Madison School District PDF:

Executive Summary:

As part of its long-range facility planning efforts, MMSD requires a refined approach for predicting enrollment arising from new development and changes in enrollment within existing developed areas. As urban development approaches the outer edges of the District’s boundary, and as redevelopment becomes an increasingly important source of new housing, these issues are critical.

Study Approach

The study period examined MMSD enrollment through the 2036-2037 school year in five-year segments. The projection model applied current MMSD student enrollment rates to 26 specific residential building forms, ranging from single-family homes to downtown redevelopment mixed-use buildings. Using these “residential typologies”, future development was mapped on more than 300 redevelopment locations and more than 2,000 greenfield locations on the periphery of the District.

Development locations, typologies, and timing were confirmed by planning department staff in Madison and Fitchburg. The model also factored in the continued decline in students per household at a rate of about 1% for every five-year period, consistent with official projections. Three Scenarios were examined, varying by the pace of development. Scenario 3, based on an extrapolation of population growth in MMSD, between 2010 and 2015, was identified as most likely.

Key Findings
1. District Territory is Approaching Build-Out by 2040
Under the selected scenario, by the year 2040, all the developable lands in MMSD’s territory (including the transferring areas from the Middleton-Cross Plains and Verona Area School Districts) are likely to be fully developed. After that point in time, all future changes in land use will occur solely through redevelopment. The economics of redevelopment require greater densities, resulting in a larger proportion of apartments – which have lower student generation rates. As a result, MMSD enrollment is likely to decline after greenfield build-out. If current household size trends hold constant, the resulting rate of enrollment decline will be about 1% for every five years following build-out in about 2040.

and

MMSD “Leavers” and “Enterers” are a Significant Enrollment Factor.
Challenge:

District leavers include students living in the MMSD territory who choose to attend non-MMSD schools. These include students choosing open enrollment at other public schools, and students attending private and non-MMSD charter schools.

Overall net open enrollment patterns show more students living in the MMSD area choosing open enrollment in other districts, than students living in other districts choosing open enrollment in MMSD. In the fall of 2015, the net loss of 999 students was a result of 316 entering students and 1,315 leaving students. This is about 4% of MMSD’s total enrollment.

Many factors are involved in open enrollment decisions, including the availability of space in other districts. The Monona Grove School District (MGSD) is the most popular destination of students leaving MMSD through open enrollment. Several MGSD schools are at capacity, and MGSD staff has indicated that they maintain full capacity by adjusting the number of open enrollment attendees. Other important considerations, cited by studies and MMSD staff, include the proximity of other schools, the condition and range of school facilities, and resulting travel distances and routes.

This study estimates that about 2,000 resident students are enrolled in private schools in the region – which represents about 9% of MMSD’s total enrollment. This estimate is based on the difference between the 2014 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates within the MMSD area for the total number of children of K-12 age enrolled in schools of any kind, the estimated number of resident students electing open enrollment outside of MMSD, and actual MMSD enrollment.

7.Key Trends:

MMSD net “Leavers” comprise about 3,000 school age children residing within MMSD territory.

Reduced capacity in many schools in adjacent districts, reflecting strong suburban population growth, is becoming a more frequent limiting factor on MMSD leavers being accepted through open enrollment in other school districts.

Rapidly evolving options, particularly for charter schools and distance learning, make projecting future enrollment changes through net leavers very difficult.

Key Assumption:
1. MMSD net “leavers” will be consistent with their current levels – about 3,000.

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Delece Smith-Barrow:

A few years of law school can easily lead to enough debt to last a decade.

With tuition and fees often running at $30,000 per year or more, many students take out loans. Among the 183 ranked law schools that submitted debt data to U.S. News, the average debt for 2015 graduates who borrowed was $112,748.

Schools vary when it comes to how much they dole out in scholarships, grants or financial aid. And at some institutions, students graduate with relatively minimal debt.

[Find out how ready you are to pay for law school.]

At the University of Hawaii—Manoa, the average debt for 2015 graduates who borrowed was $54,988. Alumni from the school had the lowest average debt among their peers from the 183 institutions that submitted data to U.S. News in an annual survey.

Three schools are new to the list of law schools where graduates have low debt: University of South Dakota, Georgia State University and Liberty University in Virginia.

Alan Borsuk:

Here’s a milestone I don’t expect anyone will celebrate. The start of the school year, just over a month from now, will mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of court-ordered school desegregation of Milwaukee Public Schools.

It’s remarkable how some of the key elements of the plans implemented beginning then remain part of the Milwaukee school landscape now. To name three:

The racial integration plan that was implemented over several years was focused largely on trying to make a group of “magnet schools” attractive enough that both white and black children would enroll. Some schools that arose in that era, such as non King High School and Golda Meir School, remain comparatively diverse and among the best in Milwaukee.

Bruce Kirkby:

The familiar roads of my neighborhood spooled out like black yarn behind the ambulance window; the lights of our family home faded in the distance. Arched atop a stretcher, I coughed up blood between shallow breaths.

Hours earlier I’d been in perfect health, or so I believed. That morning I’d skied 20 miles on nordic trails and lifted weights ­after that. But around midnight I woke up with searing pain radiating down my left arm. I prodded my wife, who called 911.

At the hospital, doctors and nurses ­orbited my bed, running a flurry of tests: blood samples, heart ultrasound, CAT scan. By the next day, a diagnosis began to take shape.

“You have pneumonia,” a burly South Afri­can doctor said. “And a small pulmonary embolism. That’s a clot in your lung. But there is something else going on. Portions of your lung tissue look like ground glass. Have you traveled abroad recently?”

George Joseph:

Over the summer, FBI agents stormed nineteen charter schools as part of an ongoing investigation into Concept Charter Schools. They raided the buildings seeking information about companies the prominent Midwestern charter operator had contracted with under the federal E-Rate program.

The federal investigation points to possible corruption at the Gulen charter network, with which Concept is affiliated and which takes its name from the Turkish cleric Fetullah Gulen. And a Jacobin investigation found that malfeasance in the Gulen network, the second largest in the country, is more widespread than previously thought. Federal contracting documents suggest that the conflict-of-interest transactions occurring at Concept are a routine practice at other Gulen-affiliated charter school operators.

The Jacobin probe into Gulen-affiliated operators in Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California found that roughly $4 million in E-Rate contract disbursements and $1.7 million in Department of Education Race to the Top grantee awards were given to what appear to be “related parties.” Awarding contracts to firms headed by related parties would seem to violate the FCC’s requirement that the school’s bidding process be “competitive” as well as “open and fair.”

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein:

In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who’d harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she’d worked in the university’s dining halls. Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her access to the union’s then-flimsy grievance procedure. Williams’ act happened to occur during a semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of “industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass workplace resistance – across the New Left. Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather Underground.) The presence of these student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political urgency. Following Williams’ firing, a hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university’s human resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university reinstate her. The students occupied the office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours. With the conclusion of the occupation, 47 students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually reinstated. (One alumnus, who’d taken a job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the occupation.) The occupation was successful – Williams won her job back – or rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never actually fired her. But, a month after returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that working at Yale was “agony.”

Robert Frank:

Social scientists have been trying to identify the conditions most likely to promote satisfying human lives. Their findings give some important clues about choosing a career: Money matters, but as the economist Richard Easterlin and others have demonstrated, not always in the ways you may think.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose you had to choose between two parallel worlds that were alike except that people in one had significantly higher incomes. If you occupied the same position in the income distribution in both — say, as a median earner — there would be compelling reasons for choosing the richer world. After all, societies with higher incomes tend also to enjoy cleaner air and water, better schools, less noisy environments, safer working conditions, longer life expectancy and many other obvious benefits.

Michael Snyder:

Debt Debt And More Debt – Public DomainIn 2006, U.S. Senator Barack Obama’s voice thundered across the Senate floor as he boldly declared that “increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.” That was one of the truest things that he ever said, but just a couple of years later he won the 2008 election and he turned his back on those principles. As I write this article, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $19,402,361,890,929.46. But when Barack Obama first entered the White House, our federal government was only 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have added an average of 1.1 trillion dollars a year to the national debt under Obama, and we still have about six more months to go.

Even though Barack Obama is on track to be the first president in all of U.S. history to not have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by 3 percent or better, many have still been mystified by the fact that the economy has been relatively stable in recent years.

Joseph Gallivan:

How would the proposal affect the Powell’s Books tax bill?

“We’re challenged every year already to figure out how we’re going to be viable for the next year, and this is about a fifty times increase on our current tax bill. We don’t know how we’re going to pay it. We’re relatively low above the $25 million mark. If you’re over 25 you are all the same.”
Are there any other costs?

“The challenge for all of us, and for the small businesses too, it’s not just the bill for the 2.5 percent tax, I fully expect our power bill will go up, many of our utilities will go up, and probably some of our cost of goods will be impacted. I fully expect our margins will go down from some of our suppliers — because they’ll be impacted as well — it’s going to hit us in a lot of places. Pacific Power have already said they’ll be passing this increase along as a price increase. We’re not sure yet but some of our publishers and wholesalers will be impacted, and they may now say, instead of offering us a previous discount, they may say we’re going to have to cut that.”

“Random House sells a lot of books in Oregon, and they, or our main distributor, Ingram Content Group, will be impacted, and if nothing else they will be impacted by these other costs, power and utility increases etcetera.”

Have any other states enacted similar legislation?

“We don’t have enough of a volume in any other state to be impacted. My understanding, from a report by the Oregon Legislative Revenue Office, is other states’ gross receipts taxes are dramatically smaller, like much less than one percent. This is the most massive gross receipts tax I believe nationwide. So while we may be involved in other states where that tax is present, we haven’t felt the impact.”

Myron Magnet:

Haunting this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.

We have lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old functions. But in fact, a new kind of government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an evolution but a usurpation.

What has now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect, Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president, who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded “nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as obsolete. (See “It’s Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a modern country needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it, effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.

Modernity, Wilson thought, demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent, hyper-educated experts, applying the latest scientific, economic, and sociological knowledge to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too complex for self-governing free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.

But the Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary.

Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought), as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.

Max Kemman:

Recent surveys have inquired about the use of discovery systems for academic literature. In a survey we conducted in 2012 with 288 Dutch respondents in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 88% used Google Scholar to some extent. JSTOR was a close second, used by 85%, although it was used less often. In a recent survey on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication, a preliminary finding from the first 1,000 responses was that 92% used Google Scholar. Here Web of Science was a distant second, used by 47% of respondents. Although such surveys do not necessarily show how Google Scholar is used, it is clear that a large portion of scholars searches for literature at Google Scholar. One research report concluded in 2013 that “library and publisher platforms were not central to discovery, but Google and Google Scholar were”.

Doug Erickson:

The annual report is a selective rather than exhaustive view of the district, with only some grades and some demographic groups highlighted in detail.

The report cited proficiency rates in reading at grade 3 and reading and math in grades 5 and 8, as measured by the Measures of Academic Progress exam, which tests students throughout the school year. Overall, fewer than half of students in any of those grades and subjects were considered proficient, though progress is being made.

Third-graders showed a five percentage point increase in reading proficiency over three years, to 41 percent. Fifth-grade reading proficiency is up 10 percentage points over the same time period, to 44 percent.

“We are taking our challenges head on, and we are seeing strong progress,” School Board Vice President Mary Burke said at the press conference, which was attended by dozens of community leaders, students, staff members and parents.

Middle school math proficiency, calculated by bringing together scores in grades 6-8, is up four percentage points over three years, to 45 percent. The math scores illustrate how racial achievement gaps can widen even when everyone is improving.

During the 2012-13 school year, 19 percent of Hispanic middle school students scored proficient in math compared to 61 percent of white middle school students, a gap of 42 percentage points. Last year, proficiency among Hispanic students improved to 24 percent, yet the proficiency of white students improved to 68 percent, widening the gap to 44 percentage points.

I am glad that the district is discussing reading results.

Joseph Asch:

A member of the faculty writes in:

Faculty hired 5-7 years ago were told explicitly that a couple of peer-reviewed articles and a book contract with a well-respected academic press was sufficient for tenure. I often used the word “humane” to describe the requirements for tenure, in that they rewarded both scholarship of a high caliber and teaching prowess. Dartmouth had a reputation as a place where work-life balance was valued, and the inconveniences associated with its rural location were offset by the benefits of raising children within a close-knit community.

Professors hired at that time are now coming up for tenure, having been mentored by department members whose curriculum vitae were far less impressive when they initially made associate. Some of my peers were pressured into service commitments that would have no bearing on tenure, and encouraged to take on projects (writing for anthologies and organizing conferences, for example) that would be time-consuming yet not lead to professional advancement. Recent tenure decisions have many members of my cohort scrambling for the exits—going on the market and taking on visiting appointments elsewhere—now that they understand that they were given a false impression of how different aspects of their trajectories would be evaluated.

Mary Grabar:

Hamilton College has for years had an open curriculum, allowing students the freedom to shape their education as they think best. Whether that’s a good idea is debatable, but the college is about to move in the opposite direction by instituting a “diversity requirement” for all students.

As a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the last year, I have watched this drama unfold on the Hamilton College campus. This depressing story reveals much about the tactics of the academic left. A small group of radical but powerful professors, claiming to act on behalf of students, succeeded in instituting the diversity requirement.

Due to their efforts, starting in the 2017-18 academic year, every concentration will require a dedicated course or combination of courses to teach about “structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.”

Johns Hopkins:

Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act.

Unlike most brain studies where scientists watch as people respond to cues or commands, Johns Hopkins researchers found a way to observe people’s brain activity as they made choices entirely on their own. The findings, which pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and action, are now online, and due to appear in a special October issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

“How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

Madison School District PDF:

Data Sources
a) MMSD will sign NWEA’s release form allowing NWEA to transfer MMSD’s test data to Consultant.

b) In signing this contract, MMSD authorizes DPI to disclose student-level information to the Consultant for the purpose of linking demographic, enrollment, and other necessary data elements to student test scores during the analysis.

i. If data from DPI cannot be used to link student test scores to student demographic data as required by the value-added model, then Consultant will terminate the contract as outlined in the Termination section of the contract.

ii. NWEA student identifiers (full name, date of birth, and any other identifying information) will be sent to DPI with all test data removed to link the state and test IDs. No MAP test scores will be sent to DPI.

c) All data will be destroyed after 10 years or as required in disclosure forms.

d) The Consultant may add de-identified data to its national student growth reference
group database.

Much more on the “Measures of Academic Progress” (MAP), here.

Himanshu Arora

Are you a Linux Journal reader or use software such as Tor and Tails Linux? If so, you’ve probably been flagged as an “extremist” by the NSA. Leaked documents related to the XKeyscore snooping program reveal that the agency is targeting anyone who is interested in online privacy, specifically those who use the aforementioned software and visit the Linux user community website.

XKeyscore is a collection and analysis software that was among a number of surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden last year.

Its source code (basically a rule file), which has been obtained and analyzed by members of the Tor project and security specialists for German broadcasters NDR and WDR, identifies two German Tor Directory Authority servers as being under surveillance by the NSA. The code also cites a number of specific IP addresses of the Tor Directory Authority.

Lindsay Caplan:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

In this one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “On the Exactitude of Science” (1946), the fictional Suárez Miranda recounts the rise and fall of an imperial project to make a map the same size as the territory it describes. As soon as the awkwardly scaled artifact is complete, however, its prospective users recognize its absurd inadequacy and abandon it to be absorbed back into the ground it was intended to figure.

Madison School District PDF:

We also know that MMSD has no extra factors to boost local revenues. Extra revenue factors, such as unused levy authority, General Fund Balance reserves, before considering a referendum to exceed the revenue limit, it is necessary to understand the tax levy forecast before any additional taxing authority. We have identified the major tax levy factors:

Flat to minimal enrollment growth over the next few years

No unused tax levy authority available

The debt service levy already reflects the impact of the 2015 referendum

The debt service levy does not reflect the impact of any future facility referendum, which would be at least 2-3 in the future

It will be important to measure the loss of equalization aid for any specific referendum to exceed the limit.

The 2008 Referendum to Exceed the Revenue Limit
In November 2008, on the presidential ballot, MMSD had a referendum question for recurring authority to exceed the revenue limit. The amounts were phased in, beginning in 2009 ($5.0 million), 2010 ($4.0 million) and finally 2011 ($4.0 million) for a combined $13 million of additional levy authority. The vote occurred three years before the before the Budget Repair Bill and Act 10, and passed with 87,329 ‘yes’ votes and 40,748 ‘no’ votes.

Partial Budget Spending Chart (excludes a number of district expenditures) – PDF and a consultant’s budget forecast.

Diane Ravitch:

FOR 15 years, since the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, education reformers have promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education. For many years, I agreed with them. I was an assistant secretary of education in George H. W. Bush’s administration and a member of three conservative think tanks.

much more on the common core, here.

Nine Times Diane Ravitch Was Wrong About Common Core in the New York Times:

1. and 2. Ravitch repeatedly refers to Common Core State Standards as national standards, and as a curriculum.

Common Core State Standards are state-chosen standards, not adopted or mandated nationally in any way. Standards and curricula are completely different things. It’s surprising that an education “expert” is willfully ignoring the difference between standards and curricula.

States and districts have always created their own curricula and reading lists using their state standards as the guide. As a result, what happens in classrooms varies school to school, and state to state even among states that share the same academic standards.

In fact, objective analysis has time and again rejected claims that the Common Core dictates what teachers teach or how they can teach it. In fact, by setting rigorous and consistent learning goals and giving local authorities full control over how best to help students achieve those targets, the Common Core fosters creativity and flexibility in the classroom.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports under the Common Core, “the curriculum and teaching methods are decided locally.” Likewise, US News & World Report points out, “School districts design the curricula, and teachers create their own methods for instruction, selecting the resources best tailored to their lessons.” That hardly sounds like a national curriculum…

3. She claims the standards are “another excuse to avoid making serious efforts to reduce the main causes of low student achievement: poverty and racial segregation.”

National civil and human rights groups have repeatedly stated the value of the standards and assessments for students of color and low-income students. In fact, the civil rights community has publicly united to oppose opting students out of annual tests. Despite the civil rights community’s agreement about the importance of state assessments, Ravitch continues to support opting out.

Refusing the test aligned to high standards robs all students of a quality education, particularly children from underserved communities that have fought to be counted. Data from these statewide assessments provide valuable information, not only to schools and policy makers who use it to inform and improve education policies, but just as importantly, to parents – especially parents of color – who deserve transparent information about their child’s performance.

Michael Nunez:

How many kilometers are in a mile?

If you’re like most Americans, you have no fucking idea. But if you’re one of the millions of Americans playing Pokémon Go, you’re about to find out.

For the uninitiated, Pokémon Go is an app that uses your phone’s GPS to detect where you are in the real world and make Pokémon “appear” in the game depending on your location. Players are encouraged to patrol neighborhoods looking for new and more powerful Pokémon.

Angela Jenks:

“What did we cover in class last week? What’s your late homework policy? When are your office hours? How will my grade be computed?” Jorge Chan’s PhD Comics strip—along with a thriving T-shirt market and Internet meme industry—reflect the frustration instructors experience when faced with a barrage of questions that can be answered with a single refrain: “It’s in the syllabus.”

The course syllabus is one of the central artifacts of contemporary American higher education. We submit them with job applications, they are referenced in evaluation and promotion decisions, and they make up the vast majority of documents in teaching materials exchanges.

It wasn’t always this way, but today, syllabus design is often viewed as the first and most important work a new instructor undertakes. Templates that can assist with this process are widely available: many institutions have their own lists of required sections, and general guides include Josh Boldt’s “Syllabus Design for Dummies” or the first chapter of James M. Lang’s On Course.

In this post, I take a different approach. Creating a syllabus does not mean checking off a list of required elements. The syllabus is a genre of writing that requires us to reflect on the purpose of our teaching, our relationships with students, and effective means of communication. I outline here four considerations that, together, have influenced my approach to syllabus design.

Trevor Griffey:

Popular discussions of higher education in the United States today are primarily organized around narratives of decline—from “The Fall of the Faculty” to “The Last Professors”, from “University Inc.” to “The University in Ruins.” Writing about the more than 70 percent of all college instructors who are off the tenure track—with poor pay and little if any job security—tends to fall squarely within this framework. Journalists’ exposés frequently make problematic popular comparisons between fast food workers and college instructors, and turn the humbling of white collar workers into a spectacle of misery that naturalizes the low status of blue collar work through titles like “The Academics Who Are Treated as “Less Than Janitors””.

If this narrative of decline is presented as anything other than inevitable, it tends to promote labor unions for the knowledge economy as the primary solution to address faculty exploitation and contingency. For example, every contributor so far to the Process series on labor and academia has so far promoted labor unions, labor law, and labor history as means to resist the race to the bottom for faculty in higher education.

Patrick Redford:

There’s this old joke around Berkeley that nobody actually knows what the town’s famous university is called. UC Berkeley, Cal Berkeley, California, and a few other permutations get tossed around—most notably “Berkeley,” which academic departments use to refer to the school, and “Cal,” the preferred moniker of the athletics department. Usually, that schism is nothing more than a quirk in nomenclature, but not now. Instead, what began with an investigation into if an assistant football coach put players in danger has evolved into a debate over who’s really in charge at Berkeley: The academics, or the football team? This is, admittedly, not a debate exclusive to Berkeley. What makes it uniquely Berkeley is that the academics seem to think they still have a chance at winning.

It started June 29, when the San Francisco Chronicle published an investigation into the inquiry that cleared strength coach Damon Harrington and the rest of the Cal staff of any wrongdoing in the death of Ted Agu and in the 2013 locker room assault that left freshman Fabiano Hale unconscious. Per the Chronicle, a former player hinted that Harrington incited the fight that left Hale unconscious and that Harrington routinely pushed players too hard in workouts, which was part of why the school had to pay out a $4.75 million settlement to Agu’s family in April. Harrington, however, was cleared by the university.

Thomas Donlan:

The American debt problem was almost entirely ignored at the Republican National Convention last week, and we can expect nothing more when the Democrats gather this week.

Both parties support the entitlement spending system and the decrepit tax system that fails to support it. They compete on the fiscal side of politics with impossible promises to spend more and tax less.

Imagine the U.S. Treasury as an airplane beginning to roll down the runway to take off. For a mile or so, the plane gains no altitude, then the wings start to generate lift. The wheels leave the ground and are retracted so the plane can fly smoothly through the air. Then the plane begins a rapid ascent, taking only a few minutes to arrive at an altitude of 30,000 feet.
For the time being, the Treasury is rumbling down the runway, already moving too fast to abort a takeoff. After takeoff, Americans will discover that Treasury debt is heading for the stratosphere, with consequences that are easy to imagine, hard to believe, and apparently impossible to act upon—except to make it worse.

Nicholas Garcia:

Colorado’s charter schools for the first time are enrolling racial and ethnic minority students at a higher rate than the state’s district-run schools, a new report by the state education department shows.

The report released Friday also found that charter school students — including those who are considered at-risk — continued to outperform their peers in district-run schools on state tests.

Lisa Speckhard:

My mom and dad would let me go run the neighborhood. I would play with friends and I was back before the sun went down. I think kids, especially in this generation, have lost some of that, so this is giving them the play back,” he said.

Bailey acknowledges that much of what makes AnjiPlay great is common sense. While adults are busy reading books about play written by other adults, the play experts — kids — are busy playing, she said.

Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan, Xin-Zeng Wu:

Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy what others are doing. However, individuals often lack global knowledge of the behaviors of others and must estimate them from the observations of their friends’ behaviors. In some cases, the structure of the underlying social network can dramatically skew an individual’s local observations, making a behavior appear far more common locally than it is globally. We trace the origins of this phenomenon, which we call “the majority illusion,” to the friendship paradox in social networks. As a result of this paradox, a behavior that is globally rare may be systematically overrepresented in the local neighborhoods of many people, i.e., among their friends. Thus, the “majority illusion” may facilitate the spread of social contagions in networks and also explain why systematic biases in social perceptions, for example, of risky behavior, arise. Using synthetic and real-world networks, we explore how the “majority illusion” depends on network structure and develop a statistical model to calculate its magnitude in a network.

Annysa Johnson:

A proposal by a military-style voucher school to purchase a vacant Milwaukee Public Schools building is scheduled to go before the city next week.

Right Step Inc., which is being sued by a group of parents for allegedly abusive practices, is proposing to open a boys-only campus for up to 150 students in the former Centro del Nino Head Start building at 500 E. Center St., on the border of the Riverwest and Harambee neighborhoods. It has offered $223,000 for the building.

The purchase proposal goes before the Common Council’s Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee and possibly the Common Council on Tuesday. The city’s Board of Zoning Appeals will take up its request for a special use permit.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm that is representing the school, has accused the city of dragging its feet on the sale and raising issues — such as test scores and graduation rates — not allowed under the law passed last year to expedite the sale of vacant MPS buildings to competing education providers.

Lani Lane:

“Fib’s a good parenting tactic”, says Becca Hirst to Daily Chronicle. She confidently presented the benefit of fibbling to her kid especially when it comes to keeping a silent home and a healthy child since she uses it to convince the child to eat. Nonetheless, fibbling is a childish lie. How far should fibbling go for parenting? Is it even healthy psychologically, mentally, and emotionally?

The surface level effect of fibbling is good but if you understand the deep effect of it in the personhood of your child, it will be something serious. The benefit is good at present, but the long term outcome is so great at the negative arena.

Study shows that kids tend to imitate what they see and when it comes to lying, the imitation is gradual. If the child is exposed to lying at an early age, he or she has the tendency to tell bigger lies as he or she gets older. Nonetheless, not all children lie because they saw someone lied to them. Lying comes naturally to kids. Susan Pinker reported in WSJ that, “The ability to bend the truth is a developmental milestone, much like walking and talking. Research led by Kang Lee, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, shows that lying begins early in precocious children. Among verbal 2-year-olds, 30% try to pull the wool over their parents’ eyes at some point. At age 3, 50% regularly try it. Fibbing is common among 80% of 4-year-olds and is seen in nearly all healthy 5- to 7-year-olds.”

By Lauren Camera and Lindsey Cook:

The federal government operates a $14.5 billion program aimed at addressing this exact type of education funding inequity. It’s called Title I and it’s the pillar of the federal K-12 law known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Its purpose is to financially bolster school districts with large proportions of poor children, like Nottoway, so they have access to the same types of learning opportunities as wealthier children – children who often reside in more affluent districts and whose schools benefit from higher property taxes, among many other supports.

Nottoway receives about $775,000 annually from the federal program. And while it’s a welcome financial boost, every cent of it goes toward teacher salaries. There is nothing left over for professional development, curriculum support, or reading and math enrichment programs.

Meanwhile, Fairfax County, a leafy green suburb outside the nation’s capital that’s home to well-heeled government workers who helped it become the first county in the U.S. to reach a median household income of six figures, rakes in a whopping $20 million in Title I funding.

Alexander Russo:

The notion that federal funding wasn’t as targeted as it should be isn’t new, but the numbers were pretty startling, and the package made it easy for readers to find out what their local funding allocation was.

The package was the work of Lauren Camera, education reporter, and Lindsey Cook, data editor. When originally it came out, the USNews series had noted that at least $2.6 billion in federal education funding is being sent to districts that are wealthier on average.

It had generated some buzz among reporters at local outlets who have taken the USNews data and written their own stories. (These included Liz Bowie from Balt Sun.) But Cook and Camera wanted more.

A longtime fan of using Reddit for reporting on previous stories, Cook came up with the idea of the pair of journalists doing an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit as a way of reaching a different set of folks than those who follow US News.

The federal redistributed tac dollars note that Madison’s poverty rate is 20.37%. This number is substantially lower than the District’s free and reduced cost lunch population.

Bill Ruthhart and John Chase:

Other emails released under the court order show several exchanges between Solomon and Beth Swanson, Emanuel’s then-deputy chief of staff for education, trading messages on a regular basis, many of them friendly in tone.

The city also released an email showing Emanuel’s then-chief of staff raising questions about the cost and impact of the $20.5 million SUPES contract.

“That means CPS is paying more than $25K per person to train them,” Lisa Schrader wrote in an email to Swanson, as well as then-Emanuel senior adviser David Spielfogel and Matt Hynes, another top mayoral aide at the time. “That’s a pretty hefty investment. Maybe a semester tuition @ UofC. Are you comfortable? Is the board? Just seems very expensive for 10 day workshop plus weekly ‘coaching’ given the other financial challenges they face.”

No one answered her concerns — at least in the emails Emanuel’s office released.

James McWilliams

I recently sat down with Becca, James, and their 26-year old son Drew, who is also badly overweight (despite the 150 pounds he lost after gastric bypass surgery last December). The family, which lives in south Austin, Texas, is more than burdened by obesity; they were (until recently) essentially killing themselves on a steady stream of Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Whataburger, queso and chips, cookies, and ice cream. Their new trainer, Mike “Bonebreaker” Crockett, explained how “the apex of their weekly planning was the list of the fast food places they were going to visit.” Becca, in a later conversation, confirmed as much, noting that the family normally ate fast food or take-out four times a day, the last meal within minutes of going to sleep.

Crockett, who owns a vegan-based gym in Austin, first met the Reeds in June. He offered to train them (for free) under one non-negotiable condition: The family had to eat a healthy plant-based diet and exercise at his gym three times a week. The Reeds jumped at the opportunity. “We’re ready to become new people,” Becca said. “Better people.” James and Drew, who typically cede most of the talking to Becca, nodded together in assent. Crockett, who has lost 150 pounds since 2011, reversing his own diabetes in the process, is as prepared as anyone to help James make it to retirement, and Becca buy that dress at a normal store.

Wendi Kaminer:

“Hate speech is excluded from protection,” CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted last year, echoing a dangerously common misconception. “Hate speech isn’t free speech,” people say, assuming they have a right not to hear whatever they consider hateful language and ideas. Government officials sometimes share this view: The Mayor of West Hollywood confirmed to Eugene Volokh that she would not issue a special events permit for a Donald Trump rally so long as he trafficked in hate, contrary to the “values and ideals” of the West Hollywood community

Related: A Champion of Free Speech Takes on the Muzzled Campus

But you don’t have to indulge in allegedly hateful speech to violate questionable local laws: In Washington D.C., an employer who fails to call a transgender employee by the employee’s preferred pronouns, including “ze,” “zir,” or “they,” may be liable for harassment, as Hans Bader explains. The New York City Commission on Human Rights has issued similar mandates, applying broadly to employers, landlords and businesses, meaning that customers and tenants, as well as employees, have a “human right” to regulate ordinary speech used in ordinary commercial transactions.

“(P)eople can basically force us — on pain of massive legal liability — to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it’s a lie,” Volokh laments. “We have to use the person’s ‘preferred … pronoun and title,’ whatever those preferences might be. Some people could say they prefer ‘glugga’ just as well as saying ‘ze’.”

US GAO

The federal budget consists of revenue (mostly taxes, but also things like user fees and intragovernmental revolving funds) and spending.

But not all spending looks the same. Spending through tax provisions—known as tax incentives or expenditures—is not as well-known as other types of federal spending, such as discretionary spending on federal programs, or spending on Social Security and other entitlement programs.

Yet tax expenditures totaled more than $1.2 trillion in fiscal year 2015—roughly what is spent on discretionary federal spending. And they didn’t have the scrutiny of other types of federal spending.

Josh Zumbrun:

Across 25 of the world’s advanced economies, about two-thirds of the population—more than half a billion people—earn the same as or less than their peers did a decade ago.

Between 540 million and 580 million people in 2014 had lower or stagnant incomes than similarly situated people, according to McKinsey…

Melody Petersen

Premiums for Californians’ Obamacare health coverage will rise by an average of 13.2% next year — more than three times the increase of the last two years and a jump that is bound to raise debate in an election year.

The big hikes come after two years in which California officials had bragged that the program had helped insure hundreds of thousands people in the state while keeping costs moderately in check.

Premiums in the insurance program called Covered California rose just 4% in 2016, after rising 4.2% in 2015 – the first year that exchange officials negotiated with insurers.

On Tuesday, officials blamed next year’s premium hikes in the program that insures 1.4 million Californians on rising costs of medical care, including specialty drugs, and the end of a mechanism that held down rates for the first three years of Obamacare.

Derek Thompson:

“I feel I kind of ruined my life by going to college,” Jackie Krowen said. She first took out student loans at 19, to go to community college in Oregon. She borrowed more when she transferred to Portland State University, and even more to go to nursing school at the University of Rochester in New York. Now, more than $150,000 in debt, Krowen told Consumer Reports that she cannot buy a house and fears the specter of her non-dischargeable debt will follow her for the rest of her life.

I read Jackie’s story earlier this summer, and I thought about it constantly while reading the student debt report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, which was released today. There’s no doubt that Jackie’s situation is disturbing and sad. It’s not unique: There are many students for whom college is not that promised ticket to the middle class, but rather an albatross that punishes their early adulthood. They are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, in jobs paying half what they expected to earn after college. They cannot buy a home, start a business. They are even afraid to get married and have a kid.

Texas Observer:

Exactly. If you look at Justice [Nathan] Hecht’s opinion in West Orange Cove II [the last school finance case] in 2004, he says, after upholding me on the property tax issue, “Look, there’s really a lot of evidence that the court considered about how the schools are underperforming.” An achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged. There’s an achievement gap in the race characteristics. And between rural and urban. There were a number of problems. He lays them out and he goes, “You know, just looking at it, we think it’s just barely constitutional, but it could get worse.”

When I was drafting the [latest] judgment, I took every one of those things, and every one had gotten worse, and we could quantify it. Two hundred thousand students in the Texas higher education system are taking remedial math and remedial English. The achievement gap between the economically advantaged and disadvantaged — which had been narrowing as they put more money in — was now widening. The English-language learner (ELL) students, they were not catching the train. And what was really sad is that there was evidence in the trial that if the students stayed in the ELL program four to six years, they performed better in every test — SAT, any of the STAAR tests — than any other demographic group. Better than rich white kids? Yeah. They had developed cognitive abilities in two different languages. So it takes a period of time. But if they do it, the children will succeed more often than not.

A conversation on Texas and Wisconsin academic outcomes.

Laurence Kotlikoff:

It’s been several weeks since the Social Security Trustees released their 2016 Trustees Report. I’ve been waiting to see if either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or anyone in the press core would say a peep about the astounding $6 trillion deficit implied by the Report’s table VI.F1.

Not a peep.

As you may know, I’m running for President as a write-in candidate along with my VP choice, UCLA economist, Edward Leamer. We’ll be on the ballot along with the two party candidates if voters simply write Laurence Kotlikoff for President and Edward Leamer for Vice President on the ballot in the space provided. It’s that simple.

Ed and I are deeply concerned about our country’s fiscal condition, which is grave to say the least. If we don’t address it, we can kiss our children’s economic futures goodbye.

I’ll get back to the overall picture, but let me tell the press what they will find if they care to do their job and look at Table VI.F1. They will learn that Social Security, according to the system’s own actuaries, is now $32 trillion in the red! The $32 trillion is the present value difference between all the system’s projected future benefit payments less the sum of a) all its projected future taxes and b) its current almost $3 trillion trust fund.

We economists call this measure Social Security’s infinite horizon fiscal gap. Last year, the Trustees reported a fiscal gap of $26 trillion. So the system’s fiscal gap grew by $6 trillion over the past year, i.e., Social Security ran a $6 trillion deficit!

The system is now 32 percent underfunded. In other words, Social Security’s 12.4 percentage point payroll tax rate must be raised immediately and permanently by 32 percent, which is 4 cents out of every dollar we earn (up to Social Security’s covered earnings ceiling, which is now $118,500). The longer we wait, the higher the tax hike will have to be, which means the larger the fiscal damage our children will face.

Christ Rickert

As a Madison School District taxpayer, I appreciate the School Board’s careful consideration of whether the Nov. 8 election would be too soon to ask voters to approve a referendum.

When you’re an elected official overseeing a $376 million operating budget and the educational lives of some 27,000 students, you can’t take the public — or its money — for granted.

Luckily, I’m no elected official, and I can say what the elected school officials probably shouldn’t: Any halfway reasonable request from the Madison schools is almost certain to get approved, and by a large margin.

So far, a November referendum is just a gleam in certain School Board members’ eyes. District administrators haven’t come up with options for how much they might want, or when.

But as long as district officials don’t ask the average taxpayer for, say, more than a hundred bucks more per year, or to outfit every board member with a Lincoln Navigator and a Caribbean timeshare, voters will comply.

The District’s 2016-2017 “budget book” mentions spending $421,473,742 “excluding construction”….

I sent a note to Michael Barry on 10 July 2016 requesting the District’s construction budget, which I could not find.

Paul Caron:

Loveday Morris

Turkey suspended more than 15,000 Education Ministry workers on Tuesday and demanded resignations from all university deans as authorities widened their far-reaching crackdowns in the wake of a failed coup attempt.

The 15,200 personnel were being investigated for links to the power grab launched last week, the ministry said in a statement. In addition, 1,577 university deans from Turkey’s public and private universities were asked to hand in their notice. A further 492 staff were removed from duty at the country’s top Islamic authority.

It marked an escalation in a purge of state institutions after a mutinous faction of Turkey’s military staged an attempted overthrow on Friday night, hijacking fighter jets and helicopters to strike key installations and security forces.

Nahima Marchal:

UW Madison’s Multicultural Center — a space designed to “ensure students of all racial and cultural backgrounds” feel welcomed at the university — held a special meeting on Monday to help students process the past week’s of racially-tinged events, which included the targeted killing of five police officers in Dallas and the fatal police shootings of two black men in St Paul, Minnesota and Baton Rouge, La.

But for all the talk of inclusivity, the support meet-ups were — disconcertingly — split up by racial groups.

In a post that has since been deleted off of the official UW-M Facebook page, the Center described the meetings as a space where all students and teachers could gather to discuss and reflect on recent events. “All are welcome and there will be affinity spaces for people of color and for white people,” the announcement said.

According to the post, the center offered two separate “processing” sessions — one for white UW employees in the morning followed by another one for white students in the afternoon, and another two for minority students, faculty, and staff.

Farran Powell:

Despite the annual sticker price shock, many students and their families are receiving tuition discounts at private colleges.

Under tuition discounting, a school offsets its published tuition price with grant aid from the institution to entice students to enroll at their college. It’s a practice that began more than three decades ago – and one that is more commonplace at many private schools, college financial aid administrators say.

But the gap between the published tuition prices and the amount students pay is widening for many private institutions – especially at smaller colleges, experts say.

Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.

uchicago:

The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right column) are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.

Guillaume Lepecq:

Cash is trustOn September 1st 2015, the French government lowered the cap on cash payments from €3,000 to €1,000. The new rule applies both to business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions; consumer-to-consumer transactions are not affected. For non-residents, the limit is €15,000.

France is one of the first countries to have introduced restrictions on cash payments as early as 2001. However, particularly in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, many countries have followed the French lead as illustrated by the table below. In Germany, a plan to introduce a limit on cash transactions has been met with fierce resistance across the country. The economic weekly magazine made this their cover story in February titled “Save Cash”.

James Rufus Koren:

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System said Monday that its rate of return for the year ended June 30 was just 0.61%. What’s more, Ted Eliopoulos, the pension fund’s chief investment officer, said the poor year has pushed CalPERS’ long-term returns below expected levels.

“We have some challenges to confront,” Eliopoulos said during a conference call. “We’re moving into a much more challenging, low-return environment.”

CalPERS assumes that, in the long-term, it will earn investment returns averaging 7.5% a year. If the fund fails to meet that goal, the state’s taxpayers could be forced to make up any shortfall in pension fund

Elizabeth Donald:

Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University saw fewer summer students this year, while the Edwardsville campus saw a slight increase — and school officials are saying online classes had an impact on both.
 
 On-campus summer enrollment at SIUC dropped 14.2 percent this year, or 571 fewer students than last. This is 1,334 fewer students than who were enrolled in summer 2014.
 
 However, when online classes are factored in, the summer enrollment at SIUC is down 5.1 percent — still a drop, but not as significant. In fact, online class enrollment grew by 8.5 percent this year.

Jordan Posamentier

ESSA provides states with the opportunity to incentivize school districts to expand parent choice. States now have the freedom to relax their NCLB-driven state laws while incentivizing local authorities to go about improving choice in their school systems.

ESSA replaced NCLB, but the law of the land leading up to reauthorization was shaped by the Obama administration’s waiver program. The Department of Education used those waivers to compel states to pass a number of rather prescriptive laws, which tied the hands of districts in some policy areas. Perhaps the most onerous requirement was performance-based teacher evaluations, which—while well intentioned—were also highly constraining.

ESSA cleared the regulatory deck established by the waiver program, but by and large, the state laws that passed because of those waivers are still on the books. To unbind districts from those laws, states can now do one of three things: repeal the waiver-driven laws, weaken them, or waive them with the condition that districts do something awesome. The latter is the sleeper policy in ESSA.

Several states have already set up waiver processes for laws that might or might not have been NCLB-waiver driven. For example, Arkansas allows districts to seek waivers from state law in order to gain the same flexibilities that charter schools have—so long as they have at least one open enrollment charter school within their boundaries. Texas (which didn’t receive an NCLB waiver) has a similar package. Georgia has several to pick from.

Krissy Clark:

Before sociologist Tressie MacMillan Cottom went to pursue her PhD, she was working at a cosmetology school in her native North Carolina. The school emphasized that she was not an admissions officer, but instead focused on enrollment. The pitch was more akin to sales (“Join now!” “Start today!”) than the staid evaluation that liberal arts grads like Tressie knew well.

The school was near the end of a bus line, next to a popular fish stand. The would-be students who called and visited were not typically fresh out of high school, but in the middle of busy adult lives. And they needed a lot more from Tressie than a student might typically ask of someone helping to fill out financial aid documents.

“I held babies, I held hands, I gave them rides home when their boyfriends took their car and the buses had stopped running.”

At the end of many meetings, the women she met with would slide a piece of paper across her desk. She soon discovered, this was welfare paperwork, specifically an accounting of the time the women spent seeking or enrolling in a short-term credential program.

anonymous

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) prides itself on being the leading research university in Northeast Ohio. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that not only would CWRU be housing approximately 1,700 riot police in student dormitories during the Republican National Convention, that not only would those police be permitted to store their weapons in student dormitories, and that not only would widespread student opposition to this decision be placated with two milquetoast Q&A sessions – “opportunities to learn,” President Barbara Snyder called them – but that my colleagues and I, with only one week’s notice, would be expected to cancel a week of summer classes in order to accommodate the quartering of the paramilitary force descending on Cleveland to police the city during the convention.

To be precise, the classes aren’t officially cancelled. A follow up notice from the university explains: “The only change to the existing practice is that these classes do not take place on our campus during those days.” Furthermore, the notice continues, “the educational experience may take place at a different time, place or manner, but the learning will still take place.” This attempt to dodge the accusation I am making—that CWRU is cancelling classes—is perfunctory at best. While my colleagues are brilliant, innovative, and committed teachers, I don’t think anyone who understands the energy and preparation that goes into teaching a college course would realistically imagine that “the learning will still take place” in anything resembling the manner we envisioned when we designed our courses. Can we actually presume that asking faculty to reboot one eighth of their entire class, during week seven of an eight week term and with less than one week of notice, will lead to a positive learning experience for our students? Unlikely. Instead of disputing semantics, I will continue to call this decision what it is: CWRU is effectively cancelling its classes in order to host 1,700 riot police for the RNC. I fail to see the wisdom in rebranding our mistakes in order to imply otherwise.

Emma Brown and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

State and local spending on prisons and jails has grown three times as much over the past three decades as spending on public education for preschool through high school, according to a new analysis of federal data by the U.S. Education Department.

The analysis, released Thursday, comes amid growing bipartisan agreement about the need for criminal justice reform, and argues that taxpayers and public safety would be better served by redirecting investments from incarceration to public schools.

“A variety of studies have suggested that investing more in education, particularly targeted toward at-risk communities, could achieve crime reduction without the heavy social costs that high incarceration rates impose on individuals, families, and communities,” it says.

Paul Hill:

On the surface, the current dispute about Title I comparability (the requirement that schools within a district must receive comparable resources from state and local sources for education of disadvantaged children before federal funds are added on) is all about money. On one side, Secretary of Education John King is pressing for regulations that would require districts to demonstrate real-dollar equality of state and local spending. On the other, Senate Education Committee Chair Lamar Alexander is insisting that the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) does not allow such a sharp definition of comparability, leaving states and localities free to interpret the comparability principle in various ways.

But the underlying issues go much deeper. They are about whether schools serving the most disadvantaged children will get a fair chance to improve, or will always be at a disadvantage in attracting and retaining good teachers and principals. Here’s why:

Driven by their collective bargaining agreements, the vast majority of big school districts ignore between-school differences in teacher salaries. This is so senior teachers can choose the schools they believe are the best workplaces—most often schools in nicer neighborhoods with students from higher-income families—while newer teachers with no seniority rights and fewer choices tend to work in more disadvantaged schools serving poorer students.

Espinosa, Miguel and Rondon, Carlos and Romero, Mauricio:

The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar’s academic career.

There has been so much debate on the increasing use of formal mathematical methods in Economics. Although there are some studies tackling these issues, those use either a little amount of papers, a small amount of scholars or cover a short period of time. We try to overcome these challenges constructing a database characterizing the main socio demographic and academic output of a survey of 438 scholars divided into three groups: Economics Nobel Prize winners; scholars awarded with at least one of six prestigious recognitions in Economics; and academic faculty randomly selected from the top twenty Economics departments worldwide. Our results provide concrete measures of mathematization in Economics by giving statistical evidence on the increasing trend of number of equations and econometric outputs per article. We also show that for each of these variables there have been four structural breaks and three of them have been increasing ones. Furthermore, we found that the training and use of mathematics has a positive correlation with the probability of winning a Nobel Prize in certain cases. It also appears that being an empirical researcher as measured by the average number of econometrics outputs per paper has a negative correlation with someone’s academic career success.

Chalkbeat:

Compared with other large Colorado school districts, Denver Public Schools has a higher proportion of teachers set to lose tenure under a sweeping educator effectiveness law passed six years ago.

Forty-seven Denver teachers are poised to lose non-probationary status — or tenure — after two consecutive years of being rated ineffective at their jobs, according to district officials. Those teachers represent about 2 percent of the total number of non-probationary teachers in DPS, the state’s largest school district.

Related: an emphasis on adult employment.

Nathan Scott McNamara:

For better or worse, writers and readers live in an age of the million-dollar book deal. The Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) increasingly gamble on massive book advances in hopes that they might put out one of the biggest hits of the year. Last fall, Knopf—a division of Penguin Random House—paid an unprecedented $2 million advance for the first-time novelist Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire. Other recent million-dollar debut deals include Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Stephanie Clifford’s Everybody Rise, and Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves—and the list goes on.

Melanie Asmar:

Was there anything you saw in the Argentine system that you admired?

It made us appreciate the extraordinary resources we have here. My two daughters went to secondary school: 2,000 kids in 32 rooms. No air conditioning, no library, no gym, no computer room, no nothing. Just bare classrooms. A thousand kids went for five hours in the morning; a thousand kids went for five hours in the afternoon. I think it was very eye-opening for the kids about the level of privilege that we have here in the United States.

It was also very interesting to have my kids be second-language learners and to talk every night about their learning process … (and) talk to their teachers, talk to their school leaders.

What would you want to say to the Spanish-speaking families that DPS serves about what you learned?

Tengo muchas ganas de hablar con ustedes directamente en español. Y es un oportunidad para hablar sin interpretación, sin traducción.

Open Culture:

In 1972, the composer Leonard Bernstein returned to Harvard, his alma mater, to serve as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, with “Poetry” being defined in the broadest sense. The position, first created in 1925, asks faculty members to live on campus, advise students, and most importantly, deliver a series of six public lectures. T.S. Eliot, Aaron Copland, W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Jorge Luis Borges — they all previously took part in this tradition. And Bernstein did too.

Delivered in the fall of 1973 and collectively titled “The Unanswered Question,” Bernstein’s lectures covered a lot of terrain, touching on poetry, linguistics, philosophy and physics. But the focus inevitably comes back to music — to how music works, or to the underlying grammar of music. The lectures run over 11 hours. They’re considered masterpieces, beautiful examples of how to make complicated material accessible. And they’re available in full on YouTube. You can watch the first lecture (on Musical Phonology) above, and find the remaining five lectures below. The lectures can also be purchased as DVDs or in book format.

Anya Kamenetz:

Dale Farran, a researcher at Vanderbilt University, has been watching closely how that money is spent in Tennessee. She argues the programs there are flawed, and unlikely to move the needle for the poor kids who need them most.

What’s worse, Farran says, is that across states, nobody’s really watching the store when it comes to quality, so these mistakes are likely to be repeated.

“I’m so old I’m getting really grumpy about this,” she says. “I have cared about this for such a long time and it’s just making me crazy.” Farran outlines her criticisms in a new paper for the Brookings Institution.

Farran’s research team visited 139 preschool classrooms in the Memphis area and Nashville, all funded by the federal grant program. They observed the classes for a full 6 to 8 hour day to see just how the teachers and students spent their time. This is really important, because we know from other research that high quality preschool means lots of choice-based play in centers, small group instruction, and outdoor or gym play so that young children can move their bodies.

Perhaps local schools might evaluate the effectiveness of current programs (including reading) prior to simply spending more….

Tim Grant

With college costs shooting through the roof and many parents unprepared for the burden of paying for it, high school students across the country are being forced to make choices about where they will attend college and how to cut costs once they get there.

One of the most significant findings in a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based College Savings Foundation is that for the first time this year a majority of high school students, 53 percent, plan to eliminate the dormitory expense altogether and live at home.

“We are encouraged that high school students are planning ahead and thinking deliberately about their futures. They may be living at home during college, but that may help them achieve more financial independence later,” said Mary Morris, chairman of the College Savings Foundation and CEO of Virginia 529 in Richmond, Va.

Some years ago, the Madison School District reduced high school academic choice via one size fits all courses, such as English 10.

Robin Lake

No one doubts that suspension and expulsion rates in too many public schools are far too high. This is true in both charter and district-run schools. No school should treat a child, much less a troubled one, as a problem to be rid of. Yet nor can schools allow a small group of students to continually hinder the learning of many.

Clearly, a balance must be found between employing overly harsh student discipline and perpetuating classroom conditions that are chaotic or even unsafe for students and teachers. But national data indicate the bar for what can get a student removed from school is alarmingly low: most out-of-school suspensions are for nonviolent misbehavior like being disruptive, acting disrespectfully, or violating dress code. These subjectively determined infractions are much more commonly meted out to black and Hispanic students than to their white peers. All of this constitutes a serious problem that requires new solutions.

Alison Gopnik:

A strange thing happened to mothers and fathers and children at the end of the 20th century. It was called “parenting.” As long as there have been human beings, mothers and fathers and many others have taken special care of children. But the word “parenting” didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1958, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and became common only in the 1970s.

People sometimes use “parenting” just to describe what parents actually do, but more often, especially now, “parenting” means something that parents should do. “To parent” is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult—better than they would be otherwise, or (though we whisper this) better than the children next door. The right kind of “parenting” will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult.

Wes Bishop & Jaime Hough:

Hemmed in by a financial aid system that privileges private lenders, forced to shoulder the burden of state cuts to higher education, the majority of US college students now expect to be saddled with thousands of dollars in debt by the time they finish their studies. They know that student debt is the price of admission to the job market, their best shot at attaining a modicum of economic security.

The explosion of student debt has triggered calls from the Left to make American public universities truly public and shift the burden back onto state coffers rather than students’ bank accounts.

The Right, meanwhile, has offered its own plans. Arguably the most ambitious is that of Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and now president of Purdue University.

“This no-debt, low risk option,” Daniels said of his plan last year, “is another way we can help keep our land-grant school within financial reach of all qualified students.” Daniels’s program, at the time called “Bet on a Boiler” — an allusion to the school’s athletic nickname, the Boilermakers — allows private companies to directly fund students’ education. In return for the private investor money, students pledge to surrender a portion of their future wages for a certain amount of time.

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar:

Growth is projected to average 5.8 percent from 2015 to 2025, below the pace before the 2007-2009 economic recession but faster than in recent years that saw health care spending moving in step with modest economic growth.

National health expenditures will hit $3.35 trillion this year, which works out to $10,345 for every man, woman and child. The annual increase of 4.8 percent for 2016 is lower than the forecast for the rest of the decade.

A stronger economy, faster growth in medical prices and an aging population are driving the trend. Medicare and Medicaid are expected to grow more rapidly than private insurance as the baby-boom generation ages. By 2025, government at all levels will account for nearly half of health care spending, 47 percent.

The report also projects that the share of Americans with health insurance will remain above 90 percent, assuming that President Barack Obama’s law survives continued Republican attacks.

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft:

THE TERM “PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL” is a fount of confusion. We admire such persons for speaking the truth about the corruptions of politics, for explaining climate change to a world that would prefer a more convenient truth, or for their unblinking acknowledgment of the structural racism of our society. At other times, we mock them for dumbing down the ideas they have the privilege to steward, and suspect them of a venal desire for influence and power, or, worse, we suspect that beneath such desires lies a lack of intellectual curiosity and seriousness. The word “public,” when conjoined with “intellectual,” sometimes seems to invite an intellectually lazy enthusiasm or an equally lazy criticism.

The real interest in the term “public intellectual” lies in what its usage can tell us about ourselves: how we imagine the links between politics and prose, thought and action, individual contemplation and social congregation. Why, for example, has the notion of publicness itself become such a high value for some, practically synonymous with benevolence, as if to attach “public” to the name of a discipline grants it a special dignity? Getting un-confused about the term “public intellectual” does not require jettisoning the notion of public engagement altogether, but rather turning these keywords — “intellectual,” “public” — over and over, depriving them of the sense of obvious meaning produced by too-frequent use.

Sean Gill, Jordan Posamentier, Paul Hil

Urban schools have been the center of investment and concern in public education for the past two decades. Yet many suburban districts now rival urban districts in the challenges they face, having experienced dramatic population changes in just the past decade, with fast growing numbers of English Language Learners and students living in poverty attending suburban schools.

Our new paper reviews the trends around these changing student populations and the accompanying demands facing suburban public school systems. For example:

Between 2000 and 2012, populations living below the federal poverty line grew nearly three times as fast in suburbs as in cities.

Amrith Ramkumar:

The upper middle class is surging, according to a recent study. One big reason: Its members are passing on more than money.

The upper middle class, defined using incomes adjusted for inflation and family size, expanded from 12.9 percent of the U.S. population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014, an Urban Institute report released in June found.

Together, the upper middle class and the rich had 30 percent of income in 1979 and 63 percent in 2014. In the same period, the middle class’s share of income declined from 46 percent to 26 percent.

In addition to showing that the richest 1 percent of Americans aren’t the only ones who have gotten richer, the study adds evidence to the link between income and education. Fifty-eight percent of the upper middle class had four-year college degrees in 2014, up from 26 percent in 1979. About 32 percent of the U.S. population had four-year degrees in 2014.

Gowers’s Weblog:

How much of the standard proof of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic follows from general tricks that can be applied all over the place and how much do you actually have to remember? At first it may seem as though you have to remember quite a bit: there is a non-obvious sequence of lemmas, starting with Bézout’s theorem, continuing with the clever proof that if p|ab then either p|a or p|b, bumping that up to a proof for bigger products, and eventually deducing the theorem itself.

But what if one were simply asked to come up with a proof? Would there be any chance of discovering that sequence of lemmas? I maintain that there would — if, that is, you are aware of certain general tricks.

Let’s imagine, then, that we don’t know the proof and are trying to work it out. I’ll split the whole process up into a number of steps. I’ll precede the description of each step by a slogan that more or less generates the argument.

1. State the problem carefully and give names to things.

Mike Antonucci:

An initiative on the November ballot in Massachusetts would lift the state’s cap on charter schools just enough to allow 12 new charters or expansions of existing charters each year. That seems relatively innocuous as political issues go, but the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) has made the referendum its line in the sand. It is devoting $9.2 million of its own budget to defeating the measure, titled Question 2 .

But why limit yourself to spending millions of Massachusetts teacher dues when you can get access to more than a million dollars of dues from teachers in other states? Just prior to the opening of the National Education Association Representative Assembly in Washington DC, the national union’s board of directors approved a $1.4 million grant to MTA from its Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund to support the anti-charter campaign.

Related: $1.57M for four senators.

Kevin Kelly:

This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.
 
 Car movements – Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car.
 Highway traffic – Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Seventy million plates are recorded each month.
 Ride-share taxis – Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips.
 Long-distance travel – Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded.
 Drone surveillance – Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
 Postal mail – The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
 Utilities – Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.)
 Cell phone location and call logs – Where, when, and who you call (meta-data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.

Ashley Joachim & Patrick McGuinn

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was designed to solve a problem that has plagued past standard-setting efforts. Many states responded to earlier efforts by watering down their standards for learning and lowering expectations for students in an attempt to artificially boost the number of students that reached proficiency. By creating a set of common expectations across states, the designers of the Common Core sought to protect the initiative from the inevitable political pressures that might lead policymakers to weaken the standards or the aligned assessments.

However, history may be set to repeat itself. While most states have stood firm in their embrace of the new standards, the number of states planning to use the aligned assessments dropped from 45 in 2011 to 20 by mid-2016.

In a new article in Education Next, we examine why states have abandoned the assessments (designed by the federally funded Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessments of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)) even as they continue to embrace the standards on which the assessments are based. The answer, in short, is politics. It’s easy for policymakers and the public to embrace high standards in principle. But when policymakers seek to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable for those standards by using the results from aligned assessments, support is far more likely to falter.

Joe Siedlecki:

Portfolio strategy ≠ charter school growth strategy

Far too often, we run into situations where stakeholders believe a portfolio strategy is nothing more than a charter school growth strategy. We encourage city leaders to think beyond the obvious. While we ultimately aim for a system of autonomous and accountable schools, we know there may be more than one path to get there.

Doug Ericsson & Dean Mosiman

There were 1,414 students in the Madison School District identified as homeless over the course of the 2014-15 school year, 5.2 percent of the student body. The number rises each year and is up 89 percent since 2008-09.

By some counts, children are the majority of the city’s homeless, yet they aren’t its typical face. They tend not to live on the streets in public view, although that does happen. Rather, a majority of their families are doubled up with relatives or friends, often in substandard conditions. Or they stay in shelters or motels.

K’won began classes at Hawthorne Elementary on Oct. 20, about seven weeks into the school year. His mother, pregnant at the time with Amir, had brought the family to Madison from Chicago, fleeing violence and drawn to this area’s low unemployment rate.

“They say you can come here and get shelter and help, but I can get that in Chicago,” she said. “What I can’t get in Chicago is a job.”

Within two weeks, she had offers from a fast-food restaurant and a convenience store. She took the latter because it paid more: $9.50 an hour.

Initially, she and K’won stayed with Turner’s aunt, who lives on Madison’s East Side in the Hawthorne attendance area. That’s how K’won came to enroll at the school.

Luke Rosiak & Kathryn Watson:

District of Columbia public and charter elementary schools have more students attending classes than the federal city’s entire population of such school-aged kids, indicating a fraud rate of at least 11 percent.

Mathematically, that is the minimum portion of elementary schoolers who must be non-D.C. residents, but whose parents are freeloading off taxpayers to take advantage of the District of Columbia Public Schools’ extended hours, after-school care and proximity to employers.

Less Wrong:

mentioned in Fields Medalists on School Mathematics, school mathematics usually gives a heavily distorted picture of mathematical practice. It’s common for bright young people to participate in math competitions, an activity which is closer to that of mathematical practice. Unfortunately, while math competitions may be more representative of mathematical practice than school mathematics, math competitions are themselves greatly misleading. Furthermore, they’ve become tied to a misleading mythological conception of “genius.” I’ve collected relevant quotations below.

Acknowledgment – I obtained some of these quotations from a collection of mathematician quotations compiled by my colleague Laurens Gunnarsen.

Related: Math Forum.

AFP:

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Saturday called on citizens to become reservists and help boost security forces in the wake of the country’s latest terror attack.

France’s “operational reservists” include French citizens with or without military experience as well as former soldiers.

“I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so, to join this operational reserve,” said Cazeneuve.

Gina Kolata:

The United States is producing more research scientists than academia can handle.

We have been told time and again that the United States needs more scientists, but when it comes to some of the most desirable science jobs — tenure-track professorships at universities, where much of the exciting work is done — there is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six has a chance of joining the club in the foreseeable future.

While they try to get a foot in the door, many spend years after getting their Ph.D. as poorly paid foot soldiers in a system that can afford to exploit them. Even someone as brilliant as Emmanuelle Charpentier, who in 2015 became head of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology after a momentous discovery in gene editing, spent the previous 25 years moving through nine institutions in five countries.

Frederick Hess:

In truth, Gates’s observation should not have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. After all, technology has long been offered as the miraculous balm that will transform and improve teaching and learning. Enthusiasts have said this about iPads, laptops, the Internet, desktop computers, videotapes, televisions, the radio . . . and even chalkboards, if you go back far enough. With each new advance, schools spend heavily on nifty new gizmos, make grand promises, and get enthusiastic reviews. And then, each time, nothing much changes.

Unfortunately, most technology in schooling has involved haphazard attempts to slather new devices across classrooms, with little vision of how or why these will make a difference.

Tim Worstall:

The World Economic Forum at Davos is fast approaching so Oxfam has decided to re-release their report screaming that we’re all going to hell in a handcart because of increasing inequality. About which we can say two things. The first thing being that they’re complaining about the wrong thing. Wealth is an interesting concept and we might well want to pay it some attention. But I’m afraid that the way Oxfam is doing it is simply wrong. Precisely because it is a net concept, as they agree it is (that is, it’s assets minus debts) then by their very definition there’s more poor people in either the US or Europe than there are in China. Just not something which passes the basic smell test and not something that should spark our concern in any great manner. Because this is a side effect of the fact that we have efficient financial markets in the rich countries. That is, it’s possible to borrow money when you don’t own anything: as students do to go to college for example. In a net wealth measurement, those students have negative wealth. And thus are classified as poor as they head out the door with their newly minted Harvard degrees.

The real joy of Oxfam’s complaint is that this is made very clear in the Credit Suisse report they take their own data from. As I pointed out here in fact:

It’s that left hand side we want to look at.

CRA:

The Taulbee Survey is the principal source of information on the enrollment, production, and employment of Ph.D.s in computer science and computer engineering (CS & CE) and in providing salary and demographic data for faculty in CS & CE in North America. Statistics given include gender and ethnicity breakdowns.

the grugq:

Mere hours after the putsch in Turkey has failed, it is still too early to understand exactly what went on. Given those constraints, I still want to discuss something which has altered “the game” so much that the existing guidebook needs to be significantly revised.

I am not a military strategist, but I have lived through a couple coups here in Thailand, so I have some first hand experience of what they look like. The guide book to running a coup is still Luttwak’s Coup d’État, but it needs to be revised to reflect the use of cyberpower. In the same vein, people who talk about cyberpower need to understand what it actually is (hint: it isn’t a stockpile of exploits, it’s the ability to create and maintain advantage.)

The Good Coup Guide

A coup is basically a sucker punch. The trick is to end the fight before it even begins. The members of the coup are in the minority and a long drawn out fight, even if they win, will not have the trappings of legitimacy or stability. The goal is to have a rapid attack against the existing leadership and replace them before anyone knows what happened. At the same time, the general population needs to be kept out of the way, because large groups of civilians complicate things to no end.

Essentially, the existing leaders need to be removed from positions of power and their ability to coordinate and organise a resistance must be blocked. This is easier when there are only a few means of mass communication (e.g the TV station, or the radio station.)

Sam Thielman:

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

Freedom of Information Act (Foia) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The Foia law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”.

Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage this month.

Foia requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year.

Mathematical Association of America:

“We are very excited to bring home another first-place IMO award, which serves as a recognition for the the high standard of mathematical creativity and problem-solving capabilities we have in our country,”said Po-Shen Loh, lead coach for the U.S. team and associate professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.

“We are very excited to bring home another first-place IMO award, which serves as a recognition for the the high standard of mathematical creativity and problem-solving capabilities we have in our country,”said Po-Shen Loh, lead coach for the U.S. team and associate professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.

The six U.S. team members were selected through a series of competitions organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), culminating with the USA Mathematical Olympiad. The six team members joined 70 of their peers at Carnegie Mellon University in June to immerse themselves in problem solving for three weeks at MAA’s Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program.

“We have been running the U.S. Olympiad training program with a focus on the long-term development of our country’s talent, and it’s great to see that reflected in the continued team success a second year in a row,” said MAA Executive Director Michael Pearson.

Members of the winning 2016 U.S. team were Ankan Bhattacharya, Michael Kural, Allen Liu, Junyao Peng, Ashwin Sah, and Yuan Yao, all of whom were awarded gold medals for their individual scores. Team members Liu and Yao each earned perfect test scores. The team was accompanied by Loh and deputy coach Razvan Gelca, professor of mathematics and statistics at Texas Tech University.

Related: Math Forum.

Erin Hinrichs:

Just a few months into Superintendent Ed Graff’s tenure as the leader of Minneapolis Public Schools, another major change in leadership will take shape. He’ll be reporting to at least one new board member, and as many as four, after the upcoming school board election in November.

Board Member at Large Carla Bates has decided not to run for re-election; Board Member Kim Ellison is looking to fill Bates’ seat, leaving the District 2 seat up for grabs.

In addition to Ellison, two more incumbents — Tracine Asberry and Josh Reimnitz — will be vying alongside five other candidates to fill four open seats.

All of the candidates have kicked off their campaign efforts online, through websites and social media activity. And yard signs have already found their way into some neighborhoods. But the race rhetoric will likely become more heated once the first round of campaign finance reports are filed by the Aug. 2 deadline.

U.S. House of Representatives – Peter Whippy:

Today, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by co-chairs U.S. Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Ted Poe (R-Texas), announced the newly formed Fourth Amendment Caucus to protect the privacy and security of Americans in the digital age.
The bipartisan caucus is comprised of twenty-five founding members, thirteen Republicans and twelve Democrats. The members will lead efforts in the House of Representatives to protect against warrantless searches and seizures, close privacy violating surveillance loopholes, and champion reform efforts to protect and restore Fourth Amendment rights.

“Members of the House of Representatives from both parties are eager to debate and vote on privacy and surveillance issues that are far too often drafted in secret and jammed through the legislative process under tight deadlines, restrictive procedures, and little debate,” said Lofgren. “From shutting the backdoor on warrantless spying to leading efforts to protect privacy, this Fourth Amendment Caucus gives members a new, nonpartisan forum for ideas, organization, and strategy as we fight to protect the Constitution and the American people.”

The fourth amendment:

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It is part of the Bill of Rights and was adopted in response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, a type of general search warrant issued by the British government and a major source of tension in pre-Revolutionary America. The Fourth Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison, along with the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, in response to Anti-Federalist objections to the new Constitution. Congress submitted the amendment to the states on September 28, 1789. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-quarters of the states had ratified it. On March 1, 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson announced the adoption of the amendment.Show LessWikipedia
Related Topics

Suzanne Goldberg:

Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment.

Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards, according to official data and interviews with dozens of farmers, packers, truckers, researchers, campaigners and government officials.

From the fields and orchards of California to the population centres of the east coast, farmers and others on the food distribution chain say high-value and nutritious food is being sacrificed to retailers’ demand for unattainable perfection

github:

The unprecedented advance in digital technology during the second half of the 20th century has produced a measurement revolution that is transforming science. In the life sciences, data analysis is now part of practically every research project. Genomics, in particular, is being driven by new measurement technologies that permit us to observe certain molecular entities for the first time. These observations are leading to discoveries analogous to identifying microorganisms and other breakthroughs permitted by the invention of the microscope. Choice examples of these technologies are microarrays and next generation sequencing.

Scientific fields that have traditionally relied upon simple data analysis techniques have been turned on their heads by these technologies. In the past, for example, researchers would measure the transcription levels of a single gene of interest. Today, it is possible to measure all 20,000+ human genes at once. Advances such as these have brought about a shift from hypothesis to discovery-driven research. However, interpreting information extracted from these massive and complex datasets requires sophisticated statistical skills as one can easily be fooled by patterns arising by chance. This has greatly elevated the importance of statistics and data analysis in the life sciences.

Megan Carpentier:

But for many thirty- or fortysomething residents of the state capital, about 150 miles north of Manhattan, their student debt is still weighing them down, despite their having aged out of the twentysomething demographic that is the focus of public student debt sympathy.

“I pay $700 a month in student loans and I didn’t go to a fancy school,” explained Deanna Fox, 30, a writer who lives in Delanson, to a table full of people in their 30s and 40s gathered at the Riverfront Bar and Grille in Albany. “But there really wasn’t any opportunity as far as scholarships go: because I came from a very middle-class family, I was too wealthy – even though we didn’t have much – to get a lot of state-funded grants or scholarships, and wasn’t wealthy enough for my parents to pay for me to go to college out of their own pockets.

“So I had to take out probably 75% of my funding for college as a loan, and most of it was private loans.”

“I also pay $700 in student loans a month,” said Emily Lemieux, a 34-year-old museum professional living in Albany, “and I also didn’t go to fancy schools.”

Dan Roberts:

Once upon a time, this middle-aged professional, who is putting her daughters through university too, would have been considered solidly middle class. Yet that full-time teaching job pays just $3,333.33 a month, a household salary that is now below official definitions of middle income – even when adjusted for the relatively low cost of living in a town such as Goldsboro, North Carolina, where she works.

When tax and medical insurance are deducted, her take-home figure drops by more than a third, after which money for food, housing, a car and college tuition has to be found. To make the numbers add up, she has to work three other jobs a week.

Sadly, her experience is far from unusual. Across the town of Goldsboro, like many other places in a country once famous for the width of its wealth, America’s middle class is struggling. The issue was one of the most prominent and persistent mentioned when Guardian US asked, as part of our Voices of America series, more than 1,300 voters to identify the single most pressing issue for them in the 2016 election campaign

3.7MB 2016-2017 Budget Book (PDF):

Focus on Reading in Kindergarten through Second Grade
For the first time, all kindergarten through second grade teachers at our highest needs schools will meet quarterly in grade levels for professional development and time to plan and collaborate together. They will also use new computer adaptive software designed to supplement core instruction and ensure students are building foundational skills in the early grades.

MAP and ACT in Context
MAP: In all categories but one, we are far above the national average for growth.
ACT: More students than ever are taking the ACT. With participation rates 25% above the national average, scores are in the 60th percentile nationally. Participation increased by 8% overall.

GOAL 1: Every student is on-track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones.

GOAL 2: Every student has access to a challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data.

Launched targeted professional development and planning on early reading for all teachers in kindergarten through second grade and computer adaptive software aimed at early literacy at our 13 highest need elementary schools

Selected elementary math curriculum and new reading resources for middle schools

I’ve always found it amazing how often the District swaps curriculum.

The emphasis on reading is welcome, but are we making progress in addressing Madison’s, long term, disastrous reading results?

It has long been a challenge to find the District’s total spending. This year, while somewhat improved (page 12) still lacks “Construction” spending.

Two budget tables are presented below and on the following page. These tables provide a high level overview of the 2016-17 budget proposal and are intended to serve as an introduction to the budget discussion which follows.

The first table, 2016-17 All Funds Summary, captures all budget activity for MMSD with the exception of the Construction Fund (reported elsewhere to maintain comparability). This table is designed to report on the ‘total budget picture’ for MMSD.

The second table, 2016-17 Operating Funds Summary, sharpens the focus to just the operating funds (defined as General Fund + Special Education Fund, less interfund transfers). This fund captures the basic operations of the district. It excludes the Debt Service, Construction, Food Service and Community Service funds. This table is designed to report on the ‘core operations’ of MMSD.

Presumably, all taxpayer dollars spent by the Madison School District support it’s mission, educating our children….

Madison plans to enroll 25,076 students for the 2016-2017 school year. The Administration plans to spend $_____ per student.

Molly Hensley-Clancy:

attorney general won a groundbreaking $168.5 million settlement against the country’s largest operator of online charter schools.

Or, after a lengthy investigation, it managed to collect only $2.5 million from a business that pulled in almost $1 billion in revenue in 2015 — with no fines, penalties, or admission of wrongdoing.

Which one is true? It all depends on who you ask.

After a wide-ranging investigation into virtually every aspect of the controversial business model of online charter operator K12 Inc. — from how its schools advertise to how they record attendance and collect payments — California Attorney General Kamala Harris settled for $8.5 million in actual, real-world money, which will be paid by the company to the state. Her office also extracted $160 million in what Harris called “debt relief” for the California schools that the company manages — for a total, the attorney general’s office said, of $168.5 million.

Joe Heim:

I didn’t even know where Finland was,” said Briana, 16. “But we’re learning more about it and trying to teach her more about America and our culture.”

She also observed a distinct difference between the Finns and the Americans.

Eric Westervelt:

by student debt: More than 40 million Americans are shouldering a crippling $1.3 trillion in loans.

That burden is obstructing careers, families, dreams, employment and even retirement.

Uncle Sam and Wall Street have made lots of money off the crisis.

We’ve covered this issue in many ways, including the debates, the players, tips for easing debt, how debt is affecting young people’s decision making and a lot more.

But how did we get here? Who has profited most and how?

George Will:

Technically, California teachers are granted lifetime tenure after just two years. Actually, they must be notified of tenured status after just 16 months. (Thirty-two states grant tenure after three years, nine states after four or five. Four states never grant tenure.) When incompetent or negligent teachers gain tenure, dismissal procedures are so complex and costly that the process can take up to 10 years and cost up to $450,000. The trial court called the power to dismiss “illusory.” Each year approximately two teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance — 0.0007 percent of California’s 277,000 teachers.

Victoria Brignell:

Amid popular fears about the decline of the national stock, one of the main drives behind the formation of American immigration policy at the end of the 19th century was the desire to exclude disabled people. The first major federal immigration law, the Act of 1882, prohibited entry to any ‘lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.’

As the eugenics movement gathered strength, the exclusion criteria were gradually tightened to make it easier for immigration officials to keep disabled people out of America. The 1907 law denied entry to anyone judged ‘mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defects being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living.’ It added ‘imbeciles’ and ‘feeble-minded persons’ to the list of automatically excluded people and inspectors were directed to exclude people with ‘any mental abnormality whatever’. Regulations in 1917 included a long list of disabilities that could be cause for exclusion including arthritis, asthma, deafness, deformities, heart disease, poor eyesight, poor physical development and spinal curvature.

Detecting physical disabilities was a major aspect of the American immigration inspector’s work. The Commissioner General of Immigration reported in 1907: “The exclusion from this country of the morally, mentally and physically deficient is the principal object to be accomplished by the immigration laws.” Inspection regulations stated that each individual ‘should be seen first at rest and then in motion’ in order to detect ‘abnormalities of any description’. It was recommended that inspectors should watch immigrants as they carried their luggage upstairs to see if ‘the exertion would reveal deformities and defective posture’. As one inspector wrote: “It is no more difficult to detect poorly built, defective or broken down human beings than to recognise a cheap or defective automobile.” An abnormal appearance meant a chalked letter on the back – L for lameness, G for goitre, X for mental illness. Once chalked, a closer inspection was required, which meant that other problems were likely to be established.

Helen Andrews:

Last fall, Toby Young did something ironic. Toby is the son of Michael Young, the British sociologist and Labour life peer whose 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy has been credited with coining the term. Toby has become an education reformer in his own right, as founder of the West London Free School, after a celebrated career as a journalist and memoirist (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People). In September, he published an 8,000-word reconsideration of his father’s signature concept in an Australian monthly. The old man was right that meritocracy would gradually create a stratified and immobile society, he wrote, but wrong that abolishing selective education was the cure. “Unlike my father, I’m not an egalitarian,” Young wrote. If meritocracy creates a new caste system, “the answer is more meritocracy.” To restore equality of opportunity, he suggested subsidies for intelligence-maximizing embryo selection for poor parents “with below-average IQs.”1 The irony lay in the implication that Young, because of who his father was, has special insight into the ideology that holds that it shouldn’t matter who your father is.

His outlandish resort to eugenics suggests that Toby Young found himself at a loss for solutions, as all modern critics of meritocracy seem to do. The problems they describe are fundamental, but none of their remedies are more than tweaks to make the system more efficient or less prejudicial to the poor. For instance, in Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz accuses the Ivy League of imposing a malignant ruling class on the country, then meekly suggests that elite universities might solve the problem by giving greater weight in admissions to socioeconomic disadvantage and less to “résumé-stuffing.”2 In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier belies the harsh terms of her title by advising that we simply learn to reward “democratic rather than testocratic merit.”3 Christopher Hayes subtitled his debut book Twilight of the Elites “America after Meritocracy,” but the remedies he prescribes are all meant to preserve meritocracy by making it more effective.4 In his latest book, Our Kids, Robert Putnam proves that American social mobility is in crisis, then reposes his hopes in such predictable nostrums as housing vouchers and universal pre-kindergarten.5

Paul Robbins

“Lazy workers.”

This, the owners of coffee and rubber estates in Karnataka, India, told us, was why they would tear out dense canopies of trees harboring wild hornbills and critically endangered frogs and replace them with more intensive and less wildlife-friendly crops. Compared to the days when their fathers ran these estates, and the workers required for the back-breaking tasks of weeding, coppicing, and harvesting were more pliable, today’s workers had become defiant and demanding. Laborers now insisted on smoke breaks, higher wages, and even electricity. Worse, farmers told us, they had little choice but to either give up labor-demanding crops or to comply with worker demands, lest their laborers vanish.

The shift in labor relations is striking given the locale. Karnataka is a place where the bargaining power of workers has always been notoriously poor, where rural poverty is crushing, and where generations of people have lived without access to modern amenities and education.1

Many factors have contributed to the shift: urbanization, labor outmigration, globalization, and an unprecedented aspirational culture that eschews rural farm labor where other opportunities exist. But one central reason, contributing to and accelerating all the others, is far more surprising: Karnataka is shrinking. As in most states throughout southern India, the fertility rate in the state has fallen to 1.8, and for many years has been well below the rate at which new births can replace those who naturally pass away.2 Population is getting smaller, influencing wages, farming practices, and habitat. Zero population growth has arrived in southern India: a Baby Bust.

As growth has ceased throughout Karnataka, across southern India, and in many other parts of the world3, new social arrangements are evolving, new ecologies are coming into being, and new political and economic conflicts are emerging. What happens to an economy, anywhere in the world, when population stalls or declines? How are relationships between workers and owners reconfigured? What happens in families, when the demands for women’s labor and demands for reproduction come into conflict, especially in historically patriarchal contexts? When labor becomes scarce, do regions shift to land abandonment and incidental rewilding, or instead to increasingly mechanized and intensive agricultural systems?

Jude Webber:

In a failing school system in which more than half of 15-year-olds cannot master basic maths, the reform is one of the most significant of the policy changes pushed through by Mr Peña Nieto in his first two years in office. Mexico’s students are among the worst performers in the OECD, so the reforms are critical to improving poor productivity and vaulting Mexico into the big league of world economies.

But a dissident teachers’ union, the CNTE, wants the reform bill — which introduces a merit-based system of appointing, promoting and firing teachers — scrapped. It has been staging weeks of roadblocks and marches, which have spread beyond the union’s southern power base to Mexico City and the northern state of Nuevo León.

Officials of the CNTE met interior ministry mediators on Monday to try to end the impasse, but came away with a commitment only to keep talking. The main SNTE union, which had earlier backed the reform, has weighed in with a dozen demands of its own. These include changes to teacher evaluations, the backbone of the reforms.

“The government is going to have to make some concessions,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst. “The question is, to what extent teachers are going to want to make life easy for Peña Nieto.”

The answer appears to be “not very”. The SNTE has begun negotiations with the education ministry on its own demands.

“There’s a lot of pressure to water down the reform,” says Marco Fernández, a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey university and researcher at think-tank México Evalúa. “I’m fearful,” he said.

Nate Raymond:

Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis’ rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Washington Heights apartment.

The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis’ apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so constituted an unreasonable search.

“Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device,” Pauley wrote.

The ruling marked the first time a federal judge had suppressed evidence obtained using a stingray, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which like other privacy advocacy groups has criticized law enforcement’s use of such devices.