders:

When someone mentions the phrase “failing school,” what image comes to mind? For most, it will be an urban school with a significant population of disadvantaged, minority kids. While this image is no doubt reasonable—many of the worst school districts in the country are urban—the problems of poor schools in other areas are too often forgotten. Particularly in America’s rural areas and small towns, performance doesn’t look all that different from central cities.

For instance, the lowest-performing school district in the state of Wisconsin is not Milwaukee. It’s tiny Cambria-Friesland, population 767. Nevertheless, the story of education reform in the state of Wisconsin, like most areas around the country, has overwhelmingly focused on the challenges of urban education.

Jenny Abamu:

Since then a slew of security breaches and malicious data hacks have hit educational institutions, including K-12 districts and their technology providers. Most recently, one of the most widely-used education technology companies, Edmodo, had records for over 77 million users compromised.

In the absence of legal recourse and protection, lawyers and researchers are encouraging educators to defend themselves—starting at the negotiating table. They point to vendor contracts as the frontline of these efforts, noting that schools can and should demand better transparency around privacy protection, cybersecurity practices and even pricing terms. By doing so, schools can save themselves headache—and possibly billions of taxpayer dollars.

Katja Grace, John Salvatier, Allan Dafoe, Baobao Zhang, and Owain Evans:

dvances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern life by reshaping transportation, health, science, finance, and the military [1, 2, 3]. To adapt public policy, we need to better anticipate these advances [4, 5]. Here we report the results from a large survey of machine learning researchers on their beliefs about progress in AI. Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. These results will inform discussion amongst researchers and policymakers about anticipating and managing trends in AI.

Daniel Lattier:

Over the past five years I’ve looked at countless student performance numbers, and almost always, my attention goes to the large percentages of students who are performing below grade level in reading, math, history, etc. I see these numbers as evidence of the failure of the current education system.

But a recent policy brief (titled “How Can So Many Students Be Invisible?) has brought something else to my attention—something equally, if not more, damning of the education system. It’s the fact that large percentages of American students are performing ABOVE grade level.

Emma Brown:

But in other states, the Great Recession sparked a spike in the growth of four-day weeks that has since slowed, according to data collected by The Washington Post. Oklahoma stands out for the velocity with which districts have turned to a shorter school week in the past several years, one of the most visible signs of a budget crisis that has also shuttered rural hospitals, led to overcrowded prisons and forced state troopers to abide by a 100-mile daily driving limit.

Democrats helped pass bipartisan income tax cuts from 2004 to 2008. Republicans — who have controlled the legislature since 2009 and governorship since 2011 — have cut income taxes further and also significantly lowered taxes on oil and gas production.

“The problems facing Oklahoma are our own doing. There’s not some outside force that is causing our schools not to be able to stay open,” said state Sen. John Sparks, the chamber’s top Democrat. “These are all the result of a bad public policy and a lack of public-sector investment.”

But Gov. Mary Fallin (R) said a downturn in the energy sector and a decreasing sales tax revenue have led to several “very difficult budget years.”

Madison is rather different, spending far more than most, around $18k per student.

Avery Thompson:

Perhaps the largest medical breakthrough this side of the Human Genome Project has been the invention of CRISPR, a technique for rewriting entire sections of DNA. CRISPR lets scientists target specific sections of DNA and edit them however they want, essentially giving scientists a potentially unlimited ability to fix genetic illnesses.

But there’s a catch: CRISPR might cause random side effects.

When scientists want to edit a gene with CRISPR, they use techniques to select a specific gene sequence to edit. But selecting a single region in an entire genome is not easy, and often CRISPR will target other regions in the genome as well. Researchers believed they could predict most of these “off-target effects,” but a new study in Nature Methods suggests they probably can’t.

Jia Tolentino:

The Columbus Circle location is Amazon’s seventh bookstore, so far. It is reminiscent of an airport bookshop: big enough to be enticing from the outside but extremely limited once you’re inside. The volumes on display are spaced at a courteous distance from one another, positioned with their front covers facing out. Greeting customers, front and center, is a “Highly Rated” table, featuring books that have received 4.8 stars or above on Amazon.com, among them Trevor Noah’s memoir, Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook, a book by the couple on the TV show “Fixer Upper,” and a book about kombucha. Other offerings are determined by digital metrics such as Goodreads reviews, Amazon sales, and pre-orders, and by input from the curators at Amazon Books. The store, in other words, is designed to further popularize, on Amazon, that which is already popular on Amazon. (The company’s new Amazon Charts feature, public online as of last week, is intended to challenge the best-seller list at the Times.)

At the right of the shop is a large, Best Buy-esque electronics area that’s mainly dedicated to the Amazon Echo. The Echo section occupies more space in the store than the section dedicated to fiction, which you’ll find on the left. Under the “G”s in the fiction section you’ll find: Roxane Gay, Hazel Gaynor, Paolo Giordano, William Golding, Bryn Greenwood, and Yaa Gyasi. That’s it. Only a handful of authors have two titles featured on the shelves: Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Paulo Coelho, Emma Donoghue, Ernest Hemingway, Jojo Moyes, Liane Moriarty, Haruki Murakami, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Marilynne Robinson, and J. D. Salinger. Only John Steinbeck and W. Bruce Cameron have three titles displayed: Cameron’s are “A Dog’s Purpose,” “A Dog’s Journey,” and “A Dog’s Way Home.” Over all, there are fewer than two hundred titles on offer in the fiction section, and three thousand titles in the store as a whole. For comparison, McNally Jackson, in SoHo, stocks about sixty thousand titles; my favorite indie bookstore—Literati, in Ann Arbor, where I went to grad school—stocks twenty-five thousand, with five thousand titles in fiction.

KC Johnson:

Middlebury’s response to the disruption of Charles Murray’s invited campus address—followed by the protesters assaulting and injuring Professor Alison Stanger, moderator for the talk—offered little ground for optimism. A statement from the college implied that evidence (albeit ambiguous evidence) existed suggesting that some professors violated the Faculty Handbook in the pre-disruption period. The disruptors themselves received token punishments, as several sympathetic professors supported them in the disciplinary process. The chief of the Middlebury Police Department even denied that the disruptors assaulted Stanger. (“It was more of a scrum. There wasn’t any assault per se.”)

The Middlebury student government, moreover, has seemed intent on confirming the critics’ case about a campus out of control. After repeatedly expressing support, in words and deeds, for the disruptors, the student government concluded its term by rejecting an academic freedom/viewpoint diversity bill, which sponsors Rae Aaron and Jack Goldfield hoped would reaffirm the college’s stated commitment—clearly not upheld in the Murray case—that “officially recognized student organizations may invite to the campus and hear any person of their choosing,” and that “free intellectual inquiry, debate, and constructive dialogue are vital to Middlebury’s academic mission and must be protected even when the views expressed are unpopular or controversial.”

Garth Sendem:

“People tend to try to learn in blocks,” Bjork said. “Mastering one thing before moving on to the next.”

Instead of doing that Bjork recommends interleaving. The strategy suggest that instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork.

“This creates a sense of difficulty,” Bjork said. “And people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”

Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with your serving ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn.

Erin Richards:

Seven days before summer break, West Bend East and West High School saw an unusual staffing change: Four of the six English teachers resigned Friday, throwing students into a lurch before finals and prompting vast speculation about the cause of the departures.

While students protested, the district released a statement that declined to name the teachers and only said that the resignations were “in no way related to any opinions expressed about curriculum.”

Whatever the specifics, the departures top an unusually turbulent year in West Bend. The Washington County district has long had fractious relations between some of its teachers, school board members and administrators, but a number of recent developments in short succession have raised new concerns.

Consider that in the past year:

Clyde Wayne Crews:

Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the size, scope, and cost of federal regulations, and how the U.S. regulatory burden affects American consumers, businesses, and the economy. Authored by CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., it shines a light on the large and growing “hidden tax” of America’s regulatory state.

Federal government spending, deficits, and the national debt are staggering, but so is the impact of federal regulations. Unfortunately, regulations get little attention in policy debates because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted, difficult to quantify, and their effects are often indirect. By making Washington’s rules and mandates more comprehensible, Crews underscores the need for more review, transparency, and accountability for new and existing federal regulations.

David Nield:.

OECD:

The framework illustrated in this document represents a new, ambitious and still experimental approach to global competence which the OECD has developed in consultation with the international community of experts and which could provide a starting point for the PISA 2018 assessment. In particular, its emphasis on attitudes and values is novel in comparative assessment. Respect and a belief in human dignity place a stake in the ground for the importance of right and wrong and offer a counterweight to the risk that sensitivity to other viewpoints descends into cultural relativism. The dilemma at the heart of a globalised world is how we strike the balance between strengthening common values, that cannot be compromised, and appreciating the diversity of “proprietary” values. Leaning too far in either direction is risky: enforcing an artifcial uniformityof values damages people’s capacity to acknowledge different perspectives; and overemphasising diversity can undermine the legitimacy of any core values at all.

Global Competence is only one dimension of what people will need to learn; the OECD is looking at a broader range of dimensions in The Future of Education and Skills: an OECD Education 2030 Framework. This project is still in its early phase, and is proceeding in consultation with OECD member countries. Over time it could present a picture of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and competencies required for the 2030 world. The framework could shape approaches to measurement; and the measurement outcomes could in turn help re ne the framework and de ne policy interventions at different levels.

Penny Spiller:

Finland has long been renowned for the quality of its education and always scores highly in international league tables.

Now it is rethinking how it teaches in the digital age – seeking to place skills, as much as subjects, at the heart of what it does. But not everyone is happy, and there are fears it could bring down standards.
It is a chilly morning in a remote village in southern Finland, but the thoughts of this class of 12-year-olds are elsewhere – in ancient Rome.

Their teacher is taking them through a video re-enactment – shown on the classroom’s interactive smart board – of the day Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the city of Pompeii.

Scott Alexander:

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

Joe Miller:

Facebook’s collection of data makes it one of the most influential organisations in the world. Share Lab wanted to look “under the bonnet” at the tech giant’s algorithms and connections to better understand the social structure and power relations within the company.

A couple of years ago, Vladan Joler and his brainy friends in Belgrade began investigating the inner workings of one of the world’s most powerful corporations.
The team, which includes experts in cyber-forensic analysis and data visualisation, had already looked into what he calls “different forms of invisible infrastructures” behind Serbia’s internet service providers.

Dan Wang:

In 2005, about 54,000 people in the US earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science. That figure was lower every year afterwards until 2014, when 55,000 people majored in CS. I’m surprised not only that the figure is low; the greater shock is that was flat for a decade. Given high wages for developers and the cultural centrality of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t we expect far more people to have majored in computer science?

This is even more surprising when we consider that 1.90 million people graduated with bachelor’s degrees in 2015, which is 31% higher than the 1.44 million graduates in 2005. (Data is via the National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics) That means that the share of people majoring in computer science has decreased, from 3.76% of the all majors in 2005 to 3.14% of all majors in 2015. Meanwhile, other STEM majors have grown over the same period: “engineering” plus “engineering technologies” went from 79,544 to 115,096, a gain of 45%; “mathematics and statistics” from 14,351 to 21,853, a gain of 52%; “physical sciences and science technologies” from 19,104 to 30,038, a gain of 57%; “biological and biomedical sciences” from 65,915 to 109,896, a gain of 67%. “Computer sciences and information technologies?” From 54,111 in 2005 to 59,581 in 2015, a paltry 10.1%.

Susannah Locke:

The United States actually tried to once before. In the 1970s, there was a big push to switch to metric. But it fizzled out because the legislation wasn’t strong enough. And that failed legislation created a slew of naysayers who think that switching to metric is simply impossible.

But that’s not true. The reasons to go metric are stronger than ever, and it’s time to revive the effort. In our increasingly global economy, America’s bizarre measurement system puts the country at a disadvantage. Popular opinion on the matter seems to be quite positive, and there are some hints of change on the horizon.

Why the metric system is superior

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

“The primary reason we wanted to do this is we really wanted to come together to celebrate Harvard black excellence and brilliance. … This is really an opportunity for students to build fellowship and build a community.”

That was Michael Huggins, president of the Harvard Black Graduate Student Alliance, explaining why the group has organized a separate graduation ceremony for black students this week. There are plenty of reasons to balk at the event — the segregationist tendency, for starters. But there is also reason to wonder why it is that students who have spent four years or more at one of the most comprehensive, most exclusive universities in the country are still struggling to find “fellowship” and “community.”

Kate Fehlhaber:

One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.

Police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs – just incredibly mistaken.

Discover Magazine:

Good looking, sociable people don’t make good scientists, according to popular stereotypes.
 
 This is one of the findings of an interesting new study of how scientists are perceived, from British researchers Ana I. Gheorghiu and colleagues.
 
 Gheorghiu et al. took 616 pictures of scientists, which they downloaded from the faculty pages at various universities. They gave the portraits to two sets of raters. The first group were asked to rate the attractiveness of the portraits and to say whether they appeared competent, intelligent, etc. A second set of raters were asked whether they thought the person pictured was a good scientist.

BRIEF OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS
AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF APPELLANT:

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (“AFL-CIO”), a federation of 56 national and international labor organizations with a total membership of 11 million working men and women, files this brief amicus curiae in support of Appellant with the consent of the parties as pro- vided for in the Rules of this Court.1

INTEREST OF AMICUS
As plaintiffs in McConnell v. Federal Election Com- mission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003), the AFL-CIO and its fed- eral political committee (“the AFL-CIO Plaintiffs”) brought a facial First Amendment challenge to § 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“BCRA”) of 2002, 2 U.S.C. § 441b(b)(2) and (c) (amending the Federal Election Campaign Act (“FECA”), 2 U.S.C. § 431 et seq.), which proscribes union and corporate funding of “electioneering communications.” The AFL-CIO Plaintiffs did so because this provision criminalized the AFL-CIO’s use of the broadcast me- dium as a legislative and policy advocacy tool, falsely characterized substantial labor organization speech on matters of public concern as wholly or substan- tially electoral, and impaired union political partici- pation as a matter of law.

Tiffany Browne:

When talking about health disparities in the District, the narrative is usually the same: African American residents in Wards 7 and 8 are either at risk or are greatly impacted by illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, kidney disease and cases of sexually transmitted diseases. These disparities are so well-known, they aren’t even newsworthy any more; it’s almost as if we can no longer see them.

A report by Georgetown University on health disparities in the District found that African American residents are being left behind. For instance, African American residents are six times more likely than white residents to die from diabetes-related complications, and twice as likely to die from coronary heart disease. Despite DC’s rapid economic growth and increasing prosperity, “health outcomes and quality of life indicators for African American residents do not reflect trends of the general population,” the report finds.

JD King:

UNC revealed its latest response to the NCAA’s most recent Notice of Allegations and as Luke DeCock details here, it’s more of the same. We’re just going to quote a passage because he sums it up really perfectly and we’re not sure anyone could put it much better:
 
 “North Carolina’s response to the NCAA’s third Notice of Allegations, released Thursday, makes it clear that the university intends to fight the NCAA’s jurisdiction on every front.
 
 “That’s the tone UNC took with its response to the second notice, back in August, and its resolve has only sharpened in this one, not only continuing to lodge objections over the NCAA’s ability to even bring the allegations, but going, at times, sentence by sentence to rebut the evidence offered.
 
 “That’s where the divide continues to fall both inside and outside the halls of the NCAA, between those who believe the scandal at North Carolina had an impact on how competitive its athletic teams were (as the NCAA clearly does, based on the way the allegations were strengthened from the second notice to the third) and those who believe the scandal was merely academic by NCAA standards (as the university continues to posit, an echo of how it hid behind the Martin Report).

Roger Scruton:

niversities exist to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and culture that will prepare them for life, while enhancing the intellectual capital upon which we all depend. Evidently the two purposes are distinct. One concerns the growth of the individual, the other our shared need for knowledge. But they are also intertwined, so that damage to the one purpose is damage to the other. That is what we are now seeing, as our universities increasingly turn against the culture that created them, withholding it from the young.

The years spent at university belong with the rites of initiation studied by the Victorian anthropologists, in which those born into the tribe assume the burden of perpetuating it. If we lose sight of this, it seems to me, then we are in danger of detaching the university from its social and moral purpose, which is that of handing on both a store of knowledge and the culture that makes sense of it.

Toni Airaksinen:

“Do you ask students to think deeply about global and local social justice issues within your mathematics classroom?” a course overview asks. “This education and teacher training course will help you blend secondary math instruction with topics such as inequity, poverty, and privilege to transform students into global thinkers and mathematicians.”

According to the website, the course can even help students to learn math, because while many aspects of middle- and high-school math “can seem abstract to students,” the developers claim that “setting the mathematics within a specially-developed social justice framework can help students realize the power and meaning of both the data and social justice concerns.”