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.

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

Amy Curtis:

Did you hear that women’s trap shooter Corey Cogdell-Unrein won her second career Olympic medal for the U.S. team in Rio this weekend? Did you cheer for Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszú, who won the gold and broke a world record in 400-meter individual medley? Or were you too distracted by the media commentary about their husbands?

Thus begins this piece by Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, an 800-plus word lament about women Olympians also being…gasp!…wives and mothers. And the media…gasp!…reporting on it.

The left likes to bill itself as “progressive” — eschewing the “oppressive” and “traditional” cultural norms for a better, more enlightened world where women are equal (because we apparently aren’t), people of different cultures hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” (despite real conflicts between, say, ISIS and Western values), and your home is powered by environmentally friendly unicorn farts.

Yet it is the left that ignores, denies, or victim blames women when they are assaulted by refugees in Europe. It is the left that obsesses about an American woman wearing a hijab in the Olympics (never mind the cultural oppression that garment symbolizes for many women around the world). It is the left that clings to regressive economic ideas like socialism and failed attempts at green energy.

Joseph Cox:

“Put simply, you can’t look through walls of a home without a search warrant,” the presentation neatly summarizes. This is the same advice given to agents by a separate FBI presentation on drone use.

Elsewhere, the presentation includes safety information, such as when to bring oxygen tanks onto an aircraft, and what the pilot needs to do before takeoff (ensure that each person has been notified to fasten his or her seat belt). Plenty of information about regulation is included too, such as a lengthy section on how FBI agents planning to fly do indeed require a pilot’s license.

Joward Blume & Sonali Kohli:

The star of an annual kickoff event for the new school year in Los Angeles was a number: 75%, the highest graduation rate ever tabulated by the nation’s second-largest school system.

That achievement, announced by L.A. Unified Supt. Michelle King on Tuesday at Garfield High School, brought acclaim from an audience of administrators and dignitaries, but also led some to wonder again whether such improvement is real.

Citizen Stewart:

Education reform is in a bad place right now, but the conditions that justify it are as strong as ever. Constantly under attack by people who want us to believe public schools are not failing (or, if they are, its through no fault of their own), reformers rarely pierce that bubble with the cold facts. Even when we do we are subject to a legion of system defenders with goal: to take us out.

I’ve encountered a few personas in education advocacy that do more to set us further back than to advance ideas that will change the game for poor students, and I think it’s worth sharing.

But first, a little context…

Alexander Holt:

Cosmopolitan elites will also like how Basic Income helps prevent the proletariat from revolting without too many invasive policy solutions. Urban poor will like Basic Income because it will increase their incomes, and also frees them from demeaning parochial meddling of administrators telling them how they can and cannot spend their money (i.e., food stamps).

To be sure, many Democrats will oppose Basic Income. They will argue that it will dismantle parts of the social welfare state (which it will). These Social Democrats will be wary that Basic Income will replace various safety nets. But with big business and urban elites in favor of the idea, there’s a good chance the Democratic Party will come to embrace Basic Income.

Ben Steverman:

ways to be poor. Some people just don’t earn much money. Almost 15 percent of Americans, or 47 million people, live below the poverty line1, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Then there are the people loaded up with debt. Even people with good jobs can owe so much on credit cards, student loans, or mortgages that, on paper, they’re worth less than zero.

households fall into this category, with a negative net worth, according to an analysis this month by the New York Federal Reserve. Add up all their possessions—cash, property, retirement accounts—and subtract all their debts, and one in seven Americans ends up in the red.

American Interest:

When the housing bubble burst and sent the economy into a tailspin, the college bubble started to inflate even more rapidly. Desperate to compete in a brutal labor market, workers faced intensifying pressures to rack up degrees. Colleges (even marginal institutions) found a pool of captive consumers willing to pay high prices for their dubious credentials. And businesses, which had a dominant edge in the slack labor market, had the luxury of tossing out applicants without impressive educational histories.

But now that the labor market is tightening, each of these dynamics is changing, and the artificially inflated value of a college degree may be starting to come back down to earth. USA Today reports:

Teresea Watanabe:

Two starkly different portrayals of Linda Katehi emerged Tuesday after she resigned her post just moments ahead of the release of a report on an independent investigation into her tenure as UC Davis chancellor.

One – propagated by her attorney, Melinda Guzman – was of a strong and accomplished public servant who was cleared of all charges in a bruising and unfair witch hunt.

“Linda Katehi and her family have been exonerated from baseless accusations of nepotism, conflicts of interest, financial management and personal gain, just as we predicted and as the UC Davis Academic Senate found within days of this leave,” Guzman said.

The other – put forward by UC President Janet Napolitano – was of a deeply flawed administrator who, investigators found, had shown poor judgment, violated multiple university policies and misled, even lied to, her superiors, the public and the media.

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.

Alan Borsuk:

Several years ago, the student council at a private school in the suburbs came up with an April Fool’s prank: They arranged for word to be spread on the day before April 1 that the school was going to require students to wear uniforms in the coming school year, and details would be announced the next day.

Students were outraged. Some immediately said they would change schools, some started organizing protests, some called their parents who called the school office. The school quickly moved to put out the fire, with no waiting until the next day. No, there would be no uniforms.

Who would have thought that kids cared so much about what they can and can’t, do and don’t, wear to school? Only people who ever went through puberty might have suspected this was the case.

School dress codes, including required uniforms at some schools, don’t usually make headlines. I don’t recall that I’ve ever written about this.

Tyler O’Neil:

At age 13, Simone Biles broke down in tears. She had decided not to attend a normal high school, opting for homeschooling in order to practice her gymnastics.

“I was just so lonely all the time,” Biles told The Undefeated’s Lonnae O’Neal. “I missed, like, all my friends at school and stuff. But I mean, in the end, it worked out.”

That would be an understatement. In 2013, she became the United States champion at the U.S. National Gymnastics Championships, and then went on to win the 2013 World Championships in Belgium.

At the global event, she won four medals — two of them gold — and became the first female African-American all-around world champion. In 2014 and 2015, she held on to her title, and racked up 10 gold medals from those three world championships.

Carrie Lukas:

A recent study may provide insight into why college women are more likely than men to leave science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) majors, and what could be done to solve this problem.

Researchers discovered that first-year calculus class leads many students—but particularly women—to drop out of STEM. Why are women more likely to make an exit? As Education Week reports, women on average start and end their first college calculus course with less confidence in their math skills compared to similarly-skilled male peers. The study suggests that boosting women’s confidence and encouraging them to stick with STEM in spite of Calculus 1 could dramatically increase the number of female STEM majors and women in these lucrative fields.

Josh Zumbrun:

The credit card is coming back, even among people with the lowest credit scores.

In the second quarter, total household debt increased by $35 billion to $12.3 trillion, according to the New York Fed’s latest quarterly report on household debt. That increase was driven by two categories: auto loans and credit cards.

While auto loans have been rising at a steady clip for the past six years, rising credit-card balances are a new development. After the recession, households cut back on credit-card use until 2014. Since then, card balances have risen by about $70 billion.

Alec MacGillis & Propublica:

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.

LA School Report:

Three people in the last 10 days have filed with the city Ethics Commission an intent to raise money to challenge Monica Garcia for school board in District 2, and one person has entered the race for the vacant seat in District 6, which is held by Monica Ratliff, who is running for City Council.

Manuel Aldana Jr., Walter R. Bannister and Berny Motto have joined Carl Petersen in challenging Garcia.

Araz Parseghian will run in District 6 and is the only candidate to declare an intent to do so.

Campaign finance reports show Garcia dominating in early fundraising. She raised about $120,000 in the first six months of this year. Petersen, who ran unsuccessfully in 2015 for the District 3 seat, raised $805 in the same period.

Unfortunately, Madison’s non-diverse K-12 system has lacked governance competition for a number of years. This, despite our tolerance of long term, disastrous reading results.

org theory:

Among higher ed policy folks, there’s a counter-conventional wisdom that there is no student loan crisis. For the most part (the story goes), student loans are a good investment that will increase future wages, and students could borrow quite a bit more before the value of the debt might be called into question. Indeed, some have argued that many students are too reluctant to borrow, and should take on more debt.

Just this month, two new pieces came out that reiterate this counter-narrative: a book by Urban Institute economist Sandy Baum, and a report by the Council of Economic Advisers. Yes, everyone agrees the system’s not perfect, and tweaks need to be made. (Susan Dynarski, for example, argues that repayment periods need to be longer.) Fundamentally, though, the system is sound. Or so goes the story.

What can we make of this disconnect between the conventional wisdom—that we are in the throes of a student loan crisis—and this counter-conventional story?

To understand it, it’s worth thinking about three different student loan crises. Or “crises”, depending on your sympathies.

Nancy Shepherdson:

Almost every man at the prison, which is located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, has been sentenced to a minimum of 20 years; some have been sentenced to life without parole. And because of Illinois truth-in-sentencing laws, many of those serving time for murder expect to remain behind bars for their entire sentence, with no time off for good behavior. It is a place that is ripe for desperation and despair. Yet, in a battered classroom on prison grounds, a serious college-level discussion is taking place. Under exposed fluorescent lights, behind a barred door, fighting to be heard over a noisy fan, liberal arts professor Christina Gómez, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, calls on Ruben Hernandez, who is serving a 60-year sentence. He is eager to read his homework essay: “How does language influence my identity? When I speak, people find out that I’m not that uneducated Mexican. Yes, I’m from Durango and also from Chicago. Mi gente … we are all one people, Homo sapiens, and we all bleed the same.”
Gómez mildly criticizes him for “code-switching” in the Spanish phrase mi gente (my people), and thus using an idiom only some of his audience would fully comprehend. Mi gente is well understood here, he argues. “People know what it means in here and you should make word choices to grab your audience,” he says, arching his eyebrows at his fellow students, emphasizing a concept Gómez has taught. There are 15 other men in the class, most with black or brown faces, and many of them smile knowingly. They are halfway through their 14-week class in Latino history and culture and they know audience-grabbing when they hear it.

After Ruben speaks, Gómez moves into a discussion of a reading from a book she co-edited, Mi Voz, Mi Vida (My Voice, My Life): Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories, which is a collection of essays written by Dartmouth College students. Many in the class identify with the student narrator Eric, who struggles with his beliefs after his mother dies while he is attending college. “How do we decide what we value in life?” Gómez asks the class. It’s a classic humanities question, incredibly broad, hard to answer, and yet very, very important.

Unlike many college students, who are sometimes unwilling to risk embarrassing themselves in front of their peers, the men in the class at Stateville are eager to share their views and what they have learned from the readings. Ruben and the other students discuss whether they are free to live as they choose or if their lives are determined by their place in “the system.” Ruben is convinced that his current troubles stem entirely from wanting more than he really needs. “My needs are simple now, but there is no doubt in my mind that if I wasn’t arrested for murder, I would have been murdered myself.” Carlos Priester, who has been in prison for 17 years and has 23 more to serve, has a more hopeful attitude: “You want to be able to supply your family’s needs, and I won’t let being a convicted felon stand in my way. I know people who are convicted felons and they own property.”

Atlas Obscura:

If you think getting a college education is tough today, try earning a degree in Russian-controlled Poland in the late 19th century. If you were a man, you couldn’t be taught anything at university outside of the state-sanctioned curriculum, which was bad enough, but if you were a woman, you weren’t allowed to attend at all.

That’s where the Flying University, which produced Marie Curie and thousands of other students, came in.

By the middle of the 1860s, Poland had been parceled up between Russian, Prussian, and Austrian powers. One of the first things the country’s new rulers did was set out to limit and control Polish education. Like so many colonizing powers before and since, they knew that the first step in stamping out that pesky nationalism was to take it out of the history books. The Germanization and Russification efforts (depending on what political power controlled the part of Poland where you lived) aimed at higher education made it nearly impossible for the citizenry to take part in a curriculum that wasn’t in some way working to erase Polish culture. Even the teaching of Catholicism among a largely-Catholic population was taboo.

Sarah Jackson:

At a summit in San Francisco in January, Ralph Smith, who leads the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, called on the early childhood field to do a better job of partnering with parents in improving outcomes for young children. “Our job,” Smith said, “is to help parents envision a bold future for their own children and then help them to attain that future.”

Yet working closely with parents can be a challenge, particularly in cities with large populations of low-income parents and recent immigrants who may face language or cultural barriers to accessing services, and whose children are not yet in the public school system. Or so people assume. A new survey of low-income, often immigrant, parents suggests otherwise.

Ian Talley:

But Mr. Piketty’s thesis, posed by the French economist in his controversial 2013 tome “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” isn’t proved by historical data, says International Monetary Fund economist Carlos Góes.

“There is little more than some apparent correlations the reader can eyeball in charts,” Mr. Góes says in a new paper published by the IMF. “While rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain.”

Mr. Góes tested the thesis against three decades of data from 19 advanced economies. “I find no empirical evidence that dynamics move in the way Piketty suggests.”

Stephen Hsu:

I’m posting the job ad below for David Lubinski. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) is the most systematic long term study of individuals of high cognitive ability since the Terman Study.

SMPY helps to establish a number of important facts about individuals of high ability:

1. We can (at least crudely) differentiate between individuals at the 99th, 99.9th and 99.99th percentiles. Exceptional talent can be identified through testing, even at age 13.

2. Probability of significant accomplishment, such as STEM PhD, patents awarded, tenure at leading research university, exceptional income, etc. continues to rise as ability level increases, even within the top 1%.

Liana Satenstein:

McFadden started selling her clothing at the age of 17, after a less-than-ideal high-school experience that often left her feeling like an outcast. “I was a teen witch! I would spend my free time doing séances with my very tight-knit group of friends, or going to the local occult shop to buy charms and incense,” says McFadden, “I attended a very average public high school that I despised. I have always hated the school system and wanted out, because I felt judged, based on my look, by the faculty.” She started buying vintage clothing in high school, hosting her first photo shoot for a site in a graveyard behind her yard. McFadden then entered university to study communications, and subsequently left to take what was supposed to be a semester off. That semester turned into a year, thanks to the success of Depop

Mary Grabar:

Hamilton College has for years had an open curriculum, allowing students the freedom to shape their education as they think best. Whether that’s a good idea is debatable, but the college is about to move in the opposite direction by instituting a “diversity requirement” for all students.

As a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the last year, I have watched this drama unfold on the Hamilton College campus. This depressing story reveals much about the tactics of the academic left. A small group of radical but powerful professors, claiming to act on behalf of students, succeeded in instituting the diversity requirement.

Due to their efforts, starting in the 2017-18 academic year, every concentration will require a dedicated course or combination of courses to teach about “structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.”

These specious topics furthermore ask students to “critically engag[e] with multiple cultural traditions and perspectives, and with interpersonal situations that enhance understanding of different identities. . . .” and to develop “an awareness of the challenges and responsibilities of local, national and global citizenship.” None of that will help Hamilton students who want to master one or more academic disciplines. Injecting those leftist tropes will be a distraction, or worse.

Kathryn Rubino:

I was told there’d be no crim pro…The LSAT may not be the rite of passage all lawyers share much longer, but LSAC, the organization that administers the exam, is not going to take that lying down.

You may recall Arizona Law has decided to accept the GRE in lieu of the LSAT. They claim it is a move designed to increase diversity, but some see increasing the school’s applicants as another nifty benefit. While most schools aren’t ready to make the move to the GRE just yet, the LSAT’s dominance may be in jeopardy. The first move LSAC made to stem the tide was to threaten to take away Arizona Law’s membership (and the application data that comes with it), but that move was wildly unpopular with law school deans, and LSAC backed off.

Now LSAC has announced another ramification of moving away from the LSAT.

In a letter sent to admissions professionals at all law schools yesterday, LSAC announced it intends to stop certifying matriculant admissions data. Amid concerns about the accuracy of law school admissions data, beginning in 2011, LSAC began certifying the accuracy of the data (i.e., average LSAT scores). Now LSAC intends to stop that:

John Patrick Leary:

When I was in college at a midwestern university famous for its right-wing economists, the coffee shop in my dorm was called T.A.N.S.T.A.F.L., which stood for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.” It was a quotation from Milton Friedman, who I suppose used it to mean that someone–the owners of capital–are the ones paying for what workers, mothers of dependent children, Chilean miners, or whomever are merely taking, as if it were “free.”

Of course, there isn’t any such thing as a free lunch, but it’s not because someone else is paying for it. It’s because someone is working for it. But that’s not what Friedman meant, and it’s not what critics of tuition-free college mean when they dismiss “free college” as a pipe dream. The derisive use of “free” in the TANSTAFL libertarian sense has experienced a revival, especially around the issue of tuition-free, publicly-funded higher education, or to its critics, “free college.”

By Oliver Roeder:

When the 2014 National Scrabble Championship begins Saturday in Buffalo, New York, the odds-on favorite will be a 47-year-old New Zealander who resides in Malaysia named Nigel Richards. He is currently ranked first in North America. The difference between his official rating and the second-place player’s is about the same as the difference between second place and 20th. He has held the first or second ranking on the continent since 2002, the year of his first National Championship. He holds the record for the highest Scrabble rating ever achieved. He is such an overwhelming favorite this weekend that a popular fantasy Scrabble rotisserie competition places him on participants’ selected teams automatically.

Chris Cook:

Few intra-governmental memos have sparked more anger than one called Circular 10/65, a memorandum sent 51 years ago by Anthony Crosland, then the education secretary, to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Only a few English counties, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, retained many.

Today, we learn, we have a new education secretary – Justine Greening – and she went to a comp. She is the first post-Crosland education secretary – and it has taken longer than one might have hoped for the new system to attain this position. But we also know, though, that Theresa May – and her advisers – are rather keen on a return to a world of grammars.

This might be an apt moment to quickly rattle through what we know about the grammar system. This is an argument that is, in truth, really about more than what is known, in the jargon, as “tracking” – the process of making pupils sit an academic test and separating the highest-performing from the rest.

Steve Denning:

Teachers can use the approach, say the authors, at different points: to introduce students to a new unit, to assess students’ knowledge to see what they need to understand better, or for students to set a fresh learning agenda for themselves. It can be used develop science experiments, create their own research projects, begin research on a teacher-assigned topic, prepare to write an essay, analyze a word problem, think more deeply about a challenging reading assignment, prepare an interview, or simply get themselves “unstuck.”

Benjamin Sledge:

Do not despair, my daughter, for as you read this, you may be tempted to believe that honorable men disappeared in the years before you were born. They still exist. You must search to find them, and that may take many years. In your search, though, you will encounter many men without honor. Do not blame them.For they had fathers who didn’t know how to train their sons in the ways in which a man should walk. Many grew up without a male figure to explain what honor and integrity look like. Feel compassion for them, instead. Point them to other men you see acting in honorable ways.

I leave you with this in closing, Adi. When you were born, my heart was yours, and I wanted nothing more than to protect you, kiss your face, and watch you smile. One day, I hope to meet the man who feels the same way.

VSCO:

In the penultimate release for the KYOTO project, director Alan Algee offers Moving / Memory, a film featuring shodō artist and teacher Hiroshi Ueta discussing and demonstrating his relationship to the country’s calligraphic tradition, from its orthodox roots in 5th century Japan to his own avant-garde approach that began with instruction as a child from his mother Nobuyo Miyamoto. Over the course of the collaboration between Algee and VSCO’s 23.5 title, the KYOTO project has explored the city’s unique intersection between ancient and contemporary worlds, between ideas of cultural preservation and modernity. In Hiroshi Ueta’s artistry we find both a very literal example and an elegant expression of these ideas at work.

Nicholas Tampio:

Did you attend a public school in the United States and perform in a school play, take field trips, or compete on a sports team? Did you have a favourite teacher who designed their own curriculum, say, about the Civil War, or helped you find your particular passions and interests? Did you take classes that were not academic per se but that still opened your eyes to different aspects of human experience such as fixing cars? Did you do projects that required planning and creativity? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you are the beneficiary of John Dewey’s pedagogical revolution.

Dewey put forth the philosophy of education that would change the world in Democracy and Education, a book that turns 100 this year. Dewey’s influence is far-reaching, but his pedagogy has been under assault for at least a generation. The United States Department of Education report A Nation at Risk (1983) signalled the rise of the anti-Dewey front, under the somewhat misleading name of the ‘education reform’ movement. The report warns that other countries will soon surpass the US in wealth and power because ‘a rising tide of mediocrity’ engulfs schools in the US. The problem, according to the report, is that US education is ‘an often incoherent, outdated patchwork quilt’. The education reform movement aims to replace that ‘patchwork quilt’ – mostly made by local school boards, teachers and parents – with a more uniform system based on national standards.

Matt Keyser:

Children’s laughter fills the halls of Dee Dee Estis’ two-bedroom Seabrook apartment. Toys are scattered throughout the house and child safety measures are in place to ensure no one gets hurt. In a back bedroom, Estis’ 6-year-old daughter, Bailey, plays with a friend.

Hanging on the walls are pictures of her 3-year-old son, Christian LaCombe, a brown-haired, blue-eyed boy. His mother describes him as an adventurous goofball with a contagious smile who can make the grumpiest person in the room grin. A caring, compassionate boy, who’s willing to do anything for those he loves.

He loves hiding behind the couch, waiting for Estis to walk by so he can attack and pounce on her back. He loves the movie “Cars” so much, Estis estimates he’s watched it at least a million and a half times. And he has a knack for memorizing song lyrics, especially “Life Is A Highway” by Rascal Flatts, the theme song to “Cars.”

aJacob Gorshman:

The ABA is considering a plan that would require 75% of a law school’s graduates who sit for a bar exam to pass the test within two years. The proposal has been floated amid a perplexing trend of declining bar exam scores nationwide and increasing attention on the racial make-up of the profession.

A number of law school deans and the largest nationwide black law student association are objecting to the proposed standard, expressing concern about its potential impact on schools with larger minority student populations.

If adopted, the new standard would “jeopardize the existence of traditionally minority law schools and ultimately erase the profession’s modest gains in diversity over the last several decades,” states a July 29 letter co-signed by the deans of more than a dozen law schools. The deans represent schools “designed to serve historically underrepresented minority population,” including Howard University, Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University and Florida A&M University.

Many of the schools represented in the letter reported passage rates among first-time test-takers in the 60% to 70% range, according to the most ABA data. Schools currently are required to report the passage rate of at least 70% of graduates who took the test for the time during the previous calendar year. So actual passage rates may be lower.

Glenn Reynolds:

Colleges, and graduate programs, are in trouble. Enrollments are falling — and not just at the PC-tainted University of Missouri — student debt is rising, and, worst of all in any bursting-bubble industry, the rubes seem to be catching on. This weekend, walking out of the drugstore, I saw Consumer Reports’ cover story, “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” It was all about student loan debt and what it does to people’s lives. Hint: Nothing good.

I noted some years ago that trends in higher education couldn’t continue. The cost of college goes up every year; salaries, on the other hand, have grown much more slowly, if at all. This means that where today’s parents might have been able to comfortably fund their educations with loans and part-time work, today’s students can’t. Tuition is too high to cover with a waitressing job, and salaries are too low to comfortably pay back the debt after graduation. Or, sometimes, to pay it back at all.

Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff:

After the initial Handbook discussions one open item around the issue of filling vacancies in the support units remained. We were directed to continue to meet to try to reach consensus on this item.

Originally, we had recommended that the language in the Handbook with regard to vacancies state as follows:

Vacancies shall first be filled by employees in surplus. The District has the right to determine and select the most qualified applicant for any position. The term applicant refers to both internal and external candidates for the position.
The District retains the right to determine the job qualifications needed for any vacant position. Minimum qualifications shall be established by the District and equally applied to all persons.

The rationale for this language change is that it is essential that the District has the ability to hire the most qualified candidate for any vacant position—whether an internal candidate or an external candidate. This language is currently used for transfers in the teacher unit. Thus, it creates consistency across employee groups.

Reuters audio.

Joshua Miller:

The pro-charter school referendum campaign is starting a massive, $2.3 million August television advertising campaign aimed at persuading residents to vote yes on Question Two, which would allow for the creation or expansion of up to 12 charter schools per year in Massachusetts.

“Massachusetts public charter schools are among the best in the country,” says a Boston charter school teacher identified as Mrs. Ingall, sitting in a classroom with sunlight streaming through on the desks behind her. “Our charter schools are public. And we have longer school days with more personal attention.”

Scott Jaschik:

Concordia University St. Paul has for years had an orientation meeting for minority students. But this year, one of those students shared part of the invitation letter online — and said it was offensive to require minority students to attend a special program. She has since said she’s looking to enroll elsewhere.

Concordia denies that it has a requirement for minority students only. But the letter — a portion of which has been widely shared on Facebook — says in bold capital letters: “All new students of color are expected to attend this meeting.”

Nicola Davis:

who are obese or overweight appear to have aged an extra 10 years compared to their lean peers from middle age onwards, brain scanning research has revealed.

The difference, scientists say, corresponds to a greater shrinkage in the volume of white matter, although they don’t know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating. Either way, it does not appear to affect cognitive performance.

White matter is tissue, composed of nerve fibres, that aids communication between different regions of the brain. The volume of white matter in a human brain increases during youth and then decreases with age for both lean who are overweight or obese.

Madison students have long endured the disastrous results of “we know best“.

Reading Recovery and Connected Math are two prominent examples.

Chris Mooney:

The question then is whether there is an effective way to prime people to be more science-curious — which could then also have political ramifications.

“It’s an asset that there’s a segment of the population that has that kind of disposition, so what you want to do is exploit it to the greatest extent,” Kahan says. “And if we’re lucky, it will percolate into other people with whom they have interactions.”

Casey Quinlan:

When Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park, Maryland, told parents in the fall of 2014 that it would allow students to use Chromebooks as a way to bridge the digital divide between low-income families and affluent families, there were mixed reactions. The plan was aimed at helping students become more adept at using technology, but the affluent parents, most of whom were white, were apprehensive about their children getting more screen time.

Laura Bliss:

Proportionally speaking, Americans living in poverty pay more for basic necessities. On energy bills, the poorest 20 percent of Americans spend more than seven times the share of their income than do the wealthiest. Dividing American incomes into three, households in the bottom third spend twice the portion of their incomes on transportation than the top third. High housing costs are hurting everyone—but they’re hurting poor Americans the most.

Emily Deruy:

As my colleague Vann Newkirk has noted, the Movement for Black Lives Matter coalition recently published a platform outlining a range of specific policies it would like to see take shape at the local, state, and federal levels. The education proposals are rooted in the K-12 space, activists who helped draft them told me, because the U.S. public-school system is so broken that college is never an option for many young people of color. And while many universities are privately controlled, the group sees an opportunity to return control of K-12 public schools to the students, parents, and communities they serve.

Alan Cole:

This map shows the real value of $100 in each state. Prices for the same goods are often much cheaper in states like Missouri or Ohio than they are in states like New York or California. As a result, the same amount of cash can buy you comparatively more in a low-price state than in a high-price state.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has been measuring this phenomenon for two years now; it recently published its data for prices in 2014. Using this data, we have adjusted the value of $100 to show how much it buys you in each state.

Jim Grant:

We asked Miron about the predictive value of these data. Could you tell that Greece was on the verge by examining its fiscal imbalance? And might notJapan be the tripwire to any future developed-country debt crisis, sinceJapan–surely–has the most adverse debt, demographic and entitlement-spending profile? Miron replied that comparative statistics on fiscal imbalance among the various OEGD countries don’t exist. And even if they did, it’s not clear that they would tell when a certain country would lose the confidence of its possibly inattentive creditors. The important thing to bear in mind, he winds up, is that the imbalances–not just in America orJapan or Greece but throughout the developed world–are “very big and very bad.”

Of course, government debt is only one flavor of nonfinancial encumbrance. The debt of households, businesses and state and local governments complete the medley of America’s nonfinancial liabil’ities. The total grew in 2015 by 51$ 1 .9 tril’h’on, which the nominal GDP grew by $549 billion. In other words, we Americans borrowed $3.46 to generate a dollar of GDP growth.

We have not always had to work the national balance sheet so hard. The marginal efficiency of debt has fallen as the growth in borrowing has accelerated. Thus, at year end, the ratio of nonfinancial debt to GDP reached a record-high 248.6%, up from 245.4% in 2014 and from the previous record of 245.5% set in 2009. In the long sweep of things, these are highly elevated numbers.

In the not-quite half century between 1952 and 2000, $1.70 of nonfinancial borrowing sufficed to generate a dollar of GDP growth. Since 2000, $3.30 of such borrowing was the horsepower behind the same amount of growth. Which suggests, conclude Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt in their first-quarter report to the clients of Hoisington Investment Management (30., “that the type and elficiency of the new debt is increasingly nonproductive.”

What constitutes a “nonproductive” debt?

hefce:

This document presents the findings of a small-scale qualitative study into the motivations of higher education providers for pursuing strategic-level innovations in learning and teaching; the source of these innovations; their impact on the learning experience of students; and their financial implications for higher education providers. The project tells us why some institutions invest in innovation in learning and teaching, and what the enablers of innovation in higher education are.

Our community, via the quite traditional Madison School District, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Has anything changed?

The District’s 2015-2016 “annual report” includes a bit of data on reading and math:

Tap for larger versions.

Unfortunately, the annual report lacks a significant amount of data, from enrollment to staffing and total spending. Boston publishes a handy two page pdf summary, shades of Madison’s long lost “Citizen’s budget“.

Commentary, from Ed Hughes. Mr. Hughes assertion that 4k plays a role in local reading results is surprising, in light of recent studies that question 4k’s lack of achievement progress.

More….

Doug Erickson:

“a selective rather than exhaustive view…with only some grades and some demographic groups highlighted in detail”

	Enrollment	Staff	Budget
Boston	56,650	9,125	$1,153,000,000 ($20,353/student)
Long Beach	78,230	6,515	$1,133,478,905 ($14,489/student)
Madison	25,231	4,081	? $421M + “Construction” and ? (at least $17k/student)

SIS:

In 2013, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said “What will be different, this time“? The Superintendent further cited Long Beach and Boston as beacons in her Rotary speech. However, based on recently released 2015-2016 budget slides (PDF) and Molly Beck’s summary, it appears that the same service, status quo governance model continues, unabated.

2013, SIS

“The thing about Madison that’s kind of exciting is there’s plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does.”

The District seeks increased tax & spending authority soon, perhaps in November. Ideally, a complete budget picture – with related outcome changes over time – would be easy to find and understand. Unfortunately, that is not currently the case. Boston publishes a handy 2 page summary (pdf).

Madison School District Slides

2017-19 Budget Premise

Next biennial state budget will continue a six-year pattern of underfunding K-12

Next two years of MMSD budget development will require deeper and more disruptive budget cuts

We need a more balanced approach to budget development, combining targeted cost cutting with additional revenues based on an affordable tax levy

We recommend an operational levy referendum this November to stabilize the budget, maintain MMSD’s positive momentum, and keep our focus on teaching and learning

Madison plans to spend at least $421,473,742 (this number apparently excludes “construction spending”) during the 2016-2017 school year.

Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz:

From the Pinkerton private detectives of the 1850s, to the closed-circuit cameras and email monitoring of the 1990s, to contemporary apps that quantify the productivity of workers, American employers have increasingly sought to track the activities of their employees. Along with economic and technological limits, the law has always been presumed as a constraint on these surveillance activities. Recently, technological advancements in several fields – data analytics, communications capture, mobile device design, DNA testing, and biometrics – have dramatically expanded capacities for worker surveillance both on and off the job. At the same time, the cost of many forms of surveillance has dropped significantly, while new technologies make the surveillance of workers even more convenient and accessible. This leaves the law as the last meaningful avenue to delineate boundaries for worker surveillance.

Michael Barajas:

Tavira and his wife were getting ready for bed when they heard the loud banging. It was the middle of the night, and as the noise grew louder and faster, Tavira realized that men were downstairs breaking through the security gate outside his home in Piedras Negras, the Mexican border city across from Eagle Pass.

Tavira’s children woke and came out of their rooms just as men, wearing bulletproof vests and armed with automatic rifles, stormed the house. Tavira would later recall how one of the gunmen covered his face with a mask made to look like a skull — “like you were looking at death.”

As a drug trafficker for the powerful Zetas cartel, Tavira recognized some of his captors. One was a friend of the family, someone whose kids played with Tavira’s own. The man ordered Tavira’s wife and children into the closet, shut the door, and then directed him down the hallway toward the staircase.

Elizabeth Stoycheff:

Since Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s use of controversial online surveillance programs in 2013, there has been widespread speculation about the potentially deleterious effects of online government monitoring. This study explores how perceptions and justification of surveillance practices may create a chilling effect on democratic discourse by stifling the expression of minority political views. Using a spiral of silence theoretical framework, knowing one is subject to surveillance and accepting such surveillance as necessary act as moderating agents in the relationship between one’s perceived climate of opinion and willingness to voice opinions online. Theoretical and normative implications are discussed.

Related: workplace surveillance.

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Our lives are on our laptops – family photos, medical documents, banking information, details about what websites we visit, and so much more. Thanks to protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the government generally can’t snoop through your laptop for no reason. But those privacy protections don’t safeguard travelers at the U.S. border, where the U.S. government can take an electronic device, search through all the files, and keep it for a while for further scrutiny – without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever.

arbing:

told me that she thought I was much cleverer than her.

Now that is an awkward first sentence to a blog post. In fact, it’s the sort of incident that I would normally try and laugh off as quickly as possible. But this time it was so blatantly untrue that I couldn’t get it out my head, I am definitely not naturally cleverer than her.

Anemona Hartcollis:

“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.

A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.

More, frome Claire Lehman.

Patrick Wall:

By allowing veteran principals to take on new challenges without abandoning their longtime schools, the split role has drawn effective leaders into buildings that need them. Where those principals have simply become mentors to other educators, weaker schools seem to be revitalized and stronger schools have not been impaired.

But experts remain wary of cases like Wiltshire’s, where one principal oversees two schools. The principals who are trying to make that arrangement work have generally handed off their original school to a deputy—but even then, playing double duty can be punishing. “This is like running a city and running a village,” said Connie Hamilton, the founder of a successful small school who was brought in to stabilize a large Brooklyn school. “I’m exhausted.”

Renee Dudley:

Among the red flags that consultant Gartner Inc raised in an October 2013 report: The not-for-profit College Board needed to better protect the material being developed for the new SAT.

Plans to secure the new test from leaks or theft had “not been developed” by the organization, the consultancy wrote in the report, reviewed by Reuters. At risk were thousands of items, or questions, that were being prepared for the redesigned SAT.

In 2014, employees at the New York-based College Board also raised concerns, arguing for limits on who could access items and answer keys for the revamped SAT, an email shows.

LawnStarter:

Majestic. It’s just one of the many ways to describe Stadium High School in Tacoma, WA. The school — originally intended to be a luxury hotel — is rich in history and rich in architectural design.

The two financial backers, Northern Pacific Railroad Co. and Tacoma Land Co., had high hopes for their hotel when they began construction in 1891.

“The hotel was to be so grand, so elegant, so ornate, so artful, so elaborate, so huge, so splendid that other grand hotels would blush with shame at their own silly pretensions,” according to HistoryLink.org.

Samantha Marcus and Susan Livio:

The constitutional amendment would require the state increase payments into the government worker pension fund. It must be approved by the voters in a public referendum. But Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) has so far declined to hold a vote on the referendum until lawmakers resolve a transportation funding impasse.

related: WEAC: four senators for $1.57 million

Laura Waters:

Would New Jerseyans rather have a governor who sucks up to special interests or a governor with courage and integrity? Our choices at the ballot box rarely split into such neat dichotomies but, if today’s news is any indication, we may have it easy in November 2017.

Today Phil Murphy, gubernatorial hopeful, released a statement that gives new heft to the concept of political pander. Parroting NJEA talking points and dissenting from the State Board of Education’s decision earlier today, he promised he would eliminate new PARCC assessments and end all high school diploma qualifying tests. Instead, he promised, N.J. would create “new and innovative tests,” “end student and teacher stress,” and save the state money because “computer-based tests have been proven to cost a fraction of PARCC.” Murphy failed to point out that designing new tests would cost mega-bucks, that meaningful tests would have to be aligned with N.J. course content standards — just like PARCC — and that PARCC is, in fact, a “computer-based test” that cost less than N.J.’s old and much-maligned ASK and HSPA tests.

Computer History Museum:

Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he “missed” the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a “could-have-been”, ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how computer platforms run today.

The Onion:

In what experts are describing as the most marked improvement in American academic performance in decades, a study released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education has found that the majority of the nation’s students have attained the skills necessary to recognize math. “We were encouraged to find that when presented with a series of numbers, mathematical symbols, or even fairly complex equations, more than half of our young people were able to correctly identify math as the academic subject before them,” said Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, who noted that for the first time on record, over 50 percent of the country’s first- through 12th-grade students are readily able to distinguish math from other areas of study when it appeared alongside English, social studies, foreign languages, or history on a standardized test. “While our schools should feel proud of this accomplishment, let’s remember that we must keep striving to do better. Too many Americans still graduate high school without learning to recognize any math beyond basic arithmetic, and our nation’s children still lag far behind students in other developed nations in their ability to identify geometry, algebra, and calculus as math.” A related Education Department study found that a majority of American eighth-graders are now able to look at a map of the earth and point to where the world is.

Bill Camarda:

So… according to the Princeton review, who tracks most? That’ll be news, arts, and sports sites, which typically provide content for free and “lack an external funding source, [and] are pressured to monetize page views with significantly more advertising.”

And who tracks least? “Mostly sites which belong to government organizations, universities, and non-profit entities… websites [that] may be able to forgo advertising and tracking due to the presence of funding sources external to the web.” Oh, and adult sites, too.

Next, Englehardt and Narayanan turned to fingerprinting: techniques for individually identifying anonymous site visitors based on the unique characteristics of their hardware and software. (Check out our detailed primer on fingerprinting here.) The researchers wanted to know: Is it really being used in the wild? How widely? Which techniques?

They began with HTML Canvas fingerprinting, reflecting subtle differences in the way browsers and devices render HTML5 Canvas-based images. Canvas fingerprinting showed up on 14,371 sites – far more than a similar measurement in 2014.

fixr.com:

Weed, liposuction and laser eye surgery, according to Google Inc., rank among the top searched-for costs of popular products and services in Denver. While Colorado now permits recreational uses of marijuana — including its alleged side effects, such as excessive hunger and bloodshot eyes — what are some of the autocomplete predictions of search queries for goods and services elsewhere? Most of them seem quite controversial.

Oxford Dictionaries:

Do you know as much about grammar as a 7 year old? Try this quiz to see whether you could pass the UK National Year 2 Grammar Test.

David Armstrong:

DJ Shanks was early into his afternoon shift as a baker at the Tim Hortons doughnut shop when the craving, and the dread, began. He called the one person he knew would help. Fast.

Justin Laycock and DJ had met on their first day of kindergarten in nearby Swanton. Now in their early 20s, they remained best friends. “Do you have anything?” DJ asked Justin. “I’m sick.” Justin didn’t hesitate: “I got you, bud.”

He didn’t need to ask what DJ needed. The childhood pals were consumed by heroin addiction, and Justin knew DJ was dope sick.

Many heroin addicts don’t fear death. Dope sickness is another matter. When the body doesn’t get the heroin it lusts for, it retaliates with brutal force: vomiting, diarrhea, profuse sweating, intense cramping, paralyzing anxiety. Addicts will do whatever they can to avoid it — stealing, lying, or pimping themselves to get heroin. Justin once took his grandmother’s debit card. DJ had pawned his little sister’s video game console.

Two ordinary kids from Middle America, DJ and Justin were caught up in the most pressing public health crisis of the day — a wave of opioid addiction that’s killing nearly 30,000 Americans a year. But their story comes with a terrifying twist.

Their descent began with marijuana use in high school, then escalated to prescription painkiller abuse and heroin. It would end with something even more wicked.

After DJ’s call, Justin phoned his heroin dealer and ordered an “80” — street slang for $80 worth of heroin, about a half-gram. A half-hour later, Justin walked up to the doughnut shop counter and slid a folded dollar bill toward his friend. DJ, wearing white baker’s pants and a Tim Hortons baseball cap, grabbed it and quickly walked to the back of the shop, where he snorted the powdery substance concealed inside the money. Justin, meanwhile, went to the bathroom and injected some of the drug, then returned and handed DJ another bill. DJ went into the bathroom to snort more of the powder.

Laura Waters:

New Jersey School Boards Association reports on an important case that will tell us much about how well the state’s tenure reform system works. In Bound Brook vs. Ciripompa, the first to reach the level of a State Supreme Court appeal, the Bound Brook Board of Education filed tenure charges against a high school math teacher because he, according to NJSBA, violated the district’s “acceptable computer-use policy when administrators learned that he stored pictures of nude women on his district-issued iPad,” made “inappropriate sexual comments” towards several female staff members, purchased flowers and had students deliver them to female staff members, and made female staff members uncomfortable,

Christopher Schaberg:

was recently having dinner with my dissertation adviser, Scott @shershow, catching up after many years, and at one point during the meal our conversation predictably drifted to something someone said on Twitter. Scott paused and said, “I must admit I don’t really get Twitter.”

He had joined Twitter maybe a year ago, had a couple dozen followers and was trying to become more familiar with it. But his admission suggested a murkiness and mysteriousness around the medium — qualities we tend to forget after several years of obsessive tweeting and accumulating thousands of followers, retweets and likes.
My mentor may be near a tipping point: either ready to abandon Twitter, or just on the verge of getting it, to use his word. Without wanting to sound like a hyped-up social media evangelist, let me see if I can help. What can Twitter be for academics?

Liam Dillon:

California’s largest teachers union has given more than $13 million to the effort to extend income tax hikes on California’s highest earners, according to newly released state campaign finance reports.

The report shows the California Teachers Assn. gave $3 million between April and June this year, in addition to the $10 million the union donated last month.

Before the $10-million contribution, supporters of the Proposition 55 campaign reported having $14 million in the bank. Also supporting the measure are the California Hospital Assn., Service Employees International Union and the California Medical Assn

. Related: WEAC, $1.57M for four senators.

and, Act 10.

Erin Einhorn:

been a struggle for sure,” said Dan Varner, the CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, who says he’s approached “dozens” of deep-pocketed philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, prominent education organizations that boost schools around the country, and charter networks that run successful schools in other cities.

“We were looking for real substantive help and all of them have poked around and have done their homework and have decided not to [come].”

Plenty of Detroiters say that’s a good thing. They point to SWAT teams of education “reformers” who’ve promised to fix urban schools, only to be accused of trampling democracy — as happened recently in Newark when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured $100 million into schools and angered many locals in the process.

Mr. Horner:

The purported reason for the penalty is that “The student made an error by not manipulating expressions independently in an algebraic proof”. It’s unclear what, if anything, this means, but there is no requirement that expressions be manipulated independently in an algebraic proof. This is an artificial criticism.

I suspect the complaint has to do with multiplying both sides of the equation by some quantity. I have occasionally heard teachers argue that, when proving an identity, you can’t multiply both sides of an equation by the same thing. Their reasons vary, but the most common explanation is that in doing so you are assuming the sides are equal, which is what you are trying to prove.

This is faulty mathematics. For the most part, there is no issue with multiplying both sides of a purported identity by the same quantity: if the original equation is true, the new equation will be true, and if the original equation is false, the new equation will be false. In general, the equations are logically equivalent, that is, true and false under exactly the same circumstances.

Julia Angwin:

Algorithms are ubiquitous in our lives. They map out the best route to our destination and help us find new music based on what we listen to now. But they are also being employed to inform fundamental decisions about our lives.

Companies use them to sort through stacks of résumés from job seekers. Credit agencies use them to determine our credit scores. And the criminal justice system is increasingly using algorithms to predict a defendant’s future criminality.

Those computer-generated criminal “risk scores” were at the center of a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that set the first significant limits on the use of risk algorithms in sentencing.

The court ruled that while judges could use these risk scores, the scores could not be a “determinative” factor in whether a defendant was jailed or placed on probation. And, most important, the court stipulated that a presentence report submitted to the judge must include a warning about the limits of the algorithm’s accuracy.

This warning requirement is an important milestone in the debate over how our data-driven society should hold decision-making software accountable. But advocates for big data due process argue that much more must be done to assure the appropriateness and accuracy of algorithm results.

Douglas Belkin and Tawnell D. Hobbs:

The state of Texas has launched an investigation into alleged fiscal improprieties at the state’s largest chain of charter schools.

Behind the probe: charges by the president of Turkey that the schools are part of a $500 million a year front to fund the revolutionary aspirations of a Turkish cleric he claims backed a recent failed coup.

The probe by the Texas Education Agency was prompted by a series of complaints filed by a Washington-based law firm hired late last year by the Turkish government to lead its case against Fethullah Gulen, a political enemy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Gulen, who lives in rural Pennsylvania, is on trial in absentia in Turkey on charges related to overthrowing the government. Thousands of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey have been arrested or detained by Mr. Erdogan following the failed coup earlier this month.

Last week, a spokesman for Mr. Gulen denied any connection to the coup and said his goal is nonviolent reform in Turkey.

Nico Savidge:

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants to extend the freeze on University of Wisconsin System tuition for another two years. The Republican governor also told UW and most other state agencies they should not anticipate any new funding in his next budget.

UW officials and supporters have called for greater state funding for the system after years of budget cuts they say threaten the quality of public higher education in Wisconsin.

But in a letter the governor sent July 25 to the heads of state agencies, Walker indicated his budget proposal won’t include any new funding for UW or any but a few other departments.

Lauren Camera:

The racial tension and violence that roiled the country this month left politicians, policymakers and protesters of every stripe shocked and exasperated.

Two separate incidents caught on video of white police officers shooting and killing black men, one in Baton Rouge and the other in Minneapolis, resulted in the killing of five Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest and most recently the killing of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers – all in a two week span.

Lilian Mongeau:

From start to finish, a day in Bolt’s Russell Elementary classroom could be a primer on what high-quality preschool is supposed to look like. Children had free time to play with friends in a stimulating environment, received literacy instruction that pushed beyond comprehension to critical thinking and communication, and were introduced to complex mathematics concepts in age-appropriate ways. All three practices have been shown to go beyond increasing what children know to actually improving how well they learn in kindergarten and beyond.

Paul Edwards:

How can you learn the most from a book — or any other piece of writing — when you’re reading for information, rather than for pleasure?
It’s satisfying to start at the beginning and read straight through to the end. Some books, such as novels, have to be read this way, since a basic principle of fiction is to hold the reader in suspense. Your whole purpose in reading fiction is to follow the writer’s lead, allowing him or her to spin a story bit by bit.

But many of the books, articles, and other documents you’ll read during your undergraduate and graduate years, and possibly during the rest of your professional life, won’t be novels. Instead, they’ll be non-fiction: textbooks, manuals, journal articles, histories, academic studies, and so on.

The purpose of reading things like this is to gain, and retain, information. Here, finding out what happens — as quickly and easily as possible — is your main goal. So unless you’re stuck in prison with nothing else to do, NEVER read a non-fiction book or article from beginning to end.

Instead, when you’re reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you’ll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time.

Mike Newall:

The one that has moved in for a few days – the media, the delegates, the protesters of all the stripes – and the one we live in every day. The one of contradiction and divide. The one with a downtown bursting with new growth and neighborhoods plagued by the highest poverty rate of any big city in the nation.

The one where working men like Henry and Jones sit on a bench in a Center City that is becoming shinier by the day and talk about the neighborhoods where they live. Neighborhoods just a few miles away that might as well be a universe away. Neighborhoods plagued by poverty and hunger – the types of issues that have not garnered nearly enough attention during this bizarre and frightening election.

God help us all if Donald Trump wins. But how is it that two nights into a Democratic National Convention held in a city where one out of four people lives in poverty, where one of five children goes without enough food, where 700 people sleep on the streets each night, the words hunger or homelessness have barely been mentioned from the lectern, if at all?

When the circus leaves, we will remain, as will our problems.

It was a point not lost on David Brown. He sighed as he watched the protesters, wishing the crowds were clamoring for something else: the end of homelessness.

I know David, having written about him. For more than 20 years, he slept on benches on the Parkway or inside refrigerator boxes in a lot next to the Free Library. Three years ago, he finally accepted a Project HOME outreach worker’s plea to come inside. Now he lives in an apartment and manages a boutique.

Having seen enough, Brown left the protests and walked to the library, passing the benches where he once slept.

At the Free Library on Tuesday, Project HOME was holding its own DNC event, “Stories From the Margins.”

Aishwarya Subramanian:

Amidst the flood of Pokémon Go stories that have dominated the news in the last week or so (to whatever extent a single story can be said to have dominated this week’s news) one recurring theme has been that of the game’s straying into the real world in unfortunate ways.

This is unsurprising. The very aspect of the game that is newsworthy is the relationship between its virtual space and the tangible, material space that we all exist in. Exhorting its users to “step outside and explore the world”, the game turns travelling through mundane urban landscapes (more rural areas haven’t been quite as well catered for) into an adventure, making you the protagonist of your own fantastic quest.

Donald Clark:

For Papert, school is a process of regimentation through age segregation, a fixed view of knowledge, of what is ‘right’, too teacher-led and too much focus on academic, abstract thinking and reading, pushing what he calls the ‘epistemology of precision’. For Papert, children should play and personalise their learning through play, improvisation and doing. They should be encouraged to see knowledge as incomplete and accept vagueness and imprecision.

As a mathematician he is highly critical of both ‘what’ maths is taught and ‘how’ it is taught in schools. Most of what is taught, he thinks, is irrelevant to most people. He thinks this is the result of paper-based learning – the ability to write and manipulate symbols on paper. How it is taught, is also flawed, as it does not connect with the real world.