Invented by MIT, Scratch is an open source system that enables individuals to program interactive stories, games and animations. Scratch is an ideal tool for teaching kids how to code. All the material is free and there are many resources to help teachers integrate coding with their curriculum.
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Indiana’s Purdue University is making a strong play for best public university in the country, based on its demonstrated commitment to free speech.
And now it’s getting interest in taking that approach to other schools, whose leaders may be tiring of giving in to student demands to censor and punish students, faculty and staff for their speech and nonthreatening behaviors.
The university has been approached by NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education) to present the “methodology” for its “free speech orientation program” – the first of its kind in the nation – at an upcoming conference, Director of Student Success Programs Dan Carpenter told the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
A committee composed of representatives from the American Association of University Professors, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center formulated this joint statement in fall 2016. The document received the endorsement of all four sponsoring organizations.
In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement spawned protests on college and university campuses from coast to coast as students, faculty, and staff sought to draw attention to what they perceived as institutional racism in higher education. The glare of the national spotlight revealed genuine problems and had real consequences, with policy changes enacted and university presidents stepping down.
The movement also shone light on the status of student journalists and their faculty and staff advisers, as demonstrated by an incident involving a faculty member and a student videographer at the University of Missouri and by one involving the student newspaper at Wesleyan University.1 While unusual for the attention they garnered, these incidents were by no means unique or even rare. It has become disturbingly routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience overt hostility that threatens their ability to inform the campus community and, in some instances, imperils their careers or the survival of their publications, as the sampling of cases discussed in this report demonstrates. Administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to provide a space for intellectual exploration and debate.
esse Leimgruber has 22 employees, and every last one is older than him. He tells me this over coffee at a downtown San Francisco Starbucks that is equidistant from his company’s coworking space and the one-bedroom apartment he shares with his girlfriend. Leimgruber is the CEO of NeoReach, a digital marketing tools firm he started in 2014 with his brother and a friend; they have raised $3.5 million so far, and last year they did over a million dollars in sales. He is 22.
Leimgruber is one of 29 people who make up this year’s class of Thiel Fellows — the crazy smart youth paid by Peter Thiel to double down on entrepreneurship instead of school. Leimgruber has dramatic eyebrows, longish hair, and the kind of earnest perma-grin that creeps across his face even when he’s trying to be serious. He speaks with the authority of a three-time CEO who has learned a lot on the job, explaining a challenge particular to fellows like him: “A common piece of advice is, don’t hire your peers; They probably aren’t qualified.”
In late October, a group of Maryland legislators met with police officials, attorneys, privacy advocates, and policy analysts to discuss creating a legal framework to govern aerial surveillance programs such as the one the Baltimore Police Department had been using to track vehicles and individuals through the city since January.
“What, if anything, are other states doing to address this issue?” Joseph Vallerio, the committee’s chairman, asked the panel.
“Nothing,” replied David Rocah, an attorney with the ACLU. “Because no one has ever done this before.”
The Baltimore surveillance program broke new ground by bringing wide-area persistent surveillance—a technology that the military has been developing for a decade—to municipal law enforcement. The police department kept the program secret from the public, as well as from the city’s mayor and other local officials, until it was detailed in August by Bloomberg Businessweek. Privacy advocates, defense attorneys, and some local legislators called for the program to be suspended immediately, until the technology could be evaluated in public hearings.
High-school students in many parts of east Asia continue to have a better command of science and other subjects than their counterparts in the rest of the world, but there is little sign that increased spending on education is producing better results in most countries.
That is a worrying development for the long-term economic outlook, since most economists believe that growth is partly driven by improvements in education levels—or what they call human capital—although the strength of the relationship is uncertain.
HAVE BEEN WORKING in di erent positions in public service for more than 25 years. The mission has stayed the same: serve the common good of Finland. Everything else has changed. What used to work is not working any more.
The grown interconnectivity, complexity and uncertainty have redecorated our space for manoeuvre. It is unclear if our well-intended decisions will cause positive outcomes. Decisions do not turn into delivery in the way they used to. There is no clarity regarding what should be done and who has the power to do it. Organizations are busy fulfilling their tasks, but alone and siloed they fall short of their targets. There is a huge disconnect between existing structures, organisations, management culture and leadership and the reality that surrounds us. Work is no longer what it used to be.
Context matters more, and it never stays the same. It is not only a question of what is the policy for the nation but it is also the question of how we all do things, how we all, both as individuals and together, solve problems, learn and work. That is why this book on perspectives on New Work is so important.
I have been reading this book with relief. There is so much explanatory power in it that it can really make a difference. It makes sense. The experience of a “frustrating combination of new technologies and old ways of doing things” is something felt every day. The practices of man- agement and leadership have a lot to accomplish with the ideas in this book.
The newest outcomes of research from different disciplines are knotted together into an easily read narrative. Although it is easy to read, it is hard to swallow. What makes it hard is the fact that it changes the way we look at things. It has changed my ideas about my future career. Be ready for a transformational experience.
Whenever people imagine virtual something, they sometimes put it at odds with the physical incarnation of it. That is exactly not what we imagine when we think of Khan Academy. When we think of Khan Academy, yes, if you have nothing, if you are a villager in some rural part of India and you have no school, hopefully we can get a device out to you and then get you access. We can help you learn and move up your knowledge edge.
But the ideal is you have a physical environment. You have inspiring mentors and adults and teachers around you. You have your peers around you in a social environment. And in that context, we see ourselves as a tool to enable really personalized instruction. That ability to move to a competency-based model as opposed to a seat-time model, that ability to move to a differentiated model as opposed to a one-pace-fits-all model is really a necessary ingredient to actually moving the dial. At the end of the day, we are a tool to empower teachers. And it is up to the teacher to decide how that tool is used.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
DPI-crafted school report cards are the primary means we have of discovering and comparing outcomes in Wisconsin schools. Schools in all sectors that receive public funding – traditional public, charter, and parental choice private schools – now all use the same annual Forward exam for students and will be evaluated with the same school report card. It’s easy to see that the transparency and honesty of the school report card design is critical to all stakeholders.
As we have stated for several years on WRC, when a school has fewer than half of its students reading proficiently, but is rated as meeting or exceeding expectations on the state report card, we question whether DPI’s expectations match parents’ expectations. Concerns about the disconnect between the report card and reality have been expressed recently in these articles:
Humphries: Is this Wobegon or Wisconsin?, from John Humphries, candidate for Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Hallelujah – MPS Is Successful Despite the Data and All the Failing Schools, from the MacIver Institute
Alan Borsuk moderated a discussion this week about school vouchers in Milwaukee, with articulate participants Scott Jensen and Julie Underwood. With vouchers clearly here to stay, attention is now shifting to the fundamental question of how to make sure each child is in a successful school, regardless of whether it is traditional public, charter, or choice. This forum is available online:
One member of the UT Board of Regents who believes that he should look for threats to the integrity of the university and diligently pursue any he finds is Wallace Hall. Mr. Hall, a graduate of UT himself, was appointed to the University of Texas Board of Regents in February 2011.
It wasn’t long before he began to suspect corruption and mismanagement.
First, there was a scandal involving a large slush fund run by the dean of the law school, allowing him to hand out “forgivable loans” to select faculty members. The university’s president, William Powers, promised an investigation by an in-house lawyer, who dutifully produced a “nothing to see here” report. Hall argued that the matter required a more objective assessment, but his complaints were ignored.
Quoted in this piece, Hall said, “I was overruled. That’s when I first felt like, one, there’s a problem at UT, and, two, the system has set up a scheme that gives the opportunity for a less than robust investigation.”
But Hall kept pushing the Board to insist that the Texas attorney general’s office dig into the matter. It did, and then the truth finally came out that the dean of the law school was using the fund simply to hand out favors, including a $500,000 “loan” to himself. The AG’s report brought down the house of cards. The dean resigned and the scandal contributed to the pressure on president Powers to choose between resigning and being fired.
Why teacher prep programs should have strong preparation in elementary mathematics
Teaching elementary children the fundamentals of arithmetic—dividing fractions, operations with signed numbers, or basic probability—requires a deep understanding of the underlying mathematics. For elementary teachers, it’s simply not suf cient just to know “invert and multiply.” One must know and be able to explain why that works, building upon the more fundamental whole number operations. This requires specialized mathematics coursework speci cally for prospective elementary teachers. Typical college-level coursework (such as calculus) does not address these topics.
To earn an A in elementary mathematics, a program must dedicate suf cient time for at least 75 percent of topics identi ed by mathematicians as being critical for elementary teachers, and require at least one course in the methods of teaching mathematics to elementary-aged children.For more information about analysis and program grades, see the Methodology in brief and Understanding program grades sections below.
Much more on nctq.
Several individuals have filed paperwork to run for the Madison School Board this spring, ending its members’ trend of running unopposed.
During the last school board election, with three seats up for grabs, TJ Mertz, Dean Loumos and James Howard all ran unopposed. Including those three, six of the last seven board races had no challengers.
There are seven at-large members of the board who serve three-year terms. Elections are held each April. Next April, the terms for seats 6 and 7 will end.
Seat 6 is currently held by Michael Flores, a Madison firefighter and paramedic. Seat 7 is held by Ed Hughes, an attorney and partner at Stafford Rosenbaum LLP. Both Flores and Hughes will run for re-election.
So far, two individuals have filed a declaration of candidacy with the Madison City Clerk to challenge Flores: Matthew Andrzejewski and Cristiana Carusi. Carusi is a PTO member and school volunteer. She has two children who attend school in the district. Andrzejewski teaches in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Links: Ed Hughes, Nicki Vander Meulen, Michael Flores, Matthew Andrzejewski and Cristiana Carusi.
Madison has long tolerated a non-diverse K-12 world, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”
Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”
Although artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other emerging technologies may reshape the world as we know it, a new global study has revealed that the majority of CEOs now value technology over people when it comes to the future of their businesses.
The study was conducted by the Los Angeles-based management consultant firm Korn Ferry that interviewed 800 business leaders across a variety of multi-million and multi-billion dollar global organizations. The firm says that 44 percent of the CEOs surveyed agreed that robotics, automation and AI would reshape the future of many work places by making people “largely irrelevant”.
What did it feel like proving Fermat’s last theorem after searching for a proof for so long?
It’s just fantastic. This is what we live for, these moments that create illumination and excitement. It’s actually hard to settle down and do anything – [you’re] living on cloud nine for a day or two. It was a little difficult at first to go back to the normal working life. I think it was hard to go back to normal problems.
Do you think your proof of Fermat’s last theorem was the beginning of something, rather than the end of something?
Well, it was both. So it was a finishing point for that particular classical romantic problem and that was the problem that drove me to mathematics and brought me to mathematics as a child, so it was an end of that childhood romantic view of mathematics.
What it began was it opened a little door to the Langland’s programme, and a new way of trying to get at results in the Langland’s programme. Opening that door, [has allowed] a lot of people to go through and develop it, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do too.
As Baylor’s president and chancellor, Ken Starr took home a sweet paycheck in 2014. He earned $896,000, including a $175,000 performance bonus.
But that’s paltry compared with what Art Briles made as head football coach: $5.9 million. Three other coaches (men’s basketball, women’s basketball and assistant football) all made more than Starr, too.
If a college’s salaries reflect its values, then it’s clear what many Texas schools treasure, based on a new report showing what universities paid their presidents and other top employees.
Worried that your child is going to go to college and waste your hard earned money on courses that not only are a complete waste of time, but that tell them what — not how — to think? You should be.
Thankfully, there are groups such as the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a national student organization, which has compiled a comprehensive list of courses that students get to choose from.
So, parents, this Christmas season, whip out that checkbook, make cursive handwriting great again with that alumnus ballpoint pen, and write in the notes section of that $40,000 check you write each year — big and bold now — “Dear God, what have I done?”
Here are five of our absolute favorites of YAF’s “Dirty Dozen” list — the most politically correct and bizarre college courses in America.
This stood in stark contrast to the public sphere—speaking on a stage or to a mass audience through a broadcast—where your audience could be of almost unlimited size. But your speech was limited to the messages which would appeal to a diversity of people and you had to be OK with everyone knowing what you said.
In its first iteration, the largely anonymous internet of webpages looked like a simple, if powerful, extension of the public sphere. It allowed individuals to speak to more people than previous mediums did, on a far wider diversity of topics.
But, as the internet has become ever more personalized, it increasingly represents a strange hybrid of the public and private spheres. Through micro-targeting and customization, the internet now provides the opportunity for people to reach an unlimited audience with unlimited speech.
If there is, therefore, a conversation to be had about the impact of the internet on the election, it shouldn’t be about fake news and feed ranking (which I believe are red herrings). It should be about what it means that a public candidate can for the first time effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Jake Bryant and Jimmy Sarakatsannis:
Shifts in the education landscape are opening doors for investment.
The US market for educational products and services, across K–12, higher education, and corporate learning, is more than $1.75 trillion, and growing. While that figure alone warrants attention from investors, much of this market has historically been difficult for investors to access. K–12 and higher education are largely seen as public goods for the government to provide. Corporate learning has been the responsibility of employers, which often have little appetite for innovation. For-profit companies and investors have mainly played supporting roles and have found a few opportunistic ways to provide resources where providers of learning required support.
Today, because of stagnation in learning outcomes and other shifts in the education landscape, schools and corporations are rethinking how they teach and train—opening the door for private investors and for-profit education providers. In 2015, deal activity involving education companies hit an all-time high of $7 billion (up about 25 percent from 2014), with the annual private-equity deal count remaining steady from 2014 at around 100.
And this year? Racist algorithms that measure a defendant’s risk of committing a crime in the future (damn you, ProPublica). The corporate defense lawyer who turned his life upside down to take on DuPont when an Appalachian cattle farmer whose cows were dying reached out for help (ptui, New York Times). A portrait of the richest touring musician in the world … guess who … nope (Deadspin!). A cottage industry of Balkan teenagers faking out Trump supporters with fake news (oh you BuzzFeed, you).
Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.
I’ve never been able to fit the concepts of privacy, history and encryption together in a satisfying way, though it continues to seem that I should. Each concept has to do with information; each can be considered to concern the public and the private; and each involves aspects of society, and perhaps particularly digital society. But experience has taught me that all I can hope to do with these three concepts is demonstrate the problems that considering them together causes.
Living at home with your parents isn’t just for little kids anymore. Young adults are now more likely to live with their parents than in any other living arrangement, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center . Recent college grads aren’t alone; adults in the 25-29 and 30-34 age brackets are also moving home in record numbers.
What forces are steering people into their parents’ basements? We wanted to find out, so we analyzed data from Earnest , a Priceonomics customer. We analyzed a dataset of more than 60,000 user responses to questions about their living situations to understand how it’s influenced by factors like gender, age, location, and education.
In the latest round of global test results, the United States remained in the middle of the pack.
But one Houston school stood out and highlighted how the United States did the best out of all developed countries to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers.
The test is called the PISA and it’s administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2015, it tested about half a million 15-year-olds from 72 countries.
Students at Chavez High School in Southeast Houston showed significant improvement, outperforming their peers at similar schools with high poverty.
A sweeping free speech resolution has been rejected by Tufts University’s student government, whose members called the effort to broaden and clarify students’ First Amendment rights “unsafe.”
Tufts has a “red light” speech-code rating from FIRE, which means it maintains at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.
Student Jake Goldberg’s free speech resolution called for an end to campus anti-free speech rules at Tufts, including vague administrative provisos that crack down on the “use of nicknames,” “hurtful words,” “bias-fueled jokes,” “comments on an individual’s body or appearance,” “innuendos of a sexual nature,” “gender bias,” and dozens more similar examples cited in the measure.
Underfunded government pensions to the tune of $1.3 trillion, with a gap that just can’t be filled, is the ticking time bomb facing the US economy, which faces dramatic cuts in public services and potentially riots reminiscent of Athens six years ago.
Danielle DiMartino Booth is the tough talking former Federal Reserve advisor and President of Money Strong, with an insider’s perspective on finance. As she picks apart the danger signs with the US on the precipice of recession, it’s the impending pensions crisis that’s really keeping her awake at night.
With so few people privy to what little recovery we’ve had and given how stretched pensions are, checks are going to have to be written from Washington sooner than you think, DiMartino Booth told Real Vision TV in an interview.
“The Baby Boomers are no longer an actuarial theory,” she said. “They’re a reality. The checks are being written.”
Here’s what the models show: Generally speaking, the smartest countries tend to be those that have acted to make teaching more prestigious and selective; directed more resources to their neediest children; enrolled most children in high-quality preschools; helped schools establish cultures of constant improvement; and applied rigorous, consistent standards across all classrooms.
Of all those lessons learned, the United States has employed only one at scale: A majority of states recently adopted more consistent and challenging learning goals, known as the Common Core State Standards, for reading and math. These standards were in place for only a year in many states, so Mr. Schleicher did not expect them to boost America’s PISA scores just yet. (In addition, America’s PISA sample included students living in states that have declined to adopt the new standards altogether.)
But Mr. Schleicher urges Americans to work on the other lessons learned — and to keep the faith in their new standards. “I’m confident the Common Core is going to have a long-term impact,” he said. “Patience may be the biggest challenge.”
President-elect Donald J. Trump and Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, have called for the repeal of the Common Core. But since the federal government did not create or mandate the standards, it cannot easily repeal them. Standards like the Common Core exist in almost every high-performing education nation, from Poland to South Korea.
We can all agree that people who hang out together and are close friends or acquaintances tend to pick up on the cues of those whom they spend a lot of time with: mannerisms, choice of words, etc.. Chrissy asked, as a White teacher whose closest friends are Black, if it was wrong to use phrases that come from Black culture?
This might sound like an ignorant question, but it was a sincere query from a sincere White woman. There are White teachers who seek to learn, not to offend; however, according to Chrissy, during this post-election season on social media, White teachers feel attacked when they ask questions about race. Black teachers appear dismissive and frustrated. As a White teacher who teaches all Black students with mostly Black teachers, she feels like she’s walking on egg shells. She doesn’t want to “mess up” and say the wrong thing. I wonder how many other White teachers feel this way? Does this resonate with you?
One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.
For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.
Uber is investigating its top New York executive after he was alleged to have tracked a journalist’s location without her permission using an internal company tool called “God View.” Buzzfeed News reporter Johana Bhuiyan used the private car service earlier this month to travel to a meeting with Josh Mohrer, general manager of Uber New York. On arriving at the company’s Long Island City headquarters, Bhuiyan says she found Mohrer waiting for her. “I was tracking you,” he reportedly said, and pointed to his iPhone.
Despite the uncertainty, CPS has time. The $215 million was earmarked to pay part of the district’s contribution to the teachers pension fund. That payment is due on June 30.
CPS spokesman Michael Passman said the Chicago Board of Education plans to vote Wednesday on an amended $5.5 billion operating budget. The vote is required to account for the increased costs of a new teacher’s contract. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is freeing up money from special taxing district’s called TIFs to pay those costs. In addition, the board will vote on a supplemental capital budget.
While there is some wiggle room, the loss of this $215 million could hurt classrooms more than cuts in the past. Over the past few years the district has provided schools less money but instructed principals to keep cuts away from the classrooms. Principals have, to some degree, found ways to limit staff layoffs but it is increasingly difficult to see how schools can keep cuts from classrooms.
About a quarter of American adults (26%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form. So who, exactly, are these non-book readers?
Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about three times as likely as college graduates (40% vs. 13%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey shows that these less-educated adults are also the least likely to own smartphones or tablets, two devices that have seen a substantial increase in usage for reading e-books since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)
The cost blowout, disclosed in a Government Accountability Office report this week, provides fodder to critics of Obama’s loan forgiveness efforts, some of whom have also sought to dismantle parts of the Education Department.
The report found deep inaccuracies in the Education Department’s estimates of how much student loan relief programs — like income-based repayment, graduate loans, and public-service loan forgiveness — would cost taxpayers. The programs will have a total price tag of $100 billion or more — tens of billions more than the Education Department once claimed. The difference is due to basic accounting errors and shortcomings by the Department, the GAO report said.
Socializing debt…..
IN 1983 the Reagan administration published “A Nation At Risk”, an apocalyptic report into the state of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law last December, a “Christmas miracle”.
That sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23rd Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades Mrs DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats.
What’s a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in The New Criterion. It’s one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it’s one that I wish museums would ask more frequently of themselves. Because the answers are changing—through assumptions that are often unannounced, unacknowledged, and unexplored.
In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.
On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance. Two years later, its charter was renewed.
Or if you live downtown, you could try Woodward Academy, a charter that has limped along near the bottom of school achievement since 1998, while its operator has been allowed to expand into other communities.
For students enrolled in schools of choice — that is, schools in nearby districts who have opened their doors to children who live outside district boundaries — it’s not much better. Kids who depend on Detroit’s problematic public transit are are too far away from the state’s top-performing school districts — and most of those districts don’t participate in the schools of choice program, anyway.
ne night this spring, the New York Institute for the Humanities hosted a gathering to discuss, as the title of the event put it, “new public intellectuals.” At the front of a crowded room, seated at a rectangular table, were three paragons of this ascendant breed — Nikil Saval, co-editor of n+1; Sarah Leonard, a senior editor at The Nation; and Jon Baskin, co-editor of The Point. All are under 40, not pursuing careers in academe, and integral to what the event’s organizers hailed as a “renaissance in cultural journalism.”
It is a notably upbeat claim, especially when compared with the hand-wringing that typically accompanies talk of public intellectuals in America, who seem always to be in the act of vanishing. The few who remain pale in comparison to the near-mythic minds that roamed the streets of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when rents were cheap, polemics were harsh, and politics were radical. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. What happened? Intellectuals who couldn’t survive as freelance writers — and as New York gentrified, who could? — became professors. By the 1960s, few nonacademic intellectuals remained. Careerism and specialization gradually opened up a gulf between intellectuals and the public. The sturdy prose of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe gave way, by the mid-90s, to the knotted gender theorizing of Judith Butler and the cult-studies musings of Andrew Ross.
They’ve waited every morning since, Gunter told The 74 in a recent interview, until the doors open and staff welcomes them warmly inside, trading handshakes and high-fives as music courses through the halls.
Not long ago, though, there was little enthusiasm from students, their families — and staff, for that matter. The pre-K–5 school is located in North Omaha’s Highlander neighborhood, for decades one of the poorest, most segregated and most violent areas in the city of 440,000.
Roughly 97 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; about 22 percent are English-language learners, and 29 percent are refugees, higher than the district average in each case, according to 2015–16 data. While students have made gains on state test scores in recent years, the school had long been one of the worst-performing in Omaha, which serves about 52,000 students, and one of the lowest-ranked in Nebraska.
Madison voters recently approved additional tax and spending to expand our least divers schools: Hamilton middle and Van Hise elementary.
Amazon also unveiled its cloud-based artificial intelligence services, including systems for recognising objects in images, processing speech commands, and operating chatbot applications. Thus, it’s joining Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM in the already crowded field of advanced AI.
For Amazon, this is hardly new territory. By now, it must have built a robust AI operation for its own use, what with all the data it has amassed on its users (it’s precisely the troves of such data that explain recent breakthroughs in one of the most promising strands of contemporary AI – deep learning).
Now, Amazon wants to make money by letting others tap into its existing AI infrastructure. It did something similar a decade ago, when it realised it had a lot of spare server infrastructure it could lend out to others. A clever move: today Amazon’s cloud services often generate more profits than its retail operations in North America.
Its nascent AI operation is likely to rely on a similar model: clients will pay to tap into Amazon’s ability to recognise images or voices and insert such magic into their app or service. The other four AI giants are also unlikely to settle on a charity model. As they integrate AI products into healthcare, education, energy and transport, they will eventually pass on the bill to citizens – either directly, as usage fees, or indirectly, through lucrative contracts with institutions such as the NHS.
Buckeyes for Concealed Carry on Campus, a chapter of the national group, Students for Concealed Carry, posted a public statement on its Facebook page and created an online petition via Change.org asking the Ohio Senate body to revise HB 48.
The law currently allows campus carry in Ohio, but delegates that decision to each individual school and reduces the penalty of having a gun on campus from a felony to a misdemeanor. Unlike the Texas version of “campus carry,” Ohio State University was allowed to opt out of letting permit holders to carry firearms on campus.
Graduating high school seniors: does the University of Southern Mississippi have a deal for you!
The 14,500-student school has cut annual out-of-state tuition and fees from $16,529 this year to $9,964 next fall, even as it increases the cost for Mississippi residents by 4 percent, to $7,963.
The idea is to reverse a 2,000-student enrollment dip by pricing a USM education below some public universities in nearby states, and attract enough high-schoolers from Houston, Dallas and San Antonio to raise overall revenue.
“I really believe that this pricing strategy is going to open us up to people looking at the University of Southern Mississippi from places we traditionally haven’t drawn from,” said Douglas Vinzant, USM’s vice president for finance and administration.
Southern Mississippi is joining a trend: The Associated Press counted at least 50 public colleges and universities nationwide that have lowered nonresident tuition by more than 10 percent in recent years without making similar reductions for in-state students.
By William Hicks | 5:10 pm, November 27, 2016
An assembly at a New Jersey high school devolved into name-calling and racially charged drama after the speaker drifted from her topic of “digital safety” into a lecture admonishing students for their white privilege. The principal later apologized to students and parents for the speaker’s comments.
Prestigious Princeton High School invited Alison Macrina, the head of the Library Freedom Project, to speak to students about cyber security. Students assumed this would be a practical lecture on how to protect themselves online, but instead got an anti-Trump screed on identity politics.
The speech went south when Macrina began speaking about racist and sexist online trolls. Some of the students in the audience started laughing — they would later argue that they were simply laughing at the idea of trolls.
But Macrina was not amused. She accused the students of cheering for white supremacist symbols like Nazi swastikas. Discussing the incident afterward on Twitter — where she goes by the handle “local resistance” — Macrina said she was “astonished”.
My pinned tweet says that I will neither participate in nor condone the normalization of Trumpism. I might have to keep it posted for the full four years of the (first) Trump presidency. After all, the normalization of the Trump regime is fully underway, from calls for a peaceful transition of power to those for unity and healing across electoral allegiances. President Obama described the election as an “intramural scrimmage” insisting that “we’re Americans.” As the recent Hamilton furor demonstrates, dissenters have to prove their civility, casting their criticism of the Trump-Pence government in polite and respectful terms, pleading with these newly elected leaders to consider that the United States is a country of diversity and difference.
But we have to ask ourselves what it means to plead thus with an administration that seems fully committed to white supremacy, misogyny, and virulent nationalism. Do the times demand of us civility or civil disobedience? And what does the peaceful transition of power entail when the new state that is taking shape is premised on the show and force of violence?
Jason Tucker and Jason VandenBeukel:
Can you give us a brief background of your academic career and your interests?
For the first two years of my undergraduate degree I studied Political Science and English Literature. I was very interested in politics, but what I was learning in economics and political science was just not correct. There was too much emphasis placed on the idea that economic interests were the prime motivators for human beings, and that was not obvious to me at all. I was spending a lot of time thinking about the Cold War, and the Cold War was not primarily an economic issue. So I started taking psychology, and I was interested in clinical psychology. I did my PhD under Dr. Robert Pihl, and I worked on drug abuse, alcoholism, and aggression – there was a heavy biological emphasis. I did my post-doc with Dr. Pihl, and Maurice Dongier. Then I taught at Harvard for six years, and I’ve been at the University of Toronto ever since then.
My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is “we must never forget.” I’ve learned that you cannot remember what you don’t understand. People don’t understand the Holocaust, and they don’t understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called “Maps of Meaning,” which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
When, in the mid-1990s, the world wide web transformed the internet from a geek playground into a global marketplace, I once had an image of seeing two elderly gentlemen dancing delightedly in that part of heaven reserved for political philosophers. Their names: Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.
Why were they celebrating? Because they saw in the internet a technology that would validate their most treasured beliefs. Smith saw vigorous competition as the benevolent “invisible hand” that ensured individuals’ efforts to pursue their own interests could benefit society more than if they were actually trying to achieve that end. Hayek foresaw the potential of the internet to turn almost any set of transactions into a marketplace as a way of corroborating his belief that price signals communicated via open markets were the optimum way for individuals to co-ordinate their activities.
This is no cookie walk. And it’s definitely not a cake walk, figuratively or literally.
The two-day cookie, craft and soup sale, billed as the largest in Wisconsin, wraps up today at St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in this Dodge County farming community of 1,645. But the 19th annual event is more like a marathon.
It includes an army of bakers, decorators and other workers and truckloads of ingredients. The endgame is to raise more than $15,000 for mission programs, the church and its small school that educates students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.
Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals.
The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. There’s no author, no title. It isn’t written in a foreign language; rather, this language is totally unknown. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning—it’s totally incomprehensible.
Most pieces of software don’t have the power to get someone arrested—but Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager does. This is the case management software that runs on the computers of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of court clerks and judges in county courthouses across the US. (Federal courts use an entirely different system.)
Typically, when a judge makes a ruling—for example, issuing or rescinding a warrant—those words said by a judge in court are entered into Odyssey. That information is then relied upon by law enforcement officers to coordinate arrests and releases and to issue court summons. (Most other courts, even if they don’t use Odyssey, use a similar software system from another vendor.)
People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup.
That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne. The remit of their study, which the Journal of Democracy will publish in January, analyzes historical data on attitudes toward government that spans various generations in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. They find that, across the board, citizens of stable liberal democracies have grown jaded about their government, say Mounk and Foa—and worse.
U.S. students are generally improving in math and science, along with their peers around the globe, but the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study results—including a longitudinal look for the 20th anniversary of the tests—show more of a slow uphill slog than a breakout performance.
“The [United States] is a large and diverse country, so it’s difficult to see a large increase over a short time,” said Michael O. Martin, a co-executive director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College. The center has conducted the TIMSS in the United States, with the National Center on Education Statistics, every four years since 1995.
Related: Stretch Targets.
China appears to have massively upgraded its powerful online censorship apparatus, using it to more severely block sensitive topics in group conversations while allowing freer rein in private chats – a sign, one expert says, of a dramatic leap in the use of artificial intelligence to silence speech that falls afoul of the Communist Party.
The growing sophistication of China’s Internet blocking, uncovered by researchers at the University of Toronto, offers a window into how the country’s authoritarian regulators are growing savvier at choking out what they see as undesirable speech – while limiting the anger their deletions stir both domestically and abroad.
It’s an almost immediate way to let students know of their acceptance, said UW-Green Bay Social Media Specialist Jena Richter Landers, who works out of the admissions department.
“We see that they’re screenshotting them,” Landers said. “We’ll see that they’re sharing them in their own personal stories. We’ll get excited selfies back. It’s a great way to celebrate with them.”
This fall marks the first time the university is using the app to alert applicants they’ve been accepted.
Katie Vlachina, the admissions department’s social media intern, said using apps such as Snapchat is a good, modern way to communicate. Plus, it’s fun.
With the news of Donald Trump’s deal to keep 1,100 of 2,100 Carrier jobs in Indiana, coastal elites appear to have just discovered tax-supported Midwestern manufacturing jobs, even as they continue to ignore tax-supported defense contractor (manufacturing) jobs.
As best as I can understand it from the details released so far, the deal may be best understood as a mix of typical state-level efforts combined with the leverage of a federal level effort. Over 25% of the jobs saved will be engineer and headquarter jobs — important for retaining technological capacity in the US, but not a big help to blue collar workers.
The package is reportedly substantially similar to one IN Governor and soon to be Vice President Mike Pence already offered.
Just when it seemed like the annual trends involving the education landscape of Milwaukee had become predictable and boring, a couple of unpredicted things happened.
Around this time every year since 2008, I’ve put together a chart showing where Milwaukee children are getting a publicly funded education, sector by sector. I try not to get too hung up on “sector wars,” but the trends for school enrollment are crucial to understanding our complicated education scene.
In summary, the percentage of students enrolled in the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system was falling by 1 to 2 percentage points almost every year. Use of publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, almost all of them religious, was rising each year (this year, just under a quarter of the city’s students are in the voucher program). Enrollment in non-MPS charter schools was rising each year. And the number of Milwaukee children going to public schools in the suburbs rather than in MPS, using the state’s open enrollment law, was rising substantially.
“If you really want to drain the swamp, as Trump says, that would be a way to do it,” Walker said in an interview.
Walker added: “It’s the work rules, the seniority, all those things. If they could tackle that in a similar way to what we did, long term it would be a major, major improvement.”
Most federal employees only have bargaining rights over working conditions. Wages and benefits were not part of bargaining, unlike in Wisconsin, where until Walker’s 2011 legislation public-sector unions had full bargaining rights.
Two federal unions sounded ready to fight to hold their ground.
Trump has some good ideas, but if he targets working people after promising to “drain the swamp,” it will be the biggest bait and switch ever, said Randy Erwin, national president-elect of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
Much more on Act 10, here.
Emory administrators are “developing a strategy on how to protect undocumented students” in response to a petition signed by more than 1,500 members and 17 organizations of the Emory community requesting that the University become a “sanctuary campus,” Senior Vice President and Dean of Campus Life Ajay Nair said.
The petition — sent to Nair, University President Claire E. Sterk and Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Stuart Zola — came 12 days after Republican Donald J. Trump won the presidential election and amid uncertainty surrounding the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The Student Government Association (SGA) endorsed the petition Monday by a vote of 26-2, with one abstention.
Israeli interior minister Aryeh Deri has called for all Israeli citizens to obtain a mandatory biometric identity card, with their personal information stored on a national digital database, according to a report by The Times of Israel.
As detailed in a memorandum, in the next two weeks citizens will be permitted to comment on the new ID system.
Following this period, the bill will go to a ministerial committee, and if approved, it will be put to a vote in the Knesset.
“The biometric database is crucial to prevent identity theft of Israeli citizens, and it is protected and secured at the highest level,” Deri said.The biometric card will store the cardholder’s data — their personal information, fingerprints, photo and facial profile — on an embedded chip, with all information also stored in a secured database.
Lotus Ruan, Jeffrey Knockel, Jason Q. Ng, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata
Keyword filtering on WeChat is only enabled for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers, and persists even if these users later link the account to an International number.
Keyword censorship is no longer transparent. In the past, users received notification when their message was blocked; now censorship of chat messages happens without any user notice.
More keywords are blocked on group chat, where messages can reach a larger audience, than one-to-one chat.
Keyword censorship is dynamic. Some keywords that triggered censorship in our original tests were later found to be permissible in later tests. Some newfound censored keywords appear to have been added in response to current news events.
Since the revolts that took the region by storm in 2010 and 2011, the Arab world continues to face a diverse set of sociopolitical challenges. Each of the countries studied in this report–Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia–has responded to the uprisings differently. Government reactions range from the expansion of rights, to social upheaval, to civil war. Additionally, the rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) poses a threat to all four countries.
In reaction to fundamentalist groups often relying on the Internet for propaganda and recruiting, several governments in the Arab world have passed shortsighted cybercrime and counterterrorism laws–ostensibly to combat these groups on the digital front.1 It is unclear what kind of motivation lies behind these laws; however, as it stands, national security appears to give lawmakers a convenient excuse to crack down on rights.
Research has found that each country’s law enforcement uses a wide range of mechanisms to stifle dissent. These laws do little to prevent activity by terrorist groups such as ISIS. Instead, they frequently explicitly criminalize speech that the government finds threatening to its legitimacy, and are often used to supplement other totalitarian practices to target and stifle unwanted or politically critical speech.
In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad’s touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card would have us believe.
The girl’s father, Jean-Louis Constanza, presents “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work” as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition. “Technology codes our minds,” he writes in the video’s description. “Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives”—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age.
Madison School Board members Ed Hughes and Michael Flores said Thursday they’ll run for re-election — Hughes for a fourth term, Flores for a second.
Candidate filing for the seats began Thursday and ends Jan. 3. Terms are for three years.
Hughes (Seat 7) and Flores (Seat 6) are the only members of the seven-person board whose terms expire in 2017. Members are elected districtwide but must run for specific seats.
Hughes has run unopposed each of his prior three campaigns but appears to have picked up a challenger this time. Juvenile attorney Nicki Vander Meulen announced on Facebook that she plans to seek Seat 7. She could not be reached for comment.
The nonpartisan general election is April 4. If a primary is needed, it will be Feb. 21.
Hughes, 64, is a lawyer and former board president. He was very visible this fall advocating for a referendum — approved overwhelmingly by voters Nov. 8 — that will provide the district with more operating money. He has been a frequent and pointed critic of the state’s funding of public education and of many Republican-led education efforts, such as the expansion of the state’s private-school voucher program.
Education in Victoria is succeeding in some areas, but failing in many others – we have new school buildings, but they are overflowing and the school rolls climbing so quickly that teachers and principals have no bandwidth left for improving educational outcomes. Schools are adapting to technology, but failing to handle the wide range of ability and rates of learning our kids have. The system is not flexible enough to handle the needs of low achievers and high achievers in specific areas.
Every couple of months there is a new study showing how badly Australia is doing compared to other countries in areas such as Math. We know there are approaches that have worked elsewhere but we seem unwilling or unable to change and adopt them.
Homeschooling is an important right for Victorians – in many cases it is the only way to solve problems with bullying, with low achieving students and with high achieving students. Homeschooling is a rising demographic which serves as an important barometer of how well our schools are serving students and parents.
The decision to remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee came after a parent filed a complaint, WAVY reported. The parent cited excessive racial slurs as the reason for wanting the books banned, Superintendent Warren Holland told the news station.
The parent, whose son is biracial, said that her concerns are “not even just a black and white thing.”
When some students borrow money from the federal government to go to school, they sometimes quality for debt forgiveness after 10, 20 or 25 years. A report published on Wednesday from the Government Accountability Office shows that the amount of student loan debt the U.S. could have to forgive is more than $100 billion dollars — much higher than originally projected
The probability and statistics cookbook is a succinct representation of various topics in probability theory and statistics. It provides a comprehensive mathematical reference reduced to its essence, rather than aiming for elaborate explanations.
For questions, feedback, or feature requests, please file an issue or submit a pull request directly.
Jensen and Underwood squared off as part of a discussion on the lessons learned from a quarter century of school vouchers in Wisconsin, moderated by Alan Borsuk, a longtime education journalist and fellow at the law school.
Wisconsin’s is the largest voucher program in the country with 261 schools and more than 33,700 students taking part. As part of the program, students receive state-funded vouchers of $7,232 or $7,969, depending on the grade, to attend private schools, most of them religious.
“Nearly a quarter of all children in the city of Milwaukee receiving a publicly funded education are doing so through
Voucher schools spend substantially less per student than traditional K-12 schools.
Madison’s traditional public schools spend about $18,000 per student, well Wisconsin voucher schools spend less than that.
The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.
Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and intelligence agencies — Republican Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo for director of the Central Intelligence Agency — are leading advocates for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The guide is split up into nine sections. One section is on introductory courses, while the other eight correspond to major branches of math. Each section starts with an overview, which discusses the subject covered by the section as well as how the subject is taught at Princeton. Following the overview is a listing of relevant courses in the subject. Most courses will have a detailed description of the course content that goes beyond the descriptions provided by the registrar or the math department. In addition to this, most overviews and course descriptions will also provide useful commentary and advice. You will find that many topics in math spill over into other departments, most notably COS, ORF, and PHI. We have provided descriptions of the relevant courses in these other departments as well.
This guide was written with the calculus student in mind, though the tips are applicable to many undergraduate math classes. In the type of course this guide addresses, you will be successful if and only if you can do well on the exams. So essentially, this guide gives tips for doing well on your math exams.
The first thing to realize in this course is that you can’t cram for your math exams. To be successful, you basically have to start at the beginning of the quarter and put in a lot of mathematical effort each week. In fact, if you follow the tips suggested, you may even find yourself working harder than you’ve ever worked before in a class. However, you’ll feel your work paid off after your first successful exam.
A major educational restructuring is underway in the Madison School District with the potential to fundamentally change the high school experience for all district students.
Beginning next fall, the district will start phasing in “personalized pathways,” described as a way for students to explore college and career options and to learn more about their passions.
The concept will start relatively small the first year, with 120 to 150 freshmen at each of the district’s four main high schools voluntarily opting into a health services pathway.
Eventually, the approach could become the new reality for all high school students. District administrators say their “current vision” is for the initiative to become compulsory by school year 2022-23, when it would be fully built out. There would be four to six pathways by then.
Before that happens, though, there is expected to be a crucial trigger point — probably midway through the second year — where administrators and School Board members will take what’s been learned and decide whether to keep moving toward full implementation.
There’s so much change happening around us these days that it’s easy to forget the speed at which things are changing.
We now have more computing power in our pocket than all of NASA had in 1969 to put the first man on the moon. India sent a spacecraft to Mars for less money than it took Hollywood to make the movie Gravity.1 It took Uber a mere four years to hit $10 Billion in gross revenue.2 And Artificial Intelligence took just 42 hours to solve the 100-year-old mystery of how flatworms regenerate body parts.3
This pace of change will continue to accelerate at warp speed, with more change expected in the next 15 years than in all of human history to date.So how does a company like HP stay ahead of all this change, to innovate, adapt, reinvent and engineer experiences for a future that promises to look very different from today?
While we can’t know what the future will hold, we can look to the major socio-economic, demographic and technological trends occurring across the globe to help guide us: megatrends that we believe will have a sustained, transformative impact on the world in the years ahead – on businesses, societies, economies, cultures and our personal lives.
At HP, we’ve identified four major megatrends: Rapid Urbanization, Changing Demographics, Hyper Globalization, and Accelerated Innovation.
Or in the case of birds. They are flying around in three dimensions, and they’re very aware of how close their neighbors are, how fast the neighbors are going, which directions the neighbors are pointing. They don’t have eyes on the backs of their heads, so they’re not so aware of who’s behind them.
But, like I said, there are simple rules about what a bird will do in response to a neighboring birds based on how fast they’re going, how close they are, and which directions they’re pointing. And then if you make computer simulations of what you’d expect, each bird is following these simple rules. You get behavior that looks exactly like what real flocks look like, including if they’re flying around obstacles such as buildings or trees. You don’t need a leader.
And of course that will be the death of us. Because then we really will have turned a blind eye to racism.
We should keep the focus where it belongs: on the states. If we’re offered a big federal push to impose choice on the states, we should say “thanks, but no thanks.” On the merits, yes, and for other reasons, too.
As someone once said on this issue, you can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.
We can work with Trump (on, for example, choice in DC and other federal jurisdictions) the same way we might work with any bad person who holds office. But with the demonization of conservatives in the movement and the big opportunities for choice that Trump will soon likely be offering us, the temptation will be to forget what we spent the last generation saying: That school choice will die if it doesn’t build a trans-partisan, trans-ethnic coalition.
Every generation has a reputation. The Baby Boomers brought the “American Dream” to our collective imagination and Generation X brought an increasing number of women into the workforce. Now, millennials are bringing a revolution to how they handle money and how they perceive their parents’ role in managing that money.
Millennials tend to look at their parents and others in the Baby Boomer generation as friends and mentors, with three out of four in the younger generation indicating that their families provided them with financial assistance after college. Of these, more than two-thirds say they couldn’t get by without their parents’ help.
Yet the article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics. It was not surprising to learn that, as BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel noted, “a lot of reporters passed on this story.” Its huge flaws are self-evident. But the Post gleefully ran with it and then promoted it aggressively, led by its Executive Editor Marty Baron:
“You give people more autonomy when you’re confident that they can do the job if they have it,” he said. “And the countries that give [teachers] more autonomy successfully are countries that have made an enormous investment in changing the pool from which they are selecting their teachers, then they make a much bigger investment than we do in the education of their future teachers, then they make a much bigger investment in the support of those teachers once they become teachers. If you don’t do all those things, and all you do is give more autonomy to teachers, watch out.”
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency has prompted a growing number of petitions signed by students, faculty members and alumni at colleges and universities across the country calling on their institutions to limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement authorities and to declare theirs “sanctuary campuses.”
“Given what is on the horizon, the promise [by Trump] to deport up to three million people, not to mention the recent history of deportation and detention already occurring in the United States, there needs to be a clear message sent to our immigrant students that UIUC is going to be a sanctuary,” said Gilberto Rosas, an associate professor in the departments of anthropology and Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-author of a petition that, among other requests, asks Illinois’ administration to “guarantee student privacy by refusing to release information regarding the immigration status of our students and community members” and to “refuse to comply with immigration authorities regarding deportations or raids.”
In case you hadn’t noticed, Merriam-Webster’s Twitter game is strong—topical, funny, smart, and informative while also being relentlessly irreverent. Not what you’d necessarily expect from the social media account of a dictionary. (This is putting aside the fact that we now generally expect things like dictionaries to have social media accounts, of course.) But if you were ever a nerd who thought of the dictionary as your best friend (just me?)—well, this is sort of like that dictionary has finally come to life and loves you back and also tweets about words all the time. To find out more about this glorious sentient dictionary, I reached out to the folks behind the tweets to ask them about words, social media, and the place of dictionaries in 2016.
At the height of the buzz around MOOCs and flipped classrooms three years ago, Bridget Ford worried that administrators might try to replace her introductory history course with a batch of videos. She agreed that something should change: Drop-outs and failures were high in the 200-person class—at about 13 percent. But the assistant professor of history at California State University at East Bay wanted something less drastic than giving up on live lectures entirely.
How substantially? About one in five American Federation of Teachers (AFT) members who cast a ballot voted for Trump, the union’s leader estimated. Among the larger National Education Association (NEA), which comprises more than 3 million members, more than one in three who voted did so for the billionaire developer, early data show.
AFT President Randi Weingarten, whose union represents about 1.6 million teachers and other workers, said some of the reason for Clinton’s defeat was timing — and perhaps sexism.
“Frankly I was always concerned about whether the country was ready to have a female president,” she said. “There was an intensity of hatred that male political figures never get. So I think we’re never really going to understand it.”
Most of the USA’s largest labor unions endorsed Clinton as early as 2015, including NEA, AFT, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
(Note: I was born and raised in the U.S. until I was 10, moved to Beijing and attended local school for 5 years, then came back to America for high school and college. I have experienced culture shock and discrimination upon entry into Beijing and re-entry into America, but eventually gained acceptance into society each time and made a bunch of great local friends in both places.)
Let me start with a personal story: One time in college, I roomed with a group of students who were all non-Asian, who all grew up in America. They lived with one another before, and at the time, I was the only one new to the group. The housing staff sent a email to them saying that “Bernard Wang”(me) would be their new roommate, and upon noticing my Chinese last name, they began to mock me. In the group text, they joked that I would stay in my room and play video games all day, never socialize with anyone, sleep at 10 PM every night, and even joked that they should all move out because of me – after only seeing my Chinese last name from an email. Eventually, after meeting one another, we all became very close, and the jokes came out. When I first heard about these jokes, I was a bit disappointed in my roommates, but decided not to hold it against any of them and use it as an opportunity to, instead, teach them about my culture instead.
Racism against foreign Asian students, especially Chinese students, is becoming a prevalent social issue for many high-ranking U.S. institutions. There has been a mass influx of highly capable foreign students from China coming in, partly due to institutions using higher foreign tuition rates as a means to obtain more money, partly due to the U.S. wanting to attract more STEM workers, and partly due to the general academic excellence of Chinese students who come in, and a plethora of other reasons. However, there is a huge cultural chasm between the local students and the foreign Chinese students, resulting in distant American and Chinese social circles. At the end of the day, this issue is a two way street, with local American students unwilling to socially accept foreign Chinese students, but also foreign Chinese students culturally maladjusted to integrate into American social circles.
A legal tug-of-war between Ugandan authorities and a for-profit international chain of schools has led to the education provider being ordered to shut down in a matter of weeks, leaving the lives of thousands of pupils in limbo.
Uganda’s High Court has described the Bridge International Academies (BIA) — which is funded by the likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — as unsanitary and unqualified, and has ordered it to close its doors in December because it ignored Uganda’s national standards and put the “life and safety” of its 12,000 young students on the line.
The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren’t qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved.
In the large, stately lobby of the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, a group of fourth graders is ushered up a set of marble stairs.
Peggy Halacy, a museum teacher with the Historical Society, captures their attention and begins motioning toward the artifacts that adorn the walls.
“Now I’d like you to look over here at the eagle. This is the actual, real eagle that was on top of the state house when it was built in 1818.”
These students, from McClelland Elementary School in Rochester, are on a field trip that fourth graders in New Hampshire have been going on since 1964. Each year, about 70 percent of all fourth graders in the state visit the Historical Society. For many schools this fieldtrip to the Historical Society is a capstone to a year’s worth of curriculum on New Hampshire state history.
Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives.
As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Here are six:
1. Anything that can be digitised will be
Digitisation began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music. We also moved complex business functions, medical tools, industrial processes and transportation systems into the digital realm. Now, we are digitising everything about our daily lives: our actions, words and thoughts. Inexpensive DNA sequencing and machine learning are unlocking the keys to the systems of life. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors are documenting everything we do and creating rich digital records of our entire lives.
However, machine learning remains a relatively ‘hard’ problem. There is no doubt the science of advancing machine learning algorithms through research is difficult. It requires creativity, experimentation and tenacity. Machine learning remains a hard problem when implementing existing algorithms and models to work well for your new application. Engineers specializing in machine learning continue to command a salary premium in the job market over standard software engineers.
This difficulty is often not due to math – because of the aforementioned frameworks machine learning implementations do not require intense mathematics. An aspect of this difficulty involves building an intuition for what tool should be leveraged to solve a problem. This requires being aware of available algorithms and models and the trade-offs and constraints of each one. By itself this skill is learned through exposure to these models (classes, textbooks and papers) but even more so by attempting to implement and test out these models yourself. However, this type of knowledge building exists in all areas of computer science and is not unique to machine learning. Regular software engineering requires awareness of the trade offs of competing frameworks, tools and techniques and judicious design decisions.
Yet, beginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance.
Blinded by the belief that Obama was too benevolent and benign to abuse his office, and drowning in partisan loyalties at the expense of political principles, Democrats consecrated this framework with their acquiescence and, often, their explicit approval. This is the unrestrained set of powers Trump will inherit. The president-elect frightens them, so they are now alarmed. But if they want to know whom to blame, they should look in the mirror.
Obama’s approach to executive power flipped so quickly and diametrically that it is impossible to say if he ever believed his campaign-era professions of restraint. As early as May 2009, Jack Goldsmith, a Justice Department official under George W. Bush, celebrated Obama’s abandonment of his promises to rein in these authorities, writing that “the new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit.” He added that the “Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.”
Donald Trump has been quiet about higher education policy during his triumphant march through the Republican presidential primaries. That could be ending soon.
Sam Clovis, the national co-chair and policy director of Trump’s campaign, outlined for Inside Higher Ed the ideas that the presumptive GOP nominee is preparing to put forth. While final decisions have not been made on when the ideas will be formally unveiled, not to mention many details worked out, Clovis said the Trump campaign expects higher education to be a major issue in the fall general election.
Some of the ideas under consideration could be “revolutionary,” Clovis said. Proposals currently being prepared would upend the current system of student loans, force all colleges to share the risk of such loans and make it harder for those wanting to major in the liberal arts at nonelite institutions to obtain loans. And even if some of the proposals would face a skeptical Congress, these ideas could gain considerable attention if Trump uses them to parry with his Democratic opponent.
Pause for a moment from your rapt attention to this review of Ian Mortimer’s terrific new book Millennium and look up. Look around you. Try to see the layers of time that blanket every feature of your world. It’s a gambit that Mortimer employs often throughout his study of “how civilization has changed over a thousand years,” and it’s unfailingly instructive.
You’re able to read this at all, in the first place, whereas for most of the previous thousand years, you probably wouldn’t have been able to, unless you were a member of the clerical or landed elite. You’re reading it in English, which no national publication would have used in the 11th century or for a good deal of time afterwards. The review is about a book, which scarcely anybody would have owned. Likewise the review assumes a common readership, which would have been forbidden – sometimes by fire or the rack – for more than half of the centuries under Mortimer’s consideration. And if you’re reading this on some kind of electronic device, we suddenly exclude all of history right up until the last twenty years.
And then one day, she asked him what he was reading. He had just started “The Hunger Games,” a series of dystopian young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins. The grandmother decided to read the first volume so that she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the phone. She didn’t know what to expect, but she found herself hooked from the first pages, in which Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place in the annual battle-to-the-death among a select group of teens.
The book helped this grandmother cut through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most important questions that humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well. Now her grandson couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find out where she was and to speculate about what would happen next.
While granting tax breaks to big corporations goes against the grain of American populism, so should ceding the economic advantage of lower corporate rates to every other major industrialized country. And given the huge sums involved, it’s not hard to see why American companies operating abroad actively shop for low-tax jurisdictions.
Take corporate “inversions,” which many lawmakers deride as un-American. In an inversion, a U.S. multinational company is acquired by a company domiciled in a low-tax country, such as Ireland or Canada, where top rates are 12.5% and 26.7%, respectively. Profits earned in the U.S. continue to be taxed at the domestic rate, while those made elsewhere are subject to lower rates.
Democrats have cynically sought to outlaw inversions, rather than lower domestic tax rates, which would solve the problem by eliminating the reason companies seek out other residences. In effect, it’s a form of protectionism, and it doesn’t work.
Another tax-avoidance strategy is to locate subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions and to keep accumulated profits offshore; hence the roughly $2 trillion held abroad by U.S. corporations that are loath to repatriate this money because it would be subject to high U.S. taxes. Here again, a lower rate would bring revenue back to the U.S., rather than stranding it abroad.
The push toward school choice is deeply unpopular with advocates for traditional public schools, including teachers unions.
“The general population of the United States of America needs to be watchful, and needs to be making sure there’s accountability there for where this money goes,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.
Unions mounted a legal challenge against Indiana’s voucher program, which Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed into existence in 2011. But courts put an end to that challenge shortly after Pence took office in 2013, and he led the charge to expand the program, getting rid of a cap on the number of recipients and loosening eligibility requirements for students.
Now nearly 60 percent of Indiana children — including those from low-income families and from the middle class — are eligible for the vouchers, which average about $4,000 per year.
Dave Weiland, an Oconomowoc school district teacher and local union leader, thinks the state union was stuck in a 1920s mentality.
“The gravy train was running, and they didn’t see the curve,” he said.
Indeed, two years prior to Walker’s election, the path appeared to be moving in a different direction.
Bolstered by union might and money, Democrats swept to control of the state Capitol, then opened 20,000 more jobs to union representation and repealed limits on teacher compensation.
One group that got the power to organize: Home child-care workers — at a time when their industry was under scrutiny for fraud that cost taxpayers millions.
Two years later, Republicans were in charge.
We already have hefty private school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine and a growing voucher scene in the rest of the state, plus a new special-education voucher program, and a convoluted but fairly lively charter school scene, particularly in Milwaukee. What more could be done?
It’s a time when school choice insiders are pulling out their wish lists and brain storming. The special ed vouchers and the statewide voucher program could be given bigger pushes. Maybe something could happen to increase the number of charter schools statewide, but charters always seem to play back-up to private schools in state politics.
Ideas such as “education savings accounts,” discussed in this column recently, are increasingly likely to emerge. Such accounts could offer parents more flexible ways to select education programs for their children, potentially including several providers. No one so far has gotten specific about what this could mean, but there’s serious interest.
This year’s election has forced Americans to take notice of class divisions between workers. And while these divisions may at first ring of lazy stereotypes — the rural Rust Belt worker without a college degree and the coastal urban college-educated worker — they’re rooted in a real dynamic. Many of the most skilled workers — young people with college degrees — are leaving struggling regions of America for cities, specifically for cities in Southern and coastal states.
Study summary: Unions have been shown to increase members’ wages. As a result, firms with large union membership among their workers have less money available to hire new workers, possibly increasing unemployment. Thus, many economists believe the net effect of unions on the distribution of income is unclear. But as unions recede, other trends are becoming apparent.
Notes and links on Madison Teachers, Inc, WEAC.
Total US state aggregate adjusted net pension liabilities (ANPL) totaled $1.25 trillion, or 119% of revenue in fiscal 2015, Moody’s Investors Service says in a new report. The results, based on compliance with new GASB 68 accounting rules, set a new ANPL baseline and are poised to rise for the next two fiscal years as market returns fall below annual targets.
“The median return for public pension plans in FY 2016 was 0.52% compared to an average assumed investment return of 7.5%,” Moody’s Vice President — Senior Credit Officer Marcia Van Wagner says. “We project that aggregate state ANPL will grow to $1.75 trillion in FY 2017 audits.”
Moody’s new report also introduces a new “Tread Water” benchmark, which measures whether states’ annual contributions to their pensions are enough to keep the unfunded net liability from growing. For FY 2015, states were evenly divided between falling short and exceeding the benchmark.
The report “States — US: Medians – Low Returns, Weak Contributions Drive Continued Growth of State Pension Liabilities,” says there were several states whose pension contributions were notably below the Tread Water mark, including Kentucky (Aa2 stable), New Jersey (A2 negative), Illinois (Baa2 negative), and Texas (Aaa stable).
Madison School District Administration (PDF):
1.
In total, MMSD has 365 open enrollment enterers and 1294 open enrollment leavers for 2016-17; among those 1294 leavers, 58% have never enrolled in an MMSD school.2. The net effect of open enrollment decreased by 70 students. The number of open enrollment leavers decreased by 21 students and the number of open enrollment enterers increased by 49 students.
3. The number of new leavers decreased by 51 students.
4. The most common grades for new open enrollment leavers are 4K, KG, and ninth grade. The most common grades for new open enrollment enterers are 4K, eleventh, and twelfth grade. Open enrollment leavers are disproportionately white while enterers are disproportionately students of color.
5. Open enrollment leavers are clustered around the outskirts of the district and most often attend the closest suburban district to their home.
2016 Surveys: “Leavers” “Enterers“.
1. The two most common reasons parents cited for transferring their children out of MMSD were the school has a better academic environment, 26%, followed by the school has a better culture or climate, 23%.
2. The top two programs in the other district that influenced parents’ decisions to leave MMSD were Advanced learner programming, 22%, and Advanced Placement courses, 15%.
3. The most common districts parents transferred their children to were: Monona, 21%, McFarland, 17%, Verona, 14% and Other District, 13%.
Much more on open enrollment, including the 2009 survey, here.
Madison School District Administration (PDF):
Project Description: MMSD has provided funding to support coursework in the content and teaching knowledge of middle school teachers of math. Toward that goal, a partnership was formed back in 2010 between the District, the UW-Madison School of Education, the UW- Madison Department of Mathematics, and the University of Wisconsin Extension – Office of Education Outreach and Partnerships. MMSD will continue this for the 2016-17 school year and continue to offer math coursework for teachers to participate. The courses consists of a five course sequence (Number, Ratio, Geometry, Algebra, and Experimentation, Conjecture & Reasoning) with two courses being offered each semester. MMSD will continue to provide some financial support for teachers in each class with priority determined by; 1) middle school teacher working with an existing condition of employment, 2) middle school math teachers, and 3) teachers who began the program in previous years.
NOTE: There is a significant reduction in the estimate of this program from the 2015-2016 school year to the 2016-2017 school year. As a reminder, the change for this program and financial support moving forward was shared with the Board April 2016. The model continues the five course MSMS Program using non-credit courses for teachers currently enrolled in the program. This reduces the annual operating budget to $27,000. In addition, the full-time Math teacher leader’s responsibilities have been repositioned to provide support and professional development for middle school math teachers and for algebra teachers.
Talent management has been working with principals to select best candidates for current and future hiring. Middle school math teachers are now provided with standards aligned curricular resources and job embedded coaching.
Related: Singapore Math, Math Forum, Connected Math, Discovery Math.
Madison School District Administration (PDF):
The University of Wisconsin System is exempt from complying with the requirements of the District’s Contract Compliance Plan.
Madison School District Administration (PDF):
1. Most MMSD schools are not over capacity. One elementary school and no middle or high schools had a Third Friday enrollment above their calculated capacity as currently configured.
2. Eighteen of the 32 elementary schools, three of the 12 middle schools, and one of the five high schools had a Third Friday enrollment above the ideal 90% of capacity.
A recent tax and spending increase referendum funded the expansion of our least diverse schools: Van His elementary and Hamilton Middle Schools.
Enrollment projections (PDF).
Occupational licenses are “one of the most substantial barriers to opportunity in America today,” a new study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) found. According to WILL’s estimates, licensing laws raise prices for consumers by $1.93 billion each year and results in roughly 31,000 fewer jobs. Over the past two decades, the number of license holders has jumped by 34 percent in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the number of occupational licensing categories has soared by 84 percent.
“While some credentialing serves to protect public health and safety,” report authors Collin Roth and Elena Ramlow note, “much is rank protectionism – a device to ‘fence in’ those who already have permission to work and ‘fence out’ those who do not.”