Karen Rivedal:

Timely text messages in the summer about key dates and must-do tasks help ensure more high school graduates make it to their chosen colleges in the fall, the Madison School District has learned in a three-year study funded by a Madison-based nonprofit here and in two other cities.

The program, which backers say helped increase enrollment in two-year colleges by 3 to 9 percentage points, essentially works by keeping high school counselors active in the lives of their former students during the three months after they’ve graduated.

“We do a hand-off (to colleges), more so than a (drop) and we’re done,” said Jen Wegner, the Madison district’s director for personalized pathways and career/technical education.

Belinda Luscombe:

Masterfile / Radius Images / Corbis
The fact that the average American working woman earns only about 8o% of what the average American working man earns has been something of a festering sore for at least half the population for several decades. And despite many programs and analyses and hand-wringing and badges and even some legislation, the figure hasn’t budged much in the past five years.

But now there’s evidence that the ship may finally be turning around: according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

Jim
Barnes:

The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is an award-winning and much-admired press widely known for its publishing excellence in the areas of Appalachian cultural history, military history, and the Civil War, along with more contemporary topics like horseracing and whiskey-making. UPK is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, representing a consortium of Kentucky’s state universities, five of its private colleges, and two historical societies — and the press celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.
So, why would Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin want to spoil the celebration and shut the press down?

Sadly, as part of a sweeping budget-cutting measure, Governor Bevin has proposed that 70 small programs in the state budget be completely eliminated, along with across-the-board cuts to public higher education that would include the University Press of Kentucky budget. That budget? $672,000, which pays employee salaries — all other expenses are covered through book sales. In contrast, the annual salary of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari? $8 million.

Phil Hill:

Nearly two years ago I wrote two blog posts giving a high-level view of the Online Program Management (OPM) market landscape. This is a growing but messy market, and the market changes since mid 2016 call for an updated view.

OPM providers are for-profit organizations that help non-profit schools develop online programs, most often for Master’s level programs. These companies provide various services for which traditional institutions historically have not had the experience or organizational capability to fully support, at least for fully-online programs and often for non-traditional student populations. Some examples of the services include marketing & recruitment, enrollment management, curriculum development, online course design, student retention support, technology infrastructure, and student & faculty call center support.

The OPM market has historically been known for a full-service, revenue-sharing model, based on the premise that most traditional institutions are not only operationally unprepared to offer online programs at scale but also are not set up to invest in online programs up front. There are extensive costs, particularly in marketing and recruitment as well as curriculum and course design, that cause most scalable online programs (that is, those designed with the intent and infrastructure to allow more than just a few dozen students) to require investment over the first several years, before tuition revenue catches up. Rather than requiring the institution to spend sizable up-front money without a guarantee of repayment, revenue-sharing OPM vendors provide this financing themselves – which is in itself an expensive proposition. It often takes three to five years for an OPM company to become profitable for any online program, which is why they often require 10-year or even longer contracts.

Karen Rivedal:

“Sometimes we get to the point where it’s a detriment in our community because we are so scared of being called racist,” Reyes said. “We have to call that out, get over it and be able to move on as a community to help support all students. And we have to have a diverse representation on the school board. It’s important.”

Reyes has called for active-shooter response training for school staff and for beefing up school security infrastructure to help keep students safe. She also has supported keeping police officers in the four main high schools, an issue that has risen in prominence after a first semester in which disciplinary problems led to a 32 percent rise in high school suspensions locally and after a mass shooting in a Florida high school galvanized students nationwide in support of stricter gun controls.

As deputy mayor, Reyes handles issues related to public safety, civil rights and community services.

Amber Walker:

Before joining the mayor’s office in 2014, Reyes was a Madison Police detective. She started Amigos en Azul — Spanish for Friends in Blue — a group dedicated to improving relations among police officers and the Latino community. She also played a pivotal role in establishing the youth court system on the city’s south side.

During her campaign, Reyes supported keeping police officers in schools and advocated for restorative justice practices. As a Madison School Board member, Reyes said she plans to make school safety her “first priority” during the first few months of her term.

Much more on the 2018 Madison school board election, here.

Richard Eisenberg:

Between a third and a half of people age 45 to 59 and a quarter of those 60+ went without needed health care in the past year due to its cost, according to a troubling new survey from the West Health Institute and NORC at the University of Chicago.

“We were surprised by the magnitude of the findings,” said Dr. Zia Agha, chief medical officer at the West Health Institute, a nonprofit applied medical research organization based in San Diego. “And 80% of the people we surveyed had health insurance, so just having insurance does not make you immune to health care costs.”

The researchers at West Health Institute and NORC at the University of Chicago (a nonpartisan research institution) interviewed 1,302 adults. Their findings were released at the American Society on Aging’s 2018 Aging in America conference in San Francisco.

Age 45 to 59 skipping health care
Specifically, the survey found these results for people age 45 to 59 (members of Generation X and boomers) as a result of health care costs:

Related: $37B and growing back door electronic medical record taxpayer subsidies since 2009.

Hannah Dreier:

when he sat slouched in his usual seat by the door in 11th-grade English class. A skinny kid with a shaggy haircut, he had been thinking a lot about his life and about how it might end. His notebook was open, its pages blank. So he pulled his hoodie over his earphones, cranked up a Spanish ballad and started to write.

He began with how he was feeling: anxious, pressured, not good enough. It would have read like a journal entry by any 17-year-old, except this one detailed murders, committed with machetes, in the suburbs of Long Island. The gang Henry belonged to, MS-13, had already killed five students from Brentwood High School. The killers were his friends. And now they were demanding that he join in the rampage.

Classmates craned their necks to see what he was working on so furiously. But with an arm shielding his notebook, Henry was lost in what was turning out to be an autobiography. He was transported back to a sprawling coconut grove near his grandfather’s home in El Salvador. In front of him was a blindfolded man, strung up between two trees, arms and legs splayed in the shape of an X. All around him were members of MS-13, urging him on. Then the gang’s leader, El Destroyer, stepped forward. He was in his 60s, with the letters MS tattooed on his face, chest and back. A double-edged machete glinted in his hand. He wanted Henry to kill the blindfolded man.

Robert Vagi Margarita Pivovarova, and Wendy Miedel Barnard:

Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers has been a long-standing policy issue as states work to alleviate chronic teacher shortages as well as close achievement gaps. Importantly, evidence points to teacher quality as the most important school-based factor that affects student achievement. Unfortunately, it is often difficult for school and district leadership to identify high-quality teachers who will remain in the classroom, especially among those who are just entering the profession and in the first years of employment.

While the vast majority of teachers in the U.S. enter the profession upon receiving roughly four years of traditional university-based training, research that links preservice teacher experiences to their performance and retention once they are in the labor force is lacking. This overlooks the fact that much of our country’s investment in improving teacher quality happens during teachers’ preservice training. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the context of a student’s preservice teaching is associated with important consequences for their later employment outcomes.

Our recent study adds to a small but growing body of literature that uses data from teachers’ preservice training to better understand how they fare in the classroom after graduation. We were interested in whether a measure of preservice teacher quality could predict entry and retention in the profession. Our data included over 1,100 graduates of a teacher preparation program housed at a large, state university. In addition to having information collected by the university, we were able to track these graduates’ employment using data from the state department of education. Students enrolled in this program complete a year-long student teaching residency that enables them to enter the labor force with the professional experience of a second-year teacher. During the residency, student teachers receive four formal observations by university-trained coaches who assign them evidence-based scores that are later combined into an overall score of effectiveness. This comprehensive score is based on several indicators including student teachers’ instructional and professional practices. Student teachers are expected to respond to their coach’s feedback after each observation and demonstrate improvement over time. We used the score from preservice teachers’ final assessments as an indicator of overall quality and readiness to enter the profession.

Related: NCTQ.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

The suburban house is the idealization of the immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home. —Los Angeles urbanist Edgardo Contini

For the better part of the past century, the American dream was defined, in large part, by that “universal aspiration” to own a home. As housing prices continue to outstrip household income, that’s changing as more and more younger Americans are ending up landless, and not by choice.

The share of homeownership has dropped most rapidly among the key shapers of the American future—millennials, immigrants, minorities. Since 2000, the home ownership among those under 45 has plunged 20 percent. In places like Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Indianapolis, and elsewhere, households with less than the median income qualify for a median-priced home with a 10 percent down payment, according to the National Association of Realtors. But in Seattle, Miami, and Denver, a household needs to make more than 120 percent of the median income to afford such median-priced house. In California, it’s even tougher: 140 percent in Los Angeles, 180 percent in San Diego, and over 190 percent in San Francisco.

Jaime Adame:

William Stixrud:

When my daughter Jora was in high school, she went to a talk I gave on the adolescent brain, during which I pointed out that high school grades don’t predict success very well. On the way home she said, “Great talk, Dad, but I bet you don’t really believe that bit about grades.” I assured her that I did. To prove it, I offered to pay her $100 if she got a ‘C’ on her next report card — in any subject.

We’ve all heard the familiar anxiety-inducing nostrums: That a screw-up in high school will follow you for the rest of your life. That if you don’t get into Harvard or Yale, you’ll never reach the c-suite. That the path to success is narrow and you’d better not take one false step. I have come to think of this unfounded belief system as what we psychologists call a “shared delusion.”

Virginia Heffernan:

A few weeks ago, I got a direct message on Twitter from one Larry Summers. Yes, the Larry Summers, if that nasty little aquafresh checkmark beside @LHSummers was to be believed.

Larry Summers of Harvard. Larry Summers of the World Bank. Larry Summers of the Treasury Department, for the love of god. Secretary Summers, President Summers. Receiver of medals for epochal contributions to macroeconomics, public finance, labor—not to mention his rare insight into women’s gender-borne intellectual shortcomings.

Yes sirree, Lawrence Henry Summers was just casually DM’ing me, because, well, he’d read an article of mine and found it astute. And now Larry Summers wanted feedback from me on an article of his.

Wisconsin State Journal editorial:

According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, seven spring elections have been held since 2000 with ballots similar to today’s, featuring a contested high court race but no presidential primary. During those seven elections, voter turnout has averaged just 21.5 percent of the voting-age population.

Voters can and should do better than that today. And in Madison, at least, lots of early voting suggested more interest than usual.

Madison school board candidates Anna Moffit and Gloria Reyes.

The Economist:

ASH GROVE ACADEMY, a state primary which sits in Moss Roe, a poor suburb on the outskirts of Macclesfield, is an excellent school. Recently, its team won a local debating tournament, besting fancier rivals; its pupils are exposed to William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde; lessons are demanding and there are catch-up sessions for those who fall behind. Most important, teaching is based on up-to-date research into what works in the classroom. It is the sort of school that ministers dream of replicating across the country.

But how to do so? When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010, it set about freeing schools from local-authority control. International studies have suggested that such freedom improves results. But giving teachers autonomy doesn’t automatically mean that all will make good decisions. So in 2011 the government provided a grant of £135m ($218m) to establish the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), a laboratory for education research which would provide teachers with the information to make smart choices.

Gail Heriot:

A college education is not everyone’s cup of tea. The United States needs other ways to instill job skills in the younger generation. The German apprenticeship system is sometimes viewed as an appealing alternative. But substantially increasing apprenticeship opportunities in the United States may not be as easy or inviting as it sounds. The German model depends for its success on strong unions and professional licensing requirements. Applying the German method to the United States would require huge — and, for some, hugely unpopular — changes to the structure of the economy.

Successfully expanding the availability of apprenticeships in the United States will therefore require real thought. Any American-style apprenticeship model will need to deal effectively with the age-old problem of the “runaway apprentice” — the apprentice who leaves his employer after the employer has invested time and energy in training him, but before the apprentice has been useful enough to make the employer’s investment worthwhile.

Andrew Perrin:

Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about five times as likely as college graduates (37% vs. 7%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. Adults with lower levels of educational attainment are also among the least likely to own smartphones, even as e-book reading on these devices has increased substantially since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Adults with annual household incomes of $30,000 or less are about three times as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (36% vs. 13%). Hispanic adults are about twice as likely as whites (38% vs. 20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. But there are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the U.S.: Roughly half (51%) of foreign-born Hispanics report not having read a book, compared with 22% of Hispanics born in the U.S.

The Economist:

It is 100 miles north-east from John O’ Groats to the Shetland Islands, a windswept outpost of 23,000 souls. Yet on many maps it looks about the same distance east, with the islands transported in an enclosed box to nearer the mainland, so that less space is taken up by sea. Locals are unhappy, and Tavish Scott, their Lib Dem MSP, has proposed an amendment to a bill devolving power to the islands that would require the Scottish government to place the islands “accurately” in official publications. “Given the amount we’ve put into the exchequer over the past 40 years with oil and gas revenues, it’s about frickin’ time they put us in the right place,” he says.

Royal Historical Society:

The Royal Historical Society has prepared a briefing note for UK-based historians on the issues surrounding Open-Access requirements for future REF exercises, and their possible implications for long-form research and book publishing. The document is available here.

Brian A. Jacob and Joseph Ryan:

This report presents findings from a unique partnership between the University of Michigan and the State that allowed us to match the universe of child maltreatment records in Michigan with educational data on all public school children in the state. We find that roughly 18 percent of third-grade students have been subject to at least one formal investigation for child maltreatment. In some schools, more than fifty percent of third graders have experienced an investigation for maltreatment. These estimates indicate that child abuse and neglect cannot simply be treated like a secondary issue, but must be a central concern of school personnel.

Dylan Brogan:

Madison assistant city attorney Roger Allen has apologized for the police department taking more than a year to fulfill an open records request from Isthmus, saying the request accidentally “fell through the cracks.” He says the city is working to make sure that delays like this won’t happen again.

“This [delay] was an outlier and, quite frankly, was embarrassing both to the records section in MPD and to my office,” Allen tells Isthmus.

The request for police records was made in December 2016 but not filled until after Isthmus and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a lawsuit on Feb. 1, 2018. The city then turned over the records, which resulted in the March 8 article “Shielded.” The piece examined how the police department handled an internal investigation of Officer Stephen Heimsness.

Tom Kamenick, deputy counsel and open government specialist for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, or WILL, calls the settlement a victory for public access to government records.

Guardian:

umans are fascinated by the source of their failings and virtues. This preoccupation inevitably leads to an old debate: whether nature or nurture moulds us more. A revolution in genomics has poised this as a modern political question about the character of our society: if personalities are hard-wired into our genes, what can governments do to help us? This is a big, creepy “if” over which the spectre of eugenics hovers. It feels morally questionable yet claims of genetic selection by intelligence are making headlines.

This is down to “hereditarian” science, a field dominated in this country by Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College London. His latest paper claimed “differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them”. With such a billing the work was predictably greeted by a raft of absurd claims about “genetics determining academic success”. What the research revealed was the rather less surprising result: the educational benefits of selective schools largely disappear once pupils’ innate ability and socio-economic background were taken into account. It is a glimpse of the blindingly obvious – and there’s nothing to back strongly either a hereditary or environmental argument.

Jonathan P. Baird:

Back on Feb. 16, the New Hampshire Bar Association held its annual mid-year meeting. This year the program was a little different. Instead of the usual continuing legal education event, the bar brought in two historians, Anne O’Rourke and Willliam Meinecke Jr., from the United States Holocaust Museum to look at how German lawyers and judges responded to the destruction of democracy and the establishment of the Nazi state.

Their presentation showed that the worst horrors of the Nazi regime did not arrive full-blown. Rather, the road to fascism was taken in gradual incremental steps, each one preparing the way for the next.

While German lawyers and judges might have opposed Hitler’s authority and the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, they failed to do so. Not only did they fail, they collaborated and interpreted the law in ways that broadly facilitated the Nazis’ ability to carry out their agenda.

Admittedly, there was a very narrow window to dissent. Courts interpreted every appearance of coolness toward the regime as a breach of professional standards. Insufficient enthusiasm for the regime could be a basis for getting disbarred.

Robert Anderson:

rypto-backdoors for law enforcement is a reasonable position, but the side that argues for it adds things that are either outright lies or morally corrupt. Every year, the amount of digital evidence law enforcement has to solve crimes increases, yet they outrageously lie, claiming they are “going dark”, losing access to evidence. A weirder claim is that those who oppose crypto-backdoors are nonetheless ethically required to make them work. This is morally corrupt.

Madison PAL:

We asked each candidate for the MMSD Board of Education detailed questions about Advanced Learning to better understand their viewpoints on how Advanced Learning fits into district priorities.

​Below are links to their answers from March 2018. The election will be held on April 3, 2018.

Notes and links on the election (Anna Moffit vs. Gloria Reyes), here.

Ed Kilgore:

Eight Kentucky school districts — including those in Louisville and Lexington — are closed today as teachers stay home to protest the GOP legislature’s destructive “reforms” of their pension system. Oklahoma teachers are planning to strike on Monday despite winning a $6,100 pay raise. And Arizona teachers rallied at the state capital on Wednesday and are threatening to strike if their demands for major pay raises and restoration of education funding cuts are not met.

As this wave of unrest among teachers spreads nationally, it’s clear it has been inspired by the nine-day strike that won West Virginia teachers (and other state employees) a pay raise earlier this month. But there’s something more fundamental going on than copycat protests. We’re seeing a teacher-led backlash against years, and even decades, of Republican efforts at the state level to cut taxes and starve public investments. This is very clear in Oklahoma, where a quick pay raise the legislature passed this week is deemed by teachers to have missed the larger point:

Locally, Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Reporting by Cezary Podkul. Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli, Jess Kuronen, Tyler Paige, Peter Santilli and Hanna Sender. :

The financial crisis and the massive federal response reshaped the world we live in. Though the economy is in one of its longest expansions and stock indexes have hit new highs, many people across the political spectrum complain that the recovery is uneven and the markets’ gains aren’t fairly distributed. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at some of the most eventful aspects of the response and how we got to where we are today.

BBC:

The teen who built a prosthetic arm for his dad

Robbie Frei is passionate about the potential of 3D printing. After all, he’s seen its potential first-hand.

Robbie’s father is a Marine veteran who lost part of his right arm in Iraq. One challenge was that he couldn’t play video games with his children. So Robbie designed a 3D-printed adapter for him. He’s since made the design available for anyone in the world to download. The 18-year-old has heard back from several people who have used the adapter – including a 21-year-old Air Force veteran and a man whose daughter has cerebral palsy.

Since then, Robbie has also made a prosthetic for his dad that not only has fingers and can move, but that, like the adapter, could be affordably 3D-printed.

“You design one thing and can email it to someone else… and you’re helping people all over,” Robbie says. “That’s the power of engineering.”

Perry Stein:

Sabrina Gordon knows that any lottery is a fluky game of odds. But she needs to believe that the school lottery is different.

The single mother lives in a poor area of Southeast Washington and refuses to enroll her 10-year-old son, Trevonte, in their neighborhood school, Johnson Middle, where he has a guaranteed slot.

So Gordon joins the thousands of families across the city anxiously awaiting results of the city’s competitive school lottery this week — a system that highlights the bleak reality that the demand for high-performing schools in the District far exceeds the supply.

The lottery has been a long-standing source of tension, with wealthy families hiring consultants to navigate the school choices and nonprofits emerging to ensure that disadvantaged families know how to maximize their options. The lottery was thrust into the spotlight last month when D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson was forced to resign amid outrage that he bypassed the lottery so his daughter could transfer to Wilson High, which has a wait list of more than 600 students. Now, because of that scandal, the school lottery is likely to draw more scrutiny than ever.

Laphams Quarterly:

Stephen Carter:

Russia’s recent declaration that it is prepared to operate its own internet should the West cut off access has struck some observers as more Putinesque bellicosity, which indeed it might be. But Moscow’s desire to build a web it can control is the dream of authoritarians everywhere. And not all the authoritarians are in government.

Regulating the flow of information has been the goal of every tyrant ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huang burned the books in 213 B.C. in the hope that later generations would believe that history had begun with his reign. 1 Nowadays one country after another wants the ability to control its own intranet — or at least to throw a kill switch.

Shutting off the web has proved easier than many imagined. When Hosni Mubarak’s regime ordered Egyptian telecoms to close down their internet service during the Arab Spring of 2011, traffic slowed to just about zero. Nowadays China’s Great Firewall is the best-known effort to restrict what a population can find online, but countries around the world are doing their best to follow Beijing’s example.

Richard Godwin:

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has of course been pivotal, prompting, at the time of going to press, shares to crash by 11 per cent, high-profile advertisers such as Mozilla and Commerzbank to withdraw support and Mark Zuckerberg to go to ground for four days before apologising on CNN after the hashtag #WheresZuck went viral to tell us that he’s ‘really sorry’ and feels ‘really bad’.

But some say the tide began to turn as recently as August 2016. That’s when Zuckerberg, under intense pressure from right-wing news organisations such as Breitbart, fired the supposedly biased humans who curated the site’s ‘Trending News’ section and replaced them with algorithms. Within days, the feed was dominated by fake news items about Hillary Clinton, pushed up the rankings by bots and trolls. We all know where that led.

Rod Dreher::

The rock band Van Halen was famous for putting a rider in their contracts requiring that a bowl of M&Ms be backstage for them, and that there be no brown M&Ms in the bowl. It sounds like typical rock star vanity, but there was actually a good reason for it. The band had this provision buried in their contract as a trick to see if the local crews assisting the band had actually read the contract. In a similar way, minor mistakes like these are the brown M&Ms of journalism about religion. They reveal a fundamental carelessness that might have more serious consequences.

The problem is not just with the media, but is even internal to Christian communities. I’ve said in this space on many occasions that as I travel to Christian colleges, one of the biggest complaints I hear from faculty is that young people have next to no theological knowledge. They are the products of parishes, congregations, and (especially) youth groups that have reduced the faith to mere relationality. I was once in the presence of a college student who had been raised in the church, been involved since childhood, and had been active in a parachurch youth ministry. She knew that Jesus was her best buddy, but she did not realize that he had been physically raised from the dead.

We’re not talking about expecting laymen to explain the hypostatic union here. We’re talking about the Resurrection.

A couple of years ago, the Charlotte Observer did an interview with the author of a book about how few Americans really understood the Bible. Look at this:

Happy Easter.

Fumika Sato:

The trend is such that Tokyo’s Hongo district, where the university’s campus is located, has earned the nickname “Hongo Valley.” Japan’s version of Silicon Valley is buzzing with startups that specialize in fields such as wealth management, health care, home sharing and space debris collection.

One of those is WealthNavi, which operates a technology-based asset management service. Founded in 2015 by former Finance Ministry bureaucrat Kazuhisa Shibayama, the startup had more than 60 billion yen ($558 million) in assets under management as of last month.

JR Minkel:

Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided “microdata,” meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.

Matthew Hindman:

The researcher whose work is at the center of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data analysis and political advertising uproar has revealed that his method worked much like the one Netflix uses to recommend movies.

In an email to me, Cambridge University scholar Aleksandr Kogan explained how his statistical model processed Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica. The accuracy he claims suggests it works about as well as established voter-targeting methods based on demographics like race, age, and gender.

If confirmed, Kogan’s account would mean the digital modeling Cambridge Analytica used was hardly the virtual crystal ball a few have claimed. Yet the numbers Kogan provides also show what is — and isn’t — actually possible by combining personal data with machine learning for political ends.

Amber Walker:

In December 2017, Madison deputy mayor Gloria Reyes announced her candidacy for Madison School Board seat one. Incumbent Anna Moffit was elected to the seat in 2015 after running unopposed in her first election.

In February, Moffit and Reyes participated in their first candidate forum. The candidates discussed the state of arts education in Madison and fielded questions from music, visual, and multidisciplinary arts teachers across Dane County. Oscar Morales, director of Omega School and Madison’s poet laurate moderated the fourm, hosted by the Arts and Literature Lab.

A voter summary is available here.

Maurice E. Stucke:

With the rise of a progressive antitrust movement, the power of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon is now topical. This article explores some of the potential harms from data-opolies. Data-opolies, in contrast to the earlier monopolies, are unlikely to exercise their power by charging higher prices to consumers. But this does not mean they are harmless. Data-opolies can raise other significant concerns, including less privacy, degraded quality, a transfer of wealth from consumers to data-opolies, less innovation and dynamic disruption in markets in which they dominate, and political and social concerns.

Data-opolies can also be more durable than some earlier monopolies. Moreover, data-opolies at times can more easily avoid antitrust scrutiny when they engage in anticompetitive tactics to attain or maintain their dominance.

Nicole Pelletiere:

A new law legalizing free-range parenting will soon take effect in Utah allowing children to do things alone like travelling to school.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed the bill on March 15, which takes effect in May.

The bill redefines “neglect” in Utah law so that kids can participate in some unsupervised activities without their parents being charged, a representative from the state confirmed to ABC News Monday.

“Kids need to wonder about the world, explore and play in it, and by doing so learn the skills of self-reliance and problem-solving they’ll need as adults,” Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement to ABC News. “As a society, we’ve become too hyper about ‘protecting’ kids and then end up sheltering them from the experiences that we took for granted as we were kids. I sponsored SB65 so that parents wouldn’t be punished for letting their kids experience childhood.”

Fillmore added that there were no organized groups against the bill, and it passed unanimously out of both houses of the state’s legislature.

PHOTO: Republican Sen. Lincoln Fillmore looks on from the Senate floor at the Utah State Capitol, in Salt Lake City on Jan. 22, 2018.

Bruce Schneier:

But for every article about Facebook’s creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it’s Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it “surveillance capitalism.” And as creepy as Facebook is turning out to be, the entire industry is far creepier. It has existed in secret far too long, and it’s up to lawmakers to force these companies into the public spotlight, where we can all decide if this is how we want society to operate and — if not — what to do about it.

There are 2,500 to 4,000 data brokers in the United States whose business is buying and selling our personal data. Last year, Equifax was in the news when hackers stole personal information on 150 million people, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver’s license numbers.

Kathy Biccella:

When Wall Street billionaire Stephen Schwarzman announced he was donating $25 million to Abington Senior High School, he said in a release that investing in public education “yields one of the best returns imaginable – a new generation of creative, capable and collaborate future leaders…”

For the Blackstone CEO there was another, far more personal, return – his name on his alma mater, which the school board voted unanimously on Tuesday night to rename Abington Schwarzman High School.

Shortly after the board vote, the news exploded on a Facebook forum where residents vented over the move, calling it “insane,” “egotistical,” and “stupid.”

“The stadium is already named after him. That’s enough. Too much ego,” wrote one commenter.

Taps Coogan:

Back in early 2017 we looked at every state’s level of pension underfunding, given realistic market values, relative to state tax revenues. Based on that metric, Illinois’ pension fund was in the second worst condition in the US; nearly 30% of the state’s revenues would need to be directed towards its pension to avoid a worsening of its already significant underfunding problem.

For those who wonder how Illinois’ pension system got into such trouble, the website Wirepoints recently shed some light on exactly that question:

“There’s little argument that Illinois politicians are to blame for the state’s massive pension crisis.

However, how politicians caused the crisis has long been misunderstood. Critics on both sides of the aisle typically accuse politicians – and by extension, taxpayers – of shortchanging pensions.

But a Wirepoints analysis reveals that too little money into pensions hasn’t been the issue. Instead, it’s the dramatic growth in total pension benefits promised by politicians that’s been bankrupting Illinois.

Osita Nwanevu:

On Jan. 24, it was announced that former White House adviser and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon had accepted an invitation from University of Chicago business school professor Luigi Zingales to participate in a debate on campus. “I can hardly think of a more important issue for new citizens and business leaders of the world than the backlash against globalization and immigration that is taking place not just in America, but in all the Western World,” Zingales wrote in a statement. “Whether you agree with him or not (and I personally do not), Mr. Bannon has come to interpret and represent this backlash in America.”

Zingales and university administrators have, predictably, spent the past several weeks dealing with a backlash of their own. Over 1,000 alumni, more than 100 faculty members, the executives of student government and nearly a dozen student groups have voiced their opposition to the event in various mediums. “[W]hen speakers who question the intellect and full humanity of people of color are invited to campus to ‘debate’ their worthiness as citizens and people, ” a faculty open letter read, “the message is clear that the University’s commitment to freedom of expression will come at the expense of those most vulnerable in our community.” Off-campus, many have scorned those protesting the invitation. “The school has a long tradition of valuing free speech and thought, recognizing that a university is — wait for it — a place of ideas and learning,” the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board wrote after the announcement. “The ‘cure’ for repellent ideas, school President Robert Maynard Hutchins said generations ago, ‘lies through open discussion rather than through inhibition.’

James Bamford:

Shortly after dawn on a July morning in 2007, a convoy of black FBI utility vehicles snaked down Ridge Road, a tranquil, leafy street lined with modest homes and manicured shrubs in the Maryland suburb of Severn. After a few twists and turns, they came to a stop at the end of a cul-de-sac opposite a two-story gray colonial. Seconds later, a dozen agents, weapons pulled from their holsters, burst into the house. Upstairs was William E. Binney, a former senior employee of the National Security Agency headquartered at nearby Fort Meade.

“They shoved my son out of the way as they rushed in with their guns drawn and charged upstairs, where my wife was getting dressed and I was in the shower,” Binney told me. “After pointing their guns at her, one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at my head as he forcibly pulled me out. Then they took me out to the back porch and began interrogating me, attempting to implicate me in a crime.”

Marilyn Wedge:

French children don’t need medications to control their behavior.

In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established in the U.S.—almost completely passed over children in France?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the U.S. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological—psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.

Danielle Tcholakian:

But I was surprised to see how many journalists came to the students’ defense, agreeing that journalism is a form of activism. They were highly respected, solid, investigative journalists. Los Angeles Times writer Matt Pearce asked, “Does anybody think that even the fairest and most diligent of investigative reporters wrote their horrifying stories hoping that nothing would change?” The Washington Post‘s Wesley Lowery asserted, “Even beyond big, long investigations, journalists perform acts of activism every day. Any good journalist is an activist for truth, in favor of transparency, on the behalf of accountability. It is our literal job is to pressure powerful people and institutions via our questions.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times Magazine and arguably one of the greatest living reporters today, quoted Lowery’s tweet, agreeing with it.

Lowery’s tweet resonated with me, too. Truth, transparency, accountability — these are all words I’m comfortable with. The pursuit of truth can certainly feel like an activist endeavor under a presidential administration that lies habitually.

Still, I was cringing at the word “activism.” I have for a long time, too. Years ago, talking with a mentor in this industry, I made a face as I uttered the phrase “activist journalism.” I said I’d never want to do that; I was a news reporter.

But my mentor just smiled and when I asked why, he said, “You are an activist journalist.” Well, I never. I insisted I wasn’t, that was nonsense. I was a news reporter. I reported the news. I didn’t insert opinions into things or tell people what to think or argue for a certain side. I gave all the facts and let the chips fall where they may!

Jenna Lyons:

He flunked all his classes in eighth grade but was still advanced to high school, Rivers wrote.

As he entered Washington High, the student felt nervous going into classrooms where he didn’t know anyone and “had no knowledge of what to do and where to go,” Rivers wrote. “This caused him to get in with the wrong crowd, which started distracting him from his studies.”

As a freshman, the boy told his high school counselor that he couldn’t focus in class and felt lost, but Rivers said the adviser was indifferent.

“The counselor (Asian) was aggressive in how she spoke with client 1 (Latino), making him uncomfortable,” Rivers wrote. “Leaving with the feeling of not being understood, respected, and discriminated against, client 1 did not seek her assistance again, nor did she seek him out.”

CBS:

In the era of #MeToo, a North Bay school district is taking action after getting complaints from teachers about being sexually harassed, not by their co-workers, but by their students.

Schools in the Tamalpais Union High School District in Marin County are requiring students to take sexual harassment training starting in April. The change comes after teachers came forward with their stories.

“When we look on the national scene and we wonder how the Harvey Weinsteins are made — we’re making them,” said Jessica Crabtree, a teacher at Redwood High School.

Marin County’s Tamalpais Union High School District spends about $16,875 per student, about 18.5% less than Madison’s nearly $20,000.

Cezary Podkul and Heather Gillers:

The only speaker standing between state budget officers and the opening cocktail hour at a Washington conference was the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he said left no one in a celebratory mood.

Medicaid costs, said then-Secretary Michael Leavitt, were projected to grow so fast that within 10 years they would “crowd out virtually every other category of spending.” State spending on higher education, infrastructure and safety, he predicted, would all get squeezed.

Nearly 10 years after that October 2008 speech, Mr. Leavitt’s prediction—part of HHS’s first-ever annual projection of Medicaid’s costs—is looking prescient.

As state and local officials prepare their next budgets, many are finding that spending decisions have already been made for them by two must-fund line items that barely mattered when baby boomers such as Mr. Leavitt were growing up: Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled, and public-employee health and retirement costs.

These days, they consume about one out of every five tax dollars collected by state and local governments. That is the highest share since Medicaid was created in 1965. Postretirement health benefits, which are harder to quantify, add to that burden and have cumulatively cost states more than $100 billion since 2008, according to government financial disclosures compiled by Merritt Research Services.

Lee Fang:

One of the agents involved in the hunt responded that they could combine the data with “IP address information back from T-Mobile.” Another agent chimed in to say that the agency had sent the phone company an expedited summons for information.

“I am going to see if our Palantir guy is here to dump the Western Union info in there since I know there is a way to triangulate the area he’s sending money from and narrow down time of day etc,” responded Jen Miller, an ICE agent on the email thread.

Palantir is a controversial data analytics firm co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel. The company, which does business with the military and major intelligence agencies, has contracted with ICE since 2014. As journalist Spencer Woodman reported last year, the company developed a special system for ICE to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them.

Josie Duffy Rice:

In May 1988 on the south side of Chicago, a video store caught fire in the middle of the night. The fire spread quickly, eventually burning down seven other nearby businesses and killing two people. The police determined it was arson, and quickly identified the owner of the video store as the mastermind of a four-person plot. But it was a local repairman, Arthur Brown, who prosecutors accused of actually setting the fire, using gasoline as an accelerant. Two other people were accused of taking part, and all four were charged with first-degree murder and arson. At the first bond hearing, local prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty for three of the men, including Brown. He immediately collapsed to the floor. “I’m just emotional,” Brown said, apologizing to the judge. “I’ve never been in a courtroom before.”

Brown had signed a confession during his interrogation but steadfastly maintained his innocence afterward, continually stating that he only signed it after being beaten and threatened by the cops for over seven hours. However, in 1990, after a trial led by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Brown was granted a new trial in 2003, but was once again found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. But last November, a judge threw out his conviction and ordered a new trial based on Brown’s post-conviction petition. That petition argued that prosecutors in his second trial had not only solicited testimony they knew to be false from one of the police officers who handled his case, but “improperly relied extensively on that false testimony in its opening statement and closing argument.” Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx asked her Conviction Integrity Unit to review the case. Days later, prosecutors dismissed the charges and Brown was released.

David Leonhardt:

First, some good news: In recent decades, students from modest backgrounds have flooded onto college campuses. At many high schools where going to college was once exotic, it’s now normal. When I visit these high schools, I see college pennants all over the hallways, intended to send a message: College is for you, too.

And thank goodness for that message. As regular readers of this column have heard before, college can bring enormous benefits, including less unemployment, higher wages, better long-term health and higher life satisfaction.

Now for the bad news: The college-graduation rate for these poorer students is abysmal. It’s abysmal even though many of them are talented teenagers capable of graduating. Yet they often attend colleges with few resources or colleges that simply do a bad job of shepherding students through a course of study.

Technology Review:

A new study has found that direct-to-consumer genetic tests, like those marketed by 23andMe, Ancestry.com, Family Tree DNA, and MyHeritage, can be used to obtain innacurate results.

Data dump: Most of these tests use a technique called genotyping to provide information about a person’s ancestry, risk of developing certain disorders, or status as a carrier of specific diseases. Some companies also make the raw genotyping data available to customers upon request.

Lost in interpretation: Scientists at Ambry Genetics, a diagnostics company that also interprets data from consumer DNA tests, looked at this raw genotyping data from 49 people. They found that two out of five reported genetic variants, or 40 percent, were false positives—that is, they indicated that a particular genetic variant was present when it wasn’t. Most of the false-positive calls were of cancer-linked genes.

The Economist:

EVERY year in Singapore 1% of pupils in the third year of primary school bring home an envelope headed “On government service”. Inside is an invitation to the city-state’s Gifted Education Programme. To receive the overture, pupils must ace tests in maths, English and “general ability”. If their parents accept the offer, the children are taught using a special curriculum.

Singapore’s approach is emblematic of the traditional form of “gifted” education, one that uses intelligence tests with strict thresholds to identify children with seemingly innate ability. Yet in many countries it is being overhauled in two main ways. The first is that educationists are using a broader range of methods to identify highly intelligent children, especially those from poor households. The second is an increasing focus on fostering the attitudes and personality traits found in successful people in an array of disciplines—including those who did not ace intelligence tests.

New research lies behind these shifts. It shows that countries which do not get the most from their best and brightest face big economic costs. The research also suggests that the nature-or-nurture debate is a false dichotomy. Intelligence is highly heritable and perhaps the best predictor of success. But it is far from the only characteristic that matters for future eminence.

Rachel Alexander:

New gun laws would not have stopped the Parkdale school shooter. The laws already in place should have stopped him. They failed. The people responsible to protect the public from people like the killer dropped the ball. In any case, mentally deranged killers don’t care about laws.

We would be better off looking at preventing the factors that led to the shooting. One thing Nikolas Cruz had in common with other school shooters is the lack of a father figure in his life. His father died when he was young.

Seven of the 19 shootings since 2005 were committed by young males. Peter Hasson at The Federalist observed that only one of the seven “was raised by his biological father throughout childhood.”

Shaun King:

When lifelong civil rights attorney Larry Krasner was elected in a landslide this past November to become the new district attorney of Philadelphia, to say that his fans and supporters had high hopes would be an understatement. Anything less than a complete revolution that tore down the bigoted and patently unfair systems of mass incarceration would be a severe disappointment.

Across the country, talking the talk of criminal justice reform has gotten many people elected as DA. Once in office, their reforms have often been painfully slow and disappointing. Krasner was the first candidate elected who publicly committed not just to intermittent changes, but a radical overhaul.

So far, having been in office less than three months, he has exceeded expectations. He’s doing something I’ve never quite seen before in present-day politics: Larry Krasner’s keeping his word — and it’s a sight to behold.

Carolina Milanesi:

Our kids might not remember what schools were like before so many started focusing on STEM, and coding. Most schools had a computer room but technology, or computer science, was very much a subject rather than a tool to use throughout the school day. We can argue whether or not technology made things better or worse but that deserves a totally separate discussion. Like it did in the enterprise market, since its launch in 2010, the iPad started making its way into education bringing technology into classrooms. It did not take long for the first one to one iPad school to get established.

The first Chromebooks hit the market in 2011 but it was not until 2013 that they started to make a considerable impact in K-12 education and they have been growing ever since across American schools and mostly at the expense of Apple.

When the iPad was first brought into the classroom it was done in schools where, by and large, budget was not an issue and teachers were empowered to invest time in finding the best way to use technology to reinvent and energize teaching. It was really about rethinking how to teach and connect with students. As technology became more pervasive, schools discovered that it was not just about teaching but it was also about managing the classroom. This is what Google was able to capitalize on. Yes, schools turn to Chromebooks because the hardware is cheaper but also because the total cost of ownership when it comes to deployment, management, and teacher’s involvement is much lower.

Alexandra Bruell:

Non-human traffic can create an “inflated number that sets false expectations for marketing efforts,” said Mr. Weinstein.
 
 Marketers often use web traffic as a good measure for how many of their consumers saw their ads, and some even pay their ad vendors when people see their ads and subsequently visit their website. Knowing more about how much of their web traffic was non-human could change the way they pay their ad vendors.
 
 Advertisers have told Adobe that the ability to break down human and non-human traffic helps them understand which audiences matter “when they’re doing ad buying and trying to do re-marketing efforts, or things like lookalike modeling,” he said. Advertisers use lookalike modeling to reach online users or consumers who share similar characteristics to their specific audiences or customers.
 
 Ad buyers can also exclude visitors with non-human characteristics from future targeting segments by removing the cookies or unique web IDs that represented those visitors from their audience segments.
 
 In addition to malicious bots, many web visits also come from website “scrapers,” such as search engines, voice assistants or travel aggregators looking for business descriptions or pricing information. Some are also from rivals “scraping” for information so they can undercut the competition on pricing.

Zoe Tillman:

First Amendment advocacy groups do have the right to argue for access to sealed information from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a court ruled Friday afternoon.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — the highest of the surveillance review courts, below the US Supreme Court — rejected the Justice Department’s argument that outside groups shouldn’t be able to petition the FISC at all under the First Amendment to get access to sealed portions of opinions.

The court did not address whether the groups that petitioned for access, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, can get the information they’re after. Instead, the court tackled a critical threshold issue: Whether the groups had standing to come before the court in the first place to ask for that access. Press freedom advocates saw the case as an important test of how much the FISC’s mostly closed doors could be open to the public.

The three judges who sit on the Court of Review agreed with a lower court’s conclusion that the ACLU and Yale media freedom clinic had shown that their claim of a First Amendment right of access to the information at issue was “judicially cognizable” — that is, that a court could recognize it. The court found that the petitioners had to only clear the “low bar” of showing that their claim wasn’t “completely devoid of merit” or “wholly insubstantial and frivolous.”

Jeff Daniels:

Californians fed up with housing costs and taxes are fleeing state in big numbers Californians fed up with housing costs and taxes are fleeing state in big numbers

Californians may still love the beautiful weather and beaches, but more and more they are fed up with the high housing costs and taxes and deciding to flee to lower-cost states such as Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

“There’s nowhere in the United States that you can find better weather than here,” said Dave Senser, who lives on a fixed income near San Luis Obispo, California, and now plans to move to Las Vegas. “Rents here are crazy, if you can find a place, and they’re going to tax us to death. That’s what it feels like. At least in Nevada they don’t have a state income tax. And every little bit helps.”

Senser, 65, who previously lived in the east San Francisco Bay region, said housing costs and gas prices are “significantly lower in Las Vegas. The government in the state of California isn’t helping people like myself. That’s why people are running out of this state now.”

C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger and Heyu Xiong:

Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence finds that when school budgets are strained, public schools can employ cost-saving measures with no ill-effect on students. We theorize that if budget cuts induce schools to eliminate wasteful spending, the effects of spending cuts may be small (and even zero). To explore this empirically, we examine how student performance responded to school spending cuts induced by the Great Recession. We link nationally representative test score and survey data to school spending data and isolate variation in recessionary spending cuts that were unrelated to changes in economic conditions. Consistent with the theory, districts that faced large revenue cuts disproportionately reduced spending on non-core operations. However, they still reduced core operational spending to some extent. A 10 percent school spending cut reduced test scores by about 7.8 percent of a standard deviation. Moreover, a 10 percent spending reduction during all four high-school years was associated with 2.6 percentage points lower graduation rates. While our estimates are smaller than some in the literature, spending cuts do matter.

Related: COMMENTARY ON K-12 TAX, SPENDING AND OUTCOMES: KANSAS CITY AND MADISON:

The Economist:

EVERY year in Singapore 1% of pupils in the third year of primary school bring home an envelope headed “On government service”. Inside is an invitation to the city-state’s Gifted Education Programme. To receive the overture, pupils must ace tests in maths, English and “general ability”. If their parents accept the offer, the children are taught using a special curriculum.

Singapore’s approach is emblematic of the traditional form of “gifted” education, one that uses intelligence tests with strict thresholds to identify children with seemingly innate ability. Yet in many countries it is being overhauled in two main ways. The first is that educationists are using a broader range of methods to identify highly intelligent children, especially those from poor households. The second is an increasing focus on fostering the attitudes and personality traits found in successful people in an array of disciplines—including those who did not ace intelligence tests.

New research lies behind these shifts. It shows that countries which do not get the most from their best and brightest face big economic costs. The research also suggests that the nature-or-nurture debate is a false dichotomy. Intelligence is highly heritable and perhaps the best predictor of success. But it is far from the only characteristic that matters for future eminence.

Leon Hadar:

The irony is that much of this backlash, or “tech-lash”, has been driven by many of the same Democrats that companies like Google and Facebook had backed during the presidential campaign, when employees of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, donated US$1.6 million to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or about 80 percent more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google between 2001 and 2017, helped set up companies to analyse political data for Clinton’s presidential campaign, and “even wore a badge labelled ‘STAFF’ at Clinton’s election-night bash,” reported the Journal.

Maya Kosoff:

After embarking on exactly the kind of cringe-inducing apology tour one would expect following the revelation that Cambridge Analytica plundered the data of millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg has yet another mess on his hands. Over the weekend, Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.

In its current iteration, Facebook’s Messenger application requests that those who download it give it permission to access incoming and outgoing call and text logs. But, as users discovered when prompted to download a copy of their personal data before permanently deleting their Facebook accounts, a certain amount of data was covertly siphoned without explicit permissions. Buried inside those data caches was an unsettling amount of specific, detailed information—in some cases, every phone call or text message ever sent or received on their Android device. Dylan McKay, who apparently owns an Android phone, reported that for the period between November 2016 and July 2017, his archives contained “the metadata of every cellular call I’ve ever made, including time and duration” and “metadata about every text message I’ve ever received or sent.” When people like McKay agreed to share their contacts with Facebook, it appears they didn’t know the extent to which they were giving Facebook access to their personal information.

The Guardian:

Andria Zafirakou has been functioning on three hours’ sleep a night for weeks, but looks radiant. “It’s adrenaline, it’s excitement, it’s everything.” Nominated by current and former colleagues for the Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher prize, dubbed the Nobel for teaching, last month Zafirakou learned she had been shortlisted from a field of more than 30,000 entries. She flew out to Dubai last week to join nine other finalists from all over the world for a star-studded awards ceremony hosted by Trevor Noah, and arrived home on Wednesday the winner of the $1m prize. The nominees were judged on, among other things, the progress made by pupils, achievements outside the classroom and in helping children become “global citizens”.

Politicians and dignitaries, the media and 100 of her schoolchildren were waiting to welcome her at Heathrow, from where she was whisked straight to parliament to meet Theresa May. The prime minister and education secretary’s praise for the arts and textiles teacher could not have been more lavish; she is, declared Damian Hinds, “truly inspiring”.

Zafirakou still hasn’t made it home to Brent, north-west London, when we meet later that day. The 39-year-old has the dazed air of a woman who barely recognises herself as she stares at her photo on the front of London’s Evening Standard. “My whole life has been transformed,” she laughs breathlessly. Amid all the wonderment of her fairytale week, however, there is one obvious irony. Had Zafirakou prioritised the targets the government sets for her profession, and focused all her energies on its official performance measures, she would never have been considered for the award. She won, instead, by being the kind of teacher our education system actively discourages.

Kate Stringer:

he rage was palpable. Oakland community members packed the district room waving signs. They shouted over school board members, screaming, “No cuts!” and “Chop from the top!” They stood in line for four hours to make public comments, voices laced with emotion, all asking the same thing: Why were millions of dollars being taken away from their schools?
Whatever Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell may have been feeling during that meeting last November, she didn’t show it, even though she had the unenviable task of explaining that “why” to a room pulsing with frustration.
“Before I move any further in the presentation, I would like to say how deeply sorry I am for the current financial position we find ourselves in,” Johnson-Trammell told the crowd that night, in the steady, even tone of a seasoned teacher addressing a room of mutinous students. “I acknowledge and understand the hurt, frustration, and anger that everyone is feeling. For the sake of our children, we must do better as a district and stay committed to fiscal vitality in the long run.”

BBC:

About 700,000 people in the UK are on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society

Five times as many males as females are diagnosed

Autism is under-diagnosed in females

David Gerard:

Universities have been offering legitimate courses about blockchains for a while now — there’s genuine demand from business students for introductory courses to teach them all about this “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” bafflegab.

The courses are usually relentlessly positive. So if you find yourself anywhere in range of one of these being set up, be sure to include Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain as a key textbook. It’s got a track record as a college text!

At first I thought Woolf University was another of those — but no, it’s much sillier.

Rene Chun:

Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. That’s how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial-recognition scanners—part of the president’s “Toilet Revolution,” which seeks to modernize public toilets. Want more? Forget it. If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal: “Please try again later.”

Sydney Widell:

Where rows of books once rested, shelves are beginning to collect dust in the Science Hall Geography Library. Tom Tews, campus geography librarian, has spent the last three months dismantling the collection he’s maintained over the last 30 years of his career.

The library closed its doors more than half a semester ago, one of the first spaces to be eliminated as part of UW-Madison’s plan to consolidate its library system. Today, at first glance, the space looks roughly the same. The long tables in the reading room are still inviting places to study, and as always, Tews is a familiar presence in his corner office.

But the computers are gone and and most of the furniture has been taken to storage or redistributed across campus. Cardboard boxes full of books are piled on the floor, and in the stacks, the shelves are bare.

“It’s been hard to see that what I did for the last 30 years is not going to continue,” Tews said. “Not that it’s right or wrong, it just is.”

Now that the library is closed, Tews divides his time between the College Library Circulation Desk and curating the digital geography collection. He is working fewer hours, but he said he is alright with the change.

Zeke Faux:

It was a Davos for digital hucksters. One day last June, scammers from around the world gathered for a conference at a renovated 19th century train station in Berlin. All the most popular hustles were there: miracle diet pills, instant muscle builders, brain boosters, male enhancers. The “You Won an iPhone” companies had display booths, and the “Your Computer May Be Infected” folks sent salesmen. Russia was represented by the promoters of a black-mask face peel, and Canada made a showing with bot-infested dating sites.
 
 They’d come to mingle with thousands of affiliate marketers—middlemen who buy online ad space in bulk, run their campaigns, and earn commissions for each sale they generate. Affiliates promote some legitimate businesses, such as Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc., but they’re also behind many of the shady and misleading ads that pollute Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of the internet.

Patrick Wolf

Here are the Newspeak translations:

• “Large body” means “five studies,” selected out of 20 rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations that exist on private school choice in the U.S. The authors claim the commentary relies on six studies but one of the supposed studies is a commentary by Mark Dynarski and Austin Nichols that discusses the other actual studies. So “six”, in Newspeak, means “five,” which somehow is a “large body.” Got it?

• “All of which” means “some of which,” as the multi-year Louisiana study cited (of which I am co-author) reports no significant achievement impacts of the program after three years and the Indiana study cited reports that the initial negative results of that program turn positive in reading by year four.

• “Worse than their peers in public school” is incorrect for all five studies. For the Louisiana and DC studies, the analyses compare students who won a voucher lottery to students who lost a voucher lottery. In both places, some of the students who lost lotteries enrolled in private schools anyway but remained in the randomized control group for purposes of calculating the effects of the program. Even more of the control group members attended high-performing public charter schools in their communities after losing the lottery. True, charter schools are “public” schools, but they are special kinds of public schools and should be described as such (at least in Oldspeak). In the Indiana study, the most rigorous program estimates come from an individual fixed-effects analysis, where the achievement gains of students while in the voucher program are compared to their achievement gains when not in the program. They are not compared to their peers but to themselves. The Ohio study matched EdChoice students with descriptively similar public school students at baseline and kept every student in their original group after that, regardless of who in either group actually attended private or public schools. These studies are rigorous precisely because they do not simply compare voucher students with “their peers in public school.”

• “Especially in math” means “almost exclusively in math.” The only lasting negative reading effect in this selective set of voucher studies comes from the Ohio study. The DC study, which is the focus of the commentary, only observes negative effects in math.

The report, from the Center for American Progress.

Monmouth University (PDF):

A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy. The Monmouth University Poll also finds a large bipartisan majority who
feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials. Americans of color on the center and left and NRA members on the right are among those most worried about the reach of government prying into average citizens’ lives.

Just over half of the public is either very worried (23%) or somewhat worried (30%) about the U.S. government monitoring their activities and invading their privacy. There are no significant partisan differences – 57% of independents, 51% of Republicans, and 50% of Democrats are at least somewhat worried the federal government is monitoring their activities. Another 24% of the American public are nottoo worried and 22% are not at all worried

BBC:

All the times we’ve predicted, wrongly, how technology will change our lives.

Matthew Hansen:

Roy Jones says he got no training on how to handle issues that might inflame the Chinese government. “My job isn’t to decide whether Tibet is a country. I’m a customer care rep in Omaha, Nebraska,” he said.

Emily Richmond:

School choice is one of the most contentious issues in K-12 education today. But it’s hardly an American invention. Sarah Butrymowicz of The Hechinger Report recently traveled to New Zealand, Sweden, and France to look at how school choice plays out, and whether there are lessons for the U.S. system. Why is New Zealand considered a “school choice utopia,” and how is its open enrollment policy driving programming and competition among local campuses? Sweden’s “free schools” are similar to what U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has said she envisions in a voucher program — but is that contributing to the Scandinavian country’s steady slide on international assessments? And in France, a longstanding reliance on funneling public dollars to private schools offers insights into the challenge of providing equitable education to less-affluent families. Butrymowicz, an EWA Reporting Fellow, discusses the research on school choice programs abroad, as well as tips and questions for covering the issue stateside.

Andy Devine:

A group of Milwaukee Public School students marched into Thursday night’s school board meeting demanding racial equity.

These students want to call attention to a report from the Department of Education that revealed racial disparities when it comes to discipline at Milwaukee public schools.

MPS junior Joya Headley led the march at the MPS administration building and says she’s witnessed what she calls discriminatory discipline first hand within MPS schools.

“I have seen many students get suspended for minor offenses like talking back or even security guards called to the classroom because a teacher can’t handle a situation in the classroom,” Headley said.

Lindsay Whitehurst:

So-called free-range parenting will soon be the law of the land in Utah after the governor signed what appears to be the country’s first measure to formally legalize allowing kids to do things on their own to foster self-sufficiency.

The bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert announced Friday that he’d signed, specifies that it isn’t neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car. The law takes effect May 8.

Utah’s law is the first in the country, said Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term free-range parent. A records search by the National Conference of State Legislatures didn’t turn up any similar legislation in other states.

Utah lawmakers said they were prompted to pass the law after seeing other states where parents had been investigated and in some cases had their children temporarily removed when people reported seeing kids p

Karen D’Souza:

California dreamin’? Flying in the face of traditional wisdom that we live on the best coast comes a stinging new U.S. News & World Report study that says we have the worst quality of life in the nation.

The coveted Best States ranking is part of an annual study that scores all 50 states on eight categories — health care, education, economy, opportunity, infrastructure, crime and corrections, fiscal stability and the most important of all for most of us, quality of life.

Sadly, Californians are in the pits by this life-quality metric, with the Golden State taking last place at No. 50. North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and South Dakota all kicked our butt in that category, according to this study.

Kashmir Hill:

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mars, you’ve likely heard about a little scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica got its hands on millions of people’s Facebook likes in 2014 by getting an academic, Aleksander Kogan, to design an app with a personality test that hoovered up data from the 250,000 or so Facebook users that took it, as well as from their millions of friends. Cambridge Analytica supposedly used all those likes combined with the magic of big data to put Donald Trump in the White House.

Now that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced in response to this a plan to “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014,” it’s a good time to look more closely at the project that inspired Kogan and Cambridge Analytica. This whole thing wasn’t their idea, after all; they copied it from the University of Cambridge, where Kogan had been a lecturer. The U.K. university’s psychometrics department had its own personality test which had been hoovering up Facebook users’ data since 2007, but, as the New York Times reported, and Kogan recently confirmed in an email, it refused to sell the dataset to the entity that became Cambridge Analytica (inspiring them to replicate the experiment).

Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin:

In a little-noticed paper issued in 2006 by the London office of one of the company’s consulting arms, executives praised boomers’ experience, but described them as “gray hairs” and “old heads.” While recognizing that older workers were important to high-tech employers such as IBM, it concluded that “successor generations … are generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
The paper was subsequently cited in an age discrimination lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania. Before the complaint was settled last year, the plaintiffs alleged in a filing: “IBM’s Boomer employees — being labeled by IBM’s own research as uncollaborative, skeptical of leadership, technologically unsophisticated, less innovative and generally out of touch with IBM’s brand, customers and objectives — were shown the door in droves.”
By the time IBM’s current CEO, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, took over in 2012, the company had shifted its personnel focus to millennials.
Rometty launched a major overhaul that aimed to make IBM a major player in the emerging technologies of cloud services, big data analytics, mobile, security and social media, or what came to be known inside as CAMS.
At the same time, she sought to sharply increase hiring of people born after 1980.

OSEP Ideas that Work:

Welcome to the 2018 OSEP Symposia Series. This year, we are discussing the importance of individualized education programs (IEPs) and the important role that high-quality IEPs play in ensuring that each child with a disability can be successful. The three symposia are interconnected. First, we will lay the policy and research foundation to establish a common understanding and set of principles. Then, we will explore what high-quality IEPs mean in practice. Specifically, we will delve into what teachers and leaders need to develop and implement high-quality IEPs, and how we can support these needs. Finally, we will learn about how education agencies, families, and other stakeholders are working together to develop and implement high-quality IEPs.

The first symposium, scheduled for April 9, 2018, is titled High Expectations and Appropriate Supports: The Importance of IEPs. During this presentation you will hear from experts, including current OSEP grantees, on what we know about:

Karen Rivedal:

A tendency by staff to let the small stuff slide — perhaps due to fears of appearing racist — is only contributing to bigger disciplinary problems down the line in Madison public high schools, Superintendent Jen Cheatham said.

As the Madison School District grapples with a rise in suspensions, fights and classroom disruption that officials say is caused disproportionately by minority students, this “failure to warn,” she said, can be the first step on a slippery slope of escalating bad behavior that ultimately harms misbehaving students as much as anyone else.

“We’ve got this issue of students being able to kind of get away with some of the small things and then all of a sudden they escalate into things that will result in suspendable behaviors,” Cheatham said. “I hear everyone (citing concerns about) the bigger behaviors, the students who desperately need our intervention. But we also have to figure out how to address the smaller behaviors.”

Related:

Gangs and school violence forum.

Madison spends more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Terrence Jeffrey:

State and local governments collected a record $404,509,000,000 in individual income taxes in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. Before 2017, the greatest level of individual income tax revenues collected by state and local governments occurred in 2015, when those governments collected $399,933,270,000 in individual income taxes (in constant 2017 dollars converted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator).

Kevin Drum:

So what do the authors conclude?

The black-white gap is almost entirely among men. On a wide variety of measures—wages, college education, etc.—black and white women have similar levels of intergenerational mobility.

Among families with similar incomes, family characteristics such as marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap.

The same is true for differences in ability.

The gap is mostly environmental:

Boys who grow up in certain neighborhoods—those with low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias among whites, and high rates of father presence among low-income blacks—show much smaller gaps. Black boys who move to such areas at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrating that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in environment.

As a result of this research, the authors suggest that interventions aimed at improving the conditions of a single generation won’t be very effective. The same is true of policies that focus on reducing patterns of residential segregation. The key is achieving racial integration within neighborhoods:

Related: They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine, not!

Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Private schools and charter schools that educate more than a third of the city’s children are showing general stability and, in notable cases, growth, even as they are having increased problems dealing positively with MPS.

Both the charter schools (publicly funded but operating outside of the conventional MPS system) and the private schools that participate in the publicly-funded voucher program have issues to deal with. But their ships are sailing forward.

Elliot Harmon:

In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad Law

Today was a dark day for the Internet.

The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. As lobbyists and members of Congress applaud themselves for enacting a law tackling the problem of trafficking, let’s be clear: Congress just made trafficking victims less safe, not more.

The version of FOSTA that just passed the Senate combined an earlier version of FOSTA (what we call FOSTA 2.0) with the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693). The history of SESTA/FOSTA—a bad bill that turned into a worse bill and then was rushed through votes in both houses of Congress—is a story about Congress’ failure to see that its good intentions can result in bad law. It’s a story of Congress’ failure to listen to the constituents who’d be most affected by the laws it passed. It’s also the story of some players in the tech sector choosing to settle for compromises and half-wins that will put ordinary people in danger.

William Davies:

There is at least one certainty where Cambridge Analytica is concerned. If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.

The villains of the piece would no doubt agree with this assessment, but not for very plausible reasons. The exposé conducted by Channel 4 News, with the support of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered to Trump thanks to micro-targeted advertising and some especially persuasive messaging. ‘Our data informed all the strategy,’ Nix says, with the swagger of an estate agent reporting that demand for period features is red-hot right now.

Related: Obama, Facebook (& Google) and Trump.

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association is a big business, with market advantages that are the envy of other big businesses. It has a jurisdictional agreement with its only potential rival, the American Federation of Teachers, which keeps competition for members at a bare minimum. It is exempt from antitrust laws, and in 22 states can compel payments from customers who never asked for its services.

Oh, and almost all of its income is tax-exempt.

That tax exemption does come with obligations, one of which is to file an annual financial disclosure report with the Internal Revenue Service detailing its income and expenditures. According to those filings, NEA and its state affiliates collected a combined $1.6 billion in revenue during the 2015-16 school year, an $8.4 million increase over the previous year.

More money would normally be good news for the union, but it comes with more problems. As revenues have increased, NEA and its affiliates have promised its own employees more and better benefits. Now those future obligations are devouring an increasingly larger share of their current revenue.

Daniel Willingham:

I’m the father of a child who has a rare chromosomal disorder, trisomy-18. It affects about one in 5,000 births and leaves children with profound mental and physical disabilities. Life expectancy is harrowingly brief; some 90% of affected infants don’t see their first birthday.

There are many reasons why it’s important for people to know about this syndrome — to encourage more research, advance better policies for families coping with it, to “raise awareness.” But when I consider my daughter Esprit, I’m interested in a specific kind of awareness, the kind that helps people feel comfortable interacting with her. Medical details and statistics don’t put anyone at ease around a severely disabled child. But a parent’s perspective might.

Chances are, you and your children will encounter Esprit or a child who is similarly disabled at a store, or in a park. Your child will be struck by Esprit’s appearance. Typical for trisomy-18 kids, her head is small, her eyelids droop and her ears are low-set. Add the wheelchair and the braces on her feet and midsection, and you’ve got quite a sight. Older children pointedly refrain from staring (usually with a furtive peek or two), but younger children gape uninhibitedly. Embarrassed parents will try to distract their child, or drag him away, probably delivering a “don’t stare” lecture once out of sight. But you can’t blame a 4-year-old for staring at a child who looks different. His curiosity is natural.

Andrew Zimbalist:

The FBI has been investigating a subterranean recruiting scandal in college basketball for the past two years. The most successful teams in the country are in the agency’s cross hairs, and Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, is shocked that there is gambling in his establishment.

Mr. Emmert says that if the claims of underground recruiting networks and impermissible benefits to athletes are true, he will initiate systemic change. The NCAA is, he says, wedded to the principle of amateurism. Say what?

More than any other organization, the NCAA has confused and obfuscated the meaning of amateurism. In its early years, the NCAA, which was founded in 1906, averred that amateurism in college sports meant athletes could get no remuneration or material benefit from playing.

Amy Wax:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms – all the furor and clamor of institutional politics

Related: A ‘Dubious Expediency’: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students :

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors. If, as the evidence indicates, the effects of race-preferential admissions policies are exactly the opposite of what was originally intended, it is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to support them.

Cori O’Connor Petersen and Libby Sobic:

This is shocking and should send chills down the spines of state lawmakers in Madison. Republicans in Madison have worked tirelessly to roll back the administrative state. Yet, as DPI indicates, at least one state agency is finding a way to work around state law by relying on federal law. This raises significant federalism concerns.

If the education agency can get away with reporting to the federal government, what will prevent other agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources or the Department of Transportation from circumventing Wisconsin state law?

The Wisconsin agency also overstepped the rulemaking process in other ways. The guidelines for promulgating a rule require the agency to compare its rule to similar ones in its four neighboring states. Instead, DPI simply provided a paragraph explaining state requirements to comply with federal law.

A plain language analysis of what the rule-change means is another requirement. Presumably, this requirement is meant to provide curious legislators and voters with an understanding of the rule, and the tasks their tax dollars go to support. But in place of the analysis, DPI only provides a one-sentence explanation on the changes to the current administrative rule.

DPI is the agency responsible for overseeing K-12 education in Wisconsin. Everything from educator licensing to school lunches and programs such as English learners and school choice are in the agency’s wheelhouse. The agency holds vast responsibility and in a democratic government, responsibility must come with checks and balances, which the rule-making process is designed to ensure.

So why does DPI think it can exercise this authority? Perhaps it’s that DPI is directed by a state superintendent who is elected every four years in an off election year in the spring. And this has produced superintendents, such as Tony Evers, who has a track record of being hostile to education reform and the rule of law. All other agencies are led by governor-appointed officials. But a difference in agency leadership doesn’t excuse DPI from the rule-making process to which other agencies adhere very closely. Like other agencies, DPI is subject to laws passed by the state legislature.

Diane Ravitch:

He writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.

:

Michael C. Zwaagstra March 13, 2018

Walk into an elementary school classroom and you will probably see a lot of books on the shelf. Take a closer look and you will often find a coloured dot, a number, or a letter on each book’s spine. Those dots, numbers, and letters show the reading level of each book.

Books are assigned these levels so students choose books that will challenge them without being too difficult for them. Instead of having the entire class read the same book, students pick books from their designated reading levels. Levelled libraries make it possible for students to find the best books to read. At least that is the theory, but the reality may be somewhat different.

In order for students to read a text effectively they must be able to do two things—decode the individual words and comprehend the sentences and paragraphs. Too often we focus on how students decode words (the ongoing phonics vs. whole language debate), but in that debate we neglect the importance of reading comprehension. A student may be able to “read” every word on a page and yet not understand what the text actually means.

I used to be an elementary school teacher so I remember doing running records with my students to assess their reading levels. However, it didn’t take long before I noticed that my students performed much better on the comprehension questions after reading an article about a sports game than after reading an article about Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian medical doctor who went to China in the early twentieth century, even though both articles were officially at the same reading level. The question is “Why?”

The problem with reading levels is they focus on quantitative factors such as word complexity and sentence length but fail to account for the important connection between specific content knowledge and reading comprehension. A student may be able to decode every single word in an article about Dr. Norman Bethune, but still be clueless about the article’s meaning since they know virtually nothing about Communism, the Second Sino-Japanese War, or blood transfusions.

In contrast, most students will breeze through an article about a hockey game because they already know how the game works. They have no difficulty understanding phrases like “high-sticking,” “pulling the goalie,” and “killing a penalty.” However, imagine how hard it would be for someone who had never heard of ice hockey before to understand an article that used these phrases. Prior knowledge about this Canadian game is actually more important to reading comprehension than the length and complexity of the words and sentences in the article.

Thus, it is clear that reading levels by themselves do a very poor job of matching students with the proper books to read. In fact, that was the finding of a recent peer-reviewed research study that appeared in the April 2018 edition of Reading and Writing. In this study, James W. Cunningham, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, and Heidi Anne Mesmer examined two of the most widely used reading level classification systems, the Lexile Framework and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level Formula.

Both of these systems have the aura of precision because it is relatively easy to calculate the average number of syllables in words, mean sentence length, and word frequencies. However, precision does not guarantee validity, particularly when it comes to reading comprehension. Cunningham, Hiebert, and Mesmer, in fact, found that “these two text tools may lack adequate validity for their current uses in educational settings.”

By placing reading level stickers on their classroom library books, teachers may be inadvertently preventing students from reading the books that would benefit them the most. Students who know a lot about a particular topic can read almost any book about it, no matter its assigned reading level. Conversely, students who know little about a topic will struggle with books at even the simplest reading levels.

This means that schools must place a much stronger emphasis on the acquisition of subject-specific content knowledge, particularly in the early grades when students are building up their general knowledge base. Instead of spending hours working on generic reading comprehension “strategies”, students should learn as many facts as possible about science, history, and the world we live in today. Time spent classifying books into reading levels would be much better spent building up the students’ background knowledge.

The more knowledge students acquire, the more they will be able to learn in the future. This is how we can help our students become stronger readers and gain a better understanding of the world in which we live.

Will Fitzhugh is founder and editor of The Concord Review, which publishes outstanding historical essays by high school students. I have long been an admirer of the publication and of Will for sustaining it without support from any major foundations, which are too engaged in reinventing the schools rather than supporting the work of excellent history students and teachers. You can subscribe by contacting him at fitzhugh@tcr.org.

He writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.

The dominance of English teachers over reading and writing in our schools has long meant that the great majority of our high school graduates have never been asked to read one complete History book in their academic careers.

Good English teachers do a fine job of teaching novels and personal and creative writing, but it is a Common Core mistake to expect them to teach the History in which they have little or no academic background. Treating History as contextless “text” is not a solution to this problem.

The ignorance of History among our high school graduates is a standing joke to those who think it is funny, and NAEP has found that only about 18% know enough to pass the U.S. citizenship exam.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch writes that: “In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors in History: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon [Anabasis], Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin.”

We may no longer imagine that many of our high school students will read their History in Latin, but we should expect that somehow they may be liberated from the deeply irresponsible Common Core curriculum that, in restricting the study of the past to the literary analysis of “texts,” essentially removes as much actual History from our schools as it possibly can.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Joanne Jacobs:

Who’s that man? Why is the crowd gathered? Teachers aren’t supposed to say.

Studying texts, without context, is no way to learn history, writes Will Fitzhugh on Diane Ravitch’s blog. But it’s the Common Core way.

A notorious lesson called for teaching the Gettysburg Address without discussing the Civil War. Teachers were told:

Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset. It may make sense to notify students that the short text is thought to be difficult and they are not expected to understand it fully on a first reading—that they can expect to struggle. Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.

Fitzhugh created The Concord Review, which publishes historical essays by high school students. Increasingly, he sees history being taught as a literacy exercise, often by English teachers who don’t know much history.

Sandra Stotsky recently spoke to California English teachers, who were frustrated by the Common Core requirement to teach historical documents. They didn’t think they had the background to do it well. Meanwhile, history teachers are asked to teach informational texts that aren’t historical, writes Stotsky.

In the comments, Bill Honig, former superintendent of public instruction in California, praises the state’s history framework.

Another commenter, “Ponderosa,” disagrees, calling the framework “an indigestible mishmash of high-falutin’ gobbledygook” that “most teachers probably ignore.”

From the county-sponsored training workshop I’ve been to, it seems the dominant interpretation is have kids do “inquiry.” What this boils down to is: sage off the stage. Give kids a question and have them try to answer it using texts you give them. Gaining historical knowledge is not the object. The aim is to have kids “grapple” (this word was used over and over) with the text. The aim is to have kids talk to each other (the presenter called student talk “sacred”). Somehow all this grappling and talking is supposed to be beneficial, and of course there is probably some benefit. But I can tell you that if the aim is to get kids to learn history, this is not the best approach. Nothing beats lucid direct instruction for that. I guarantee you that this approach will LOWER the already low level of historical literacy among our students.

I remember learning in Sunday school that the Israelites were forced by Pharoah to make bricks, but not given straw. You need straw to hold the bricks together. Our text-grappling students, unprivileged by background knowledge, are going to have trouble building anything with those soggy lumps of clay.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Andrew Van Dam:

The decrease of birthrates in countries where we operate could negatively affect our business. Most of our end-customers are newborns and children and, as a result, our revenue are dependent on the birthrates in countries where we operate. In recent years, many countries’ birthrates have dropped or stagnated as their population ages, and education and income levels increase. A continued and significant decline in the number of newborns and children in these countries could have a material adverse effect on our operating results.

It may not have been the biggest existential threat confronting Geoffrey the Giraffe (the store’s mascot), but it’s the one with the broadest implications outside of the worlds of toys and malls.

Measured as a share of overall population, U.S. births have fallen steadily since the Great Recession. They hit their lowest point on record in 2016 — the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has comparable data.

Even adjusted for the aging population and declining share of women of childbearing age, U.S. fertility rates are at all-time lows.

That’s problematic for Toys R Us, which also operates the Babies R Us stores. The company claims in its annual report that its income is linked to birthrates, and it appears to be right.

Eva Moskovitz:

Success Academy is reinventing the American high school. Expanding on our proven approach to elementary and middle school, we provide rigorous and exciting academics, specialized opportunities for talent and leadership development, and comprehensive support for college admissions and persistence.

John Davis:

Some educators in western Wisconsin aren’t completely sold yet on changes to the state’s teacher licensing, implemented in part to address a shortage of teachers.

But one rural school superintendent said the new system should work if schools maintain control over personnel decisions.

Whitehall School Superintendent Mike Beighley said he generally supports the licensing changes because of the flexibility they could provide to rural school districts.

“I can think of a small handful of folks I’ve interacted with in the past few years that don’t have education backgrounds, but they would make wonderful educators based on their knowledge, compassion, ability to learn and willingness to engage,” he said. “I can think of some folks who’ve been through teacher training programs that don’t have those skills, but (they’ve) met the requirements.”

Michael J. Petrilli:

Since 2002, federal law has conditioned Title I funding on states’ participation in the biannual administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math and reading in grades four and eight. This is a boon to us policy wonks because we can study the progress (or lack thereof) of individual states and use sophisticated research methodologies to relate score changes to differences in education policies or practices. That’s the approach that allowed Tom Dee and Brian Jacob, for example, to inform us that NCLB-style accountability likely boosted math achievement in the 2000s.

Over the years, NAEP has also made stars out of leading states and their governors or education leaders, and has galvanized reformers to try to learn from their successes. It started with North Carolina and Texas, which saw stratospheric increases in the 1990s, especially in math, and across all racial groups. Then it was Jeb Bush’s moment in the sun, as Florida’s scores climbed quickly from the late-1990s through the 2000s, with particular progress for black and Hispanic youngsters. Delaware, Minnesota, and even New York have also produced some big improvements at various times. And let us not forget the Massachusetts Miracle.