Colleen Flaherty:

Most professors probably have learning outcomes for their students — it would be hard to know what to teach and how to assess students without them. But whether professors write down those desired outcomes is a different question. And it’s a question at the heart of a new lawsuit against the College of Charleston by a faculty member who says he’s being booted for refusing to include learning outcomes in his syllabus.

The plaintiff, Robert Dillon, a longtime associate professor of biology at Charleston, is by all accounts an independent thinker, and his lawsuit alleges that numerous personal animosities were at the play in his case. Dillon has organized a popular Darwin Week on campus for the last 16 years, for example, and he alleges that his supervisors feel “threatened” by his challenges to state lawmakers over K-12 science standards in his role as president of South Carolinians for Science Education. But aside from his past clashes with his superiors, his suit raises questions about the role of learning outcomes in course syllabi, and, especially, in the accreditation process.

Letter #2 from Janet Stickmon

So before my husband and I even chose her name, the inoculation started when we decided to buy her African and African American children’s books. I was 11 weeks pregnant when I began our collection with a handful of books from Ashay by the Bay owned by vendor Deborah Day at the Ashby Flea Market in Berkeley. By the time Baby Girl was born, our collection included books like Shades of Black—A Celebration of Our Children, I Like Myself, Please, Baby, Please, and Book of Black Heroes: Scientists, Healers and Inventors. These were among several books we read to her while she was still in the womb.

Anne Trubek:

When the Common Core standards were released in 2010, handwriting took a back seat to typing. Schools were told to ensure that all students could “demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills” by fourth grade, but they were required to teach students “basic features of print” only in kindergarten and first grade. Cursive was left out entirely.

This infuriated many teachers, parents and lawmakers. At least nine states and numerous districts have lobbied, successfully, to reintroduce cursive into public and publicly funded charter schools, and others have bills pending.
People talk about the decline of handwriting as if it’s proof of the decline of civilization. But if the goal of public education is to prepare students to become successful, employable adults, typing is inarguably more useful than handwriting. There are few instances in which handwriting is a necessity, and there will be even fewer by the time today’s second graders graduate.

If printing letters remains a useful if rarely used skill, cursive has been superannuated. Its pragmatic purpose is simple expediency — without having to lift pen from paper, writers can make more words per minute. There have been cursive scripts since the beginning of writing: The Egyptians invented one of the first, demotic, which allowed scribes to take notes on business transactions and Pharaonic laws faster than they could using hieroglyphics

NSA CSS:

Intelligence. It’s the ability to think abstractly. Challenge the unknown. Solve the impossible. NSA employees work on some of the world’s most demanding and exhilarating high-tech engineering challenges. Applying complex algorithms and expressing difficult cryptographic problems in terms of mathematics is part of the work NSA employees do every day.

Try your hand at this month’s problem written by a member of our expert workforce.

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

Stanford University, the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology and the entire Ivy League submitted a brief arguing that involving students in the bargaining process would disrupt operations if negotiations included the length of a class, amount of grading or what’s included in curriculum. Bringing more people to the table, they said, could lead to lengthy and expensive bargaining, potentially to the detriment of all students.

“If a union is allowed to bargain about what teaching and research assistants do, that would in effect be interfering with the educational requirement of many of these schools,” said Joseph Ambash, a Boston attorney who filed the brief on behalf of the schools and represented Brown in 2004. “That would have a dramatic impact on higher education.”

Ananya Bhattacharya:

The chances of recovery for paraplegic patients were once considered nearly nil. But in 2014, 29-year-old Juliano Pinto, who faced complete paralysis below the chest, literally kicked off the opening match at the FIFA World Cup. Researchers had created a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allowed Pinto to control a robotic exoskeleton for the symbolic kickoff at São Paulo’s Corinthians Arena.

Fast forward two years, the Walk Again Project (WAP), the same nonprofit international research consortium that designed Pinto’s exoskeleton, is now using virtual reality to help paraplegic people regain partial sensation and muscle control in their lower limbs. According to a study published Aug. 11 in Scientific Reports, all eight patients who participated in the study have already gained some motor control.

Diana Lambert & Sam Stanton

In the end, UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi was done in largely by pepper spray and ego.

Although she faced serious allegations when UC President Janet Napolitano suspended her in April, the investigative report into her actions that was released Tuesday found the most damning evidence was a near-obsession with her own reputation, something that began when she first assumed the chancellor’s post in 2009 and escalated following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students by campus police.

Jeffrey Tucker:

The cultural fascination with the idea of an “intelligence quotient” or IQ seems to be experiencing a resurgence. Relentless testing is a feature of schooling and school admissions, and tests are used for a variety of occupational screenings. The practice reflects an intuition we all have: some bulbs are brighter than others. Surely there is nothing wrong with knowing, measuring, and acting on that information, however difficult it might be to assess.

Where matters become elusive is in codifying those skills, reducing them all to a single quantitative number, aggregating them based on other demographic traits, assessing the variability of the results, comparing the results across large population groups, determining the variety of causal factors – genetic, environmental, sheer personal determination – that make up what we call intelligence, and cobbling together a plan for what to do with the results.

Frederick de Boer:

I got an email request to talk about online-only education and why I’m such a skeptic that it can replace physical education. I’ve written about this before but let me try to sum it up.

Here’s the model that the constant “online education will replace physical colleges” types advance: education is about gaining knowledge; knowledge is stored in the heads of teachers; schooling is the transfer of that knowledge from the teacher’s head to the student’s head; physical facilities are expensive, but online equivalents are cheap; therefore someone will build an Amazon that cuts out the overhead of the physical campus and connects students to teachers in the online space or, alternatively, cuts teachers out altogether and just transfers the information straight into the brains of the student.

Vermont Law School is hoping to borrow $15 million from the federal government to help restructure its debts and take advantage of lower interest rates.
VLS officials said the school has put the worst of its financial woes behind it, and the proposal would fund a land-lease transaction involving its 15-acre South Royalton campus.

“It means significant operating savings for VLS,” said Lorraine Atwood, vice president of finance at the school, which she said currently spends about $1.2 million annually to service about $13.5 million in debt.

The school, which has an annual budget of $28 million, is hosting a public information meeting at 5 p.m. Thursday at Oakes Hall about the plan, which would create a land-lease agreement with a separate entity, VLS Campus Holdings LLC.

The law school would continue to own its land and 22 buildings, which have a combined net book value of $22 million, according to Atwood.

LD Burnett:

The overpriced and understudied behemoth from “Intro to Econ” was easy to part with. And my well-used grammar and exercise books from French I and II? How useful could they be in our tiny apartment, on our tiny budget, with me staying home to take care of our tiny baby? In such straitened circumstances, I didn’t need those books taking up room in my life; I needed whatever money they might bring.

But those were not the only books I culled from my little library. I gathered up Robert Lowell and Alice Walker, Edmund Spenser and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretius and Virginia Woolf, Lorraine Hansberry and Aristotle, Montaigne and Nietzsche, Flaubert, Boethius and Baudelaire, and many others besides — most of them authors I had never so much as heard of before I set foot on the Stanford campus.

Hugo Greenhaigh:

“Enough to give them opportunity, but not to induce a sense of complacency,” is how Gavin Oldham, philanthropist and founder of The Share Centre summed it up. Gerald Ratner confessed that it did his children “quite a bit of a good when I was in my wilderness years” following the infamous speech that cost him his job, as their inheritance was no longer assured.

The property tycoon Sir Jack Petchey said his children and grandchildren knew he was a “50:50 man”, explaining: “If they really believe in something and are prepared to raise 50 per cent themselves, then I would consider backing them too.” But the author Lesley Pearse said that beyond help with property and education, she intended to “spend as much as possible”, adding: “If I have to stay in a nursing home, it will be a posh one.”

As you wrangle with this question for yourself, you must determine when and how you intend to pass on wealth to your children. Will you leave a certain sum in trust for your heirs when they turn 18 or will they inherit the bulk of your estate when you die?

Will you choose to invest in the best education money can buy — and perhaps their first home — but then leave them to plough their own financial furrow?

Warren Buffett has it nailed. “A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing,” he once said. How much this will be is almost impossible to answer: somebody whose parents are worth £1bn will be used to a different lifestyle from those with £10m to leave to their children.

Sometimes, the answer can be as simple as understanding your children’s character, says Alexandra Ruffel, a private wealth partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell. “You may have a child who’s lovely, but not the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to finances,” she says. “You have to recognise that.”

And at what age are they ready to inherit? Many trust structures will mature on a child’s 18th birthday, but parents should ask themselves if their teenage children will possess sufficient financial maturity at this age.

“It is a concern of a number of our clients,” says Chris Shepard, a partner in the private client tax department at Smith & Williamson, the accountancy and investment management group.

David Mulroney:

What I consider my third year of higher education, from September, 1975, to June, 1976, was spent travelling around the world. It was a deeply influential experience that neatly separated my first two years at the University of Toronto, in which I was making the transition out of my high-school self, from my last two years as an undergraduate, when I began to grow emotionally and intellectually, developing the skills and inclination to be a lifelong learner.

My travels were partly financed from money I made delivering imported Italian delicacies to the corner grocery stores and pizzerias of Sydney, Australia – a stop on the first leg of my travels. I was a beneficiary of one of the earliest versions of the now-familiar working-holiday program for student travellers. The program was based on the assumption that international experience could be, as we said then, “broadening.” The idea was to extend your intellectual horizons, becoming aware of the depth, complexity and sheer richness of the world.

Neerav Kingsland:

II. Walking Through Low Effect Size and High Effect Size Schools

The famous Anna Karena quote goes something like this: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I think the opposite is true of schools.

When I visit low effect size schools, I am often saddened by the level of dysfunction. Students walk the halls aimlessly, teachers seem woefully unprepared for working in a low-income environment, and the principal generally spends her day putting out fires.

When I visit high effect size schools, I’m often struck by how different they are. While most hit the basics of a calm culture and thoughtful instruction, they vary greatly in atmosphere, curriculum, and staffing models – as well as the overall student experience. A Summit school is very different than a Collegiate Academies school, despite both achieving high effects. Even No Excuses schools can feel fairly different from each other, though the do tend to gravitate around some core practices (that Fryer has helped illuminate).

I also think I would struggle mightily in a blind walk through of .1 and .2 effect size schools; it is highly unlikely I would be able to tell you which school has which effect.

So while it’s easy to identify schools that are a total mess, it’s a little difficult to tease out what’s going well in non-dysfuctional schools, as well as to distinguish between high-performing and very-high-performing schools.

Fix the Debt:

What are the effects of a high national debt?

The effects of the national debt on the economy are far from abstract. High levels of federal debt will cause:

Higher costs of living: Large amounts of debt mean higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgage loans.

Slower wage growth: In normal economic times, every dollar an investor spends buying government debt is a dollar not invested elsewhere in the economy. That is, high debt “crowds out” more productive investments, leading to slower economic growth and lower wages.

Generational inequality: By not making responsible debt choices, we are placing higher debt burdens on our children and threatening their standard of living and retirement.

Reduced fiscal flexibility: Our debt levels doubled between 2008 and 2013 from 35 percent of GDP to over 70 percent, a result of and in response to the Great Recession. We can’t afford another recession. With an already high debt, the government has less room to respond to future crises such as international events or economic downturns.

Fiscal crises: Unchecked debt growth could eventually lead to a fiscal crisis, as recently occurred across Europe. At that point, investors in U.S. debt will demand higher returns, driving up interest payments, and leading to a debt situation spiraling out of control.

Jeremy Beaman:

The Princeton University HR department has largely wiped the word “man” from its vocabulary.

The relatively new policy in effect at the Ivy League institution spells out the directive in a four-page memo that aims to make the department more gender inclusive.

Instead of using “man,” employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.

Jane Robbins, via a kind Will Fitzhugh email:

The U.S. Department of Education (USED) longs to plumb the psyches of our children (as its own reports reveal – see here and here), and it enjoys the eager complicity of state education establishments. As reported by Education Week, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) recently announced that eight states will “work collaboratively to create and implement plans to encourage social-emotional learning in their schools.” These states are jumping on a bandwagon that threatens to roll over innocent children and their privacy.

CASEL is the big gorilla in the zoo of social-emotional learning, or SEL. Having proved so adept at (or perhaps having given up on) teaching students English, math, science, and history, state progressive-education establishments are joining CASEL to explore more esoteric pursuits. Better to diminish academic content knowledge and push SEL: “self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.”

The average parent might object, “Wait, that’s what my child learns from me and from Sunday school.” But CASEL & Co. believe the government should take over in case the parents and church don’t do it right — perhaps teaching the wrong attitudes and mindsets.
CARTOONS | Henry Payne
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Suppose the government decides a child will be a more acceptable student, citizen, and worker bee if he learns to acquiesce to the “consensus” of the group, regardless of his own moral standards, or if she learns to accept that all commands of the government must be obeyed. The student may fulfill the standard by developing the correct attitudes, but under whose authority does the government presume to instill attitudes that may conflict with parents’ desires?

Joseph Varnish:

In California, costs to run a business are higher than in other states and nations – largely due to the states tax and regulatory policies – and the business climate shows little chance of improving. It is understandable that from 2008 through 2015, at least 1,687 California disinvestment events occurred, a count that reflects only those that became public knowledge. Experts in site selection generally agree that at least five events fail to become public knowledge for every one that does. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that a minimum of 10,000 California disinvestment events have occurred during that period.

The report has been designed to rely only on public sources of information – primarily news reports and company reports to several government agencies. Each disinvestment event can be substantiated simply by checking the entries against sources of information available on the Internet. The nearly 2,600 endnotes in this report would ease any such effort.

This report provides a catalog of disinvestment events, which is why the bulk of Chapters 16 through 23 are fact-filled, listing actions by companies large and small. The entries show that some companies left the state entirely while others declined to grow their in-state facilities but invested in expansions elsewhere. A few companies that planned to locate in California decided against doing so – performing a “U-Turn,” so to speak.

Why so many businesses are fleeing California for Austin — and why a lot more may be on the way
.

Isabel Berwick:

Parents are struggling, it seems. We are obsessed with the job of “parenting”, trying to mould our children so that they are happy, garlanded with top grades and achievements, and ready to take on the future — even though that future is unknowable to us. Meanwhile, the frightening wider world lurks, chaotically, beyond our control. And to minimise our own fear and worry, we try to protect our young people so that a middle-class childhood now lasts until college, and often beyond.
There is an impossible mismatch between modern micromanagement inside the home and the unknowables outside. To assuage this crisis, parents (meaning, in my experience, anxiety-prone middle-class mothers) lap up advice from books telling us how to fix our family life so as to engineer more successful futures for our kids.

The standout among these manuals in capturing the parenting zeitgeist was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). This memoir by a Chinese-American mother of bringing up two high-achieving girls details how a traditional Asian regime can work wonders. Its key mantras include: be very strict, enforce music practice, don’t allow free expression through drama, sport — or sleepovers. Overnight, “tiger mother” became shorthand for a woman who turns parenting into a high-stakes management career.

Richard Phelps, via a kind email:

Drilling through the Core:

“The federal Department of Education’s coercion of states to join Common Core sought to preempt a necessary debate at the state and local level. Nevertheless, that debate is now raging in state capitals across the country and Pioneer has been at the forefront of the discussion with thoughtful critiques on every aspect, from the notion of common standards, to the specific standards as written, and the process by which they were adopted. This book is a valuable resource for parents or anyone else who wants to understand the criticisms of Common Core.” – U.S. Senator Charles Grassley

More:

The Common Core K-12 standards have gone from “inevitable” to “poisonous.” A new book adds to the woes of Common Core’s supporters by bringing together academic critiques from over a dozen scholars who provide an independent, comprehensive book-length treatment of this national standards initiative. The book arrives at a moment when popular support for the Common Core is declining.

Two national polls show widespread opposition; repeal and rebranding efforts are underway in numerous states; it has become toxic for presidential candidates; and the number of states participating in Common Core-aligned testing consortia has dwindled. The Common Core standards have lost credibility with the general public, parents, and teachers.

Common Core Math Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Courses:

Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course. This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College Stem Curriculum

The framers of Common Core claimed the standards would be anchored to higher education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades. But Richard P. Phelps and R. James Milgram, authors of “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.,” find that higher education was scarcely involved with creating the standards.

Fordham’s PARCC v. MCAS Report Falls Short:

The Fordham Institute has long been at work on a study of the relative quality of tests produced by the two Common Core-aligned and federally funded consortia (PARCC and SBAC), ACT (Aspire), and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (MCAS). What Fordham has produced is only in the most superficial way an actual analysis – in fact, it reads more like propaganda and lacks the basic elements of objective research.

It takes only a little digging under the surface to reveal pervasive conflicts of interest, a one-sided sourcing of evidence, and a research design so slanted it cannot stand against any scrutiny. In developing their supposedly analytic comparisons of PARCC, SBAC, Aspire and MCAS, the authors do not employ standard test evaluation criteria, organizations, or reviewers. Instead, they employ criteria developed by the Common Core co-copyright holder, organizations paid handsomely in the past by Common Core’s funders, and predictable reviewers who have worked for them before. The authors also fill the report with the typical vocabulary and syntax of Common Core advertising – positive-sounding adjectives and adverbs are attached to everything Common Core, and negative-sounding adjectives and adverbs are attached to the alternatives.

Study: Poor Performance of Other States in PARCC Consortium Would Translate to Lower Standards for Mass.

“If too many students fail to reach the new threshold and are denied diplomas, our education system seizes up,” said Dr. Richard P. Phelps, author of “Setting Academic Performance Standards: MCAS vs. PARCC.”

Massachusetts’ bar for scoring “proficient” on MCAS is currently the second highest in the nation for 4th grade math, third highest for 4th grade reading, fourth highest for 8th grade math and 23rd for 8th grade reading. The composite rankings for rigor associated with definitions of proficiency in the 11 states that were still part of the PARCC consortium in August (it has since dropped to seven states and Washington, D.C.) was 27th in 4th grade math, 20.5 in 4th grade reading, 25.3 in 8th grade math and 25.1 in 8th grade reading.

In this case, the inevitable reversion to the mean would translate to a one-half year drop in performance expectations for 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade math in Massachusetts.

The Education Writers Association casts its narrowing gaze on Boston, May 1-3
April 28, 2016

Many billions have been spent, and continue to be spent, promoting the Common Core Standards and their associated consortium tests, PARCC and SBAC. Nonetheless, the “Initiative” has been stopped in its tracks largely by a loose coalition of unpaid grassroots activists. That barely-organized amateurs could match the many well-organized, well-paid professional organizations, tells us something about Common Core’s natural appeal, or lack thereof. Absent the injection of huge amounts of money and political mandates, there would be no Common Core.

The Common Core Initiative (CCI) does not progress, but neither does it go away. Its alleged primary benefit—alignment both within and across states (allegedly producing valid cross-state comparisons)—continues to degrade as participating states make changes that suit them. The degree of Common Core adoption varies greatly from state to state, and politicians’ claims about the degree of adoption even more so. CCI is making a mess and will leave a mess behind that will take years to clean up.

How did we arrive in this morass? Many would agree that our policymakers have failed us. Politicians on both sides of the aisle naively believed CCI’s “higher, deeper, tougher, more rigorous” hype without making any effort to verify the assertions. But, I would argue that the corps of national education journalists is just as responsible.

Too many of our country’s most influential journalists accept and repeat verbatim the advertising slogans and talking points of Common Core promoters. Too many of their stories source information from only one side of the issue. Most annoying, for those of us eager for some journalistic balance, has been some journalists’ tendency to rely on Common Core promoters to identify the characteristics and explain the motives of Common Core opponents.

An organization claiming to represent and support all US education journalists sets up shop in Boston next week for its annual “National Seminar”. The Education Writers Association’s (EWA’s) national seminars introduce thousands of journalists to sources of information and expertise. Many sessions feature journalists talking with other journalists. Some sessions host teachers, students, or administrators in “reports from the front lines” type panel discussions. But, the remaining and most ballyhooed sessions feature non-journalist experts on education policy fronting panels with, typically, a journalist or two hosting. Allegedly, these sessions interpret “all the research”, and deliver truth, from the smartest, most enlightened on earth.

Fordham report predictable, conflicted:

On November 17, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will decide the fate of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and the Partnership for Assessment of College Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) in the Bay State. MCAS is homegrown; PARCC is not. Barring unexpected compromises or subterfuges, only one program will survive.

Over the past year, PARCC promoters have released a stream of reports comparing the two testing programs. The latest arrives from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in the form of a partial “evaluation of the content and quality of the 2014 MCAS and PARCC “relative to” the “Criteria for High Quality Assessments”[i] developed by one of the organizations that developed Common Core’s standards—with the rest of the report to be delivered in January, it says.[ii]

Much more on the Common Core, here.

Kiah Collier:

The number of Texas school districts and charter schools considered failing under the state’s accountability system increased slightly in 2016, though the number of individual campuses that received that label decreased somewhat, according to ratings the Texas Education Agency released Monday.

Last year, 55 school districts and charters — or 4.5 percent — fell under the failing, or “improvement required” category; this year, it’s 66, or 5.5 percent. Forty-four of those failing are traditional school districts, while 22 are charter schools.

At the same time, the number of individual campuses labeled as failing fell to 467 in 2016, from 603 last year.

The accountability ratings — in which schools are generally labeled “met standard” or “improvement required” — are based mostly on how students perform on the controversial state-required STAAR exams, a rigorous testing regime implemented in 2012.

Will Wissert has more.

Judy Newman:

Wisconsin’s average electric rates are highest among eight Midwest states for the first time since 2006, according to the SEA, at 10.97 cents per kilowatt-hour. The other states’ average rates range from 8.65 cents in Iowa to 10.87 cents in Michigan. The U.S. average is 11.02 cents per kilowatt-hour, the report says.

For industrial customers, rates are also highest in Wisconsin at 7.81 cents per kilowatt-hour compared with those in other Midwest states, ranging from 6.06 cents to 7.25 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Barrons:

Apparently, some of the folks most tortured about retirement are still struggling through algebra I. Almost three-quarters of 15-to-19-year-olds, the oldest members of Generation Z—that’s the gang behind millennials—are focused on saving for a distant future, according to a Lincoln Financial Group…

David Gunning:

Dramatic success in machine learning has led to a torrent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Continued advances promise to produce autonomous systems that will perceive, learn, decide, and act on their own. However, the effectiveness of these systems is limited by the machine’s current inability to explain their decisions and actions to human users. The Department of Defense is facing challenges that demand more intelligent, autonomous, and symbiotic systems. Explainable AI—especially explainable machine learning—will be essential if future warfighters are to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage an emerging generation of artificially intelligent machine partners.

The Explainable AI (XAI) program aims to create a suite of machine learning techniques that:

Caitlin Dewey:

As explained on that shiny new portal, Facebook keeps ads “useful and relevant” in four distinct ways. It tracks your on-site activity, such as the pages you like and the ads you click, and your device and location settings, such as the brand of phone you use and your type of Internet connection. Most users recognize these things impact ad targeting: Facebook has repeatedly said as much. But slightly more surprising is the extent of Facebook’s web-tracking efforts and its collaborations with major data brokers.

While you’re logged onto Facebook, for instance, the network can see virtually every other website you visit. Even when you’re logged off, Facebook knows much of your browsing: It’s alerted every time you load a page with a “Like” or “share” button, or an advertisement sourced from its Atlas network. Facebook also provides publishers with a piece of code, called Facebook Pixel, that they (and by extension, Facebook) can use to log their Facebook-using visitors.

John Kass:

And while we’re at it, why not find that magical unlimited federal checkbook and a committee of the best and the brightest to guide us?

But we’ve already had government run by the best and the brightest. And we’ve spent trillions of dollars in America’s war on poverty.

And just what has been accomplished? The crime statistics tell you. The jobless numbers tell you. The graduation rates tell you. Open your eyes and see the despair.

Emily Hanford:

Attending Arlington Senior High School in St. Paul, Minn., she kept her head in her books and did her homework. “I was that student everybody wanted to multiply,” she said.

Her mother was elated with Arlington, a brand new school with the latest technology, web training, access to Apple computers and — best of all — the promise that it would prepare every student for college. Gandy’s parents hadn’t gone to college.

Gandy was in the honors program and graduated with a GPA of 4.2 out of 5.

But when she went to enroll at her local community college, a counselor said she had to take a placement test. When the results came back, Gandy was told she needed remedial classes.

Related: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman require remedial math.

Madison’s math task force.

Danielle Allen:

If Congress wanted to make an actual difference regarding the rising cost of college, and to give universities and colleges a fighting chance to solve this problem, it would strip from the Higher Education Act the requirement that colleges publish a “tuition” number. The figure is as good as useless now.

Colleges should instead publish five numbers: how much they spend each year on educating each student; the range a family is expected to contribute to that expense, from zero to a maximum; how much a family contributes on average; the range of what a college itself will contribute for each student; and how much the college contributes on average to the total expense for each student.

Why is the concept of tuition as good as useless? Let me count the ways.

1. At Ivy Leagues and top liberal arts colleges, whose tuition announcements get lots of attention, the tuition is only a “sticker price.” The majority of families whose children attend these elite schools pay less, as determined by their level of financial need. Increases to tuition matter only for the full-payers. For those on financial aid, changes to aid policies, not to tuition, are what matter. These policies get little public attention or transparency. How often do our major newspapers publish stories on how colleges define need?

Ivan Oransky & Adam Marcus

New research suggests that nearly half of all clinical trials involving kids go unfinished or unpublished — either because the researchers lose interest in the work or take up more pressing projects, or, in some cases, because the companies that funded the studies don’t want the results to get out.

That news won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the fate of studies in general. But it should catch the notice of the FDA: The pharma industry currently gets a special bonus, in the form of extended exclusive marketing rights, for testing their drugs in kids — a rule that was implemented to accelerate research into childhood ailments.

Kirk Johnson:

Part of Jillian Boshart’s life plays out in tidy, ordered lines of JavaScript computer code, and part in a flamboyant whirl of corsets and crinoline. She’s a tech student by day, an enthusiastic burlesque artist and producer by night. “Code-mode” and “show-mode,” she calls those different guises.

“My mother got stage fright for me,” she said on a recent night while talking about her childhood performances and dreams. She looked like a 1940s starlet in a tight, black sequined dress, a red rose pinned into her red hair. “I like to be prepared,” she said. “I like to be in control.”

At age 31, she seems to be. This year she won a coveted spot at a nonprofit tech school for women here, whose recent graduates have found jobs with starting salaries averaging more than $90,000. Seattle, where she came after college in Utah to study musical theater, is booming with culture and youthful energy.

Citizen Stewart:

Most Black families support charter schools, not because they are duped or privatizers, but because many see their neighborhood schools, and know their children need better options. I know, because I saw it first hand in West Oakland, struggling to get my brother the education he deserved, in a system that didn’t treat him with concern or respect.

I never intended to be the charter guy, it just happened. It all started when I went to my brother “johnny’s” school in West Oakland.

When schools disrespect you

“The teacher made fun of my mama” my little brother said, restraining his sobs.

I would help Johnny with his homework if I was around, but I was in law school and out a lot. If his mom couldn’t help him, I told him to just tell the teacher he couldn’t do the homework and needed help.

A majority if the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, among others.

Crystal deGregory:

A degree from a black college has always been a valuable gear in the machinery of America’s class system. Early black college graduates emerged as exceptional models of black achievement and uncommon potential as well as leader-spokesmen of a race historically viewed as an industrial commodity.

It is tradition born out of the early post-slavery days when black women and men who were once reduced to chattel, labored to demonstrate their somebodiness to the white missionary teachers at most black schools, and oddly, to their former owners too. But what was — and arguably still is — a strategic attempt to survive racism and white supremacy, has devolved into a totem of assimilation, separating the “bad” black masses from the “good” black elite.

Black colleges, unwittingly or otherwise, have long been forerunners in the tradition now known as black respectability.

Yoni Blumberg:

Millennials are too “spooked” to use credit cards, claims Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times.

Data from the Federal Reserve indicates that the percentage of Americans under 35 who hold credit card debt has fallen to its lowest level since 1989.

Why? Millennials are already in debt. In 1995, when there were fewer students going to college, and lower tuition rates for those who did, the average American under 35 had 182 percent less student debt, Popper notes, compared to today. The average millennial now owes $17,200. So maybe student loan payments are too much of a burden to even consider accumulating an additional form of debt.

ed.gov:

These partnerships will allow students—particularly low-income students—to access federal student aid for the first time to enroll in programs offered by non-traditional training providers, in partnership with colleges and universities, including coding bootcamps, online courses, and employer organizations. The goals of the experiment are to: (1) test new ways of allowing Americans from all backgrounds to access innovative learning and training opportunities that lead to good jobs, but that fall outside the current financial aid system; and (2) strengthen approaches for outcomes-based quality assurance processes that focus on student learning and other outcomes. The experiment aims to promote and measure college access, affordability, and student outcomes.

Tamara Hiler & Lanae Erickson Hatalsky

Public colleges and universities play an essential role in unlocking the doors of higher education for many Americans. Today, more than 6.8 million students attend four-year public institutions, making up nearly two-thirds of the entire bachelor’s degree-seeking population in the United States.1 Close to two-thirds of all students attending these schools take out student loans in order to finance their education, with the average loan-holding student finding themselves more than $20,000 in debt four years later.2 And American taxpayers spend more than $10 billion dollars a year on federal Pell grants to help more than 2.7 million low- and moderate-income students attending these institutions afford a postsecondary education.3

This investment is one most Americans are willing to make—in part because of the irrefutable economic benefits gained in our modern economy by those who earn a college degree.4 But our analysis of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard data reveals that not all four-year public schools are giving students, or taxpayers, a good return on their investment. In fact, at many of these institutions, first-time, full-time students are not graduating, a large number are unable to earn wages higher than the typical high school graduate, and many cannot pay back the loans they’ve taken out.

Benjamin Wermund

Texas public colleges are “dropout factories” where students have just a 40 percent chance at earning a degree within six years, according to a recent report that paints a stark picture of higher education in Texas and across the nation.

Dan Solomon:

The good people of Texas possess many skills. (Learn some of the ones you don’t currently possess by reading TexasMonthly.com editor-in-chief Andrea Valdez’s book How To Be A Texan!) One skill that does not appear in the pages of that volume, however, is “driving in the rain”—and with good reason. Texans stink at it. Boy, Texans stink at it.

Flying down the highway at a perfectly legal 85 miles per hour? We’re great at that when it’s dry. Enduring the mind-numbing gridlock found in Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio every single day? We do it with charm, class, and aplomb. But navigating a roadway when there’s so much as a simple drizzle falling from the sky is beyond the ken of the average Texan. We don’t intend to bash our beloved home, or our fellow Texans, but we owe it to ourselves to be honest about our shortcomings.

Michael O’Connell:

“Everybody gets caught up in the slogan and the protest,” says Winfrey as she and DuVernay sit for a joint interview around TV series ‘Queen Sugar.’ Adds the director: “If you treat being black as a plight, it affects your creativity.”

“Don’t count on me, I’m one person,” says Ava DuVernay, with a light shrug that suggests she’s sorry to disappoint. “That’s not change. That’s an anomaly.”

She’s back in New Orleans, where she has spent a sizable portion of her spring filming the first 13 episodes of the forthcoming cable series Queen Sugar — a present-day drama about a family of sugarcane farmers in Louisiana — and the conversation has turned to Hollywood’s “diversity” problem. It is a word that she bemoans but a subject on which she has become the industry’s reluctant expert ever since her star-making turn as the director of 2014 Academy Award nominee Selma. In the nearly two years since, the former publicist has been courted for (and passed on) a Marvel superhero movie, inspired a Barbie doll of her likeness and, in signing on to direct Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, will become the first woman of color tapped to helm a $100 million live-action movie. She adds with the kind of steely confidence that has earned her a bevy of followers (197,000 of them on Twitter) and a platform that commands the industry’s attention: “The fact that the mainstream starts to gaze at this space doesn’t make it a moment. It makes it a moment for them

Imran S. Haque, PhD; Gabriel A. Lazarin, MS; H. Peter Kang, MD; Eric A. Evans, PhD; James D. Goldberg, MD; Ronald J. Wapner, MD

Importance Screening for carrier status of a limited number of single-gene conditions is the current standard of prenatal care. Methods have become available allowing rapid expanded carrier screening for a substantial number of conditions.

Objectives To quantify the modeled risk of recessive conditions identifiable by an expanded carrier screening panel in individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and to compare the results with those from current screening recommendations.

Design, Setting, and Participants Retrospective modeling analysis of results between January 1, 2012, and July 15, 2015, from expanded carrier screening in reproductive-aged individuals without known indication for specific genetic testing, primarily from the United States. Tests were offered by clinicians providing reproductive care.

Exposures Individuals were tested for carrier status for up to 94 severe or profound conditions.

Main Outcomes and Measures Risk was defined as the probability that a hypothetical fetus created from a random pairing of individuals (within or across 15 self-reported racial/ethnic categories; there were 11 categories with >5000 samples) would be homozygous or compound heterozygous for 2 mutations presumed to cause severe or profound disease. Severe conditions were defined as those that if left untreated cause intellectual disability or a substantially shortened lifespan; profound conditions were those causing both.

Christopher Ingraham:

The United States’ full-time college students are more likely to be heavy drinkers than young adults who aren’t enrolled in college, according to a new federal report. But they’re no more likely to experiment with other drugs, including marijuana, than other people their age. And college students are far less likely to smoke cigarettes than other young adults.

Those findings come from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), using data from the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The survey found that roughly 59.8 percent of full-time college students ages 18 to 22 drank at least monthly, compared to 51.5 percent of young adults not in college. More strikingly, while only 17.9 percent of college students smoked cigarettes in the past month, a whopping 32.6 percent of young adults not in college were past-month cigarette smokers.

Jacqueline Varas

Donald Trump’s jobs plan is largely defined by his desire to overhaul U.S. trade policy. During an address at a metals recycling facility in Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee asserted that “globalization has wiped out our middle class.” To rebuild it, Trump proposed withdrawing from major trade deals including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He also argued that restricting trade would be a job creator. By imposing high taxes on imports, Trump pledged to increase domestic production and bring jobs back to the U.S.

On the opposite side of the aisle, Hilary Clinton is not far from Trump on this issue. She spoke at length about the weaknesses of trade during an economic policy speech last week. After declaring that “past trade deals have been sold to the American people with rosy scenarios that did not pan out,” she vowed to “stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages – including the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

Both candidates maintain that they want to advance American prosperity. Each has also blamed trade for the economic woes of working class families. But is globalization really the culprit?

Rachel Brooks:

In the literature on higher education, there is an increasing emphasis on the importance of virtual spaces in terms of both pedagogic practice and wider aspects of university life. It has also been argued that online spaces, and social media in particular, are playing a key role in facilitating the political engagement of students. In our research on contemporary students’ unions, however, much greater emphasis was placed by our respondents (students’ union officials and senior institutional managers) upon the physical spaces of the campus than on the virtual spaces available to students and/or students’ union officials for both academic and social activities. Indeed, the students’ union building itself was discussed, at great length, by many of the students’ union officials and senior managers who participated in our focus groups. Several respondents described how changes had recently been made to the buildings used by the students’ union, which, they claimed, had had a positive effect. For senior managers at one of our higher education institutions (HEIs), for example, a shift to a more central location on campus was thought to have had a significant influence on the visibility of the union, and the propensity of others to engage with it:

Alan Smith:

As the Pew research suggests, education is important. In most countries, while students of particular subjects — for example, economics, mathematics or science — may spend time developing chart-making and chart-reading skills, there is no educational strategy for ensuring everyone does.

Even many of those who develop chart literacy suffer an inverse problem: most of the professional statisticians and economists I have worked with have never received any formal academic training on how to present complex information to non-expert audiences. Entire organisations can suffer from this two-way skills gap: researchers and policy analysts often find it difficult to communicate effectively with leaders, even if they are in acute need of support.

Michael Barany

Most people never become mathematicians, but everyone has a stake in mathematics. Almost since the dawn of human civilization, societies have vested special authority in mathematical experts. The question of how and why the public should support elite mathematics remains as pertinent as ever, and in the last five centuries (especially the last two) it has been joined by the related question of what mathematics most members of the public should know.

Why does mathematics matter to society at large? Listen to mathematicians, policymakers, and educators and the answer seems unanimous: mathematics is everywhere, therefore everyone should care about it. Books and articles abound with examples of the math that their authors claim is hidden in every facet of everyday life or unlocks powerful truths and technologies that shape the fates of individuals and nations. Take math professor Jordan Ellenberg, author of the bestselling book How Not to Be Wrong, who asserts “you can find math everywhere you look.”

JD Vance:

Gowing up in Middletown, Ohio, we had no sense that failing to achieve higher education would bring shame or any other consequences. The message wasn’t explicit; teachers didn’t tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed: No one in our families had gone to college; older friends and siblings were perfectly content to stay in Middletown, regardless of their career prospects; we knew no one at a prestigious out-of-state school; and everyone knew at least one young adult who was underemployed or didn’t have a job at all. In Middletown, 20 percent of the public high school’s entering freshmen won’t make it to graduation. Most won’t graduate from college. Virtually no one will go to college out of state. Students don’t expect much from themselves, because the people around them don’t do very much. Many parents go along with this phenomenon.

I don’t remember ever being scolded for getting a bad grade until my grandmother (whom I called “Mamaw”) began to take an interest in my grades in high school. When my sister or I struggled in school, I’d overhear things like “Well, maybe she’s just not that great at fractions,” or “J.D.’s more of a numbers kid, so I wouldn’t worry about that spelling test.” There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried. Because very few in Middletown fall into the former category, people assume that everyone who makes it is just really smart. To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent. It’s not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she’d blather on about the importance of industriousness. “So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,” she’d say. This was the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she — despite never having worked in her life — was an obvious exception. People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown.

You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. During the 2012 election cycle, the Public Religion Institute, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on working-class whites. It found, among other things, that working-class whites worked more hours than college-educated whites. But the idea that the average working-class white works more hours is demonstrably false. The Public Religion Institute based its results on surveys — essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought. The only thing that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work. Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, and their skills don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground. The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it.

Technical progress is often associated with moral and political regress, a theme as ancient as Hesiod’s seventh-century b.c. poem Works and Days.

In 200 b.c., not a male could vote freely in Hellenistic Greece, but the so-called Antikythera analogue computer could predict astronomical cycles in a way unimaginable 250 years earlier in Periclean Athens.

The uncanny ability to craft the great dome of Hagia Sophia did not imply that the people of Constantinople in a.d. 537 had retained many freedoms from the impoverished Roman Republic of 700 years earlier.

We are in such a period of rapid breakthroughs in technology, consumerism, and scientific advancement — equally matched by cultural, social, and political ruin.

Take the question of free speech. Fifty years ago leftist student activists — without iPads and Facebook pages — fought for “free speech areas” in university plazas where they could voice unpopular and even uncouth expression.

Not today.

Dan Solomon:

On Friday, six-month-old Dillon Martinez was supposed to be at day care while his dad worked. The boy’s father drove to his job at the Helotes Walmart at 6:15 in the morning, and when he returned to the car at 3 p.m., he realized what had happened: He left the infant in the backseat. Police and paramedics were unable to revive Dillon.

The man—whose name hasn’t been officially released—was hospitalized with chest pains upon returning to the car, though reports indicate that he was cooperative with police during the chaotic scene. At this point, Dillon’s father hasn’t been arrested or charged with a crime—though there are plenty of people on social media and in comment sections without much empathy for the man.

Jay Matthews:

Several years ago, I stopped reading the reports I frequently receive on “the future of education research” from many fine universities. Most education research has little or no relationship to important developments in schools, and it never will.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. The Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for students from low-income households, has been peeking recently at what is happening inside classrooms, an intrusion rarely done because it is expensive and tends to expose unattractive realities.

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

Christopher de Bellaige:

One of Simon Henderson’s first decisions after taking over last summer as headmaster of Eton College was to move his office out of the labyrinthine, late-medieval centre of the school and into a corporate bunker that has been appended (“insensitively”, as an architectural historian might say) to a Victorian teaching block. Here, in classless, optimistic tones, Henderson lays out a vision of a formerly Olympian institution becoming a mirror of modern society, diversifying its intake so that anyone “from a poor boy at a primary school in the north of England to one from a great fee-paying prep school in the south” can aspire to be educated there (so long as he’s a he, of course), joyfully sharing expertise, teachers and facilities with the state sector – in short, striving “to be relevant and to contribute”. His aspiration that Eton should become an agent of social change is not one that many of his 70 predecessors in the job over the past six centuries would have shared; and it is somehow no surprise to hear that he has incurred the displeasure of some of the more traditionally minded boys by high-fiving them. What had happened, I wondered as I left the bunker, to the Eton I knew when I was a pupil in the late 1980s – a school so grand it didn’t care what anyone thought of it, a four-letter word for the Left, a source of pride for the Right, and a British brand to rival Marmite and King Arthur?

Jonathan Schifman:

Pencils aren’t just for the SATs. It is the go-to drawing tool of the carpenter and the architect, the cartoonist and the painter. We used pencils when we learned math in elementary school, and a graphite-filled piece of wood remains the implement of choice for anyone who needs to make a mark that is not permanent.

The pencil’s journey into your hand has been a 500-year process of discovery and invention. It began in the countryside of northern England, but a one-eyed balloonist from Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, one of America’s most famous philosophers, and some of the world’s most successful scientists and industrialists all have had a hand in the creation and refinement of this humble writing implement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

Walter Russell Mead:

No program epitomized the boomer progressive synthesis better than the efforts to increase black homeownership launched by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Using the power of Fannie Mae and a flexible mortgage market, instructions went out to help get more black and minority families in homes of their own.

There is nothing wrong with the idea in many ways. Home ownership has been the foundation of middle class prosperity and wealth accumulation for many American families: $12.5 trillion in home equity, most of it held by middle class households, provides financial security, dignity and stability to millions of American families. I have written at length about how the owner occupied home replaced the owner-occupied farm as the central institution of American life in the 20th century.

While some black families were able to take advantage of the opportunity, many more were not. From the start of the postwar boom through the 1960s, legal barriers kept blacks out of the housing market in many neighborhoods and subdivisions. Blacks who tried to move into white neighborhoods met with mob violence in some cases, but usually other obstacles kept them “in their place”. Banks discriminated against African American borrowers, “redlined” neighborhoods where blacks lived, and otherwise helped separate black Americans from the most successful middle class wealth creating mechanism in modern American history.

Paul Jossey:

But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned—all that was left were the PACs and their lists.

***

Any postmortem should start with the fact that there were always two Tea Parties. First were people who believe in constitutional conservatism. These folks sense the country they will leave their children and grandchildren is a shell of what they inherited. And they have little confidence the Republican Party can muster the courage or will to fix it.

Second were lawyers and consultants who read 2009’s political winds and saw a chance to get rich.

For 18 months ending in 2013, I worked for one of these consultants, Dan Backer, who has served as treasurer for dozens of PACs, many now defunct, through his law and consulting firm. I thus benefited from the Tea Party’s fleecing.

The PACs seem to operate through a familiar model. It works something like this: Prospects whose name appear on a vendor’s list get a phone call, email or glossy mailer from a group they’ve likely never heard of asking them for money. Conservative pundit and Redstate.com Editor-in-Chief Erick Erickson described one such encounter. A woman called and asked if she could play a taped message touting efforts to help Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz fight for conservative governance. When the recording stopped an older man (the woman was gone) offered Erickson the chance to join “the Tea Party.” He wouldn’t say who paid him, just “the Tea Party.” Membership was even half price. For just $100 he was in! Erickson declined.

Erickson’s call came from InfoCision or a similar vendor hired by PACs to “prospect” for new donors. Often PAC creators have financial interests in the vendors—in fact, sometimes they are the vendors, too—which makes keeping money in house easier, and harder to track. PAC names include “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” “Freedom,” or some other emotive term to assure benevolence. And names and images of political figures the prospects admire (or detest), usually accompany the solicitation, giving the illusion of imprimatur. Those people are almost never actually involved and little money ends up supporting candidates.

According to Federal Election Commission reports between 80 to 90 percent, and sometimes all the money these PACs get is swallowed in fees and poured into more prospecting. For example, conservative activist Larry Ward created Constitutional Rights PAC. He also runs Political Media, a communications firm. The New York Times reviewed Constitutional Rights’ filings and found: “Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising—making no donations to candidates.” Ward justified the arrangement by saying Political Media discounts solicitations on behalf of Constitutional Rights.

Let that sink in. Ward takes his PAC’s money and redistributes it to his company and other vendors for more messaging and solicitations, but suggests critics should rest easy since the PAC gets a discount on Political Media’s normal rate. Constitutional Rights PAC may be extreme but it’s hardly an outlier.

Robert Steinbuch:

A now-former university president once said to me: “the most important title in academia is professor.” Professors are supposed to be given appropriate deference and respect to make critical decisions regarding teaching, research, and service.

Schools are places of inquiry and experimentation. Professors individually manage their spaces. I have seen recurring instances of a growing problem in academia, however, wherein administrators view their roles more like kings than deans. Under this model, administrators not only advise, but also dictate. I’ve seen this phenomenon, and it’s not good. Last year, the National Jurist published an article I wrote critiquing a recent practice at some law schools, including my own, of having new students recite what I call loyalty oaths.

I submitted the link for inclusion in the section of my school’s website dedicated to faculty publications in periodicals. After some time, the Dean informed me that the link to my National Jurist article would not be posted on my school’s website — because my article would not help with student recruitment. Only after a colleague intervened, the Dean reversed himself. I received no explanation why my article then met the administration’s good grace.

Matthew C. Makel, Michael S. Matthews, Scott J. Peters, Karen Rambo-Hernandez, and Jonathan A. Plucker:

America’s K-12 education systems place students in grade levels by age and set performance expectations accordingly, using historical, average grade-level performance rather than any specific content students are expected to master7. This should not surprise us. Nearly all aspects of America’s schools are built upon age-based grade levels and corresponding grade-level expectations: standards, instruction, curriculum, and assessment, among others. Indeed, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like the No Child Left Behind Act before it, has a strong grade-level framework running throughout its nearly 400 pages. The stated importance of “getting students to grade level” reinforces the implicit message that doing so is the primary purpose of schooling. This emphasis ignores an important question: How many students already perform one or more years above grade level on their first day of school?

The answer to this question has profound implications for American education policy and for the organization of schools. If a mere 2% of students perform above grade level, the present obsession with grade-level proficiency might make sense. But what if it were a far larger proportion? If one in every five students has surpassed that criterion before the school year even starts, policymakers would need to re-think the merits of an age-based, grade-level focus.

The purpose of this policy brief is to answer the following foundational question, which should be considered by policymakers and school administrators well before adopting curricula or assessments: How many students perform above grade level?

Before investigating, we canvassed colleagues and friends for their estimates of the percentage of students performing above grade level. Our queries were generally met with bemused silence, followed by hesitant (and quite wide-ranging) estimates, and ended with comments such as, “That seems like a question we should be able to answer, but I just don’t know.”

Prior research in this area is limited. Two data points stand out: textbook and curriculum analyses suggest that intellectual rigor declined significantly over the last hundred years;8 the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented found that teachers, using pre-testing strategies, could eliminate 40-50% of the existing curriculum for advanced elementary school students without causing achievement declines on out-of-level standardized tests.9 The authors noted, “Targeted students had mastered some material in all content areas prior to instruction; at a minimum, they demonstrated mastery of one-fourth of the curriculum for the year before it was taught” (p. 81). A few students in the same study had mastered three-quarters of the upcoming year’s curriculum. This research and related studies suggest that the regular classroom routinely under-challenges advanced students. This work does not, however, provide insight into the matter at hand: How many K-12 students perform above grade level?

L.D. Burnett:

A few years after I graduated from college, short on cash, short on space, and short on hope that I might ever again spend at least part of my days reading and writing and thinking, I made a decision that I have wished many times I could take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks.

The overpriced and understudied behemoth from “Intro to Econ” was easy to part with. And my well-used grammar and exercise books from French I and II? How useful could they be in our tiny apartment, on our tiny budget, with me staying home to take care of our tiny baby? In such straitened circumstances, I didn’t need those books taking up room in my life; I needed whatever money they might bring.

But those were not the only books I culled from my little library. I gathered up Robert Lowell and Alice Walker, Edmund Spenser and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretius and Virginia Woolf, Lorraine Hansberry and Aristotle, Montaigne and Nietzsche, Flaubert, Boethius and Baudelaire, and many others besides — most of them authors I had never so much as heard of before I set foot on the Stanford campus.

Mikita Brottman

It was at this time that I discovered William Burroughs’s Junkie (original subtitle: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict). I knew literature didn’t always have to focus on rich people, or even the middle classes — I’d encountered the noble poor in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and I’d read about the not-so-noble poor in George Orwell and H.G. Wells — but until then I’d never read literature that involved the kind of people Burroughs writes about. I loved horror stories but had read only the kind that elevate ordinary nastiness, making it lofty and supernatural. Junkie does just the opposite, grinding your face in the dirt.

During my first sabbatical year, I started a reading group in a men’s prison outside Baltimore and chose Junkie as one of our books because I thought the inmates would be interested in the unflinching description of the addict’s underworld. Many of these men had been addicts or dealers, and I was curious whether they would recognize themselves in Burroughs’s world.

Michael Lind

Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.

My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.

Patrick Jonsson:

Nikita Bush comes from a family of public school teachers: Her mom, aunts, uncles – nearly all of them have been involved in public education at some level.

But her own teaching career ended, she says, “in heartbreak” when she had to make a decision about where her own child would go to school.
After being reprimanded repeatedly for folding Afro-centric education into her Atlanta classroom, she left. Fifteen years and six children later, Ms. Bush leads a growing homeschooling co-op near Atlanta’s historic West End neighborhood.

Mary Pilon:

On a recent afternoon at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in a dark, windowless, carpeted room, a group of visitors took turns playing on the school’s football team.
Under the protective watch of two lab assistants, I and my fellow visitors each strapped a set of virtual reality goggles to our faces. I listened as my newfound teammates, dressed in crisp white and red jerseys, talked through their plays.

I swiveled my head up to gaze at the blue California skies. When it came time to play, I shuffled my feet to dodge an oncoming athlete and to charge at a foe; and my arms swung as I tried to make myself open for a pass. The experience was tense and exciting, but also jarring; I constantly felt on the cusp of meeting the real-life ground below me.

Elvia Malagon , Rosemary Regina Sobol and Alexandra Chachkevitch:

Her hair braided carefully around a white bandage, 6-year-old Zariah McCray-Muhammad held onto her mother with one hand and a dozen balloons with the other as she returned home in Chatham Sunday, three days after being shot in the head.

Hours later, about six miles away, 6-year-old India Tucker just got back from the beach when two young men stepped out of a gangway, shouted a gang slogan and opened fire, according to police and her family. India was hit in the right arm, breaking a bone.

Kristin Rizga:

A few weeks ago, the Movement for Black Lives, the network that also includes Black Lives Matter organizers, released its first-ever policy agenda. Among the organization’s six demands and dozens of policy recommendations was a bold education-related stance: a moratorium on both charter schools and public school closures. Charters, the agenda argues, represent a shift of public funds and control over to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.

The statement came several weeks after another civil rights titan, the NAACP, also passed a resolution, calling for a freeze on the growth of charter schools. The NAACP had equated charters with privatization in previous resolutions, but this year’s statement—which will not become policy until the National Board meeting in the fall—represents the strongest anti-charter language to date, according to Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education leadership and education chair of the NAACP’s California State Conference. “The NAACP is really concerned about unregulated growth of charter schools, and says it’s time to pause and take stock,” says Vasquez Heilig, who posted a copy of the resolution on his blog.

Brian Jacob:

Testing is ubiquitous in education. From placement in specialized classes to college admissions, standardized exams play a large role in a child’s educational career. The introduction of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001, which required states to test all students in grades 3-8 in reading and math, dramatically increased the prevalence and use of test scores for education policymaking.

Contrary to popular belief, all modern cognitive assessments—including the new Common Core tests—produce test scores based on sophisticated statistical models rather than the simple percent of items a student answers correctly. There are good reasons for this, as explained below. The downside is that what we see as consumers of test scores depends on decisions made by the designers of the tests about characteristics of those models and their implementation. These details are typically hidden in dense technical documentation, if publicly available at all.

Elliot Dordick:

A group of students at the Claremont Colleges in search of a roommate insist that the roommate not be white.

Student Karé Ureña (PZ ’18) posted on Facebook that non-white students in need of housing arrangements should reach out to either her or two other students with whom she plans to live in an off-campus house. The post states that “POC [people of color] only” will be considered for this living opportunity. “I don’t want to live with any white folks,” Ureña added.

“This is directed to protect POC, not white people. Don’t see how this is racist at all…”

Dalia Zada (PZ ’18) expressed concerns to the anti-white discrimination. “‘POC only?’ Maybe I’m missing something or misunderstanding your post, but how is that not a racist thing to say?”

“This is directed to protect POC, not white people. Don’t see how this is racist at all…” responded AJ León (PZ ’18), a member of the Pitzer Latino Student Union.

“People of color are allowed to create safe POC only spaces. It is not reverse racism or discriminatory, it is self preservation [sic],” Sara Roschdi (PZ ’17), another Pitzer Latino Student Union member, stated. “Reverse racism isn’t a thing.”

Peter Pomerantsev:

As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no longer matter much in the land of the free. When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.

How did we get here? Is it due to technology? Economic globalisation? The culmination of the history of philosophy? There is some sort of teenage joy in throwing off the weight of facts – those heavy symbols of education and authority, reminders of our place and limitations – but why is this rebellion happening right now?

Daniel Oberhaus:

On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik entered the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California and opened fire on the attendees of a holiday party underway inside. After four minutes of shooting, the married couple fled the scene and left 19 dead in their wake. At the time, it was the deadliest act of terrorism in the United States since 9/11.

Farook and Malik were both killed in a shootout with authorities later that day, and in the weeks that followed the tragedy, it became apparent that this act of terrorism was an inciting incident in the renewal of another war which began over 20 years ago. This war, however, is only tangentially related to religiously motivated terrorism. Rather, its frontline combatants are programmers and hackers, the battlefield is cyberspace and the munitions are lines of code.

It is Crypto War 2.0, and its outcome will affect every internet user on Earth, for better or worse.

Peggy Noonan:

with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.

Rebecca Klein:

Knightdale, N.C. — It was just a dumb fight. Two boys, both juniors, stood in the hallway discussing a classic teenage hypothetical: whether one of them could win in a fight against another student. But when one of the teens, Scott, said he didn’t think his friend could win, things turned personal.

They flung curse words back and forth that Thursday morning in March, lurching through the hallway of Knightdale High School, slamming into a row of lockers and tripping over a trashcan. A video shot by another student shows a teacher breaking up the fight after a few seconds, and both teens ending up on the ground, hurt only in pride.

Thomas Donlan:

Knocking five-hundredths of a second off a world-record race time, adding five inches to a world-record height, or lifting five more kilograms beyond a world record are minor accomplishments in every sense except two: the amount of time and effort required of the winning and losing athletes, and the amount of money wasted in building new facilities for each new Olympic Games, most of which aren’t used much afterward.

It still could be worthwhile if Olympians went on to new excellence after their last time on the podium. But that is rare, unless we count those who become coaches for the next generation of academic dropouts.

Larry Hardesty

Genome-wide association studies, which try to find correlations between particular genetic variations and disease diagnoses, are a staple of modern medical research.

But because they depend on databases that contain people’s medical histories, they carry privacy risks. An attacker armed with genetic information about someone — from, say, a skin sample — could query a database for that person’s medical data. Even without the skin sample, an attacker who was permitted to make repeated queries, each informed by the results of the last, could, in principle, extract private data from the database.

In the latest issue of the journal Cell Systems, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Indiana University at Bloomington describe a new system that permits database queries for genome-wide association studies but reduces the chances of privacy compromises to almost zero.

Sata Hajaian, Carlos Castillo & Francesco Bianchi:

Algorithms and decision making based on Big Data have become pervasive in all aspects of our daily (offline and online) lives, as they have become essential tools in personal finance, health care, hiring, housing, education, and policies. Data and algorithms determine the media we consume, the stories we read, the people we meet, the places we visit, but also whether we get a job, or whether our loan request is approved. It is therefore of societal and ethical importance to ask whether these algorithms can be discriminative on grounds, such as gender, ethnicity, marital or health status. It turns out that the answer is positive: for instance, recent studies have shown that Google’s online advertising system displayed ads for high-income jobs to men much more often than it did to women; and ads for arrest records were significantly more likely to show up on searches for distinctively black names or a historically black fraternity.

Cyrus Farivar

Eventually we were led to Brittany Bir, the school’s chief operating officer. She tried to answer our most fundamental question: why offer a free coding school?

“I do know that what [Niel] has been very interested in doing is to fill this gap that we have with Web developers to get projects to advance so that we can continue to evolve as a society and a community together,” she said.

“If we put up barriers to education with money or with backgrounds, that means there are innovative talents and individuals that are not able to have access to education. So the idea behind 42 is to create an opportunity where individuals from all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of financial backgrounds, can come and have access to this kind of education so that then we can have new kinds of ideas. Because in order to innovate, you need to have new people who think differently.”

For now, the school clearly needs to do much more outreach, particularly to women: when we visited, 81 percent of the students were men.

“We’re only limited by the amount of women that want to apply to the program,” she said. “For us, we’re more than willing to take in more women, but more need to apply.”

Jump in, the water’s fine

Jon Entine:

Is this running’s “smoking gun” gene? No. Sports ability, like IQ, is the product of many genes with environmental triggers influencing the “expression” of our base DNA. But its isolation does underscore that when it comes to performance, genes circumscribe possibility.

As UCLA professor Jared Diamond has noted, “Even today, few scientists dare to study racial origins, lest they be branded racists just for being interested in the subject.”

But we have no choice but to face this third rail of genetics and sports. Over the past decade, human genome research has moved from a study of human similarities to a focus on patterned based differences. Such research offers clues to solving the mystery of diseases, the Holy Grail of genetics.

Kristin Holmes:

WHEN JALAAL HAYES of North Philadelphia applied to a doctoral program in applied chemistry, even the admissions staff at Delaware State University did a double take.

Hayes was but 18.

Surely he had mistakenly checked the box next to graduate school. His application was dispatched to the undergraduate division.
Eventually, it came back.

The teenager, who had graduated from high school at 15, and from college at 18 – with two bachelor’s degrees, no less – knew exactly what he was doing.

And last month he made a bit of history.
At 22, Hayes became the youngest student to earn a doctorate at the Dover school since the 124-year-old historically black university began granting Ph.D.s in 2004.

Neil Gross:

THE white working-class men who are planning to vote for Donald J. Trump this November have been called many things: xenophobic, racist, misogynist, dangerously naïve. But even if those descriptions are true, it doesn’t mean these men were fated to be Trump supporters. Recent research in social science and history suggests that they might have been out front in the fight against Mr. Trump — if only the American labor movement weren’t a shell of its former self.

When we think about unions, what typically come to mind are interest groups concerned with wages, benefits and working conditions. Scholars, however, have shown what everyone in politics knows instinctively: Unions are also political organizations that, under the right circumstances, can powerfully channel the working-class vote.

Frank Bruni:

This summer, as last, Dylan Hernandez, 17, noticed a theme on the social media accounts of fellow students at his private Catholic high school in Flint, Mich.

“An awfully large percentage of my friends — skewing towards the affluent — are taking ‘mission trips’ to Central America and Africa,” he wrote to me in a recent email. He knows this from pictures they post on Snapchat and Instagram, typically showing one of them “with some poor brown child aged 2 to 6 on their knee,” he explained. The captions tend to say something along the lines of, “This cutie made it so hard to leave.”

The Madison School District is considering another property tax increase referendum for the upcoming November election.

We’ve long spent more than most districts (“plenty of resources”), despite challenging academic outcomes. I thought it might be useful to revisit the choices homeowners and parents make. I’ve compared two properties, one in Middleton (2015 assessment: $257,500.00) and the other in Madison (2015 assessment slightly less: $249,300.00).

A Middleton parent/homeowner pays less over the years, with the difference growing significantly in recent times (note that my example Madison property features a 3.2% lower assessed value).

Tap to view a larger version of these images.

It is useful to review the assumptions in the District’s limited 2017-2019 budget disclosure document (lacks total spending….) 900K PDF. Related memo and proposed language.

Wisconsin redistributed taxpayer K-12 (and higher ed) spending: 2004-2014. Details below:

Tap for a larger version. Excel or Numbers versions.

Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 budget, charts, documents, links, background and missing numbers:

Where have all the students gone?

In closing, I’ve found that full budget information is much easier to find and review from Boston (spends more, but has lots of student choice) and Long Beach (spends quite a bit less per student, but offers more student choice).

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham mentioned Boston and Long Beach as urban districts that have narrowed the achievement gap. Both districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.

Daniel Douglas-Gabriel:

The Federal Communications Commission issued rules Thursday restricting companies from bombarding Americans with cellphone calls to collect any money owed to or guaranteed by the government, including federal student loans, mortgages and taxes.

“Consumers want and deserve control over the calls and text messages they receive,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in a statement. “It is vital that we continue to use all the tools at our disposal to help protect consumers against unwanted calls.”

The new rules tighten a provision that was tucked into last fall’s congressional budget deal, amending a law meant to protect people from being harassed or inundated with text messages and calls that could run up their cellphone bills. Consumer advocates were livid at Congress for sneaking in a proposal that many said would unleash a deluge of unwanted calls and place a financial burden on people of modest means with limited cellphone plans.

Karol Markowicz

Only about 10% of high school students and 20% of college students admit to smoking marijuana in the last 30 days, but good statistics on teenage marijuana use are difficult to come by. Teenagers aren’t going to be forthcoming about a practice that remains illegal in the great majority of states around the country. And while Malia was doing something fairly typical for young people, one thing that was atypical for the average person smoking weed was her lack of risk. While it’s certainly unpleasant to have her video shared, no one is going to be arresting the president’s daughter for smoking pot. Yet that’s something that happens to many people every day all over the country.

The concert Malia was attending was in Chicago. A few years ago, Chicago loosened up its fairly strict marijuana laws. Now possession of a small amount of marijuana gets you a ticket instead of an arrest, but the fine is several hundred dollars. Smoking in public, however, is a different offense and can easily lead to arrest. No one is arguing that Malia should be arrested for her smoking (if she was) — but then why should anyone be arrested for it? The rules should apply to everyone, including the president’s family, in the same way. And it’s the rules themselves that need changing. A Federal ban on marijuana remains in place, even in states that have legalized it. If the president’s Harvard-bound daughter is smoking marijuana without repercussions, perhaps other people should have the same benefit.

Malia’s seeming indiscretion was revealed during the same week that Michael Phelps took home his 22nd gold medal. Phelps had also been caught smoking pot on video in 2009. It does not seem to have hindered his success.

Aleszu Bajak:

hen his son Sam was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at six months of age, Doug Melton was incredulous. “I remember at night, my wife and I pricking his heel, and saying ‘No, this can’t be, this can’t be,’” he says. “It felt like we had lost the lottery.”

Later, his daughter would receive the same diagnosis. By then, Melton had already dropped what he was doing—studying frog eggs at Harvard—and launched an effort to grow pancreatic cells from scratch in his lab. The beta cells of the pancreas are the ones killed off in type 1 diabetes, and Melton reasoned he could replace them using new tissue manufactured from embryonic stem cells.

Melton’s effort, involving a 30-person lab at Harvard and a startup company, Semma Therapeutics, which he named after his children, Sam and Emma, is one of the most costly and sustained efforts to turn stem cells into transplantable tissue, an attempt that Melton admits has been full of false starts and dead ends. “The public definitely doesn’t appreciate that much of science is failure,” he says.

In fact, no field of biotechnology has promised more and delivered less in the way of treatments than embryonic stem cells. Only a handful of human studies has ever been carried out, without significant results. The cells, culled from IVF embryos, are capable of developing into any other tissue type in the body, and therefore promise an unlimited supply of replacement tissue.

Our World in Data.

Abby Shachter:

The adults and the kids lose trust in the people who are charged with keeping us safe and healthy, and the kids are kept from developing necessary life skills like self-reliance, creativity, intuition, and grit. The overreaction of the nanny state to young people who are allowed to operate independently feeds the already overly-developed anxiety of too many parents regarding their kids’ freedom. Moreover, look at any bookstore’s shelf of current titles on education, child development, sociology, and public policy, and you’ll see one analysis after another of why deficiencies of these characteristics in our children is hurtful to us all.

In 2007 Lenore Skenazy caused an uproar when she wrote a newspaper column about allowing her nine-year-old son Izzy to ride the subway by himself. After her initial decision to let Izzy off his previously tight parental leash, she endured numerous phone conversations with the police to defend her choice. And as she explained it to me, she now believes that society is “criminalizing things that used to be perfectly OK, such as punishing parents for trying to raise independent children, [something that] used to be a value and now is worth a hefty fine or a stint in lock-up.”

Jo Livingston:

What is academic writing?
JL: You’ve used the term “academic writing” with me before, as an insult. Where did you get this term, and what does it mean?

DW: Well, obviously the thought is not original to me! There’s a stereotype — which is wrong on many levels, and I’m not endorsing it — that journalists write good, plain, intelligible, clear sentences which everyone understands, whereas academics write torturous, confusing, hermetic, boring shit that no one would want to read unless they were also an academic. They don’t realize they’re doing this: they’re oblivious to the fact that they are writing in an academic way. This is the stereotype.

JL: This stereotype does match reality sometimes. Often an academic thinks they are clarifying when in fact they’re obfuscating, if the reader doesn’t share the same vocabulary of professional terms.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

Is the US facing a critical shortage of STEM skills? Do we have enough STEM workers to meet the demands of the labor market? Are enough young people choosing STEM careers so we can meet future demands?

Such serious concerns have been expressed in a number of national studies over the past two decades. In 2005, for example, the National Innovation Initiative listed “Build the Base of Scientists and Engineers” as one of its top recommendations, noting that “unless the United States takes swift action, the demand for S&E talent will far outstrip supply. The number of jobs requiring technical training is growing at five times the rate of other occupations.”

Ars Technica:

Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen “countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.

Danielle Dreilinger:

Louisiana Education Superintendent John White has a radical solution to get 362 voucher students off waitlists: Enroll now, the state will pay later.

These students have all been granted taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private school. But the budget ran short by about $2 million, generating anguish and attention for families that had already made their plans and, in some cases, purchased uniforms.

If private schools agree to enroll these students anyway, without a guarantee of payment, White will go to the Legislature in the spring and ask lawmakers for more money, he said. But if lawmakers’ answer is no, the schools would get less than $100 per child.

Locally, a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Brad Heath:

Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.
Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.

DEA agents have profiled passengers on Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports from a network of travel-industry informants that extends from ticket counters to back offices, a USA TODAY investigation has found. Agents assigned to airports and train stations singled out passengers for questioning or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to California or having paid for a ticket in cash.

Sasha Van Oldershausen:

Border Protection won’t let me ride in their blimp. Hovering dreamily above the desert’s horizon, it’s as alien to the landscape as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float—Snoopy-like in proportion—that broke loose from its tethers on Sixth Avenue and rode an arid breeze all the way to West Texas.

It turns out no one can ride in the blimp, because it isn’t a blimp at all. According to Bill Brooks, the CBP spokesperson for the Big Bend sector, it’s a Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS), an unmanned aircraft with a constitution considerably less cheery than Snoopy’s.

Moored somewhere between the tiny Far West Texas towns of Marfa and Valentine, the TARS is equipped with a 2,200-pound radar that can detect any low-flying aircraft within a 200-mile range. One of eight of the CBP’s “eyes in the sky” spanning the southern border of the U.S.—three of which reside in Texas—its purpose is to catch any narcotics that might be traveling across that dividing line.

David Dayen:

This goes back to the core issue: Incumbents prospering from a system don’t have much interest in seeing it change. And those wanting to reform the system must challenge those incumbents. It’s easier to single out the easy villains, the Sallie Maes and the Corinthian Colleges. But that just sidesteps the real opponent, and will lead to something far less than reform.

Most colleges are seen in a fairly benevolent light. Large higher-education institutions are often major employers in their communities. They drive innovation, and provide sanctuary to some of our best thinkers. And for many adults, they are wrapped in the warm and fuzzy gauze of nostalgia. It’s hard to get people to see them as propping up a crisis that is over-burdening students and even stunting the growth of our economy. But until we do, it’s going to be very difficult to see any change.

Bimyanin Applebaum & Michael Shear:

The Obama administration in its first seven years finalized 560 major regulations — those classified by the Congressional Budget Office as having particularly significant economic or social impacts. That was nearly 50 percent more than the George W. Bush administration during the comparable period, according to data kept by the regulatory studies center at George Washington University.

An army of lawyers working under Mr. Obama’s authority has sought to restructure the nation’s health care and financial industries, limit pollution, bolster workplace protections and extend equal rights to minorities. Under Mr. Obama, the government has literally placed a higher value on human life.

“We know best.”

Conor Friedersdorf:

On November 18, 2011, Lieutenant John Pike, a University of California police officer, approached lawfully assembled student protesters seated peacefully on a campus quad in Davis and ordered them to disperse. When they refused, he attacked them with a chemical agent that causes pain, temporary blindness, and breathing difficulties. A subsequent investigation found that Pike’s use of force was “objectively unreasonable”; that he was neither trained nor authorized to carry the weapon he used to dispense pepper spray; that he abdicated his duties as an incident commander; and that he wasn’t alone in sharing responsibility for the brutal incident, which disgraced UC Davis in the eyes of many who watched it.

Among other culprits, the investigation blamed UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, who bore some culpability for the decision to remove students from the quad, the dubious timing of the operation, and the failure to convey that force should not be used. She said at the time that she took “full responsibility” for what happened. Ever since, student activists have been calling for her resignation.

California’s median household income is $61,933. Assistant professors at UC Davis earn about $80,000.

“After resigning Tuesday as UC Davis chancellor under a cloud of controversy, Linda P.B. Katehi will take advantage of a University of California perk that allows campus leaders to receive chancellor-level pay with few responsibilities for one year,” the Sacramento Bee reports. “Katehi will continue to receive her salary of $424,360 plus retirement and health benefits, but she will not have to teach classes in her transition year, after which she plans to become a UC Davis engineering professor.”

The Economist:

It is naughty. Perhaps its most beloved character is Onkel Reje (“Uncle Shrimp”), a sailor-themed character in a red suit with a scruffy beard. He picks his nose. His stinky socks tell each other jokes. But much more than that, in the best Danish tradition, he mocks beloved institutions: his grandmother lights a fart on fire. He says the worst gift he ever got for Christmas—from Queen Margarethe herself—was the washbasin she washes her bare bottom in. And God he says, lives in heaven with Santa Claus and their dog Marianne, implying that the Supreme Being is not only imaginary, but also gay.

DR should have known this is what they would get when they hired, for the actor playing Onkel Reje, Mads Geertsen, had previously recorded as a kind of avant-garde musician under the name Je m’appelle Mads. It boggles the mind that the producers at Ramasjang saw this video—in which a mostly naked Mads offers rude tributes to Denmark like a dancing pack of cigarettes and a cow pooing—and said “let’s give that man a children’s show.”

Cyborgology

As we saw previously, Thiel was ruminating on Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard in the summer of 2004, but also on the future of social media platforms, which he found himself in a position to help shape. It is worth adding that around the same time, Thiel was involved in the founding of Palantir Technologies, a data analysis company whose main clients are the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense – a company explicitly founded, according to Thiel, to forestall acts of destabilizing violence like 9/11. One may speculate that Thiel understood Facebook to serve a parallel function. According to his own account, he identified the new platform as a powerful conduit of mimetic desire. In Girard’s account, the original conduits of mimetic desire were religions, which channeled socially destructive, “profane” violence into sanctioned forms of socially consolidating violence. If the sacrificial and juridical superstructures designed to contain violence had reached their limits, Thiel seemed to understand social media as a new, technological means to achieving comparable ends.

If we take Girard’s mimetic theory seriously, the consequences for the way we think about social media are potentially profound. For one, it would lead us to conclude that social media platforms, by channeling mimetic desire, also serve as conduits of the violence that goes along with it. That, in turn, would suggest that abuse, harassment, and bullying – the various forms of scapegoating that have become depressing constants of online behavior – are features, not bugs: the platforms’ basic social architecture, by concentrating mimetic behavior, also stokes the tendencies toward envy, rivalry, and hatred of the Other that feed online violence. From Thiel’s perspective, we may speculate, this means that those who operate those platforms are in the position to harness and manipulate the most powerful and potentially destabilizing forces in human social life – and most remarkably, to derive profits from them. For someone overtly concerned about the threat posed by such forces to those in positions of power, a crucial advantage would seem to lie in the possibility of deflecting violence away from the prominent figures who are the most obvious potential targets of popular ressentiment, and into internecine conflict with other users.

Samantha Cole:

A law proposed by Italy’s center-right political party Forza Italia would charge parents with neglect if they force their children to eat a vegan diet.

The bill, proposed by Italian parliament member Elvira Savino, states: “There is no objection if the person making this choice is an informed adult. The problem arises when children are involved… The vegetarian or vegan diet is, in fact, deficient in zinc, iron, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and omega-3.”

This comes after several cases in the last 18 months of malnourished children being hospitalized in Italy as a result of a vegan diet, according to the BBC. Italy has the highest population of vegetarians in the EU, at 10 percent. For comparison, in the U.S., seven percent of adults identify as vegan. Whether or not veganism is appropriate for babies and young children is a hotly debated subject, but improving public education around nutrition might be a better option than sending parents of young kids to prison.

Eric Boehm

If public service truly is a sacrifice, then join me in shedding a tear for the 20,900 public workers in California who pulled down more than $100,000 in retirement benefits during 2015.

Thanks to Transparent California, a project of the Nevada Policy Research Group, you can now check out the retirement benefits for the more than 625,000 people who drew a pension last year from the California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS.

Leading the way for 2015 was Michael Johnson. The former Solano County administrator received a $388,407 pension last year. There are some payouts for 2015 that exceeded Johnson’s because they included one-time settlements, but Transparent California considers his pension to be the richest in the state because it’s the highest annual payment.

:

Katie Miller recently graduated from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Md., where she was captain of the tennis team, leader of the spoken-word poetry club and edited her school literary magazine. She loves music and writing and is very relieved to be finished with the painful process of applying to colleges. Here, she reflects on what she learned along the way. — Susan Svrluga

At my lowest moment during the college application process, I closed the blinds in my room and buried my head in despair.

My email was filling up with rejections from schools that I had worked so hard to impress with my applications. Even worse, my phone was buzzing with texts and Facebook posts from friends who were getting good news from their first choice schools — some of which had turned me away.

Two months later, I feel much better. I ended up with a fistful of rejections, but ultimately had two great options: the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. The school I chose didn’t start near the top of my list.

But then, nothing about this insanely unpredictable process went as I expected.

Ericka Mellon:

The Houston school board signed off Thursday on a $1.2 million price tag for the renaming of eight schools named after Confederate loyalists.

John Robb:

Here’s a simple overview of what is increasingly becoming the dominant method of offensive warfare in the 21st Century. Early applications of this methodology to modern conflict have been very successful. In short, it’s better to understand its dynamics than to assume it doesn’t exist.

Matteo Cantielo:

The paradox of 21st-century science is that increasingly complex and collaborative cutting-edge research is still being written and published using 20th-century tools.

The essential question—How come the internet age has yet to deliver a collaborative writing and publishing tool for research?—is what two of my physicist friends and I were thinking about several years ago while working at CERN, before we started Authorea. It didn’t occur to us then, but in retrospect it seems like CERN—the birthplace of the World Wide Web—was the perfect place to hatch our new idea.