Rep Tim Ryan (Ohio):

Salad bars are one of the easiest ways for schools to meet nutrition standards. They empower students to try new fruits and vegetables and have been shown to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. Combined, these efforts create the conditions for students to learn that carrots can be a substitute for candy bars and that it’s better to eat some hot peppers instead of a hot pocket.

My efforts are based on programs that I have seen up close and in person, like the Eatiquette program in Philadelphia where students participate in preparing, serving and cleaning up after the meal. They pass food around and engage in conversations to help them develop the pro-social skills future employers are looking for. Not only do these nutrition education programs benefit students by decreasing the number of overweight youth and increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables they are eating, they also help students develop healthy eating habits so that they can do better in school because they are more energized and alert. Programs like this have been shown to improve the overall health of the student body and will create the opportunity to develop a healthier generation.

When 20 percent of school-aged children are obese and our country is losing over $240 billion in diabetes related costs, we have to prioritize our investments and policy to improve student health and wellness. Congress must act now so our children can succeed.

Data?

Maryanne Demasi,Robert H Lustig and Aseem Malhotra

Emerging evidence shows that insulin resistance is the most important predictor of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Aggressive lowering of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) has been the cornerstone of preventative cardiology for decades. Statins are widely used as the go-to solution for the prevention of heart disease owing to their ability to slash LDL-C levels, a ‘surrogate marker’ of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Indeed, statins are one of the most widely prescribed class of drugs in the world. But this phenomenon begs two questions: is the enthusiasm for aggressive lowering of LDL-C justified; and is pharmacotherapy superior to lifestyle intervention?

Over the years, medical guidelines have continually expanded the number of individuals for whom statin therapy is recommended. Proponents argue that statins are ‘life-savers’ and that ‘people will die’ if they discontinue their medicine[1],[2]. Prominent researchers from reputable universities have declared that ‘everyone over 50’ should be on a statin to reduce their risk of CVD and that even children with high LDL-C as young as 8 years should be afforded statin therapy[3].

Mike Antonucci:

I’m often asked why teacher unions skew so heavily towards the Democratic Party. This isn’t a mystery. Liberals are more active in the union, and though 12 years have passed since I wrote The NEA Pyramid, I believe it is still true that the larger a teacher union is, the more likely its leaders are to be liberal. If the overwhelming majority of decision-makers are Democrats, they are going to support Democratic policies and donate PAC money to Democrats. To expect them to support Republicans according to the percentage of Republican union members is naive.

Political leanings aside, the share of members who are actively involved in union activities is small. The last NEA survey I saw reported only 15 percent were “quite a bit” or “a great deal” involved. A full 36 percent were “not at all” involved.

Nico Dosenbach:

As a society, we could do a lot more for the safety of our children if we focused on accident prevention instead of being consumed by irrational fears.

I am a child neurologist and neuroscientist, as well as the parent of a 4-year-old and a 19-month-old. My research and patient care revolve around childhood brain injury and how to prevent it.

Since having kids, I have noticed that my parenting concerns are strikingly different from those of many other parents. My kids get to eat loads of candy. They get to stay up late if they want to. They’re allowed to watch cartoons till they’ve had their fill. I don’t care if they use swear words. When they fall down, I don’t pick them up. If they’re eating dirt, I don’t stop them. I don’t really care if they get bitten by other kids at daycare – but if they do, I’d like them to bite back.

Madhumita Murgia:

A few weeks ago, a report on the impact of social media on British children’s mental health caught my eye. In a survey of 1,500 young people across the UK, the Royal Society for Public Health explored how platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook stoked anxiety, depression and poor sleep in children.

The survey grabbed my attention because, over the past few months, I’ve been talking to schoolchildren and young teens about their digital lives in order to better understand what it means to be born into an online world.

Young people are tech insiders, but in a very different sense from those I am used to interviewing. They are social-media critics, digital-content connoisseurs, mobile natives. They aren’t loyal to the big technology giants such as Facebook or Microsoft. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of YouTube’s catalogue and Snapchat shortcuts, and are the harshest critics and earliest adopters of new consumer apps.

Tom Simonite::

ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER record-breaking AI research study released by Google—this time with results that are a reminder of a crucial business dynamic of the current AI boom. The ecosystem of tech companies that consumers and the economy increasingly depend on is traditionally said to be kept innovative and un-monopolistic by disruption, the process whereby smaller companies upend larger ones. But when competition in tech depends on machine learning systems powered by huge stockpiles of data, slaying a tech giant may be harder than ever.
Google’s new paper, released as a preprint Monday, describes an expensive collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. Their experiments on image recognition tied up 50 powerful graphics processors for two solid months, and used an unprecedentedly huge collection of 300 million labeled images (much work in image recognition uses a standard collection of just 1 million images). The project was designed to test whether it’s possible to get more accurate image recognition not by tweaking the design of existing algorithms but just by feeding them much, much more data.

Lucy Kellaway:

The first example I can find comes from 1994 when I wrote an article mocking ugly business jargon, arguing that language had got so stupid that the pendulum must soon swing back and plain talking about business would shortly reassert itself. The words I objected to back then? Global, downsize, marketplace and worst of all, the mathematically nonsensical “110% committed”.

What an innocent age that was.

Fast forward to July 2017, and an entrepreneur sits down to write a blog post about his company. “We are focused 1,000,000% on positive, move forward, actionable efforts to help facilitate change.” When someone sent me this bilge last week, I read it and shrugged.

Over the past two decades, two things have happened. Business bullshit has got a million% more bullshitty, and I’ve stopped predicting a correction in the marketplace. I’m 110% sure there won’t be one.

Concord Coalition:

According to the trustees, the general revenue subsidies for Social Security and Medicare will total $311 billion in 2017 — $27 billion for Social Security and $284 billion for Medicare. By 2027, the general revenue subsidy for both programs combined jumps to $971 billion.

The rising costs can be attributed to large numbers of retiring baby boomers, the lengthening American lifespan, and the continuing growth of health care costs. All this means the government must pay more each year just to provide the same level of services to more beneficiaries.

The trustees’ projections on how long the Medicare and Social Security trust funds will remain solvent often receive considerable public attention. Today’s reports say the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted in 2034, the same as last year’s report, while Medicare’s Hospital Insurance fund will be exhausted in 2029, one year later than projected last year.

It is important to remember, however, that the trust funds are merely internal government accounting mechanisms that do not provide meaningful information about these two programs’ sustainability as their growth puts increasing pressure on the overall federal budget.

Greg Toppo:

Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.

That’s right: Nearly half of America’s Class of 2016 are A students. Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale — suggesting that those A’s on report cards might be fool’s gold.

The new findings come courtesy of two researchers: Michael Hurwitz of the College Board, the folks who bring you the SAT; and Jason Lee, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education.

Hurwitz called the rise of the A average “really stunning.”

The revelation comes as the USA’s public high schools graduate a record number of students: The average high school graduation rate now tops 83%, according to federal statistics.

Related: When A stands for average.

Middle school report cards. deja vu

Robbie Allen::

Recently, I wrote about how the future job prospects for my two-year-old son may not be the rosiest. Also, I don’t have the best opinion about the future of our higher education system even though I decided to go back to get my third post-undergraduate degree. That’s led me to rethink how to position the future, post-high school world to my kids.

Entrepre-what?
The first time I heard the word entrepreneur was after I left college. My father worked in manufacturing at AT&T (and Lucent) for thirty years. My mom worked at a hosiery plant. Needless to say, we didn’t have a very entrepreneurial family. I was the first person in my family to go to a four-year college. In my family, you graduated high school (or not — my father made it to 10th grade), get a job at the local plant down, and wait for retirement.

Caitlin Emma::

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she is “returning” the Office for Civil Rights “to its role as a neutral, impartial, investigative agency.”

In a July 11 letter to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, DeVos asserted that the department’s civil rights arm under the Obama administration “had descended into a pattern of overreaching, of setting out to punish and embarrass institutions rather than work with them to correct civil rights violations and of ignoring public input prior to issuing new rules.”

As part of the changes she is implementing, the civil rights office would no longer issue “new regulations via administrative fiat,” as the Obama administration did, she wrote.

DeVos’ letter, which lays out a far less activist philosophy for the civil rights office, came in response to a letter sent late last month by 34 Senate Democrats, who blasted her for a series of actions they said had “diminished” civil rights enforcement. The lawmakers asked DeVos for a host of information by July 11, including a list of civil rights investigations that have been closed or dismissed since the Trump administration began. DeVos didn’t provide any of the information in her response.

Murray sent DeVos another letter on Friday repeating her request for the information. She did not address DeVos’ assertions about the actions taken by the Obama-era civil rights office.

DeVos wrote that the agency is “unwavering in its commitment” to defend students’ civil rights. But during the Obama administration, the office “all too often handled individual complaints as evidence of systematic institutional violations,” she wrote. Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, told the office’s regional directors in June to stop doing just that.

Daniel Drezner::

Based on my own conversations, it would seem that most traditional D.C. wonks look at most of the Trump family and see a bunch of wealthy, not-very-bright boors who do déclassé things like eat their steaks well-done and with ketchup. Indeed, there is a whole conservative genre defending the Trumps for some of their gauche tendencies. Most of the Trumps gleefully ignore the cultural codes that Brooks describes, because they are rich enough to not care.

Then we get to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the narrative switches.

The rest of the Trumps might scream bridge and tunnel, but Jared and Ivanka have undeniably mastered the cultural codes of the educated class. It is hard to read a profile of either of them without words like “polished” or “poised” appearing.

Take the opening sentences to Jill Filipovic’s Politico essay from May: “Ivanka Trump is the poised, polished face of a chaotic White House, a bright young mother who many suspect is a voice of reason and moderation among the Steve Bannon acolytes in the West Wing, whispering socially liberal values in her daddy’s ear.” Look at the Post’s Style Section profile of Ivanka from this month: “Ivanka Trump’s office: clean, white, quiet. A zone of punctual start times and promptly offered water bottles, and a conference table at which she conducts meetings. A short, winding walk away from her father’s Oval Office downstairs.” Or as T.A. Frank noted in Vanity Fair, “let’s agree that one of the finest qualities of Jared Kushner is his tailoring. The fit is so good. Even with bespoke work, that’s hard to achieve.”

Cal Flyn:

Maryam Mirzakhani did not enjoy mathematics to begin with. She dreamed of being an author or politician, but as a top student at her all-girls school in Tehran she was still disappointed when her first-year maths exam went poorly. Her teacher believed her – wrongly – to have no particular affinity with the subject.

Soon that would all change. “My first memory of mathematics is probably the time [my brother] told me about the problem of adding numbers from 1 to 100,” she recalled later. This was the story of Carl Gauss, the 18th-century genius whose schoolteacher set him this problem as a timewasting exercise – only for his precocious pupil to calculate the answer in a matter of seconds.

The obvious solution is simple but slow: 1+2+3+4. Gauss’s solution is quicker to execute, and far more cunning. It goes like this: divide the numbers into two groups: from 1 to 50, and from 51 to 100. Then, add them together in pairs, starting with the lowest (1) and the highest (100), and working inwards (2+99, 3+98, and so on). There are 50 pairs; the sum of each pair is 101; the answer is 5050. “That was the first time I enjoyed a beautiful solution,” Mirzakhani told the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2008.

John Rapley:

Although Britain has an established church, few of us today pay it much mind. We follow an even more powerful religion, around which we have oriented our lives: economics. Think about it. Economics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle”. And, like the old religions it has displaced, it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.

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Over time, successive economists slid into the role we had removed from the churchmen: giving us guidance on how to reach a promised land of material abundance and endless contentment. For a long time, they seemed to deliver on that promise, succeeding in a way few other religions had ever done, our incomes rising thousands of times over and delivering a cornucopia bursting with new inventions, cures and delights.

John Fensterwald:

The latest attempt in the Legislature to lengthen the probation period for new teachers has stalled for the year. On Wednesday, the author of a bill to add an optional extra probationary year pulled her bill amid the surprise emergence of a competing bill by Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction.

Thurmond’s Assembly Bill 1164 adopts the position of the California Teachers Association, which is expected to support his candidacy, and appeared last week as an alternative to a bill by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego. Her bill would extend the standard two-year probation to a third year for those teachers “on the bubble,” showing potential but needing further help and supervision. Thurmond’s bill also would permit a third probationary year, but contains conditions and restrictions, advocated by the teachers’ unions but criticized by school districts, that aren’t in Weber’s bill.

Amber walker:

Currently, I am the education specialist for The Road Home. Before, I was a housing case manager, but I spent a half of my time with homeless families trying to connect them to the schools, advocating for their kids in the schools, and helping them find resources in the neighborhood, community centers and other programs around the city. Other case managers were also doing a lot of work around education, too.

I just thought it would be great if we worked to have a holistic approach to end homelessness so our clients could have someone who navigated education full-time and be able to answer their questions.

I go to meetings (at schools) with parents, and if a parent can’t make it, they usually give me a release of information to go on their behalf. Attending meetings takes away a lot of time from a parent’s work day, especially if they don’t have flexible schedules. I hear a lot of educators thinking parents don’t want to be involved, but the reality is we don’t live in a society where every parent has a flexible schedule.

Katie DuPere:

Shady businesses, you’re on notice. This robot lawyer is coming after you if you play dirty.

Noted legal aid chatbot DoNotPay just announced a massive expansion, which will help users tackle issues in 1,000 legal areas entirely for free. The new features, which launched on Wednesday, cover consumer and workplace rights, and will be available in all 50 states and the UK.

Matthew Taylor::

The work of this Review is based on a single overriding ambition: All work in the UK economy should be fair and decent with realistic scope for development and fulfilment. Good work matters for several reasons: • Because, despite the important contribution of the living wage and the benefit system, fairness demands that we ensure people, particularly those on lower incomes, have routes to progress in work, have the opportunity to boost their earning power, and are treated with respect and decency at work. • Because, while having employment is itself vital to people’s health and well-being, the quality of people’s work is also a major factor in helping people to stay healthy and happy, something which benefits them and serves the wider public interest.• Because better designed work that gets the best out of people can make an important contribution to tackling our complex challenge of low productivity.

Tyler Cowen:The pioneer in robot education so far is, not surprisingly, Singapore. The city-state has begun experiments with robotic aides at the kindergarten level, mostly as instructor aides and for reading stories and also teaching social interactions. In the U.K., researchers have developed a robot to help autistic children better learn how to interact with their peers.

I can imagine robots helping non-English-speaking children make the transition to bilingualism. Or how about using robots in Asian classrooms where the teachers themselves do not know enough English to teach the language effectively?

A big debate today is how we can teach ourselves to work with artificial intelligence, so as to prevent eventual widespread technological unemployment. Exposing children to robots early, and having them grow accustomed to human-machine interaction, is one path toward this important goal.

In a recent Financial Times interview, Sherry Turkle, a professor of social psychology at MIT, and a leading expert on cyber interactions, criticized robot education. “The robot can never be in an authentic relationship," she said. "Why should we normalize what is false and in the realm of [a] pretend relationship from the start?” She’s opposed to robot companions more generally, again for their artificiality.

Alina Adams:

Last week, New York City schools received two pieces of contradictory news, which made for an interesting contrast in how teachers are viewed.

In the first, the Department of Education will now require principals to staff vacancies with teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve, also known as “the rubber room,” where pedagogues who have been let go from previous positions and haven’t managed to find another are paid their full salary to sit and do nothing because they cannot be fired, even in cases of misconduct or incompetence.

In the second, SUNY proposed regulations that would allow some charter schools to certify their own teachers, rather than requiring Education Master’s degrees and certification exams, the way that traditional public schools do.

The response to the latter was predictably hysterical.

But at no point were the following realities addressed:

Related: MTEL.

Techdirt::

The DHS has decided air travel is the unsafest thing of all. In the wake of multiple fear mongering presidential directives — including a travel ban currently being contested in federal courts — the DHS has introduced several measures meant to make flying safer, but in reality would only make flying more of a pain in the ass.

The government has argued in court that flying is a privilege, not a right, and the DHS seems hellbent on making fliers pay for every bit of that privilege. We’ve seen laptop bans introduced as a stick to push foreign airports to engage in more security theater and a threat to rifle through all travelers’ books and papers to ensure nobody’s reading explosive devices.

Quote Investigator:

Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
 
 Dear Quote Investigator: For decades the most powerful mass medium has been television. The internet has dramatically shifted our access to information. Nowadays, society reflects upon itself by using internet search engines. Yet, both of these fundamental channels of communication, access, and synthesis are primarily supported by advertising. A pithy expression explicates the resultant skewed perspective:
 
 You’re not the customer; you’re the product.

Emily Jashinsky::

But among all adults, not just self-identified Republicans, Pew found 36 percent also say colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country — that’s up 10 percent since 2010. Similarly, the percent of all adults who say colleges and universities are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country has declined from 61 to 55 percent in the same time period.

Karen Herzog:

University of Wisconsin students and their families also pay for room and board at least the first year, plus about $1,000 more a year toward student unions, recreation centers, organizations and services such as mental health counseling.
Add up “other” costs beyond tuition — not including books and miscellaneous expenses — and a year at UW-Madison or UW-Milwaukee this fall will cost 8% more than it did in fall 2013, when tuition for resident undergraduates was first frozen. Costs have gone up 10% at both UW-Green Bay and UW-Eau Claire, and 13% at UW-Stevens Point. The average for four-year campuses is up 8.5%.
The details of little-known mandatory student fees — which have been rising along with room and board on UW campuses against the backdrop of a much-touted, five-year tuition freeze — are buried in complex operating budgets most families never see.

Amy Binder:

In 2010, Bastian Nichols moved into his freshman dorm at Harvard without much thought of what he would do after graduation. He felt sure that in time he’d find a career that matched his passions (among them, journalism and travel), but while in college he would experiment at becoming “a more interesting person.”* His concentration in psychology and comparative literature matched his general philosophy. So did his choice of summer jobs, which ranged from leading a bike trip through Austria and working in a theater in Croatia to doing post-production work in an Italian film company.

Yet, as senior year approached, Nichols began to feel anxious about life after Harvard. He described being “scared because I was like, ‘Crap, I’ve got a year left, and I just don’t even know what I could possibly do.’” Feeling he had few choices, in the early weeks of his senior year Nichols began working with Harvard’s Office of Career Services to find a job in management consulting. Much to the dismay of peers who thought that at least he would be a holdout, he will begin his job at one of the country’s top three consulting firms this fall.

契約結婚:

By abandoning the norm of marriage we end up with fewer children. This ultimately leads to economic crisis, as fewer workers translates to reduced growth and not enough tax revenue to support social welfare systems. Governments may try to mitigate this by taking in immigrants to replace natives who refuse to have children, but this solution too involves a number of trade-offs. A nation may get some cheap workers to bolster the economy. It may also get more economic inequality, the destruction of working class industries, ethnic strife, and eventually cultural dilution and degradation.

In theory the government could drastically cut spending and the wider society could choose not to take in immigrants and instead adjust itself to a reduced population without economic strife. This is extremely difficult but technically possible. The problem is that it is at best a temporary solution. Japan for example will see it’s population reduced by half by the end of the century. Eventually, the society will simply cease to exist. Adjusting to a shrinking population is the equivalent of a society rolling over and dying, but making itself comfortable first. If a civilization seeks to have a future, it eventually has to solve the problem of birthrates and get to a replacement level.

McKinsey::

In this independent discussion paper, we examine investment in arti cial intelligence (AI), describe how it is being deployed by companies that have started to use these technologies across sectors, and aim to explore its potential to become a major business disrupter. To do this, we looked at AI through several lenses. We analyzed the total investment landscape bringing together both investment of large corporations and funding from venture capital and private equity funds. We also reviewed the portfolio plays of major internet companies, the dynamics in AI ecosystems from Shenzhen to New York, and a wide range of case studies. As part of our primary research, we surveyed more than 3,000 senior executives
on the use of AI technologies, their companies’ prospects for further deployment, and AI’s impact on markets, governments, and individuals. This report also leverages the resources of McKinsey Analytics, a global practice that helps clients achieve better performance through data. The research was conducted jointly with Digital McKinsey, a global practice that designs and implements digital transformations.

In addition to identifying a gap between AI investment and commercial application, which
is typical of early technology development curves, we found that the new generation of AI applications is based on the foundation of digitization. Leading sectors in digital tend to be leading sectors in AI, and these are predicted to drive growth. We also found that AI has the potential to accelerate shifts in market share, revenue, and pro t pools—all hallmarks of digitally disrupted sectors. This report leverages two MGI analyses of digitization, Digital America: A tale of the haves and have-mores, published in December 2015, and Digital Europe: Pushing the frontier, capturing the bene ts, published in June 2016. These reports introduced the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) Industry Digitization Index, which combines dozens of indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of where and how companies are building digital assets, expanding digital usage, and creating a more digital workforce. This report also builds on MGI’s work on advanced analytics, The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world, published in December 2016, and on automation, A future that works: Automation, employment, and productivity, published in January 2017, as well as Arti cial intelligence: Implications for China, published in April 2017; and an April 2017 Digital McKinsey report, Smartening up with arti cial intelligence (AI): What’s in it for Germany and its industrial sector?

Diane Ravitch Blog, via a kind reader:

“The TEACHERS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE will never enter our schools through the dismantling process of deregulating the profession and intentionally lowering standards. The standards were put in place to guarantee a level of expertise.

“In summary,

“WE DON”T HAVE AN EMERGENCY THAT REQUIRES DUMBING DOWN THE PROFESSION OF TEACHING.

“WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY THAT REQUIRES COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP!”

Tim Slekar testified to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction that the teacher shortage is a “manufactured crisis” and it will not be solved by lowering standards.

He is a one-man crusade, fighting for the integrity of the teaching profession in a state led by hostile actors. The people of Wisconsin deserve better leadership but they won’t get it until they vote Scott Walker and his malignant enablers out of office.

Heather Gerken:

In this, the summer of our discontent, many college presidents are breathing a sigh of relief that they made it through a politically fraught spring without their campuses erupting. Nobody wants to be the next Middlebury or Claremont McKenna, where demonstrations disrupted controversial speakers.

Law deans, in sharp contrast, have reason to be cheery. Their campuses have been largely exempt from ugly free-speech incidents like these. Charles Murray, the controversial scholar whose speech drew violent reaction at Middlebury, has spoken at Yale Law School twice during the past few years. Students and faculty engaged with him, and students held a separate event to protest and discuss the implications of his work. But he spoke without interruption. That’s exactly how a university is supposed to work.

Erika Sanzi

And now she is the Mom-in-Chief and Executive Director of Massachusetts Parents United, an organization she founded based on the belief that ordinary parents are not being heard or even included in hugely important conversations that involve their children. She decided, based on her experience, that there wasn’t an organization doing an effective enough job actually “speaking parent” and in order to make a real difference for kids, she wanted that to change. And even after just a few short months, MPU is making a difference.

Why Education?

Keri came to believe in education reform because of her own personal experience as a mother of a child who had a terrible kindergarten experience. He was suspended from school more than 25 times during that first year of school and the school’s inability or unwillingness to meet his needs drove her into education advocacy. Yes, a former union organizer decided that she would battle anyone and everything who stood in the way of children getting the schools they deserve, including unions. And her commitment has been unwavering ever since.

Nicholas Kristof::

So far, it seems it can — much better. An interim study just completed shows Bridge schools easily outperforming government-run schools in Liberia, and a randomized trial is expected to confirm that finding. It would be odd if schools with teachers and books didn’t outperform schools without them.
 
 If the experiment continues to succeed, Liberia’s education minister would like to hand over “as many schools as possible” to private providers. Countries in Asia and others in Africa are also interested in adopting this model.
 
 The idea of turning over public schools to a for-profit company sparks outrage in some quarters. There’s particular hostility to Bridge, because it runs hundreds of schools, both public and private, in poor countries (its private schools in other countries charge families about $7 a month).

Madison, unfortunately, continues with a non diverse K-12 system, now spending nearly $20k annually per student. This, despite long term disastrous reading results.

ycombinator news:

Turkey reached another milestone of propaganda thanks to the total control of the communications.
Right know when you make a phone call using your mobile phone, before ringing starts citizens are forced to listen to 10 seconds voice recording of the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Here is a demonstration: https://twitter.com/sendika_org/status/886343590208835584

Here is a Twitter search that will provide you with many more videos showcasing the issue: https://twitter.com/search?f=videos&vertical=default&q=erdoğan%20telefon&src=tyah

Here is a report by BBC(Turkish edition): https://twitter.com/bbcturkce/status/886351634888085505

The message is about the anniversary of the unsuccessful coup attempt believed to be orchestrated by Gulenists(previous allies of the president, currently branded as Terrorists ) that took place on 15.06.2016, claiming the lives of more than 200 civilians and led to uncontested power grab by the President.

Right now Turkey is one of the most hostile countries for the journalists. Wikipedia is banned since a while.

Alan Borsuk::

But there is a lot more at work than Act 10 when it comes to attracting and keeping people in teaching.

The roots of the shortages were showing up before 2011. For example, it was already getting challenging to find math and science teachers.

The number of people in college-level programs to train teachers has fallen sharply, but the drop began before Act 10. And, the percentage declines in some other states, where there was no Act 10, are higher than in Wisconsin.

It is hard to pin down numbers of how many veteran teachers have quit or retired early because of Act 10. Some years, in some places, turnover has been high. But teachers quit for many reasons.

Much more on Act 10 and the attempt to reduce Wisconsin’s weak teacher content knowledge requirements.

Colleen Flaherty::

Carolyn Brown, an assistant professor of journalism at American University, says it’s her ethical duty to hold her students to high standards, especially the kinds of firm deadlines they’ll face in their careers. So she wonders why American is denying her tenure over some moderately lower than average student evaluations of her teaching, which she says are linked to her at-times unpopular rigor — not poor teaching.

So do many of her colleagues, who have appealed to Scott Bass, provost, on her behalf.

“Denying her tenure after six years based on the clearly specious basis of teaching evaluations is clearly wrongheaded,” John C. Watson, associate professor and director of the journalism division, said this week. “That’s as a matter of principle, and more specifically in terms of what’s happening at the university today.”

Anthony Gockowski:

On average, each administrative position, generally identified as some variation of a chancellor, provost, or dean, earns $175,088—though at least 15 such officials earn well over $200,000 annually, including two administrators who earn more than $300,000 annually.

University of Virginia Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Marcus Martin, for instance, earns $349,000 annually (the highest of any salary identified by Campus Reform), while University of Texas at Austin Vice President for Diversity and Engagement Gregory Vincent pulls in a comparable $331,000 per year.

Rick Barrett::

It’s getting easier to find high-speed internet service in rural Wisconsin, yet there are still places where a robust online connection is as elusive as the Hodag, a mythical creature that legend says prowls the Northwoods.

What’s more, critics of government grants aimed at boosting the service across the country say much of the money is being spent on internet speeds that are obsolete.

When the service providers focus on short-term profit, rather than building the best possible network, it’s not good for rural America, said Christopher Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps communities with internet access issues.
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“I don’t blame the providers any more than I blame tigers when they maul humans. They are what they are. The problem is that government policy lets them do it,” Mitchell said.

The Federal Communications Commission defines high-speed internet, or broadband, as an online connection capable of handling at least 25 megabits per second of download data. That’s more than adequate for streaming a video and downloading documents.

In Wisconsin, the average download speed is 37.7 megabits per second for a wired connection, according to new figures from Ookla, a Seattle technology firm.

That’s up 42% from June 2016, but it’s still slower than the national average of 69 megabits per second.

Charles Choi:

Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.
The researchers chose Obama for their latest work because there were hours of high-definition video of him available online in the public domain. The research team had a neural net analyze millions of frames of video to determine how elements of Obama’s face moved as he talked, such as his lips and teeth and wrinkles around his mouth and chin.

Marta Jewson:

The Louisiana Department of Education released English, math and science standardized test results for elementary schools throughout the state on Wednesday.

Nearly half of the 64 Orleans Parish public elementary schools recorded a higher percentage of LEAP tests at mastery level or higher than in 2015. That’s in line with statewide growth.

State schools Superintendent John White said scores generally held steady across Louisiana.

The figures are based on tests taken rather than students because most students are tested in English, math and science, but some may miss one test or another.

In 2015, the state implemented new standards for English and math and raised its benchmark of proficiency from a score of basic, the middle of five levels, to mastery, the second-highest.

Google Transparency:

Since our release Tuesday of our Google Academics Inc. report, we have heard a wide range of feedback. We wanted to address the points made in one place.

Many, if not most, agreed with the need for us to shine a light on Google’s funding of academic research with a bearing on the policy sphere, and of corporate funding more generally. Some sent Google-funded papers that should be included in the database; other academics objected to the inclusion of their work in the tally of papers and took issue with aspects of our methodology.

Here are some of the issues raised and our thinking on them. There’s no single way to do this, and we’re necessarily limited by the information Google, academics and institutions themselves disclose. However, it’s an evolving document so we plan to keep updating our database with new information as we receive it. Broadly, the main questions raised were:

Some authors felt that only those who had directly received Google money should be included. They argued that working for an institution that receives funding from Google should not merit inclusion in the list. However, we felt that would give an incomplete picture of the ways in which Google funds academic research that can advance its public policy positions. Google funds many universities, programs and departments, and our analysis of correspondence obtained through open-records requests makes clear that many academics at places like George Mason University are regularly called upon by Google’s public policy office to aid its positions, even if they do not receive funding as individuals. Studies have found that “other types of financial ties besides direct sponsorship can have an effect on results,” so omitting them would obscure the ways in which Google attempts to influence research.

Celia Storey :

The tweet that raced around the internet before truth had time to put on its shoes was this: In a delicatessen in Pittsburgh, a mysterious sign had appeared adjuring customers to “Please Refrain From Discussing Mathematics While Waiting in Line.”

People in Pittsburgh couldn’t find this deli (because it’s in Connecticut). Nevertheless humorous folks felt free to decide it was a real sign posted by a real lunchman tired of having his totals second-guessed by know-it-alls. Wasn’t it?

Well, no. Nothing like that (see accompanying story). But the thing is, that explanation was plausible. These cashiers these days, they can’t do the math, right?

But who can? Math is too hard. Only numbers-people can do it.

Again, not true. But as a statement of a common belief? Mmm, could be.

Denise LeGrand sees evidence in restaurants, in stores. Maybe she’s out with friends and it’s time to split the bill, work out the tips. “It scares people, problem-solving in general,” she says.

Before cash registers made deducting discounts a matter of knowing which icon to tap, she often helped sales clerks tally her bill. Meanwhile, she was thinking, “How do they take care of their finances? How do they do a budget?”

But then, LeGrand is one of those numbers-people. She runs the Mathematics Assistance Center (MAC) at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and teaches calculus in the department of mathematics and statistics. And by the way, she’s dismayed by how people react when they learn her profession — “You’re a math teacher? Oh, I hated that.”

Marquita Brown::

When Baltimore County school officials wanted to move boundary lines in 2015, some parents predicted declining property values and voiced fears of sending their children to school with “those kids.”

Liz Bowie, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, pushed for clarity on the coded language. Doing so, she told a packed room at the Education Writers Association’s recent National Seminar, is crucial to news coverage of school boundaries and the often related issues of segregation, class bias, and equity.

“The key is to really keep asking parents and community members, when you talk about property values, what do you really mean?” Bowie said. “When you’re talking about ‘those kids’, what are you afraid of about ‘those kids’? What are ‘those kids’ going to do to your kids?”

In Bowie’s reporting for Bridging the Divide, a recent Sun series that included a look at the impact of changes in school boundaries, she pressed parents and community members to truthfully answer a crucial question: “What’s really at the heart of your fear?”

Curiously, Madison recently expanded its knees diverse schools.

Fred Thys:

Right now, MIT selects most graduate students pretty much the same way other universities do: Students usually have to have a college degree. They have to take standardized tests, like the GRE. They must send letters of recommendation and submit their earlier grades.

Esther Duflo thinks MIT can find a better way.

“The GRE is not very informative, because no one who comes to MIT doesn’t have a near-perfect GRE anyways,” Duflo says.

Letters of recommendation, Duflo adds, are only useful if they come from people and universities that MIT faculty are familiar with. “So, in practice, if you come from the University of the Middle of Nowhere, we have no way to judge the quality of your application, and therefore that creates a lot of barriers.”

Greg Jaffe:

Sullivan was going on about the “growing” and “scary” divide in the country when a law student from a rural town in Kentucky interrupted his monologue: “Coming from a flyover state, it is difficult for me to even be on the same wavelength as the people I grew up with.”

The student’s confession brought Sullivan back to his own upbringing in Minnesota. He was 13 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. A few months later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, eager to meet with some average Americans, visited a home in Sullivan’s Minneapolis neighborhood. Sullivan remembered Latvian and Estonian Americans protesting for Baltic independence along the Soviet premier’s motorcade route. He felt a sense of what America could mean to the world.

As a candidate, Trump had rejected the very idea of American exceptionalism as an unnecessary burden. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term. We’re exceptional. You’re not,” Trump had said at a tea party rally in Texas. “I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much.”

Sullivan increasingly thought that the antidote to Trumpism was a full-on embrace of American exceptionalism of the sort he had felt in Minnesota. “We need something audacious that’s rooted in our national DNA; who we are as a people,” he said. “There needs to be a call to arms that can motivate people.”

But he struggled to describe his idea in detail. To spur his thinking, he read a dense 1890 essay by military strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, making the case for America as a global naval power. He studied historian Stephen Kinzer’s book, “The True Flag,” on Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the birth of the American empire.

He played with ideas that he hoped might resonate in Minnesota or Kentucky. “Our exceptionalism is rooted in the idea that we have the ability to innovate and solve hard problems — climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation,” he posited at one point. Maybe America’s exceptional mission was rooted in an unshakable commitment to a strong and growing middle class, he suggested a few weeks later.

But none of these formulations seemed big, audacious or inspiring enough.

Sullivan often insisted that he had developed his views about the world at “a public high school in Minneapolis.” But he is also unquestionably a product of Washington’s insular foreign-policy elite.

Jay Matthews:

In a compelling piece for the Washington City Paper, D.C. high school teacher Rob Barnett has confessed his anguish at passing students who haven’t mastered the content of his math courses and described his radical solution.

It’s called mastery learning. Barnett recorded all of his lessons, put them online and let each student move through them at his or her own pace. “They must show they understand one topic before advancing to the next,” he said. “I think of myself not so much as a teacher but as a facilitator of inquiry.”

This method is not new. I remember a Virginia high school that tried it 20 years ago. Barnett identified charter schools in Yuma, Ariz., and Chicago that are having success with it. It is a logical way to deepen the education of our children and, as Barnett discovered in his classes, inspire initiative. “They learn to assess their own understanding, to ask for help when they need it, and to teach themselves and their peers without my guidance,” he said.

Molly Beck::

“The governor supports the K-12 education budget he introduced to the Legislature five months ago,” spokesman Tom Evenson said when asked if Walker would support the proposal. “It provides a $649 million increase in funding for our schools, bringing funding for K-12 to an all-time high. After visiting nearly 50 public schools this year, the governor has seen overwhelming support for his plan.”

Walker’s budget did not include the proposal to increase income eligibility for vouchers, and Evenson did not say whether Walker would sign a budget that included an increase.

Beyer said Vos thinks “it’s unfortunate that Senate Republicans refuse to give more families the opportunity to choose the best school for their children.” Jim Bender, a lobbyist for School Choice Wisconsin, said lawmakers’ haven’t had much energy to discuss anything other than transportation.

Joint Finance Committee co-chairman Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, said the matter is still up in the air.

Raising the income limit to 300 percent of the federal poverty level would put the income limits for the statewide program on par with the older voucher systems in Milwaukee and Racine.

The statewide program has been questioned by Democrats in part because the majority of students using the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools.

David French::

As I read the story, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I’ve litigated cases like this before, I’ve evaluated cases like this before, and I’m familiar with the extraordinary double standards that define how academic freedom works in modern higher education. Perhaps UCLA is right. Perhaps it has even-handedly applied its alleged “incredibly high” standards and has fired popular left-wing lecturers in part because they’ve pushed their views too much on their students. Perhaps it routinely fires even popular teachers for poor teaching performance. In other words, perhaps it’s different from the vast majority of colleges and universities — schools that have consciously and unconsciously created entire systems of anti-conservative discrimination. First, let’s discuss the challenge of even finding a job in higher education. It’s difficult enough for even well-qualified leftists, but often academic departments define academic positions in such a way that effectively excludes the conservative point of view. Look at this current job posting at Harvard’s divinity school. It’s for a tenure-track professor of “religion, violence, and peace-building.” There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about the topic. Indeed, it fascinates me, but hidden within the job description is this gem of a sentence:

James Pethokoukis:

From Axios reporter Kim Hart: “The birth rate of new companies collapsed with the Great Recession, and the number of firms that opened during the recovery period is lower than that of any other post-recession period.”

I should note the piece uses analysis from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG). Its analysis from earlier this year, “Dynamism in Retreat,” speculates the startup decline stems from “declining population growth, a sharp decline in startup capital (notably home equity) during the recession, and changes to the regulatory environment,” according to Hart.

David Burkehead:

This is just simple math. People compare some “big ticket” item with “small ticket” items and don’t mention how the very large numbers of those small ticket items add up, or how very little the large ticket item would really stretch among the many to whom those small ticket items apply.

So when someone says “if we can afford X, then surely Y isn’t too expensive” take a closer look. Just how much of those “Y” do we have to buy and how much is the total cost?

Related: Math Forum audio and video.

Beth Hawkins:

The buzz that attends to personalized learning these days is inevitably followed by a little potential buzzkill. Can the model, in which students follow their own academic path at their own speed, work on a large scale?

By definition, personalized learning is idiosyncratic, and common wisdom has held that because of their flexibility, public charter schools have the advantage when it comes to using technology as a tool to engage each student according to their passions. School districts, the supposition has been, are too rigid to easily enable truly individualized learning.

A RAND Corp. study released earlier this week came to no firm conclusion on this point, though it jibed with past reports on the elements and school settings in which personalized learning seems to flourish. With this in mind, the study’s authors suggested that anyone hoping to take a look at early, district-wide implementation turn to three distinct school systems: Piedmont, Alabama; Georgia’s Fulton County; and Horry County, South Carolina.

Lauren Hill:

This summer, Simpson Street Free Press is celebrating 25 years of efforts tackling Madison’s educational achievement gaps through its out-of-school literacy programs. Three assistant editors represented the organization at a Rotary Club of Madison South luncheon Monday, sharing SSFP’s plans for its 25th year.

SSFP is a literacy program based in South Madison dedicated to addressing the city’s educational disparities. Almost 300 students ages eight through 18 write and publish their own articles for six different newspapers, including two bilingual publications. Students also participate in book clubs, internships, writing workshops and even receive math and physics tutoring through the program.

The idea behind SSFP is based on the research-supported notion that what young students do during their out-of-school time is just as important to their education as in-school learning, explained SSFP assistant editor and UW-Madison senior Taylor Kilgore.

Robert Hart::

The consequences of this oversight are pernicious. Women are far more likely to suffer the deleterious side effects of medication than men. Pregnant women get sick, but the consequences of taking many medications when pregnant are chronically understudied, or worse yet, unknown entirely. Women are far less likely to receive the correct treatment for heart attacks because their symptoms do not match “typical” (read: male) symptoms.
If evidence-based medicine is already far less evidence-based for anybody who is not a white male, how can the use of this unmodified data do anything other than unwittingly perpetuate this inequality? If we want to use AI to facilitate a more personalized medicine for all, it would help if we could first provide medicine that works for half the population.

The effects of this data can be even more insidious. AI systems often function as black boxes, which means technologists are unaware of how an AI came to its conclusion. This can make it particularly hard to identify any inequality, bias, or discrimination feeding into a particular decision. The inability to access the medical data upon which a system was trained—for reasons of protecting patients’ privacy or the data not being in the public domain—exacerbates this. Even if you had access to that data, the often proprietary nature of AI systems means interrogation would likely be impossible. By masking these sources of bias, an AI system could consolidate and deepen the already systemic inequalities in healthcare, all while making them harder to notice and challenge. Invariably, the result of this will be a system of medicine that is unfairly stacked against certain members of society.

Staci Zaretsky:

As thoroughly reported here at Above the Law, bar exam passage rates have plummeted across the nation for the past several years. In California in particular, test-takers’ performance has been outstandingly poor, prompting a chorus of critics to demand that the state’s cut score be lowered so that more law school graduates will be able to pass the exam and become practicing attorneys. As it stands, California’s required passing score of 144 is higher than that of 48 other states, with only Delaware’s cut score being higher. For decades, California’s bar exam has been referred to as the hardest in the country, but year in and year out, data has revealed that to be untrue. With the state’s mean scaled MBE scores continuing to be higher than the national average, it seems that California’s bar exam is simply the most difficult to pass thanks to its arbitrarily high cut score.

Sarah Harris::

More than half of primary schools are holding non-competitive sports days that fail to announce ‘winners’, according to a new survey.

They host events where individual children are not singled out to compete but instead work in teams and are recognised simply for taking part.

The findings have been revealed in a poll by Families Online which warns that youngsters must learn that ‘losing is completely ok’.

Fifty-seven per cent of parents surveyed said their children’s infant and primary schools hold sports days with a ‘non-competitive theme’.

I recently read, with interest, Amy Goldstein’s book Janesville.

The work is a worthwhile look at Janesville’s history, including George Parker (Parker Pen) and Joseph A. Craig (brought GM to Janesville).

Goldstein revealed the workforce’s culture, opportunity and ultimate cost of the shutdown. She also dwelled quite a bit on Congressman Paul Ryan and Governor Scott Walker, with a bit on his predecessor, Jim Doyle.

If I have one criticism, it is Goldstein’s heavy emphasis on the politicians is, in my view an error.

Breann Schossow:

Workers Attend Blackhawk Technical College For Retraining

Goldstein: In this country, the notion of what to do when jobs go away often is, ‘Go back to school to learn to do something else.’ It’s just a very popular idea. So almost 2,000 people in Janesville went to Blackhawk Tech in the couple years after all this work went away.

The question of what is success, I thought, was a very interesting question as I was getting to know people in town, because, as I said, many people who went to Blackhawk didn’t finish what they were studying for a whole lot of reasons.

Either financial reasons or because they found that being a student, they weren’t cut out to do that. But even people who (were cut out for it) sometimes found that they just couldn’t find a decent job in what they had been studying.

… Blackhawk Tech tried very, very hard with their students.

I mean, they set up all kinds of programs to try to make it easier for factory workers to turn themselves into students, but I think it’s a hard situation when you don’t always have enough jobs of the right kind or enough jobs at all on the other end.

I don’t think it is an indictment of retraining programs broadly, but I think it does suggest that in a community that’s still having a hard time pulling enough jobs into itself, that retraining alone can’t solve everything.

Cindi May::

As recent high school graduates prepare for their migration to college in the fall, one item is sure to top most students’ shopping wish lists: a laptop computer. Laptops are ubiquitous on university campuses, and are viewed by most students as absolute must-have items, right alongside laundry detergent, towels, and coffee pots.

Without question, personal laptops can enhance the college experience by facilitating engagement with online course material, providing access to sources for research, maximizing internship searches, and even improving communication with friends and parents. Many students also opt to bring their laptops to class so that they can take notes, view online lecture slides, and search the web for course-related material. This practice, it turns out, may be a mistake.

New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer.

Collin Binkley:

Presidents of U.S. public colleges and universities saw their earnings climb by 5.3 percent last year, with several of them topping $1 million, according to an annual survey.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s study of more than 150 college presidents found that their average annual pay increased in fiscal year 2016 to $501,000.

Among the top earners were eight public university presidents whose total compensation exceeded $1 million, up from five the year before, the study found. Most of them come from the nation’s largest schools and university systems.

Pippa Biddle:

Denise Garcia knows that her students sometimes cheat, but the situation she unearthed in February seemed different. A math teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut, Garcia had accidentally included an advanced equation in a problem set for her AP Calculus class. Yet somehow a handful of students in the 15-person class solved it correctly. Those students had also shown their work, defeating the traditional litmus test for sussing out cheating in STEM classrooms.

Garcia was perplexed, until she remembered a conversation from a few years earlier. Some former students had told her about an online tool called Wolfram|Alpha that could complete complicated calculations in seconds. It provided both the answers and the steps for reaching them, making it virtually undetectable when copied as homework.

Second line:

Let me begin by stating that I am a strong proponent for having more teachers that are representative and reflective of the population that it serves. I believe race match is a significant and valuable contributor to student performance and success.

Translation: black teachers + black kids = potentially more support and opportunities.
But in the city of New Orleans, this is not our reality. Until school talent search teams employ recruitment methods that better address the issue of limited black teaching staff, this will be our reality for some time.

The NOLA public school system has had its struggles and discussions were in place to revamp the district, but when Katrina happened in 2005, the revamp was expedited. NOLA students needed schools and charters became the answer. In the process, teachers were fired or displaced. This made charter schools both the hero and the villain at the same time.

Stephen Schroeder:

Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to see your child’s bus on a map, know if it is running late, get an ETA estimate of its arrival, get notifications if it is behind schedule, and get alerted in case of emergency?

How about even being able to see that your child is confirmed to be on the bus so you know they are safe and en route as expected?

With today’s quickly developing systems these features and many more are giving parents and school administrators more peace of mind, control and efficiency in the critical effort of transporting children safely to and from school.

Let’s explore the top 17 school bus tracking systems and applications and see what they each have to offer:

I recently read, with interest, Amy Goldstein’s book: Janesville.

The work is a worthwhile look at Janesville’s history, including George Parker (Parker Pen) and Joseph A. Craig (brought GM to Janesville).

Goldstein revealed the workforce’s culture, opportunities and the shutdown’s ultimate cost. Further, she dwelled extensively on Congressman Paul Ryan and Governor Scott Walker, with a bit of time on his predecessor, Jim Doyle.

If I have one criticism, Goldstein’s heavy emphasis on the politicians is, in my view an error. Government in and of itself cannot create sustainable jobs on the scale of a large manufacturer and its supply chain. It (using taxpayer funds) can create – hopefully on our behalf – an environment conducive to sustainable entrepreneurs.

Goldstein’s look at the funds spent on retraining and the downstream effectiveness, or lack thereof, at Blackhawk Technical College is likely most interesting to readers.

Related: Amy Goldstein:

But even under such favorable circumstances, I wondered, how easily can a vocational college teach laid-off people a new identity, as well as new skills? What does it take for a campus to absorb droves of worried, angry factory workers who were out of school, in most cases, for a few decades and may not have liked school as kids? Most fundamentally, does retraining succeed in an environment in which work remains scarce—at least in places like Janesville, where, despite intense economic development efforts the past few years, the number of jobs remains about as low as at any time since the recent recession began?

These were questions that drew me to Wisconsin a year before a native son would bound onto the Republican presidential ticket. They led me to the kitchen tables and back decks of people struggling to regain their footing, to Blackhawk’s classrooms and counselors’ offices, to the United Auto Workers hall and the local job-placement agency. Finally, they led me into a Wisconsin agency, two blocks from the state capitol in Madison, in a quest for unemployment claims and wage records to bore into the most central question of all: How are laid-off people who went to Blackhawk to retrain faring at finding new work? What kind of pay are they getting?

In the end, I found certain successes. But from the many people I’ve met and from an analysis of the state records, most of what I discovered was sobering. It suggests that, even if the US economy as a whole is gradually reviving, the bruises to individual workers and individual communities can be deeper than job training can readily heal. “Retraining, yes,” Chris Pody, who directs Blackhawk’s Career Center, which helps students choose what to study and learn how best to look for jobs, told me the first time we met. “But the question has been—and hasn’t been answered—for what?”

Bob Borremans runs the Rock County Job Center in Janesville, which is the county seat. The warren of offices and cubicles that occupies a former K-Mart is part of the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board, a regional funnel for the federal job-hunting and job-training money that flows through every state and into communities around the country. With a white beard and a sly sense of humor, Borremans has a doctorate and the kind of independence of thought that can come with being within sight of retirement. For nearly two decades, he was a senior administrator at Blackhawk and, in his job now, has been instrumental in virtually every initiative in the past few years to try to bring jobs and assistance to town. “Looking back on it, we may have trained too many people, because there weren’t enough jobs,” Borremans told me one day. “People are experiencing a double whammy. They lost their jobs. They went to school to get skills, and they still can’t get jobs.”

Locally, Madison College’s spending has nearly doubled over the past decade.

Breann Schossow:

Workers Attend Blackhawk Technical College For Retraining

Goldstein: In this country, the notion of what to do when jobs go away often is, ‘Go back to school to learn to do something else.’ It’s just a very popular idea. So almost 2,000 people in Janesville went to Blackhawk Tech in the couple years after all this work went away.

The question of what is success, I thought, was a very interesting question as I was getting to know people in town, because, as I said, many people who went to Blackhawk didn’t finish what they were studying for a whole lot of reasons.

Either financial reasons or because they found that being a student, they weren’t cut out to do that. But even people who (were cut out for it) sometimes found that they just couldn’t find a decent job in what they had been studying.

… Blackhawk Tech tried very, very hard with their students.

I mean, they set up all kinds of programs to try to make it easier for factory workers to turn themselves into students, but I think it’s a hard situation when you don’t always have enough jobs of the right kind or enough jobs at all on the other end.

I don’t think it is an indictment of retraining programs broadly, but I think it does suggest that in a community that’s still having a hard time pulling enough jobs into itself, that retraining alone can’t solve everything.

Ideally, our increasingly expensive education system should focus on the essentials: reading, math and science. Madison continues to tolerate long term, disastrous reading results.

There has been some discussion about a reduction in our economy’s dynamism. Matt Stoller and Tyler Cowen are worth following. Cowen has written two books of note:

The Complacent Class

Average is Over

Stoller:

The Return of Monopoly.

A recent propublica report worth reading:

President Obama promised to fight corporate concentration. Eight years later, the airline industry is dominated by just four companies. And you’re paying for it..

Niche:

The Top Public Universities ranking is based on rigorous analysis of academic, admissions, financial, and student life data from the U.S. Department of Education along with millions of reviews from students and alumni. The ranking compares over 500 public colleges and state universities

Concord Coalition::

Why we need your help to change budget decisions
When faced with a challenge as complex as the nation’s fiscal future, it can be easy to feel helpless and discouraged. The numbers involved can seem intractable and the problems may seem daunting. But there are things YOU can do to help America’s fiscal future!

One of Concord’s main goals is to stimulate honest discussions about federal finances that transcend partisan politics. We are determined to communicate with and empower American citizens to change the direction in which the country is headed.

Here is what we can do
The Concord Coalition can help you start this discussion with your neighbors, colleagues, and representatives. Whether you are interested in attending an event, hosting an event, contacting your representatives, or just reaching out to your friends, Concord has staff and publications to support your initiatives.

It is easy to stay involved! Attend Concord events in your state, educate others, and join our social networks.

Chris Aldrich::

Here’s what’s happening
 
 I write my content on my own personal site. I automatically syndicate it to Facebook. My mom, who seems to be on Facebook 24/7, immediately clicks “like” on the post. The Facebook algorithm immediately thinks that because my mom liked it, it must be a family related piece of content–even if it’s obviously about theoretical math, a subject in which my mom has no interest or knowledge. (My mom has about 180 friends on Facebook; 45 of them overlap with mine and the vast majority of those are close family members).
 
 The algorithm narrows the presentation of the content down to very close family. Then my mom’s sister sees it and clicks “like” moments later. Now Facebook’s algorithm has created a self-fulfilling prophesy and further narrows the audience of my post. As a result, my post gets no further exposure on Facebook other than perhaps five people–the circle of family that overlaps in all three of our social graphs. Naturally, none of these people love me enough to click “like” on random technical things I think are cool. I certainly couldn’t blame them for not liking these arcane topics, but shame on Facebook for torturing them for the exposure when I was originally targeting maybe 10 other colleagues to begin with.

Matt Stoller:

On July 15, 2015, Amazon marked the twentieth anniversary of its founding with a “global shopping event” called Prime Day. Over the next 24 hours, starting at midnight, the company offered special discounts every ten minutes to the 44 million users of Amazon Prime, its members-only benefit program. The event was astonishingly successful: Amazon made 34 million Prime sales that day, nearly 20 percent more than it had on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying bonanza. The company received almost 400 orders per second—all on a single, ordinary day in the middle of summer.

University of Washington – Tacoma::

[The UW Tacoma Writing Center’s “Statement on Antiracist and Social Justice Work in the Writing Center,” highlighted in the story below, has been misrepresented by issues-oriented blogs based in other states. Read more: “Response to Inaccurate Reports about the UW Tacoma Writing Center.”]

The UW Tacoma Writing Center has taken significant steps towards standing against racism in the field of writing. With its new antiracism and social justice statement, the Center starts a conversation on the discrimination and alienation that often go unnoticed in academia. As the statement urges, “there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” and with this in mind, the Center aims to ensure that through compassion and careful consideration, staff do not inadvertently embrace racist practices.

Spearheaded by Writing Center Director Dr. Asao Inoue—who is also an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and director of university writing—the statement is very much influenced by Inoue’s research on racism in writing assessments. In his 2015 book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future, Inoue considered the many ways in which racism becomes apparent in academia, as well as proposed that only through the acknowledgment of structures of racism could they begin to be dismantled. Dr. Inoue, who has received two Outstanding Book Awards—the first in 2014 for Race and Writing Assessment and again in 2017 for Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies—from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, has dedicated his career to the study of rhetoric and composition, in order to better understand and work to solve racial inequity in academia.

Every student, regardless of their background, comes to college with a different collection of experiences, said Dr. Inoue. “The anti-racism statement is a document that took over a year to collaboratively create with writing center professional staff and student writing consultants. It was officially put up and incorporated in our work in the fall of 2016, so we are just beginning.” Dr. Inoue contends that in order for something to become anti-racist, there must first be an earnest discussion of how racism has produced certain standards of education or systems themselves. As a result of the pervasiveness of racism, Inoue argues, its presence must be acknowledged on a systemic level, and thus this statement was born.

Rob Shimshock:

“Linguistic and writing research has shown clearly for many decades that there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” proclaims the writing center’s statement. “Language is constantly changing. These two facts make it very difficult to justify placing people in hierarchies or restricting opportunities and privileges because of the way people communicate in particular versions of English.”

In the introduction to its “commitment” section, the Tacoma Writing Center pledges to “listen and look carefully and compassionately for ways we may unintentionally perpetuate racism or social injustice, actively engaging in antiracist practices” before making nine specific promises to students.

“We promise to emphasize the importance of rhetorical situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts,” announces the poster. “We promise to challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations.”

In an article accompanying the poster, the University of Washington, Tacoma revealed Friday that Dr. Asao Inoue, director of the writing center, is behind the new push for social justice.

On his Tacoma faculty page, Inoue states that he does “research that investigates racism in writing assignments.” Meanwhile, the professor’s Twitter presence indicates no love for President Donald Trump:

Concord Coalition::

In 1994, less than two years after the founding of The Concord Coalition, President Bill Clinton appointed then-senators Bob Kerrey (D-NE) and Jack Danforth (R-MO) to lead the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform. The two senators — now Concord co-chairs — and their commission produced a report in which 30 of the 32 members agreed that “current trends are not sustainable.”

While much has changed in the past 25 years, this fundamental reality has not: Federal budget policy remains on an unsustainable track, driven by structural forces that increase federal spending faster than revenues.

It is true that for a while, things were headed in the right direction. Deficits steadily declined in the mid-1990s and budget surpluses emerged in 1998. However, this favorable trend ended in 2002 when a combination of tax cuts, military spending and a mild recession plunged the budget into deficits again.

Policy decisions and a much deeper recession that began in 2008 led to even worse deficits. At the height of that recession in 2009, the federal government ran its first annual deficit greater than a trillion dollars.

Frank Tobe:

Two reputable research resources are reporting that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Both research firms acknowledge that yesterday’s robots — which were blind, big, dangerous and difficult to program and maintain — are being replaced and supplemented with newer, more capable ones. Today’s new, and future robots, will have voice and language recognition, access to super-fast communications, data and libraries of algorithms, learning capability, mobility, portability and dexterity. These new precision robots can sort and fill prescriptions, pick and pack warehouse orders, sort, inspect, process and handle fruits and vegetables, plus a myriad of other industrial and non-industrial tasks, most faster than humans, yet all the while working safely along side them.

David Bell:

IN 1922, Austrian art historian Josef Stryzgowski lectured in Boston on “The Crisis in the Humanities as Exemplified in the History of Art.” In 1964, British historian J.H. Plumb published a volume of essays entitled The Crisis in the Humanities. Between 1980 and 2000 a “crisis in the humanities” was discussed more than a hundred times in the pages of major scholarly journals. Is there anything new to be said about it? Has the hypochondriac finally come down with a life-threatening disease?

Certain forms of apprehension do seem built into the very structure of the modern humanities. I found no record of Stryzgowski’s lectures, but Plumb’s complaints from 1964 sound familiar: overspecialization; triviality; insularity; fragmentation; and opaque, overly technical writing. Just two years later, a certain James Newcomer, professor of English at Texas Christian University, identified a threat to the humanities almost identical to the one classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum warns about in her 2010 Not for Profit: “Since the sciences are … exerting a dominant influence on the activities of the universities, the humanities are in danger of being forced into practices … that can end only in diminishing still further their effectiveness in modifying the character and the customs of our society.” And in 1975, a writing teacher named Mel Topf discussed much the same list of problems that Harvard professor Louis Menand sees as critical in his 2010 Marketplace of Ideas: “declining public support, declining enrollments as students turn away from the liberal arts to professional studies, and overproduction of Ph.D.’s.”

The reasons for these continuities are obvious. The modern university is in some ways a strange place for the humanities. On large campuses filled mostly with pre-professional students imbibing the technical skills demanded by industrial and postindustrial economies, philosophy can feel like an exotic luxury. Making bored, ill-prepared adolescents skim unwillingly over the surface of great literature can forever associate it in their minds with unwelcome toil. Judging scholars in the humanities rigidly on the basis of “productivity” and “citations,” as if their insights were precisely quantifiable, can quickly destroy the very qualities that “peer review” is supposed to foster. And subjecting the most exhilarating adventures of the human mind to endless, microscopic analysis in minor publication after minor publication, as demanded by systems of promotion and tenure, easily degenerates into intellectual embalming. But these discordances between the humanities and the university system go back to the creation of modern universities in the nineteenth century and the idea that departments of English and philosophy should function along roughly the same lines as departments of chemistry and mechanical engineering. Can the humanities survive in these settings, let alone flourish?

Suzanne Woolley:

Crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and YouCaring have turned sympathy for Americans drowning in medical expenses into a cottage industry. Now Republican efforts in Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare could swell the ranks of the uninsured and spur the business of helping people raise donations online to pay for health care.

But medical crowdfunding doesn’t have to wait for Congress to act. Business is already booming, and its leaders expect the rapid growth to continue no matter what happens on the Hill.

“Whether it’s Obamacare or Trumpcare, the weight of health-care costs on consumers will only increase,” said Dan Saper, chief executive officer of YouCaring. “It will drive more people to try and figure out how to pay health-care needs, and crowdfunding is in its early days as a way to help those people.”

TH Chan:

In St. Louis, Missouri, Delmar Boulevard marks a sharp dividing line between the poor, predominately African American neighborhood to the north and a more affluent, largely white neighborhood to the south. Education and health also follow the “Delmar Divide,” with residents to the north less likely to have a bachelor’s degree and more likely to have heart disease or cancer.

Pointing to Delmar as an example, Melody Goodman, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, recently spoke to a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) audience about the links between segregation and poor health. An HSPH alumna, Goodman gave the keynote address at the first annual symposium sponsored by the Department of Biostatistics Summer Program in Quantitative Sciences. She told the audience at the July 24, 2014 event, which was held at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, “Your zip code is a better predictor of your health than your genetic code.”

Rick DelVeccio:

The Teamsters are complaining that Oakland’s Mills College took jobs away from working men and women and gave them to goats.

The union’s top official in the East Bay has told college officials that Mills may have violated its work agreement with the Teamsters when, instead of dispatching union workers to clear and haul away brush, it assigned the task to a herd of 500 goats with the four-footed brush clearance crew Goats R Us.

The college has three choices, says Teamsters Local 70 Secretary-Treasurer Chuck Mack, if it wishes to avoid a formal grievance:

It could agree to not enter into any future goat contracts without first discussing the matter with the union.

An emphasis on adult employment.

Don Behm::

While corrections of the majority of individual accounts highlighted in the audit’s findings will be less than $2 a month, the auditors found up to $400,000 in total overpayments to several others receiving disability benefits.

Auditors confirmed a separate $132,000 overpayment to a surviving family member of a deceased retiree that had been reported earlier by the Retirement Plan Services office.

Apart from reviewing 534 individuals in previously identified problem areas, auditors also checked a small random sample of 50 retirees. They found that 54% of those benefit calculations were “likely incorrect.” Overpayments to those individuals amounted to $2,800.

In a statement released Wednesday, the Pension Board said it will review the report and work with retirement services employees to correct the mistakes and determine why the errors were made.

The Pension Board said it is committed to working with the administration and the County Board to decide which overpayments should be pursued for collection.

Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele requested the audit and called for comprehensive reform of the pension system following disclosure of a 2014 report to the IRS of hundreds of pension errors that will cost the county nearly $2.2 million to correct. The report was not made public until it was released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in response to a records request.

Tim Bradshaw

Self-driving cars seem like a magical idea. The concept of vehicles that can operate themselves, without steering wheels or pedals, leaps straight from the pages of science fiction.
 
 Yet like so many fantastical stories, there are “wizards” hidden behind the curtain — lots of them. Constructing the road to fully automated driving, it turns out, requires a lot of manual labour.
 
 Most companies working on this technology employ hundreds or even thousands of people, often in offshore outsourcing centres in India or China, whose job it is to teach the robo-cars to recognise pedestrians, cyclists and other obstacles. The workers do this by manually marking up or “labelling” thousands of hours of video footage, often frame by frame, taken from prototype vehicles driving around testbeds such as Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh and Phoenix.

Electronic Frontier Foundation::

In this era of unprecedented digital surveillance and widespread political upheaval, the data stored on our cell phones, laptops, and especially our online services are a magnet for government actors seeking to track citizens, journalists, and activists.

In 2016, the United States government sent at least 49,868 requests to Facebook for user data. In the same time period, it sent 27,850 requests to Google and 9,076 to Apple.1 These companies are not alone: where users see new ways to communicate and store data, law enforcement agents see new avenues for surveillance.

There are three safeguards to ensure that data we send to tech companies don’t end up in a government database: technology, law, and corporate policies. Technology—including the many ways data is deleted, obscured, or encrypted to render it unavailable to the government—is beyond the scope of this report.2 Instead, we’ll focus on law and corporate policies. We’ll turn a spotlight on how the policies of technology companies either advance or hinder the privacy rights of users when the U.S. government comes knocking,3 and we’ll highlight those companies advocating to shore up legal protections for user privacy.

Since the Electronic Frontier Foundation started publishing Who Has Your Back seven years ago, we’ve seen major technology companies bring more transparency to how and when they divulge our data to the government. This shift has been fueled in large part by public attention. The Snowden revelations of 2013 and the resulting public conversation about digital privacy served as a major catalyst for widespread changes among the privacy policies of big companies. While only two companies earned credit in all of our criteria in 2013 (at a time when the criteria were somewhat less stringent than today4), in our 2014 report, there were nine companies earning credit in every category.

Ramsey Touchberry::

A new study by Wisconsin HOPE Lab founder Sara Goldrick-Rab and two co-authors found that thousands of community college students nationwide are homeless or on the verge of homelessness. The Wisconsin HOPE Lab says it’s “the nation’s first laboratory for translational research aimed at improving equitable outcomes in postsecondary education.”

The study surveyed more than 30,000 students at 70 community colleges in 24 states. It found that 13-14% of students were homeless and about half were housing insecure, meaning they’ve missed rent payments or couch-surf from place to place. The survey also found that two-thirds of community college students are food insecure, meaning they lack the resources to properly feed themselves.

Another recent survey found 20% of Los Angeles community college students are homeless and nearly two-thirds are food insecure. Past studies have found similarly high numbers when it comes to college homelessness across the country.

The student loan debt explosion indicates that the incentives are mis aligned.

Related: Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments

Rebecca Greenfield:

Last year, Richard Laermer decided to let his employees work from home on a regular basis. “We hire adults, they shouldn’t be tied to the office five days a week,” said Laermer, who owns a New York-based public relations firm. “I always assumed that you can get your work done anywhere, as long as you actually get it done.”
 
 Turns out, he was wrong.
 
 Employees took advantage of the perk, Laermer said. One was unavailable for hours at a time. Another wouldn’t communicate with co-workers all day, which Laermer found suspicious. The last straw, he said, was when someone refused to come in for a meeting because she had plans to go to the Hamptons. “That was the most unbelievably nervy thing I’d heard in years,” he said.

It’s interesting to consider recent Madison School Board/Administration decisions in light of David Brooks’ 7/11/2017 column:

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.

Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.

Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

As life has gotten worse for the rest in the middle class, upper-middle-class parents have become fanatical about making sure their children never sink back to those levels, and of course there’s nothing wrong in devoting yourself to your own progeny.

Let’s begin with the rejection of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school (which would have operated independently of the current model) and continue to a recent referendum that expanded Madison’s least diverse schools.

Madison has continued to substantially increase tax and spending practices, now approaching $20,000 per student, annually. This is far more than most school districts and continues despite disastrous reading results.

See also Van Hise’s special sauce.

IVY LEAGUE SUMMARY: TAX BREAK SUBSIDIES AND GOVERNMENT PAYMENTS:

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

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

Ben Popken:

Over 38 million American households can’t afford their housing, an increase of 146 percent in the past 16 years, according to a recent Harvard housing report.

Under federal guidelines, households that spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs are considered “cost burdened” and will have difficulty affording basic necessities like food, clothing, transportation and medical care.

But the number of Americans struggling with their housing costs has risen from almost 16 million in 2001 to 38 million in 2015, according to the Census data crunched in the report. That’s more than double.

Interestingly, Madison continues to grow its tax and spending practices with per student expenditures now approaching $20,000 annually – far more than most K-12 organizations. .

Walter Williams::

Is there no limit to the level of disgusting behavior on college campuses that parents, taxpayers, donors, and legislators will accept?

Colleges have become islands of intolerance, and as with fish, the rot begins at the head.

Let’s examine some recent episodes representative of a general trend and ask ourselves why we should tolerate it, plus pay for it.

Students at Evergreen State College harassed biology professor Bret Weinstein because he refused to leave campus, challenging the school’s decision to ask white people to leave campus for a day of diversity programming.

The profanity-laced threats against the faculty and president can be seen on a YouTube video titled “Student takeover of Evergreen State College.”

What about administrators permitting students to conduct racially segregated graduation ceremonies, which many colleges have done, including Ivy League ones such as Columbia and Harvard universities?

Permitting racially segregated graduation ceremonies makes a mockery of the idols of diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion, which so many college administrators worship. Or is tribalism part and parcel of diversity?

Karen Herzog::

Language quietly slipped into the proposed state budget would allow someone from outside academia to become the University of Wisconsin System’s next president or a campus chancellor, potentially moving politics and business interests squarely into future searches for top university leaders.

While public university leaders traditionally have come from academia, a few politically appointed governing boards for universities elsewhere around the country have tapped businessmen or politicians.

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels became president of Purdue University, the Iowa Board of Regents two years ago chose a businessman with little experience in academia as president of the University of Iowa and University of Colorado President Bruce Benson made millions in oil, but his formal education ended with a bachelor’s degree.

The most common road to the presidency continues to be the traditional route of academic affairs (43%), according to a study released last week by the American Council on Education. Only 15% of college and university presidents came directly from outside of higher education in the ACE study, down from 20% in 2011.

At age 69, UW System President Ray Cross said he has no immediate plans to retire. There also are no indications UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank is looking to move.

Christian Jarrett:

Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test of self-control is one of psychology’s iconic experimental set-ups. First conducted in the 1960s, Mischel told the kids he tested that if they managed to resist eating the marshmallow in front of them until he returned (usually about 15 minutes later), they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow.

The children varied greatly in their powers of restraint and those who performed better displayed some cute distraction strategies, such as singing to themselves and covering their eyes. Perhaps most important, those kids who performed well at the test tended to do well in later life too, in terms of their health, education and career success. Given the huge impact this research has had, it’s amazing that it’s never been exported to a non-Western setting. Until now.

Bennett Murray:

“Each person only has a life, but if I had the chance to choose again I would still choose my way.”

They are the words of one of Vietnam’s most influential bloggers — known by her online pseudonym, Mother Mushroom — minutes before she was handed the shock sentence of a decade in prison. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh directed her defiant comments at her 61-year-old mother, who was watching a live feed in a room next door as she was not allow into the courtroom.

The 37-year-old was accused of defaming Vietnam’s communist regime in her blogs and interviews with foreign media.

Ken Burns returns to take on Vietnam – ‘a war we have consciously ignored’
Read more
“I clapped my hands in the room, where 20 security officials looked at me with very angry eyes, but I was not afraid; I was OK, very proud of her,” said Nguyen Thi Tuyet Lan.

Arrested in October while attempting to visit another dissident in prison, Quynh, 37, has already spent nine months behind bars, in what her lawyer said were desperate conditions.

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She subsisted only on a diet of anchovies and spinach soup for the first seven months, and was denied both sanitary pads and underwear, Vo An Don said.

After Quynh was arrested on 10 October, her mother heard nothing about her whereabouts or wellbeing until a brief reunion in prison hours before her 29 June trial for crimes against the state.

The months had taken their toll on her daughter, Lan told the Guardian in a phone interview from her home in the southern coastal city of Nha Trang. Quynh appeared sickly during their meeting, she said.

Scientific American::

Which 10 disruptive solutions are now poised to change the world?

David Sessions:

Writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci jotted down the fragments that would become his theory of intellectuals. New classes, like the European bourgeoisie after the Industrial Revolution, he proposed, brought with them their own set of thinkers, which he called “organic intellectuals”—theorists, technicians, and administrators, who became their “functionaries” in a new society. Unlike “traditional intellectuals” who held positions in the old class structure, organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas as the invisible, unquestioned conventional wisdom circulating in social institutions.

Today, Gramsci’s theory has been largely overlooked in the ongoing debate over the supposed decline of the “public intellectual” in America. Great minds, we are told, no longer captivate the public as they once did, because the university is too insular and academic thinking is too narrow. Such laments frequently cite Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987), which complained about the post-1960s professionalization of academia and waxed nostalgic for the bohemian, “independent” intellectuals of the earlier twentieth century. Writers like the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof attribute this sorry state of affairs to the culture of Ph.D. programs, which, Kristof claims, have glorified “arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” If academics cannot bring their ideas to a wider readership, these familiar critiques imply, it is because of the academic mindset itself.

In his book The Ideas Industry, the political scientist and foreign policy blogger Daniel W. Drezner broadens the focus to include the conditions in which ideas are formed, funded, and expressed. Describing the public sphere in the language of markets, he argues that three major factors have altered the fortunes of today’s intellectuals: the evaporation of public trust in institutions, the polarization of American society, and growing economic inequality. He correctly identifies the last of these as the most important: the extraordinary rise of the American superrich, a class interested in supporting a particular genre of “ideas.”

The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Everybody lies. People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when they’re not. They say they’ll be in touch when they won’t. They say it’s not about you when it is. They say they love you when they don’t. They say they’re happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives. They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys. Here’s my brief survey for you:

Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias. An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered. Even though nobody gave their names, people, in large numbers, exaggerated their voter registration status, voting behaviour, and charitable giving.

Christopher Sims::

Artificial-intelligence engineers have a problem: They often don’t know what their creations are thinking.
 
 As artificial intelligence grows in complexity and prevalence, it also grows more powerful. AI already has factored into decisions about who goes to jail and who receives a loan. There are suggestions AI should determine who gets the best chance to live when a self-driving car faces an unavoidable crash.
 
 Defining AI is slippery and growing more so, as startups slather the buzzword over whatever they are doing. It is generally accepted as any attempt to ape human intelligence and abilities.

Teddy Fischer (Mercer Island High School):

TEDDY: How can the US defeat an ideology?

Ideologies can be countered by showing people a better education and hope for the future.

MATTIS: I think the most important thing on that is probably education. An economic opportunity has to be there as well. On the education, I sometimes wonder how much better the world would be if we funded for nations where they have ideology problems, where the ideologies are hateful, full of hatred. I wonder what would happen if we turned around and we helped pay for high school students, a boy and girl at each high school in that country to come to America for one year and don’t do it just once, but do it ten years in a row. Every high school whether it be in Afghanistan or Syria or wherever, would send one boy and one girl for one year to Mercer island or to Topeka, Kansas or wherever.

It wouldn’t cost that much if you had sponsoring families that would take them in. Most American families are very generous, unless they’ve lived in places where they’ve adopted kind of a selfish style. But, that’s only a few pockets of the country that really have that bad. Although they’re big pockets in terms of population, most of the country is not like that. I bet we could do that. I think ideologies can be countered by showing people a better education and hope for the future by learning how to get along with one another. And for all of our problems in our country, we’re probably still the best example of that in the world.

David Gelernter::

Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves “the resistance.” But I was startled a few days ago when a thoughtful, much-admired conservative commentator used the same term on TV—casually, as if “the resistance” was just the obvious term. Everyone is saying it. It’s no accident that the left runs American culture. The right is too obsessed with mere mechanics—poll numbers and vote counts—to look up.

Peter Gascoyne::

How Are You Doing? is a “book” that describes in detail why and how seasonally adjusting your data will lead to a much better understanding of performance over time, for almost any given metric. I describe it as a “book” — in quotes — as it comes in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
 
 Executive Summary
 59 pages
 42-minute audio
 
 For managers and executives, this overview describes the hazards of typical reporting that relies on comparison with Plan or year-over-year to inform you how you’re doing. It also quickly describes how seasonally-adjusting your data works, and how it can give you much greater understanding about how you’ve done in the past, where you’re at today, and where you’re heading in future.

Peter’s work is well worth reading. I am thankful for all that he has done over the years. Contact Peter at Peter@MakingApples.com

Molly Beck:

Two years ago Preston Bratz made the mistake of trying to buy a joint for 10 bucks.

Bratz, who was a 15-year-old sophomore at La Follette High School at the time, got caught arranging the purchase at school and was immediately put on track to be kicked out of school.

But after an aggressive campaign to reverse that decision, spearheaded by Bratz’s grandmother, Bratz’s recommended expulsion was thrown out and his case helped push the Madison School Board to rethink its zero-tolerance discipline policies.

Vanessa Bates Ramirez::

If you’re one of the many people who’s embraced the sharing economy, you’ve probably stayed in someone else’s apartment or ridden in someone else’s car. Maybe you’ve also done away with your clutter of DVDs, books, or CDs, since you can watch movies on Netflix, read books on Kindle, and hear music on Pandora.
 
 The concept of having more while owning less sounds paradoxical, but that’s exactly the scenario we’re finding ourselves in. Technology is enabling us to move away from ownership and towards an economy based on sharing and subscriptions. Platforms like Airbnb and Lyft or Uber connect renters and riders to landlords and drivers, and digitization means all kinds of media can be stored, streamed, or downloaded in seconds.
 
 But where does it end? Are there things we’ll always want to own, and if so, what are they?
 
 In a new video from Big Think, author and WIRED founding executive editor Kevin Kelly explores the limits of what he calls the subscription economy and asks, “Is this the end of owning stuff?”

Scientific American:

Innovations that are on the verge of making a difference to society

Marta Jewson:

After three months, five requests and a formal warning, Friends of King Schools has finally provided state officials with most policies and documentation related to a March incident in which a security guard handcuffed a nine-year-old student at one of its schools.

The charter group posted a seclusion and restraint policy to its website on June 22, weeks past the state’s May 26 deadline. The policy appears to have been posted 30 minutes after The Lens inquired about the status of the documents, which the state Department of Education had sought since March.

The state provided the documents to The Lens last month and informed us midday that the documents fulfill its request.*

The morning of March 16, a private security guard handcuffed a fourth-grade boy at Joseph A. Craig Charter School after he threatened to hurt himself, according to an incident report provided by the school to the state.

The boy became upset while waiting for his mother to drop off a permission slip, according to the report. It was written in first-person, but it doesn’t say who wrote it.

“He was pushing the officer, hitting him, and swinging himself into anyone who was near him,” it states. The officer handcuffed the boy until his mother arrived. She calmed him down and took him with her.

Kyle Peterson:

Rewriting the code of life has never been so easy. In 2012 scientists demonstrated a new DNA-editing technique called Crispr. Five years later it is being used to cure mice with HIV and hemophilia. Geneticists are engineering pigs to make them suitable as human organ donors. Bill Gates is spending $75 million to endow a few Anopheles mosquitoes, which spread malaria, with a sort of genetic time bomb that could wipe out the species. A team at Harvard plans to edit 1.5 million letters of elephant DNA to resurrect the woolly mammoth.

“I frankly have been flabbergasted at the pace of the field,” says Jennifer Doudna, a Crispr pioneer who runs a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re barely five years out, and it’s already in early clinical trials for cancer. It’s unbelievable.”

The thing to understand about Crispr isn’t its acronym—for the record, it stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—but that it makes editing DNA easy, cheap and precise. Scientists have fiddled with genes for decades, but in clumsy ways. They zapped plants with radiation to flip letters of DNA at random, then looked for useful mutations. They hijacked the infection mechanisms of viruses and bacteria to deliver beneficial payloads. They shot cells with “gene guns,” which are pretty much what they sound like. The first one, invented in the 1980s, was an air pistol modified to fire particles coated with genetic material.

Don Gaetz::

Just when the moaning choir of critics and political organ grinders strike up their dirges about Florida’s bad old government, the overland stage brings us news from the world north of Florida.
 
 On July 1, Illinois started closing schools and shuttering state offices. They taxed themselves silly until businesses that create jobs, which create revenues, started leaving. The state comptroller, a Democrat, says the state that boasts Barrack Obama and Rahm Emanuel as models of leadership will be the first to have its bonds rated, literally, as junk. Oh, yeah, and more people were shot in Chicago last year than America lost on 9/11. New state motto: Come to Illinois and Take Your Chances.
 
 On July 1, New Jersey went on life support. The governor, a Republican, wants to drain state reserves to fund drug treatment. The problem is that reserves are a non-recurring source of money and drug treatment is a recurring cost. Put simply, you can’t pay your rent from your savings account or pretty soon you’ll be both evicted and broke.

Madison plans to spend nearly $20k per student during the 2017-2018 school year.

Alan Borsuk:

t’s an emergency. It says so right there on the legal papers: “Order of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Adopting Emergency Rules.”

But it’s a curious kind of emergency. Elsewhere in the paperwork, it uses the term “difficulties.” Maybe that’s a better way to put it.

Underlying the legal language lie questions that are causing big concern in perhaps every school district and independent school in Wisconsin this summer:

Who’s going to fill the remaining open teaching jobs we have? How are we going to put together a staff when some specific positions are proving hard to fill? Are we really getting the best people we feasibly could to work in our classrooms?

And one question that was prominent in my thoughts as I sat through a public hearing in Madison on Thursday on these “emergency” changes to some of the rules governing teacher licensing in Wisconsin:

Would you call these new rules “good” or call them “necessary because of the shape things are in”?

If you’re hanging around with school administrators, you hear a lot of talk about teacher shortages. The “pipeline” leading into classroom jobs is not nearly as full as it used to be. Certain jobs — science, math, special education, bilingual, to name four — are a challenge to fill. Some areas, especially the most rural and the most urban, are finding it particularly difficult to attract top candidates for jobs.

Overall, how much of a shortage is there? The situation “has proven to be very difficult to quantify,” Tony Evers, the state superintendent, told me after Thursday’s hearing. Nonetheless, Evers said, he hears about shortages from school officials all the time.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, sat quietly in the audience of about 30 at the public hearing. But he told me that the emergency rules were regarded as very important by the administrators he represents.

Will there be classrooms without regularly assigned teachers come the start of the school year? Yes, Bales said. Not a large number, but some. There is a real need to get more people into the pool of candidates applying for teaching jobs.

The “emergency rules” that have now been put in place make it easier to get a Wisconsin teaching license in a variety of circumstances — to name several, if you’re close to meeting the existing requirements for a specific license, if you’re moving to Wisconsin from another state, if you haven’t quite met the existing requirement to demonstrate knowledge of the content you’ll be teaching, and so on. There are several things going on here.

Much more on the attempts to weaken Wisconsin’s thin teacher content knowledge requirements, here.

Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh:

Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core’s effects on their children’s learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything academically worthwhile in the standards funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and promoted by the organizations it has subsidized to promote them (e.g., the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence).

Joy Pullmann’s The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids (Encounter Books, 2017) is a recent addition to the critics’ side of the Common Core controversy. Her purpose is to explain what Common Core is and how it got to be implemented in almost every public classroom in almost every state in a remarkably short period of time (less than five years). She does so chiefly from the perspective of the many parents and teachers she quotes.

Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach…not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature…but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.

Overnight, teachers discovered they were accountable to anonymous bureaucrats for students’ scores on tests these teachers had not developed or reviewed, before or after their administration. Amazingly, state boards and governors believed all teachers were accountable to the federal education department despite the fact that the federal government pays for only about 8 to 10 percent of the costs of public education on average across states, and not for teachers’ or superintendents’ salaries.

The complex story of how sets of English language arts and mathematics standards (and, later, compatible science standards) created by non-experts selected chiefly (so far as we know) by Gates got adopted legally by mathematically- and scientifically-ignorant state boards of education is carefully told in a relatively short book. What we miss are analyses of four crucial topics: the academic quality of Common Core’s standards, why they were adopted by mathematically-illiterate state boards of education, why “school choice” doesn’t address the problems in Common Core’s standards, and how the peer review process for approving a “State Plan” under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) ensures continuing federal control of a state’s public schools.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

In 2009, 328 black students started 9th grade in Madison’s public high schools. By June 2013, only 177 (54%) of these students graduated with a diploma. Only 14 of these graduates were considered “ready” to succeed in college level reading upon completion of the ACT college entrance exam. That’s just 4% of the freshman class from four years earlier.

We will never diversify business and industry, or reduce poverty and underemployment if this is all the success we produce among our children. These are the reasons our preschool exists: to ensure children are reading-ready by kindergarten, and have the foundation necessary to succeed in grade school and beyond.

Look around your office when you are at work. Imagine one of our Baby Badgers sitting next to you, working with you or leading your team or organization. One day, they will be. Our children WILL graduate, with your help.

Want to “insure” their success? Click below and help us hire great teachers. Your support is appreciated, and the return on investment will be huge.

Just ask Myssac, your future Governor. Onward!

Please Enjoy this Highlight Videoof our First Graduation.

Madison now spends nearly $20,000 per K-12 student annually.

Richard P. Phelps:

My comments below in response to the USED request for comments on existing USED regulations. To submit your own, follow the instructions at: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=ED-2017-OS-0074-0001

MEMORANDUM
To: Hilary Malawer, Assistant General Counsel, Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Department of Education
From: Richard P. Phelps
Date: July 8, 2017
Re: Evaluation of Existing Regulations[1]

Greetings:

I encourage the US Education Department to eliminate from any current and future funding education research centers. Ostensibly, federally funded education research centers fill a “need” for more research to guide public policy on important topics. But, the research centers are almost entirely unregulated, so they can do whatever they please. And, what they please is too often the promotion of their own careers, the suppression or denigration of competing ideas and evidence, and the use of their control of abundant federal tax dollars to promote the careers and evidence they prefer and dismiss or suppress the careers and evidence they do not prefer.

In short, federal funding of education research centers concentrates far too much power in too few hands. And, that power is nearly unassailable. One USED funded research center, the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) blatantly and repeatedly misrepresented research I had conducted while at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in favor of their own small studies on the same topic. I was even denied attendance at public meetings where my research was misrepresented. Promises to correct the record were made, but not kept.

When I appealed to the USED project manager, he replied that he had nothing to say about “editorial” matters. In other words, a federally funded education research center can write and say anything that pleases, or benefits, the individuals inside.

Capturing a federally funded research center contract tends to boost the professional provenance of the winners stratospherically. In the case of CRESST, the principals assumed control of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment, where they behaved typically—citing themselves and those who agree with them, and ignoring, or demonizing, the majority of the research that contradicted their work and policy recommendations.

Further, CRESST principals now seem to have undue influence on the assessment research of the international agency, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which, as if on cue, has published studies that promote the minority of the research sympathetic to CRESST doctrine while simply ignoring even the existence of the majority of the research that is not. The rot—the deliberate suppression of the majority of the relevant research–has spread worldwide, and the USED funded it.

Alan Borsuk::

And it definitely is the July Fourth weekend. In honor of that, I was tempted to skip writing a normal column and offer a selection of the questions on the civics test that is given to people who want to become citizens of the United States. I thought it might be a good time for everybody to make sure they’re up to speed on fundamentals of American governance and history.

Besides, we just came through the first high school graduation season in which every student in Wisconsin was required to take the civics test and get at least 60 of the 100 questions right in order to get a diploma. By the way, there’s a proposal floating around the Legislature to increase the passing score from 60 to 80 out of 100.

Doing that isn’t very hard and there are many ways to succeed at this task. I suspect no one was denied a high school diploma only because of the civics test. For one thing, the test is easily available online, with the answers.

Wanna see if you’re as smart as a Wisconsin high school graduate? Take the test. One way to get it is to Google “U.S. citizenship civics test questions.” Might be a patriotic thing to do for the holiday.

But on to my main theme: School is in, in terms of it having turned popular in Wisconsin to support kindergarten through 12th-grade schools.