Andrea Peterson:

In public classrooms across the country, the corporate name that is fast becoming as common as pencils and erasers is Google.

More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software. Beyond its famed Web search, the company freely offers word processing and other software to schools. In total, Google programs are used by more than 50 million students and teachers around the world, the company says.

The Economist:

MANY MBA students dream of striking it rich. Stacey Brewer dreamed of reforming education. Ms Brewer worried that South Africa’s education system was perpetuating racial divisions with its combination of substandard public schools for the black majority and elite private schools for a mainly white minority. So in her MBA thesis for GIBS Business School in Johannesburg, in 2011, she produced a blueprint for a chain of private schools that would use standard business methods (such as economies of scale and technological innovation) to provide cut-price private education for the masses. The chain, SPARK, now operates four schools and will open another four in 2016.

Everything about SPARK Bramley, in a mixed district of Johannesburg, bespeaks aspiration. The pupils are racially diverse—about 80% are black and the rest are white or “coloured”, to use the ugly local term for mixed-race—but they are all in smart uniforms. The school has some of the flavour of a conventional private school with its emphasis on character and discipline. But it also uses lots of unorthodox methods such as chants and dancing. The pupils start each day by reciting a creed that includes the phrase, “I am a SPARK scholar and I am going to university.”

Alex Leary:

The Senate plan, championed by Democrat Steve Geller, mandated insurers cover autism. But insurers in the state’s exchange under Obamacare are exempt. Clinton’s campaign said more than 30 states require the coverage under exchanges. “Clinton’s plan calls on Florida to make this coverage a requirement for all plans offered in their state-run health insurance exchange,” according to the campaign.

Her proposal also calls for:

– A nationwide early screening outreach campaign to ensure that all children, and in particular children from underserved backgrounds, can get screened for autism.

– An “Autism Works Initiative” to extend new resources and establish public-private partnerships that will ensure a post-graduation transition plan for every student with autism aging out of school-based services.

– Enacts the “Keeping All Students Safe Act” to protect children from abusive practices in their school by banning bans the use of mechanical and chemical restraints, and physical restraints that restrict breathing; and other reforms to protect children with autism from abusive treatment in the schools.

Sigal Alon:

The recent wave of campus protests further confirm what we all know: Race is still an open wound in America, and racial discrimination and racism still exist in the United States. Despite the great achievements of the civil-rights movement, including affirmative action in higher education and the workplace, black people still suffer the ramifications of centuries of discrimination and the accumulated burden of their imposed subordination. But campus protests may not only be a backlash against persistent discrimination, racism and inequality, but also a display of a long-lasting frustration with the fact that these problems are not acknowledged in the public sphere. Indeed, among the demands made by the student protesters is that universities acknowledge historic injustices and issue formal, public apologies. There is no better place to illustrate this point than the current debate about affirmative action in college admissions, which reached the Supreme Court last week with the oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas.

In the late 1960s, towards the end of the civil-rights era, most leading colleges and professional schools started to give black students special consideration in admissions. The obvious rationale behind affirmative-action programs was reparation for past societal discrimination and the legacy of slavery. In essence, affirmative action is a type of redistribution policy. In the case of black people in America, it can be viewed as a tool to rectify the egregious wrongs that were perpetuated in the past, including generations of slavery, discrimination, degradation, and limited opportunity. Its role was to facilitate the social and economic mobility of people of color and women and to level the playing field between blacks and whites.

Yet, in the Court last week, where Fisher was heard, the justices mentioned neither the idea of reparations for black people nor persistent racial inequality. Why did these important issues vanish from the discourse on affirmative action and from our public consciousness?

Tax Foundation:

In addition, because capital gains are income that has already been taxed once, the statistics that Cohen and Scheiber present do not tell the full story. While the top 400 taxpayers payed only 17 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes in 2012, the portion of their income that came from capital gains had already been taxed previously, when it was earned as a salary in a former year. Therefore, the effective tax rate faced by high-income individuals in 2012 does not fully capture the burden faced by these taxpayers.

Despite these issues, the New York Times piece contains several interesting insights about the U.S. tax system. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that the more complex the U.S. tax code becomes, the more it will advantage those who can afford tax lawyers. Cohen and Scheiber describe how high-income taxpayers systemically make use of the most complicated parts of the tax code – partnership law, income sourcing rules, etc. – to lower their tax burdens. Again and again, the authors emphasize that these strategies are unavailable to taxpayers with lower incomes.

Catherine Ross:

In the face of spiraling campus demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, mandatory diversity training and sanctions against offensive words, some pundits are asking where today’s college students learned to be so “coddled,” so fearful of competing viewpoints. One answer that has escaped scrutiny could lie in our public schools, where principals and school boards too often fail to teach and respect the speech rights of students that the Constitution protects.

Writing in 1943, while the nation was at war, in a case where the court upheld the right of students to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson proclaimed that individual rights must be respected even in grade schools “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source.”

The court later reaffirmed that robust vision of students’ speech rights. In the 1969 seminal case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, it held that middle- and high-school students have the right to wear black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War so long as their personal expression did not threaten to upend the school day.

James Ford:

ON THE FIRST DAY of every semester during my five years as a teacher at Garinger High School, I had a candid talk with my students about how the world perceives them. The school, sitting off of Eastway Drive in east Charlotte, is high-poverty, majority-minority, and distinctly urban. I knew, from my own experiences, exactly what “type” of school this was, and I didn’t shy away from telling the kids.

I told them that many people didn’t expect much from their population, because of where they live and what they look like. That they all fit into somebody’s stereotype. I told them that students who go to a school such as Garinger are less likely to graduate than students elsewhere. I told them it was a setup of sorts. Then I waited, reading the responses on their faces. Some pouted, sulking in a sense of internalized low self-worth. Others were visibly angry, as if I had confirmed something they never had the language to articulate.

I should say here that my teaching experience at Garinger was amazing. I enjoyed my students and labored passionately to ensure they received a great education. I even became the North Carolina Teacher of the Year. But I knew what was happening from the first day I arrived on campus.

This school, home of the Wildcats, was a symbol of our local system’s backward trend toward re-segregating along racial and socioeconomic lines—a startling shift for a system that, just a few decades ago, was the district referenced in the landmark Supreme Court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, a system that was once regarded as the vanguard of school desegregation.

Doug Erickson:

School administrators say Dereian confessed to bringing a BB gun to school, though they acknowledge the boy never threatened anyone, that police were not called, and that no one actually saw the boy in possession of such an object.

Dereian already has served a suspension of 15 school days. The district now is seeking to expel him for two semesters, although he could be eligible for reinstatement after one semester. That means he would be out for at least the rest of this school year but could return as early as summer school, said Dylan Pauly, the school district attorney prosecuting the case.

Monday’s court-like proceeding lasted more than four hours and included sworn testimony by several parties. Hamdy Ezalarab, the independent hearing examiner who presided, said he will issue a written ruling within five days of receiving transcripts from the hearing.

Hua Hsu:

It was a rich year for even the casual observer of campus life. There were tales of students seeking “trigger warnings” before being exposed to potentially upsetting class materials. There was a new interest in “microaggressions,” or hurtful, everyday slights rarely uttered with the intention to offend. There was the Northwestern professor whose editorial against “sexual paranoia” resulted in students filing a Title IX suit against her, and the University of Missouri students who sought to bar journalists from a public plaza, which they claimed to be a “safe space” protected from the media. There were the students at Yale who demanded that a residential adviser be reprimanded after she prevailed upon them to be more open-minded about offensive Halloween costumes. And there was the item in the Oberlin school paper about sketchy Asian food, a piece that the New York Times described as evidence of the new “culture war.” Every week seemed to bring additional evidence for the emerging archetype of the hypersensitive college student, spotlighted at the beginning of the school year by the Atlantic, in a cover story about the “Coddling of the American Mind,” and just last weekend, in a Times Op-Ed about the “culture of victimhood.”

Chad Wellmon, Esther Vinarov, Anne Manasché, and Andrew Piper

When people talk about inequality these days, they typically mean economic inequality, disparities in income, assets, or other financial measures. But inequalities come in other forms as well, and the academy is home to some of the more entrenched and persistent ones. To those who think the democratizing effects of gender equality and digital technology had begun to erode the hegemony of the academic elite, a close look at hiring and publishing patterns might come as a surprise.

Several recent studies have shown a high degree of concentration in academic hiring from a small number of PhD-granting institutions. One study of political science programs in the United States found that the top five programs placed 20 percent of all academics at research institutions; another study found that graduates of eight universities were hired for half of all tenure-track jobs. In our study of long-term publishing trends in three leading humanities journals, the patterns were similarly striking.

Laura Waters:

NPR reported this past weekend that 40 out of 50 states are having trouble finding special education teachers teachers and the primary reason is “the paperwork, the meetings, the accountability.” Donald Drescher, a professor from Kansas State, surveyed the days of special ed teachers and found that they spend only 27% of their time on student instruction and the rest on oversight of Individual Education Plans (I.E.P.’s), meetings, co-teaching, and data management. Prof. Drescher says, “If we wonder why teachers are frustrated, this data sheds some light on it.”

This much-circulated article/podcast skirts a larger question: have we lost the proper balance between classroom instruction and accountability, both within and without the world of special education? Has paperwork and data run amok? Do federal and state education laws unduly burden schools with compliance requirements, teachers with test preparation, and students with test anxiety?

Sean awilliams:

Ohropax’s current factory in the Hessian town of Wehrheim, is not one of Germany’s quietest places, buzzing and whirring as thousands of earplugs roll off the production line each day.

Its products, however, have been mitigating noise for over a century. They, like Ohropax’s home, have changed throughout the 20th Century.

In 1958, as private enterprise was calcified under East German communism, the company moved to Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt, under the leadership of Negwer’s son Wolfgang.

Tea Leaf Nation:

In the 1970s, they came from Iran, riding the wave of the oil boom. Then in the first decade of the second millennium, they came from India, filling up graduate programs in business and science. Now, it’s Chinese students who comprise the largest group of international pupils in the United States, buoyed by a growing Chinese middle class that’s willing to pay top dollar for their children’s educations. According to an annual report by the Institute of International Education (IIE), in the 2014-2015 academic year more than 304,000 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, an almost five-fold increase from just a decade earlier.

Chrotopher Phillips:

An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the education of intelligent, virtuous citizens who would be able to compete on a global scale.

In this history, Christopher J. Phillips examines the rise and fall of the new math as a marker of the period’s political and social ferment. Neither the new math curriculum designers nor its diverse legions of supporters concentrated on whether the new math would improve students’ calculation ability. Rather, they felt the new math would train children to think in the right way, instilling in students a set of mental habits that might better prepare them to be citizens of modern society—a world of complex challenges, rapid technological change, and unforeseeable futures. While Phillips grounds his argument in shifting perceptions of intellectual discipline and the underlying nature of mathematical knowledge, he also touches on long-standing debates over the place and relevance of mathematics in liberal education. And in so doing, he explores the essence of what it means to be an intelligent American—by the numbers.

Ross Breneman:

For a decade or so, the de facto statistic about new teachers was that almost half of them leave the teaching profession within five years. But a longitudinal study conducted by the Institute for Education Sciences, published in April, found that statistic to be very different by 2012: Only 17 percent of new teachers are now believed to leave the profession within five years:

Mark Tapson:

Published in 1885 with the Civil War still in living memory, Mark Twain’s classic novel about a white boy traveling down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave remains one of our nation’s most controversial books even 130 years later. It was the 14th most “challenged” book in the country during the 2000s, according to the American Library Association, and it still faces occasional bans and boycotts in schools due to its notorious abundance of N-words and politically incorrect depictions of black characters.

In 2011, in a well-meaning attempt to soften the book’s tone for a modern audience, a publisher released an edition of Huck Finn with all 219 instances of the racial slur replaced by the word “slave,” a pale synonym that guts Twain’s original language and lacks the abhorrent impact of the N-word (as does the euphemism “N-word” itself).

But students (and adults too, for that matter) deserve the unvarnished reality of art, not a revisionist attempt to sand down its rough edges. After all, we don’t drape the nude loins of Michelangelo’s David with Hanes boxers just because the sight of the statue’s penis might make some tourists feel awkward.

Rani Neutill:

Gradually, I started to resent academia, partly because I couldn’t get a permanent job and partly because of the elitism and snobbery that came with the profession—an elitism that seemed inextricable from the environment and the people in it. I would grit my teeth at academic parties, listening to conversations where it was impossible for a person to talk about anything other than Hegel or T.S. Eliot. All I wanted to talk about was “The Good Wife.”

“How do you deal with these people?” a colleague’s spouse asked me one night. We were smoking on a porch in the dead of winter, shivering through our conversation. There was snow everywhere. I had been quietly listening to two white dudes from the philosophy department alternate between a discussion of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and reminiscences of traveling to Paris in the summer for research, how wonderful the city was and how hard it had been to return to the provincial United States. In my head, which had started to throb, I was thinking, “You guys have it real hard here, don’t you?” Another guy from the English department launched into a monologue about his recent publication in some fancy academic journal. No one seemed impressed. No one there seemed impressed by anything other than themselves.

More.

Terry Eagleto:

advanced university in Asia by its proud president. As befitted so eminent a personage, he was flanked by two burly young minders in black suits and shades, who for all I knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets. Having waxed lyrical about his gleaming new business school and state-of-the-art institute for management studies, the president paused to permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.’s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly “Your comment will be noted.” He then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably “Kill him.” A limousine the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car disappear from view, wondering when his order for my execution was to be implemented.

Daniel Wesley:

LMU Munich:

Just as in any other area in which logical or mathematical methods are being used, it is necessary to first learn to understand and practice these methods before they can be applied successfully. One way of achieving this is of course to take courses at our Center. Additionally, here is some background material on logic and philosophy that will be of use for self-study:

Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner:

In 1960, 22 percent of the American public, some 40 million people, earned an income below the poverty line.1 Fifteen years later, the rate had been reduced to 12 percent as spending on poverty assistance increased from 3 to about 8 percent of U.S. government spending.2 The War on Poverty had a dramatic impact. Poverty, espe- cially among the elderly, was indeed reduced, and substantially so (for a thorough discussion of how various demographics fared during the decades after the War on Poverty, see Danziger & Weinberg, 1994). The poor were seen as victims of an economic system that had no place for them, trapped in dysfunctional schools, plagued by racial barriers to progress, and a potential threat to social stability and peace if their needs were not addressed. Poor Americans were “people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress,” wrote Michael Harrington in The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which provided an important intellectual framework for the War on Poverty (Harrington, 1962). Government response was urgent, and it came in dramatic fashion.

Betsy McCaughey.

Charlotte Hays:

Instead of rejoicing that at last the single-sex school, once of prerogative only of the affluent, is becoming an option for more low-income families, these folks are mounting a campaign against the upswing. It began in the 1990s when less affluent families, facing the prospect of sending their kids to failing or dangerous public schools, began to lobby for the single-sex option for their kids. Generally speaking, parents of girls wanted them free from the pressures of impressing boys. And parents of boys wanted teachers who could be firmer and espouse certain ideals of—if you’ll excuse the politically incorrect term—manliness.

The push for single-sex public schools for kids from low-income families became so pronounced that the Obama administration had to hold its nose and issue guidelines for establishing such schools. They stipulate that there must be a compelling educational reason for setting up a single-sex school and that “gender stereotypes” are strictly forbidden.

According to the guidelines, parents must opt-in rather than simply having children assigned to one of these nefarious institutions. Unfortunately for the critics of single-sex public education, parents seem to be doing just that: The waiting lists for successful single-sex public schools such as the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy in Dallas, where young men wear ties and blazers, or the Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School, which enrolls girls from low-income families and is considered one of Texas’ best public schools, are long. In 2004 there were 34 single-sex public schools in the U.S.; today there are around 850.

Elizabeth Cheung:

A controversial Hong Kong bookseller who specialises in reading material critical of the Chinese Communist Party has gone missing – just weeks after four of his associates disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

The wife of 65-year-old Lee Bo, a major shareholder in Causeway Bay Books, reported her husband missing yesterday afternoon.

The disappearance of Lee is the fifth such case related to the bookstore, after Gui Minhai, owner of Mighty Current, the publishing house which owns the bookstore, turned up in Thailand after leaving town.

Missing person reports were made to police about three other members of the bookstore’s staff – manager Lam Wing-kei, Lui Bo, general manager of the publishing house and Cheung Jiping, the publishing house’s business manager, on November 5.

Police last night confirmed they had received a report from a 61-year-old woman surnamed Choi yesterday at North Point police station, saying that she could not establish contact with her 65-year-old husband surnamed Lee.

Eugene Volokh:

Judge Alex Kozinski — for whom I clerked 20 years ago, who is one of our nation’s most prominent appellate judges, and who has long been seen as on balance a libertarianish conservative (appointed by President Reagan) — has recently published an article in the Georgetown Law Journal that says some pretty harsh things about our criminal justice system, and offers some (doubtless controversial) proposals for improving it. You can read the whole article, Criminal Law 2.0, but I also asked Judge Kozinski for permission to serialize the article here, and he graciously agreed. Here is the introduction, which gives 12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system; I’ll post other parts of the article in the days to come. I’ve added some paragraph breaks and removed the footnotes (which are available in the PDF version), but otherwise this is as Judge Kozinski wrote it:

Peter Elkind:

When Exxon Mobil, GE, Intel, and others pushed for the education standards, they incurred the wrath of Tea Party conservatives and got a painful lesson in modern politics.

In February 2014, two of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and Charles Koch, dined together at a West Coast restaurant.

They made quite the odd couple: the Seattle Microsoft MSFT -1.40% co-founder, now devoting his time and fortune to changing the world, and the Kansas industrialist, still running his private conglomerate while working to shrink government to the size of a pea.

The two discussed many subjects and even touched, diplomatically, on topics they disagree about, such as climate change. There was a second sensitive subject that Gates broached, and it didn’t come up by chance. His team at the Gates Foundation had engaged in a process it calls a “faction analysis” and identified Koch as a key opponent on a crucial issue. Gates had a mission that night: He wanted to persuade Koch to change his mind about Common Core.

Harry Mount:

Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education. That whirlwind has imported imbecilic trigger warnings – when academics have to warn students that western European literature, from the Iliad on, is full of sex and violence. It has also brought the pernicious idea of “no-platforming” – when students refuse to give a stage to anyone who doesn’t fit with their narrow view of the world.

We shouldn’t blame the student emperors for all this. Their warped supersensitivity is the fault of the generation above – the teachers and parents who have so indulged them. I first noticed the disaster of child-centred education six years ago. Near my childhood home in north London, there is a late-Victorian school. According to the noticeboard outside, it didn’t have a headmaster. Instead, Mr MJ Chappel was called the “lead learner”.

Dean Mosiman:

In Madison, the tax bill for a fair market home valued at $200,000 was $4,690. Outside Madison, the tax bill for a fair market home with the same value ranged from $2,815 in the town of Christiana in the Stoughton School District to $4,736 in the village of Brooklyn in the Oregon School District.

The tiny town of Blooming Grove saw average drops in average bills for homes that didn’t change in value between 7.43 percent and 11.47 percent depending on which of four school districts property is located.

The decreases came from savings in an intergovernmental agreement under which the city of Madison is now providing fire and emergency medical service to the town, town administrator-clerk-treasurer Mike Wolf said.

The town had employed three full-time firefighters supplemented by volunteers and interns, but contracting with the city saves $100,000 and makes sense because the town is set to dissolve in 2027, he said.

A similar Middleton home pays 13 to 16% less than a Madison property.

Despite spending more than most school districts (currently $17k/student), Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Nate Bowling:

Elijah was the most energetic student I have ever taught. He drove me up the wall freshmen year. But, over the next three years I had the pleasure of watching him grow, mellow slightly, and turn into one of the hardest working students I had last year. He was a captain of the wrestling team. He sat in the front seat in my AP Government class. He grinded for me like no other student last year. And I remember how proud of him I felt as I read his name last June at graduation. Now I can’t believe he’s gone.

We’ve lost kids before, we lost Chandler and Hector in the last few years. Last year, we lost Jalon–that one really hurt me too. But I have never felt a loss this personal.

The next thing I remember was finding his math teacher in her classroom. She also had a very close relationship with Elijah. We had just discussed a few days prior how much we missed him–now he was gone. We hugged and cried in her doorway for what seemed like an eternity. I was a mess; she was worse. Neither of us knew what to say. We just cried. There really aren’t words for moments like that, if there are I certainly am not smart or composed enough under pressure to know them. We just cried.

It was Election Day and I had an armful of Voters’ Pamphlets to use in Government with me. As I shuffled past pockets of students, some with tears in their eyes, other completely unaware of what had happened, I just cried.

Justin Fox:

have also been studies that purport to measure risk aversion by country. One recent attempt using Gallup polling data on happiness, by Nestor Gandelman of Universad ORT in Uruguay and Ruben Hernandez-Murillo of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found the Dutch to be among the least risk-averse people on the planet (only Zimbabwe and Belarus scored lower), while U.S. risk aversion came out on the high side (among developed countries, only France, Belgium and Taiwan scored higher, as did nine developing countries).

I’m not sure how much stock to put in that result, which uses happiness data “to estimate how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases using an iterated maximum likelihood procedure, assuming a constant relative risk aversion utility function.” But there do seem to be a lot of indications that the famously footloose and risk-tolerant citizens of the U.S. are becoming less willing to take leaps into the unknown. Along with the entrepreneurship decline mentioned above, median job tenure has risen markedly since 2004 and the percentage of Americans who change residences each year has been in a long decline. As the New York Times reported last week, the “typical adult” in the U.S. now “lives only 18 miles from his or her mother.”

Annie Herbert, Ruth Gilbert, Arturo González-Izquierdo, Alexandra Pitman, Leah Li:

Hospitalisation for adversity-related injury (violent, drug/alcohol-related, or self-inflicted injury) has been described as a “teachable moment”, when intervention may reduce risks of further harm. Which adolescents are likely to benefit most from intervention strongly depends on their long-term risks of harm. We compared 10-y risks of mortality and re-admission after adversity-related injury with risks after accident-related injury.

Tisha Thompson, Rick Yarborough and Jeff Piper:

The News4 I-Team started investigating Montgomery College after receiving multiple letters from staffers throughout the summer complaining about the school’s president, Dr. DeRionne Pollard, and how much she spends on travel and transportation, including an armed driver recently hired by the school to protect her.

The I-Team obtained a copy of Dr. Pollard’s contract after filing a public records request with the school, and it shows she receives a $281,000 salary with a possible 5 percent annual bonus, along with an additional $3,000 housing allowance each month for her home in Germantown, Maryland.

According to the contract, the school’s Board of Trustees also agreed to pay for all of her work-related travel — and for all of her wife’s travel costs anytime she accompanied her on business trips.

New York Times:

Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.

Congress understood this fundamental point, and kept the testing requirement, when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act — now called the Every Student Succeeds Act — last month. But lawmakers ducked the most important problem: the fact that most states still have weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless and that leave graduates unprepared for college, the job market or even meeting entry requirements for the Army.

The costs associated with this problem are demonstrated in a recent report by Motoko Rich in The Times, which focused on Berea High School in Greenville, S.C., where the graduation rate has risen to 80 percent, from under 65 percent just four years ago. But college entrance exams given to 11th graders last year showed that only one in 10 students was ready for college-level reading and only about one in 14 was prepared for entry-level college math. On a separate job skills test, only about half of students demonstrated the math proficiency needed to succeed at most jobs.

With results like that, it’s no wonder some South Carolina business leaders are worried that the state is producing high school graduates who are not qualified to compete for higher-skilled jobs at companies like Boeing, Volvo and BMW.

This is a national problem. A recent study from Achieve, a nonpartisan organization that works with the states to raise academic standards, showed that only 18 states and the District of Columbia required all graduates in the class of 2014 to meet the minimum preparation requirements for college — four years of English and math through Algebra II, or its equivalent.

Related:Young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.:

American Panorama is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.

Robby Soave:

Eric Posner, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, hasn’t actually censored anyone, so he doesn’t make the list. But he certainly provides a great deal of intellectual ammunition for people working to restrict free expression rights—including and especially university administrators, as well as the police. Whether he is arguing that 18-year-olds are better off with fewer rights, or that vast infringements on internet freedom are necessary in order to protect the U.S. from ISIS, Posner is a reliable ally of would-be muzzlers everywhere.

Food Timeline:

Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why? So do we!!! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it’s impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve. We make food history fun.

Ben Goertzel:

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his recent and celebrated book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, argues that advanced AI poses a potentially major existential risk to humanity, and that advanced AI development should be heavily regulated and perhaps even restricted to a small set of government-approved researchers.

Bostrom’s ideas and arguments are reviewed and explored in detail, and compared with the thinking of three other current thinkers on the nature and implications of AI: Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly Singularity Institute for AI), and David Weinbaum (Weaver) and Viktoras Veitas of the Global Brain Institute. Relevant portions of Yudkowsky’s book Rationality: From AI to Zombies are briefly reviewed, and it is found that nearly all the core ideas of Bostrom’s work appeared previously or concurrently in Yudkowsky’s thinking.

However, Yudkowsky often presents these shared ideas in a more plain-spoken and extreme form, making clearer the essence of what is being claimed. For instance, the elitist strain of thinking that one sees in the background in Bostrom is plainly and openly articulated in Yudkowsky, with many of the same practical conclusions (e.g., that it may well be best if advanced AI is developed in secret by a small elite group).

Jonathan Rothwell:

College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times higher in 2015 than in 1980, dramatically higher than the 2.5 increase in overall personal consumption over the period. For private education, from pre-K through secondary, prices are 8.5 times higher now than in 1980. For public schools, the rise is lower—4.7 from 1980 to 2013

—but still far above general inflation.
…but learning has stagnated

For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy since the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s.

AFP

The change, which was announced in October by the Communist Party, would take effect on January 1, Xinhua reported.

All married couples will be allowed to have a second child but the legislation maintains limits on additional births. The law was formally adopted by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress as it wrapped up its bimonthly session.

The one-child policy, instituted in the late 1970s, restricted most couples to only a single offspring and for years authorities argued it was a key factor to the country’s economic boom and had prevented 400 million births

Christopher Ingraham:

some social science researchers, these characterizations would not come as a surprise. Rice is black. And research published last year by the American Psychological Association found “evidence that black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their white same-age peers.” In other words, people tend to think of black boys as bigger and older than they actually are.

In one experiment, a group of 60 police officers from a large urban police force were asked to assess the age of white, black and Latino children based on photographs. The officers were randomly assigned to be told that the children in the photographs were accused of either a misdemeanor or felony charge. The officers overestimate the age of black felony-suspected children by close to five years, but they actually underestimated the age of white felony-suspected children by nearly a year.

Motoko Rich:

A sign in a classroom here at Berea High School, northwest of downtown in the largest urban district in the state, sends this powerful message: “Failure Is Not an Option. You Will Pass. You Will Learn. You Will Succeed.”

By one measure, Berea, with more than 1,000 pupils, is helping more students succeed than ever: The graduation rate, below 65 percent just four years ago, has jumped to more than 80 percent.

But that does not necessarily mean that all of Berea’s graduates, many of whom come from poor families, are ready for college — or even for the working world. According to college entrance exams administered to every 11th grader in the state last spring, only one in 10 Berea students were ready for college-level work in reading, and about one in 14 were ready for entry-level college math. And on a separate test of skills needed to succeed in most jobs, little more than half of the students demonstrated that they could handle the math they would need.

John Timmer:

For all its flaws, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. Despite the vandalism, edit wars, and arguments over what constitutes a point of view, it provides key information about a dizzying variety of topics. I’ve relied on them for a lot of information. Most entries have the basics—who, what, when, where, and why—and a long list of references if going beyond the basics is required.

Most entries, but not all. Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you’re likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible.

This failure is a minor problem for Wikipedia, as most of the entries people rely on are fine. But I’d argue that it’s a significant problem for science. The problematic entries reinforce the popular impression that science is impossible to understand and isn’t for most people—they make science seem elitist. And that’s an impression that we as a society really can’t afford.

BBC

Conductor Marin Alsop believes “music is all about living in the positive”. As one of the few women to reach the top of her profession, she’s embarked on a music programme to reach 10,000 children and to create opportuinites for girls and women to follow in her footsteps.

Worthwhile links: The tyranny of low expectations and Harrison Bergeron.

Much more on Marin Alsop, here.

Adam Entous and Danny Yadron.

The lack of civic oversight is unconstitional, not to mentionbad for our institutions and democracy.

Locally, the Madison government school board failed to review then Superintendent Rainwater for a number of years.

Christopher Newfield:

What kind of budgetary future do the humanities have in public universities? Dire predictions have been around for years and take many plausible forms (Donoghue), including the retreat of humanities research into wealthy private universities for the dwindling leisure class. In this piece I focus on what I believe to be the most likely public university trajectory: the closure that converts a combined research and instructional department into a service unit. My approach here reflects my reluctant conclusion that most faculty members outside the humanities would accept this conversion of the humanities into a domain that teaches a range of basic skills. Since I began to study university budgets through an academic senate position fifteen years ago, cross-disciplinary inequalities have worsened, but I have in general not found faculty members to be much more interested in addressing them than are academic managers. Thus I’m going to be a bit less polite about competing faculty disciplinary interests than I have been in the past.

Fix the Debt:

We heard a lot of concern about the national debt from the politicians in Washington this year. However, policymakers still managed to add over $1 trillion to the debt in 2015.

Not paying for legislation and budget gimmicks that masked the true cost of new policies added up this year. The biggest hole was dug just before Congress left for the rest of the year with a massive tax and spending package. When interest is included, nearly $1.2 trillion over ten years was added to the debt.

bishboria:

A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory,Kenneth Ireland Michael Rosen

A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory,Kenneth Ireland Michael Rosen

A Course in Arithmetic,Jean-Pierre Serre
A Course in Computational Algebraic Number Theory,Henri Cohen

Peter Wong:

Oregon’s major business groups want lawmakers to start dealing with rising public pension costs as early as the session that opens Feb. 1.

Although those costs start to kick in with the 2017-19 budget cycle — 18 months away — advocates say it’s not too early to whittle down an unfunded liability projected at $18 billion over the next few decades.

“If we do nothing, 100 percent of the burden falls on taxpayers, government services and their ability to undertake reinvestment in budgets going forward,” says Tim Nesbitt, currently a consultant for the Oregon Business Plan.

Nesbitt is a former president of the Oregon AFL-CIO labor federation and an adviser to two governors.

Nesbitt also says that public employees themselves will be hurt by a system that diverts dollars from government services into ever-higher pension contributions.

nymag:

Where do we stand now, economically?
Well, we are right back at it: trying to stimulate growth through easy money. It hasn’t worked, but it’s the only tool the Fed’s got. Meanwhile, the Fed’s policies widen the wealth gap, which feeds political extremism, forcing gridlock in Washington. It seems the world is headed toward negative real interest rates on a global scale. This is toxic. Interest rates are used to price risk, and so in the current environment, the risk-pricing mechanism is broken. That is not healthy for an economy. We are building up terrific stresses in the system, and any fault lines there will certainly harm the outlook.

What makes you most nervous about the future?
Debt. The idea that growth will remedy our debts is so addictive for politicians, but the citizens end up paying the price. The public sector has really stepped up as a consumer of debt. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is leveraged 77:1. Like I said, the absurdity, it just befuddles me.

Jeff Guo:

Tuesday in October and Terrell Kellam is running late. He usually wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the first of two buses that will take him from southwest Baltimore to Morgan State University, just north of the city. With a good connection, making it to his college classes might take an hour and a half.

But his bus pass has been acting up recently. He spends the morning looking for spare change. He’s going to miss his first class. And, because he forgot to pack food from home, he doesn’t have anything to eat for the rest of the day. He goes hungry pretty often.

Larissa Macfarquhar.

by Aleks Berditchevskaia:

Many services that we use every day rely on machine learning. Machine learning is used in internet search engines, email filters to sort out spam, websites to make personalised recommendations, banking software to detect unusual transactions, and lots of apps on our phones such as voice recognition.

Many services that we use every day rely on machine learning.
The technology has many more potential applications, some with higher stakes than others. Future developments could support the UK economy and will have a significant impact upon society. For example, machine learning could provide us with readily available ‘personal assistants’ to help manage our lives, it could dramatically improve the transport system through the use of autonomous vehicles; and the healthcare system, by improving disease diagnoses or personalising treatment. Machine learning could also be used for security applications, such as analysing email communications or internet usage. The implications of these and other applications of the technology need to be considered now and action taken to ensure uses will be beneficial to society.

John Horgan:

These are tough times for scientists. As funding has flattened or declined, the competition for grants and glory has grown increasingly fierce. In response, many researchers are touting their work more aggressively.

That is the implication of a new study by three biomedical Dutch researchers (to which communication scholar Matthew Nisbet drew my attention). The authors examined the frequency of 25 positive words—from “amazing” and “astonishing” to “unique” and “unprecedented”–in abstracts listed in the biomedical database PubMed between 1974 and 2014. Here is how they summarize their results in the British Medical Journal, BMJ:

Amy Dockser Marcus:

It was a big decision, and Kathy Giusti saved the conversations about it for quiet moments. A phone call catching up with her mother. A car ride with her children. A backyard party celebrating a high-school graduation.

Ms. Giusti wanted to discuss the complex, intimate and sometimes life-changing choice that many families will have to make in the coming years: whether to get your genes sequenced and then share the data.

Ms. Giusti, 56 years old, is a well-known cancer advocate and proponent of data sharing. She and her identical twin sister, Karen Andrews, founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation in 1998, two years after Ms. Giusti was diagnosed with the disease, a rare and incurable cancer of the plasma cells.

Alan Borsuk:

In hopes of revving up readership, I invited Miley Cyrus to join in presenting the annual Wisconsin education awards. But she was busy lowering standards of public decency in America, so you’ll have to put up with me. How boring — but this year wasn’t boring for Badger state education, so let’s get right to the 2015 honors.

The Everyone Gets an A Award. This goes to Wisconsin’s messed up standardized testing system for 2014-’15. Wondering how kids are doing in your community’s schools? So am I! So is everyone! Maybe they’re all doing great.

The launch of what was called the Badger Exam was awful. And the test was killed off before it really came to life. There were screw ups in several big ways. Now, at the end of 2015, no scores have been released publicly. (They’re coming soon, I’m told. Great. And we have a new state test coming in the spring. Also great.) This also kiboshed the state report cards for schools for the past year. From a public accountability standpoint, 2014-’15 might as well not have happened.

The Hail Mary Award. No, it doesn’t go to Aaron Rodgers for that pass against the Lions. It goes to the Milwaukee Archdiocese and its launch of an ambitious effort, called Seton Catholic Schools, aimed at raising the quality of more than two dozen parochial grade schools in the city. The initiative aims to centralize control of key matters, including hiring and training teachers and principals and raising overall professionalism and energy. This is a big deal and, given the thousands of children involved, I hope it pays off.

Ricardo Hausmann:

Inequality is the result of many different phenomena. Some of them should be a source of policy concern while others should not. My main problem is the inequality that arises from differences in productivity—namely, differences in productivity across regions, across cities, within cities and across social groups. We know that there are huge differences in income across countries of the world: the richest countries are 200 to 300 times richer than the poorest countries in per capita terms. That’s inequality at the global scale.

That is mostly caused by differences in productivity. It’s not because there’s a global pie and it is shared unequally between the rich countries and the poor countries. These are just independent pies of radically different size. At the global level, the bulk of inequality across countries is inequality in productivity.

Annysa Johnson:

A Marquette University summer reading program for children developed by former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and education reform advocate Howard Fuller would get a $1.25 million boost from the state under a bill making its way through the Legislature.

The Assembly bill, proposed by Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-New Berlin), would require the state Department of Public Instruction to award Marquette’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning, headed by Fuller, $375,000 next year and $750,000 in 2017. And that could increase in coming years, he said, if the program is as effective as Fuller and Marquette have claimed.

“We’re using this as a pilot program,” said Sanfelippo, who learned of the Marquette program when he sat down with Fuller to discuss education issues in 2014. “We would fund it for two years so we can take a good, hard look at the numbers. And if we continue to see the results Marquette is achieving, we would hope to expand it statewide for any district interested.”

Jonathan Haidt:

Truth is a process, not just an end-state. The Righteous Mind was about the obstacles to that process — confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and the worship of sacred values. Given the many ways that our moral psychology warps our reasoning, it’s a wonder we’ve gotten as far as we have, as a species. That’s what’s so brilliant about science: it is a way of putting people together so that they challenge each other and cancel out each others’ confirmation biases and tribal commitments. The truth emerges from the interaction of flawed individuals.

But something alarming has happened to the academy since the 1990s: it has been transformed from an institution that leans to the left, which is not a big problem, into an institution that is entirely on the left, which is a very big problem.

Madison City Clerk’s Office

This is a list of candidates who have submitted paperwork to run for school board.

This is not a list of official candidates.

Remarkable.

School Board Candidate Information.

By Mahmoud Badavam:

MIT NEWS MAGAZINE 5
On April 30, 2015, I was standing behind the very tall and heavy door of Rajaee-Shahr prison in the suburbs of Tehran, anxiously waiting for a moment I’d been imagining for four years. At last, the door opened and I could see the waiting crowd that included my family, friends, and former students. The first thing I did was hug my wife. We were both crying.

In 2011, my career had taken an unexpected and unusual turn: I was imprisoned for the crime of teaching physics at an “unofficial” university called the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE).

Iran’s Baha’i community created BIHE in the 1980s after our youth were banned from Iranian universities. I began volunteering there in 1989 after serving three years in prison for simply being an active Baha’i. At BIHE, I taught physics and electronics and, as a member of BIHE’s e-learning committee, was a liaison with MIT’s OpenCourseWare Consortium. When I was arrested in 2011, I was on the engineering faculty at BIHE on top of my day job at an engineering company.

After six months in solitary confinement, I joined 70 to 80 fellow prisoners of conscience (many of us Baha’is); I shared a two-by-four-meter room with five others. I spent most of my time meditating, praying, and reading any available books. I wrote letters to friends and family, talked to fellow prisoners, and taught English.

Weekly visits with my wife and daughter (and sometimes my sister) provided a connection to the outside world. They brought news of calls, e-mails, and visits from my friends and colleagues. Once my daughter brought me a copy of MIT Technology Review, which I read line by line and page by page, including all the advertisements! But the authorities did not allow me to receive the next issue, because it was in English and no one there could verify its contents.

Dwyer Gunn:

Earlier this month, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution—two Washington, D.C.–based think tanks that typically occupy opposite ends of the ideological spectrum—released a joint report on poverty in America. The report, authored by an “ideologically balanced” working group of conservative, liberal, and centrist experts, lays out a comprehensive plan for fighting poverty that’s admirable for its emphasis on evidence-based solutions from across the political spectrum.

The report recommends a variety of policies aimed at increasing the skills and wages of low-income workers, closing the education gap, and increasing economic mobility. But it’s the section on family, particularly its emphasis on the declining institution of marriage and the perils of non-marital childbearing, that likely required particularly delicate negotiations between the working group’s more liberal and conservative scholars. The authors’ conclusion: Childbearing should be delayed until couples tie the knot, and marriage should be promoted as “the most reliable route to family stability and resources.”

Peter Mandler:

The humanities are in crisis. It’s become orthodoxy. In fact, so much attention has been paid to the ‘crisis of the humanities’ that few have stopped to ask if there actually is such a crisis. Over just the past few generations, enormous changes have transformed higher education. These changes have brought a greater proportion of 18-year-olds to university. In the case of most countries apart from the United States, this brings a huge increase, from a low base – and thus tremendous changes in the composition of that student body in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and other key markers. In each generation, commentators have predicted (and policymakers have demanded) that the humanities would suffer from a more utilitarian, career-oriented, tech-savvy influx. But it hasn’t happened.

In the English-speaking world, over the past half-century, the proportion of students studying humanities at university has hardly changed. True, as one might expect, in the US, the United Kingdom and Australia, there have been fluctuations and important changes in educational demographics, most importantly more women going to college. The crude picture is this: in 1971, humanities students outnumbered business students; now it’s the other way around. But in 1971 there were also about 50 per cent more business majors than science majors; now there are about 250 per cent more.

Brian Costa:

This shift threatens to cost Major League Baseball millions of potential fans, raising concerns about the league’s future at a time when revenues are soaring and attendance is strong.

“The biggest predictor of fan avidity as an adult is whether you played the game,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. An MLB spokesman cited fan polling conducted by the league last year as proof. When asked to assess the factors that drove their interest in sports, fans between the ages of 12 and 17 cited participation as a major factor more often than watching or attending the sport. That was particularly true among male fans in that age group, 70% of which cited “playing the sport” as a big factor in building their interest.

Medium Col:

years after publishing Ralph 124C 41+ in the pages of his pop technology magazine Modern Electrics, Hugo Gernsback published a second, far less studied work in his second imprint, The Electrical Experimenter. This novel, The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen, ran from May 1915 to February 1917.

As a work of fiction, the novel is insufferable. It reads as a series of lectures on physics, chemistry, and astronomy, all situated within a stock fantastic setting and strung together with the thinnest of narrative expositions. But because this is a budding work of “scientifiction,” and beholden to the Gernsbackian tenets of scientific rationality, the narrative has to explain exactly how these lectures are transmitted from locations such as the Moon or Mars.

And here’s where things get interesting. Münchausen, before leaving for Mars, sets up a relay station on the Moon capable of receiving his long distance audio transmissions and amplifying them for reception by the novel’s narrator, I.M. Alier, on Earth. Gernsback selects the obscure recording device known as the telegraphone, patented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, to be the substrate on which Münchausen’s transmissions are recorded for rebroadcast in the form of serial fiction.

EFF:

What books, TV shows, and movies helped shaped the way EFF staff were thinking about cutting edge issues this year? Each December we like to look back at some of the new and noteworthy media we took in. We don’t endorse all the arguments you’ll find in them, but we think they at least add something valuable to the discussion. Also, this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list—more of a conversation starter.

Some notes about this list: it’s presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name, and most links contain our Amazon affiliate code, which means EFF will receive a portion of purchases made through this page. Books reviewed by Cory Doctorow point to his original review. Descriptions are by Parker Higgins except where otherwise specified.

License Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, edited by Madeline Ashby and David Nickle
James Bond may only live twice in the movies, but in the imaginations of his readers he can live a thousand different times—and tell as many different stories. In Canada, where the novels describing his adventures entered the public domain this January, that’s exactly what’s happened. Under the editorship of established authors Madeline Ashby and David Nickle, a diverse collection of writers have reimagined the famous secret agent and his escapades in 19 new stories.

tapwage:

Hiring managers overwhelmingly disagree

We analyzed over 50,000 job listings by major technology companies, and another 50,000 job listings at major companies outside of tech. It appears that the hiring managers at Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies didn’t get Sheryl’s memo.

In absolute terms, Facebook has a large number of job listings that prefer, or strongly prefer an MBA, including internships specifically for current MBA students. In fact, they are currently looking to fill 75 positions, or 9% of their total openings with a preference for an MBA.

Kyle Spencer.

Rebecca Robbins:

A STAT analysis of data updated in September finds that Harvard — used to being at the top of most rankings that count — isn’t even in the same league as many US universities by several measures of success in commercializing faculty research.

Harvard ranks 25th among universities and university systems in terms of the number of faculty inventions it licensed or optioned out to industry in the 2012-14 fiscal years, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers.

James Manyika, Sree Ramaswamy, Somesh Khanna, Hugo Sarrazin, Gary Pinkus, Guru Sethupathy, and Andrew Yaffe:

Digital capabilities, adoption, and usage are evolving at a supercharged pace. While most users scramble just to keep up with the relentless rate of innovation, the sectors, companies, and individuals on the digital frontier continue to push the boundaries of technology use—and to capture disproportionate gains as a result.

The pronounced gap between the digital “haves” and “have-mores” is a major factor shaping competition at all levels of the economy. The companies leading the charge are winning the battle for market share and profit growth; some are reshaping entire industries to their own advantage. Workers with the most sophisticated digital skills are in such high demand that they command wages far above the national average. Meanwhile, there is a growing opportunity cost for the organizations and individuals that fall behind.

Our new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, Digital America: A tale of the haves and have-mores, represents the first major attempt to measure the ongoing digitization of the US economy at a sector level. It introduces the MGI Industry Digitization Index, which combines dozens of indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of where and how companies are building digital assets, expanding digital usage, and creating a more digital workforce. In addition to the information- and communication-technology sector, media, financial services, and professional services are surging ahead, while others have significant upside to capture.

Miriam Jordan:

Chinese students are enrolling in American primary and secondary schools, public and private, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security, many with the goal of getting an edge in U.S. college admissions.

The number of Chinese K-12 students rose 290% to 34,578 as of November from 8,857 five years ago, according to data collected by the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, a DHS unit that tracks foreigners on student visas and the schools they attend.

Chinese students now make up roughly half of the 60,815 foreign pupils in U.S. high schools and the 6,074 in primary schools.

Spencer Robins:

Every philosophy major has at some point had to answer the standard challenge: “What are you going to do, teach?” It’s especially frustrating after you realize that, for someone with a humanist bent and a disinterest in worldlier things, teaching is a pretty good career choice. Unemployables in the humanities might take comfort from the fact that one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, made the same choice. He revolutionized philosophy twice, fought with shocking bravery in World War I, inspired a host of memoirs by people who knew him only glancingly—and for six years taught elementary school in the mountains of rural Austria. Biographers have tended to find this bizarre. Chapters covering the period after his teaching years, when Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, are usually called something like “Out of the Wilderness.” (That one’s from Ray Monk’s excellent Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. The next chapter is called “The Second Coming.”)

Vanessa de la Torre:

Teacher Heather Zottola was at a training session for city educators on the evening of Sept. 2, hearing about ways they can better serve students of color — the bulk of Hartford’s students — when she noticed one of the attendees angling a cellphone camera in her direction.

“I remember thinking, at first, ‘Oh, she’s taking a selfie.’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, look it, I’m in her picture,'” Zottola recalled this month. The woman, city board of education member Shelley Best, was seated only a few feet away in a downtown banquet room.

Grégoire Chamayou:

In 1749, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Jacques François Guillauté, a French police officer and a mechanical engineer, who would later become an “Encyclopediste,” dedicated a richly illustrated manuscript to King Louis the 15th. The title of his manuscript was “Mémoire sur la Réformation de la Police de France.” With this token, he sought to convince the king to adopt a radical plan to reform the old French police system.

This work, along with numerous others in Europe at the time, formed part of a flourishing new genre which sought to constitute a new “science of police,” one which would not only improve the fight against crime, but moreover lay the basis for a whole new rationality of government. If this forgotten manuscript is worth remembering today, it is because it was one of the first attempts to articulate a new technology of power, one based on traces and archives, and which has since been widely perfected.

Guillauté’s prospectus contained a drawing of a strange machine, which formed the core of the whole project. Guillauté, proud of what he considered to be a revolutionary invention, called it “le serre-papiers,” the “Paperholder.”

Whet Moser:

A few weeks ago I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. It’s about as adult-contemporary as a podcast gets: a roundtable of British academics talking about one subject every week, everything from the Lancashire Cotton Famine to Beowulf to Dark Matter.

Last month they covered a famous math question, the P vs. NP problem. It’s an arcane problem, though famous enough that it turns up as a Simpsons joke. And its implications are genuinely immense.

What is P vs. NP? While it’s one of the hardest unsolved problems in math, it’s conceptually very simple. Start with Wikipedia’s definition of the problem: “Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified by a computer can also be quickly solved by a computer.”

Frank Cagle:

The NCAA often comes down hard on athletic programs under the rubric of “lack of institutional control.” It means a university has been asleep at the switch while things damaging to the university were willfully ignored.

The University of Tennessee already had one kerfuffle over its Office for Diversity and Inclusion trying to promote idiotic gender-neutral pronouns. Given the tone deafness of that office, you would think that Chancellor Jimmy Cheek would keep an eye out for any further controversies that might arise. He is chancellor of a public university that needs taxpayer support.

But his Diversity Office put out suggestions that the university community not engage in holiday parties that might be construed as Christmas parties. Even “disguised Christmas parties,” whatever those might be. Lest you think this is about Christians, the memo also suggests no Dreidels, a traditional Jewish Hanukkah game. They also warned against “Secret Santa.” Attacking Santa? Really?

Alex Tabarrok:

In a new NBER paper, “Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition,” Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund create a sophisticated model of the college market and find that a large fraction of the increase in tuition can be explained by increases in subsidies.

Catherine Perlman:

I don’t care where my children go to college. I’m not saying I don’t care in the but-deep-down-I’m-hoping-they-get-a-full-ride-to-Harvard way. And I’m not saying that I don’t care because my kids are complete failures destined for a life of living in my basement watching Family Guy re-runs. Nope, it isn’t any of that.

I really don’t care where they go to college. Where they end up has no effect on me. I will be equally satisfied if they go to a prestigious university as I would if they decide community college is a better fit. They might even decide to travel the world and work for a few years before choosing a college and subsequent career. Fine with me.

I’ve been thinking about this for more than a decade. With general despair, I have watched parents–from the moment Junior emerges from the womb–dedicating themselves to the sole purpose of getting their child into the very best college. First, there was Baby Einstein and flash cards. Soccer is now beginning for 4-year-old children. Piano at 5. Karate and Mandarin at 6. Then there is travel baseball and private trainers at 10. By middle school children are so programed they have no down time. No time for family dinners. No time to decide for themselves what they enjoy doing. No exploring with friends in the woods behind the house for hours and discovering hidden passions and talents. No leadership that isn’t force-fed through planned undertakings.

Leonard Sax:

Kyle was absorbed in a videogame on his cellphone, so I asked his mom, “How long has Kyle had a stomach ache?” Mom said, “I’m thinking it’s been about two days.” Then Kyle replied, “Shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he gave a snorty laugh, without looking up from his videogame. Kyle is 10 years old.

I have been a physician for 29 years. This sort of language and behavior from a 10-year-old was very rare in the 1980s and 1990s. It would have been unusual a decade ago. It is common today. America’s children are immersed in a culture of disrespect: for parents, teachers, and one another. They learn it from television, even on the Disney Channel, where parents are portrayed as clueless, out-of-touch or absent. They learn it from celebrities or the Internet. They learn it from social media. They teach it to one another. They wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “I’m not shy. I just don’t like you.”

Farhad Manjoo:

Silicon Valley luminaries are easily mocked as having a precious, narrow take on the world. People in the tech industry can’t see past themselves, critics often charge; they act as if the products they build sit at the center of everything.

But this year, the techies were right: Technology did rule many issues in 2015. And not only did tech dominate the news, it often moved too quickly for politicians, regulators, law enforcement officials and the media to understand its implications. This year we began to see the creaking evidence of our collective ignorance about the digital age.

Samita Thapa:

Today, on Human Rights Day, we focus on the importance of digital safety for human rights defenders around the world. In an increasingly digitally connected world, it is even more crucial for human rights defenders – whether activists, journalists or aid workers, to be safe online as they fight for the rights of marginalized and oppressed groups.

One of the organizations working to keep human rights defenders safe online is Security First. Established in 2013, Security First aims to make it easier for human rights defenders (HRDs) to work safely. We spoke to the co-founder, Holly Kilroy to learn about their work and their latest app, Umbrella.

Richard Sander:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ignited a firestorm last week at oral arguments for Fisher v. University of Texas, a case concerning that school’s affirmative-action policies. The media pounced after Justice Scalia suggested that it might be not be a bad thing if fewer African-Americans were admitted to the University of Texas. Many rushed to call the comments racist.

Subsequent reports clarified that Mr. Scalia had been invoking the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that students who receive large admissions preferences—and who therefore attend a school that they wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise—often end up hurt by the academic gap between them and their college peers. But on the whole even this coverage has spread confusion.

Jeff Desjardins:

much money exists in the world?

Strangely enough, there are multiple answers to this question, and the amount of money that exists changes depending on how we define it. The more abstract definition of money we use, the higher the number is.

Eric Westervelt:

More than half of the professors in the United States are adjuncts. As largely part-time educators, they’re excluded from most of the benefits and security granted to full-time faculty. Even though their numbers have dramatically increased in recent decades, that doesn’t necessarily translate into power. Many struggle to attain any recognition at all for their hard work, low pay and often terrible commutes.

Artist Dushko Petrovich is one of those adjuncts, and he has an extreme story. He teaches at four colleges: Boston University, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design and New York University. That’s right, four different states. Talk about a nightmare commute.

Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa:

When citizens lose faith in liberal democracy, they will eventually start to consider illiberal forms of government. This is beginning to happen. Most Americans are still horrified by the idea of living in an authoritarian regime, but the number of citizens who are open to some form of illiberal rule is going up. One of the most striking shifts we have seen concerns the number of Americans who think it would be a “good” or “very good” thing to “have the army rule.” Twenty years ago, when the World Values Survey first asked this question, one in 15 Americans agreed with this sentiment. Today it’s one in six.

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people have higher incomes – and therefore more gadgets and data plans – to peruse social media in their free time?
Or is it historical? Have well-educated Germans better internalized the lessons of German history under Nazi and communist rule? Do they therefore distrust the collection of their data more than in other countries?

Or is it instead a sign that the well educated in Germany are simply satisfied with their rustling newspapers, weekly magazines and evening news programs? Do they better trust traditional German media sources? An extension of this argument is that educated individuals in countries like Turkey or Hungary, whose media records are less than pristine, are seeking raw, unfiltered and accurate information beyond state-controlled channels.

Andrea Fuller & Josh Mitchell:

Arkansas Baptist College got a dire warning from the Education Department last year. So many students had defaulted on their loans that the college was at risk of losing access to federal aid.

That threat is one of the biggest weapons the agency has to police the performance of colleges and universities. But the warning to Arkansas Baptist also came with an offer of help, says Yvette Wimberly, a dean at the college.

For the next six months, the Education Department told the college how to look for errors in its student-loan data. Arkansas Baptist identified at least three students who were murdered after they left the college. Fixing that and other data problems cut the default rate enough to save Arkansas Baptist.

Economic Times:

All CBSE books and learning material will be made available online for free as part of the Centre’s good governance efforts, HRD Minister Smriti Irani said here today.

At a function organised at a Kendriya Vidyalaya in east Delhi, she also said that initiatives would be undertaken to ensure holistic nurturing and improve learning outcomes at these schools.

“We made NCERT books available online for free through e-books and mobile applications a month-and-a-half ago. We are similarly going to make CBSE books available online along with additional learning material and videos as part of our good governance efforts,” Irani said at the inauguration of a new building of the school in Khichripur.

Michael Lewis:

As fate would have it, I had just shown my students at Williams College the grainy footage of Burden’s shooting when we learned of his death in May. Curiously, the clip did not provoke them as it had their predecessors in my classrooms in decades past. No one expressed any palpable sense of shock or revulsion, let alone the idea that the proper response to the violation of a taboo is honest outrage. One student fretted about the legal liability of the shooter; another intelligently placed the work in historical context and related it to anxiety over the Vietnam War.

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Dan Walters:

years ago, the Legislature adopted a landmark measure to give parents – particularly poor parents – more power over their children’s educations.

The education establishment, especially unions, didn’t like it, but refusing to compete for a “Race to the Top” federal grant was an unpalatable option.

The best-known aspect of the measure, carried by Democratic Sen. Gloria Romero, was the “parent trigger” that allowed parents of children in low-performing schools to intervene – even seizing control.

Another provision, however, required the state schools superintendent, then and now Tom Torlakson, to publish annually a list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools, as shown by academic tests, and allowed parents of children in those schools to move them to higher-rated schools.

The basis for those judgments was the Academic Performance Index, a test-based scoring system for schools that teacher unions and other elements of the education establishment also disliked.

Two years ago, the testing regime upon which the API was based was changed, and the API itself was suspended. The state Board of Education is devising a “multiple measures” accountability program that downplays testing and is likely to seek a repeal of the API.

Seb Schmoller:

Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).

The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.

Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:

James Pethokoukis:

McKinsey offers a great tool that looks at the automation potential of various job categories. Or to be more precise, the consultancy “analyzed more than 750 occupations in the United States to determine the percentage of time that could be automated by currently demonstrated technology.”

So this is less about robots replacing workers than parts of jobs being automated. Indeed, McKinsey has found “that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.”

John Fallon:

The OECD has just released their annual ‘Education At A Glance’ report. At over 800 pages, there’s quite a lot to it. But you don’t need to read too far in to get to one of its key points: “Efforts to achieve universal access to education must go hand-in-hand with a renewed focus on education quality…”. In other words, access with progress.

At Pearson, we have put a huge focus on measuring how what we do helps to improve learning outcomes. It’s something we started talking about over two years ago, and though it’s a commitment that’s seen our company totally transformed, the basic principle remains unchanged – everyone in education should seek to measure the effect of their impact. The consequences are too important not to do so.

Here’s how I made the case back in June 2014 at the Harvard University Global Education Conference.

The Economist:

Disney is its determination to put storytelling at the heart of its business, and its ability to get its hands on new characters capable of bringing fans back again and again. Disney’s purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and Marvel Entertainment brought Buzz Lightyear of “Toy Story” and Iron Man of “The Avengers” to a stable of mice and Muppets. Lucasfilm added Star Wars to the cast of characters that the firm has amassed since Mr Iger succeeded Michael Eisner as CEO.

These new franchises have joined the world’s most formidable licensing and entertainment empire, one that encompasses toy shops, video games, theme parks, cruises, comics, music, television and feature films. Disney is commercialising childhood through lots of channels—and making the companies it bought, as well as itself, far more valuable in the process.

Alan Borsuk:

This just in: Every child in America will not be reading and doing math on grade level by the end of 2014.

You know that. You knew that years ago.

But as 2015 headed toward its end, it was the law of the land.

My actual focus today is on the new federal education law that is taking the place of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law that was on the books for almost 14 years, which I’d suggest was at least nine too many. What will the new law mean to Wisconsin?

But first I can’t resist recounting an anecdote. In 2008, Margaret Spellings, then secretary of education for President George W. Bush, met with the editorial board of the Journal Sentinel during a visit to Milwaukee. I sat in.

I told her that it was obvious that 100% of students nationwide were not going to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, as the law required. I asked what was a realistic goal.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

In order to understand why our children are making the decision to die, Silicon Valley parents need to be willing to examine what is perhaps our community’s most sacred cow: the false but tightly-held belief that students must attend a highly selective college to be worth anything in life, and that our worth as parents is also measured by that metric.

With this mindset as mantra, and with those colleges routinely denying 90-95% of applicants, we set our children on a grim racecourse to try to beat those nearly impossible odds. We’ve created a way of life in which kids have no time for play—which is an inalienable right for every child around the globe, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Instead, we insist that every moment of our children’s lives be enriching, as if each activity, athletic endeavor, quiz, and piece of homework is a make or break moment for their future. As if every afternoon must be harnessed for usefulness.

Sean Michael Morris:

The only explanation for Ron Srigley’s recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books is chagrin. His own, or his hope to lather with chagrin the parents of university students, his fellow teachers — in particular those he refers to as “not scholars but employees” — and even students themselves. His voice comes off the screen acerbic and self-satisfied, and the nakedness of his spite for current trends in education (“student-centered learning”, YouTube lectures, and the veering away from a tradition of classic texts, grade- and professor-centered university culture) is so palpable it’s a feast of bile.

I am not trying to shame or malign or even chide Ron Srigley. What would be the point of that? To respond to him in kind would be to agree with him. I do not agree with him; most particularly, I don’t agree with what his argument evidences of his pedagogy, namely that learning happens through shaming, maligning, chiding. For I think we can make no mistake in his intention: his article is not meant as just a testament or epistle — it’s meant to teach. To teach us and the rest of his audience about the insolence of today’s educators, the erosion of the ivy-covered tower, and to remind us about the inevitable laziness of college students. And he teaches through scorn. It’s that scorn I disagree with.

Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker

The main dining hall at Trinity College starts you off with a choice of infused water: lemon, pineapple, strawberry, melon. There are custom-made smoothies, all-day breakfasts, make-your-own waffles, and frozen yogurt, along with countless choices of entrees hovered over by white-jacketed chefs.

Sun pours in through windows overlooking the leafy, manicured campus fringed with stately red brick dorms and classroom buildings past which students stroll with their noses in books. A new student center that will include a Starbucks is going up beside the tennis courts. As a college worker clears her dishes, one senior talks over lunch about the job she’s already lined up after graduation with the help of an alumna.

British Library:

Portable almanacs were most probably made to be used by physicians and those with an interest in astronomy, astrology and prognostication. They were small, consisting usually of 6 to 8 parchment leaves folded in half and then into 4 or 6 oblong sections, sewn together at one edge with a tab that could be fastened to the girdle with a piece of cord. On the outside of each section were often titles for easy reference so that the correct page could be selected. – See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/12/all-manacs-on-line.html#sthash.7NFUandT.dpuf

Larry Sanger:

Support for democracy is declining. First, let’s talk a bit about support for democracy—yes, democracy itself, as in voting for your leaders and representatives and holding them accountable in the arena of public debate. Only one in five Millennials aged 18 through 29 cast a ballot in the 2014 elections—the lowest youth voter turnout in 40 years, says the Atlantic.

As Vox recently asked, “Are Americans losing faith in democracy?” The article makes a series of points illustrating that Americans, especially younger Americans, are ignorant of and aren’t engaging in American political life. The article’s main source is a forthcoming paper by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk titled “The Democratic Disconnect,” together with the World Values Survey. The writers summarized their own work in the New York Times last September.

Asked how much interest they have in politics (as Vox reports), Americans born in the 1930s said “very interested” or “somewhat interested” almost 80% of the time; for those born in the 1970s, the figure dropped to about 50%, and for those born in the 1980s, it was continuing to drop just as precipitously.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

(was a literature major in college, and only came to read history seriously afterwards. No one emphasized the benefits of history when I was in school. And I realize that the appreciation of history is a bit cumulative. That is, when a student first reads history she doesn’t know who these people are or what they are doing or why that might be important to know.

Teachers have to assume some responsibility for expressing their assurance that history is not only interesting but also essential—that is, if they are aware of that themselves. Things go slow in learning any new language. Students can’t love French poetry or Chinese philosophy right away. They have to work to learn the language basics first.

That goes for history as well. But after reading history for a few years, people and events come to be more familiar, and the chronology turns out to be no more difficult and perhaps even more interesting than irregular verbs.