Jesse Saffron:

Two years ago I attended a student debate at North Carolina Central University, one of the state’s five public historically black colleges and universities. It was fascinating, especially given the self-examination raised by its topic, “HBCUs: Can They Survive?”

The moderator asked several incisive questions: Would the closure of HBCUs materially impair black students’ access to higher education? Would closing some HBCUs make the remaining ones stronger? Would the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s support an enduring HBCU presence today?

As I reported at the time, the students eloquently argued both “pro” and “con” positions and deeply engaged with the relevant facts and issues. If only more of today’s political and higher education leaders did the same.

Many of America’s 106 HBCUs—which are concentrated mostly in the South—are in crisis. Years of falling enrollment, declining academic standards and graduation rates, shrinking endowments, and poor management have called into question such institutions’ staying power.

Various reforms have been attempted, but those have often been Band-Aids for problems that demand long-term solutions and fresh thinking. The downward trajectory has continued as HBCU supporters and policymakers have treated the sector as a protected class in higher education—one in which outside criticism is labeled reactionary or, worse, a vestige of racism.

Objectively, however, HBCUs in many respects fail the students they purport to uplift: low-income students, first-generation college students, and students with substandard academic preparation.

Avrahm Berkowitz

Perhaps, however, it is best to start at the beginning, as free speech has been nursing its wounds for some time now.

There is a perception that being liberal is synonymous with tolerance. As youth tends to spawn idealism, it would follow that the most liberal campuses are home to the most tolerant student body.

However, after nearly three years of study at Harvard Law School, I have found that a significant number of the most liberal students tend to be the least tolerant of opposing viewpoints.

In late 2014, during my second year at Harvard Law School, a student group called Students For Inclusion created a blog entitled Socratic Shortcomings. Its commitment, we are told, is to “[foster] productive and contextualized conversations on matters related to race, gender and class.” The site allows students—and anyone really—to post anonymously about events at Harvard Law School.

Christine Campbell:

Reform efforts in cities like New York City, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans have led to improved school options and better outcomes for more students. But the pace and shape of the reforms were wrenching for all involved and each of these cities carries some legacy of bitterness and mistrust around how reforms played out. The turnover of familiar teachers, the shuttering of iconic school buildings and shuttling of children away from neighborhood schools, and the loss of middle-class jobs in central office most often impacted communities of color. In response, many black education leaders say education reform needs “an attitude adjustment.”

At a 2015 Center on Reinventing Public Education meeting at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, Pastor Raymond Jetson of the Star Hill Church in Baton Rouge explained to a group of education reform leaders: “There are legitimate emotions, loyalties and alliances that may at times seem to be at odds with your assumptions and efforts. The elementary school I went to is closed. The middle and high school I went to are in the Recovery School District. There were more students in my graduating class than were on the campus of my high school last year. When a revolving door of new leaders come out of nowhere and tell me what’s in the best interest of Capitol High School but have not done the work to know its past…It would be difficult to explain to you the level of resentment that I have felt.”

Josh Mitchell:

More than 40% of Americans who borrowed from the government’s main student-loan program aren’t making payments or are behind on more than $200 billion owed, raising worries that millions of them may never repay.

The new figures represent the fallout of a decadelong borrowing boom as record numbers of students enrolled in trade schools, universities and graduate schools.

Siderea:

The US has at least two different systems of what gets termed “socioeconomic class”. They are everywhere conflated, and this is bad.

Two of them I will term economic class and social class.

Economic class refers to money. It refers to the wealth or poverty of a person, and to the privileges they do or do not have because of their economic might or lack thereof.

Social class is what is being referred to by such terms as “middle class”, “working class”, “white collar”, “professional”, “blue collar”, and the pejoratives “white trash” and “townie”.

It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class. But what what differentiates, say, the middle class from the working class is not mere wealth or earning power; as we all know, a plumber (presumed working class) may make much more money than a professor (presumed professional).

To use myself as an illustration: I make very little money, so I am heir to the misfortunes that disproportionately impact the impecunious – the almost-certain forthcoming hike in T fares looms large in my anxieties right now – but I am a professional with an advanced degree and possession of the shibboleths of the professional class. I didn’t stop being in the social class I had been in when I dropped to a much lower economic class. The privileges I lost were only those attendant to economic might; I retained the privileges of social position.

So, for instance, if I don’t like the medical care I get from the doctors my state-subsidized health plan (thanks, Mitt!) gives me access to, I can’t just whip out my checkbook and buy myself care from a better reputed specialist. Being poor might yet shorten my lifespan, as it curtails my access to care. But on the other hand, if I present with a serious booboo to just about any doctor, I will have narcotic pain relief offered me with no questions asked, because someone of my social class is not suspected of being one of those naughty “med-seeking” addicts. The decision of whether or not to trust me with a prescription for percoset is not made on the basis of the MassHealth card in my pocket marking me one of the precariat, but my hair style, my sense of fashion, my (lack of) make-up, my accent, my vocabulary, my body language, my (apparent) girth, my profession (which, note, doctors often ask as part of intake), and all the other things which locate me in a social class to observers that know the code. Contrariwise, a patient of mine – who is a white woman of almost my age – who is covered with tattoos, speaks with an Eastie accent, is over 200lbs, and wears spandex and bling and heavy make-up, gets screamed at by an ER nurse for med-seeking when she hadn’t asked for medication at all, and just wanted an x-ray for an old bone-break she was frighted she had reinjured in a fall.

Jay Bullock:

Last Friday, I was in Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers Union was staging a one-day strike. While the Milwaukee Public Schools, for which I teach, was on spring break last week, a number of my Milwaukee colleagues were marching alongside their Chicago brothers and sisters.

I wasn’t; I was having a long-planned and much-needed vacation. Part of me felt guilty for not walking the streets with my fellow educators. Most of me, though, was glad to have some time not thinking about what has been a grueling school year here in Milwaukee, not thinking about what has happened to public schools here in Wisconsin, not thinking about what consequences will follow the April 5 elections and the Nov. 5 elections and on and on.

Jay Bullock notes and links.

Anya Kamenetz:

Andrea Diaz was applying to colleges, she got good news and bad news. The good news was that American University, a private four-year university in Washington, D.C., wanted her. The bad news was that it required her to come to campus early to take two summer developmental-level courses in math and English.

“I was traumatized by it,” Diaz says, “because I felt that they didn’t see in me the potential to do well in college.”

When is a college course not really a college course? When it’s classified as “developmental,” or, less euphemistically, “remedial.” These courses cover material considered high-school level, typically in math or English composition.

Ade Adeniji:

recent years, the Satter Foundation has held upwards of $70 million in assets and has given away some $6 million annually. A recent 990 filing listed close to 90 grantees. The active foundation is the philanthropic vehicle of former Goldman partner Muneer Satter and his wife Kristine Hertel. Satter spent years commuting from Chicago to New York racking up frequent flier miles, kind of like George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air. Satter reportedly donated millions of these miles to Room to Read, a nonprofit that delivers books to children in developing countries.

The Satters reside in Winnetka, Illinois, outside Chicago. Satter is only in his mid-50s, but has racked up a number of charitable interest areas, including education reform and charters, policy, global development, health and even the environment. Satter is a national council co-chair of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He’s also a top backer of a number of Republican candidates, but also Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat. Of the many Goldman Sachs pre-1999 IPO partners I’ve written about, Satter’s philanthropy is among the more robust.

Andrew Simmons:

I’d drawn a little tombstone on the board. I was in the middle of leading a class of 10th-grade English students through Piggy’s death scene in Lord of the Flies: the rock, the shattered conch, Piggy’s long fall, the red stuff flowing out, the twitching legs. The corners of her eyes bubbling, a 15-year-old girl dashed for the door.

When I spoke with her after class, the student explained that she identified with Piggy. Being studious, fearful of bullies, and a bit of an outsider, it upset her to casually discuss his violent death. Piggy’s demise was not the symbolic death of order or logic, but the murder of a kid like her.

In my experience teaching and observing other teachers, students spend a lot of time learning academic skills and rarely even talk about the emotional reactions they may have to what they read—even when stories, as they often do, address dark themes. The Common Core Standards push students to become clinical crafters of arguments and masters of academic language. While these are essential skills to possess, the fact that my other students appear perfectly comfortable not acknowledging and discussing emotional responses to literature may be as revelatory as this one student’s teary dash from class. Inundated with video games, movies, and memes, teenagers often seem hard to shake up. Characters are fictitious abstractions, and, without actors to bring them to life and makeup and digital tricks to make the drama feel real, students may strictly do the analytical work teachers expect without the interference of a significant emotional response. That’s a bad thing. An emotional response should be part of the curriculum.
ARTICLE

Ian Leslie:

A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you’ve read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

“If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin, “that material would promptly be banned.” The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man.

Will Fitzhugh:

There is a great deal of concern about the quality of student academic writing at the secondary level, but those who seek to assess it usually think in terms of large numbers and quick scoring. A few years ago, a vice-president of The College Board was happy to announce that they could assess 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, and it seems likely that ACT depends on software and fast computers as well, in its academic writing assessments. A local print shop had this sign: “Good, Fast, Cheap…choose two.” The College Board chose fast and cheap.

In 1998, I started the National Writing Board [tcr.org] with the idea of a more craft-like service for the assessment of student academic writing. We have now provided 4-5 page reports on hundreds of history research papers written by high school students from 31 states and Belgium, Canada, China, Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

We typically spend about three hours on each paper, with two Readers for each, but one Reader recently spent more than three hours on one recent 12,000-word paper from Asia. The Readers have the title of the paper and the length in words, but they know nothing else about the students, except that they are in high school. This helps to eliminate any bias which might come from knowing more about the authors. We chose good over fast and cheap…

In addition to advice about improvements to student organization and writing, our Readers often provide observations on the content of their papers, for example: “…Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army was stationed in Manchuria near the town of Pingfan. It was placed under the command of then Major—later Lt. General—Ishii Shiro, and consisted of some 3,000 soldiers, scientists and Japanese Red Cross nurses. Ishii was a surgeon, and held a degree from Kyoto University. His installation was both huge and most secret, and its stockpiles of biological weapons were such that they could have killed every person on the planet. Doing research on procedures for Bacteriological Warfare, Ishii’s staff carried out ghastly medical experiments on Allied POWs. Prisoners were purposely infected with anthrax, plague and cholera. They were subjected to experiments with salmonella, tetanus, botulism, gas gangrene, smallpox, tick encephalitis and tuberculosis. Some of the victims—Americans, Australians, and British POWs and prisoners from the Soviet Union, Korea and China—were also surgically examined without benefit of anesthesia. Other prisoners were burned, electrocuted and subjected to pressure chamber experiments “that popped eyes out of their heads.” Some had their blood drained, and replaced with that of a horse. Women prisoners were purposely infected with syphilis, impregnated, and their live fetuses removed for dissection. Many prisoners were exposed to X-Rays until they perished. Some were frozen, and then immersed into hot water, and immediately subjected to the amputation of limbs. Some scholars, and a number of Japanese veterans, suggest some 12,000 people were killed in these experiments. Under the auspices of Unit 731, plague-carrying fleas were dropped on cities in northern China. Dysentery, cholera and typhoid cultures were dropped into local Chinese water supplies as early as 1942…”

Jonathan Reider, for many years Senior Associate Director of Admissions at Stanford, has written that: “The National Writing Board provides a unique independent assessment of serious student research papers, and submits three-page reports to colleges at the request of the author. Thirty-nine highly selective colleges, both research universities and liberal arts colleges, have stated their willingness to accept these evaluations. This is an excellent tool for colleges to add to their array of evaluative techniques. While some colleges ask for a graded paper of the student’s work, few have the time or the expertise to evaluate these systematically as part of an application for admission. It is more efficient if these can be evaluated by an independent and reliable source.”

Bill Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions at Harvard, has written that: “Since 1998, when it started, we have been supporters of your National Writing Board, which is still unique in supplying independent assessments of the research papers of secondary students. The NWB reports also provide a useful addition to the college application materials of high school students who are seeking admission to selective colleges.”

We are able to do this level of assessment because we have more time than teachers, and because we don’t believe mass computer-scoring of writing does any good for students. A few years ago, I spent some time with high school teachers in Collier County, Florida. They read some of our student work and we talked about the value of term papers and assessment. On the last day I discovered that all the teachers but one had six classes of thirty students each (180), and the one had seven classes of thirty students (210). It was quite clear that their students would not be asked to do 12,000-word papers, or even the 7,400-word papers which are now the average for those published in The Concord Review.

Student academic expository writing is important, both in itself, and in the extensive study and reading necessary to do it well, but if we keep thinking in terms of the mass-assessment of huge numbers of short samples of formulaic (software-readable) student writing, we will be doing nothing to help improve writing. Such an approach constrains and trivializes student work, and fails to introduce students (and their teachers) to the necessary effort for nonfiction term papers students should be learning to make as they prepare for further education and for their careers.

Fraser Nelson:

It’s comforting now to think of eugenics as an evil that sprang from the blackness of Nazi hearts. We’re familiar with the argument: some men are born great, some as weaklings, and both pass the traits on to their children. So to improve society, the logic goes, we must encourage the best to breed and do what we can to stop the stupid, sick and malign from passing on their defective genes. This was taken to a genocidal extreme by Hitler, but the intellectual foundations were laid in England. And the idea is now making a startling comeback.

A hundred years ago the eugenic mission involved a handful of crude tools: bribing the ‘right’ people to have larger families, sterilising the weakest. Now stunning advances in science are creating options early eugenicists could only dream about. Today’s IVF technology already allows us to screen embryos for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. But soon parents will be able to check for all manner of traits, from hair colour to character, and choose their ‘perfect’ child.

The era of designer babies, long portrayed by dystopian novelists and screenwriters, is fast arriving. According to Hank Greely, a Stanford professor in law and biosciences, the next couple of generations may be the last to accept pot luck with procreation. Doing so, he adds, may soon be seen as downright irresponsible. In his forthcoming book The End of Sex, he explains a brave new world in which mothers will be given a menu with various biological options. But even he shies away from the word that sums all this up. For Professor Greely, and almost all of those in the new bioscience, eugenics is never mentioned, as if to avoid admitting that history has swung full circle.

The word ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a polymath who invented fingerprinting and many of the techniques of modern statistical research. He started with a hunch: that so many great men come from the same families because genius is hereditary. Fascinated by the evolutionary arguments of his cousin Charles Darwin, he wondered whether advances in health care and welfare had sullied the national gene pool because they allowed more of the sick and disabled not just to survive but to lead normal family lives. He went off to collect data, and came back with his theory of eugenics.

Mark Hansen:

The mean scaled score on the February administration of the Multistate Bar Examination fell to 135, down 1.2 points from the previous year and the lowest average score on a February administration of the test since 1983.

The number of test-takers was up 4 percent from last year, from 22,396 in 2015 to 23,324 this year, according to Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which developed and scores the test.

February scores are typically lower than July scores, Moeser said, because July test-takers tend to be first-time test takers, who generally score higher on the exam than repeat takers.

She said the results, while “a bit disappointing,” are not a surprise.

Inside Higher Ed:

Harvard and Princeton Universities have released their responses to questions from members of Congress about the way they use their endowments. The questions come amid heightened scrutiny of the wealthiest universities. Both the Harvard and Princeton letters to Congress stress common themes, including the way their endowments are not general funds but collections of endowments donated for different purposes, and that the endowments directly support undergraduate student aid among many other purposes. A cover letter on Harvard’s response, from President Drew Faust, said that her university’s endowment should be viewed as 13,000 separate funds. Princeton’s letter indicated that its endowment is made up of 4,300 separate accounts.

Harvard’s endowment (at more than $36 billion) is the largest in the nation, and Princeton’s (at nearly $23 billion) is the fourth, according to the latest data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund.

Concord Coalition:

Amid widespread concern about rising tuition rates, top Republican tax-writers appear to be taking a hard look at the ways in which colleges and universities are using — or perhaps not using — their tax-exempt endowments.

Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam sent letters to dozens of institutions with endowments over $1 billion, accord to a recent report in The Hill.

The lawmakers say many schools are raising tuition rates faster than inflation despite their large and growing endowments. They requested a prompt response from the schools, a few of which have built up endowments in excess of $22 billion.

Unlike private foundations, The Hill reports, colleges are not required to spend a minimum percentage of their endowments each year. Critics say the schools are hoarding cash while students struggle with ever-higher tuition rates and graduate with excessive student loan debt.

Ingrid Schroeder:

Over roughly the past decade, federal spending on higher education per full-time student grew by 32 percent in real terms, with the Pell grant seeing a substantial increase since the start of the recession. Over the same time frame, however, state government spending on higher education has shrunk by 37 percent, and public colleges and universities across the country have significantly increased tuition. At many schools, the increases in federal financial aid have not been enough to offset rising tuition.

Much of the decline in state support for higher education can be traced to state policy choices resulting from the recession: As job losses mounted and tax receipts fell, many states were faced with tough choices in order to balance their budgets — and opted to cut funding for public colleges and universities. As of the 2014-15 school year, per student funding in 47 states remained below pre-recession levels after adjusting for inflation.

Mary Beth Quirk:

So much of what we hear about copyright law is about how it limits the use of protected content — you can’t sell pirated movies; don’t share your mp3 library on Pirate Bay; no selling T-shirts with Hello Kitty on the front.

In fact, a California state law now declares that if a school wants to receive an educational tech grant, its curriculum must “include a component to educate pupils… on the appropriate and ethical use of information technology in the classroom, Internet safety, the manner in which to avoid committing plagiarism, the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright so that pupils are equipped with the skills necessary to distinguish lawful from unlawful online downloading, and the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.”

BBC:

Twenty-one people have been arrested after US authorities set up a fake university to expose immigration fraud.

Officials said the accused knew that the University of Northern New Jersey did not exist, but they were unaware it was a ruse run by immigration agents.

The defendants acted as brokers for more than 1,000 foreigners who sought to maintain student and work visas, prosecutors said.
Most foreign nationals involved in the scheme came from China and India.

Immigration authorities will deal with the nationals affected, but they will not be prosecuted, officials said.

“This was just another stop on the ‘pay-to-stay’ tour,” Paul Fishman, US attorney for New Jersey, told the Associated Press.

Amy Wang:

Per today’s (April 5) fourth annual “Money Matters on Campus” report, conducted by financial management firm Higher One and education company EverFi based a sample of nearly 90,000 US college attendees, students are increasingly uneducated when it comes to personal finance. Less than 10% of students feel they have the information necessary to pay off their loans.
Borrowing money can be confusing, so perhaps that’s understandable—but students are also getting demonstrably worse at far simpler tasks, like making spending budgets and paying credit card bills.

Marni Bromberg and Christina Theokas:

Ed Trust’s new report, Meandering Toward Graduation: Transcript Outcomes of High School Graduates, shows that too many students leave high school with a diploma in hand but no clear path forward.

The report finds that 47 percent, or almost half, of American high school graduates complete neither a college- nor career-ready course of study — defined here as the standard 15-course sequence required for entry at many public colleges, along with three or more credits in a broad career field such as health science or business.

It also shows that only 8 percent of high school graduates in 2013 completed a full college- and career-prep curriculum. Less than one-third of graduates completed only a college-ready course of study, and just 13 percent finished a career-ready course sequence only.

This research comes as both educators and policymakers become increasingly aware of the need for a sharper focus on college and career readiness. But what does this phrase really mean, and how well are our schools doing in preparing all students for success after graduation? Meandering Toward Graduation delves into these questions by examining the high school transcripts of a nationally representative group of 2013 graduates.

The report encourages high school leaders to reflect on their school’s structure, culture, and instruction, and how those elements influence exposure to rigorous, engaging, and relevant coursework that prepares students for success after high school in various college and career paths.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Douglas Belkin and Miriam Jordan

Chutian Shao moved from China to the Midwest college town of Champaign, Ill., a few years ago. Some days, he says, it feels as if he hasn’t traveled very far at all.

On a recent Monday, the 22-year-old woke up in the apartment he shares with three Chinese friends. He walked to an engineering class at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he sat with Chinese students. Then, he hit the gym with a Chinese pal before studying in the library until late into the night.

He recalls uttering two fragments in English all day. The longest was at Chipotle, where he ordered a burrito: “Double chicken, black beans, lettuce and hot sauce.”

At first glance, a huge wave of Chinese students entering American higher education seems beneficial for both sides. International students, in particular from China, are clamoring for American credentials, while U.S. schools want their tuition dollars, which can run two to three times the rate paid by in-state students.

On the ground, American campuses are struggling to absorb the rapid and growing influx—a dynamic confirmed by interviews with dozens of students, college professors and counselors.

scmp:

Every day, many of us English speakers quote William Shakespeare, even if we’ve never read a word of his plays. And we don’t even know we’re doing it. Such is the reach of Shakespeare’s mastery of language that phrases he coined and popularised have, over the centuries since he was writing, been woven into everyday English vocabulary. They range from the obviously poetic to the seemingly banal, but if it wasn’t for Shakespeare, we wouldn’t be using them at all. Here are some of the verbal tics we owe to the Bard.

“Salad days” – Antony and Cleopatra

This is a phrase where the earliest known usage seems to be Shakespeare – and it comes with a handy definition in the text, too. “My salad days, / When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,” says Cleopatra. If only she knew that, years later, her words would form some of the most well-known lyrics of Gold, by Spandau Ballet (“These are my salad days / Slowly being eaten away”). The 1980s owes Shakespeare a great debt, clearly.

Sarah Chambers & Micah Utrecht:

The Chicago Teachers Union is going on strike tomorrow. But they aren’t going alone.

The union struck in 2012, claiming to fight not just for themselves but for a broad social justice agenda in defense of public schools and all public services. They emerged victorious over Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Public Schools, who wanted to further erode teachers’ power in the schools and institute more free market-friendly reforms. At a time when the labor movement was in dire straits, the win was an inspiration to unionists around the country.

But since then, the union has suffered defeat after defeat: forty-nine school closures, rounds of layoffs, devastating budget cuts. And Illinois’ new Republican governor, private equity mogul Bruce Rauner, has carried out a disastrous agenda of austerity, holding the state budget hostage unless legislators agree to major rollbacks of union rights.

Megan McArdle:

Every time I write about bias against conservatives in academia, I can count on a few professors writing me to politely suggest that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes they aren’t so polite, either. How would I know what goes on in their hiring meetings, their faculty gatherings, their tenure reviews? They’re right there, and they can attest firsthand that there ain’t no bias, no sir!

But none of them can explain why, if that bias doesn’t exist, so many of their conservative and libertarian colleagues feel compelled to hide in the closet. Deep in the closet, behind that plastic zip bag of old winter coats in mothballs, and sealed, with many layers of packing tape, in a box marked “Betamax Tapes: Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon 1981-1987.”

“The modern academy pays lip service to diversity,” notes my colleague Virginia Postrel in a column about “Passing on the Right,” a new book about the conservatives in academia. “Yet as a ‘stigmatized minority,’ the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments.” If conservatives aren’t being discriminated against, then why are so many of them, sitting in those same meetings and tenure reviews, afraid to show their ideological colors?

Mandarin Society.

The China Syllabi Project aims to help China-focused professionals expand their knowledge of China beyond their current areas of expertise. We hope these syllabi will also help recent graduates and young professionals transition from academic China studies to a professional environment requiring more specialized knowledge. Finally, this project attempts to break down knowledge silos and get people thinking more holistically about China.

These self-study syllabi contain targeted readings in English and Chinese and have been prepared by experts in their fields. Each should be able to be completed in one month, with a hour or so of reading per day, five days a week. We have made efforts to ensure that most readings are available online; where the authors have suggested books, it means that they think these are worth buying and owning. Below each syllabus you will also find a vocabulary list to help with specialized terms from the readings with which you may not yet be familiar.

Robert Kelchen and Luke J. Stedrak:

States have traditionally provided funding for public colleges and universities based on a combination of the number of students enrolled and how much money they were allocated previously.

But, in the face of increasingly tight budgets and pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness to legislators, more and more states are tying at least some higher education funding to student outcomes.

As of 2015, 32 states have implemented a funding system that is based in part on students’ performance in at least some of their colleges. In such states, a portion of state funding is based on metrics such as the number of completed courses or the number of graduates.

Teach for America:

lively discussion, curated by Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World: and How They Got That Way, will explore in-depth how systemic change has been achieved in Ontario, Canada, and how this approach compares with others around the world that have driven dramatic improvements in student outcomes. Rather than offering a checklist of successful approaches, this session will introduce the people and stories behind the policies and inspire us to consider what meaningful application of these approaches could yield for children in the United States.

Chicago Tribune:

Free expression is not faring well on American college campuses these days. In some places, the problem is students taking grave offense at opinions that merit only minor umbrage or none at all. In others, it’s official speech codes that chill discussion. In still others, it’s administrators so intent on preventing sexual harassment that they avoid open discussion of gender-related matters.

There is a lot to be said for making people aware of the ways in which their words and deeds can do harm. No one wants to go back to the days when casual expressions of racial prejudice were common, or when women were mocked for taking places that should have gone to men, or when some professors made passes at students.

It would be great if the “reporters” dove into these staged events. Who is selected? Why? Do they have scholarships, financial aid? Members of? Can any student attend? Can anyone ask questions? Are these events compatible with the free exchange of ideas? How much are we spending? Has that changed? How has the overhead of these institutions changed?

Emily Hamer, writing in the Badger Herald is better than the full time reporter. Her story:

While all students thought there should be additional aid for students, Courtney McCourt, a UW junior, said she did not think college should be free, as the third bill in Baldwin’s package aims to do. She said students work hard to go to college, and should have to contribute to their education, even if students who are more disadvantaged need more help.

Samuel Park, a UW sophomore, said he thinks part of the problem is that students from low-income backgrounds often don’t even consider college an option. He said financial literacy needs to improve, starting in middle school and high school, because most students don’t understand high interest rates associated with private loans, how to fill out a tax form or the FAFSFA and aren’t aware of all aid options.

Nico Savidge:

Baldwin said she might try to advance her proposal by adding it to the sprawling federal Higher Education Act, which Congress is working to reauthorize.

“Shame on us if we don’t use that as an opportunity to talk broadly about helping young people get the preparation they need for a bright start in life,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin told senators opposed to her bill to “listen to your constituents” on the cost of higher education.

One of the nine students who attended Tuesday’s meeting, sophomore Samuel Park, said he works 30 hours per week to put himself through school. For Park and other students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds, he said, those hours take time away from their studies or extracurricular activities that could help them find jobs after they graduate.

“How am I supposed to take on volunteer work or unpaid internships or other activities that are supposed to help build resumés … when you’re supposed to be working?” Park said.

Question Free at a Russ Feingold and Elizabeth Warren UW-Madison event.

Scott Jaschik:

American universities awarded 54,070 research doctorates in 2014, the highest total in the 58 years that the National Science Foundation has sponsored the Survey of Earned Doctorates, a new edition of which was released Friday.

But while more doctorates are being awarded, the figures also point to transitions and concerns in graduate education.

Increasingly, the pool of doctoral degrees coming out of American universities is dominated by science and engineering Ph.D.s. Their numbers were up 2 percent in 2014, compared to the prior year, while all other research doctorates were down by 2 percent. With those changes, science and engineering Ph.D.s make up 75 percent of all doctorates awarded in 2014. In 1974, they made up only 58 percent of the total. And science and engineering doctoral education remains dependent on non-American talent — which many view as a sign of success for American higher education but others worry leaves American universities vulnerable if students opt to enroll elsewhere.

The job market for new Ph.D.s is ever tighter. While this attracts the most attention and debate within academe about humanities graduates, there are signs of a tightening job market across disciplines.

scmp:

Mellody Hobson is immaculately dressed, beautiful – and tired. She is on a week-long Asia-Pacific trip that has been packed with meetings, interviews and conferences. She jokes that she saw “to and from” the airport in Sydney, and there won’t be any time for sightseeing in Hong Kong, either. The day’s engagements include an interview with Bloomberg and a keynote address at AsianInvestor’s forum on diversity.

Yet, when she starts to talk, after we meet in the Mandarin Oriental’s M Bar, she glows. Each answer is measured and meaningful. She is attentive and honest, in fact kind, and everything she says makes sense. After two minutes in her presence, I am an acolyte. And when she quotes from Star Wars, the universally loved creation of her husband, film director George Lucas, I regress from admiration to childish adoration.

allAfrica:

It is completely unacceptable for Liberia to outsource its primary education system to a private company, said the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Kishore Singh. “This is unprecedented at the scale currently being proposed and violates Liberia’s legal and moral obligations,” he stressed.

Liberia’s plan is to privatise all primary and pre-primary schools over the next five years. Public funding will support services subcontracted to a private company – the Bridge International Academies. “Public schools and their teachers, and the concept of education as a public good, are under attack,” the expert cautioned.

“Such arrangements are a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution,” the Special Rapporteur stated. “This also contradicts political commitments made by Liberia and the international community to the fourth UN Sustainable Development Goal which is on education and related targets.”

Brennan Barnard:

In 20 years of counseling students, I have witnessed a seismic shift in the approach towards college admission.  As application numbers have increased, so has the collective angst around college admission.  With sinking admit rates, high-stakes testing, rising tuition costs, unmanageable debt and an unhealthy fixation on the handful of most selective schools, we are debilitating the next generation of learners.  The message we inadvertently send: a prestige acceptance is better than a joyful childhood.

In an ideal world, college preparatory education would encourage students who crave knowledge, seek community engagement, desire connection and live their values.  We say we want our children to feel secure, be inspired and take risks with their curiosity.  The reality of “Hunger Games” comes closer to the truth, where students battle to survive in application pools seeming to demand perfection.

Scott Aaronson:

In one sense, there’s less mystery in mathematics than there is in any other human endeavour. In math, we can really understand things, in a deeper way than we ever understand anything else. (When I was younger, I used to reassure myself during suspense movies by silently reciting the proof of some theorem: here, at least, was a certainty that the movie couldn’t touch.) So how is it that many people, notably including mathematicians, feel that there’s something ‘mysterious’ about this least mysterious of subjects? What do they mean?

There are certainly mysteries that exist within math. For starters, there are the thousands of unsolved problems, assertions that no one can prove or disprove, sometimes despite decades or centuries of effort. Although many of these problems are deep and important, a small example will do for now: no one has proved that, as you go further out in the decimal digits of π=3.141592653589…, the digits 0 through 9 occur with equal frequency.

Lee Sandlin:

But that just shows how little anybody really understood what was happening to the world. Nobody outside of China remembered Nanking a couple years later when the German Reich began its stunning expansion through Europe. The Wehrmacht stampeded whole armies before it with its terrifyingly brutal new style of tank attack (the European press called it “blitzkrieg,” and the name stuck), and rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories — wholesale deportations and systematic massacres, like a vast mechanized replay of the Mongol invasions. A story solemnly made the rounds of the world’s newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, “Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!”

It was in September 1939, in the wake of the German invasion of Poland, that the phrase “the Second World War” began turning up in newspapers and government speeches. The name was a kind of despairing admission that nobody knew how long the war would go on or how far the fighting would spread. Over the next two years the news arrived almost daily that battles had broken out in places that only weeks before had seemed like safe havens. By the time of Pearl Harbor the war had erupted in Norway and Mongolia, on Crete and in the Dutch East Indies; the Italian Army had marched on Egypt, and the German army was pushing into the outskirts of Moscow; there had been savage fighting in Finland north of the Arctic Circle and sea battles off the coast of Argentina. The United States was one of the last secluded places left on earth.

NPR:

For hundreds of years, people have been talking about machines taking jobs from people. Less often discussed: machines creating new jobs.

In the first part of the 20th century, agricultural technology — the tractor, chemical fertilizers — meant a single farmer could suddenly grow much more food. So we didn’t need as many farmers. Technology destroyed a huge number of farming jobs.

Justin Fox:

economics, as the recession persuaded many young people to stay in or go back to school, while the subsequent recovery has pulled them into the job market. It is also simple demographics — the “echo boom” of births to baby-boomer parents in the U.S. peaked in 1990, and a lot of those kids entered college in 2008. Since then the number of Americans in their prime college-attending years has been going down.

Naomi Pagoda:

The tax-exempt endowments of colleges and universities are coming under scrutiny in a presidential election year where the cost of higher education has become a top issue.

Leading Republican tax-writers in Congress have sent questions to 56 private institutions with endowments of over $1 billion, giving them until April 1 to respond. The answers they receive could lead to legislation.

The letters — which were sent in February and signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) — stated that many colleges are raising tuition at rates above inflation despite having large and growing endowments.

The five private colleges with the largest endowments in fiscal year 2015 were Harvard University ($36.4 billion), Yale University ($25.6 billion), Princeton University ($22.7 billion), Stanford University ($22.2 billion) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($13.5 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute.

Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh:

When students arrive at college these days, they hear a familiar mantra about the purpose of higher education: Find yourself. Use these four years to discover who you are. Learn flamenco dancing or ceramics, start a composting project, write for the student newspaper or delve into 19th-century English poetry. Self-discovery, they are told, is the road to adulthood.

So why is it that so many students feel such anxiety? On campus, we hear the same complaint again and again: “I’ve done lots of extracurriculars. I’ve taken a variety of courses. Why can’t I figure out who I am and what I want to do?”

Our answer: Read Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi and other Chinese thinkers who lived more than 2,000 years ago. Recognize that the contemporary Western emphasis on self-discovery and self-acceptance has led you astray.

Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton:

Whitmire tells a familiar story of how public and private institutions derailed an American’s dream: In 2000, he bought the $40,000 house with no money down and a $620 monthly mortgage. He made every payment. Then, in the fall of 2010, his partially disabled wife lost her state job. “Governor [Mitch] Daniels slashed the budget, and they looked for any excuse to squeeze people out,” Whitmire says. “We got lost in that shuffle — cut adrift.” The Whitmires couldn’t make their payments anymore.

They applied for a trial loan-modification through an Obama administration program, and when it was granted, their monthly bill fell to $473.87. But, like nearly a million others, the modification was canceled. After charging the lower rate for three months, their mortgage lender reinstated the higher fee and billed the family $1,878.88 in back payments. Whitmire didn’t have that kind of cash and couldn’t get it, so he and his wife filed for bankruptcy. His attorney advised him to live in the house until the bank foreclosed, but “I don’t believe in a free lunch,” Whitmire says. He moved out, leaving the keys on the kitchen table. “I thought the bank should have them.”

Guy Sorman:

Career politicians have become incredibly boring. This helps to explain the appearance of rebel parties in every Western democracy. These new splinter groups include the Ciudadanos in Spain, the National Front in France, the Tea Party in the United States, and the Independentists in Catalonia and Scotland. Voters have grown tired of accepting the same old tunes, whistled from both Left and Right. Constantly recycled policies and programs offer no solutions to difficult, long-term, and often intergenerational problems, such as unemployment among the unqualified youth, or the excessive dependence of certain groups on the welfare state. The same goes for the debate over immigration. One side demonizes globalization; the other decries nationalism.

New ideas are far from lacking, however. Economists and sociologists in universities, laboratories, and foundations provide a steady stream of fresh approaches to these problems. But politicians don’t seem to read much these days, preferring the advice of a closed circle of marketing consultants and dried-up slogan manufacturers. This makes Finland’s move toward instituting a universal basic income (UBI)—often referred to by economists as a negative income tax—all the more refreshing. The negative income tax is often associated with the free-market economist Milton Friedman, who defended it with passion and flair in the 1970s.

wsj:

Can you remember the last time you did calculus? Unless you are a researcher or engineer, chances are good it was in a high-school or college class you’d rather forget. For most Americans, solving a calculus problem is not a skill they need to perform well at work.

David Kravets:

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world’s best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It’s time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.

Lynn Gamwell:

One of the most profound insights of modern science is that nature has a symmetrical structure. Since antiquity, naturalists have observed bilateral symmetry in plants and animals, as well as symmetrical hexagons in ice and snow. In the 19th century, scientists looked through microscopes and saw that nature’s building blocks (cells, crystals) are arranged in symmetrical patterns and come in left-right pairs. In 1905, Albert Einstein discovered the symmetry of mass and energy – mass can be converted into energy and vice versa (E = mc2). He soon developed the general theory of relativity to give an accurate description of the cosmos from any frame of reference.

Alia Wong:

Right about now, anxious high-school seniors around the globe are obsessively checking their mailboxes, awaiting decision letters from the U.S.’s elite colleges. For all but a tiny handful of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who applied—pouring countless hours into agonizing over forms, editing personal essays, sitting through standardized tests, and nervously monitoring their GPA—those letters won’t bear good news.

Acceptance rates at highly selective colleges have plummeted in recent years. Exclusivity has always been baked into their brand: Only about 3 percent of 18-year-olds in the U.S. go to schools that admit fewer than half their applicants, making the “college-admissions mania,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson once put it, “a crisis for the 3 percent.” Still, it’s a mania to which more and more teens are subjecting themselves, pressuring applicants to pad their resumés and tout superficial experiences and hobbies, convincing them that attending a prestigious school is paramount. And critics say that mania has even spread into and shaped American culture, often distorting kids’ (and parents’) values, perpetuating economic inequality, and perverting the role of higher education in society as a whole.

The American Interest:

It’s elite college admissions season, which means that it’s also the season for elite media handwringing about how stressful it for high school students to compete for the vanishingly small number of spots available in the Ivy League. These concerns are understandable, of course—any young person who has recently gone through this process, or any parent who has watched—knows that it can be agonizing and arbitrary. But most elite commentary on the subject—which imagines that the best way to slow down the rat race is for admissions offices to de-emphasize academic achievement and instead emphasize character traits like kindness and generosity—misses the mark by a rather wide margin. Take the Atlantic‘s recent contribution to this genre, which approvingly cites a college admissions overhaul agenda championed by the admissions deans of the nation’s most selective colleges and administrators at the most elite feeder schools:

Dylan Matthews

The results are striking: Low-paying jobs (those paying less than $20 an hour, or under $40,000 a year for full-time workers) have an 83 percent chance of being automated. Medium-paying jobs ($20 to $40 an hour, or $40,000 to $80,000 a year) have a 31 percent chance, and high-paying ones (more than $40 an hour, or more than $80,000 a year) have only a 4 percent chance.

This may seem obvious. There are a whole lot of low-paying service jobs you can imagine being automated out of existence. Better Roombas could reduce the need for janitors, self-checkout machines are already replacing cashiers, etc.

But there are also high-paying professions that intuitively appear at risk. Just see this vintage 1998 Atul Gawande article about how artificial intelligence was already better than experienced cardiologists at interpreting EKGs. Radiologists, who spend much of their time visually interpreting test results, are also at risk. So are lawyers who formerly could spend hours scouring paper documents during discovery, charging the client throughout, and now are threatened by “e-discovery” software that makes those files easily searchable.

:

world has quietly been undergoing a performance revolution. In nearly all areas, people are continuously getting better at what they do. This is obvious when measured on running tracks and tennis courts. But it is happening in myriad other areas as well, from surgery to management—and even violin-playing. Better training is largely responsible, by breaking down activities into discrete parts, and measuring how people perform best.

Two new books promise to help people improve their abilities with a generous mix of fascinating anecdotes and a romp through the academic literature. In “Smarter, Faster, Better”, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times looks at the numerous ways that people can become more effective, whether in improving motivation, setting goals, making decisions or thinking creatively. Basically, Mr Duhigg’s is a self-help book for white-collar professionals.

Robert Pondisco:

are all familiar with the bracing “hero teacher” book or movie. A plucky, young (inevitably white) teacher ends up in a tough inner-city classroom filled with “those kids” – the ones that both school and society have written off as unteachable – and succeeds against all odds, through grit and compassion, embarrassing in the process those who run “the system.” Ed Boland’s “The Battle for Room 314” is the dark opposite. It’s a clear-eyed chronicle of first-year teaching failure at a difficult New York City high school, vividly written and wincingly frank.

Reading the book brought back a flood of memories of my own not dissimilar struggles as a new teacher at a low-performing public school in the South Bronx. Like Boland, I had my share of defiant and difficult students. If I’d been teaching high school, not elementary school, I likely would have made the same decision he did: to abandon ship and return to my previous career after one year, shell-shocked and defeated.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Kyndal Wilson:

Broome Street Academy, a tuition-free public charter high school in New York City, is doing big things. While 77 percent of the school is classified as economically disadvantaged, 82 percent of Broome Street’s first graduating class enrolled in a two-year or four-year college program in 2015.

Gaius Publius:

Why is this rebellion permanent, at least until conditions improve? Because life in the U.S. is getting worse in a way that can be felt by a critical mass of people, by enough people to disrupt the Establishment machine with their anger. And because that worsening is seen to be permanent.

Bottom line, people are reaching the breaking point, and we’re watching that play out in the 2016 electoral race.

Alan Borsuk:

By the way, test scores can be a factor in evaluating teachers, but they have not emerged as a big factor. And the momentum behind connecting scores to ratings of teachers seems to have waned nationwide. (Why? Because it doesn’t really work.)

With the new scores, the “report card” for each school in the state will be relaunched, after a year off. This time, private schools with publicly-funded voucher students are slated to get report cards. Don’t expect the same level of data for voucher schools as public schools. Maybe that will take a few years to build up.

In the end, even as it is the third set of tests used in three years in Wisconsin, the Forward Test is pretty consistent with its predecessors. And, now on computers, the giant enterprise of testing our kids to get some broad handle on how they’re doing is on the move again.

Jonathan Adler:

Georgetown University professor John Hasnas writes in the Wall Street Journal of his experience with faculty candidate searches over the past twenty-plus years. Not only is there rarely any effort consider ideological or viewpoint diversity, but in some cases there have been efforts to squelch it.

in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions

Quora, via a kind Richard Askey email:

You are in Mordor now and way closer to Mount Doom.
There is suddenly so much less free time and everyone including the aunt of your neighbor kid’s cousin start to ask you how many years you have till “High School Entrance Exam”.

Now the main subjects are:
Chinese
Math
English
Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology)
Politics

Secondary subjects are:
Physics
Information Technology
Music
Art
Moral training (Apologize for my inability to properly translate.. You are generally taught how to behave, to love the Party, etc)

At the same time as an excellent student (score high is usually sufficient to earn that title), you will be taking National Math/Science Olympics Competition and spend loads of time on high school maths problems.

If unfortunately you don’t have a decent grade ensuring a good high school, you will have to spend much time on home tutorials apart from school.

I was of the second category, and spent 8 hours per week on Chinese, Math and Science, later English too.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

While Act 10 limits bargaining to base wages only, all other issues and conditions of employment are addressed as part of the Employee Handbook development process. Last year, MTI worked with MMSD administration and the Board of Education to establish a new collaborative process for continued employee voice in the development of the Employee Handbook. That collaborative process commenced last summer and, after months of difficult discussions and eventual BOE approval, produced an Employee Handbook that continues the pay, benefits, and working conditions most critical to employees, while forging acceptable compromises in other areas. This summer, the joint Oversight Group of employee and management representatives will meet again to discuss, and possibly recommend, potential modifications to the Employee Handbook. Later this spring, MTI will be surveying MTI members to identify what changes they would like to see in the Employee Handbook.

Ron Srigley:

Why not? A university degree, after all, is a credential crucial for economic success. At least, that’s what we’re told. But as with all such credentials—those sought for the ends they promise rather than the knowledge they represent—the trick is to get them cheaply, quickly, and with as little effort as possible. My students’ disaffection is the real face of this ambition.

Mikhail Zinshteyn:

That information void is a sore spot for Ozan Jaquette, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona who is emerging as a research leader on higher education enrollment policy. So far, Jaquette and a co-writer have published a journal article showing that a 10-percent drop in state appropriations is associated with a public research university increasing by five percent the number of non-resident freshmen it enrolls. He and his colleagues also found that at public research universities, spikes in the number of non-resident students who are admitted are associated with declines in the number of under-represented minorities and students who receive Pell grants (which are mostly issued to low-income students).

Jaquette talked with me about what effects non-resident students have on the racial and economic diversity of state universities. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows

Madison School District Administration Slides (PDF)

Learning is accelerated

Fewer students are at risk over time

Decisions about who needs Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions are reliable and can be made rapidly

Rates of intervention success are high

Key decision makers look at the effects of implementation and troubleshoot regularly

Resources are allocated efficiently

Caroline Racine Gilles (PDF)

I. Purpose
The purpose of this memo is to provide an update on MMSD’s strategy for literacy tiers of support, to highlight a targeted acceleration strategy implemented with intensive elementary schools this year, and to re-cap the major findings from two secondary program reviews along with next steps.

II. Background Information
The Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) department is working strategically with many departments to help improve overall outcomes for students through a tiered approach to support. Critical to an effective MTSS system is high quality first teaching and a robust, guaranteed and viable curriculum. Efforts must be placed squarely in this arena as the effectiveness of our interventions and supports hinge on the effectiveness of our Tier 1. To this end, we have a multi- pronged approach to MTSS implementation. Increasing our capacity to implement and sustain literacy supports and intervention is one focus within the context of larger MTSS implementation. Given our student outcome data, we work in two main areas: prevention and intervention. Our ultimate goal is to prevent skill deficits from occurring in the first place (e.g., catching students before they fail), while simultaneously providing intervention for those students who already have skill deficits. Therefore, our efforts must rest in supplementing our core instruction in the early grades, while having a relentless focus on catching up our middle and high school students. This briefing sheet will detail our strategies and efforts in both areas.

An unfortunate data free update.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Patterson:

While I’m open to interesting new challenges, starting in July my tentative plan (which sounds pretty good) is graduating my remaining students while continuing to coach interested faculty, revise textbooks, consult, travel, play soccer on Sundays, and attend the free faculty lunch on Mondays.

Kate Sweeney:

Poverty” just isn’t a word she identifies with. She points out that she and her niece live on a nice, suburban street, in a nice house … She pauses. “Without a lot of furnishings, or comforts that we’d like to have.”

Indeed, the walls are bare, and there’s little furniture in this house on an Austell cul-de-sac, where she’s lived for the past 13 months. Still, she insists that she doesn’t feel impoverished.

This is why it demoralized her when she recently had to make the 12-mile drive to Marietta to apply for food stamps.

“Because, um, it’s emotional,” she said. “It’s more than just paperwork. It’s the dramatization of, you know, ‘This is where you’re at.’ The whole tone of ‘I’m needy’ doesn’t sit well on your identity. Not me, anyway.”

Denise Cummins:

College graduates from poor families were found to earn 91 percent more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group. But college graduates from upper-middle-class families earned 162 percent more over their careers than those with just a high school diploma.

Graph courtesy the Brookings Institute. FPL is short for federal poverty level. You can read more about the smaller “bachelor’s bump” here.

Why the difference? Researchers point to disparities in family resources during childhood and the colleges that low-income students attend. Children born to highly educated women receive more of their parents’ time and money than those born to the less well-educated women. They also point out that poor students are more likely to attend lower ranked colleges than rich students. The researchers explicitly assume that this means poor students are receiving lower quality education than their richer peers.

James Piereson & Naomi Schafer Riley:

Earlier this month, students for the first time took a new, and allegedly improved, SAT. The test’s developer included more-contemporary vocabulary and removed penalties for guessing the wrong answer. The changes came with a predictable outcry—complaints, for instance, that too many word problems in the math sections disadvantage some students. There was also a familiar refrain from parents: Why do we have this exam at all? Why do colleges put so much stock in the results? And why-oh-why do our kids have to take so many tests?

It might seem unfair that admissions officers place almost as much weight on a one-morning test as they do on grades from four years of high school, as a 2011 survey from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling showed. But there’s a simple reason for this emphasis on testing: Policy makers and educators have effectively eliminated all the other ways of quantifying student performance

Matthew Yglesias:

What Sanders’s plan, as spelled out in his College for All Act, does is provide federal matching grants to help defray the costs of eliminating tuition for in-state students.

Specifically, he is offering a 2-to-1 federal match for states that do this along with meeting a few other criteria like reducing reliance on adjunct faculty. This is a sufficiently attractive offer that some states would probably go for it. But it’s going to cost a lot of money, and tax-averse Republican governors like Walker pretty clearly aren’t going to do it.

Scott Jaschik:

What did happen was a sudden spike in enrolling out-of-state undergraduates, even as demand increased for spots at the University of California — and especially at the campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles and, to a slightly lesser degree, San Diego. There has been plenty of grumbling by applicants, parents and politicians. Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, complained that “normal” students can’t get into Berkeley anymore.

The state auditor on Tuesday released a report that went well beyond complaints of rejected applicants. It accused the university system of admitting out-of-state applicants who didn’t meet standards set by the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education. And thousands of these non-Californians took the spots of more academically qualified Californians, the audit charged. This narrative counters the image that many admissions officials at popular flagships promote, which is that it is the out-of-staters who must meet higher standards.

Max Ehrenfreund:

“Race trumps class, at least when it comes to incarceration,” said Darrick Hamilton of the New School, one of the researchers who produced the study.

He and his colleagues, Khaing Zaw and William Darity of Duke University, examined data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national study that began in 1979 and followed a group of young people into adulthood and middle age. The participants were asked about their assets and debts, and interviewers also noted their type of residence, including whether they were in a jail or prison.

The researchers grouped participants in the survey by their race and their household wealth as of 1985 and then looked back through the data to see how many people in each group ultimately went to prison. Participants who were briefly locked up between interviews might not be included in their calculations of the share who were eventually incarcerated.

deutsch29:

n March 21, 2016, education historian and activist, Diane Ravitch, posted a communication dated March 17, 2016, from “a current high-level administrative employee at Teach for America.” The big news is that TFA will be cutting roughly 150 national and regional staff. The communication also notes that when TFA failed to reach its recruitment goals for 2015, jobs were cut, but not at the higher levels. This time (2016), TFA did not reach its recruitment goals for a second year, and this time, the job cuts are not just “rank and file staff.”

On the same day as Ravitch’s post, March 21, 2016, TFA posted news of the cuts on its own web site.

Jonathon Deetman

Liberal-arts colleges now find themselves in a brutal competition to attract a certain kind of paying student. By and large, students are not moneymakers for the college if they are poor enough to qualify for need-based aid, pedigreed enough to command major scholarship offers, or a minority who must be lured, with a nice tuition discount, to a place like Crawfordsville, Indiana. In short, white mediocrity is the bread and butter of the contemporary liberal-arts college.

But in order for the formula to work, these colleges must have a critical mass of students. There have to be enough profit-generating students to allow the college to take a loss on the students who will boost selectivity™ and diversity™. This is why Simon Newman wants to increase enrollment at MSMU and why college presidents everywhere lose sleep over enrollment numbers. These pressures are not unique to liberal-arts colleges, just more acute because of their relatively small size and their already inflated tuition.

Andrea Powell:

Back in October, before the campus became a cauldron of student protests and angst-filled town hall forums, 12 members of Mills College’s student newspaper, the Campanil, gathered around a whiteboard for their weekly editorial meeting. As the all-female staff discussed what issues to report on, one student piped up with some important news: A campus-wide announcement was imminent, she said, and it would reveal proposed curriculum changes affecting multiple academic departments. She had been tipped off by staff members who worried that, once the news broke, students would become anxious and have questions. “I saw the faculty come out [of a meeting], and they didn’t look happy,” she reported to her colleagues.

Sure enough, not two hours after the news team wrapped up its meeting, a memorandum was disseminated among the campus community. Titled “Transforming Mills’ Curriculum for the 21st Century” and sent by the school’s departing president, Alecia DeCoudreaux, the email outlined proposed “teach-outs”—that is, closures—of three undergraduate programs. While it also announced the possible creation or expansion of certain programs, mostly in the STEM and education fields, the letter stated, “We must keep in mind that our programs need to operate with greater efficiencies; some will be revised, some will be created, some will grow, some will need to become more efficient; and some will be eliminated or sunset.” Or, in the plain English befitting a top-tier liberal arts college: Here comes the ax.

csvideo:

Hello there, if you like any of the lectures here can you give it an upvote. That would help to keep quality lectures to stay at the top. And if you know any great video lectures please don’t forget to share it here. Thanks alot!

Rodney Sampson:

This week is the first week of our #CodeStart School, a 13 month collaborative partnership between @AtlWorkforce @TechSquare @TheIronYard @OHUBAtl. 17 disconnected youth are in the program. Today, the 2nd full day of the program, we experience the following.

EFF:

Schools are issuing laptops and other digital devices to students under 18 years old, as well as requiring students to use cloud-based education platforms. We’re conducting a survey to learn more about these practices. Will you help us by reporting what’s happening at your school? This survey is open to parents, students at least 13 years of age, district or school administrators, and teachers.

Bre Payton:

Rowe is referring to a policy idea popularized by Bernie Sanders that taxpayers should heavily subsidize college — to the extent that it initially wouldn’t cost students anything out of pocket to attend. Obviously, there are some serious flaws in this idea. When one considers where tax dollars come from, it becomes apparent that students would ultimately end up paying for their tuition one way or another.

Under Sanders’s proposal, the difference is that instead of paying for their tuition at enrollment, students (and everyone else, for that matter) will pay for this “free” education when filing taxes every single year for the rest of their lives.

This won’t make college tuition less expensive, either. We can take a look at the impact government subsidies have had on higher education and determine that it’s done nothing to make college more affordable for anyone. In fact, for every dollar the federal government spends on college subsidies, the cost of tuition goes up by 55 to 65 cents.

Scott Jaschik:

The first major update in seven years of a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges.

Since the last significant release of the survey, faculty members at Princeton University and Wellesley College, among other institutions, have debated ways to limit grade inflation, despite criticism from some students who welcome the high averages. But the new study says these efforts have not been typical. The new data, by Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor, and Christopher Healy, a Furman University professor, will appear today on the website GradeInflation.com, which will also have data for some of the individual colleges participating in the study.

The findings are based on an analysis of colleges that collectively enroll about one million students, with a wide range of competitiveness in admissions represented among the institutions. Key findings:

Ogechi Emechebe:

The achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts in Dane County has been an area of concern for the past several years. In addition to what the Madison School District is doing to try and eliminate the gap, a local grassroots organization is hoping to reduce the achievement gap before kids start kindergarten.

Harold Rayford, pastor of The Faith Place Church in Sun Prairie and President of the African American Council of Churches, will launch the 1800 Days initiative on Tuesday, March 29, at 6 p.m. at the Central Madison Public Library.

1800 Days is a nonprofit organization focusing on a child’s first five years of life where significant intellectual development takes place, said Rayford. The emphasis will be on early childhood development so children can be academically and intellectually equipped to start kindergarten and stay on track once in school.

Rayford said the idea came about after he volunteered as an assistant librarian in a local middle school for about four years. He said he initially began the role to help teachers interact with minority students, but over time he realized the achievement gap was an issue that needed participation from everyone in the community, including minority groups.

Rachel Huebner:

discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish.

But then I started college.

Elizabeth Harringron:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued a proposed rule Monday to codify parts of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama.

The regulation would punish schools and state departments with fines for “egregious or persistent disregard” for the lunch rules that imposed sodium and calorie limits and banned white grains.

MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.

Michael Shermer:

The French political journalist and supporter of the Royalist cause in the French Revolution, Jacques Mallet du Pan, famously summarized what often happens to extremists: “the Revolution devours its children.” I was thinking about this idiom—and its doppelgänger “what goes around comes around”—while writing a lecture for a talk I was invited to give at my alma mater California State University, Fullerton on the topic: “Is freedom of speech harmful for college students?” The short answer is an unflinching and unequivocal “No.”

Rafael Gomez held a forum this evening with unopposed candidates for three Madison School Board Seats: James Howard, Dean Loumos and TJ Mertz.

Listen via this 29MB 60 minute mp3 recording.

Katrease Stafford and Tresa Baldas

In its latest crackdown on school corruption here, the federal government Tuesday dropped a legal bomb on 12 current and former principals, one administrator and a vendor — all charged with running a nearly $1 million bribery and kickback scheme involving school supplies that rarely were delivered.

Among those charged: Ronald Alexander, principal at Charles L. Spain Elementary-Middle School that’s scheduled to receive more than $500,000 in donations from TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Alexander’s charge, unrelated to DeGeneres’ announcement in February, is bribery for allegedly pocketing $23,000 money from Norman Shy in exchange for using the owner of Allstate Sales as a school-supply vendor, according to federal court records.

Renee Dudley, Steve Stecklow, Alexandra Harney and Irene Jay Liu

Internal documents show that the U.S. college entrance exam has been compromised in Asia far more often than acknowledged. And the newly redesigned SAT retains a key vulnerability that the test-prep industry has exploited for years.

Xingyuan Ding is a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of America’s most exclusive public universities. In applying to schools, the 20-year-old from China took the SAT college entrance exam four times.

He had an advantage on his final try: a booklet compiled by a Shanghai test-preparation school he attended.

His study aid was far more valuable than the practice questions that students in America use to prepare for the SAT, the standardized test used by thousands of U.S. colleges to help select applicants. Known in Chinese as a jijing, the booklet was essentially an answer key. It revealed words from the correct responses to multiple-choice questions that had appeared on past SATs – many of which would be used again on the exam Ding took.

Thanks to the booklet, Ding said he already knew the answers to about half of the critical reading section of the SAT when he took the test in Hong Kong in December 2013.

“I felt really lucky,” Ding said.

His score on that section? A perfect 800, he said.

Akshat Rathi:

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Few people know the struggle of correcting such lies better than David Spiegelhalter. Since 2007, he has been the Winton professor for the public understanding of risk (though he prefers “statistics” to “risk”) at the University of Cambridge.

In a sunlit hotel room in Washington DC, Quartz caught up with Spiegelhalter recently to talk about his unique job. The conversation sprawled from the wisdom of eating bacon (would you swallow any other known carcinogen?), to the serious crime of manipulating charts, to the right way to talk about rare but scary diseases.

Douglas Starr:

About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an abbreviated version of the Reid Technique, which is used across the country by police officers, private-security personnel, insurance-fraud investigators, and other people for whom getting at the truth is part of the job. Schneider, who is a staff attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was alarmed. She knew that some psychologists and jurists have characterized the technique as coercive and liable to produce false confessions—especially when used with juveniles, who are highly suggestible. When she expressed her concerns to Brian Schwartz, the I.P.A.’s general counsel, he said that the association had been offering Reid training for many years and found it both popular and benign. To prove it, he invited Schneider to attend a session in January of 2015.

Evgeny Morozov:

Finally, technology firms – thanks to data they collect – can always position themselves as essential to fighting the terrorist threat. For every Tim Cook fighting the FBI, there’s a Peter Thiel, the famed venture capitalist and the chairman of Palantir, a $20bn machine-learning giant that caters to the defence establishment. In a recent interview, Thiel even boasted that Palantir’s technology had helped thwart terrorist attacks.

The grim reality of contemporary politics is not that it’s impossible to imagine how capitalism will end – as the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson once famously put it – but that it’s becoming equally impossible to imagine how it could possibly continue, at least, not in its ideal form, tied, however weakly, to the democratic “polis”. The only solution that seems plausible is by having our political leaders transfer even more responsibility for problem-solving, from matters of welfare to matters of warfare, to Silicon Valley.

This might produce immense gains in efficiency but would this also not aggravate the democratic deficit that already plagues our public institutions? Sure, it would – but the crisis of democratic capitalism seems so acute that it has dropped any pretension to being democratic; hence the proliferation of euphemisms to describe the new normal (with Angela Merkel’s “market-conformed democracy” probably being the most popular one).

Catherine Rampell:

The waters of Lake Wobegon have flooded U.S. college campuses. A’s — once reserved for recognizing excellence and distinction — are today the most commonly awarded grades in America.

That’s true at both Ivy League institutions and community colleges, at huge flagship publics and tiny liberal arts schools, and in English, ethnic studies and engineering departments alike. Across the country, wherever and whatever they study, mediocre students are increasingly likely to receive supposedly superlative grades.

Sarah Garland:

Several students sit around a conference table at Simon Gratz High School in North Philadelphia on a surly winter’s day, the kind that makes even the school’s drafty classrooms seem welcoming. They are there to give their assessment of the school – and they’re not afraid to be blunt.

“I like this school, but I kind of don’t,” says Chynah Perry, age 15, a thin girl with straight posture and stylish black-rimmed glasses. “It’s strict. Real strict.”

Quaseem Foxwell, a linebacker on the football team, says several of his friends left the school because of the tough rules. Yet he defends the strictures. He says he improved his own behavior after a heart-to-heart with his teachers and administrators. “When I came here and got into a fight, they told me I could get kicked out, or I could talk to the teachers and some of the deans,” he says. “The strict rules are all for a reason.”

Ashlee Keiler:

Millions of would-be students turn to the federal government in order finance their education, each taking out thousands of dollars in loans. While that influx of funds allows borrowers to seek a better life by obtaining a degree, it also has to be repaid. And when that becomes impossible for some consumers, debt collectors hired by the Department of Education sometimes resort to garnishing wages.

According to recently released data from the Department of Education, that strategy paid off in the last three months of 2015, with debt collectors bringing in more than $176 million in garnishments [PDF].

Debt collectors, even those working for the federal government, can only garnish a borrower’s wages after they’ve defaulted on their debt — failed to pay for a certain number of months — and received a court order allowing the deductions.

Alan Borsuk:

The importance of principals. The school has had six principals in less than four years. That alone tells you a lot. I interviewed several people who are or were involved in the school and they all pointed to leadership as a problem. “Leadership sets the tone for everything happening in a building,” Knox said.

Lighthouse moved through several principals in rapid order at the start. Other circumstances around the school may have had an impact, but the bottom line is simply that having a good principal who provides steady, effective leadership is crucial to any school.

The importance of leadership more broadly. Adam Peck, current chair of the local Lighthouse board, summed up what went wrong: “Number one, leadership. You have to have the right leadership in place to run a school. And that’s leadership at all levels.”

Kang Shu:

Shenzhen’s government has doubled this year’s budget for programs related to attracting talented people to the city to 4.4 billion yuan this year in a bid to attract more academics and professionals to help nurture innovation.

The city government, which announced the plans through media outlets on March 21, made especially rich offers to top talents. It defined those as world-class scientists and researchers who have led nationally or internationally acclaimed research projects.

Shenzhen gave those luminaries three options should they come to the city. The first was a one-off cash payment of 6 million yuan. The second was a 10-year lease on a 200 square meter apartment, which could be kept if the person stayed for the entire period. That offer also included local household registration privileges, which entitle the holder to health care, education and other public services. The final option was 10 million yuan in cash and benefits, payable after 10 years.

Eric Pianin:

Amid the cacophony of presidential campaign promises promising huge tax cuts and large spending increases, the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday renewed it’s warning that the Obama administration’s celebrated era of shrinking deficits has ended and that serious long- term debt problems are once again on the horizon.

By the end of the current fiscal year, the federal budget deficit will rise to $534 billion – about $100 billion more than last year’s shortfall but slightly better than a previous estimate in January. Then, as a new Democratic or Republican president takes control, the deficit will begin a steady upward march unless the new administration and Congress take steps to slow the rise.

Location: Sequoya Library at 513 Midvale Blvd. Madison, WI 53711
Date: March 29th. From 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Sponsor by Schoolinfosystems.Org.
Any questions contact: Rafael Gomez at 608 445 2106

Katherine Kersten:

A St. Paul Central High School teacher is choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury. A teacher caught between two fighting fifth-grade girls is knocked to the ground with a concussion. Police are compelled to use a chemical irritant to break up a riot at Como Park High School.

Increasingly, some St. Paul Public Schools resemble a war zone. Ramsey County Attorney John Choi has branded the trend of violence “a public health crisis.” Teachers threatened to strike over the dangers they face, and their safety was a pivotal issue in recently concluded contract negotiations. “We are afraid,” one told the Pioneer Press.

Though many — including St. Paul school officials — seem reluctant to acknowledge it, the escalating violence and disorder follow a major change in school disciplinary policies. In recent years, district leaders have increasingly removed consequences for misbehavior, and led kids to believe they can wreak havoc with impunity.

Col Bikram Singh:

By Col Bikram Singh

Winters had just set in, and so were the apprehensions of ‘What Next’ syndrome for an anxious father, who himself had missed the experience of a conventional college life. I had joined National Defence Academy and this intended venture was altogether a unique combat zone for me.

As the pre-boards were approaching, the journey dwindled like the grand annual migration of Wildebeest herd towards the great Mara River. The river was in proximity, its eerie noise was increasing day by day, and on its far bank, the green pastures full of life and freedom were alluring us.

Whenever I gazed at my son, I anticipated achievement; and his “look of silence” conveyed to me, “Buddy come what may, you will get me across to those green pastures”. It was a challenge for both of us to live up to. Another cord which connected us both was the “confusion”, which was growing day by day in our minds.

Connor Friedersdorf :

For starters, leftist activists are far more likely than anyone else to use sidewalk chalk and should be pushing to dispense with existing, rarely enforced campus regulations. The medium is unusually suited to the powerless, too: It is cheap, easy to use, and very hard to suppress. Yet they’re signing on to surveillance and punishment for chalk-wielding activism, as if it hasn’t even occurred to them that their allies stand to lose the most from future crackdowns, whereas Donald Trump 2016 could foreswear sidewalk chalk forever without suffering from it at all. I don’t know whether these students have an incoherent theory of how power works, or haven’t thought the matter through, but future leftist activists may rue their behavior.

What’s more, if the sidewalk-chalker is unmasked and punished, the effect will be to fuel the popularity of Trump 2016, not to undermine it. This is so obvious to everyone outside the bubble of campus leftism that I begin to wonder if activists at Emory don’t understand that, or just don’t actually care about outcomes beyond their bubble.

Evan Belanger:

After 20 years of competing in land-based robotics competitions, students at the Limestone Career Technical Center are taking their skills beneath the waves.

For the first time, the school will compete in an underwater robotics competition to take place next month at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

The competition is representative of the growing presence of robotics in industrial applications and for scientific research.

It will test the students’ abilities to perform underwater tasks that engineers currently accomplish with remotely operated vehicles or ROVs, as well as tasks they hope swimming robots will perform in the future.

Tampa Bay Times:

One of the most controversial elements of HB 7029 is a move to create more school choice even though there already are ample choices for students and parents in many school districts. The bill would allow parents from any school district in the state whose child is not suspended or expelled to enroll their child in any public or charter school that has an open seat. There are several reasonable parts of the provision, including giving preferential treatment to students who move because of their parents’ military assignment or who seek transfers because of court proceedings such as divorces. But on balance, open choice would create havoc for local districts. It also would create a bias toward students whose families have the time and resources to take them to the school of their choice miles away — even across county lines. It would not help poor children who could benefit from attending higher-performing schools with open seats or special programs but don’t have reliable transportation to get there.

Charter schools

There is another break for charter schools in the bill, although it’s not as generous as supporters originally sought. The bill would allow charter schools to receive capital funding within two years of being established instead of the three years required now. Reducing the time frame would shortchange taxpayers who deserve more proof that a charter school is sustainable and produces solid educational results before it gets construction money. Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Nice-ville, attempted to make it more difficult for charters to get state money, particularly if they have ties to private or for-profit entities, but unfortunately lost in horse trading among lawmakers. What remains would make charters even less accountable and foolishly siphon more money from traditional public schools.

Thomas Content:

The analysis, published by the state Public Service Commission, found that 2015 marked the first year that Wisconsin’s rates for residential, commercial and industrial electric customers ranked higher than Michigan as well as six other nearby Midwestern states.

But monthly residential electric bills on average stood at more than $97 a month last year — nearly $8 a month below the average of all eight Midwest states.

That’s because Wisconsinites are using 19% less electricity per month compared with the Midwest average.

Amelia Sims:

Shortly after the incident, several student groups sent out a petition demanding Trump support be recognized as hate speech.

Many see President Wagner’s email as a harmless appeasement of the protesters’ demands. However, one should not underestimate the kind of precedent his response sets.

While the chalkers may have violated some parts of the vague chalking policy, the remedy for these violations is stated to be a clean-up fee, not a conduct hearing.

Stephen Burd:

In the new report released today, “Undermining Pell III: The News Keeps Getting Worse for Low-Income Students,” Stephen Burd, Senior Policy Analyst with New America’s Education Policy Program, examines U.S. Department of Education data showing the average net price that students from low-income families attending 1,400 four-year public and private colleges paid in the 2013-2014 academic year. The average net price is the amount of money that students and their families have to pay after all grant and scholarship aid is deducted from the listed price.

Accompanying the research is a data visualization tool that allows users to view private and public institutions featured in this report—based on the percentage of their student population that receives Pell Grants and the average net price those students are charged per academic year.

Nicholas Fleisher:

The formal decline of tenure in Wisconsin has coincided with renewed media interest in faculty pay. System President Ray Cross said in an interview earlier last week that, while changes to tenure “are causes to make faculty nervous…the real reason I think faculty are being lured away is compensation packages.” The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on faculty retention efforts at UW-Madison, detailing the tens of thousands of dollars in raises and additional research funds that a handful of faculty have negotiated in the face of job offers from elsewhere. The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the end of tenure will bring a financial windfall for UW professors near and far.

Indeed, the elephant in the room last Thursday was money, particularly the Regents’ apparent unwillingness or inability to advocate for more of it in the face of legislative slashing and burning. The overarching goal of the new policies, we were repeatedly told, is to give chancellors flexibility. Flexibility, of course, is code for a host of austerity measures predicated on the consolidation of power in administrative hands. It can also be read here as a byword for Regental buck-passing: far from standing up to legislators, the Regents have turned around and told chancellors to stand up to faculty, all while adopting policies that create a glide path for further cuts. The time to draw a line in the sand was yesterday; instead, our new flexibility-enhanced chancellors will be able to use program prioritization and other means to enact a kind of financial emergency in slow motion.