Dave Zirin:

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say. I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

J Shrager:

Probably mostly true, the joke implies that it’s a bad thing to know only one language. More specifically, it’s poking fun at the fact that most Americans only speak English. But is it such a bad thing to only know English? According to this Wikipedia list of most commonly spoken languages, the most spoken “primary” language (“mother tongue” or “L1 Rank”) is, predictably, Mandarin, followed by Spanish, and then English. So, you’re at least in the top 3 just out of the gate!

But just looking at the number of speakers of their Mother Tongue (L1) is misleading, because when someone does learn a second language, it is almost always English! So instead of looking at the most common “first languages” (L1), you look at the most common languages including second languages , that is, the languages by total number of speakers (L1+L2+…), you get a very different, and somewhat surprising, list (the rightmost column in the WP table, and the main sorting rank of the table). By this measure, English is the most commonly spoken language, with 1.12 Billion speakers (at this writing), followed closely by Mandarin (1.11B), and then by Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and French. The reason that most people learn English as a second language, if it isn’t their Mother Tongue, is that English is the de facto language of Business, Engineering, Science, and, most influentially, The Internet. Indeed, by the time you get to French, there are fewer speakers of French word-wide than the population of the US! So, really, there are only five global languages: English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic. So if you were going to learn a second natural language, you’d do best to learn one of those.

Qian Zhecheng:

These days, Xu Li doesn’t worry whenever her elderly father takes off on one of his frequent solo trips to Europe. Although the native of provincial capital Hefei speaks little English and has Chinese so heavily infused by his city’s local patois that other Chinese cannot always understand him, Xu trusts that, in case of an emergency, he can communicate using the dialect transcription and translation app on his phone. After all, she helped develop the program.

Xu is a researcher at iFlytek, a Chinese tech firm known for its AI-powered iFlytek Voice Input keyboard app. The app’s voice-to-text function lets users transcribe vocal recordings and dictate written messages. But to win over consumers and succeed in the Chinese market, it needs to do more than just be able to recognize and translate spoken Standard Mandarin, the country’s only official national language — it has to be able to understand and process dialect, too.

That’s where Xu comes in. Despite decades of concerted government effort, tens of millions of Chinese, including Xu’s father, still speak little-to-no Standard Mandarin, instead communicating in one or more of the country’s thousands of distinct regional and local vernaculars. It’s Xu’s job to increase the accuracy of iFlytek’s input method — and the software’s potential scope — by using deep learning techniques to teach the program these dialects.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Unlike most findings in the sleepy field of occupational therapy, her findings, which were published last year in the Journal of Hand Therapy, touched off a media firestorm, as the revelation seemed to encapsulate any number of smoldering fears in one handy conflagration: The loss of human potential in the face of automation, of our increasing time spent on smartphones and other devices, the erosion of our masculine norms,2 of the fragility and general shiftlessness of millennials. Even taking into account the cautionary statistical notes—that the sample sizes of the 1980s studies were not huge, that Fain’s study was mostly college students—the idea of a loss in human strength, expressed through a statistical measure hardly anyone had previously heard of, seemed to hint at some latter-day version of degeneration.

That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength. In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength.3 Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”

Quinn Norton:

Fighting charges can take years of life, millions of dollars, and a rare resiliency in the face of an adversarial system designed to destroy you. Prosecutors and DAs use the threat of piling on additional charges and harsh mandatory minimums to force people to give in.

As a result, around 96% of defendants accept plea bargains. They go to prison without ever being proven guilty in a court of law. For the disproportionately poor and often black and latino arrestees, the constitutional right to a fair trial is a mocking fiction. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in 2012, “it is insufficient simply to point to the guarantee of a fair trial… If there is no trial, there can be no fair trial.”

Even the government admits that up to 8% of those pleading are likely to be completely innocent. That’s at least 176,000 souls trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Given the common practice of misapplying charges to edge cases of the law, and the harshness of sentences even in situations where no one got hurt, the number of lost souls ripped from their lives and fed into this terrible machine are undoubtedly much higher.

Tom Gantert:

A Republican state representative has introduced a bill that would make it illegal in Michigan for social media companies such as Google or Facebook to “censor, ban, shadow-ban” or use other means to exercise viewpoint discrimination against users on the basis of the person’s political opinions.

State Rep. John Reilly of Oakland Township introduced House Bill 4801 on June 26. A press release from the Michigan House Republican caucus cited a Project Veritas undercover sting that secretly recorded a Google executive, Jen Gennai, saying that her company is focused on “never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”

The bill has been referred to the House Communications and Technology Committee, chaired by Rep. Michele Hoitenga, R-Manton.

“This isn’t a question of property rights. This is a question of fraud,” Reilly said in the press release. “In this modern era, social media networks are the new public square. Banning – and worse, secretly banning while deceiving the user into believing their content is being shared equally – excludes individuals from public life.”

Reilly continued: “Social media companies cannot eat their cake and have it too. They cannot enjoy the privileges of being a platform, such as immunity from liability for users’ content, while also enjoying the privileges of being a publisher to control what everyone may or may not say on their network.”

Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, said in an email that there is a distinction between a government entity and a private enterprise.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 organizations use Google and Facebook services, including Madison.

Alex Gillis:

A scholar for forty years, Franco has followed the rise of junk publishers for about a decade. He has seen them go from anomalous blights on academics’ credentials to widespread additions on scholarly resumés, nearly indistinguishable from legitimate work. Now, he says, “there’s never been a worse time to be a scientist.” Typically, when a scholar completes work they want to see published, they submit a paper to a reputable journal. If the paper is accepted, it undergoes a rigorous editing process—including peer review, in which experts in the field evaluate the work and provide feedback. Once the paper is published, it can be cited by others and inspire further research or media attention. The process can take years. Traditionally, five publishers have dominated this $25 billion industry: Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), and Sage. But, before the turn of the century, a new model of online publishing, “open access,” began opening doors for countless academics—and for thousands of scams in the process.

The new online model created an opportunity for profits: the more papers publishers accepted, the more money they generated from authors who paid to be included—$150 to $2,000 per paper, if not more, and often with the support of government grants. Researchers also saw substantial benefits: the more studies they posted, the more positions, promotions, job security, and grant money they received from universities and agencies. Junk publishers—companies that masquerade as real publishers but accept almost every submission and skip quality editing—elbowed their way in.

Logan Wroge:

In 2012, the School Board hired consultant Ray and Associates, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for $31,000 to assist in the search process to replace former Superintendent Dan Nerad.

But questions around a finalist’s background left some board members at the time saying they were not fully aware of controversial issues. That finalist withdrew shortly before a scheduled visit to the district, clearing the way for Cheatham’s hiring.

To fill the superintendent role on an interim basis, the School Board last month chose Jane Belmore, a former Madison assistant superintendent, who will start Aug. 1.

Cheatham will leave for a teaching position at Harvard University at the end of August.

Notes and links on recent Madison Superintendent searches.

2013: What will be different, this time?

“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”

Briana Reilly:

Mary Burke announced Friday she’s stepping down from her position on the Madison School Board after seven years.

Burke, who was first elected to the board in 2012, said in a statement her departure comes as her “personal and professional commitments do not allow me the time and energy needed to fulfill my term.”

“I have faith that the Board will hire a great new superintendent, pass a transformative referendum and continue towards fulfilling our mission of every student graduating college, career and community ready,” she said in a statement.

Logan Wroge:

The School Board will discuss filling the vacant seat when it meets Monday night. Board policy calls for a vacant seat to be filled by appointment within 60 days of a resignation.

According to the policy, interested candidates will need to file a statement of interest of no more than 700 words with the district, including:

Much more on Mary Burke and Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 school District

Ms Burke initially supported the later aborted (by a majority of the School Board) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

“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”.

John Otis:

At a primary school in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, the students’ parents play an outsize role.

Gasoline shortages have collapsed public transportation, making it hard for teachers to get to work. Others skip class to scrounge for food and medicine, both of which are in short supply in Venezuela. Due to low salaries, some teachers have quit.

That’s why Karen Benini, the mother of a sixth-grader, often steps in to substitute even though she lacks a teacher’s certificate.

“I’m not a teacher. I never studied to be a teacher. I’m a graphic designer,” says Benini, 41, who volunteers two to three days per week.

Amid Venezuela’s catastrophic economic meltdown, education experts say that it’s getting much harder for children to get a good grasp of history, geography and their ABCs.

School staff are resigning in droves. Legions of students and teachers are among the 4 million Venezuelans who have fled the country in recent years. Those still going to school in the country often find that classes have been canceled due to power outages, water shortages and other breakdowns.

Jill LePore:

The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong’s boots, caked into dust. There’s no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don’t blow away and they don’t wash away and there’s no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they’re so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they’ll last for tens of millions of years.

China Heritage:

Gong Renren (龔刃韌, 1954-), the author of the following essay, is a professor (retired) in the Law School of Peking University (see here for details) and the head of the Institute for Human Rights 人權研究院.

On 21 June 2019, Professor Gong published an essay that is nothing less than an indictment of China’s academic culture, an accusation of mediocrity and a critique of a cowed and compliant intelligentsia. In his analysis of the ever-deepening crisis in the Chinese humanities and social sciences, Gong contrasts the failures of today with the achievements of the country’s universities during the turbulent and war-torn decades of the Republic of China.

The following essay is thus an elegy for the long-lost world of pre-1949 Chinese academia, a warning about the bedevilled state of the country’s universities under a reinvigorated Party ideology and a caution about the global blight of metrics- and ranking-driven, industrial-scale for-profit education. In particular, the author skewers the Chinese academy for having barely sloughed off the Maoist past only to become a laboratory for a dual experiment: one in which the culture of neo-liberal metrics in line with the concocted laws of the global educational marketplace is combined with stifling ideological controls that serve the policy shifts of a monolithic party-state.

The author also deftly encapsulates the dilemma of Global China. The People’s Republic has the economic and intellectual heft to contribute to the betterment not only of its own people but to humanity as a whole. Over recent decades, mature policy makers have developed ways for the country to engage creatively with the world, but resurgent Party dominance also demands every greater, and absurd, levels of fealty to its inward-looking dogmas. As a result, higher education is a battleground on which China’s best angels and worst spirits tussle. There may be no clear winners, yet, for many, the struggle itself is of great significance.

Theodore Dalrymple:

In February 2017, an 18-year-old Cambridge University law student, Ronald Coyne, was filmed on the streets of Cambridge at night burning a £20 note in front of a 31-year-old homeless man, Ryan Davies, who had asked him politely for spare change. According to Davies, Coyne said, “I’ll give you some change. I’ve changed it into fire.” Coyne then continued down the street as if he had done nothing worthy of note. A member of the university’s Conservative club, he was drunk at the time—though not dead drunk, for he was more swaggering than staggering—and dressed in white tie and tails.

The video of the encounter went viral; a picture of the young man, looking very pleased with himself, appeared in most British newspapers. Public condemnation swelled. Before long, 23,000 people signed a petition calling for his expulsion from the university.

In a drop of rain, said the eminent British historian Sir Lewis Namier, can be seen the colors of the sun: and in this episode, brief and simple as it appeared, all the social, political, and philosophical conflicts of modern British society, and perhaps of Western society in general, can be seen.

No decent person could witness, or read of, Coyne’s conduct without revulsion. But expressing a universally shared disgust is not enough; it is necessary to go deeper and analyze the reasons for it. Why did the incident—relatively harmless, compared with the examples of violence and savage acts that fill the British tabloids daily—provoke such outrage?

At the moment of his gesture, Coyne exhibited a disturbing coldheartedness. It strikes fear in our hearts that men should be so effortlessly capable of such cruelty. If a young man—intelligent, educated, privileged, and with everything to look forward to in life—can behave like this, of what else might he, and others like him, not be capable? We cannot console ourselves that his action was mere thoughtlessness, a momentary lapse, like someone with much on his mind who passes through a swinging door without thinking of who might be behind him. Coyne’s gesture was not only malign; its malignity was its whole point. He took pleasure in the pain he knew it would cause, in the extra humiliation inflicted upon a man already in a humiliating position. His was an archetypically malicious action.

Coyne’s mother, who did not condone her son’s conduct, claimed that it was completely uncharacteristic. He had always been a quiet, studious boy rather than a roustabout, she said, and indeed, while still at school, he had worked as a volunteer for a homeless charity. Even if this were all true, however, it would not be entirely reassuring, for it would mean that a decent, even a good, person could suddenly transform into a bad one and perform a callous act. But at least such a reflection would warn us that we must constantly be on guard against ourselves.

Philip Jeffery:

One friday afternoon in November 1948, T. S. Eliot opened a new chapter in American culture policy. Eliot, just two weeks removed from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, spoke at the invitation of the Library of Congress on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance as a poet. He derided Poe as immature and sloppy — his kindest comment was that Poe was at heart a “displaced European” — but found it significant that the French symbolist poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all drew extensively on Poe. Poe’s careless style-over-substance approach, Eliot explained, looked to the French symbolists like an avant-garde forebear of la poésie pure — the point at which subject matter would cease to matter, while poetic technique, theory, and the artistic process in itself would be all-important. Valéry in particular held up the individual artist and his artistic process as the ideal central concern of any artistic “content.” Eliot lamented this development, but nonetheless saw it as the legitimate and historically inevitable development of Western poetry. To reject la poésie pure “would be a lapse from what is in any case a highly civilized attitude to a barbarous one.”

Charlie Warzel:

The home page for Gaggle, a software program that scans student activity across digital platforms like email, computer files and online assignments, features a staggering, if unprovable, statistic. “This past academic year, Gaggle helped districts save 542 students from carrying out an act of suicide,” it reads.

Calculating figures like suicide prevention is a murky science at best (Gaggle emailed to say that the number was “actually 722 students saved”), but that hasn’t stopped digital student monitoring systems like Gaggle, which has roughly five million users, from growing in popularity. In the wake of mass shootings like Parkland, school districts are facing pressure to find new ways to deter violence, and many of them force administrators to make a choice between student safety and privacy.

Their decisions are ushering in a K-12 surveillance state. This spring, Western New York’s Lockport City School District started testing facial recognition technology with “the capacity to go back and create a map of the movements and associations of any student or teacher.” There have been gunfire-detecting microphones installed in New Mexico schools and playgrounds that require iris scans. A recent ProPublica report explored the deployment of unreliable “aggression detector” cameras in places like Queens, New York. The increase is most likely linked to the number of security and surveillance technology vendors courting school district budgets.

Susan Edelman:

At the Science School for Exploration and Discovery, MS 224 in the Bronx, an impressive 94 percent of students in grades 6-8 passed their math classes in the 2017-18 school year.

But how much math they actually mastered is questionable.

Only 2 percent of those same Mott Haven students — nearly all Hispanic and black from poor or low-income families — passed the state math exams, which measure skills that kids should have at each grade level, according to city data reviewed by The Post.

At Harbor Heights middle school in Washington Heights, an awesome 100 percent of kids — all Hispanic — passed their state English Language Arts classes.

But only 7 percent of those kids passed the ELA exams, the data show.

Some education advocates politely call it “grade inflation.”

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”.

Michael Sheridan:

However, in the course of researching a book on Hong Kong, I have found that Mrs Thatcher, for one, had less cause for remorse than she may have thought. Indeed she may have set an example. About a year after watching Chris Patten and the Prince of Wales sail away in a storm on the royal yacht Britannia, I was browsing one afternoon in the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Beijing when a snappy new title caught my eye.

Mao Zedong on Diplomacy, published in 1998, contains official papers and transcripts from the “liberation” of China to late in Mao’s life. A light-hearted read it is not, until the last pages, in which the chairman greets an unctuous Edward Heath, then leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, for a chat about world affairs on May 25, 1974.

‘I cast my vote for you!’ declares Mao, ignoring an aide who asks if he is not afraid of offending Harold Wilson, the sitting Labour prime minister. Mao was on record as preferring conservatives, De Gaulle and Nixon among them, to liberals and socialists. No doubt he found something to admire in pragmatism tempered by ruthlessness.

He trusted Heath to send a message to the British government about Hong Kong. ‘We won’t discuss it at present,’ said Mao, ‘This will be the business of the younger generation.’ Heath was back eight years later. This time he met Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, and inquired again about the colony. ‘How could we face our ancestors and the Chinese people if we did not take it back?’ said Deng, according to a memoir by a senior Chinese official. It landed in Mrs Thatcher’s in-tray just after the Falklands War. Britain’s lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997 and the Foreign Office pressed her to make a deal.

She did so, but it troubled her for the rest of her life to see millions of British subjects handed over to a Communist dictatorship. Yet her resolve may have got them a better future than Deng ever intended to grant.

We knew that her meeting with Deng in September 1982 was grim. ‘A tiny man who radiated power,’ says a British official who advised her. Deng dismissed the 19th-Century treaties granting Hong Kong Island and part of the Kowloon peninsula to Britain in perpetuity. She was shocked. Deng said he could take Hong Kong in an afternoon. He chain-smoked and spat. But I did not know that when Mrs Thatcher steadied and held her ground, the Chinese leader had private cause for doubt. Memoirs by Chinese officials and Communist Party histories – all laudatory of their own wisdom, of course – show that her firmness changed Deng’s political calculations.

The People’s Liberation Army had a plan for invading Hong Kong, on the shelf since the Cultural Revolution. But Deng knew the PLA had come off badly in a brawl with Vietnam. Plus, China had no friends. Deng still feared the USSR. He had to do economic reform, so he needed the United States. Perhaps, the Chinese leader thought, this difficult woman might actually make a fight of it. One never knew.

Stephen Wolfram:

So what was the hearing really about? For me, it was in large measure an early example of reaction to the realization that, yes, AIs are starting to run the world. Billions of people are being fed content that is basically selected for them by AIs, and there are mounting concerns about this, as reported almost every day in the media.

Are the AIs cleverly hacking us humans to get us to behave in a certain way? What kind of biases do the AIs have, relative to what the world is like, or what we think the world should be like? What are the AIs optimizing for, anyway? And when are there actually “humans behind the curtain”, controlling in detail what the AIs are doing?

It doesn’t help that in some sense the AIs are getting much more free rein than they might because the people who use them aren’t really their customers. I have to say that back when the internet was young, I personally never thought it would work this way, but in today’s world many of the most successful businesses on the internet—including Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter—make their revenue not from their users, but instead from advertisers who are going through them to reach their users.

All these business also have in common that they are fundamentally what one can call “automated content selection businesses”: they work by getting large amounts of content that they didn’t themselves generate, then using what amounts to AI to automatically select what content to deliver or to suggest to any particular user at any given time—based on data that they’ve captured about that user. Part of what’s happening is presumably optimized to give a good experience to their users (whatever that might mean), but part of it is also optimized to get revenue from the actual customers, i.e. advertisers. And there’s also an increasing suspicion that somehow the AI is biased in what it’s doing—maybe because someone explicitly made it be, or because it somehow evolved that way.

Time:

The month of July is a time for Americans to look back at the country’s past—specifically to that indelible moment in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain. But, while the nearly 250 years since then have been chock full of major milestones, not every moment that shaped the country gets the credit it deserves.

With that in mind, TIME asked 15 experts to each nominate an unsung moment from American history. These are events that, though not necessarily widely known today, either changed the national story in some important way or embodied a significant current. And if you don’t know about them yet, these historians will explain why they think you should.

Luc Sante:

Last Witnesses was the second book by Svetlana Alexievich, originally published in 1985, the same year as her first, The Unwomanly Face of War. Both of them, like the three major works that followed—Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013)—could be briefly and superficially described as oral histories. They indeed consist of testimony, recorded and transcribed, by witnesses to major events and periods in the history of the former Soviet Union.

Oral history is an important research tool, but it has not often been treated as literature. Although it obviously harks back to the oldest means of transmission, its publishing history is for the most part recent. Many of these published accounts consist of lengthy, unstructured, often repetitive monologues; they seldom make for good reading. In her books, Alexievich transforms the genre, turning it into literature through her editing and orchestration. That word is not idly chosen; there is a distinctly musical flow to the way she groups speakers and subjects. In Voices from Chernobyl, among multipage individual stories, she composes “choruses” of single-paragraph accounts by multiple people who underwent similar experiences. In Secondhand Time she assembles two chapters, both called “Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations,” that replicate the experience of ambient talk and circulating notions; the speakers are distinguished from one another only by punctuation and sometimes speak only one line.

John Naughton:

We Have Been Harmonised is the most accessible and best informed account we have had to date of China’s transition from what scholars such as Rebecca MacKinnon used to call “networked authoritarianism” to what is now a form of networked totalitarianism. The difference is not merely semantic. An authoritarian regime is relatively limited in its objectives: there may be elections, but they are generally carefully managed; individual freedoms are subordinate to the state; there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law in any meaningful sense.
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Totalitarianism, in contrast, prohibits opposition parties, restricts opposition to the state and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. As the historian Robert Conquest put it, a totalitarian state recognises no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and seeks to extend that authority to whatever lengths it can.

Which pretty well matches Strittmatter’s portrayal of contemporary China under Xi Jinping, its new “leader for life”, who is increasingly looking like Mao 2.0 right down to his Little Red App as the contemporary version of his predecessor’s Little Red Book. Mercifully, though, he does not seem to have Mao’s enthusiasm for sacrificing millions of people on the altar of socialist rectitude. But, as Strittmatter tells it, under Xi’s leadership the Communist party of China (CCP) has been closely following the totalitarian playbook as described by Hannah Arendt and other observers of the phenomenon.

Clifford Humphrey:

What is two plus two? Well, as it turns out, it depends.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” This statement was the “thoughtcrime” of Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Though not yet a thoughtcrime in the real world, this statement is increasingly suspect.

Politics is the conversation a whole people has about what is good and bad, and just and unjust regarding their common life and common nature as human beings.

That conversation, of course, is only possible if language is possible, if words mean discernible things and are communicable. The famous story of the Tower of Babel, in which God mixed up the languages of men and forced them to scatter, is an apt analogy for the breakdown of politics following the breakdown of language.

Language itself, though, is only possible if reason is possible. The law of noncontradiction holds that two plus two can’t be four and not-four at the same time. The whole potential for politics depends on that law, because by it people can use their reason to arrive at and assent to a conclusion, and by it, people can deliberate together and consent to government.

If one denies the law of noncontradiction, however, all that remains is the tyrannical rule of force, one party foisting its will on the rest. A tyrant, after all, doesn’t bother asking for the opinion of his slaves.

Eric Litke:

Voucher schools are an ongoing point of contention in Wisconsin’s divided government, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers even promising to tighten or end the decades-old program.

The system, which uses taxpayer money to send low-income students to private schools, has been tweaked and debated but ultimately expanded under Republican control in recent years.

In recent comments, one Democratic lawmaker claimed it has grown into a program with a 10-figure tax impact.

“The only thing voucher schools have done for low-income kids is increase their parents’ property taxes. That’s it,” said state Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, during a May 23, 2019, session of the Joint Committee on Finance, the Legislature’s budget-writing body.

She went on to say: “They have failed to increase academic performance of low-income kids or graduation rates of low-income kids, but they’ve increased property taxes. You know how much by? Since 2011, and this is from the (Legislative) Fiscal Bureau — $1 billion.”

We’ll leave the performance arguments for another day and focus on the price tag.

Has the voucher program, also known as school choice, really raised property taxes by $1 billion?

Understanding vouchers

Though the voucher program is often referred to as a single entity, it is actually four different programs.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is the first and largest, launched in 1990. The Racine Parental Choice Program started in 2011, the statewide Wisconsin Parental Choice Program in 2013 and the statewide Special Needs Scholarship Program in 2016.

The programs allow parents to send their children to private schools with a taxpayer-funded voucher. Families must meet certain income limits (though those don’t apply for the special needs program) to qualify for vouchers and must reapply every year.

The programs had a combined enrollment of about 40,000 students in 2018-19, with about 75% of those in Milwaukee.

The state could fund the voucher program by simply paying the vouchers from the state’s general fund — the Racine and statewide programs used to work like this — but instead it is now done through a complex exchange of funds.

The mechanics vary between programs, but generally it works like this:

When a student enrolls in a voucher school, the state pays the amount of that voucher — roughly $8,000 per student — to the school and reduces the state aid to the public school district where the student lives by the same amount.

The state then increases the amount the district can levy in property taxes by the same amount to make up for the lost voucher funds.

The system helps restore district funding levels since losing a smattering of students at different levels doesn’t typically result in lower costs for the district. That is, a district can’t get rid of a grade-level classroom or drop a teacher who teaches a particular subject just because two students in one grade and one in another move to a voucher school.

The district isn’t required to raise taxes; it could make up the money by cutting elsewhere.

But since 2011, the period cited by Taylor, there was just one year where Racine or Milwaukee didn’t increase the property-tax levy to that maximum, according to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Dan Rossmiller, government relations director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, also noted districts are motivated to levy to this maximum since this is a “use it or lose it” system. Districts that don’t tax to that full amount in a given year can’t return to that levy amount in the future.

The state is in the process of changing this system for Milwaukee.

Taxpayers support traditional K-12 school districts with many taxes, including property, sales, income (state and federal) and fees. Voucher schools make do with much less, per student.

Erica Meltzer:

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference on the science of reading held by John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT. It was, if nothing else, an eye-opening experience—not always in good ways, but certainly in ways that laid bare the problems involved in implementing broad changes to how reading is taught in the United States.
At the reception after the conference, I happened to be introduced to Nancy Duggan, one of the founders of the Massachusetts chapter of Decoding Dyslexia, an organization that advocates for screening and support for dyslexic students. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned one of the stranger reading problems I’d seen among my students—namely, that they had trouble making their eyes follow a line of text from left to right. Instead, their gaze seemed to dart randomly around the page. “Oh,” Nancy said promptly, “that’s the three-cueing system. Kids are supposed to look at just the beginning of the word and then look at the pictures for context clues.”
I was vaguely familiar with the term, but I had never made the connection between it and the reading difficulties I had witnessed in teenagers. I also confess that I did not know that children were actually taught to read in quite this bizarre a manner, or that the three-cueing system had anything to do with it.
Of course I knew that students were encouraged to look at the pictures or at other parts of the text for clues, but I had somehow always imagined that they were instructed to do these things if they could not figure out what a word meant—naively, I assumed that the initial focus was still on all the letters in the word, and that students were taught to look elsewhere afterward. It literally did not occur to me that children could be told to look at just the first letter or two in a word, and then be directed to immediately look somewhere else, before they had even demonstrated any difficulty making the connection between the letters and the word as a whole. That was too far outside the realm of my experience. It was just too illogical. And, quite frankly, too dumb. Who in their right mind would teach someone to read that way?

Bryan Anderson:

Data from the Berkeley Unified School District shows the school had 15 black students in 1963 — a year before Harris was born. They represented 3% of the total elementary school student body, while other schools in the district had a black population as high as 97%.

A fierce advocate of integration, Neil Sullivan moved to California 1964 to take over as superintendent. In the subsequent years, a task force reported to him to address the de facto segregation in the community.

In 1967, Sullivan’s team drafted a plan for all elementary schools to have black representation between 35% and 45%. By that time, the district had already desegregated its secondary schools — grades 7 to 12.

Black representation had grown slightly in the early-1960s. By 1967, the district considered its schools to be “partially desegregated,” but still “making progress toward racial integration,” according to documents obtained by The Sacramento Bee. The records show one in ten students at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in 1967 were black.

“These schools shall be totally desegregated in September, 1968, and we might make history on that day,” Sullivan said in a May 1967 education board meeting.

BBC:

Meredith’s mother was suspicious about vaccines and would never let her have them as a child. For a while it didn’t seem to matter, but eventually Meredith (not her real name) starting coming down with some frightening illnesses.

It started when I accidentally stood on a nail. Some time afterwards my jaw and shoulder started to seize up and paramedics rushed me to the closest hospital in an ambulance.

It was a teaching hospital in Brisbane and I remember vividly that the doctor left the room saying quietly, “Oh my God!”

He brought in all the medical students to take a look at me. It was tetanus – also known as lockjaw. They hadn’t had a patient diagnosed with tetanus in over 30 years.

I was determined and said: “I’m not going to die at 36 because of tetanus.”

Despite the pain, I felt angry towards my mother, because she deliberately didn’t get me vaccinated. The doctors took white blood cells from someone who had already had tetanus – cells that had proved that they were “seasoned fighters” – and injected them into me to help my white blood cells recognise the illness and fight it.

With this treatment, eventually I got better. But I was still angry, because this is something that could’ve been completely prevented.

Jessica McCrory Calarco:

The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success.

But a new study has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores.

Bill Murphy, Jr.:

My poor daughter. She’s happy and healthy, and has loving parents and a stable home.

But, she also has a dad who scours scholarly articles to find the modern consensus on best practices in raising kids.

I hope we’re not treating her like a guinea pig. But I do think we’re careful to make small adjustments in the ways we try to raise her, having pored over some of the most useful and interesting strategies out there.

I think the five daily habits I’ll describe below are among the most compelling.

1. Stay on top of them.
It can be exhausting, and sometimes you think your words are going in one ear and out the other. But British researchers found that parents who articulate high expectations are more likely to have kids who grow up to be successful — and avoid some key pitfalls. ‘

Specifically, a study of 15,000 British girls over 10 years, from ages 13-14 to 23-24, found that those whose parents who consistently displayed high expectations for their children were:

Andy Ngo:

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination.
This trend of student hate-crime hoaxes has continued. In May 2017, St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass “anti-racism” protests that caused classes to be cancelled. Samantha Wells, a black student activist, was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. In September of that year, five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
In November 2018, students at Goucher College in Maryland demanded social-justice training and safe spaces after “I’m gonna kill all [n—s]” was discovered written in a dorm bathroom. Fynn Arthur, a black student, was responsible for the hoax. That same month, thousands of students at Drake University protested after racist notes turned up on campus. Kissie Ram, an Indian-American student, pled guilty for targeting herself and others in the hoax. And in May of this year, a student at the University of La Verne allegedly had a bag placed over her head while she was groped and had her head slammed into a dormitory stair railing. The student declined medical assistance, however. An outspoken activist in the campus “decolonize” movement, she reported other unsubstantiated hate crimes earlier this year, making one wonder if these incidents were hoaxes.
And there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators.
At Oberlin College, in particular, this problem precedes the Trump era. In 2013, students at the elite liberal arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration cancelled all classes for the day. The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes.
With their preoccupation with identity, privilege, and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that participants in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards victimhood by manufacturing it?

Bob Dohr:

Revenue is decreasing because of declining student enrollment and the resultant decreased state aid, according to the district. Expenses are mounting because of rising educational costs, insurance costs, utility costs and bus fuel.

The district has taken several measures to try to balance the budget, including cutting teaching and other staffing positions, changing employee insurance to cut costs and eliminating district-sponsored post-employment benefits for all employees hired after 2001, according to the district.

Other expense reductions have included consolidating bus routes, reducing utility costs through energy-efficiency projects, canceling summer school, refinancing long-term debt and delaying spending on maintenance.

The district will be open for the 2019-20 school year. But district officials have said they don’t have enough money to operate beyond that.

Philip Marsden:

The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool of evidence the past 800,000 years. Even this, he admits, narrows the study because it leaves out non-human thinkers — we know that animals dream. But to compensate, he allows his dog Beau a couple of walk-on appearances.

It’s a compelling thesis, and one that the author takes on with gusto: behind the whole monumental enterprise of human endeavor lies ‘the power of seeing what is not there’. We imagine things, then we strive to create them in the real world:

‘A human can hear a note and compose a symphony, survey a landscape and envision a city, endure frustration and conceive perfection, look at his chains and fancy himself free.’

Valerie Bauerlein:

This Raleigh, N.C., suburb was declared the best place to live in America by a national magazine in 2015, around the time Lindsay and Terry Mahaffey were drawn by its schools, affordable housing and quaint downtown.

The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.

Many other families had the same idea. Apex, nicknamed the Millennial Mayberry, is the fastest-growing suburb in the U.S., according to Realtor.com, and the town is struggling to keep pace with all the newcomers.

When Mr. and Mrs. Mahaffey took their eldest daughter for the first day of kindergarten, school officials told them they didn’t have a seat. Too many kids, they said. On weekends, the family thinks twice about going downtown—not enough parking. And the horse farm next door was sold for a subdivision.

WILL:

The Wisconsin institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter to the Appleton Area School District on June 18 explaining why a school board member was well within his rights to discuss his Christian faith at a graduation ceremony in early June. In addition, WILL warned the school board against taking any action that would serve to violate the First Amendment rights of speakers based on their viewpoint.

The Background: Rev. Alvin Dupree, a member of the Appleton Area School District school board, invoked his Christian faith in remarks at a June 6 graduation ceremony at Appleton North High School. In response, a group of students and the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) expressed outrage and asked the Appleton school board to prevent Dupree from speaking at future district-sponsored events. Additionally, FFRF encouraged the school board to adopt a policy for graduation remarks that require review and approval.

Paul Caron:

The tax applies to any private college or university that has at least 500 full-time tuition-paying students (more than half of whom are located in the U.S.) and that has assets other than those used in its charitable activities worth at least $500,000 per student. An estimated 40 or fewer institutions are affected.

For affected institutions, the guidance clarifies how to determine net investment income, including how to include the net investment income of related organizations and how to determine an institution’s basis in property.

These proposed regulations incorporate the interim guidance provided in Notice 2018-55, that for property held by an institution at the end of 2017, generally allows the educational institution to use the property’s fair market value at the end of 2017 as its basis for figuring the tax on any resulting gain.

Related: . 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.

James Fishman:

This paper argues that the legislation as enacted is politically motivated and fatally flawed. The “assets per student” ratio that triggers the tax is both over and under-inclusive, and irrelevant and arbitrary as a guide to excessive endowment accumulation. The legislation serves to exempt multi-billion dollar endowments of many universities yet ensnare smaller colleges that may have more limited resources, but the endowment to student ration exceeds $500,000.

The growing income inequality in American society is reflected in the inequality of access to elite schools with billion dollar endowments. While large endowment schools have increased financial aid, the percentage of students from lower income families has remained the same. A student whose parents come from the top one percent of income distribution is 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than one from the bottom income quintile. Among “Ivy League Plus” colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Chicago, Stanford, MIT and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of income distribution (14.5%) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5%).

Recommended is that the investment income tax be triggered for all billion dollar endowment institutions when the endowment earns $75 million in net investment income ($150 million for public school billion dollar endowments). The endowment per student ratio should be jettisoned. Schools could offset the net income investment tax on a one dollar to one dollar basis by increasing financial assistance to the student body. If the school increases the admission of students from underrepresented constituencies, the tax offset would be two dollars for each dollar spent in expanding the number of such students.

Marvin Joseph:

Books are a portal to our personal histories. Pick up a worn copy of a childhood favorite and you might be transported to the warmth of a parent’s arms or a beanbag chair in a first-grade classroom or a library in your hometown. Avid readers could build autobiographies around their favorite books and come to the realization that what they have read is almost as meaningful as when they read it. A high schooler poring over “To Kill a Mockingbird” for a summer reading assignment encounters a different book than someone who reads it decades later, closer in age and outlook to Atticus than Scout.

In light of that reality, we took a stab at picking the best book for every age. There’s no definitive way to do this, of course. What moves one reader may not resonate with another, regardless of their birth year. So think of this list as a starting point, plus an invitation to look back at your own literary chronology: What spoke to you during a certain time in your life — and why? Feel free to submit your nominations here.

Here are our picks for worthwhile books to read during each year of life, from 1 to 100, along with some of the age-appropriate wisdom they impart.

Nicole Allen:

Stymied when it came to prosecuting crime, Harris turned her attention to trying to prevent it. One of her first targets was an unlikely demographic: elementary school kids and their parents. “We went to the school district,” says Silard, Harris’s then–policy chief, “and they looked back at the records and found that all of these folks, well before dropping out of high school, had been chronically truant.” And not just in high school — the data showed that these students had missed large portions of elementary school.

Here was a problem that felt more solvable than convincing gang members to testify against one another. Harris decided to try to stop young people from joining gangs and committing crimes in the first place. She and Silard considered their options. Their initial conversations with the San Francisco school district were not productive. “My opinion, frankly, is that for some people within the education systems, not having to deal with some of these kids is not something they’re sad about,” says Silard, who now runs the Rosenberg Foundation, a racial- and economic-justice organization based in San Francisco. “They’re not necessarily taking big efforts to keep these kids in school.”
At the time, California law contained a civil infraction, akin to a traffic ticket, for parents whose kids missed a certain number of days of school, with a maximum fine of $100 and no jail time. Some counties also charged these parents with a criminal misdemeanor for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” which carried a fine of up to $2,500 and as much as a year in jail. Harris decided to threaten to enforce these penalties to get foot-dragging parents to pay attention — and to prosecute if they didn’t.
She announced the policy at a meeting in the DA’s office, remembers Keith Choy, who was working as the district’s stay-in-school coordinator. The room was filled with school principals and administrators, school-board members, and representatives from the police and health departments, Choy says. As Harris describes the meeting in her first book, Smart on Crime, the audience “erupted” when she announced her plan — half “sneered and were visibly upset,” while “the other half clapped and cheered out loud.”

“People were pushing back,” Choy confirms. “The big concern was, How can you jail parents and kids for truancy in San Francisco? Nobody ever said it out loud like that. But it was like, Hey, we’re The City. We don’t do that.”

Harris, however, remained committed to the plan. “The idea was not to be punitive,” Silard explains, “but to connect parents to the kind of support they needed to get their kids to school.”

Under the program, parents received a letter on DA letterhead at the beginning of the school year informing them that truancy was a crime and listing the number for a city hotline if they needed help getting their kids to school. Parents were notified when their children had more than 20 unexcused absences. School administrators pulled them into a series of meetings at which they were offered various forms of assistance: busing, child care for other kids, transfers to more-convenient schools. At some of these meetings, an assistant DA would sit in the room, symbolizing the potential for legal consequences. “It was a carrot-and-a-stick meeting,” explains Choy.
In concert with Donna Hitchens, a longtime San Francisco judge who had overhauled the county’s family court, Harris and her team set up a special truancy court for families who did not respond to earlier interventions. Before Hitchens called each case, a social worker would meet with the parents, almost none of whom could afford lawyers. An assistant DA was always present, and hanging over every proceeding was the fact that the city could always attempt to remove the child from the family. Hitchens says that most parents were concerned and embarrassed. “They really wanted their children to be in school,” she says.

CRISTOPHER TREMOGLIE:

College tuition has exploded well beyond the rate of inflation: Since 1978, college tuition has increased more than four times — a staggering 1375 percent — the rate of inflation. It’s risen eight times faster than wages since the 1980s, according to Forbes.

“The reason people keep paying huge amounts for college is because it is assumed – and somewhat correctly, yet with lots of exceptions — that a college degree is needed to advance career-wise beyond mere economic subsistence,” Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, told National Review. Statistically, college graduates still earn over 1.5 times more than those with just a high school diploma.

American society has been sold on the idea that obtaining a college degree is the key to success. “Universities are seen through rose-colored glasses,” Dr. Jenna A. Robinson, president of the Martin Center, told National Review. And the government’s backing of student loans has allowed more students to be financially viable to attend college. Children go to high school, get accepted to college, get the dream job after graduation and buy the house with the white picket fence; the process is almost formulaic. “Conventional wisdom has been pushing college-for-all for a very long time,” Robinson said. “The minute a kid hits first grade he or she is pushed toward college,” Schalin said.

Michael Lind:

Desch, a professor of international relations at Notre Dame and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, explains that “from the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a tension between the two objectives of the evolving research university system. Science and practical application were in tension generally, but the social sciences experienced it particularly acutely.” In relating the history of debates about the interaction between the making and the study of foreign policy, Desch narrates the larger story of American political science, whose birth as an independent scholarly discipline can be dated to the founding of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1904. Desch observes that a majority of the early members of the APSA were not academics and that its early presidents like Frank Goodnow and Woodrow Wilson were progressives committed to using social science to promote social reform. But public-spirited scholars like Charles Beard, president of the APSA in 1926, were already losing out by the 1920s to the likes of University of Chicago’s William Fielding Ogburn, who opined that the scholar had “to give up social action and dedicated [himself] to science.”

Matthew Ladner:

Among the report’s highlights:

The great majority of students are not learning on, or even near, grade level.

With rare exception, teachers are demoralized and feel unsupported.

Most parents feel shut out of their children’s education.

Principals find it very difficult to demonstrate leadership.

Many school buildings are deteriorating across the city, and some are even dangerous to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing.

You can view local television coverage of the “devastating” report here and here.

Meanwhile, the Digest of Education Statistics shows that Rhode Island spent a total of $16,496 per pupil in the 2014-15 school year compared to Florida’s per-pupil expenditure of $9,962.

The John Hopkins researchers visited multiple Providence classrooms and found reading classes where no one was reading and French classes where no one was speaking French. They did, however, observe kindergarten students punching each other in the face, students staring at their phones during class, and students communicating over Facetime during class. One can only shudder to think what might be going on when university researchers aren’t touring the school.

Madison spends far more, between $18 and $20K/student, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Tom Vander Ark:

Does college still matter? The Department of Education makes the case that college is more valuable than ever: Degree holders earn $1 million more that workers without postsecondary education and the innovation economy is likely to require a more educated workforce. But averages and projections hide the rapid loss of faith in higher education as the escalator to the middle class.

Frustrated with increasing costs and underemployed grads living in their parent’s basement, less than half of American adults have confidence in higher education, a big decline in the last three years according to Gallup.

With this rapid loss of faith in higher ed, expensive nonselective colleges are in trouble. A dozen trends have conspired to create the beginning of the end of college as we know it.

BBC:

People are being urged to stop using social media for up to 48 hours later this week in an effort to pressure the networks into restoring control of personal data to users.

The call to strike has been issued by Dr Larry Sanger – a co-founder of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.

In his call to action, Dr Sanger said the strike – from 4 to 5 July – would show the “massive demand” for change.

However, some people have questioned how much impact the strike will have.

Those taking part will avoid social networks on those two days to show they have a “serious grievance” against the services.

Sarah Krouse and Patience Haggin:

AT&T Inc. mines customers’ web-surfing habits as part of a broader advertising operation that taps into viewing data from television set-top boxes and location data from mobile phones, according to its privacy policy. Google Fiber gathers broadband-usage data on its customers.

Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. CHTR +1.34% say they have so far shied away from the practice, out of fear of alienating customers. Verizon Communications Inc. doesn’t use Fios internet-usage or cable-viewing data for targeted advertising, a spokeswoman said. Cable operator Altice USA Inc. says it has also stopped short of doing so, but retains flexibility to pursue the strategy if it chooses to later.

Sarah Allison:

The basic question of authorship attribution—who wrote what—is a question we’re increasingly able to answer, using computers that employ stylistic analysis. But this process also creates new questions about the role of the author: not about whether it’s the author or reader who makes meaning from a text, but what it means to write something at all.

In some naive algorithmic approaches that know nothing of the author—or, indeed, of history, ideology, or critical traditions—authorship emerges powerfully from the sea of texts as a set of shared patterns. That is, an artificial intelligence, or AI, successfully “recognizes” an author not as a person, but instead as the likeness of features that characterize a body of work. In order to find patterns across texts, the algorithmic “reader” uses a collection of textual traits—like frequently used words or punctuation—to draw conclusions about who wrote what.

Here’s how it works. In a relatively coherent set of texts by a single author, a writer’s idiosyncratic linguistic choices leave a mark analogous to a fingerprint. In order to recognize that fingerprint, you need a reasonably large, reasonably similar set of texts to compare with the one you’re curious about, and the one you’re curious about should be long enough to exhibit the fingerprint patterns.1 Methods that use style to discover who authored an anonymous piece of writing—or to validate who really wrote it—rely on text alone to draw probable conclusions.2

Logan Wroge:

The plan suggests that within the next two years, the district begin to identify potential buyers for the building and search for a new location that “meets our operational and instructional support needs, has sufficient parking, is near public transportation, and is somewhat centrally located.”

The building — renamed in 1990 for longtime board member and state Rep. Ruth Bachhuber Doyle, mother of former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle — holds offices for the district’s administrative team, human resources, finance, research, and curriculum and instruction departments, among other employees. It is also where the Madison School Board usually meets for monthly meetings.

According to the facilities plan, the district has concerns with the building’s safety, ventilation, and heating and cooling system.

Ald. Mike Verveer, who represents the area, said he would be disappointed if the district eventually moved its administrative offices out of Downtown, but said he recognizes “that they do hold valuable property there.”

Given the location, Verveer said he thinks potentially interested purchasers could be the university, a developer looking to build student-oriented housing or the city of Madison for park space since the neighborhood is largely deprived of open land.

Diane Ravitch, via Will Fitzhugh:

Since 1987, The Concord Review (TCR) has sought and published more than 1,300 history research papers by high school students from 41 countries in 121 quarterly issues. TCR.org.

Over the course of these many years, Will Fitzhugh, the founder of TCR, has been turned down by every foundation while seeking funding for this worthy endeavor. In their drive for innovation, the nation’s philanthropies did not find merit in the idea of acknowledging the dedication of students who conduct primary historical research and who are recognized by having their work published.

In different years,, three sisters from Cincinnati, Ohio, won the journal’s highest honor: the Emerson Prize.

The girls attended Summit Country Day School.

Fitzhugh wants high school students to read history, not textbooks, but actual history. He wants them to do research and write in-depth history essays. He publishes the best of them in TCR.

Many IB papers have been published in The Concord Review, a quarterly collection of [history] research by high school students. AP papers have appeared in the Young Researcher and the Whitman Journal of Psychology. The Review publishes only 5 percent of submissions, but AP Research pieces will be in the running.

Jay Matthews, via Will Fitzhugh:

America’s 22,000 high schools rarely require or even encourage students to write long research papers. That’s why nonfiction writing is one of the weakest parts of our education system.

But change is coming. The vanguard to immerse teenagers in research has been the International Baccalaureate program. High school seniors have been writing 4,000-word IB papers for more than 40 years. Other than IB, only private schools usually require lengthy research projects.

Now, the much larger Advanced Placement program, run by the College Board, has joined in. Its Capstone AP Seminar and AP Research courses began in 2014 and 2015. The seminar course on analyzing complex issues is for 10th- or 11th-graders. The research course for 11th- or 12th-graders ends with a 5,000-word paper, plus a 15- to 20-minute presentation and oral defense.

This year, 29,793 U.S. students, 90 percent of them in public schools, completed IB papers, called extended essays. That is six times the number of IB papers submitted 20 years ago, and nearly double the number of AP papers done this year.

Rushi Sheth, executive director of the AP Capstone diploma program, estimated that the number of AP Research papers will grow from 16,000 this year to 30,000 in 2022. Sheth is a former investment banking analyst who switched to teaching algebra to eighth-graders from low-income families in Denver and then joined AP to expand access to college-level coursework.

Many IB students have told me the extended essay was their most satisfying experience in high school. That success has inspired AP to upgrade its approach to nonfiction writing.

“English teachers want to teach writing well,” said Allison Malloy, an AP Capstone teacher at Carmel High School, near Indianapolis, “but they unfortunately do not always have the time to do so, while also trying to teach the entirety of curriculum.”

IB requires all students to take a theory of knowledge course that, among other things, teaches the analytical skills covered in AP Seminar. Gerardo Gonzalez, a teacher at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, explained how the AP program works at his public magnet school, where half of the students are from low-income families. “The process of writing is often far more difficult for our students than we recognize,” he said. “There are skills that need to be taught, retaught and then re-re-taught.”

Other than those working on school newspapers, American teenagers rarely interview anyone about anything. Checking the legitimacy of sources is also a big leap from surfing the Web.

Gonzalez said students new to research are able “to develop a sense of confidence that allows them to believe that they belong in the college environment.” He said one Lane Tech student interviewed 25 principals, superintendents and school council representatives about art funding reductions in Illinois for a 5,000-word AP paper.

The IB and AP research programs are designed to involve teachers outside those classes who have special expertise. IB students have two years to complete their extended essay on their own time, with guidance from a school adviser. AP students complete their paper in a year with help from their research course teacher and other experts.

Topics vary. IB extended essays have been written on language and reality in the Mimamsa school of Indian philosophy and the effects of sugar-free chewing gum on the pH of saliva in the mouth after a meal. AP Research topics have included 3-D printing applications for amputees and alternative therapies for opioid addiction.

Many IB papers have been published in The Concord Review, a quarterly collection of research by high school students. AP papers have appeared in the Young Researcher and the Whitman Journal of Psychology. The Review publishes only 5 percent of submissions, but AP Research pieces will be in the running.

Knowledgeable teachers say they like both programs. Daniel Coast at George Mason High School in Falls Church, Va., is one of the most experienced IB coordinators in the country. He also has twins, a daughter and a son, who will be taking the AP Capstone courses at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., over the next two years.

“The skills needed to successfully meet the requirements of the research papers at Capstone and the IB extended essay seem to be identical,” he said.

I have a perhaps unrealistic hope that research papers will someday be required of everyone going to college. But in the next few years, there will be more U.S. high school students stretching their nonfiction abilities than before. That’s a good start.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Almost half of the schools in the Madison School District need to provide additional support to certain groups of students, according to accountability reports compiled by the state earlier this year.

At schools that were identified in the reports, black students and students with disabilities were most commonly found to have poor outcomes compared to their peers — a trend mirrored by schools across the state. The reports were released publicly for the first time in March as part of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

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”

and

Why are Madison’s Students Struggling to Read?

Yet, taxpayers spend far more than most K-12 school districts, between $18-20k per student depending on the documents one reviews.

John Thornhill:

We are already in danger of creating “industrial” school systems, the authors note, in which teachers are reduced to near-automatons, implementing a prescriptive model of education and ticking boxes. “Those trained only to reheat pre-cooked hamburgers are unlikely to become master chefs,” in the words of Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills. The solution, if there is one, is to devolve more autonomy to motivated teachers working in collaborative schools.

Instead, there is a danger that educational technology, or edtech, may only worsen the industrialisation of the system as governments resort to new ways of measuring student output and teacher productivity. Big claims have long been made for technological tools, such as massive open online courses, or Moocs, as a more efficient way of bringing education to the masses — even if their completion rates are poor.

The demands on our education systems are certain to explode in the coming decade, particularly in the developing world. A recent Citi GPS report forecasts the number of secondary and tertiary students in China, India and Brazil will grow by 56m over the next 15 years (about 2.5 times the current US student population). Total global spending on education will double from $5.1tn in 2015 to $10tn by 2030.

Education goes well beyond the classroom as employers demand more technical skills and workers retrain throughout their careers. In this context, it makes little sense to cram all formal education into the first 21 years of life.

Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University and author of Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, says that universities will increasingly have to offer their students life-long learning plans: “At present, our education system is not affordable, adaptable or scalable,” he says. “Education needs to be continuous, which means we have to rethink how we dispense access to it.”

Technology is surely part of the answer. It can increase the productivity of existing institutions by personalising learning. It can also broaden access. Some of the most interesting new models of education are being pioneered in India and China, where a lack of traditional institutions has encouraged innovation.

Wall Street Journal:

The Oberlin jury said, in effect, enough is enough. College administrators cannot continue to have it both ways. No matter what the Oberlin faculty and students imagined about their experiences inside Gibson’s Bakery, the Gibsons were not engaged in racial profiling. They manifestly were protecting their business from shoplifters.

Inside and outside academia, a lot of people in recent years have been accused of violating someone’s idea of their lived experience, often with “hurtful speech.” Leading, in turn, to being suspended from their jobs or ostracized by people they considered colleagues.

Agreed. One shouldn’t need a multimillion-dollar liability judgment against a college to define recognizable boundaries of common sense. But given the intensity of political animosities these days, maybe that’s what it takes.

Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao:

Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior’s performance on this April afternoon didn’t disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren’t enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.
A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D’Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: “StressedVoice detected.”
“There we go,” D’Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. “There’s my coughs.”
The students were helping ProPublica test an aggression detector that’s used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S. Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that makes the software for the device, plans to open an office this year in Chicago, where its chief executive will be based.

Josh Mitchell and Michelle Hackman:

But when Upjohn looked at how many students from the 2006 through 2012 high-school classes earned a bachelor’s degree within six years of their graduation, it found the rate for white students, 46%, was triple the rate for black students.

And among high-school graduates from mid/high-income households—defined as those not eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches—the percentage of students earning some kind of college credential jumped to 56% from 43%, a contrast to the nearly unchanged figure for black students. The institute’s Mr. Hershbein said this is where the other layers of the onion—the societal problems preventing students from being prepared for college—are revealed.

About 55% of children in Kalamazoo come from single-parent households, U.S. Education Department figures show. In recent years, as many as 7% of the city’s public-school students were homeless, twice the national average, also based on Education Department data. The teen pregnancy rate in Kalamazoo County is nearly 50% higher than the national rate, according to state and federal data.

Mr. Hershbein said such problems undermine students’ ability to persist in college even with tuition costs covered. Some drop out to take care of family members. Others weren’t academically prepared for college and are overwhelmed when they get there, he said.

Mr. Hershbein said his research tells a more encouraging story. College graduation rates among minorities have indeed been flat in Kalamazoo. But they fell in other Michigan cities with similar demographics in the most recent recession and early in the expansion, he said.

Mike Davis:

To the executives of Google and Apple:

I am Persian. In 1979, when I was just two years old, revolution upended Iran and permanently altered the country’s foundation. His vocation as an academic made my father a direct target of the new regime, and so — like so many other families — we fled Iran and began again in the United States. That was exactly 40 years ago. Today, I am a father, a husband and an entrepreneur with a deep love of America, but I think often of the country to which I have still been unable to return.

Iran is a land of strong-willed people. It is a land of grit and of hard-earned success. I see that most clearly in its emergent generation of entrepreneurs, birthed from the country’s 30+% unemployment rates. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Iran’s entrepreneurship sector is skyrocketing; in 2018 alone, the country moved up 13 spots on the Global Entrepreneurship Index. And the goals driving these new businesses are equally as impressive — things like improving women’s education, sustainability, urban waste management, advocacy of the arts. Forbes has said that Iran could become an entrepreneurial powerhouse, “if nothing gets in the way.” Unfortunately, Google and Apple are doing just that.

Seth Wynes:

Flying comes at a huge environmental cost, and yet many researchers view it as crucial to their success. Using the University of British Columbia as a case study, we investigated whether the faculty at our institution who flew the most were also the most successful. We found that beyond a small threshold there was no relationship between scholarly output and how much an individual academic flies.

These results are not intuitive. Networking, attending conferences and delivering lectures should give your ideas an edge, help you to disseminate your research, and result in higher quality papers that get more citations. And the fastest way to do all of these things in person is to fly. But even when accounting for department, position and gender, we found no relationship between how much academics travel and their total citation count or their hIa (a version of h-index adjusted for academic age).

Sean F. Reardon, Demetra Kalogridesand Kenneth Shores:

The authors estimate racial/ethnic achievement gaps in several hundred metropolitan areas and several thousand school districts in the United States using the results of roughly 200 million standardized math and English language arts (ELA) tests administered to public school students from 2009 to 2013. They show that achievement gaps vary substantially, ranging from nearly zero in some places to larger than 1.5 standard deviations in others. Economic, demographic, segregation, and schooling characteristics explain 43%–72% of the geographic variation in these gaps. The strongest correlates of achievement gaps are local racial/ethnic differences in parental income and educational attainment, local average parental education levels, and patterns of racial/ethnic segregation, consistent with a theoretical model in which family socioeconomic factors affect educational opportunity partly through residential and school segregation patterns.

John Banzhaf:

Several other courts had held that due process did not apply to cases of this type involving private colleges, but, as Judge John Fowlkes, Jr., noted in the cases involving Rhodes College, those cases were only based upon a “breach of contract claim against a private university”; i.e. that the university had promised in its policy statements to treat students fairly.

But this case is different, Fowlkes ruled: “These cases are distinguishable, however, from the present circumstance because although Defendant Rhodes is a private university, Plaintiff’s claim here, regarding cross-examination, invokes due process concerns under Title IX, not a breach of contract theory.”

Thus Banzhaf is repeating the suggestion that he had made earlier to attorneys for students charged with rape; argue violation of due process rather than simply unfairness, or that error occurred in the campus hearing, and do so based upon the important federal rights established by Title IX.

In other words, says Banzhaf, a simple change in pleadings by lawyers for the accused – the words used in the complaints to bring these campus rape cases to courts – can finally impose on all institutions of higher education, private as well as public, the obligation to conduct disciplinary proceedings which are fair and accord due process.

Frederick Hess and Grant Addison:

Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) from inquiring about applicants’ criminal history, due to concerns that capable job candidates will be turned away or otherwise deterred. A number of states and locales are going further: New York City, for example, prohibits public employers from asking about applicants’ prior-earnings history; in 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit the practice for all employers.

Bari Weiss:

Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a committed Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

Such appeals to reason and history failed to sway the school board. On Tuesday, it dismissed the option to pull an Ashcroft and simply cover the murals, instead voting unanimously to paint them over.

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal. John M. Strain, an English teacher, told The Times’s Carol Pogash that his students “feel bad about offending people but they almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”

Which makes one wonder who these bureaucrats actually seek to protect. Is it the students? Or could it also be their reputations, given that those in favor of preserving the murals are being smeared as racists?

Eric Geller:

Senior Trump administration officials met on Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms of encryption that law enforcement can’t break — a provocative step that would reopen a long-running feud between federal authorities and Silicon Valley.

The encryption challenge, which the government calls “going dark,” was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.

“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.

:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mayor Jorge Elorza was quick to describe the report as “accurate,” a sign, he believes, that changes need to be made. Behind the scenes, he has begun exploring what it might mean if the state took advantage of an existing law that allows for a failing school district to be “reconstituted.”

The law is vague about how much power the state has to take over a school system – especially when it comes to altering a union contract – but Elorza’s aides say giving the state more power may create leverage against the teachers.

“I’ve been very vocal that one thing that makes it very difficult is we have a very thick contract, and that’s spelled out very clearly in the report,” the second-term Democrat said. “And the legal environment, the rules of contract arbitration, are such that it’s very difficult to move from the status quo.”

Elorza attended the first public forum hosted by Infante-Green Wednesday night, but he left the state to attend a conference in Hawaii Thursday. A spokesperson for the mayor said city leaders expect to continue meeting with the commissioner in July.

But for any changes to be successful, the community needs to be front and center, researchers say.

Additional coverage.

Public forums to discuss the report.

The John’s Hopkin’s School of Education Report (PDF)

Ed.gov Snapshots: Madison | Providence.

Madison spends $18 to 20K per student, more than Providence. Yet, we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Sarah Min:

A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of employees report having regrets when it comes to their advanced degrees, according to a PayScale survey of 248,000 respondents this past spring that was released Tuesday.

Student loan debt, which has ballooned to nearly $1.6 trillion nationwide in 2019, was the No. 1 regret among workers with college degrees. About 27% of survey respondents listed student loans as their top misgiving, PayScale said.

The findings illustrate why education loans burdening millions of Americans have become a hot-button issue among some Democratic presidential candidates. Most recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday proposed a plan to impose a tax on Wall Street trading and use the proceeds to erase that $1.6 trillion of debt.

About 70% of college students graduated with student loan debt this year, averaging about $33,000 per student. And as younger grads pay off student loan balances, they’re struggling to accumulate wealth or are putting off purchasing homes — some millennials are even struggling to purchase groceries.

Laura Counts:

The paper, “Common neural code for reward and information value,” was published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authored by Hsu and graduate student Kenji Kobayashi, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, it demonstrates that the brain converts information into the same common scale as it does for money. It also lays the groundwork for unraveling the neuroscience behind how we consume information—and perhaps even digital addiction.

“We were able to demonstrate for the first time the existence of a common neural code for information and money, which opens the door to a number of exciting questions about how people consume, and sometimes over-consume, information,” Hsu says.

Rooted in the study of curiosity

The paper is rooted in the study of curiosity and what it looks like inside the brain. While economists have tended to view curiosity as a means to an end, valuable when it can help us get information to gain an edge in making decisions, psychologists have long seen curiosity as an innate motivation that can spur actions by itself. For example, sports fans might check the odds on a game even if they have no intention of ever betting.

Debra Heine:

James O’Keefe’s explosive video exposing Google’s political agenda appears to have ruffled some feathers in the media world.

Jen Gennai, the Google executive seen talking to Project Veritas undercover journalists about Google’s plans to prevent “the next Trump situation,” has already published a response complaining that she was taken out of context.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Geoffrey Fowler:

You open your browser to look at the web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the web.

This was made possible by the web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really is up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most-popular web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.

It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla’s Firefox, which has default privacy protections. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine.

My tests of Chrome versus Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer, but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.

HARRY STEIN:

It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience. The celebration of feelings over reason? The certainty of moral virtue? The disdain for tradition and the revising of history for ideological ends? The embrace of the latest definition of correct thought? Lyons was one of the most gifted reporters of his time, and among the bravest, and his story of the spell cast by Stalinist-tinged social-justice activism over that day’s purported best and brightest—literary titans, Hollywood celebrities, leading academics, religious leaders, media heavies—would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t so eerily familiar.

Indeed, looking backward from a time when, according to surveys, more millennials would rather live under socialism than capitalism, it’s apparent that Lyons was documenting not just a historical moment but also a species of historical illiteracy as unchanging as it is poisonous, its utopianism able to flourish only at the expense of independent thought. On a range of issues, alternative views were defined as not merely mistaken but morally reprehensible; and among the elites who dominated the cultural sphere, deviants from approved opinion were subject to special abuse. Of course, having lived and worked in Soviet Russia, Lyons made distinctions about relative abuses of power. Under Stalinism, dissidents were liquidated, or vanished into the gulag; the American Left could only liquidate careers and disappear reputations.

It’s not surprising that during those desperate Depression years, the program of the Communist Party USA would have held such wide appeal, especially among the young. Who else stood up so adamantly—or at all—against Jim Crow? Who stood so fearlessly on the front lines with labor against the power of rapacious big-business capitalism? What other party spoke so passionately for peace and justice? Soviet Russia was nothing less than the future of humanity! There, all were free and equal, poverty and oppression banished, and food, lodging, and health care guaranteed! As screenwriter Richard Collins would later recall of his time in the party, Communism was, for its devotees, “a cause, a faith, and a viewpoint on all phenomena. A one-shot solution to all the world’s ills and inequities.”

John Rosenberg:

Today’s liberals not only tolerate but encourage colleges and universities to give preferences based on race (see affirmative action and the College Board’s new “adversity” score). Now they want to prohibit giving preferential admissions treatment based on … well, it’s not completely clear, but family wealth comes pretty close. As a result, many defenders of academic freedom — at least many occasional defenders of academic freedom — are forced to choose among inconsistency, hypocrisy, or embarrassing silence.

Responding to the recent bribery and cheating admissions scandal, last week, Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) introduced the College Admissions Fairness Act. It would “cover situations where a child’s family makes large donations to the university the child attends. For donations to a university to be fully tax deductible, the institution must establish a policy that bars consideration of family members’ donations or ability to donate as a factor in admissions.”

Specifically, the legislation would in effect require colleges and universities to have a written policy that “prohibits as a factor in admissions decisions the consideration of direct or indirect donations from an applicant or family member of an applicant, and the financial ability of an applicant or family member of an applicant to make a donation.” [Emphasis added]

Ben Domenech:

This is not a conversation limited to activists or media members when families are talking about mom losing her income and her friends.

Yesterday, many of the major media figures on the right were talking about another insider whistleblower who was the source of a Project Veritas report on Google’s plans to prevent another “Trump situation” in 2020, including footage of an executive making some troublesome comments. The executive’s comments defending herself are here.

It was yet another example of the problems these large Silicon Valley entities are facing as we enter into 2020 campaign season in earnest, and deserves attention in the broader context of accusations of partisan bias. But the more important story, believe it or not, was about a knitting website.

Don’t laugh. Ravelry, a crochet- and knitting-focused site that boasts millions of users, is not just an online network built around the practice, but a source for patterns, a place knitting groups can share their work, and more. It is a combination of a community and a sales platform, one where users of all political walks of life have invested time and effort, and where many stay-at-home moms and hobbyists have developed work — some over more than a decade — and depend on the side income.

In the past, it had allowed all sorts of material that was political. Where do you think all those pink p-ssy hats came from? Tens of thousands of them came from Ravelry.

David French:

It turns out that most Americans have fundamentally mistaken notions about their political opponents, consistently believing that they are substantially more extreme than they really are. For example, Democrats are far less likely to support open borders, far more likely to support private ownership of firearms, and far more friendly to police than Republicans believe they are. Republicans support controlled immigration far more than Democrats believe, and an overwhelming majority believe that racism and sexism still exist in the United States.

At one level, these conclusions are hardly surprising. After all, previous research has shown that Democrats and Republicans have wildly false notions of the demographic make-up of the opposing party. Democrats think Republicans are older, richer, and more Evangelical than they really are. Republicans think Democrats are more secular, black, and gay than they really are.

And more broadly, surveys showing civic ignorance are squarely in the dog-bites-man category. Spend nine seconds on Google, and you can find depressing studies that show “more than half of Americans can’t name a single Supreme Court justice” or more Americans know that Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol than know John Roberts is the chief justice of the United States.

Nuclino:

The year is 1935, and the U.S. Army Air Corps is holding a competition for airplane manufacturers vying to secure a contract to build the military’s next long-range bomber.

Boeing unveils their state-of-the-art airplane B-299, later known as the B-17 Flying Fortress. A stunning design, in perfect working order. The test pilots are experienced and well-trained. They add power for takeoff, become airborne…

And then abruptly crash after climbing only a few hundred feet.

The checklist that started it all

The crash wasn’t caused by a design flaw, but rather a pilot error. While the new bomber could fly faster and further than any other, it was also very complex to operate. The pilot had to keep track of four different engines, the wing flaps, the landing gear, and much more. Preoccupied, he simply forgot to disengage a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls.

Instead of making the pilots undergo further training, however, Boeing came up with a simple yet ingenious solution – a pilot checklist.

David Shariatmadari:

What is it about language that gets people so hot under the collar? That drives them to spend hours arguing with strangers on the internet, to go around correcting misspelt signs in the dead of night, or even to threaten acts of violence? The languages we speak are central to our sense of self, so it is not surprising that their finer points can become a battleground. Passionate feelings about what’s right and wrong extend from the use of “disinterested” to what gay people are allowed to call themselves. Here are some of the most memorable rows, spats and controversies.
Apostrophe catastrophe
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A so-called “grammar vigilante” has been correcting shop fronts in Bristol, England, for more than a decade. His pet peeve is the confusion of plain old plurals with possessives, which in English are usually marked by an apostrophe followed by an S. Confronted with a sign advertising “Amy’s Nail’s”, he will obliterate the second apostrophe with a sticker. Addressing the potentially illegal nature of his mission in a BBC report, he said: “It’s more of a crime that the apostrophe is wrong in the first place”. Linguist Rob Drummond disagrees: “Fetishising the apostrophe as if its rules are set in stone,” he writes, “and then fostering an environment in which it is acceptable to take pleasure in uncovering other people’s linguistic insecurities is not OK.”

Xinhua:

A newly-published guideline on senior high school education reform aims to improve education quality with expanded enrollment, said a senior official with the Ministry of Education Thursday.

China’s high school education has expanded fast, but education at this level has outstanding problems such as being exam-oriented and neglecting students’ development in aspects other than academic performance, said Lyu Yugang at a press conference.

He added that the problems should be addressed through reforms.

According to the guideline, unveiled by the General Office of the State Council on Wednesday, reform goals by 2022 include the establishment of improved systems for nurturing students with an all-round moral, intellectual, physical and aesthetic grounding in addition to hard-working spirit.

The government plans to introduce a new syllabus and corresponding textbooks nationwide by 2022, according to the document.

Brooke Masters:

Back when I attended Harvard University, one of the odder graduation requirements I faced was a mandatory swim test. We were told the demand was a legacy of Eleanor Widener, who had donated the school’s main library in honour of her son, class of 1907, who drowned on the Titanic.

The story turns out be apocryphal, but we believed it. Our lives were shaped by the hands of dead donors. We slept and ate in halls built to realise Edward Harkness’s dream of replicating Oxford in America. We took classes in a science building funded by Polaroid camera inventor Edwin Land, that resembled his creation. We even swam the required 50 yards in a pool named after donor John Blodgett.

Since then the influence of plutocrats on US universities has only grown and it is expanding to the UK. This week, Blackstone boss Steve Schwarzman gave £150m to Oxford university not long after quant investor David Harding handed £100m to Cambridge.

James Freeman:

Americans on each side imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views than actually do, scholars Daniel Yudkin, Stephen Hawkins and Tim Dixon explain in a new report, “The Perception Gap.” The survey, conducted by the nonpartisan organization More in Common and the polling firm YouGov, was taken just after the 2018 midterms.

Real and consequential differences separate Americans, but the more divided we get, the more mistakes we make. For example, Democrats estimate that about half of Republicans would admit that racism is still a problem in the United States, when in reality 79 percent of Republicans say so. Republicans, meanwhile, think fully half of Democrats would say that “most police are bad people.” The actual percentage is 15 percent.

Some amount of the time, we are fighting ghosts, not real people. And the more inaccurate our perceptions, the more likely we are to describe our opponents as “hateful” and “brainwashed,” the study found.

Kelsey Piper:

A conquering army wants to take a major city but doesn’t want troops to get bogged down in door-to-door fighting as they fan out across the urban area. Instead, it sends in a flock of thousands of small drones, with simple instructions: Shoot everyone holding a weapon. A few hours later, the city is safe for the invaders to enter.

This sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. But the technology to make it happen is mostly available today — and militaries worldwide seem interested in developing it.

Experts in machine learning and military technology say it would be technologically straightforward to build robots that make decisions about whom to target and kill without a “human in the loop” — that is, with no person involved at any point between identifying a target and killing them. And as facial recognition and decision-making algorithms become more powerful, it will only get easier.

Called “lethal autonomous weapons” — but “killer robots” isn’t an unreasonable moniker — the proposed weapons would mostly be drones, not humanoid robots, which are still really hard to build and move. But they could be built much smaller than existing military drones, and they could potentially be much cheaper.

Kevin Arceneaux, Bert N. Bakker, Claire Gothreau, Gijs Schumacher:

Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia.

It was a path-breaking and provocative study. For decades, political scientists and psychologists have tried to understand the psychological roots of ideological differences. The piece published in Science offered some clues as to why liberals and conservatives differ in their worldviews. Perhaps it has to do with how the brain is wired, the researchers suggested—specifically, perhaps it’s because conservatives’ brains are more attuned to threats than liberals’. It was an exciting finding, it helped usher in a new wave of psychophysiological work in the study of politics, and it generated extensive coverage in popular media. In 2018, 10 years after the publication of the study, the findings were featured on an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast.

Fast forward to 2014. All four of us were studying the physiological basis of political attitudes, two of us in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Bakker and Schumacher at the University of Amsterdam), and two of us in Philadelphia (Arceneaux and Gothreau at Temple University). We had raised funds to create labs with expensive equipment for measuring physiological reactions, because we were excited by the possibilities that the 2008 research opened for us.

Harriett Sherwood:

On Friday, the court of protection in London decided an abortion was in the best interests of the woman, who is in her 20s, and is 22 weeks pregnant. She has the mental capacity of a six- to nine-year-old child.

Justice Nathalie Lieven, who made the original ruling, described it as “heartbreaking”, saying: “I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the state to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion.”

But, she added, she had to act in the woman’s “best interests, not on society’s views of termination”.

The NHS trust that is caring for the woman had sought the court’s permission for doctors to terminate the pregnancy. Three specialists, an obstetrician and two psychiatrists, said a termination was the best option because of the risk to the woman’s psychiatric health if pregnancy continued.

Both the woman and her mother were opposed to the abortion, and the woman’s mother had offered to care for the child. A social worker who works with the woman said the pregnancy should continue.

The court was told last week that the woman had a “moderately severe” learning disorder and a mood disorder.

Coby McDonald:

On her next trip to Japan, she paid a visit to Hagoromo Bungu, the small factory that had produced the chalk since 1965 (an earlier incarnation of the business was destroyed in WWII). There she met with the company president, Takayasu Watanabe, who showed her how the chalk was made. “It’s complete craftsmanship,” she says. “They change the portion of ingredients constantly, like they were experimenting with it. It is a good product.” Watanabe told her that Hagoromo Bungu had never extended its market beyond Japan and Korea, in part because he was uncomfortable doing business in English. Lee left with more than sixty cases of Hagoromo chalk, poised to become the only source for the precious stuff in the United States.

Her first customer was Eisenbud. The rest were mathematicians he sent her way. In America, chalk is cheap. Lee’s went for around $18 a box. Nonetheless, when she kicked off her small operation in 2012, grad students, post docs, and professors from all over the country flocked to her because they had nowhere else to turn to get their fix.

Frederick Hess:

Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) from inquiring about applicants’ criminal history, due to concerns that capable job candidates will be turned away or otherwise deterred. A number of states and locales are going further: New York City, for example, prohibits public employers from asking about applicants’ prior-earnings history; in 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit the practice for all employers.

Steph Machado:

The 93-page report, conducted by the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy, describes a school district that is struggling to support many of its students academically, socially and emotionally, and is bogged down by an organizational structure and red tape that impedes progress.

“My initial reaction was devastation,” Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s new educational commissioner, told WPRI 12. “It was tough to read without feeling the pain. I actually was sick after I finished reading the report.”

Infante-Green said the review was conducted at her request in reaction to abysmal test scores on the RICAS exam, the state’s new assessment that mirrors Massachusetts. The Partnership for Rhode Island, an organization made up of the CEOs of major Rhode Island employers like CVS Health and Brown University, paid for the $50,000 review.

In the report released Tuesday evening, the authors said they interviewed scores of people involved in Providence’s public schools, including teachers, students, parents, administrators, district employees, city councilors, school board members, the outgoing superintendent and the mayor of Providence.

Here are 12 key takeaways from the report. You can read the full report here, and find a schedule of public follow-up forums here.

There’s not enough learning going on

The review team made a stunning observation: “very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited.”

The report almost never names individual schools, but does give specific examples, including an English language arts class in one school where reviewers observed “almost no authentic reading.” During a French lesson at another school, the researchers report, “No French was spoken by anyone in the room.”

Only one of the 12 schools visited had “no substantial challenges.” Researchers said that school, which was not named, “seemed to be using blended learning successfully with high student engagement and teacher monitoring.”

The report also described a “large number of classrooms” where students were on their phones watching YouTube videos, taking phone calls and chatting with other students during the lesson. The authors said some teachers even arranged their classrooms so that the off-task students were in the back or facing a wall, rather than attempting to engage them in the lesson.

Test scores drop off in 8th grade

Test scores show fewer than one in five Providence Public School District students are proficient in English language arts and math across all grades, and the rates get worse as students get older.

“The proficiency rates of PPSD students start low and decline in middle and high school,” according to the researchers.

RICAS scores from 2018 showed 17% of 3rd grade students achieved proficiency in math, compared with about 6% for 8th grade students. While that was the first year of the RICAS exam, the researchers said a similar drop-off was seen on the results of other tests since 2015.

In fact, only 3% of Providence 8th graders achieved proficiency in math on the 2017 PARCC test.

Students in Providence also scored lower than their peers in Newark, New Jersey, and Worcester – both cities with comparable standardized testing – in English language arts and math across all grades and years examined. The gap between those communities and Providence was even larger among racial and ethnic minorities.

“Black and Hispanic students in Providence experienced a serious drop in performance in 8th grade English language arts that was nowhere near as evident in Worcester, and these minority students performed substantially lower than their white peers in Providence across all grades,” according to the researchers.

The dismal results are coming even though the Providence schools spend more per pupil than the state average: $17,273 in Providence, compared with $16,558 statewide, as of the 2015-16 academic year.

Additional coverage.

Public forums to discuss the report.

The John’s Hopkin’s School of Education Report (PDF)

Ed.gov Snapshots: Madison | Providence.

Madison spends $18 to 20K per student, more than Providence. Yet, we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Via Chan Stroman.

NEGASSI TESFAMICHAEL:

During the 1995-96 school year, a pilot program placed police officers at West and La Follette for most of each school day.

At West, the idea to bring officers into schools — instead of having detectives assigned to schools on an as-needed basis — came after a group of students in student government did an exchange with Janesville Craig High School.

“We took about 50 kids to Janesville Craig,” said Mike Lipp, a former West High teacher who was the staff adviser for student government at the time. “(Officers) were not in uniform, but were in a blazer and were armed. They were oftentimes in classrooms such as social studies classes and discussed things like the rights of citizens.”

Lipp and then-West principal Libby Burmaster thought the Janesville model could work in Madison.

“Libby and I agreed that an officer assigned to the school on a regular basis who interacts with the students during good times as well as during times of stress was a better model,” Lipp said in an email.

The Janesville reference is rather ironic. A recent Madison school executive responded to my question on learning from other, more budget constrained districts with a “I would never do that”.

Sacramento Bee:

Here we go again: Another scandal involving a state-funded entity hoarding a secret stockpile of money. This time, an investigation by California State Auditor Elaine Howle discovered $1.5 billion in surplus funds hidden in outside accounts controlled by the California State University system.

Yes, that’s billion with a “b.” While CSU was squirreling away this massive fortune, it was simultaneously raising tuition costs for students and begging the California State Legislature for more money.

“CSU put the money, which primarily came from student tuition, in outside accounts rather than in the state Treasury,” according to a story by The Sacramento Bee’s Sawsan Morrar.

We’ve seen this story before. In 2017, Howle’s office busted the University of California Chancellor’s Office for hiding a $175 million slush fund from public view – while also hiking tuition on students. And in 2012, California state parks Director Ruth Coleman was forced to step down when it became public that the parks department had been shielding $54 million in “hidden assets” from the state Department of Finance.

The University of Wisconsin also was found to have substantial reserves, amidst ongoing tuition, fee and spending increases.

Daniel Engber:

On June 5, the number of measles cases in the U.S. this year passed 1,000, a milestone the country last reached in 1992. There’s little doubt, in most circles, about the source of this resurgence: It’s the anti-vaxxers’ fault. “Federal health officials attribute this year’s outbreak to U.S. parents who refuse to vaccinate their children,” noted Reuters in a recent update on the crisis.

That much seems self-evident: Measles spreads most readily through undervaccinated populations, so if the disease is newly spreading, then there must also be a major outbreak of vaccine refusal. The numbers tell a different story, though. As I’ve noted here in Slate, U.S. vaccination rates for measles aren’t really plummeting. In fact, they’ve been very stable over many years, at around 91 or 92 percent of the population. While it’s possible that local hotspots of refusal have gotten slightly bigger over time, or that more of these communities are cropping up, hard evidence in support of this idea has been rather modest.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Regent President Drew Petersen said in an interview last week that his “sense right now” is that the System is “committed to test scores.” But he also said he would like feedback from others and a chance to look at what the research says.

A 2018 study examining more than 950,000 applicants to 28 test-optional institutions found high school grades and first-year college GPAs were lower in students who did not submit test scores, but those students graduated at equal or slightly higher rates than those who submitted scores. And all but one of the institutions saw substantial increases in minority, low-income and first-generation students applying.

But skeptics of the practice — which includes the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT — defend standardized tests as a good predictor of college readiness. They also say that relying entirely on high school performance can be problematic with growing grade inflation, where teachers award higher grades than they did in the past or that students deserve.

Garrett Ward Sheldon:

Since retiring from the university, several people have asked if I miss it. I tell them I miss what it was, but not what it has become. Higher education in America has gone from being the best in the world to one of the most pathetic. Why? It’s hard to describe what academia was to me and to millions in the past. It was not just a job, but a way of life, and of Western Civilization; and I’m so close to it, that it’s hard to describe—like trying to describe one’s own mother (hence alma mater!).

But let me try. University life at its best was both the most serious, difficult, challenging and maddening existence; and yet, it was also the most exciting, lively, rewarding, and fun experience.

It was deadly serious because we constantly examined the most intense human issues: historical and personal tragedies; ethical dilemmas, philosophical complexities; theological mysteries; and scientific wonders. It was hard because it stretched you intellectually and emotionally, made you question everything and be changed by that knowledge. And it was difficult, because of the enormous workload and demands; assignments, exams, papers, presentations and seminars. I don’t know of another situation, except possibly the military during a war, where one could be tested so much.

Yet this academic rigor was so exciting, lively, and fun because it developed and fulfilled the most essential part of the human soul, what the Bible calls “Logos” and Aristotle “reasoned speech” of a naturally social being. It was exciting because that individual development occurred within a discipline, but free, intellectual and social environment—full of debate, discussion, argument, and questioning in a community of tolerance and respect, but also laughter, joking, flirting, fighting, explaining, and learning. That “community of scholars”—open, searching, teachers and students—changed one’s life and prepared one for whatever came one’s way. Socrates’ dictum “Know Thyself” and “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living” underlay the traditional liberal arts education: to learn something of every subject (“Renaissance Man”) and all perspectives on every subject and thereby to learn how to think, reason, and analyze: and then be able to handle anything in life and adapt to change.

I realize that this “life of the mind” within a rigorous but friendly community is an ideal; there were plenty of dull classes and mediocre professors at every university. But the “system” of academic freedom and its attendant experiences of intellectual growth prevailed.

Evan Goldstein:

A month later, when I reach Loury at his office at Brown University, where he is a professor of the social sciences, he’s genial and excitable. Ask him a question and you get a litany of names, dates, and book titles. These conversational chops are put to work on his internet chat program, The Glenn Show, where academics and intellectuals discuss race, politics, economics, and whatever else is on Loury’s mind.

He has spent decades studying the black experience in America. His books include The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2002) and Race, Incarceration, and American Values (MIT Press, 2008). He has migrated back and forth across the ideological spectrum, from foot soldier in the Reagan revolution to center-left apostate and back again, with the scars and fractured friendships to show for it. He’s at work now on a memoir titled Changing My Mind.

I spoke with Loury about the closely watched legal challenge to affirmative action filed against Harvard, why becoming the first-ever tenured African-American in the Harvard economics department was a disaster, and how a crack addiction nearly killed him.

Q: How would you characterize the quality of discourse on affirmative action?

A: Dishonest.

We’re sliding into a dispensation where we concede that blacks can’t compete academically, so we configure things to achieve titular representation.

Equality is the only legitimate long-term goal — racial equality, not head-counting. I’m talking about equality of dignity, respect, standing, accomplishment, achievement, honor. People have to earn these things. What do I want to do? I want to reorient the discussion around the development of African-American capacities to compete.

Wall Street Journal:

Don’t forget that when Democrats nationalized student lending in 2010, they promised it would make money for the government. The Congressional Budget Office estimated $87 billion in savings over a decade. From the start this was fiction, and now Mr. Sanders is admitting it was off by a mere $1.5 trillion.

As for ending tuition, that won’t address the real troubles in higher education. Thanks to creeping credentialism, many jobs that once didn’t require a bachelor’s degree now do. College-funding mechanisms make little distinction between studying nuclear engineering and pursuing contemporary dance. Administration buildings teem with associate deputy deans for diversificlusion, and schools compete to have the most climbing walls per capita. The fix isn’t to promise taxpayer-funded diplomas for everybody.

Mr. Sanders said his plan would cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years and would be “fully paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation.” A fact sheet from his office lays out a financial-transactions tax of 0.5% on stocks, 0.1% on bonds and 0.005% on derivatives. To exempt investors of modest means, he would create an offsetting tax credit for people with incomes under $50,000 or couples under $75,000.

There’s no way a financial-transactions tax would pay for this. It could make America’s capital markets less liquid or push traders overseas. By lowering asset values, it would dent every 401(k) and public pension, while raising costs for institutional investors. Mr. Sanders says it would raise $2.4 trillion over a decade, but France’s version failed to meet revenue targets.

China Tribunal:

In December 2018 The Tribunal issued an interim judgement:

“The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

Since then, the Tribunal has contended with a pervasive culture of secrecy, silence and obfuscation by the PRC relating to much material that could have helped in the determination of whether forced organ harvesting has occurred in China. The Tribunal is neither deterred nor disabled from reaching a proper conclusion on the evidence that is available.

China’s reputation as a gross human rights abuser has not had a bearing on the Tribunal in reaching a proper conclusion. The Tribunal has adopted a process for its work that safeguards an even-handed approach to the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) interests. The Tribunal has requested contributions from the PRC at every stage.

The Tribunal has considered evidence, in its many forms, and dealt with individual issues according to the evidence relating to each issue and nothing else and thereby reached a series of conclusions that are free of any influence caused by the PRC’s reputation or other potential causes of prejudice.

These were as follows;

John Altman:

The University of Chicago’s Principles of Freedom of Expression ought to be standard operating procedure at every college and university. And it is time for the philanthropic community to make it their own operating procedure that there will be no money for any university without its official commitment to a comprehensive policy protecting and fostering freedom of expression.

For this reason, the Altman Charitable Foundation offered $1 million to Miami University of Ohio for its Humanities Center, conditional upon the university first adopting the Chicago Principles of Freedom of Expression. In fact, that operational rule for higher education philanthropy is now written into the Foundation’s bylaws.

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a major higher education donor, has stated that it will be taking colleges’ track records on academic freedom into account for future grants. President Diana Davis Spencer has made the policy direction clear: “Colleges and universities must allow free speech on campuses and encourage students to inquire and question all sides of an issue. Otherwise, democracy is doomed.”

For those who love and support higher education – and that should be everyone – it will seem hard to padlock our wallets. Until colleges embrace basic principles of academic integrity, however, it is the way forward. Admittedly, the gifts of a few foundations cannot change the entire system. But an overdue revolution is gathering momentum.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

The budget currently relies on a 6.2% increase in the tax levy, which would mean an increase of about $86 on the average value home at $295,000. Depending on how much of an increase the state budget allows, the tax levy could see an increase of closer to 7%.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts: around $18.5 to 20K per student, depending on the documents used.

Yet, we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Douglas Belkin:

More than half the students now enrolled at the top 200 colleges and universities would lose their seats to students who performed better on the test—and the median SAT score would rise by 70 points to 1320, the study found.

The biggest losers in this reshuffling were black and Latino students, whose numbers would be cut nearly in half, to 11% of all students from 19%. The share of Asian students would slip to 10% from 11%. The principal winners were wealthy white male students, whose ranks would increase. But a large number of white students would lose their seats and be replaced with other white students.

“The affluent have extraordinary advantages in college admissions,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which performed the analysis. Until 2005, Mr. Carnevale was a vice president at Educational Testing Service, which is a client of The College Board and administers the SAT.

Many elite colleges consider a range of factors such as grades, extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations in what they call a holistic admissions approach. They also try to build a diverse student body and might look for students from underrepresented ethnic or racial backgrounds or geographical regions.

Molly Beck:

Tuesday’s decision overturns the court’s own ruling just three years ago when a split panel of justices said in Coyne v. Walker that Evers could write rules and regulations related to education policy on his own — without permission from then-Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature — because the state constitution provides him with the power to do so

The Wisconsin DPI, long led by our new Governor Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements.

The Price of Teacher Mulligans:

“I DIDN’T STOP TO ASK MYSELF THEN WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ALL THE KIDS WHO’D BEEN LEFT IN THE BASEMENT WITH THE TEACHER WHO COULDN’T TEACH” – MICHELLE OBAMA

This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results

Darrel Burnette II:

Several Massachusetts superintendents are spending more money on schools that enroll mostly wealthy students than they are on schools that educate mostly poor students, even though the state designed its funding formula to do the exact opposite. And some schools are outperforming other schools even though they’re receiving significantly less money.

That’s according to a new report by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which analyzed school-spending data now provided by the state’s department of education under a new ESSA provision.

The data dump comes amid a tense debate at the state capital over how to overhaul the state’s funding formula. Three bills under consideration in the state legislature could provide significantly more money to districts. But the distribution methods and amounts vary widely. All are tangled up in a politically contentious process that’s spurred protests and a lawsuit.

MBAE found that under the current system, districts such as Brockton, Chelmsford and New Bedford, distribute their money between schools in an inconsistent way that often is not targeted toward the state’s neediest students.

“Money isn’t always getting to the students who need it the most,” Edward Lambert Jr., the group’s executive director said in a press release.

Madison recently expanded Hamilton Middle and Van Hise elementary school, our two least diverse organizations.

David Blaska:

Nichols is in a dither because the Legislature — meeting after the 2018 election in which Democrat Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker — passed legislation curbing the new governor’s powers. (Among other things: to prevent the new governor from rescinding Medicaid work requirements without legislative approval and to withdraw Wisconsin from multi-state lawsuit against ObamaCare. The legislature also ratified 82 last-minute Walker appointments.)

Democrats descended on the capitol to make noise but it was short-lived and anemic, a shadow of the Act 10 intifada. So, a number of groups brought suit, including (lamentably) the once-nonpartisan League of [Liberal] Women Voters. Of course, they won in Dane County (Wisconsin’s version of the federal system’s 9th circuit) but lost when the high court affirmed the legality of the legislature’s action by a 4-3 vote Friday (06-21-19). Hence Nichols’ alliterative tantrum

Legislature is always in session

It may well be that John’s readers suffer short-term memories. He can only hope because just two months ago one of those right-wing Republican legislators explained the law about as well as it can be explained. Oh wait a minute!!! Tom Loftus is no Republican and is hardly “right wing” but the former Democratic speaker of the state Assembly and the Democratic nominee for governor in 1990. How embarrassing!

Peter Wood:

The suit would have amounted to very little if, in fact, Gibson’s Bakery had indeed engaged in racial profiling or any other form of racism. Those claims, however, were demonstrably false. Gibson’s Bakery in recent years had been victimized by a great deal of shoplifting, mostly by Oberlin students. We know this because police records show 40 instances of shoplifting in which the perpetrators were arrested from 2011 through 2016. More than four out of five of those arrested (82.5 percent) were Oberlin students. Thirty-two of those arrested (80 percent) were white, six were black, and two were Asian.

The College fought (unsuccessfully) to exclude this information from the trial. Plainly, Gibson’s Bakery had a problem with Oberlin students shoplifting, but it was a problem that had nothing to do with race. Students at Oberlin generally understood the situation. The student newspaper, the Oberlin Grape, reported in a December 2017 article about Oberlin College’s student “Culture of Theft.” The article reports the insouciance of students towards pilfering local businesses. As one student put it, describing her multiple thefts from Gibson’s: “It wasn’t expensive, and I felt like it…I just preferred not paying for it, but I could have.”

Stealing from local businesses is, in the eyes of many Oberlin students, a quasi-right or privilege. They don’t feel guilty about it. They feel cool, or to put in today’s language, entitled.

They also feel uninhibited about making up stories and flinging accusations without any need for evidence or any sense of simple fairness. How widely are attitudes like this spread among Oberlin’s 2,800-some students? Plainly there is no way of knowing. But perhaps it is a factor employers should consider when an Oberlin graduate applies for a job. Honesty isn’t high on the list of values that Oberlin cultivates in its students

Janet Lorin:

Kirk Brennan, director of undergraduate admission at the University of Southern California, was on a bus in Baotou earlier this month, part of a multi-school recruiting trip in Inner Mongolia, when he heard the news: The Chinese Education Ministry had issued a warning to students studying in the U.S. to be vigilant about restrictions on academic visas.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of international students in general — and Chinese students in particular — to U.S. colleges and universities. Second only to New York University in its international student population, USC draws about 12% of its 47,000 students from China. Its 1,000 Chinese undergraduates alone could bring in more than $50 million in annual tuition revenue.

But the increasingly fraught relationship over trade between the U.S. and China threatens that pipeline. Orientations for incoming USC first-years in Beijing and Shanghai went off without a hitch last week, Brennan said, and as of now, the school has yet to confront “these kinds of road blocks.’’

Gail Heriot and Alison Somin:

On March 8, 2010, one year into the Obama Administration, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a passionate speech in which he asserted (correctly) that African-American students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than white students. Although he did not mention it, it is also true that white students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than Asian American students and that male students are disciplined at higher rates than female students.

In response to the racial disparity he identified, Duncan promised that the Department of Education would be stepping up its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years that followed, the Department of Education made good on that promise by opening numerous investigations based on statistical disparities. On January 18, 2014, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice jointly issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on school discipline in which they asserted that the law prohibits not only actual discrimination in discipline on the basis of race, but also what they called “unjustified” disparate impact.

In Part I of this article, we point out that there are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin. The Department of Education has focused only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students. By failing to consider the other side of the coin — that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms — its policy threatens to do more harm than good even for the group Secretary Duncan was trying to help. In Part II, we discuss the Department of Education’s enforcement policy toward school discipline in greater detail, its over-reliance on racial disparate impact, and how that over-reliance pushes some schools to violate Title VI’s ban on race discrimination rather than honor it. In Part III, we elaborate on why school discipline is important and present evidence that the Department of Education’s policy has contributed to the problem of disorderly classrooms, especially in schools with high minority student enrollment. In Part IV, we discuss how aggregate racial disparities in discipline do not in themselves show the discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians that some proponents of the Department of Education’s policy claim. Rather, the evidence shows that they are the result of differences in behavior. In Part V, we explain why the Department of Education’s disparate impact policy is not just wrong-headed, but also unauthorized by law.

Qin Chen:

They measured changes in the subjects’ desire for uncensored information throughout the 18-month experiment.
The duo followed more than 1,800 college students in Beijing. The subjects were randomly assigned either the censored internet or the uncensored one.
Even when given free tools to access anything they wanted, less than 5% of the subjects actually accessed uncensored content. The number of students seeking uncensored content rose only after they were given incentives and instructions.
Chen and Yang found that students who were consistently exposed to uncensored foreign media outlets became more informed of events that are usually unreported in Chinese media, such as President Donald Trump’s businesses in China and surveillance in Xinjiang.
They were also more pessimistic about China’s economic outlook and skeptical of the Chinese government. These changes were limited to people who had seen the uncensored internet for themselves.
For example, the roommate of a student accessing uncensored content is, on average, only 13% more likely to be informed about the same events, the study found. That means the “social transmission” of information was relatively small.

Koh Gui Qing, Alexandra Harney, Steve Stecklow and James Pomfret:

The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges.

IOWA CITY, Iowa – The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture.

Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.

For dozens of Chinese nationals at the University of Iowa, the offers proved irresistible.

“Test-taking services. Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you,” says the social-messaging profile of one Chinese coaching outfit used by Iowa students, UI International Student Services. A pitch emailed by another business ended with this reassuring claim: “Your friends are all using us.”

Today, the University of Iowa, one of the largest state universities in the American Midwest, says it is investigating at least 30 students suspected of cheating. Three sources familiar with the inquiry say the number under investigation may be two or three times higher.

University spokespeople declined to name the students or comment on their nationality, citing academic privacy laws.

Eliza Shapiro and Vivian Wang:

Mr. de Blasio and others have argued that the only way to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the schools is to eliminate the exam. This year, only seven black students received offers to Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the specialized schools, out of 895 seats. Albany has controlled the exam since 1971. Mr. de Blasio wanted to replace the test with a system that offered seats to top performers at every city middle school.

Some black and Hispanic students have said they did not even know the exam existed or could not afford preparation for the test, which quizzes students on concepts they may not learn in middle school.

CSIS:

The Human Rights Initiative at CSIS invites you to a public event on the mass detention and surveillance of Muslims in Xinjiang, China and the risks such technologies may pose as they are implemented in other areas of China and globally.

Over one million Uyghurs and Muslims from other ethnic minority groups have been detained by the Chinese government and sent to “re-education” internment camps. Sources indicate that detainees are psychologically and physically abused. Uyghurs outside the camps in Xinjiang are also not free, as they are kept under constant surveillance, often using advanced technology. The Chinese government is increasingly testing this technology in Xinjiang and exporting it nationally and globally, with concerning implications for democracy and human rights.