Shahien Nasiripour:

The federal government has, in recent years, paid debt collectors close to $1 billion annually to help distressed borrowers climb out of default and scrounge up regular monthly payments. New government figures suggest much of that money may have been wasted.

Nearly half of defaulted student-loan borrowers who worked with debt collectors to return to good standing on their loans defaulted again within three years, according to an analysis by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For their work, debt collectors receive up to $1,710 in payment from the U.S. Department of Education each time a borrower makes good on soured debt through a process known as rehabilitation. They keep those funds even if borrowers subsequently default again, contracts show. The department has earmarked more than $4.2 billion for payments to its debt collectors since the start of the 2013 fiscal year, federal spending data show.

Susan Berfield:

“Here’s the high school. It’s so huge, it takes a minute just to drive by,” says John Diamond as we pass a giant brick Victorian building surrounded by a lush green lawn. We’re on a tour of Evanston, Ill., which borders Chicago, runs along Lake Michigan, and is home to Northwestern University. In some ways, Evanston is an American idyll. People move here and stay, because it’s a diverse, relatively affluent, and well-read community. Two-thirds of its residents have library cards. Yet, to the dismay of the progressive citizenry, Evanston educates white students far more successfully than students of color.

Diamond, 47, is the parent of an Evanston seventh-grader, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. His book is based on a five-year examination of an unidentified Midwestern high school that’s diverse and affluent and still treats black and white students differently. Diamond promised never to reveal the school’s location. Maybe it isn’t in Evanston. But it could be.

Francis Collins:

Researchers attribute this disturbing gap to a variety of social and economic influences, as well as differences in modifiable behavioral and lifestyle factors, such as obesity, inactivity, and tobacco use. The findings serve as a sobering reminder that, despite the considerable progress made possible by biomedical science, more research is needed to figure out better ways of addressing health disparities and improving life expectancy for all Americans.

In the new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, a research team, partially funded by NIH, found that the average American baby born in 2014 can expect to live to about age 79 [1]. That’s up from a national average of about 73 in 1980 and around 68 in 1950. However, babies born in 2014 in remote Oglala Lakota County, SD, home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, can expect to live only about 66 years. That’s in stark contrast to a child born about 400 miles away in Summit County, CO, where life expectancy at birth now exceeds age 86.

Earlier studies suggested that Americans living in some parts of the country were living more than a decade longer than others [2]. In the new study, a team led by Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle, wanted to get a closer look at those disparities. To fill in as much geographical detail as possible, they mapped life expectancies county by county—the smallest unit for which death records are routinely available—from 1980 to 2014.

Making Duolingo Blog

To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!

How is this even possible?

For one, there are several different ways to say “I” in Japanese (i.e., watashi, watakushi, boku, ore, etc.), each of which can be written in any of the three writing systems mentioned above. There are also two particles that can go with “I”, which you are actually able to omit. You can even choose to not mention “I” at all, since it is implied. This already makes 37 (4 × 3 × 3 + 1) different ways to just say “I” in Japanese.

The Economist:

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL (HBS) has come under the cosh this month. A new book, “The Golden Passport” by Duff McDonald, argues that HBS has lost its crown as the top business school in America and also become a breeding ground for toxic behaviour, with conflicts of interests rife within the school, and its alumni responsible for pushing a rapacious form of capitalism that explains many of the ills of the world’s biggest economy. Mr McDonald is a well-regarded author whose previous books, on McKinsey & Company, a consultancy, and JPMorgan Chase, a bank, were authoritative. Why is he attacking the school, and does he have a point?

Alex Arriaga:

Students at Northwestern University disrupted a sociology class on Tuesday to protest the visit of an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Daily Northwestern reports that members of student groups gathered outside the campus building where the ICE representative was beginning a guest presentation. The sociology course focuses on “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class, and gender,” its syllabus says.

According to the student newspaper, the protesters carried banners and yelled profanities. Administrators told the protesting students they would be allowed into the classroom if they did not disrupt the presentation. The students entered, and the officer left. Protesters asked the sociology professor, Beth Redbird, why the officer had been invited.

Jason Whitley:

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office has secret audio recordings in which a campaign worker claims he pays off someone inside the county elections to find out when mail-in ballots get sent out.

Sidney Williams, 33, made the audio recordings of Jose Barrientos. Williams shared the audio with the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office and WFAA.
Barrientos told WFAA that the recordings are just “guy talk.” He said he has not done anything illegal.

“I don’t do that stuff. I know that looks bad me and Sidney talking s*** or trash. That looks bad. And I know it does but that’s just talk,” Barrientos told WFAA.

Alana Dunagan:

Last month’s announcement that Indiana’s Purdue University would acquire the for-profit Kaplan University shocked the world of higher education. The Purdue faculty are up in arms. The merger faces a series of regulatory obstacles. And it’s unclear whether the “New U,” as the entity is temporarily named, can be operationally viable or financially successful.

But Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, is willing to give it a shot.

The venture is unexpected, unconventional and smart. The nature of the partnership—in which Kaplan will transfer its assets to Purdue, a public university—is unprecedented. It’s also a rare instance of attempted self-disruption.

There are lessons here from the business world. In the seminal 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Harvard professor Clayton Christensen describes how leading companies can do everything “right” and still be thwarted by disruptive competitors. In an effort to appease stakeholders, leaders focus resources on activities that target current customers, promise higher profits, build prestige, and help them play in substantial markets. As Mr. Christensen observes, they play the game the way it’s supposed to be played. Meanwhile, a disruptive innovation is changing all the rules.

Leighton Akio Woodhouse:

IMMIGRATIONS AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT imprisons more than 10,000 parents of American citizens in California each year, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch.

The report, entitled “I Still Need You,” analyzes the impact of immigration enforcement policy on immigrant families in California and finds that parents with U.S. citizen children were more likely to be deported from detention rather than released. The report also finds that from January 2011 to June 2015 nearly half of the immigrants detained in California had no criminal history, findings that directly contradict claims President Obama made about his immigration enforcement policy at that time. Under President Trump, the report’s authors believe, the trends suggested by the data have likely become even more pronounced.

In 2014, Obama announced a new immigration enforcement policy known informally as “felons, not families,” which purported to prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants with serious criminal histories and avoid separating families. But as the Marshall Project has shown, less than a fifth of the immigrants deported nationwide under the policy had been convicted of violent or potentially violent crimes. More than 40 percent had no criminal convictions whatsoever.

HistoryofInformation.com

In 1755 French writer and philosopher Denis DiderotOffsite Link published in the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de gens de lettres an article entitled Encyclopédie. In that he explained that a primary reason for undertaking this enormous writing and publishing project was to manage information overload by providing a rational and comprehensible order to what was already an almost impossibly large and disorganized body of information.

I preface my remarks About the Database with a brief quotation from Diderot’s article. Equally relevant is this somewhat longer quotation, which places Diderot’s partially self-deprecating thoughts in better context:

Don Boudreaux:

This Atlantic story reveals how Americans lived 100 years ago. (HT Warren Smith) By the standards of a middle-class American today, that lifestyle was poor, inconvenient, dreary, and dangerous. (Only a few years later – in 1924 – the 16-year-old son of a sitting U.S. president would die of an infected blister that the boy got on his toe while playing tennis on the White House grounds.)

So here’s a question that I’ve asked in one form or another on earlier occasions, but that is so probing that I ask it again: What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916? 21.7 million 2016 dollars (which are about one million 1916 dollars)? Would that do it? What about a billion 2016 – or 1916 – dollars? Would this sizable sum of dollars be enough to enable you to purchase a quantity of high-quality 1916 goods and services that would at least make you indifferent between living in 1916 America and living (on your current income) in 2016 America?

Howard Blume and Anna M. Phillips:

The Los Angeles Unified School District underwent a dramatic political shift Tuesday night, as the curtain dropped on what has been the most expensive school board election in the nation’s history.

The election has been a proxy war between wealthy charter school advocates and public employee unions. Charter supporters appeared to secure their first-ever majority on the seven-member Los Angeles Board of Education, a move that could accelerate the already-rapid expansion of charter schools across the city.

toptal:

The following animations illustrate how effectively data sets from different starting points can be sorted using different algorithms.

By Peter Jamison and Aaron C. Davis:

Former D.C. Public Schools chancellor Kaya Henderson routinely helped well-connected parents — including two senior aides to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) — bend or break the rules of the District’s notoriously competitive school lottery to enroll their children at coveted schools, according to a confidential report obtained by The Washington Post.

The report, based on an investigation by the D.C. Inspector General’s Office, describes in remarkable detail how Henderson used her power as head of the school system to place the children of those with political clout at campuses they could not otherwise access through the random lottery, which every year leaves thousands of families on waiting lists for their desired schools.

Kashmir Hill:

The ever-expanding operations of Uber are defined by two interlocking and zealously guarded sets of information: the things the world-dominating ride-hailing company knows about you, and the things it doesn’t want you to know about it. Both kinds of secrets have been in play in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, as Ward Spangenberg, a former forensic investigator for Uber, has pursued a wrongful-termination lawsuit against the company.
 
 The case, filed in May of last year, has weaponized Uber’s secrecy. Most sensationally, Spangenberg’s suit got significant press coverage in December for his claims that company employees accessed its data inappropriately to track exes and to spy on celebrities like Beyoncé. Uber responded to those claims by saying that employees only have access to the amount of customer data they need to do their jobs and that all data access is logged and routinely audited, with thorough investigations performed in the event of potential violations.

Wall Street Journal:

The legal brawl over Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy begins this week, and it will be long and ugly. The pain might be worth something if the island can use this rare chance to reform its government, and creditors learn a hard lesson about lending to spendthrift politicians.

After San Juan said last year that it couldn’t repay its debts, Congress passed a law known as Promesa that created a seven-member federal oversight board modelled on the one that turned around Washington, D.C. in the 1990s. The board rejected the first two fiscal plans proposed by former governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla and his successor Governor Ricky Rossello before accepting a third.

But even that plan couldn’t prevent a debt restructuring after Mr. Rossello and creditors failed to agree on a voluntary plan. The creditors are now crying foul, claiming that the control board intervened to scuttle the talks. But the board says Promesa’s Title III bankruptcy process to reduce the debt was all but inevitable, and mutual funds could face losses as high as $5.4 billion in what are likely to be court-directed haircuts.

National Association of College and University Business Officers:

Average institutional tuition discount rates are rising as larger percentages of students receive grants and scholarships from their institutions, and the awards cover more of their costs. An estimated 87.9 percent of freshmen and 78.5 percent of all undergraduates received grant aid in 2016-17, covering more than half of tuition and fees, on average, for both cohorts.

More than three-quarters of all institutional grant aid was used to meet students’ financial need. Institutions with the largest endowments were most likely to give aid to financially needy students: At schools with endowments worth more than $1 billion, 90.8 percent of all grant and scholarship funds met need.

“In each of the past 12 years, private colleges and universities have increased their freshman tuition discount rate–culminating in this year’s record-high estimate of nearly 50 percent,” said Ken Redd, NACUBO director of research and policy analysis. “As the findings from the 2016 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study suggest, many private colleges are greatly expanding their aid programs to meet the needs of more students and families, but these financial aid expenditures are contributing to a financial strain for some institutions.”

The 2016 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study points to other trends that are putting financial pressure on some schools. Net tuition revenue from first-time, full-time students grew by an estimated average of 0.4 percent this academic year, down from 1.5 percent in 2015-16 and 2.1 percent the year before. Meanwhile, 39.1 percent of respondents reported declining enrollments in both their first-year class and total student body, up from 37.5 percent last year.

Liberty Blog:

Failure to disclose any of the required details, or to keep the certificate for the full seven years, results in outrageous penalties. Even an inadvertent omission can subject a seller to actual damages, plus a civil penalty of up to 10 times the damages, plus court costs, plus reasonable attorney’s fees, plus expert witness fees, plus interest. Professional plaintiff’s lawyers must be chomping at the bit. If Bill sold just 100 signed copies of a $30 book, but six years later, couldn’t locate the records noting the size of the edition, he’d be liable for (at minimum) $30,000. Bill sells tens of thousands of signed books each year.

For many booksellers like Bill and Book Passage, this massive threat of liability will make holding author events too much of a risk. And the loss to California’s marketplace of ideas will be gargantuan. Book signings aren’t just central to Book Passage’s business model, they’re vital to up-and-coming authors with less represented views, who use book signings to lure new readers. Many famous authors got their start by doing signing events. While Book Passage hosts such big names as Isabelle Allende and Khaled Hosseini, it also frequently hosts local poets, fiction writers, and even chefs who have authored cookbooks.

Even worse than irrational, the law is pernicious: despite the law’s vast breadth (it also covers paintings, sculptures, and auctioneers), certain sellers have secured exemptions. Online retailers and pawn shops, those places where uninformed buyers are most vulnerable, do not have to comply.

Kay Hymowitz:

Last week, my high school alma mater in the prosperous Montgomery County suburbs of Philadelphia went viral. A video of a student brawl injuring four security officers and eight teachers appeared on YouTube, bolstering long-whispered rumors of the district’s decline. Four students were taken into custody; one of them, 18 and charged as an adult for four counts of aggravated assault, is still in jail as I write. All four of the students were black females.

I haven’t visited Cheltenham High since I graduated in the faraway American Graffiti era, but I ventured back for a packed emergency community meeting about the May 4 events. In addition to memories, I found a stark illustration of the nation’s evasions about racial gaps in education.

Related: English 10, high school redesign and TAG complaint.

The Economist:

YOU will all be aware that a book has just been published about our institution, Harvard Business School (HBS). Entitled “The Golden Passport”, by Duff McDonald, it makes a number of unflattering claims about the school’s ethics and its purpose. While often unbalanced, it is likely to galvanise hostility to HBS both inside Harvard University, of which we are a part, and among the public. This memorandum, circulated only to the most senior faculty members, assesses HBS’s strategic position.

Our school has been among the country’s most influential institutions since its foundation in 1908. Our forebears helped build America’s economy in the early 20th century and helped win the second world war. HBS educates less than 1% of American MBA students but case studies written by our faculty are used at business schools around the world. Our alumni fill the corridors of elite firms such as McKinsey. Many bosses of big American companies studied here. Even in Silicon Valley, where we are relatively weak, about a tenth of “unicorns”—private startups worth over $1bn—have one of our tribe as a founder.

MIT Video.

Jessica Bruha

The storied former coach of the Permian Panthers, Gary Gaines, will return to the gridiron next month to help raise awareness for a disease he himself must now tackle.

Gaines was recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, joining millions of Americans estimated to have the disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. In an effort to raise money to help find a cure and support local programs, Gaines will help coach a team of women battling for victory in a friendly flag football competition.

Kickoff for the Blondes vs. Brunettes game is at 6 p.m. June 10 at Bushland Falcon Stadium, 99 Farm to Market Road 2381, Bushland, Texas. Gates open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $25.

Gaines, who retired as head football coach at Permian in 2012 after his second stint as the Permian head coach, said he is looking forward to returning to the football field.

Citizen Stewart:

If the possibility of discrimination is cause for block funding for educational programs we might as well shut down public schools and start over. It’s that bad, and it’s the reason so many families want alternatives.
Yes, there are valid arguments against vouchers. Most can be addressed by the way voucher laws are written. But, it’s simply unfair to summarily disregard the aspirations of marginalized children and parents who currently make good use of public funds to access educational programs they want and need. They matter. They deserve choices. It’s their lives on the line and God bless them for actively seeking better for themselves.

For me, prioritizing their rights and their self-determination over the whims and privilege of voucher opponents is the truly moral thing to do.

Jenny Anderson:

But students can be taught to think strategically about thinking and studying, says Chen, the lead author of a new study about the practice, and parents can prompt this type of learning by posing some strategic questions of their own.

In the study Chen led, researchers conducted two field experiments in which some university students were offered a variety of prompts to help them think carefully about how they studied, and how they might study more effectively for an introductory statistics class exam. The other students—the control group—simply received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should prepare.
Those who reflected on how they wanted to perform and what they needed to do to perform better outperformed those who did not, by an average of one-third of a letter grade. Those who received the intervention prompts twice did better than those who received it once.
“Our key insight in this research is the importance of being goal-directed and thoughtful about how one chooses and uses resources for learning—or to achieve any other goal for that matter,” Chen said.

Greg Piper:

Paul Griffiths spoke a little too freely when he responded to a professor’s faculty listserv invitation for “racial equity” training at Duke Divinity School (DDS) three months ago.

The professor of Catholic theology told his colleagues not to “lay waste your time” with the training, which he predicted would be full of “bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs”:

When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance

Craig Torres:

Top officials from two U.S. government economic-statistics agencies said their measurement tools are understating growth and overstating some components of inflation by modest amounts, while cautioning that this doesn’t explain the sluggish expansion in recent years.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis agree that price index mismeasurement continues to lead to understated growth in real output over time,” five current and former officials from the agencies wrote in a paper published May 3 in the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives and presented last week at a meeting of the BEA’s advisory committee.

The Economist:

IMAGINE you are a poor parent in Washington, DC. You assumed you would send your child to a public school. But you have been offered a voucher worth up to $12,000 towards tuition at a private one. Should you use it?

Until recently the evidence suggested that you should. In 2004 Congress created the DC Opportunity Scholarship Programme, the first school-voucher scheme directly subsidised by the federal government (states and charities subsidise many others). Since then up to 2,000 families a year have been handed vouchers to attend private school after winning lotteries. In 2010 a study found that 82% of pupils offered a voucher went on to graduate from high school, compared with 70% of similar peers who attended public schools.

Michael Rosenwald:

Daniszewski, the AP vice president, said that given the time period — a war, with censors on both sides — readers would have known that Nazis had taken the photos, even if those origins weren’t specifically described.

Asked why the captions distributed with the photos didn’t include references to Nazi or SS photographers, Daniszewski said, “It is easy to second-guess eight decades later, but we do not believe and did not find in our research any intention to deceive anyone about the German origins of these photos depicting scenes from the German side of the battle lines and inside Germany itself.”

Jane Stancill:

Nathan Hatch, president of Wake Forest University, had total compensation of $4.23 million listed on the university’s 2015 tax filings.

The disclosure was made on the university’s website Monday by Board of Trustees Chair Donna Boswell.

In a lengthy message posted on the day of Wake Forest’s graduation, Boswell explained the elements of Hatch’s compensation, which could put him among the most highly compensated university presidents in 2015. “We on the Board of Trustees, together with President Hatch, want to be as open and transparent as possible concerning this information,” she wrote.

Neerav:

I. The Morality of Productivity

What if we knew a way to increase educational opportunity at no additional cost?

The benefits would be enormous. We could give more children the education they deserve.

And, by not having to increase educational spending, we could spend these saved tax dollars on families in need, or paying off government debt, or keeping money in the hands of working families.

Increasing educational productivity is one of the great moral issues of our time.

Unfortunately, increasing educational productivity in our country has been enormously difficult to accomplish.

II. Inequity in the City

Madison’s far above average spending has yet to address its long standing disastrous reading results.

University of Wisconsin Cartography department (Jennifer Smith):

Despite the internet-dependent nature of our world, a thorough understanding of the internet’s physical makeup has only recently emerged, thanks to painstaking work by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers and their collaborators.

Professor of Computer Sciences Paul Barford, Ph.D. candidate Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan and colleagues have developed Internet Atlas, the first detailed map of the internet’s structure worldwide.

Jenni White:

Tommy Schultz, national communications director for the Federation for Children, says WILL’s study is different from others because it shows how school choice affects the neediest children.

“There are many studies and testimonials that illustrate the positive impact of school choice, but this study is unique in its specific breakdown of how this is impacting children from low-income families and closing the achievement gap,” Schultz said.

Will Flanders, WILL’s research director and the study’s author, says the study provided data not previously available.

“Until this year in Wisconsin, we had no data on race and socioeconomic status, but part of the additional reporting requirements for schools last year included these data,” Flanders said. “We loaded all these data into an econometric regression model and isolated the effect of the school itself, so we controlled for those aspects.”

Leah Shafer:

When racially charged controversies dominate the news cycle, some young people may feel disconnected — or even uninterested.

The reality is that many neighborhoods and schools in suburban and rural America are not diverse and are largely white. Students may not see many people who look different from them. Conversations about race can feel personally irrelevant, and therefore obligatory and rote. And teachers may feel stymied, worried about finding the right words.

Phil Luciano:

Last month, the state announced that Peoria Public Schools and Williamsfield Community Unit School District are among 10 school districts picked for a new project designed to transform how students prepare for college and careers after high school. The title is a mouthful — Illinois’ Competency-Based High School Graduation Requirements Pilot Program — but the idea is simple: get away from the old model of youths sitting at desks and taking tests.

Instead, the program hopes to brainstorm new ways to equip kids for their future. As Tim Farquer, Williamsfield’s superintendent, put it, “The goal is to make high school less about chasing credits and more about building knowledge and skill.”

As the program’s educators and school boards begin to revamp high school curricula, they should listen to some recent customers — those who wore a mortar board not too long ago.

I teach freshman-level composition courses at Bradley University and Illinois Central College. Of my spring-semester students, the majority had graduated from high school within the last year or so, though a few are non-traditional (older) students. As the term wound down, I asked if they’d like to offer anonymous input regarding a simple question: looking back, how could high school have prepared them better — for college, the workplace or otherwise? Their responses had nothing to do with their grade: those who participated did so only with the aim of offering suggestions to help high schools and students.

Edited only for flow and space, these are their ideas:

Madison’s administrative adults have tried: English 10 and “high school redesign“.

Nina Martin and Renee Montagne

AS A NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE NURSE, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people’s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently — “the happiest and most alive I’d ever seen her.” When Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while, then with a neighbor in Hazlet, New Jersey, who was like a surrogate mom, but in important ways she’d grown up mostly alone. The chance to create her own family, to be the mother she didn’t have, touched a place deep inside her. “All she wanted to do was be loved,” said Frankie Hedges, who took Lauren in as a teenager and thought of her as her daughter. “I think everybody loved her, but nobody loved her the way she wanted to be loved.”

Rhett Jones:

But many experts are afraid the beginning of the new work week will bring more attacks and reveal ones that already existed that went unnoticed. Many workers in Asia had already finished their business for the day on Friday. It’s possible that people could be heading into the office to find a nasty surprise. And despite the best efforts of a young security researcher in the UK who goes by MalwareTech, the temporarily halted ransomware has simply been altered and is being spread by copycats. “We are in the second wave,” Matthieu Suiche of Comae Technologies, tells the New York Times. “As expected, the attackers have released new variants of the malware. We can surely expect more.”

Gayle Worland:

When James Smith talks about the generations of students he’s led for 32 years as music director of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras, his tone belies a little amazement.
 
 He’s astonished by the level of talent he sees in his young string players. He’s witnessed huge growth in WYSO in recent years, and seen the positive impact of tours its young musicians have taken to perform together around the world.
 
 In fact, Smith seems shocked that he ever wound up conducting a youth orchestra program at at all.

MathOverflow

I often find that textbooks provide very little in the way of motivation or context. As a simple example, consider group theory. Every textbook I have seen that talks about groups (including some very basic undergrad level books) presents them as abstract algebraic structures (while providing some examples, of course), then spends a few dozen pages proving theorems, and then maybe in some other section of the book covers some Galois Theory. This really irks me. Personally I find it very difficult to learn a topic with no motivation, partly just because it bores me to death. And of course it is historically backwards; groups arose as people tried to solve problems they were independently interested in. They didn’t sit down and prove a pile of theorems about groups and then realize that groups had applications. It’s also frustrating because I have to be completely passive; if I don’t know what groups are for or why anyone cares about them, all I can do is sit and read as the book throws theorems at me.

This is true not just with sweeping big picture issues, but with smaller things too. I remember really struggling to figure out why it was supposed to matter so much which subgroups were closed under conjugation before finally realizing that the real issue was which subgroups can be kernels of homomorphisms, and the other thing is just a handy way to characterize them. So why not define normal subgroups that way, or at least throw in a sentence explaining that that’s what we’re really after? But no one does.

Chen Shaoyuan and Li Rongde

Education authorities in Shanghai have ordered two private primary schools to apologize after it was revealed that one gave parents grueling IQ tests and another grilled students over the profession of their grandparents.

The move comes amid public uproar triggered by one parent’s social media tirade about how he was forced to take a sophisticated IQ test – on par with ones used to recruit civil servants – when he took his daughter for an interview at the city’s Yangpu Primary School.

It prompted thousands of comments over the growing inequality of access to quality education in China, arguing that better-resourced private schools increasingly favored children from privileged backgrounds.

new york school talk:

There are certain cruel realities that are seen in schools everyday. Teachers see the multitude of barriers students face from bullying, to poverty, to learning difficulties. Schools offer various methods to help students cope with these issues, many of which are a part of policies like DASA (the Dignity for All Students Act) that offer safe environments, lunch programs to make sure students are fed, and finally, IEPs and special education services to help students with learning disabilities.

But what we’re doing isn’t nearly enough.

One of the areas where we are having too little success is with students with learning disabilities. As a middle school teacher, too frequently I have students with reading skills far below grade level. Many of these students receive special education services, but some have slid through the cracks despite scores of 1 on state exams indicating that they are “far below grade level.” These students — with IEP’s or not — sit beside peers who were taught in the same way, yet their peers progressed while they didn’t.

James Altucher:

This is what I wish: that my daughters don’t go to school.

I offered my oldest the very prestigious “Altucher Fellowship”. Never awarded before. Only awarded to her.

Basically it says: do exactly what I tell you to do for a year and don’t go to college.

I’m not sure she’s going to take it.

Here’s my ideal program:

Liana Loewus:

Many elementary students are on a “starvation diet of thin and infrequent science instruction,” according to a new report from Change the Equation.

The nonprofit group, which works with the business community to advocate for improved STEM learning, analyzed data from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Over the last few months, the group has released similar analyses of NAEP data regarding students’ access to computer science, statistics, and engineering.)

More than half of 4th graders spend less than three hours a week on science, the data show. And 1 in 5 students get less than two hours.

Cristian Cruz:

Following a contentious 5-2 vote by the Madison School Board, James C. Wright Middle School will be the first school in the Madison Metropolitan School District to require students to wear uniforms.

Wright principal Angie Hicks told the board that the new uniform policy will decrease distractions for her students and, as such, aid in closing the school’s achievement gap, one representative of schools across the county and state.

First proposed in 2013, the uniform policy will go into effect in the 2017-2018 academic year. It will require students to dress in white, black or royal blue shirts and khaki or black slacks, shorts, skorts or skirts. The policy will also require Wright teachers to follow a similar code.

Natasha Singer:

CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill.

In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, and began composing essays.

Looking up from her laptop, Masuma Khan, then 11 years old, said her essay explored how schooling in ancient Athens differed from her own. “Back then, they had wooden tablets and they had to take all of their notes on it,” she said. “Nowadays, we can just do it in Google Docs.”

Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the United States, with about 381,000 students, is at the forefront of a profound shift in American education: the Googlification of the classroom.

In doing so, Google is helping to drive a philosophical change in public education — prioritizing training children in skills like teamwork and problem-solving while de-emphasizing the teaching of traditional academic knowledge, like math formulas. It puts Google, and the tech economy, at the center of one of the great debates that has raged in American education for more than a century: whether the purpose of public schools is to turn out knowledgeable citizens or skilled workers.

The director of Google’s education apps group, Jonathan Rochelle, touched on that idea in a speech at an industry conference last year. Referring to his own children, he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.”

Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.

Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.

Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts — but schools encourage them to do so. This month, for instance, Chatfield Senior High School in Littleton, Colo., sent out a notice urging seniors to “make sure” they convert their school account “to a personal Gmail account.”

That doesn’t sit well with some parents. They warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children’s school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults.

“My concern is that they are working on developing a profile of this child that, when they hit maturity, they are able to create a better profile,” said David Barsotti, an information technology project manager in the Chicago area whose daughter uses Google tools in elementary school. “That is a problem, in my opinion.”

Mr. Rochelle of Google said that when students transfer their school emails and files to a personal Google account, that account is governed by Google’s privacy policy. “Personal Gmail accounts may serve ads,” he said, but files in Google Drive are “never scanned for the purpose of showing ads.”

Mike de Sisti:

Christine Carr says she may have found a way to do that.
The parent of a young autistic daughter, Carr is set to graduate Saturday from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. For her senior thesis, Carr created a video camera-equipped drone designed to give parents some extra help keeping an eye on their kids.
She calls the device “Nonni” because it is a combination of a “nanny” and a “mommy.”
“It’s sometimes just a challenge to do laundry or get chores done because you feel like you need to be there all the time,” said Carr, 35.

Raio Open Source

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has 20 pills he wants us to take, and keep taking, perhaps to save our country. The stark premise that he laid out for us a month ago is that the real project of Donald Trump and Company is “regime change.” When they mock the legal restraints of “so-called judges” and call journalism “the opposition,” we should understand that they’re test-marketing their contempt for the rule of law and the constitutional protection of critical freedom. So Tim Snyder has written out his pocket-size get-real manual, called: On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Richard Stallman:

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers’ developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer’s root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Tim Cushing:

The First Amendment contains no such requirement to run leaked documents past the government first. This can be an ethical decision on the part of the publisher, but the notion that the First Amendment only covers publishing after government input has been sought is a dangerous one. This assertion by Comey also just isn’t true. As Trevor Timm pointed out on Twitter, Wikileaks has attempted to contact the US government in the past before publication, but has been ignored.

Furthermore, Comey and Sasse both claim Wikileaks’ publications have caused some sort of damage to government employees. They offered unproven assertions it has endangered lives, even though the evidence shows the worst the US government (and its employees) suffered is some embarrassment.

The only mitigating factor was Comey’s assertion that the DOJ isn’t interested in using espionage laws to prosecute journalists for publishing leaked documents. As he correctly points out, the culpability lies with the person leaking the documents, not the journalists publishing them. Of course, this statement isn’t being made in a vacuum. It’s being made in the current political climate where the president has expressed an interest in reducing free speech protections. The DOJ itself appears to be working towards prosecuting Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. All that can really be gathered from Comey’s assertions is that the DOJ may not prosecute journalists who run everything past the government before publication.

Loran Kloeze

Creating a database of phone numbers, profile pictures and status information of almost all users of WhatsApp turns out to be very easy . The user doesn’t even have to be added to your contacts. This should raise at least some privacy concerns and hopefully a lot more. Let me explain how it works.

A few years ago WhatsApp made it possible to use WhatsApp in your web browser. That is good for user experience because composing a message on your keyboard is a lot easier than using those tiny touch screen buttons. It also makes copying/pasting and adding attachments easier. So much for the good news. The bad news is that it’s technically possible to use the WhatsApp Web interface to create a huge database of all possible WhatsApp users. There’s only a small group of users not affected: the users who have changed their privacy settings. Unfortunately, most users don’t change those privacy settings and WhatsApp doesn’t encourage it very much. These facts open up the possibility of collecting huge amounts of interesting data which i’m going to show you now.

Melinda Baldwin:

In January 1861 John Tyndall, a physicist at London’s Royal Institution, submitted a paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The paper bore the title “On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction.” After testing the heat-retaining properties of several gases, Tyndall had concluded that some were capable of trapping heat, and thus he became one of the first physicists to recognize and describe that basis for the greenhouse effect. A month after its submission, the paper was read aloud at a meeting of the society, and several months after that, a revised version of the paper was in print.

That path from submission to revision and publication will sound familiar to modern scientists. However, Tyndall’s experience with the Philosophical Transactions—in particular, with its refereeing system—was quite different from what authors experience today. Tracing “On the absorption and radiation of heat” through the Royal Society’s editorial process highlights how one of the world’s most established refereeing systems worked in the 1860s. Rather than relying on anonymous referee reports to improve their papers, authors engaged in extensive personal exchanges with their reviewers. Such a collegial approach gradually lost favor but recently has undergone something of a resurgence.

Edgar Sandoval:

Richard Gamarra’s long trip from inmate to the Ivy League ends next week with a master’s degree — in redemption.

The former Latin King gangbanger, after seven years behind bars for assault and weapon convictions, graduates May 17 from Columbia University’s renowned Mailman School of Public Health.

He never imagined swapping a prison jumpsuit for the university’s iconic blue cap and gown — but his dreams are coming true.

“When there’s a will, there’s a way,” said a beaming Gamarra as he walked around the prestigious Morningside Heights campus last week. “This is historic for me. It’s very humbling. I won’t believe it until I have that diploma in my hands.”

The 28-year-old Gamarra, after earning his master’s in public health, paused for a minute to admire the bronze “Alma Mater” sculpture outside Low Memorial Library.

John Nova Lomax:

JNL: How big a role do American employers play in the problems we’re seeing with immigration? It seems like we put more of the burden on the immigrants than on the people who hire them.

HA: We’ve gone from maybe 3 million illegal aliens in the United States a couple of decades ago to anywhere from 10 to 13 million now. The reality is they wouldn’t be here if they couldn’t work. And it’s no different under this administration, despite the rhetoric. The administration talks about making it harder for refugees to come into the country. They talk about increasing the number of Border Patrol agents. But they don’t say much about what they’re doing with employers. I think it’s obvious why—we have a president who’s a businessman. If any agent had the guts to do an I-9 audit on Trump’s businesses—of course, nobody has the guts, but if I was an agent, I would do it—they would be surprised by what they would find.

Let me backtrack and say that agents tend to like what the president’s doing. The increased border security is great. The catch-and-release policies are great; the detention is great. But if we don’t start holding employers accountable, the problems will continue. When I was an agent, I walked the mountains of New Mexico for eight hours with a lady who was pregnant. And all she knew was that once she got away from the border and made it into Chicago, she would be home free.

Leslie Brody:

Newark district and union officials said that under the tentative four-year agreement, teachers must still be deemed effective to climb up the salary ladder and those deemed highly effective would still get a bonus of $5,000.

Five years ago, those provisions marked a departure from the usual system of automatic annual raises for experience and pay increases for advanced degrees. At the time both Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, hailed the contract as an example of how they could work with political adversaries.

The bonuses were initially paid for by the foundation started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. For the first time, district Superintendent Chris Cerf said, the bonuses would come from district funds, showing this model is sustainable.

“We think this is a good deal for the district, teachers and especially for the students,” Mr. Cerf said.

Newark Teachers Union officials said about 200 teachers a year got a bonus. According to district data, in recent years 15% to 18% got ratings less than effective.

Unions often argue that pay-for-performance can undermine the collaboration that teachers depend on, but supporters say it adds incentives and helps recruit quality staff.

John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union, backed the deal but said he would rather have the district spend more on school resources and professional development, rather than bonuses.

“Those members who receive it are fine, of course they don’t complain about receiving it,” he said. “We still believe all people across the board should be given the same resources, and the same circumstances under which to teach, so they can all be highly effective.”

Smia Simring:

Meanwhile, I had been raised by striving parents and sent to the infamously elite Horace Mann School, where I was decidedly not in with the in-crowd — and I loved it. I loved that if I could dream it, I could write up a proposal and get a budget for it. I loved that I found my home in the out crowd, the goths and punks and nerds and theater kids. But I don’t think Horace Mann ensured my or my classmates’ success later in life.

So when we realized late last year that my daughter, born in the last week of 2012, could be entering kindergarten in 2017, I tried to keep an open mind, unclouded by the terrible things my mother had always said about public school. The fact was, my husband and I shared the primary goal of finding an educational setting that would first and foremost support our daughter’s social and emotional development. We realized this might have been different from our (and especially my) parents’ goals. We decided to first look at public schools, since we figured we would have the option of starting her a year later if she went to private school.

Bryan Horwath:

A journalism instructor at Hutchinson Community College said he and his students had been locked out of their journalism computer lab by the school, which later decided to allow a final edition of the school paper to be published.

Alan Montgomery, a 17-year instructor and academic adviser at the college, said he was informed on Friday that he had been suspended from his job. He said the action was taken after several stories were published in the school’s newspaper – The Collegian – that were critical of its administration.

Alina Dizik:

When Jean-Philippe Michel, an Ottawa-based career coach, works with secondary school students, he doesn’t use the word profession. Neither does he focus on helping his young clients figure out what they want to be when they grow up—at least not directly.

For him, there’s really no such thing as deciding on a profession to grow up into.
Rather than encouraging each person to choose a profession, say, architect or engineer, he works backwards from the skills that each student wants to acquire. So instead of saying, “I want to be a doctor”, he’ll aim to get students to talk about a goal, in this case “using empathy in a medical setting”.

Anna Aizer and Janet Currie:

Using a unique dataset linking preschool blood lead levels (BLLs), birth, school, and detention data for 120,000 children born 1990-2004 in Rhode Island, we estimate the impact of lead on behavior: school suspensions and juvenile detention. We develop two instrumental variables approaches to deal with potential confounding from omitted variables and measurement error in lead. The first leverages the fact that we have multiple noisy measures for each child. The second exploits very local, within neighborhood, variation in lead exposure that derives from road proximity and the de-leading of gasoline. Both methods indicate that OLS considerably understates the negative effects of lead, suggesting that measurement error is more important than bias from omitted variables. A one-unit increase in lead increased the probability of suspension from school by 6.4-9.3 percent and the probability of detention by 27-74 percent, though the latter applies only to boys.

Josh Vorhees:

Civis says it mostly limited itself to publicly available information so that its analysis was repeatable; Hersh counters that repeating a flawed analysis will just lead to the same flawed results. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn pointed out on Twitter, and as Hersh echoed in his conversation with me, the absence of a detailed voter file-based analysis of the impact of voter ID laws—by Civis or anyone else for that matter—is in itself telling at this point. “I would in no way argue that these [voter ID] laws have no effect, but what we’ve found is that it’s a relatively small one,” Hersh said. Making things more complicated, he added, is that the effect of a voter ID law can be difficult to separate from that of other non-ID-based measures that disenfranchise the same types of people. “It’s just very unlikely that these voter ID laws by themselves would translate into the effect of 200,000 voters,” Hersh said.

Related: openvote.me.

Five Books:

What life exists below the surface of the earth?

Previously biologists believed the only subsurface life was at the soil zone, that you go a metre down and it is inconsequential, except for in caves. But even then the people looking in caves didn’t realise the caves were being formed by sub-surface life. There were actually bacteria eating the rocks that make the caverns. They were looking at these minerals and gypsum deposits and saying “how did these things get here, how did they form?” — not realising that these enormous rooms that exist in caves are produced by a thin layer of bacteria dissolving the rock in order to get minerals. That’s an underlying theme of all subsurface life. It’s bacteria eating rocks and living off energy in the rocks and in the process dissolving the rocks and making more room.

open culture:

If you’ve ever had difficulty pronouncing the word Yoknapatawpha—the fictional Mississippi county where William Faulkner set his best-known fiction—you can take instruction from the author himself. During his time as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Faulkner gave students a brief lesson on his pronunciation of the Chickasaw-derived word, which, as he says, sounds like it’s spelled.

If you’ve ever had difficulty getting around in Yoknapatawpha—getting the lay of the land, as it were—Faulkner has stepped in again to help his readers. He drew several maps of varying levels of detail that show Yoknapatawpha, its county seat of Jefferson in the center, and various key characters’ plantations, crossroads, camps, stores, houses, etc. from the fifteen novels and story cycles set in the author’s native Mississippi.

Timothy Lee:

Decade after decade, health care and education have gotten more expensive while the price of clothing, cars, furniture, toys, and other manufactured goods has gone down relative to the overall inflation rate — exactly the pattern Baumol predicted a half-century ago.

Baumol’s cost disease is a powerful tool for understanding the modern economic world. It suggests, for example, that the continually rising costs of education and health care isn’t necessarily a sign that anything has gone wrong with those sectors of the economy. At least until we invent robotic professors, teachers, doctors, and nurses, we should expect these low-productivity sectors of the economy to get more expensive.

While some argue that prices keep rising because the government subsidizes health care through programs like Medicare and college educations through student loans and grants, you see the same basic pattern with services like summer camps, veterinary services, and Broadway shows that aren’t hamstrung by government regulations and subsidies.

Of course, as the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson pointed out a few years ago, the cost of many of these services is actually rising faster than wages are growing, suggesting that Baumol’s disease isn’t the whole story. Universities, for example, have been hiring a growing army of administrators and building ever more lavish amenities to attract the best students. The growing incomes of the richest Americans are a major underlying factor here — rich people are buying services like Broadway shows, summer camp spots, and Harvard educations more quickly than anyone can expand the supply.

Matthew Desmond:

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. The standard of “affordable” housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family’s income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. Yet America’s national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing. It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America’s inequality in such a sweeping fashion.

Consider Asare and Diaz. As a homeowner, Asare benefits from tax breaks that Diaz does not, the biggest being the mortgage-interest deduction — or MID, in wonk-speak. All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes. In 2015, Asare and Jean-Charles claimed $21,686 in home interest and other real estate deductions, which saved them $470 a month. That’s roughly 15 percent of Diaz’s monthly income. That same year, the federal government dedicated nearly $134 billion to homeowner subsidies. The MID accounted for the biggest chunk of the total, $71 billion, with real estate tax deductions, capital gains exclusions and other expenditures accounting for the rest. That number, $134 billion, was larger than the entire budgets of the Departments of Education, Justice and Energy combined for that year. It is a figure that exceeds half the entire gross domestic product of countries like Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.

OSHEA SAYS: ‘‘Right now, we can’t even come up with $1,490 for our monthly rent. Every time our tax returns come through, we have to pay off the car, catch up on rent, buy food — by the time we’re done, there isn’t anything left to set aside. We talk about wanting to get our credit score recovered. Patricio was out of work for seven or eight months, and that ruined our credit. Outside of God providing a way, there really isn’t a way to get out of this situation. I don’t see it.’’

Recently, Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser to President Trump, heralded his boss’s first tax plan as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big.” And indeed, Trump’s plan represents a radical transformation in how we will fund the government, with its biggest winners being corporations and wealthy families. But no one in his administration, and only a small (albeit growing) group of people in either party, is pushing to reform what may very well be the most regressive piece of social policy in America. Perhaps that’s because the mortgage-interest deduction overwhelmingly benefits the sorts of upper-middle-class voters who make up the donor base of both parties and who generally fail to acknowledge themselves to be beneficiaries of federal largess. “Today, as in the past,” writes the historian Molly Michelmore in her book “Tax and Spend,” “most of the recipients of federal aid are not the suspect ‘welfare queens’ of the popular imagination but rather middle-class homeowners, salaried professionals and retirees.” A 15-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government-subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. It is only by recognizing this fact that we can begin to understand why there is so much poverty in the United States today.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction — an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

The MID came into being in 1913, not to spur homeownership but simply as part of a general policy allowing businesses to deduct interest payments from loans. At that time, most Americans didn’t own their homes and only the rich paid income tax, so the effects of the mortgage deduction on the nation’s tax proceeds were fairly trivial. That began to change in the second half of the 20th century, though, because of two huge transformations in American life. First, income tax was converted from an elite tax to a mass tax: In 1932, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (precursor to the I.R.S.) processed fewer than two million individual tax returns, but 11 years later, it processed over 40 million. At the same time, the federal government began subsidizing homeownership through large-scale initiatives like the G.I. Bill and mortgage insurance. Homeownership grew rapidly in the postwar period, and so did the MID.

Karen Rivedal:

A Madison School District review of financial practices at Black Hawk Middle School found widespread disregard for proper accounting and money handling practices under then-principal Kenya Walker, who admitted using district credit cards for personal needs and oversaw school office operations so lax they resulted in the theft of at least $1,000 from a school fundraiser and more than $10,500 in credit card charges for which the district has no receipt, among other deficiencies noted in the review.

Walker, 45, who was paid $106,466 annually, effectively resigned on April 28 after spending months on a medical leave that began in late January and caused increasing concern among parents at the school. Also in January, the district hired external reviewer Shana Lewis to begin reviewing Black Hawk’s financial practices after concerns were noted by Central Office staff about spending there.

Many of the problems noted in the review revolved around the use of some 15 district-issued credit and procurement cards that are to be used by school staff members for the purchase of low-cost goods, usually under $500. They are designed to eliminate the use of petty cash and personal funds that have to be reimbursed to staff later, setting up a more secure, cost-effective method to purchase small-dollar items for district programs and activities.

Much larger spending questions arose several years ago after a large maintenance referendum.

Philip Olterman:

Then a tall, athletic man with a light-grey three-piece suit and a greying goatee who has spent most of the morning playing with his smartphone strides to the podium, and suddenly baby steps become interstellar leaps. “Very soon, the smartest and most important decision makers might not be human,” he says, with the pitying smile of a parent explaining growing pains to a teenager. “We are on the verge not of another industrial revolution, but a new form of life, more like the big bang.”

Jürgen Schmidhuber has been described as the man the first self-aware robots will recognise as their papa. The 54-year-old German scientist may have developed the algorithms that allow us to speak to our computers or get our smartphones to translate Mandarin into English, but he isn’t very keen on the idea that robots of the future will exist primarily to serve humanity.

Instead, he believes machine intelligence will soon not just match that of humans, but outstrip it, designing and building heat-resistant robots that can get much closer to the sun’s energy sources than thin-skinned Homo sapiens, and eventually colonise asteroid belts across the Milky Way with self-replicating robot factories. And Schmidhuber is the person who is trying to build their brains.

Bettina Elias Siegel:

On the first day of seventh grade last fall, Caitlin Dolan lined up for lunch at her school in Canonsburg, Pa. But when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash.

“I was so embarrassed,” said Caitlin, who said other students had stared. “It’s really weird being denied food in front of everyone. They all talk about you.”

Caitlin’s mother, Merinda Durila, said that her daughter qualified for free lunch, but that a paperwork mix-up had created an outstanding balance. Ms. Durila said her child had come home in tears after being humiliated in front of her friends.

Holding children publicly accountable for unpaid school lunch bills — by throwing away their food, providing a less desirable alternative lunch or branding them with markers — is often referred to as “lunch shaming.”

Neerav:

Moreover, if you increase access but restrict supply you well get frustration. And this is exactly what has happened in New York City. The city’s enrollment system persists, but its efforts to increase supply have faltered.

When NYC leaders have focused on increasing supply – both through the small schools movement and growing the charter sector – rigorous research found that school quality increased. The results of these efforts are detailed below.

In sum:

School choice is all about equity in access.

School supply is about creating better options.

We should not confuse the two, and we should not expect school choice to increase school performance in and of itself. It must be coupled with a deep focus on school supply.

Alina Adams:

The same thing happens at the AP level. While Chancellor Fariña is happy to collect accolades for her schools’ rankings, she neglects to admit that, at the same time, her department is failing to provide adequate teachers for her highest-performing students. It’s almost like they’re succeeding in spite of the DOE, not because of it.

It’s an established fact that the city is failing its low-performers, with over 50% of high-school graduates not exiting college-ready. But there’s a problem at the top, too. The US News and World Report rankings are not a perfect tool but, nonetheless, they should serve as a wake up call about thousands of qualified kids losing their opportunity to take AP classes.

Joel Achenbach:

U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county

New Jersey Star Ledger Editorial:

The Newark parents who sued, arguing that forcing school districts to prioritize seniority over teacher talent hurts their kids, just lost their case in court. That’s a real blow to students, who don’t have a special interest union.

But make no mistake: this fight is far from over. Their families can appeal, of course, and while it may be a long shot to argue that the state constitution should decide this, the issue is in no way settled – because changing the policy itself is essential.

The Legislature should have fixed this long ago; these parents never should have had to go to court. Absolute seniority rights are about Democratic fealty to the teacher’s union, not what’s best for children.

Much more on the New Jersey Last in, First Out (LIFO) teacher governance lawsuit, here.

Related: An emphasis on adult employment.

Victor Davis Hanson:

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.

But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.

The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education.

Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university.

But if the recent examples at Berkeley, Claremont, Middlebury and Yale are any indication, there is nothing much left to the idea of a free and civilized exchange of different ideas.

Alan Borsuk:

“Never, never give up on students.”

Two weeks ago in this column, I quoted Marc Tucker, who leads the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington-based nonprofit, saying that in a talk in Madison. On its face, it’s not controversial. Who’s in favor of giving up on kids?

But what does it mean to give up or not give up? That’s a provocative matter, particularly in a city where the needle has moved so little in improving deeply distressing overall outcomes for students. (Let one fact represent the problem: Fewer than 20% of students in both Milwaukee Public Schools and the private school voucher program were rated as proficient or advanced in reading and math in tests given a year ago.)

Some teachers took Tucker’s remarks as criticism of their own efforts.

Amanda Erickson:

If you’ve traveled even a little bit, you’ve surely had the experience of sharing a public space with someone (or many someones) who wants to stand closer to you than you’d allow your partner most of the time. (I often had this experience at the ATMs in Baku, Azerbaijan, where crowding has replaced queuing.)

It’s because personal space — how close we stand to our colleagues, our friends, strangers — varies widely between countries. Sociologists have studied the whys and hows, and they’ve come up with some theories about why these social norms exist. Temperature tends to affect how people define personal space. So do gender and age.

Dan Goodin:

Almost a year after app developer SilverPush vowed to kill its privacy-threatening software that used inaudible sound embedded into TV commercials to covertly track phone users, the technology is more popular than ever, with more than 200 Android apps that have been downloaded millions of times from the official Google Play market, according to a recently published research paper.

As that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC
As of January, there were 234 Android apps that were created using SilverPush’s publicly available software developer kit, according to the paper, which was published by researchers from Technische Universitat Braunschweig in Germany. That represents a dramatic increase in the number of Android apps known to use the creepy audio tracking scheme. In April 2015, there were only five such apps.

Sandra E. Black, Erik Grönqvist, Björn Öckert

We study the effect of birth order on personality traits among men using population data on enlistment records and occupations for Sweden. We find that earlier born men are more emotionally stable, persistent, socially outgoing, willing to assume responsibility, and able to take initiative than later-borns. In addition, we find that birth order affects occupational sorting; first-born children are more likely to be managers, while later-born children are more likely to be self-employed. We also find that earlier born children are more likely to be in occupations that require leadership ability, social ability and the Big Five personality traits. Finally, we find a significant role of sex composition within the family. Later-born boys suffer an additional penalty the larger the share of boys among the older siblings. When we investigate possible mechanisms, we find that the negative effects of birth order are driven by post-natal environmental factors. We also find evidence of lower parental human capital investments in later-born children.

github:

Using the 23andme API it is now possible to utilize genetic profile information and likely phenotypes in custom applications. This means you can restrict access to your site based on traits including sex, ancestry, disease susceptability, and arbitrary characteristics associated with single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a person’s genotype.

How does it work?

GAC uses the standard third-party authentication mechanism OAuth2 to request minimal permissions from 23andme on behalf of the user. The user is presented with a dialog asking them to approve the sharing of certain genetic data with your application.
If the request is approved a temporary access token is passed to your application which can be used to make API requests to retrieve information, such as ancestry composition and SNP nucleotide sequences. This data can then be used to grant or restrict authorization.

Andrew Zaleski:

avid Molina was stationed at Dover Air Force Base, 100 miles outside Baltimore, when he started trying to become a coder. After 12 years of service, his time in the army was almost up, and he needed a new career. “My dream has always been to create something in my head,” says the 38-year-old Molina. So in his spare time, he tried to build iPhone apps and learn some basic programming. He even took Mattan Griffel’s One Month Rails course on Skillshare.

He wasn’t very successful. “It just didn’t click. I couldn’t deploy anything.” Molina started hunting for help in Baltimore, where he quickly fell into B’more on Rails, a longstanding Ruby on Rails Meetup in the city. “People taught me about open source. There was pizza, there was beer,” he recalls. “They made me feel like I was at home.”

Bruce Schneier:

LyreBird is a system that can accurately reproduce the voice of someone, given a large amount of sample inputs. It’s pretty good — listen to the demo here — and will only get better over time.

The applications for recorded-voice forgeries are obvious, but I think the larger security risk will be real-time forgery. Imagine the social engineering implications of an attacker on the telephone being able to impersonate someone the victim knows.

Citizen:

ach year The Julliard School accepts only 12 young men from around the world into its renowned dance program. This year five of those young men come from one public high school – Booker T. Washington – in Dallas, Texas.

This is their story…

Washington Post:

CRITICS OF school choice could not contain their glee over a new study on the District’s school voucher program showing that students attending private schools did not perform as well on standardized tests as their public school counterparts. It is pretty rich that those who have railed against using test scores to hold schools accountable now invoke them to try to shut down the federally funded voucher program. And it is pretty easy for people who already have educational options for their children to discount the importance of school choice to parents who do not.

Ryan Masters:

UC Santa Cruz has agreed to the demands of the Afrikan Black Student Alliance after a three-day occupation of Kerr Hall, the primary administration building on campus.

To loud cheers of victory, UCSC director of News and Media Relations Scott Hernandez-Jason stood before hundreds of students at Kerr Hall about 5:30 p.m. Thursday and announced that the university was committed to better serving its African, black and Caribbean-identified students.

To illustrate this, UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal agreed to the Alliance’s demands and made the following commitments:

• UCSC committed to extending up to a four-year housing guarantee to all students from underrepresented communities who applied to and live in the Rosa Parks African American Theme House.

Stephanie Saul:

In the competition for marquee commencement speakers, the University of California, San Diego thought it had scored a coup this year — a Nobel Peace Prize winner, best-selling author and spiritual North Star to millions of people.

“We are honored to host His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,” gushed Pradeep Khosla, the university’s chancellor, “and thankful that he will share messages of global compassion.”

Within hours of Mr. Khosla’s announcement, though, the university was blindsided by nasty remarks on Facebook and other social media sites: “Imagine how Americans would feel if someone invited Bin Laden,” said one.

Mary Dockray-Miller:

“Old English,” also termed “Anglo-Saxon,” was and is simply the form of the English language that predates the Norman Conquest of 1066. The first line of the earliest poem in Old English, a prayer called “Cædmon’s Hymn,” largely unfamiliar to modern English speakers, offers a taste of this forgotten language: Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard (“Now we must praise the guardian of the heaven-kingdom”).

Scattered American antiquarians and scholars, including Thomas Jefferson, investigated Anglo-Saxon in the early years of the American republic. The study of the language became more widespread in the decades following the Civil War, when many of the growing numbers of American universities and colleges added it to their curricula. As with any endeavor in nineteenth-century higher education, many more men than women took part.

Malhar Mali:

Last week, Ulrich Baer, a vice-provost and a professor of English at New York University, made an astonishing case against free speech in the New York Times. Baer framed the debate as one of speakers operating to “invalidate the humanity” of others — thus justifying shutting down the speech of speakers students might not be appreciative towards. But in doing so, he revealed far more about his mindset and that of many scholars who operate in the humanities. After all, who do you think teaches students that speech is dangerous, the ideas that cause the “snowflake” reactions we have become accustomed to viewing, or that anyone who is not a straight white male is experiencing oppression at unprecedented levels?

Baer’s article has already been skewered by Conor Friedsdorf in The Atlantic and Ted Gup in The Chronicle. I’m more interested in exploring how Baer argues as it lends us an insight into what’s causing students to behave in the ludicrous ways we have witnessed.

The most comically disturbing statement made by Baer, when referencing the at times odious views of controversial speakers, is:

Daniel Arp, Erwin Quiring, Christian Wressnegger and Konrad Rieck

Device tracking is a serious threat to the privacy of users, as it enables spying on their habits and activities. A recent practice embeds ultrasonic beacons in audio and tracks them using the microphone of mobile devices. This side channel allows an adversary to identify a user’s current location, spy on her TV viewing habits or link together her different mobile devices. In this paper, we explore the capabilities, the current prevalence and technical limitations of this new tracking tech- nique based on three commercial tracking solutions. To this end, we develop detection approaches for ultrasonic beacons and Android applications capable of processing these. Our findings confirm our privacy concerns: We spot ultrasonic beacons in various web media content and detect signals in 4 of 35 stores in two European cities that are used for location tracking. While we do not find ultrasonic beacons in TV streams from 7 countries, we spot 234 Android applications that are constantly listening for ultrasonic beacons in the background without the user’s knowledge.

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

But after the initial shock, she said she realized she had been waiting for something like this to happen for a long time.

Over the years, Ms. Bloomberg has become one of the most outspoken and visible critics of New York City’s public schools, regularly castigating the Education Department’s leadership at forums and in the news media. Most of her criticism is aimed at actions that she says perpetuate a segregated and unequal educational system and that penalize black and Latino students. Through the years, she has helped organize protests and assemblies to push for integration and equal resources and treatment for her almost entirely black and Latino student body.

Last Friday, Ms. Bloomberg filed a lawsuit against the school system saying it violated her rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects an individual’s civil rights and the right to free speech under the First Amendment. Ms. Bloomberg was seeking an injunction to stop the investigation until her lawsuit is resolved.

James Wollack
and Michael Fish:

Major Findings

• CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students
• Change in performance was observed immediately after switch
• Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly

  Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis

• CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as the traditional-AP students

  Both sample sizes were low

2012: “An increasing number of freshmen in the UW System need remedial math when they start college, according to UW officials.”

2014: “

The UW’s freshman math remediation rate of 21% is below the national average of 25% to 35%, according to Cross.

UW Regent Jose Vasquez bristled at the UW System taking on “a problem that is really our cohort’s problem,” referring to K-12. “The problem was not created by the university and I’m not convinced we can solve it within the university.”

He advocated earlier intervention in high school.

”

Related: Math Forum audio/video.

Discovery Math

Connected Math

Singapore Math

Core Plus

and: Foundations of Reading Results (Wisconsin Education Schools), or MTEL arrives.

James Freeman:

At last, there’s hopeful news on intellectual liberty from a college campus. A new survey of students at Yale finds that a large majority favor free speech. Perhaps the kids can now also persuade the school’s administration of the virtues of academic freedom.

Linda Blackford:

The odds were long, but a couple of University of Kentucky students decided it was worth the risk to climb through the ceiling ducts to a teacher’s office to steal a statistics exam.

Unfortunately for them, the teacher is a night owl.

According to UK Police, UK statistics instructor John Cain had been working late in his third floor office in the Multidisciplinary Science Building on Rose Street on Tuesday night. About midnight, he left to get something to eat. When he returned about 1:30 a.m., he tried to unlock the door, but it was blocked by something.

“He yelled out that he was calling the police and then the door swung open and two young men ran down the hallway,” recounted UK spokesman Jay Blanton.

Elle Kaplan:

I’ve said it many times: Reading books is a major key to success. The mega-rich and successful like Bill Gates and Elon Musk devote extraordinary amounts of their time to reading. Musk even attributes his knowledge of how to build rockets to his reading repertoire, and studies have proven that reading can reduce stress, increase focus, and improve long- and short-term memory.

The benefits of flexing your reading muscles are clear. But reading is time-consuming—and as a busy professional, it’s almost impossible to both find the time to read and actually stay focused enough to reap the benefits when deadlines start piling up.

CBS SF:

The non-profit California Policy Center obtained documents from the Office of the UC President this week through a California Public Records Act request, and shared those documents with CBS San Francisco.

The revelation that such large pensions are being received by UC retirees — both teaching faculty members and non-teaching staff — comes at a time when the Office of the President faces severe scrutiny after a slush fund of up to $175 million was discovered during an audit.

UC President Janet Napolitano has apologized for how she handled the audit but maintains that the amount of money not in the public view was much less.

Jessica Stillman:

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” Mark Twain supposedly quipped.

It’s a catchy witticism, but while many of us remember the quote, far too many people still fail to make the distinction between “schooling” and “learning,” engineering professor, master teacher, and author Barbara Oakley believes. And that is holding us back from becoming successful lifelong learners.
Learning doesn’t always look like what you did in school

This insight comes from a fascinating and lengthy post on blog Farnam Street, which digs into how our unexamined beliefs about learning prevent us from gaining as much knowledge as we could. Too many of us, writer Shane Parrish insists, drag emotional baggage from our school days into our adult efforts at self-improvement, slowing us down significantly.

What sort of emotional baggage? The kind that associates “learning” exclusively with the focused reading, note taking, and reviewing we did as students. Any other approach to nourishing our brains tends to make many of us feel a little guilty. If we’re not staring at a book or a page of notes, we’re slacking off, we tell ourselves.

Joseph Tago:

Mr. Hayes’s solution is to improve education, specifically with a national apprenticeship program that would guide local public-private partnerships to train and prepare the workforce better. He knows the problem firsthand: “I’ve got thousands of job openings.”

Do you really?

“Thousands,” he replies. “A lot of this is because we’ve got growth in business on the aerospace side, but we’ll be adding thousands of jobs in the next three years, and right now I cannot hire mechanics who know how to put together jet engines. But it’s not just jet engines. We also make fan blades, other products, very sophisticated things. These are the high-value manufacturing jobs that America can actually support.”

A Pratt machinist earns $34 to $38 an hour, which with overtime works out to more than $100,000 a year—“pretty good money,” Mr. Hayes says. The positions can be filled by high-school graduates with “basic competencies in math and English” sufficient to, say, read a blueprint.

Mr. Hayes’s apprenticeship idea is about teaching such candidates the technical skills they need for the manufacturing jobs of the future—the kind that aren’t becoming obsolete due to automation and artificial intelligence. Labor arbitrage, like moving to Mexico, can only work so long, as rising wages in China show. But humans can’t compete with robots, which, as he says one of his Chinese managers put it, “never get sick, never ask for a raise, and they work 24/7.”

Labor mobility is another concern. People are less willing to move to where jobs are. UTC recently built a factory in Lansing, Mich., to make engine housings for a new type of titanium-aluminum fan blade and needs to bring on about 1,000 new people. The work pays $23 an hour on average, yet some workers in Huntington, who earned $15 on average, “won’t move two hours north to Lansing.”

Related: Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading results, and FOUNDATIONS OF READING RESULTS (WISCONSIN EDUCATION SCHOOLS), OR MTEL ARRIVES:

Wisconsin’s DPI provided the results to-date of the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading exam to School Information System, which posted an analysis. Be aware that the passing score from January, 2014 through August, 2014, was lower than the passing score in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Since September of 2014, the Wisconsin passing score has been the same as those states. SIS reports that the overall Wisconsin pass rate under the lower passing score was 92%, while the pass rate since August of 2014 has been 78%. This ranges from around 55% at one campus to 93% at another. The pass rate of 85% that SIS lists in its main document appears to include all the candidates who passed under the lower cut score.

Shelby Webb:

Amina Mabizari couldn’t control her tears after she read the text message from her father.

The 18-year-old’s ability to articulate herself earned the Alief ISD senior one of 100 spots in the prestigious United States Senate Youth Program in Washington, D.C., yet in that moment in March, she was unable to compose herself. Her father had opened a letter from Yale University, advising that Amina was likely assured a spot in the incoming freshman class.

And the acceptance letters kept coming. When she checked online in April, she saw a college acceptance letter from Princeton. Then came one from Columbia. Others arrived from Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania.

Anthony Sanders:

The Pew Charitable Trusts recently came out with their study, “The State Pension Funding Gap: 2015”. PSRS_The_State_Pension_Funding_Gap_2015 And an ugly picture it paints of state pension funds.

Here is a nice editorial from The Sacramento Bee:

Throughout California, local government and school district officials are writing new budgets and confronting rapidly rising costs of pensions.

Many have seen their costs double in the last few years, largely consuming revenue increases that the state’s expanding economy have produced. For instance, a projected $1 billion increase in school districts’ teacher pension costs in 2017-18 will more than equal projected revenue gains.

However, as the old rock song says, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Lackluster earnings by pension trust funds, revised actuarial projections and impacts of benefit increases are compelling the systems to sharply increase mandatory “contributions” from public employers.

James Clear:

Sometime in the late 1800s—nobody is quite sure exactly when—a man named Vilfredo Pareto was fussing about in his garden when he made a small but interesting discovery.

Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the peas.

Now, Pareto was a very mathematical fellow. He worked as an economist and one of his lasting legacies was turning economics into a science rooted in hard numbers and facts. Unlike many economists of the time, Pareto’s papers and books were filled with equations. And the peas in his garden had set his mathematical brain in motion.

What if this unequal distribution was present in other areas of life as well?

Matthew Diebel:

“My mother always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do in life,” she told the paper.

While at Purdue Northwest, which is in nearby Hammond, Osborne stood out to faculty and staff, BTN reported.

“She not only is academically gifted, but has demonstrated amazing intellectual maturity in her pursuit of a baccalaureate degree at Purdue Northwest,” Purdue Northwest spokesman Wes Lukoshus told the Northwest Indiana Times.

Meanwhile, Purdue associate professor of sociology Ralph Cherry, who had Osborne last spring in a class on research methods, said he did not realize that she was a high school student.

“Research methods is the most demanding class that I teach,” he told the Times.

If all that wasn’t enough, Osborne, who will turn 19 in August, was also striving to earn money.

Barbara Haislip:

What happens when your children find STEM more appealing than the Magic Kingdom?

Start a business.

Every year, Dori Roberts and her students at Colonial Forge High School in Stafford, Va., would compete in technology and engineering tournaments, and in 2008 they did well enough to reach the finals at a national competition in Orlando, Fla.

Ms. Roberts decided to bring her 6-year-old son, Matthew, and her 8-year-old daughter, Kaley, along for the trip, and promised to take them to Disney World. She thought it was going to be torture with her children asking, “When are we going to Disney World?” Instead, Matthew and Kaley were mesmerized by the engineering projects created by their mother’s team, expressing a desire to participate and hang out with the students.

Clara Dollar:

“You’re like a cartoon character,” he said. “Always wearing the same thing every day.”

He meant it as an intimate observation, the kind you can make only after spending a lot of time getting to know each other. You flip your hair to the right. You only eat ice cream out of mugs. You always wear a black leather jacket. I know you.

The Economist

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Shane Hampton:

60 years has made a big difference in the urban form of American cities. The most rapid change occurred during the mid-century urban renewal period that cleared large tracts of urban land for new highways, parking, and public facilities or housing projects. Fine-grained networks of streets and buildings on small lots were replaced with superblocks and megastructures. While the period did make way for impressive new projects in many cities, many of the scars are still unhealed.
 
 We put together these sliders to show how cities have changed over half a century.