Greg Piper:

Lawyers for “John Doe” wanted Pomona College to pay at least $250,000 in attorney’s fees for repeatedly violating its own policies to find the accused student responsible for sexual assault.

They got about half that from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel, who said Pomona’s conduct was so egregious that she couldn’t “conclude that the factual scenario was unique and unlikely to recur.” (Pomona attempted to retry Doe with the same approach Strobel struck down.)

The private college appealed. The result? More money for Doe.

A California appeals court upheld the $130,000 judgment against Pomona in a ruling Thursday and awarded Doe “his costs on appeal,” concluding “there was no abuse of discretion” by Judge Strobel.

The trial judge had found that Pomona denied Doe a “fair hearing” by refusing to let him submit followup questions for his female accuser in writing and then letting her skip the hearing so he couldn’t question her in person.

Rainesford Stauffer:

I was covered in a layer of sweat, and my iPhone charger was dangling out of a bag that contained the after-hours work I still needed to do along with a Lara bar, crushed under the weight of my laptop. It should have been obvious: I’d been stressed, and moving way too fast. But, as usual, I didn’t realize it until I was on the train. I poked my head out of my inbox long enough to play peek-a-boo with a toddler clutching her snack, and chat with an older couple en route to vacation. I felt joy, and a familiar pang of shame that comes from realizing you’ve moved too fast to cherish what’s in front of you.

Logan Wroge:

To help students make the transition to a higher-intensity setting, two Madison School District teachers spend time at Goodman South instructing courses with solely STEM Academy students and some with a mix of traditional college and high school students.

“We thought it was really important to have high school teachers be part of the program, teachers that kind of know 16-year-olds well and may already have relationships with students,” Green said.

MATC also has two resource specialists working with the students at Goodman South, acting as academic and career advisers.

Green said the district and college have been intentional about structuring the student schedules so they are on campus between about 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. This is designed so students can continue to participate in sports or after-school, extra-curricular activities, she said.

“We felt it was important for them to still have a connection to their home school,” Green said.

Miranda, the La Follette High School student, makes it back to the Southeast Side school three days a week to participate in three different clubs.

“I just felt like I left part of my high school experience or teenage experience back there, even though I have friends here,” Miranda said. “At the same time, I really do like this environment because it does fit with being mature and having your own independence.”

2008 (!) A
history of parent attempts to implement credit for non taxpayer supported Madison School District credit.

“The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.”

You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would “cave in” to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to “freeze” policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.

An emphasis on adult employment

Jane Li:

China is taking every measure it can to verify the identities of its over 850 million mobile internet users.

From Dec. 1, people applying for new mobile and data services will have to have their faces scanned by telecom providers, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a Sept. 27 statement (link in Chinese).

MIIT said the step was part of its efforts to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of citizens in the cyberspace” and to control phone and internet fraud. In addition to the facial-recognition test, phone users are also banned from passing their mobile phone numbers to others, and encouraged to check if numbers are registered under their name without their consent.

Libby Emmons and Barrett Wilson :

Today, The New York Times continued its mission of trying to eliminate free expression for everyone that isn’t part of the elite media family. In an authoritarian and dangerous article called “Free Speech Is Killing Us,” Andrew Marantz argues that free speech is not, in fact, for just anybody. Forgetting, of course, that it’s for everyone.

After all, Marantz has spent “the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy.” So he “no longer [has] any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.”

You see, Marantz is basically a hero. It’s a miracle that he managed to make it out alive. He actually had to hold his nose and spend social time with unwashed, uncivilized people he thinks are deplorable. He’s basically the 2019 version of a SCUD stud.

Marantz boldly explains to us regular folk why we should be okay with the erosion of our rights to expression and why corporate censorship is a “good thing”:

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

Samira Shackle:

When he started working at Brunel University London 19 years ago, Terry Vass, who is now head of security, recalls that most of his work involved breaking up drunken fights outside the bars and nightclub on campus. Over the two decades he has been in the job, he has noticed a shift. Now, an increasing number of calls are for mental health incidents.

The worst times are at the start of term, when students are adjusting to being away from home, or over the holidays, when the small number who remain on campus may feel lonely and isolated. Increasingly, Vass’s security team are called out to mental health emergencies, sometimes accompanying suicidal students to A&E and staying with them. “We spend as much time as it takes,” says Vass. On occasion, he has spent six hours with a student in distress.

Leonard J. Shustek:

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

Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines. His career choices reflect a different definition of success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion drive your work and making source code available for others to build upon. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the open-source community today.

With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice.

In this excerpt Gary writes about his vision for bringing the new microprocessors into homes and businesses. In 1974, he invented CP/M, the first operating system that could run on these new desktop platforms. Soon after, he created the BIOS, which enabled CP/M to easily interface with different computer hardware.

Michael Grothaus:

But there’s a problem: low-cost smartphones are privacy nightmares.

According to an analysis by the advocacy group Privacy International, a $17 Android smartphone called MYA2 MyPhone, which was launched in December 2017, has a host of privacy problems that make its owner vulnerable to hackers and to data-hungry tech companies.

First, it comes with an outdated version of Android with known security vulnerabilities that can’t be updated or patched. The MYA2 also has apps that can’t be updated or deleted, and those apps contain multiple security and privacy flaws. One of those pre-installed apps that can’t be removed, Facebook Lite, gets default permission to track everywhere you go, upload all your contacts, and read your phone’s calendar. The fact that Facebook Lite can’t be removed is especially worrying because the app suffered a major privacy snafu earlier this year when hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users had their passwords exposed. Facebook did not respond to request for comment.

Alia Wong:

Back in the 1940s, college libraries had something of an existential crisis. Charles Gosnell, a prominent library-sciences scholar and college librarian in New York, suggested that shifting academic priorities and space constraints threatened to deplete certain book collections, particularly those in highly technical fields such as chemistry, economics, and education. By phasing out the seemingly antiquated books, perhaps libraries would also be divesting themselves of the titles’ particular perspectives or scientific frameworks, many of which could be invaluable. New books had begun to far outnumber older titles in libraries’ collections, a trend that Gosnell described in his article as “book mortality.”

Wall Street Journal:

Is the success of charter schools an illusion? Critics claim charters merely skim the best students, whose parents care enough to apply, while pushing out troublemakers. So it’s worth noting a new study showing that often test scores improve for all students when charters increase their market share.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute examined 21 urban school districts with at least 2,500 black students per grade from 2009-2015. As the “black charter market share” rises in the study to 50% from zero, the associated educational gain is 0.8 grade level in English and 0.7 in math. This bump is for all black students in the district, whether they attend a charter or not.

Dan Kois:

The pitch of the average whine is a B above middle C, but played on an oboe that’s a quarter-step flat.

Research shows that whining peaks in children between the ages of 2 and 4, but every parent knows that it continues well into tweenhood. In adolescence the whine is sometimes replaced by the sulk or the simmer, the dissatisfaction swallowed or, more likely, tucked away for later use. This is part of becoming an adult.

Our family spent a year traveling around the world, and during that year I learned that children whine nearly everywhere. New Zealand children whine. Costa Rican children whine in Spanish. Dutch children whine, but in a country built on comity and compromise, whining is accepted as part of the endless negotiation every family decision must undergo. And our American children, ages 11 and 9, whined everywhere: hiking on the beautiful coastline of New Zealand’s South Island, swimming in a water park in Dubai, watching a homecoming parade down Main Street of a small Kansas town. (“They’re throwing more candy to the other kids!”) As we rode horses through the Costa Rican jungle, the sound of howler monkeys expressing their discontent failed to drown out the sound of our children expressing theirs. I now consider myself a keen amateur scholar of whining.

Joel Kotkin:

The intellectual class across the West—encompassing its universities, media, and arts—is striving to dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy. Europe, the source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in academia and elite media, to replace its cultural and religious traditions with what one author describes as a “multicultural and post-racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” writes French philosopher Pierre Manent, assessing the damage. “European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.”
The increasingly “woke” values of the educated upper classes reflect, as Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago, the inevitable consequence of mass affluence, corporate concentration, and the shift to a service economy. The new elite, Toffler foresaw, would abandon traditional bourgeois values of hard work and family for “more aesthetic goals, self-fulfillment as well as unbridled hedonism.” Affluence, he observed, “serves as a base from which men begin to strive for post economic goals.”
The driving force for these changes has been the ascendant clerisy, which, reprising the role that the Church played in medieval times, sees itself as anointed to direct human society, a modern version of the “oligarchy of priests and monks whose task it was to propitiate heaven,” in the words of the great French historian of the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch. Traditional clerics remained part of this class but were joined by others—university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations. This secular portion of society has now essentially replaced the clergy, serving as what German sociologist Max Weber once called society’s “new legitimizers.” The clerisy spans an ever-growing section of the workforce that largely works outside the market economy—teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers, and medical professionals. Meantime, positions common among the traditional middle class—small-business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have dwindled as a share of the job market.

Bryan Caplan:

I recently received this email from Pakistani homeschooler Fasih Zulfiqar. I advised him to seek out econ professors at the nearest universities, but he’d likely appreciate further advice. Reprinted with his permission.

Hello Prof Bryan, Fasih here. Perhaps Prof Cowen informed you about me, but in case he did not, let me introduce myself.

I’m a student from Pakistan who has self-studied through secondary education. I decided to quit schooling when I was in grade 6, much to the consternation of my relatives. They dinned into me that schooling is the only avenue for success, and that I would certainly fail if I go solo.

There were days when I would come back to home from school – completly exhausted – and ask myself if I truly learned anything. Sure I had friends and all, but school was not serving the purpose it was meant to. Moreover, it wasn’t cheap. My father could hardly afford sending me and my sister to school, let alone pay the prohibitive rent. More and more often, I found myself considering whether it was all even worth it. So in the summer of 2012, I decided it was enough and quit school.

Chronicle:

Four public, one private nonprofit, and three for-profit four-year colleges received more than $75 million in Pell Grant aid for their undergraduate students in 2016-17. Among the 25 four-year public institutions whose students were awarded the…

Claer Barrett:

Should young people prioritise saving for a house or a pension? And do they have what it takes to make a killing on world stock markets — or will they end up losing the lot?

Parents and teachers will be relieved to hear that these are among the virtual outcomes of the FT’s new board game, Road to Riches, launched this week in collaboration with Eliora Games.

education Opportunity:

Differences In Educational Opportunity; Wisconsin districts, White / Black students, grades 3 – 8 from 2009 – 2016, sized by number of students

Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, Tyler Ransom:

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.

MadelineMuldoon:

A recent study found that between 2009 and 2014, nearly half of caucasian students admitted to Harvard University were either athletes, legacy, or children of faculty and donors.

Researchers from Duke University, University of Georgia, and University of Oklahoma, found that 43% of Harvard’s white admits had one of these admissions advantages. The study, published on Sept. 11, concluded that only one-quarter of these students would have received admission had it not been for their advantageous circumstances.

Beth DeCarbo:

Fall is hunting season across the U.S., a time when high-school seniors target their favorite colleges and their parents aim for financial aid.

One factor to consider when applying: the impact of your home’s equity on financial aid. But prepare yourself. It seemingly takes an advanced degree to calculate eligibility, since formulas vary widely from school to school.

“I wish it weren’t so complicated. I study this day and night,” says Paula Bishop, a college financial-aid adviser in Bellevue, Wash.

Almost all U.S. colleges and universities require financial-aid applicants to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which doesn’t ask parents about home equity. However, several hundred other schools—many of them elite, private institutions—also require the College Scholarship Service Profile (or CSS Profile), an application created by the College Board for nonfederal financial aid. It asks applicants for the home’s purchase price, purchase year, current value and current debt and determines the home’s equity (value minus debt).

Here’s the catch: Schools that require the CSS profile handle the home-equity information differently. Boston College, for example, looks at 100% of home equity. Stanford University announced last year that it won’t consider home equity all. Cornell University will limit home equity to 1½-times the family’s adjusted gross income. So for a household with $800,000 in home equity making $200,000 a year, home equity is capped at $300,000 (200,000 x 1.5).

edweek:

Want to know if a K-2 classroom is using explicit, systematic phonics or balanced literacy? This visual illustrates some of the main instructional differences between the two approaches to early reading.

Eugene Volokh:

Reddington moved to dismiss, but the court allowed Goldman’s claim to go forward:

First, Reddington argues that the complaint fails to adequately allege that her statements were false. While plaintiffs must offer more than a conclusory statement of falsity, Reddington attempts to impose a heightened standard contrary to New York law. Goldman unambiguously disavows the accusation of rape as “utterly unfounded,” and presents specific facts through the OCDA report to plausibly allege that Reddington’s claims are not true….

Reddington cautions the Court against the use of the OCDA report, noting that the District Attorney’s decision not to bring criminal charges “does not conclusively establish that no sexual assault occurred.” However, the criminal standard of proof is immaterial here…. While the Court is sensitive to the exceedingly difficult task of corroborating claims of sexual assault, and has questions about the SANE examination and Title IX investigation, a motion to dismiss is an inappropriate forum to deal with these concerns. Reddington is free to renew her arguments regarding falsity in a motion for summary judgment following discovery.

Ben Eisen & Adrienne Roberts:

Mr. Jones, now 22 years old, walked out with a gray Accord sedan with heated leather seats. He also took home a 72-month car loan that cost him and his then-girlfriend more than $500 a month. When they split last year and the monthly payment fell solely to him, it suddenly took up more than a quarter of his take-home pay.

He paid $27,000 for the car, less than the sticker price, but took out a $36,000 loan with an interest rate of 1.9% to cover the purchase price and unpaid debt on two vehicles he bought as a teenager. It was particularly burdensome when combined with his other debt, including credit cards, he said.

Just 18% of U.S. households had enough liquid assets to cover the cost of a new car, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 2016 data from the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, a proportion that hasn’t changed much in recent years.

Even a conservative car loan often won’t do it. The median-income U.S. household with a four-year loan, 20% down and a payment under 10% of gross income—a standard budget—could afford a car worth $18,390, excluding taxes, according to an analysis by personal-finance website Bankrate.com.

Related: Discovery, Connected and Singapore Math.

Madison’s math task force.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math
.

Scott Girard:

According to a fiscal estimate attached to the bill, 32 of the state’s 421 school districts currently offer full-day 4K Monday through Friday.

The estimate acknowledges the incentive for districts to move to full-day 4K if the bill is approved, but also points out some caveats and states that DPI does not have data on how many districts would expand if the bill were approved.

“Other factors would have to be considered, such as available space and the wishes of the local community to expand the 4K program,” the narrative states.

Madison Teachers Inc. executive director Doug Keillor wrote in an email that MTI had not reviewed all of the details of the proposal, but was generally in support.

“MTI strongly supports legislation which would allow school districts to expand the delivery of 4K services, including the ability for school districts to offer full-day 4K programs,” Keillor wrote. “Any and all investments in early childhood education produce dividends down the road and help us close gaps.”

Much more on 4K spending and effectiveness, here..

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Andrew Yang:

Each of us generates a significant amount of data each day during the normal course of our activities. Our phones and computers track our movement and actions, while our browsers and websites track our online activities. As we’ve seen, some of the largest tech companies can know more about us and our lives than our families and those closest to us.

As of now, that data is owned by the people who collect it, and they’re allowed to do anything they want with it. They’ve sold it, used it to target us with advertisements, and have analyzed the vast quantity of data to draw conclusions on whole populations, allowing them to monetize it.

We’ve also seen it abused. Some companies haven’t done enough to protect our data, resulting in breaches that have made our private information insecure. Others have sold it to disreputable companies, allowing them to target us for everything from marketing fraudulent services to influencing elections. Companies themselves have asked for better and clearer rules.

This needs to stop. Data generated by each individual needs to be owned by them, with certain rights conveyed that will allow them to know how it’s used and protect it. These rights include:

Terence Jeffrey:

In 2018, according to Table R-1, American consumer units spent an average of $9,031.93 on federal income taxes; $5,023.73 on Social Security taxes (which the table calls “deductions”); $2,284.62 on state and local income taxes; $2,199.80 on property taxes; and $77.85 on what BLS calls “other taxes.”

The combined payments the average American consumer unit made for these five categories of taxes was $18,617.93.

At the same time the average American consumer unit was paying these taxes, it was spending $7,923.19 on food; $4,968.44 on health care; and $1,866.48 on “apparel and services.”

These combined expenditures equaled $14,758.11.

So, the $14,758.11 that the average American consumer unit paid for food, clothing and health care was $3,859.82 less than the $18,617.93 it paid in federal, state and local income taxes, property taxes, Social Security taxes and “other taxes.”

Colin Dwyer:

In a move that puts California on a collision course with the NCAA, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill effectively allowing college athletes in the state to earn compensation for the use of their likeness, sign endorsement deals and hire agents to represent them.

The governor signed the measure in a segment released Monday by Uninterrupted, a sports programming company co-founded by LeBron James.

Newsom proclaimed the move as “the beginning of a national movement — one that transcends geographic and partisan lines.”

“Collegiate student athletes put everything on the line — their physical health, future career prospects and years of their lives to compete. Colleges reap billions from these student athletes’ sacrifices and success but, in the same breath, block them from earning a single dollar,” he said in a statement. “That’s a bankrupt model — one that puts institutions ahead of the students they are supposed to serve. It needs to be disrupted.”

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

The F.B.I. has used secret subpoenas to obtain personal data from far more companies than previously disclosed, newly released documents show.

The requests, which the F.B.I. says are critical to its counterterrorism efforts, have raised privacy concerns for years but have been associated mainly with tech companies. Now, records show how far beyond Silicon Valley the practice extends — encompassing scores of banks, credit agencies, cellphone carriers and even universities.

The demands can scoop up a variety of information, including usernames, locations, IP addresses and records of purchases. They don’t require a judge’s approval and usually come with a gag order, leaving them shrouded in secrecy. Fewer than 20 entities, most of them tech companies, have ever revealed that they’ve received the subpoenas, known as national security letters.

The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shed light on the scope of the demands — more than 120 companies and other entities were included in the filing — and raise questions about the effectiveness of a 2015 law that was intended to increase transparency around them.

Simpson Street Free Press:

On the wall at Simpson Street is a feature editorial from the Wisconsin State Journal. The headline reads “Support State Reading Initiatives” and announces the launch of a bipartisan effort co-chaired by Tony Evers and Scott Walker. The editorial is dated September 12, 2012.

Local News and Numbers

Recent reports by Wisconsin State Journal, The Capital Times, Channel 3 News, Isthmus, and other news outlets paint a new, more tragic picture. Nothing has changed. Achievement gaps are worse.

Reporting on the latest round of Forward Exams, Logan Wroge of the Wisconsin State Journal points out that fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient or advanced in English/language arts or math, and that those numbers are going down. About 543,000 Wisconsin students in grades 3-8 took part in Forward Exams last school year.

Forward Exam results, as in previous years, show Madison students trailing state-wide averages.

“In grades 3-8, 34.8% of Madison students are proficient or advanced in English on the Forward Exam and 38.2% in Math,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal .

In the Madison school district, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced was stagnant or slightly down from 2017-18. Language arts dropped from “36.6% in 2017-18 to 34.9% last year. In math, the percentage went from 38.2% to 38.4%, and in social studies from 46.7% to 45.5%” according to The Capital Times.

Wisconsin DPI reports almost 60% of African-American students in Madison scored “below basic” in language arts on recent Forward exams. About 47% of Hispanic students scored below basic in English-Language Arts. Only 10.1% of black students and 16% of Hispanic students scored in one of the two highest categories (proficient or advanced) The Capital Times reported.

What’s more, students in the state of Mississippi continue to outperform kids living in Madison, Wisconsin.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Emma Coleman:

Conversations about privacy concerns in recent years have often focused on the online space, given high profile data breaches and repeated revelations of tech companies’ misuse of personal information. But the private sector isn’t alone in surveilling people, and invasions of privacy aren’t just threats online.

Offline surveillance by the government has grown exponentially in the past few years. One estimate found that the number of security cameras in the U.S. grew from 33 million in 2012 to 62 million in 2016. Now, a new report from Comparitech, a technology research firm, takes a count of the number of closed-circuit television cameras owned by both government and private sources in cities around the world and compares that with the city’s population to find the density of cameras.

Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents. That may seem low compared to cities higher on the list, most of which are in China and have 39 to 168 cameras per thousand residents, but Atlanta’s rate is high by U.S. standards. The five other municipalities that made the list of the top 50 most surveilled cities in the world included Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston.

Richard Vedder:

Colleges rarely sue one another, so when little Hillsdale College in Michigan sued the much larger University of Missouri a couple of years ago, it raised some eyebrows. Hillsdale alleges that Mizzou blatantly violated the terms of Wall Street financier Sherlock Hibbs’ will, who left $5 million to his alma mater upon his death to create multiple chairs to be held by “disciples” of the Austrian school of economics. Hibbs, who died in 2002, was a strong adherent of that approach to economics, led in the 20th century by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, asserting, among many other things, that market-based solutions to problems are generally superior to those imposed by governments. Austrian economists are generally libertarians or at least market-oriented conservatives.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal’s account of the current brouhaha by Hillsdale alum Nicole Ault revealed the published vitae of about two dozen members of the Department of Economics (the logical home of Austrian economists) at Mizzou. None had a remotely Austrian orientation. I then learned the names of the alleged Austrian disciples holding Hibbs financed positions, all teaching management or marketing courses unrelated, as far as I could tell from published vitae and course offerings, in any important way to Austrian economics. To be fair, Mizzou once did have a genuine (and good) Austrian economist, Peter Klein —but he left in 2015 to go to Baylor, and I do not believe he was funded with Hibbs money.

Seattle Public Schools PDF.

Much more on Seattle’s math program, here

Sameer Rahim:

Attention spans are getting shorter. We no longer have the patience to read properly. The printed codex is a dead technology and the future is browsing ebooks and hyperlinked webpages. Listening to an audiobook isn’t as good as reading a proper book. These are some common arguments you hear. But are they right? Leah Price, an English scholar at Harvard, says we’re too quick to assume that there was a golden age of reading from which we have declined. Prospect’s Sameer Rahim talked to Price about her new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, down the line from America. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ava Kofman and Daniel Golden:

Starting in 2011, when the oldest of their three children was about two years away from applying to college, the Shaw Family Endowment Fund donated $1 million annually to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford and at least $500,000 each to Columbia and Brown. The pattern persisted through 2017, the most recent year for which public filings are available, with a bump in giving to Columbia to $1 million a year in 2016 and 2017. The foundation, which lists Kobliner as president and Shaw as treasurer and secretary, has also contributed $200,000 annually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2013.

The total donations for “general” purposes across seven years and seven elite schools are $37.3 million, which represents 62% of the foundation’s giving over that period. At minimum, experts in higher-education fundraising say, Shaw and Kobliner’s strategy improved their children’s chances of getting into at least one of the country’s top universities. At best, it would allow them to choose whichever blue-chip school they preferred, making selecting a college as easy as ordering from a takeout menu.

Nas Reilly:

Hey, engineering student. Thanks for coming to talk to me at your school’s career fair.

Want to impress me, and work with me at my shiny big tech company? Of course you do!

But how?

Here’s how.

Being good at your discipline is the easiest way to get noticed.

That’s a lousy platitude to spit out first thing, but it’s true. The good ones have taken what they’ve learned, and internalized it. Typically, they go one step farther. They don’t stop at what they’re fed in class. They take the stuff they learn in class and apply it. As a result – they learn outside of class. That’s a bitchin’ signal to send to a prospective employer.

How do you show that? Project work.

Lucian Armasu:

There has been a discussion about quantum computers being able to break encryption almost since the beginning of their history. One of the very first “quantum algorithms” that were developed for quantum computers many years before anyone even started building a quantum computer was actually encryption-breaking algorithms.

One algorithm, called Shor’s algorithm, quantum can completely break RSA and elliptic curve cryptography as soon as the quantum computer has enough (logical) qubits to do that. The other, called Grover’s algorithm, can drastically reduce AES encryption from 128-bits to 64-bits, which can then be broken by run-of-the-mill PCs.

You can attempt to increase the bits on each encryption algorithm and try to defend yourself that way against quantum computers, but once quantum computers can break the lowest levels of encryption, we should be only years away before they break the strongest versions of these encryption algorithms, too.
The good news is that thousands of logical qubits will be needed to achieve break what are currently the most common encryption algorithms in use.

Researchers from Canadian company Krypterra believe that we’d need 2,953 logical qubits to break AES-128 and 6,681 logical qubits to break AES-256. Similarly, we’d need 4096 logical qubits to break RSA-2048.

But what are logical qubits anyway? Here comes the even “better” news in regards to encryption — Krypterra researchers say that to get thousands of logical qubits we’d need millions of physical qubits, or the same type of qubits Google, IBM, Intel, and others currently claim to have. Google itself has said before that quantum computers get truly interesting when we reach somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million qubits.

Hacker News:

I’m at the end of my MSc. studies in CS. At the moment, I can choose to graduate in a month or two, or stay-on for another 9 months doing research in interactive theorem proving that will potentially lead to a PhD opportunity.

I’m doing my MSc in a foreign country and I’m very unhappy here. Another ~9 months seems like a huge hurdle to me. The current situation is if I choose to graduate soon, I will likely surrender my chance for a PhD.

I don’t particularly love studying. I think interactive theorem proving is quite cool, but the actual practice of studying/research hasn’t been that enjoyable to me, but I enjoy having the knowledge once I’ve acquired it. In many ways it seems like “the future” to me, and it’d be really neat to be one of the first passengers on that train, so to say.

I have no desire to become a professor/researcher. After I acquire my PhD, I surmise that I would go to industry.

The issue here is one of bad information: I don’t have industry experience and I don’t really know how any of this stuff plays out. I’m worried that if I chose to forego the PhD, I’ll really regret it in a number of years. I’m afraid I won’t be able to find interesting work with just a MSc, and I’m really afraid of getting a boring software engineering gig.

A professor mentioned some years ago that when getting your PhD, you try to save the world and then after you have it you try to save yourself.

Ava Kofman and Daniel Golden:

One of her areas of expertise is how to pay for college. In her writing, media interviews, and YouTube videos, she cautions parents not to “follow the herd with your donating dollars” or pin their hopes for their children on getting into brand-name colleges. “Don’t believe the hype,” she tells them. “You might find yourself obsessing over those annual college rankings. Don’t take them too seriously.” The sensible solution, she argues, is for families to “pick a few financial safety schools” — public universities close to home. A degree from an elite college, she reminds readers, may not translate into higher earnings in later life. “The Ivy League isn’t necessarily the gravy train.”

This is not quite the message imparted by Horace Mann, the exclusive prep school where the Shaws sent their children. At Horace Mann, the need to battle for slots at the nation’s most prestigious colleges is ingrained in students from an early age. Peers of the Shaw children remember classmates talking about where they wanted to go to college — and understanding that they might very well not go there — as early as the sixth grade. “It is difficult to dodge the school’s reputation as a ‘pressure cooker,’ college-obsessed school when, for example, a seventh-grade class has divided into teams named after the eight Ivy League institutions,” noted an editorial in the school’s newspaper, The Record, in a 2014 issue printed shortly before Rebecca Shaw’s graduation.

Tang Fanxi:

The parent did not achieve her goal, so she used these tactics to threaten the teacher,” Deng told Southern Metropolis Daily. “She (the teacher) has always been fair and dedicated to her job, and we hope she is not treated unfairly.”

The school told the newspaper that it is investigating the case but declined to comment further.

Given the high level of competition for coveted spots at China’s top-flight high schools and universities, parents have been known to lavish teachers with gifts in hopes of creating better opportunities for their kids, even as Chinese authorities have tried to curtail such practices. In 2014, the Ministry of Education passed a regulation “firmly prohibiting” teachers from accepting money or other gifts from students or their parents.

Meanwhile, local governments have taken additional steps to discourage corruption in education. In 2015, Shanghai’s education bureau forbade teachers from accepting gifts from students or their parents, warning that anyone caught violating the rule would be ineligible for promotions or pay raises. Then in January of this year, Beijing banned teachers and parents from exchanging red envelopes — or digital currency — in chat groups on WeChat, China’s most widely used social platform.

Nicola Davis:

Artificial intelligence is on a par with human experts when it comes to making medical diagnoses based on images, a review has found.

The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare has caused excitement, with advocates saying it will ease the strain on resources, free up time for doctor-patient interactions and even aid the development of tailored treatment. Last month the government announced £250m of funding for a new NHS artificial intelligence laboratory.

However, experts have warned the latest findings are based on a small number of studies, since the field is littered with poor-quality research.

One burgeoning application is the use of AI in interpreting medical images – a field that relies on deep learning, a sophisticated form of machine learning in which a series of labelled images are fed into algorithms that pick out features within them and learn how to classify similar images. This approach has shown promise in diagnosis of diseases from cancers to eye conditions.

However questions remain about how such deep learning systems measure up to human skills. Now researchers say they have conducted the first comprehensive review of published studies on the issue, and found humans and machines are on a par.

Associated Press:

When the Arkansas Board of Education took over the district, it dismissed the local school board and put the district superintendent under state control. The state’s board last week approved a “framework” for the district’s future if it doesn’t meet the requirements to leave state control. Under the plan, schools that are rated at least “D″ by the state would remain under the control of the board. Schools rated “F″ would be placed under “different leadership” in partnership with the district, though it’s unclear what that means. The plan also says another category of schools that are being reconfigured “may” be run by the local board.

All but one of the eight currently F-rated schools in the district are located south of Interstate 630, which is historically viewed as the dividing line between Little Rock’s predominantly white and predominantly black neighborhoods. The latest grades for the schools come out next month.

“If you do this, you’re helping to perpetuate a divide that was put there deliberately,” Democratic Sen. Joyce Elliott, referring to the interstate, told the board last week. “If you do this, you will be furthering that effort to keep us divided deliberately.”

Proponents say the plan gives parents and community leaders the local control they’ve been seeking but offers the schools the state support they need to address academic problems.

“If the state ignored the academic performance measures and returned all schools without sufficient support, then we would surely have dedicated civil rights lawyers that would immediately be filing a lawsuit saying we’re not meeting our obligations,” said Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who dismissed the notion that the plan amounts to re-segregation.

“That is wrong, it is not based in fact and it is really trying to resurrect old history that has no application to today,” Hutchinson said.

The testing system and accountability measures for schools have changed since the 2015 takeover. Education officials say that although the district hasn’t made the academic gains it hoped to make, it has improved in some areas, such as its facilities and finances.

“There were a lot more problems in Little Rock than just the way the academics was showing up when we intervened and we discovered all those after the fact,” Board Chairwoman Diane Zook said.

Related: ”The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East , especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Raahul:

Proud dropouts sometimes swear by online courses, because the project-based learning that they provide is hands-on, and also representative of the how the real world is going to be. On the other hand, proud academics sometimes like to brag about equations and theorems that are really not relevant, but still sound academically enlightening.

I’ve done numerous Udacity nanodegrees and paid Coursera courses. I’m also currently pursuing my masters online from Georgia Tech in computer science (it’s OMSCS program). I’m going to make a contrast between the two approaches, highlighting their merits and demerits.

Didem Tali:

A railway line separates the slum from a high-security gated complex. The pair often crossed the tracks to scavenge among the refuse of their wealthy neighbours. So when a woman who had arrived in the slum several months earlier, and who always seemed to be a little bit better off than everyone else, showed up with a proposal, a desperate Sophea was willing to listen.

“The woman said she came together with a few others and did pickpocketing in markets,” Sophea says, looking down at the concrete floor of her house while nursing her youngest child. “I joined her to steal people’s wallets, but soon the police caught us and I was in jail, charged with petty theft.”

Chuck Grassley:

Universities have long been centers of political correctness. But campus administrations increasingly seem to be indulging students who, when faced with uncomfortable ideas, complain of feeling “harmed” or “unsafe.” This is reaching its breaking point and making it hard for professors to teach.

As part of my oversight work in the Senate, I’m seeking answers from some of the nation’s top universities about incidents that have taken place on their campuses. These incidents give me concern about the state of academic freedom:

The Economist:

LAST MONTH Japan’s Financial Services Agency, the financial-industry regulator, lobbed a grenade into a fractious debate on how to support the world’s oldest population in retirement. The typical elderly couple, it warned, will need to top up their public pensions by a whopping ¥20m ($185,000). This gloomy forecast should have come as no surprise. The system was built on the expectation that people would live until their 70s or 80s. But more than half of Japanese babies today can expect to live to over 100. A quarter of all 60-year-olds will still be alive in 35 years, estimates the government.

All 20- to 59-year-olds in work must pay a flat premium of ¥16,410 into the national pension fund every month. Those who do so for 40 years get a full pension, currently ¥780,100 a year. Corporate and government workers also make payments into supplementary schemes. But the system is imbalanced, with shrinking numbers paying in and growing numbers drawing out. Japan already has more than 35m people aged over 65—28% of the population. The share is projected to reach a third by 2050.

Jocelyn Kaiser:

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released new rules yesterday governing when police can use genetic genealogy to track down suspects in serious crimes—the first-ever policy covering how these databases, popular among amateur genealogists, should be used in law enforcement attempts to balance public safety and privacy concerns.

The value of these websites for law enforcement was highlighted last year when Joseph DeAngelo was charged with a series of rapes and murders that had occurred decades earlier. Investigators tracked down the suspect, dubbed the Golden State Killer, by uploading a DNA profile from a crime scene to a public ancestry website, identifying distant relatives, then using traditional genealogy and other information to narrow their search. The approach has led to arrests in at least 60 cold cases around the country.

But these searches also raise privacy concerns. Relatives of those in the database can fall under suspicion even if they have never uploaded their own DNA. (One study found that 60% of white Americans can now be tracked down using such searches.) And even those who have shared their DNA may not have given informed consent to allow their data to be used for law enforcement searches.

Joan Wong:

That seems to be the emerging bipartisan consensus. “On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition,” writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. “Our supposedly meritocratic system is nothing but a long con,” declares Alanna Schubach, a college-admissions coach, in Jacobin. “Merit itself has become a counterfeit virtue, a false idol,” argues Daniel Markovits, a professor of law at Yale University, in a new book, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press). “And meritocracy — formerly benevolent and just — has become what it was invented to combat. A mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.”

An attack on meritocracy is invariably an attack on higher education, where meritocrats get sorted and credentialed. So the turn against meritocracy prompts big questions. Has meritocracy in fact failed? Is it time for universities to rethink the definition of merit, and, more broadly, higher education’s role in American life? Are meritocracy’s critics too sweeping in their indictment? Is it still — flaws and all — the fairest way to organize society? If we do away with it, what comes next?

We put these questions to 10 scholars and administrators from across the academy. Here are their responses.

Bloomberg:

Yet there’s little evidence that this technology improves student performance — and excessive use may even have negative effects. A 2015 study of 38 countries found that those that made large investments in educational technology showed “no appreciable improvements in student achievement” on international assessments of math, science and reading.

In the U.S., fourth graders who reported using digital devices in most or all of their classes did worse on reading tests than students who used them in less than half their classes. Similarly, eighth-grade students who used a computer every day for math scored four points lower on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than those who did so only once or twice a year. To the extent technology plays a productive role, research shows it’s far more helpful for students in high school and beyond than for grade-schoolers. But even for older students, the mere presence of devices in the classroom can divide their attention and worsen their long-term performance.

As is true in every aspect of schooling, teacher engagement is critical to realizing ed-tech’s potential. But in the U.S., only 40% of K-12 teachers say that they’ve received effective training on how to use such tools. More than one-third say that they never use the digital products or devices their school districts give them; an additional 30% say they’re unaware if they even have such technology at their disposal. That disconnect is costly: One analysis found that as much as 67% of software licenses purchased by schools go unused, which amounts to $5.6 billion in annual waste.

Related:

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Why are Madison’s Students Struggling to Read?

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Five-year-old old Brandajah Smith grabbed the loaded .38-caliber revolver after her mother left her alone in their New Orleans apartment. It’s still not clear why she pulled the trigger, whether it was an accident or related to the suicidal thoughts the child had expressed. But when her mother returned from the store, Brandajah was dead from a single gunshot to the head.

Brandajah’s death in 2013 was shocking, but few people who knew her were surprised.

For almost a year, her teachers had repeatedly reported suspicions that she was being sexually abused. They also told authorities that she talked about her own death, what it would be like in heaven and about the gun in her home.

Following Brandajah’s death, officials from Louisiana’s Department of Children & Family Services told the Times Picayune newspaper that the agency “thoroughly investigated each of the complaints received.” But they also said that Brandajah’s mother, Laderika Smith, was not complying with the “safety plan” that the agency had set up. In November 2012 – after months of leaving the child in a home with her mother and the mother’s boyfriend, who owned the gun (both are felons) – DCFS asked the local court to either order compliance or give the agency the authority to take the child away. By the time of the kindergartner’s death, the court had done neither.

Child welfare case files are not public, so it is not clear why the court did not act in Brandajah’s case. But that inaction came amid a growing push by liberal advocacy groups, child welfare agencies, and some judges to leave children in troubled homes instead of placing them in foster care.

No one argues that foster care cannot be improved. But this movement, which boasts strong financial and political support, is drawing attention for two reasons. First are concerns that it puts children at risk. The second is that it is based on racial ideology that ignores the evidence about child maltreatment.

David Griffith:

Plenty of studies have compared the progress of students in charter schools versus traditional public schools. And more than a dozen have examined the “competitive effects” of charters on neighboring district schools. Yet, to our knowledge, no prior study has directly addressed the trillion-dollar question—that is, whether overall achievement increases as the “market share” of charter schools grows.

Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement, authored by Fordham’s David Griffith, is a first-of-its-kind study that looks at the relationship between “charter market share” and the academic achievement of all students in a given community, including those in traditional public schools. To accomplish this, the report uses data from a new source, which allows researchers to compare English language arts and math scores from thousands of school districts and dozens of different tests.

Nathan Vanderklippe:

Chinese authorities are sending Christian Uyghurs and even members of the Han Chinese majority to internment camps in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, an indication that the regime’s indoctrination strategy is broader than previously understood.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps more than a million – sent to a sprawling network of centres for political indoctrination and vocational training are Muslims, members of minority groups such as Uyghurs and Kazakhs, according to former detainees and instructors. Beijing has said the centres are being used to stamp out extremism.

But six accounts from people who have recently lived in the region or have family there – three Christian Westerners, a lawyer, a Chinese petitioner and a Uyghur family living in France – reveal that others are also being incarcerated.

William Davies:

e live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies take up a growing share of public discussion.

Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.

But this is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath. Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiter, every bad economic forecast is just another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now fuels public debate.

This mentality now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.

Francois Chollet:

In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Decades later, the concept of an “intelligence explosion” — leading to the sudden rise of “superintelligence” and the accidental end of the human race — has taken hold in the AI community. Famous business leaders are casting it as a major risk, greater than nuclear war or climate change. Average graduate students in machine learning are endorsing it. In a 2015 email survey targeting AI researchers, 29% of respondents answered that intelligence explosion was “likely” or “highly likely”. A further 21% considered it a serious possibility.
The basic premise is that, in the near future, a first “seed AI” will be created, with general problem-solving abilities slightly surpassing that of humans. This seed AI would start designing better AIs, initiating a recursive self-improvement loop that would immediately leave human intelligence in the dust, overtaking it by orders of magnitude in a short time. Proponents of this theory also regard intelligence as a kind of superpower, conferring its holders with almost supernatural capabilities to shape their environment — as seen in the science-fiction movie Transcendence (2014), for instance. Superintelligence would thus imply near-omnipotence, and would pose an existential threat to humanity.

Ian Graber-Stiehl:

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

r/IAmA:

In 2011 I was a college sophomore at MIT frustrated with the state of higher education. The tech industry was rapidly evolving and yet college curriculum was frozen in time. My high school CS teacher had been more innovative in offering a project-based education than my MIT professors were. Something felt broken.

I dropped out of MIT, teamed up with a friend from high school, and started teaching computer science the way we wished it had been taught to us. Our first program was literally run out of the living room of a house in Palo Alto, CA.

By 2014 we grew into a full-fledged alternative to college in San Francisco. There were dorms, faculty, clubs, but no degree. We pioneered a new financial model – don’t pay any tuition unless you get a job. Facebook/Google/Apple and co hired our students. The model worked and the media called it the anti college.
The thing is.. thriving without a college degree is much easier if you come from a privileged background. We came to realize a lot of the dropout-worship in the Silicon Valley was blind to the fact that forgoing a college degree was a lot more costly if you were low-income or a student of color. To really disrupt higher education and serve students who were being left behind by the current system, we had to find a way to offer degrees.

James Flynn:

I was notified of Emerald’s decision not to proceed by Tony Roche, Emerald’s publishing director, in an email on 10th June:

I am contacting you in regard to your manuscript In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious concerns. By the nature of its subject matter, the work addresses sensitive topics of race, religion, and gender. The challenging manner in which you handle these topics as author, particularly at the beginning of the work, whilst no doubt editorially powerful, increase the sensitivity and the risk of reaction and legal challenge. As a result, we have taken external legal advice on the contents of the manuscript and summarize our concerns below.

There are two main causes of concern for Emerald. Firstly, the work could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law. Clearly you have no intention of promoting racism but intent can be irrelevant. For example, one test is merely whether it is “likely” that racial hatred could be stirred up as a result of the work. This is a particular difficulty given modern means of digital media expression. The potential for circulation of the more controversial passages of the manuscript online, without the wider intellectual context of the work as a whole and to a very broad audience—in a manner beyond our control—represents a material legal risk for Emerald.

Secondly, there are many instances in the manuscript where the actions, conversations and behavior of identifiable individuals at specific named colleges are discussed in detail and at length in relation to controversial events. Given the sensitivity of the issues involved, there is both the potential for serious harm to Emerald’s reputation and the significant possibility of legal action. Substantial changes to the content and nature of the manuscript would need to be made, or Emerald would need to accept a high level of risk both reputational and legal. The practical costs and difficulty of managing any reputational or legal problems that did arise are of further concern to Emerald.

Tawnell Hobbs:

Average scores dropped on the SAT this past test-taking cycle, with a greater percentage of high-school students not ready for college-level work, according to results released on Tuesday by the College Board.

A record 2.2 million 2019 graduates took the college entrance exam, up from 2018’s record of 2.1 million. The increase is partly attributed to more districts offering students the option to take the test during the school day, often at no cost.

Piotr Wozniak:

Scrapping the school system
I have spent over two decades in the school system, three decades working in the field of memory and learning, and my whole life learning on my own. The contrast between schools and self-directed learning is so stark that I wake up daily in disbelief about the survival of the old Prussian factory school model. The main thesis of this article is that schooling is the thing of the past. The future will be based on free learning. Before humanity is taken over by artificial intelligence, there is still a lot of room for progress. The human brain has an amazing potential. These days, most of that potential is wasted at school. There is no denying that schools have changed the world for the better. The same can be said about the combustion engine. However, these are the days for scrapping the old technologies and the old systems. It is time for a change.

Phil Christma:

That I would eventually teach college writing was a conclusion foregone, I suppose, as soon as I decided that I was “going to be a writer.” (Not “I was going to write” – that commitment to the process of actual making comes later.) This is true in the obvious sense that our culture doesn’t offer many careers that leave a (lucky; healthy; non-primary caregiver) person the time or energy to write three or four hours a day. But it’s true also in the far deeper sense that, once I had committed to Being A Writer, I immediately encountered a huge body of contradictory lore, and the ongoing mental exertion of harmonizing all that lore – how-to books; new-age inner-creative-child books; classic works on aesthetics and poetics; exhortatory books like John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist and life-coaching books like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; what writers said in interviews; what my teachers told me; what I absorbed from pop culture; last and least of all, my fanny-pack’s worth of firsthand experience – ensured that I would need to do something with all of it.

I am not sure why I settled on the idea. I had not read, at fifteen or sixteen, all that much serious literature – really just The Catcher in the Rye, a book I was too stupid to realize was indicting me by evoking the kind of identifying, idolizing love from me that it did. Most of what I read as a kid was fundamentalist propaganda; or comics; or Nancy Drew novels (I wanted to be her boyfriend); or, if I felt ambitious, sci-fi. In adolescence I added to these books about running and music magazines. I read slowly and badly, with a puny attention span and a kind of neurotic repetition-compulsion – over and over, in middle school, the same June 1989 issue of Batman; over and over, in high school, the same November 1995 Spin profile of Tori Amos. (I also wanted to be her boyfriend, after she had re-accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.) Most of the time, in high school, I did not read at all. I listened to music, and was depressed.

Matthew Green:

“Collect it all”

Prior to Snowden, even surveillance-skeptics would probably concede that, yes, the NSA collects data on specific targets. But even the most paranoid observers were shocked by the sheer scale of what the NSA was actually doing out there.

The Snowden revelations detailed several programs that were so astonishing in the breadth and scale of the data being collected, the only real limits on them were caused by technical limitations in the NSA’s hardware. Most of us are familiar with the famous examples, like nationwide phone metadata collection. But it’s the bizarre, obscure leaks that really drive this home. For example:

Chris McGreal:

When Dollar General came to Haven, Kansas, it arrived making demands. The fastest-growing retailer in America wanted the taxpayers of the small, struggling Kansas town to pick up part of the tab for building one of its squat, barebones stores that more often resemble a warehouse than a neighbourhood shop.

Dollar General thought Haven’s council should give the company a $72,000 break on its utility bills, equivalent to the cost of running the town’s library and swimming pool for a year, on the promise of jobs and tax revenues. The council blanched but ended up offering half of that amount to bring the low-price outlet to a town that already had a grocery store.

“Dollar General are a force. It’s hard to stop a train,” said Mike Alfers, Haven’s then mayor who backed the move. “Obviously there’s been collateral damage. We didn’t expect it. I’m torn but, net-net, I still think it was a good move to bring them in.”

The Dollar General opened in Haven at the end of February 2015. Three years later, the company applied to build a similar store in the neighbouring town of Buhler, a 20-minute drive along a ramrod straight road north through sprawling Kansas farmland.

Buhler’s mayor, Daniel Friesen, watched events unfold in Haven and came to see Dollar General not so much as an opportunity as a diagnosis.

Will Flanders:

In the never-ending debate on test scores in Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, old is new again. Alan Borsuk, in his most recent column discussing the topic, brings up the possibility that higher scores in choice schools might be the result of better parents and students taking advantage of the program, leaving the worse students behind for MPS to deal with. This is notion of “creaming” is pervasive among opponents of school choice. But the evidence does not support it.

First, by all of the measures that are able to be observed, it is worth noting that students in the MPCP and MPS are very similar. Demographic data for choice students was not included in the DPI release for this year, but the 2017-18 numbers reveal 77.5% of students in the MPCP come from low-income backgrounds compared to 84.8% in MPS. 87.3% of MPCP students come from minority backgrounds, as do 89.3% of students in MPS. There are no significant differences along these dimensions. When WILL conducts it’s annual Apples to Apples report that accounts for demographic factors like these, choice schools still rise to the top.

But what Borsuk is probably really focused on are more intangible differences between the students. If a parent takes the time to seek out an alternative educational option, it may indicate some additional level of caring about a child’s education than a parent who leaves their child in an assigned school, whatever its quality. Fortunately, there are a number of studies that are also able to account for this possibility thanks to lotteries that were held to determine admissions to the school. Such research takes advantage of random assignment to receiving school choice, usually due to limitations in the number of vouchers that are available. This means that the students who lose the lottery come from the same sort of family environments as those that win the lottery, allowing for a true effect of educational choice to be observed experimentally. Of 18 studies that have used these methods, 14 have found positive effects on student achievement, 2 have found no effects, and 2–both in Louisiana–have found negative effects. This includes 2 studies in Milwaukee conducted before caps were lifted on the program. In other words, the vast majority of studies that directly address Borsuk’s worry have found no evidence of the problem.

Perhaps the reason for this is that it isn’t just the “cream of the crop” that make the decision to send their students to an alternative school. Indeed, a case can be made that if a student is doing very well in their current public school, why would a change be needed? Of 10 studies that have examined this very question, eight find either evidence in the opposite direction or ambiguous results, and only two find choice students are more advantaged.

Related: ”The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic” .

Mike Antonucci:

Biggs and Richwine are especially effective in dissecting the annual reports on the “teacher pay gap” published by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute. They demonstrate that when EPI’s methodology is applied to other professions, it shows “pay gaps” for about 40 percent of all occupations. EPI’s methods suggest telemarketers are woefully underpaid.

Biggs and Richwine don’t stop there. It’s amazing what an examination of the data tells us:

Teachers leaving the profession in droves? Nope.

Former teachers earning more when they switch to new professions? Nope.

Widespread teacher shortages? Nope.

Teachers work more hours than private-sector professionals? Nope.

Teaching is more stressful than most other occupations? Nope.

An emphasis on Adult Employment .

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Wisconsin residents make up a bare majority of freshmen at UW-Madison this year, the smallest percentage of in-state students the university has enrolled in at least 25 years.

The incoming class includes a record-breaking 7,550 students, 50.3% of whom are from Wisconsin.

That’s a 3.1-percentage-point drop from last year’s incoming class and an even steeper decline since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when two out of every three freshmen were Wisconsin residents, according to a Wisconsin State Journal analysis of enrollment reports.

Jim Higgins:

Graphic novelist, cartoonist and creativity educator Lynda Barry of Madison is one of this year’s winners of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship, commonly known as a “genius” grant.

In naming her one of its 2019 fellows, the MacArthur Foundation praised Barry for “inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication.”

Barry, 63, is known for her graphic novels, including “One! Hundred! Demons!” (2002), a contemporary riff on a 16th-century Zen painting, and “The Good Times Are Killing Me” (1988), and for her long-running “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” a weekly comic strip that appeared in alternative publications.

She is also an associate professor of interdisciplinary creativity in the art department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In her ‘Writing the Unthinkable’ workshops, she leads students through exercises that emphasize the physical process of writing and drawing, often under time pressure, to stimulate creative thinking,” the MacArthur Foundation noted.

Chris Stewart:

When you emerged as a young, talented, highly educated leader years ago public schools in this country were miseducating black children en masse.

Today, as you run for president that problem continues.

But something changed between the you back then and the you today: your relationship with truth.

In a time when too many families are redlined into carefully gerrymandered education deserts, those hope-killing places where middle-class “workers” drive in each day to collect paychecks from school systems only to leave miseducated, marginalized kids in their rear view mirrors as they leave at 4 pm, you choose to step away from school choice and reform.

To bad old Cory is gone because that guy was a master of positive triangulation capable of forging bipartisan local and national relationships to raise money and interests in closing bad schools, opening good ones, fixing teacher contracts, and working on behalf of parents so desperate they were routinely lying about their addresses to gain admission to suburban schools.

20 years ago when your entered politics only 1% of Newark’s students were in charter schools. Today the percentage of students in charters has risen to 30%. Graduation rates rose from 59% to 74% between 2010 and 2015. Poorly performing staff were replaced with high-quality educators.

You did that with the help of dedicated friends (the ones you now betray).

Scott Girard:

There will be a police officer in each of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s four comprehensive public high schools until at least January 2021.

The first deadline for the school district to notify the Madison Police Department that it wanted to remove one of the school resource officers, which could have been effective June 15, 2020, passed Sept. 15 with no notification. That deadline, along with one next year, was set in the contract approved on a 4-3 vote in June to cover the 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

A statement from School Board president Gloria Reyes provided to the Cap Times in an email from district spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson stated the district needed “more time to discuss that option, and will return to that discussion at the next deadline set forth in the contract.”

David Blaska:

If you haven’t noticed, September 15 has come and gone while the Madison school board sat on its hands. With this bunch, doing nothing is the right thing. September 15 was the deadline to evict a school resource (police) officer from one of the four main high schools for next school year (2020-21). The school board didn’t do so despite all the storm und drang from Muldrow and Mirilli so the high schools will be safer places for another full school year. Background here.

As the late Sam Cooke sang, “Ain’t that good news!”

Southern Wisconsin is enjoying its finest weather all year: cool clear and crisp days, low humidity, high skies and temps topping out in the low 70s F. The field corn is starting to turn; tassels are already cherokee red. Matched with yellowing soybeans on hillsides stippled with green alfalfa. The blush in the woodlots beginning to glow. Butterflies and hummingbirds are loading up on nectar at Blaska Experimental Work Farm (and Penal Colony).

Logan Wroge:

If the School Board wants to pilot a high school without an officer, it will need to act by the second deadline in the contract, June 10, which would remove an officer after the fall semester of the 2020-21 school year.

The contract runs through the 2021-22 school year.

Reyes said if the option is exercised, it will need to be done in “the most thoughtful and comprehensive way possible” and require careful planning on what an alternate model to having an SRO would look like at a high school without the officer.

For more than two years, opponents of SROs urged the board to end the program outright, arguing students of color are disproportionately cited and arrested by the officers. After months of closed-session discussions among School Board members, the board ultimately approved the contract in June.

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Ken Fisher:

For debt to become a problem, Uncle Sam must spend like a drunken sailor for decades (which he may). Or interest rates must skyrocket and stay there, with the country’s interest payments ballooning and investors demanding more return for more risk. Do you see any signs of that now? Maybe someday. But not any time soon.

Pockets of debt trouble do exist around the world. To see them, look to markets. Compare low-default-risk Treasury rates to similar-maturity rates from other issuers — it’s called a credit spread. For example, South Africa and Turkey are both suffering significant debt pressure. How do you know? America can borrow for 10 years at 1.62%. Investors demand 8.82% to lend to South Africa. Turkish rates are 15.18%.

Willis Krumholz:

A Minnesota teacher received a $525,000 settlement, after suing the St. Paul School District for retaliating against him after he criticized its use of racial quotas in school discipline.

Aaron Benner, a black man, filed the suit in 2017. He said the St. Paul School District forced him to quit after investigating him four times in the 2014-15 school year. Those investigations were a first for Benner, who had nothing else on his disciplinary record, and was by all accounts an outstanding teacher.

If fact, you might be a bad teacher in the St. Paul School District and be safely employed for life. Benner, however, did something worse than be a bad teacher—he stood against the leftwing system.

Benner first spoke out, through the proper channels, in the 2011-12 school year. That fell on deaf ears.

At the time, the district was led by Valeria Silva, a leftwing activist who was pushing to “reduce racial disparities in student discipline.” Silva’s way of doing this was to simply not discipline black students who had repeat misbehavior problems.

Rachel Lu:

It’s an interesting conundrum. It seems obvious that many of these regions need help. Even our most desperate and impoverished citizens, though, seem to prefer the dignity of a free exchange to the discomfort of being patronized by people with an agenda. Who is able and willing to provide the goods they want at a price they can afford? It’s McDonalds, a company so “global” that its presence (or absence) in a given place is sometimes used as a quick gauge of a country’s success in entering global markets. Even in our least-thriving regions, the invisible hand is still feeding people more successfully than its public-spirited competitors. Shouldn’t this give our nationalists pause, as they contemplate far more aggressive efforts to engineer a top-down revitalization of small-town American life?

Arnade’s chapter on racism is interesting and impressively nuanced. Naturally, he discusses the impact of anti-black prejudice, which drew American blacks to manufacturing towns in the mid-20th century. (Northerners were prejudiced too, but they needed capable workers.) But we also hear about more-recent African immigrants (especially Somalis), some of whom say that they find white communities more welcoming to them than longer-established black communities. He talks to Mexican Americans in Lexington, Nebraska, who came to the Cornhusker State to take the meatpacking jobs that white Americans didn’t want. Today, they are in turn suspicious of the Somalis, who are immigrating to the region to take the jobs that they no longer want.

Arnade doesn’t argue that rural America is rife with bigotry. He introduces us to a number of people who are not bigots, and also makes clear that prejudice can take more and less virulent forms. Not everyone who responds to Donald Trump’s racially-inflected rhetoric is seething with racial hatred.

At the same time, it does seem plausibly true that provincial people (given their strong attachment to community and clan) have a stronger tendency to attach real significance to race and ethnicity, as one criterion that distinguishes “my people” from “not my people”. What should we make of this? Is it a damning indictment of rural America, or just another form of in- and out-grouping, of a sort that all people exercise in some way or another? The political right needs to address these questions if they hope to generate a platform with broad-spectrum appeal.

For the progressive left, Dignity poses a different kind of challenge. To leftist eyes, it seems that provincial people are suffering from a closed-minded refusal to adapt to contemporary circumstances. Better job prospects are indeed part of the answer, but these need to be reached through better education, more comprehensive social programs, and a relinquishment of racist and xenophobic prejudices that have no place in our shrinking world.

There’s a problem, though. As Arnade’s narrative makes clear, most residents of back-row America have very little interest in joining the cosmopolitan party, or of being told how to live. They aren’t dreaming of relocating to Manhattan apartments, where they can win a place in our hyper-woke “creative class”. Instead, they want secure jobs, supportive families, and Jesus. This last is especially uncomfortable for progressives, so it’s nice that Arnade devotes a full chapter to it.

I once asked a Madison taxpayer supported K-12 Superintendent if they visited other, more rural districts to learn, for example Janesville? “I would never do that”.

Former Madison School Board member Ed Hughes commented on College Station, TX vs. Madison.

Wiseye @ 24 September WisPolitics Lunch:

Jim Zellmer:

Thank you for your service Governor Evers.

Under your leadership, the Wisconsin d.p.i. granted Mulligan’s to thousands of elementary teachers who couldn’t pass a reading exam (that’s the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam), yet our students lag Alabama, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per students.

What message are we sending to parents, citizens, taxpayers and those students (who lack proficiency).

Governor Evers: I’m not sure how many mulligans we issued but they are all mulligans that the local school districts are asking for because there are people that generally speaking were people that worked in those schools while they are trying to pass that test they are very close to getting there hitting the mark there.

So I believe that the mulligans that we did issue were were the right thing to do.

The other thing that concerned me and I supported putting that piece in place around passing that test and I still do but the data that concerned me was that the test may have been biased and that it was probably.

34:09

Yes disproportionate number of people of color were not passing that test and this I know the state of Massachusetts had that problem and the state of Wisconsin had that problem. so given that there were we were and I can honestly say I don’t know what came out of the study but we are working with Massachusetts to take a look at that issue and see how how we can correct it.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

2009: “An emphasis on adult employment”.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

2010: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

2011: A Capitol Conversation on our disastrous reading results.

The followup legislation lead to the MTEL based Foundations of Reading: an elementary reading teacher content knowledge examination.

Subsequently undermined:

The Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading, based on Massachusetts’ best in the States MTEL requirement)

Alan Borsuk on MTEL and our disastrous reading results.

“the majority of ALL 11th-grade students in Madison read and write below basic proficiency. Translated: they are functionally illiterate.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

2021: Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

More on our long term, disastrous reading results, here.

Interestingly, a number of local and state media folks attended this event, but I’ve seen no coverage of this vital question.

“an emphasis on adult employment”.

Betsy DeVos is coming to Wisconsin. So I’m heading to Milwaukee early tomorrow morning to join @MTEAunion and Milwaukee families in sending a crystal clear message: the Trump/DeVos team might not believe in public schools, but we do. https://t.co/XHUzMPbuVn

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) September 16, 2019

Evers signs record number of executive orders in first year

David Blaska:

Second brawl involving a taser in five school days

A parent informs the Policy Werkes: “Awesome. My kid has been at East for two weeks & this is the second such incident. The first was not reported [to parents]. Good thing we’ve got cops.”

Dear East Families,

I am writing you to let you know about a fight involving East students that began off-campus over the lunch hour today [09-24-19]. Unfortunately, this is not the first fight involving our students that has taken place near campus during lunch in the last two weeks. The physical altercation involved several students, and many other students were outside for the lunch hour to witness the conflict, so I want to communicate openly with you about what occurred while respecting the privacy of the students involved.

Today’s incident began near 4th Street and Mifflin. Our staff responded and police were present to assist in de-escalating the situation. It has been reported to us that in a secondary conflict, across the street from school near 4th Street and Johnson, a responding Community Officer discharged their taser. Near the end of the lunch hour, we briefly closed school doors to ensure building safety before admitting students who were not involved to attend class.

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Stephen Kinzer:

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.

Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.

Noah Lachs:

Thousands of international students flock to China every year. A lucky and talented few belong to ultra-competitive, fully-funded degree programs. Leading the pack among these are the Yenching Academy at Peking University and the newer, shinier Schwarzman Scholarship Program at Tsinghua University — the alma mater of President Xi Jinping and his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Where Yenching hopes to “build bridges,” Schwarzman aims to “deepen understanding,” both “between China and the rest of the world.” This talk of transnational amity is compelling. However, in a world of tariffs, Uyghur concentration camps, racialized theories of conflict emanating from the U.S. State Department, alleged profiling of Chinese students at U.S. schools, Huawei bans and arrests, detained foreign nationals in China, and protests in Hong Kong, it is worth asking: How much “deepening” and “bridge-building” is possible, particularly between Western and Chinese students?

Having spent a year in one of these programs, I have my own sense of the critical limitations.

Before suggesting where deepening stops and bridge ropes fray, it must be noted that many students complete study programs in China enamored with the country. Many graduate with enduring friendship groups comprising Western and Chinese peers. Many are confident that their programs fulfill their missions. Students in the fold can attest to this. But speaking for myself, and for some others, I can say this: I left China more disillusioned than enamored. I did not make as many Chinese friends as I would have liked — very possibly at my own fault. And I believe there is some distance to go before any international study program in China can profess to have comprehensively deepened mutual understanding and built bridges, much as they are committed to this objective.

Tyler Cowen:

America has long fancied itself a meritocracy, and American universities have a reputation as the world’s best. Both of these premises are now under serious doubt.

A recent study of Harvard’s admissions practices leaves me with the queasy feeling that America’s top schools are bastions of self-replicating privilege, far worse than what most people think. The study draws upon the data generated by the lawsuit against Harvard alleging that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants.

Julie Jargon:

Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to videogames and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media.

James Vaznis and Matt Stout:

House and Senate leaders Thursday unveiled long-awaited legislation to overhaul the state’s antiquated school-funding formula that they say would pump an additional $1.4 billion in local aid to schools over the next seven years.

The proposal — jointly announced by House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, Senate President Karen E. Spilka, and other legislative leaders — aims to bridge the divide in educational opportunities between poor and affluent systems by directing more money to districts that serve greater concentrations of students living in poverty or those with language barriers.

“While we are all proud that Massachusetts is top-rated nationally in education, we want to extend that success to all students,” said DeLeo, a Winthrop Democrat.

John Warner:

Three years ago I mused that I could make far more money writing essays for contract cheating paper mills than teaching writing.

According to reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education at the time, I could earn $1800 per week writing “reference” materials for paper mills, in contrast to the $2850 per semester-long course adjunct wage I was receiving from College of Charleston.

I thought we had reached peak absurdity, but thanks to being alerted by Ben Williamson on Twitter, I now see things can get stranger.

Logan Wroge:

Last school year, the district began using a 35-page guidance document on student gender identity, which is based on federal and state laws and School Board policies regarding anti-bullying and non-discrimination, Hohs said.

While the document was not voted on by the Madison School Board, members received updates on it when it was in development, she said.

The document covers topics like when a student’s name can be changed in the district’s student information system, the policy for restroom and changing area use, and how to communicate with the family of transgender and non-binary students about their identity.

The document states: “School staff shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardians and other school staff, unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure.”

David Blaska:

The things Madison public schools won’t tell you.

They’re teaching your children that they may not be boy or girl. Five and six years old. Gender confusion, et cetera. But don’t tell mom or dad. Because the policy enacted one year ago was secret. Until now.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty uncovered this policy, never before revealed to Madison voters or parents:

Related: The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, between $18k and 20k per student, depending on the district documents reviewed.

“An emphasis on adult employment”.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

The Wconomist:

Seek “harmony but not sameness”, advised the Chinese philosopher Confucius 2,500 years ago. Neither quality was on display when Chinese nationalists violently disrupted a rally at the University of Queensland in July in support of anti-government demonstrators in Hong Kong. Since then Drew Pavlou, one of the organisers of the sympathy rally, says he has received a litany of threats from Chinese patriots. The passport details of another participant in the rally, who is from the Chinese mainland, have been disseminated on social media. A third says authorities in China visited his family there, to warn them of the consequences of dissent.

Rebecca Lurye:

Democrats, in leadership in Hartford since 1971, are responsible for the city’s educational failures, Lewis said.
“[The party] doesn’t serve black people, it doesn’t serve middle-class or poor white people, it doesn’t serve Hispanics,” Lewis said. “It serves people at the top tier of the party.

“No matter how many times people from the party have said education is better than ever, the research doesn’t lie. It’s very clear, especially in the city of Hartford, the system is not doing well.”

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, between $18k and 20k per student, depending on the district documents reviewed.

“An emphasis on adult employment”.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Years ago, a senior Madison teacher mentioned to me that the local union leadership traded benefit growth for reduced salary increases, which affected younger teachers.

The Madison school district has benefited greatly from a growing property tax base – supported by a massive federal taxpayer electronic medical record subsidy (nearly $40B since 2011!). Will that continue? What happens if things change?

David McWilliams:

Mr Bernanke’s unorthodox “cash for trash” scheme, otherwise known as quantitative easing, drove up asset prices and bailed out baby boomers at the profound political cost of pricing out millennials from that most divisive of asset markets, property. This has left the former comfortable, but the latter with a fragile stake in the society they are supposed to build.

As we look towards the 2020 US presidential election, could Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s leftwing politics become the anthem of choice for America’s millennials?

But before we look forward, it is worth going back a bit. The 2008 crash itself didn’t destroy wealth, but rather revealed how much wealth had already been destroyed by poor decisions taken in the boom. This underscored the truism that the worst of investments are often taken in the best of times.

Mr Bernanke, a keen student of the 1930s, understood that a “balance sheet recession” must be combated by reflating assets. By exchanging old bad loans on the banks’ balance sheets with good new money, underpinned by negative interest rates, the Fed drove asset prices skywards. Higher valuations fixed balance sheets and ultimately coaxed more spending and investment. However, such “hyper-trickle-down” economics also meant that wealth inequality was not the unintended consequence, but the objective, of policy.

Japanese Complete:

Japanese is a beautiful language entwined ceaselessly with a proud, powerful, and organized culture that teeters between brilliance, freshness, isolation, despair, and true gratitude. Much like the human condition, the Japanese language has many facets and many expressions simply cannot easily be translated into other languages like English without some interpretive acrobatics by the translator. Lexical Gaps exist in many languages, but this Untranslatability is not because our human experiences are somehow fundamentally different, it is because the rich media and culture surrounding and associating with our languages are quite distinct. Language itself is permeated with an unending wave, an ebb and flow, of culture and counter-culture. To be exposed to the various media of Japanese culture: books, movies, poems, paintings, elaborate gardens, temple campuses, hotsprings, thematic festivals, hole-in-the-wall restaurants — is to be exposed to a celebration of history and cultivation of elegance. Learning Japanese is not difficult because it is untranslatable, learning Japanese is notorious because one drop of Japanese has a whole ocean of culture.

Peter Arcidiacono,
Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom :

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, lega- cies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.

Aaron Boyd:

Customs and Border Protection collects a wealth of information through the technologies deployed at the ports of entry, all of which is stored in a master crossing record the agency keeps on every individual who enters the country.

That record contains information gathered at every crossing: the time, date and port of the crossing, the information taken from their travel documents, photos and data collected on their belongings and vehicles, and determinations made by customs officers throughout the process. For non-U.S. citizens, this also means biometric data, such as photos and fingerprints.

That record also includes data culled from a variety of federal databases and sources. But CBP doesn’t automatically share its records with other parts of the government—even other Homeland Security components. However, there are procedures and agreements in place that enable some information sharing, spreading the data beyond just CBP’s control.

Over the last few months, Nextgov has been reporting on where and how CBP collects information on people crossing the border, where and how that data is stored and shared, and the agency’s plans to collect and further integrate more data in the near future.

Greg Hurst:

No man is an island entire of itself, as John Donne observed. Men are, however, much more likely than women to lead solitary lives without people they consider to be friends.

Almost one in five men admits to having no close friends, a survey has found, prompting charities to urge men to make more time for hobbies and socialising.

A poll by YouGov found that 18 per cent of men did not have a close friend and 32 per cent had no one they counted as a best friend.

Rod Dreher:

Those poor children of Washington Township schools. The teachers responsible for their education are throwing old books into Dumpsters, and filling their minds with histories of privilege, oppression, and power. It’s all from Paul Gorski and his “Equity Literacy” idea, which is the Marxisization of teaching high school literature. Look at the Principles Of Equity Literacy:

An important aspect of equity literacy is its insistence on maximizing the integrity of transformative equity practice. That means not being lulled by popular diversity approaches and frameworks that pose no threat to inequity. The principles of equity literacy help us to ensure we keep a commitment to equity at the center of our work and conversation. Download and share these principles here
​
Direct Confrontation Principle: There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.

“Poverty of Culture” Principle: Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems, not primarily cultural problems, so equity requires power and privilege solutions, not just cultural solutions.

John McWhorter:

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

Rosie Levine, Johanna M. Costigan, Kyle Hutzler, Dan Keane, Rebecca Arcesati :

From my seat at the Yenching Academy Opening Ceremony in September 2016, I remember looking around the auditorium at my peers who came from over 40 countries. United by an interest in China, we knew that our time in Beijing would help our future careers. Our time on the ground would set us apart.

A few years later, my peers have been set apart—not for their achievements, but for FBI scrutiny. The past few years have seen a dramatic change in the U.S.-China relationship, yet, as tensions between our nations rise, it is more essential than ever that young Americans understand China—its language, people, and culture. Instilling fear among the next generation of China scholars undermines this aim.

At Yenching, my peers and I learned as much outside the classroom as we did on campus. Our carefully orchestrated visits to corporate offices featured flashy slideshows that praised China’s advances in cashless payments and fin-tech. But these experiences conflicted with the antiquated fapiao reimbursement system used on campus, which necessitated hard-copy receipts printed on vintage contraptions. Visits to the school’s financial office revealed the extent to which the ever-changing anti-corruption laws govern campus operations—first dictating no alcohol could be purchased with Peking University funds, then no coffee, and then even no tea. But with each new decree, if you asked politely for an exception, the rules might give way.

Increased scrutiny of Yenching Academy students fits into a broader pattern of FBI suspicion of educational exchange with China, visible in aggressive FBI briefings for U.S. academic administrators, a growing distrust of ethnic Chinese researchers, and recent visa restrictions for Chinese academics. While instances of espionage should certainly not go unpunished, a small minority of cases seem to have had an outsized influence on prevailing attitudes within the U.S. government.

Karl Bode:

A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet.

As it currently stands, all books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain, meaning they’re publicly owned and can be freely used and copied. Books published in 1964 and after are still in copyright, and by law will be for 95 years from their publication date.

But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law.

Robert Harington:

What led to your writing this article about the history of peer review?

I think my peer review project started when I discovered something really unexpected about Nature: that it hadn’t employed systematic external refereeing until 1973! When I first learned that, I assumed Nature was unusual, but as it turned out, a lot of commercial journals did not consult referees about every paper they published until well into the 1970s and even the 1980s. That seemed especially true outside the US. I didn’t have the space to explore that issue fully in my book on Nature, but as I wrapped up that project I knew I wanted to write more about the history of peer review.

What are the key highlights of your study that you would like readers of The Scholarly Kitchen to carry with them? Are there any stories you would particularly like to highlight?

One major takeaway point that I think might surprise Scholarly Kitchen readers is that peer review is much, much younger than we usually assume. There’s this story about Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, that claims he was the first person to consult external referees. Which would suggest that peer review has been part of scientific publishing ever since the first scientific journal.

But it turns out that’s not really true. The referee system as we know it today first started to take shape in the nineteenth century, and it developed very slowly and haphazardly from there. Refereeing was most common in Anglophone countries and among journals that were affiliated with learned societies like the Royal Society of London. Well into the twentieth century, commercial journals and journals outside the English-speaking world tended to rely on editorial judgment instead of referee opinions.

James Vaznis:

A preschool seat in the Boston Public Schools often seems harder to come by than a winning Megabucks ticket, even for some of the city’s most politically connected residents.

City Councilor Michelle Wu struck out getting a seat for her 4-year-old son, Blaise, who was waitlisted earlier this year at the Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale. That is until this Monday, when she finally received a phone call from the school system that many families in her situation wait months for: A seat had opened up at the Sumner.

Shocked about her good fortune two weeks into the new school year, Wu yanked her son out of Sacred Heart School, scrambled to buy him new school uniforms, and brought him to the Sumner on Wednesday.

Echo Huang:

Since the 2016 US presidential election, social media users have grown used to hearing of inauthentic accounts—which are most often attributed to Russia. When Twitter last month said it was suspending more than 900 accounts linked to China, it marked the first time the platform had publicly identified and removed a Chinese disinformation campaign. Facebook took similar action against a handful of pages the same day. The accounts and tweets made public by Twitter offer researchers a chance to study China’s tactics.

After an estimated 2 million people marched in Hong Kong to protest against the now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed extradition of criminal suspects to the mainland, a Twitter account with a red Chinese flag as its profile picture tweeted in Chinese that protesters dressed in black and linked to foreign agents had attacked police headquarters, “instigating others to march and protest as a means to disrupt Hong Kong.” In other instances, if users scrolled down, they would have seen that two of the accounts with the most retweets in recent days about Hong Kong topics were earlier tweeting links offering nude photos. Others were previously tweeting in Portuguese or Indonesian.

Christina Leuker & Wouter Van Den Bos:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity.

In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.

Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death—or even the future dates of happy events.

Each of these is an example of willful ignorance. Socrates may have made the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Hobbes may have argued that curiosity is mankind’s primary passion, but many of our oldest stories actually describe the dangers of knowing too much. From Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge to Prometheus stealing the secret of fire, they teach us that real-life decisions need to strike a delicate balance between choosing to know, and choosing not to.

John Murawski:

The ethnic studies movement has been underway for years and is now poised to enter the mainstream, raising tough questions for educators and policymakers about how to present such material to teenagers. Teachers around the country are already offering ethnic studies classes, units or lessons on their own initiative, citing a growing urgency to confront racism, sexism, homophobia and other entrenched social inequalities.

Two years ago, the Indiana legislature mandated that high schools offer an ethnic studies elective. As approved by the state’s education department, the class teaches about the contributions of ethnic and racial groups, various cultural practices, as well as such concepts as privilege, systematic oppression and implicit bias. And now three states – California, Oregon and Vermont – are trying to create authoritative statewide templates that, advocates hope, will make it easier for schools to adopt ethnic studies.

Advocates believe they are within striking distance of making ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high schools across the country, making it a prerequisite for preparing students to navigate the world, much as learning about the Western tradition had once been. They say the shift to ethnic studies appears inevitable because of the nation’s changing demographics, the growing awareness of white supremacy and other forms of systemic discrimination, and a newfound political clout for the ethnic studies movement.

“We don’t want students to have the option not to take ethnic studies,” said Melina Abdullah, a professor Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a board member of the national Association for Ethnic Studies. “It is as important as taking a lab science.”

Camilla Hodgson:

On a foggy September lunchtime in San Francisco, a group of researchers and data scientists sat around foldable plastic tables in what was once a Christian Science church, evangelising about open-source information and the democratisation of knowledge.

The 50-strong party, which had been assembled for a weekly progress discussion, dined downstairs in a pillared building that now houses the Internet Archive, a digital library dedicated to providing “universal access to all knowledge”. As computers hummed on cluttered workstations all around, the employees and a handful of invited guests greeted each update with optimistic applause.

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is a non-profit that collects and digitises information, from films to books. It is best known for the Wayback Machine, a free repository of web pages that allows users to see what a particular URL looked like when it was archived, regardless of whether it has since been changed or taken down.

Christina Capatides:

And while the problem is widespread, certain American kids are more likely than others to participate. In particular, experts say economic privilege is a factor.

“There are some studies that show that a lot of kids who grow up in affluent suburban communities grow up in communities where the adults around them drink a lot. And they’re going to model that behavior,” explains Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. “They also may have access to alcohol from the alcohol that their parents have purchased and have at home. So, you know, we often think that money and privilege is a protective condition. But I think in this case, it may be associated with actually more dangerous behavior.”

“They have access to money,” concurs Julie Fenn, a clinical social worker in the Massachusetts public school system. “In households where two parents have college degrees or secondary degrees beyond that, there’s a higher rate of alcohol use among kids. … Parents who are highly educated will think their kids will never do it. Or they’re at work or traveling and kids are left alone more, or aren’t supervised as closely. Then you do see higher rates of alcohol abuse. You can see that nationally in the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — communities that are of higher socioeconomic status are at the higher end of that.”

Peter Dye:

Before taking a group of international college students on a field trip to a place like Stone Mountain Park, it’s important to give them the proper context. As a teacher of English as a second language, a good bit of that context involves linking language to history and culture, and this week’s vocabulary lesson included some doozies. Confederacy, Klansmen, mini-golf, and laser show aren’t words you’d typically find in any ESL textbook. I wasn’t even sure if I should be teaching some of these words to my students, much less how they would react to them.

For those unfamiliar, Stone Mountain — a stone monadnock that rises 825 feet above the ground east of Atlanta — today is essentially a theme park known for hiking trails, yearly festivals, adventure courses, and perhaps most famously, the 90-foot tall Confederate monument carved prominently into the mountain’s side. As children scurry around the ropes course and families hike upward to see the beautiful views of the Atlanta skyline, the chiseled profiles of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis stare off into the distance, with their hats held closely to their hearts as they sit atop majestic horses.

Nuha Dolby:

The external review conducted on University of Wisconsin fraternity and sorority life was released recently, after being submitted mid-May.

The review, according to the Fraternity and Sorority Life website, was conducted with a goal for “students to be healthy and safe and for fraternities and sororities to contribute positively to the campus community through their shared values of scholarship, leadership, service and sisterhood/brotherhood.”

The review was conducted by five professionals from other universities, each holding membership in an organization that is part of the four governing Greek councils (Interfraternity Council, Multicultural Greek Council, National Panhellenic Council and Panhellenic Association).

The report discussed accountability and relationships with UW.

The report stated that concerns about behaviors and how to manage accountability for them varied by Council. While accountability was not brought up as a critical issue during conversations with members of the NPHC and MGC, that did not hold true for all councils.

IFC and Panhellenic council members, according to the report, didn’t address using their own judicial or standards boards to resolve infractions committed by their members.

While IFC has a Judicial Board, the report stated that “its function was unclear.” A Panhellenic Council Judicial Board was brought up, but the report stated that no conversation was directed in verifying whether this was an operational or effective tool or deterrent.

The Committee on Student Organizations, according to the report, brought on almost universal negative connotations. Chapter members, student officers and alumnus advisers complained that CSO had a lack of transparency, a process that appeared to apply differently to Greek life organizations versus other student organizations, sanctions that were not deemed fitting to the violation and confusion over what role different staff members played in the process.

Pamela Paul:

“I’m bored.” It’s a puny little phrase, yet it has the power to fill parents with a cascade of dread, annoyance and guilt. If someone around here is bored, someone else must have failed to enlighten or enrich or divert. And how can anyone — child or adult — claim boredom when there’s so much that can and should be done? Immediately.

But boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it’s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up — boredom is for boring people — boredom is useful. It’s good for you.

If kids don’t figure this out early on, they’re in for a nasty surprise. School, let’s face it, can be dull, and it isn’t actually the teacher’s job to entertain as well as educate. Life isn’t meant to be an endless parade of amusements. “That’s right,” a mother says to her daughter in Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” “You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”

New York Times:

For nearly a century, many American college and university admissions officers have given preferential treatment to the children of alumni.

The policies originated in the 1920s, coinciding with an influx of Jewish and Catholic applicants to the country’s top schools. They continue today, placing a thumb on the scale in favor of students who already enjoy the benefits of being raised by families with elite educations. Of the country’s top 100 schools (as determined by the editors at U.S. News & World Report), roughly three-quarters have legacy preferences in admissions. These anachronistic policies have been called “affirmative action for the rich” and “affirmative action for whites.”

Preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity. Little wonder that it is unpopular with most Americans, yet supported by the affluent who both oversee the college admissions process and are its primary beneficiaries.

Legacy admissions are no ordinary leg up. In 2011, a Harvard researcher who studied 30 of the nation’s most selective schools found that all legacy applicants had a 23 percent higher probability of admission, while “primary legacy” students (those with a parent who attended the school as an undergraduate, rather than, say, a grandparent or aunt) had a 45 percent higher probability compared with their peers, all other things being equal. …

Related: Open The Books:

1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Marlena Tavernier-Fine:

Multiple students on campus have offered to pay their classmates to drop out of classes they are waitlisted for, raising concerns about over-enrollment and advising.

Campus sophomore David Wang reposted a screenshot on the Overheard at UC Berkeley Facebook page showing a post by a Haas senior in their final semester before going abroad offering to pay $100 to the first five students to drop UGBA 102B, “Introduction to Managerial Accounting.” The student in question needed the class to graduate, and claimed that the “advising office was no help, so I’m taking matters into my own hands.”

Wang said in an email that in this student’s situation it would have made sense for advisers to make an exception for the senior since their graduation status was in jeopardy.

“I do not blame the students for paying his/her classmate to get in the class — I would do the same in that situation,” Wang said in an email.