Citizen Contributor:

The result: My children missed the opportunity to enter the first round of the lottery by a mere two weeks.

This meant my son entering Kindergarten was guaranteed a slot in one of our city’s worst performing schools- something our city still promises for children being displaced due to being in foster care- compounding trauma onto trauma. The students who need the best are reserved the worst. They’re left vulnerable and unprotected because they have nobody influential to fight for them.

We were still somewhat lucky. For one, my child who missed the kindergarten lottery qualified for special education services and I happened to know people who helped us get him into a better performing school. His kindergarten team was incredible! However, things went downhill from there. At one point, knowing our child was on the sibling wait list at a high performing public charter school, a district teacher pulled me aside for a private conversation. As a parent of a Black male she disclosed, “THEY (the district) don’t do well with OUR (African American, male) children.”

Annie Reneau:

Can we talk for a minute about parents who ignore their kids when they are being disruptive?

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: A foreign language school in our area offered a story time for kids ages 4 to 6 at our local library. Each week, the stories and songs were conducted in a different language. I thought that sounded neat, so I took my 5-year-old one week. There were six or seven other families there with their preschool and kindergarten-aged children. The kids sat on the floor in front of the storyteller, and the parents all watched from benches on the perimeter a few feet back.

David Freedman:

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

Jena MacGregor:

But perhaps the most common and seemingly elementary tactic — compulsory diversity training aimed at helping people’s biases or preventing discriminatory behavior — appears to actually do more harm than good.

In the cover story of the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, sociologists from Harvard University and Tel Aviv University explore the counterintuitive idea that some of the most common tools for improving diversity — one of which is mandatory training — are not just ineffective. They could be detrimental to improving the number of women and minorities in the managerial ranks.

Making people attend diversity training may seem to make sense, said one of the study’s co-authors, Alexandra Kalev, in an interview: “But it doesn’t work. For decades, diversity management programs flourished with no evidence whatsoever about their effects and their success.”

Andrew Rotherham:

School districts around the country are getting ready for the 2017 school year, which for many starts in just a few weeks. Officials are thinking about transporting students to school, what they’ll feed them, health services for them, sports teams and schedules, and all the other things we call on school districts to do. Meanwhile, if you’re lucky, someone might also be focused on who is going to teach your child and what they’re going to teach.

Backward? Yes, of course it is. And like many things in our education system it’s not what we might design but instead what has evolved and embedded itself over time. Teaching and learning, ostensibly the core functions of schools and school districts, are now just one among many important things we expect them to do. Larger school districts operate food services rivaling restaurant chains and transportation programs on par with large bus companies. We wouldn’t ask Greyhound to also get really good at introducing students to algebraic concepts in the early grades or call on Five Guys to teach Shakespeare, so why we do expect school districts to be great at complicated work like transportation and food as well as teaching?

Related: A focus on adult employment.

Moriah Balingit and Donna St. George:

Under a new policy in Virginia’s Fairfax County, one of the nation’s largest school systems, middle and high school students can earn no lower than a score of 50 if they make a “reasonable attempt” to complete work. And for the first time this year, high school teachers who were going to fail a student had to reevaluate the student using “quality points,” making an F less detrimental to a student’s final grade. Prince George’s County in Maryland will limit failing grades to a 50 percent minimum score when students show a “good-faith effort.”

Related: When A stands for average.

Dan Primack:

At the time, it just felt like idle elevator conversation. But that was my mistake, because Miner is now planning to launch an education-focused company within Google GOOG -0.88% . This also means that he’ll be stepping down as a general partner with GV, transitioning into a venture partner role through which he’ll maintain some of his existing portfolio board seats.

“cost disease” opens many opportunites for diverse education services, rather the generally monolotithic k-12 world. The current system, despite spending more than any other country, often struggles with the essentials.

Paul Campos:

along a couple of interesting stories regarding what’s happening in the US economy to workers with different educational credentials.

This WSJ article looks at the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate among prime working-age men (the LFPR is the percentage of a group’s members who are either employed or looking for work). The LFPR among this group has been declining for more than half a century, and has now fallen to 83% among 25-54 men with a high school degree or less (it’s 94% among 25-54 men with a BA degree or more).

Meanwhile Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce has put out a report estimating that 99.2% of the jobs created since the end of the Great Recession have gone to workers with at least some college education.

Now to the extent that estimate is accurate it would appear to mean that workers “need” at least some college credits to be competitive for new jobs. But “need” is a tricky concept in this context. Do workers need college credentials because the jobs that demand them require either enhanced human capital or skills training provided by college in order for the jobs to be done, or at least done adequately? Or are employers using higher ed as a sorting and signaling device because they can?

One clue is provided by wage rates. If employers are hiring the college-educated because these credentials indicate that employees are acquiring scarce assets, either in the form of enhanced human capital or practical skills, then the increased wages paid to them should reflect that scarcity. On the other hand, if credentials are simply being used as sorting devices to winnow a overly large labor pool, then we wouldn’t expect to see wage increases for the lucky winners of this lottery.

MIT Technology Review:

Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.

Vonnegut mapped out several arcs in his lecture. These include the simple arc encapsulating “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole” and the more complex one of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.”

Vonnegut is not alone in attempting to categorize stories into types, although he was probably the first to do it in graphical form. Aristotle was at it over 2000 years before him and many others have followed in his footsteps.

Shane Vander Hart:

The SAT 2014 test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year. Some 13,549 homeschool seniors had the following mean scores: 567 in critical reading, 521 in mathematics, and 535 in writing (College Board, 2014a). The mean SAT scores for all college-bound seniors in 2014 were 497 in critical reading, 513 in mathematics, and 487 in writing (College Board, 2014b). The homeschool students’ SAT scores were 0.61 standard deviation higher in reading, 0.26 standard deviation higher in mathematics, and 0.42 standard deviation higher in writing than those of all college-bound seniors taking the SAT, and these are notably large differences.

Roberta Michnick, Ph.D. Golinkoff and Kathy, Ph.D. Hirsh-Pasek:

“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?”

When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn the question back to her and help her figure out the answer with plenty of encouragement.

No parent, teacher or caregiver has the time or patience to respond perfectly to all of the many, many, many opportunities like these that come along. But a new book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, is designed to get us thinking about the magnitude of these moments.

Londonist:

He didn’t get on with the librarian there either, and could never find the books he wanted. His solution? To set up a lending library on his own.

In 1840 Carlyle started generating public support, giving a rousing speech at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Covent Garden (now the site of the Freemason’s Hall) where he suggested that “the building of a library is one of the greatest things we can do.”

From a little acorn a mighty oak grew and by May 1841 the library had raised enough money to open its doors to the public.
In fact, three mighty oaks have grown from The Freemasons’ Tavern. The Geological Society was established there at a meeting held in 1807. The London Library came next and in 1863, The Football Association was established at a fiery meeting in which the rules of football were laid down. Blackheath FC were overruled in their wish to allow “hacking” (kicking an opponent in the leg) — a practise, we are pleased to say, that the library has never allowed.

Kyle Stokes:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has inked a deal bringing in an outside school turnaround group to run 20th Street Elementary School, averting a protracted court battle over a long-running “parent trigger” effort that would’ve wrested the school from the district’s control.

Under terms of a five-year agreement released Tuesday, the Partnership for L.A. Schools — a non-profit created by former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that already operates 17 schools — would assume control over most day-to-day operations at the school just south of downtown.

The decision represents a compromise between the district and parent advocates at the school, who in February petitioned the district to allow an independent charter operator to run the school. Under California law, if parents at low-performing schools gather enough signatures, the school district can be forced to introduce changes, including converting the school to a charter.

Marilyn Odendahl:

Valparaiso Law School is hardly the first to feel the pain of falling student applications, but as the subject of a recent profile in the New York Times, its troubles may be the most well-known.

In February, the northwest Indiana institution announced it was going to reduce its faculty and class sizes in response to fewer lawyers finding jobs and fewer students wanting to get a J.D. Valparaiso offered buyouts to all tenured faculty members.

The harsh spotlight was on Valparaiso again when The Gray Lady published a long article June 17 about the law school’s plight. The newspaper found alumni who were heavily in debt and interviewed professors who were rethinking the decisions to accept less-qualified students to keep enrollment steady when applications dropped.

Uri Freedman:

On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you’d think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user’s friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better “connecting people and ideas.”

But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new “world of self-reference” that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump’s appeal to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possess outsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.

For 16 years, Edelman’s company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm’s findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe “a person like me”—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A “person like me” is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways.”

Dave Gentry:

Never forget to pump a handshake three times- not one, and definitely not five. Seen from an autistic perspective, the social, shared, and flexible attributes of the modern shared office can be intimidating. As work and life spill into each other, they clash with coping mechanisms for autism spectrum disorder, in which high-level functioning depends on adherence to routine, scripts, and schedules. Despite this challenge, autistic professionals can have precious attributes, and demand better understanding of the relationship between the workplace and this complicated disorder.

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Intel

Intel believes governments should not weaken the security of technology. On the current policy discussions of whether governments should be able to access the content of encrypted communications, Intel has the following perspective.

Encryption is fundamental to the global economy

The law does not, and should not, mandate companies to include backdoors

Encryption must not be architected with backdoors

Government mandates on the design of technology are likely to impede needed innovation

Finding a path forward requires collaboration between industry and law enforcement

Laura Noonan

Goldman Sachs is abandoning the time-honoured practice of on-campus interviews for undergraduates at elite schools and will now ask students to use pre-recorded interviews to pitch for a job at the bank.

The Wall Street bank announced the new initiative on Thursday along with a range of other innovations it says will make its recruitment more consistent and rigorous.

“The number one priority is how do we find more terrific people that are potential candidates for the firm,” said Edith Cooper, global head of human capital management at the bank. “Leveraging technology will help you get to more places.”

Goldman attracts more than 250,000 applications from students annually, including almost 225,000 from undergraduates. But more than half of the undergraduates it traditionally hires comes from a group of less than 50 “target” schools, including prestigious Ivy League colleges.

The American Interest:

One of the under-appreciated tragedies of black history in the United States is that they have tended to win access to employment in certain sectors of the economy just as those sectors were starting to decline—or, as WRM put it several years ago, “blacks often only get to the gravy train when the locomotive is coming to the end of its run.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, when employers had access to mass low-skilled European immigrant labor, blacks were more-or-less shut out of Northern factory jobs, one of the underpinnings of middle class prosperity. Blacks started to make their way into manufacturing by midcentury, but by the 1970s, this sector of the economy had already peaked.

Ditto for government employment. A key objective—and success—of the civil rights movement was to grant blacks access to middle-class professional jobs in the civil service. In the 1970s and 1980s, blacks flocked to public sector jobs that provided middle-class wages and strong retirement security. But now state and local finances are starting to deteriorate, burdened by can-kicking legislators and mismanaged pension funds.

Molly Beck:

A majority of the state’s public school districts will receive more state general aid in the coming school year than they did the prior year, the latest state estimates show.

Of the state’s 424 school districts, 61 percent — or 260 — are projected to receive more aid in the 2016-17 school year, the state Department of Public Instruction said Friday.

The DPI estimates show Madison schools receiving about $53.7 million in state general aid next school year, a 2.3 percent increase.

On Monday, the Madison School Board passed a $376.5 million preliminary operating budget that was predicated, in part, on the conservative assumption that the district would get about $47.8 million in general state aid for the upcoming school year, said Rachel Strauch-Nelson, district spokeswoman.

While Friday’s estimate is good news, it does not mean the district suddenly has more money to spend, district officials said.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2016-2017 budget, here.

Rob Bensinger:

A Bayesian agent acting in a multi-agent environment learns to predict the other agents’ policies if its prior assigns positive probability to them (in other words, its prior contains a grain of truth). Finding a reasonably large class of policies that contains the Bayes-optimal policies with respect to this class is known as the grain of truth problem. Only small classes are known to have a grain of truth and the literature contains several related impossibility results.

In this paper we present a formal and general solution to the full grain of truth problem: we construct a class of policies that contains all computable policies as well as Bayes-optimal policies for every lower semicomputable prior over the class. When the environment is unknown, Bayes-optimal agents may fail to act optimally even asymptotically. However, agents based on Thompson sampling converge to play ε-Nash equilibria in arbitrary unknown computable multi-agent environments. While these results are purely theoretical, we show that they can be computationally approximated arbitrarily closely.

Rachel Becker:

An online debate is swirling around a tactic that academic publisher John Wiley & Sons uses to fight online piracy. The company created a webpage, accessible by several URLs, that appeared to be an academic paper to automated downloading programs. But any users who accessed the URLs were then blocked from viewing other Wiley content. Wiley and other publishers use these ‘trap’ URLs — which are invisible to most human users — to detect and prevent unauthorized downloading and republishing of their content. But some users say that the tactic is too heavy-handed.

Computational biologist Richard Smith-Unna of the University of Cambridge, UK, brought Wiley’s use of trap URLs to light in late May, after several users were locked out of the university’s Wiley subscription. Smith-Unna, who says that he inadvertently accessed some trap URLs during a data-mining project, tweeted about the lock-out and posted a Google doc containing the URLs. The post incited an outcry from scientists and librarians on social media, and curious onlookers who clicked on the URLs also reported losing access to Wiley content.

Farnam Street:

Legendary scientist Richard Feynman was famous for his penetrating insight and clarity of thought. Famous for not only the work he did to garner a Nobel Prize, but also for the lucidity of explanations of ordinary things such as why trains stay on the tracks as they go around a curve, how we look for new laws of science, how rubber bands work, and the beauty of the natural world.

Feynman knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. And was often prone to telling the emperor they had no clothes as this illuminating example from James Gleick’s book Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman shows.

Lynn Bonner:

The House overwhelmingly approved a bill that will change charter school oversight, allowing less frequent reviews of charter schools and making easier for struggling schools to keep their charters.

Under the bill, charters would no longer be reviewed at least once every five years. Instead, a school would be reviewed once before its charter expires, unless there are indications it’s in trouble.

Rep. Paul Stam, an Apex Republican, said the change will allow the state to focus on the schools that need the most help.

The State Board of Education would no longer be able to revoke a charter simply because a school is low performing. Charters with low test scores that meet or exceed growth, or those that are making progress on improvement plans would be able to stay open.

Are the same standards applied to traditional public schools?

Sumathi Reddy:

When Frank Biro walks into a class of second- or third-graders these days, there are almost always a couple of girls who look different than the rest.

“There will be quite a few girls that look like they’re going into early puberty,” says Dr. Biro, a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who gives talks about puberty at schools occasionally.

Dr. Biro researches a phenomenon that has increasingly captured the attention of researchers: Puberty appears to be starting earlier in healthy girls, and possibly even boys. At Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, clinicians begin assessing girls for changes related to puberty at age 6.

Marc Joffe:

Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university.

Among the most prominent of these scholars is Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Reich’s 2013 film, Inequality for All, is an indictment of a rigged U.S. economy that makes a select few richer while consigning the middle class to stagnation. A review of the film and Reich’s other work suggests that the economist and former Clinton-era Labor Secretary provided numerous talking points for Bernie Sanders’ high-profile – though ultimately unsuccessful – presidential campaign.

Wall Street Journal:

Do you think the gaokao is a good and fair way to select students?

Not so fair. For most ordinary families, Gaokao is a fair selection. I have watched some news reports that said people stole identity information to take the Gaokao. There is still vulnerability in this selection system.

Do you think Chinese students face more pressure than students in other countries?

Chinese students face more challenges, especially now it is hard to get a job in China. I just took the Gaokao this year. Chinese students have less happiness compared to students in other countries. Compared to the strict graduation here, it is easier to be enrolled in universities abroad. A lot of Chinese students lost their teenage during high school and are bound by their parents and teachers.

What do you think about the gaokao’s role in deciding a student’s future?

Gaokao is a turning point, but it can’t totally decide one’s life.

Rosanna Xia:

Hunkered down in the sub-basement of the Norman W. Church Laboratory for Chemical Biology, underneath a campus humming with quantum teleportation devices, gravity wave detectors and neural prosthetics, Rick Gerhart chipped away at a broken flask.

Blowtorch in hand, he pulled the softened glass apart like taffy, tweezing out glass shards with a flick of his wrist. Peering into the dancing flames, he examined his work for wrinkles — imperfections invisible to the untrained eye.

“It not only should be functional,” he said, smoothing the rim with a carbon rod, “it has to look good.”

Conor Dougherty:

The small city of Boulder, home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, has a booming local economy and a pleasantly compact downtown with mountain views. Not surprisingly, a lot of people want to move here.

Something else is also not surprising: Many of the people who already live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle somewhere else.

Federation of American Scientists:

This report contains short summaries describing warnings similar to the Miranda warning that are required in 108 jurisdictions around the globe. The summaries are divided into sections based on broad geographic categories: Americas and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub- Saharan Africa.

The warnings specified in the surveyed jurisdictions vary, but typically include the right to remain silent and the right to legal counsel. A number of countries also specify that a person who is arrested or detained has the right to be informed of the reasons for the arrest or detention or of the charges being brought. In some countries, the additional right to have these things explained in a language the detainee understands is explicitly stated. Commonwealth countries have traditionally followed the English Judges’ Rules developed in the early twentieth century, and some continue to do so, while many Member States of the European Union (EU) have adopted an EU directive on the issue.

Points of variance among the countries concern the timing of the warning and whether the detainee is told that the fact of remaining silent will or will not be used in legal proceedings.

Countries surveyed that have no Miranda-type warning were not included.

Philip Olterman:

Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

Katherine Mangan:

Many were once a boon to their universities, with revenues that subsidized money-losing parts of the institution. Now the money is frequently going in the opposite direction.

Melinda Anderson:

Nancy Gutierrez was primed to shine. As the new principal at Fischer Middle School in East San Jose, California, it was more than a new job for Gutierrez, it was a homecoming. She was a product of the heavily Mexican American, working-class, and immigrant community, and her mom still lived just a few blocks from the school in Northern California. “I grew up going to the same bodega on the corner as they did,” Gutierrez said, speaking of her students and their families. “I wasn’t someone who … had these expectations and didn’t know who the community was.”

Even so, she got a rude awakening at her first back-to-school meeting, and it ultimately changed her perspective. “Even though I was from that same [area], even though I was of the same [Hispanic] background, they still didn’t trust the school system,” she said. “I thought I would immediately earn credibility by just who I was, but that wasn’t the case. Rightfully so, I had to earn my stripes.”

The Economist:

After many false dawns, AI has made extraordinary progress in the past few years, thanks to a versatile technique called “deep learning”. Given enough data, large (or “deep”) neural networks, modelled on the brain’s architecture, can be trained to do all kinds of things. They power Google’s search engine, Facebook’s automatic photo tagging, Apple’s voice assistant, Amazon’s shopping recommendations and Tesla’s self-driving cars. But this rapid progress has also led to concerns about safety and job losses. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others wonder whether AI could get out of control, precipitating a sci-fi conflict between people and machines. Others worry that AI will cause widespread unemployment, by automating cognitive tasks that could previously be done only by people. After 200 years, the machinery question is back. It needs to be answered.

Megan Scudellari:

Seven years ago, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to map all the connections in the brain. In 2010, the Human Connectome Project (HCP) was born. It has provided funding to the tune of $40 million to two collaborating consortia whose aim was to acquire and share high-resolution data of structural and functional connections in the human brain. The researchers have sought to understand, on a scale never before attempted, the neural pathways that make us human, and how changes in those pathways make us sick.

At a symposium yesterday at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, top researchers from the HCP came together to provide an update on the project’s achievements and future directions. To date, the consortia have released brain-scanning data from hundreds of individuals and that data has been used in more than 140 scientific publications. Perhaps even more importantly, the effort has produced impressive new tech, including unprecedented magnetic resonance (MR) hardware. Among the gadgets are high-powered scanners and customized head coils. In addition, there are legions of software for analyzing, visualizing and sharing the petabytes of neuroimaging data being generated.

Kim Liao:

Last year, I got rejected 43 times by literary magazines, residencies, and fellowships—my best record since I started shooting for getting 100 rejections per year. It’s harder than it sounds, but also more gratifying.

In late 2011, a writer friend was sharing her experiences of having months of uninterrupted writing time at her residencies at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, and Yaddo. I was staggered by her impressive rates of acceptance. You probably have one of those friends, too—you know the one I’m talking about, that friend who is a beautiful writer, but who also seems to win everything? I could barely believe that she had the balls to apply to—let alone, get accepted to—several residencies, a prestigious fellowship, and publications in journals I had actually heard of.

Justin Fox:

A survey released this week by Bain and Kantar Worldpanel found that Chinese shoppers are increasingly turning to domestic brands and abandoning foreign ones. That’s not happening with post-secondary education, though! The number of Chinese students at foreign universities rose from 417,351 in the 2005/2006 school year to 712,157 in 2012/2013 (the most recent year for which I could find data). The U.S. is by far the leading destination:

Alan Borsuk:

Another possibility: I have floated in the past a fantasy of creating a school oversight board that would control the faucet for public money for schools in Milwaukee. Leave the structure of MPS, vouchers and charters in place, but put a board above them that would require individual schools to show good cause why they are worthy of public support. Sort of like a super chartering authority.

Of course, there is the option of not doing much to change things. Every year, the percentage of Milwaukee children enrolled in the conventional MPS system goes down by one to two points. Most likely, within three to four years, less than half will be in MPS, with the rest generally in charter schools, private schools, or suburban public schools available through the open enrollment option. In other words, MPS is in deep long-term trouble already. Maybe those who don’t like MPS can just let existing trends keep working.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial.

Laura Kusisto:

Inflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64% since 1960, but real household incomes only increased by 18% during that same time period, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data released by Apartment List, a rental listing website.

Becky Vevea:

Is it fair? That was what a panel of Illinois lawmakers tried to answer about how Illinois pays for its public schools. The discussion was held at a City Club luncheon on Mondayand WBEZ’s Becky Vevea was there.

Much more on per student spending, here. Madison is > $17k while Chicago is > $14k.

New America.

JD Vance:

During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford—the mystical “top three” schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed. I just needed to get to any law school, and then I’d do fine: a nice salary, a respectable profession, and the American Dream. Then my best friend, Darrell, ran into one of his law school classmates at a popular D.C. restaurant. She was bussing tables, simply because that was the only job available to her. On the next round, I gave Yale and Harvard a try.

I didn’t apply to Stanford—one of the very best schools in the country—and to know why is to understand that the lessons I learned as a kid were sometimes counterproductive. Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser.

I didn’t know the dean of my college at Ohio State. It’s a big place. I’m sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn’t ask. I had never met this person, never taken a class with her, and, most of all, didn’t trust her. Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider. The professors I’d selected to write my letters had gained my trust. I listened to them nearly every day, took their tests, and wrote papers for them. As much as I loved Ohio State and its people for an incredible education and experience, I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn’t know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D.

Alexander Holt:

Clinton’s second proposal is that “for young innovators who decide to launch either new businesses that operate in distressed communities, or social enterprises that provide measurable social impact and benefit, she will offer forgiveness of up to $17,500 of their student loans after five years.”

Let’s see how that would work. Government officials would first have to define “distressed community.” Perhaps they would define it as any ZIP code where average earnings are less than 150 percent of the poverty line. That means that a bunch of Stanford graduates with master’s degrees in computer science who work out of office space in a poor part of Oakland could get $17,500 loan forgiveness after five years — even if their company is being funded by venture capitalists. Why would we ever want that? If anything, this seems like a plan to speed up gentrification in Northern California.

Rachel Cohen:

But challenges loom for the movement—politically and philosophically. Some tensions can be chalked up to growing pains: a nationwide bipartisan coalition is bound to disagree at times, and certainly policy implementation can be far more contentious than passing legislation. Transforming the public education system, reformers have found, turns out to be hard, messy work.

But the problems run deeper than that. Internally, two main camps of reformers—market-driven advocates and accountability hawks—have been butting heads increasingly over goals and political priorities. For a long time, these two groups seemed to be one and the same—“choice and accountability” have always been buzzwords for the movement. But over time, the divisions between Team Choice and Team Accountability have grown more apparent. Today, some veteran choice advocates, those who have been pushing market-driven reforms for the last 25 years, have expressed feelings of being hemmed in, and in some cases crowded out, by others who are demanding formal checks and balances.

Reveal News:

generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access to higher education.

In its place, lawmakers created another profit center for Wall Street and a system of college finance that has fed the nation’s cycle of inequality. Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

Today, just about everyone involved in the student loan industry makes money off students – the banks, private investors, even the federal government.

Jessie Suren is an energetic 28-year-old who wanted a career in law enforcement. Albert Lord is a 70-year-old former accountant who became a multimillionaire executive. The two have never met, but their stories tell the history of America’s student debt crisis.

Suren attended a free boarding school for underprivileged youth in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and enrolled in La Salle University in Philadelphia. Scholarships didn’t cover the cost of the private college, so she borrowed about $71,000, much of it from Sallie Mae, the financial giant of the student loan industry.

Suren did well in school. But a job with the U.S. Marshals Service fell through, and by graduation in 2010, she had a soaring loan balance and no career prospects.

Thomas Davenport and Julie Kirby:

If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what’s on the public’s mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don’t expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon — they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans. In the face of a sprawling and fast-evolving set of opportunities, their challenge is figuring out what forms the augmentation should take. Given the kinds of work managers oversee, what cognitive technologies should they be applying now, monitoring closely, or helping to build?

Tucker Leighty-Phillips:

In the middle of the 19th century, a relatively unknown author named Pedro Carolino rapidly gained intercontinental popularity over a small Portuguese-to-English phrasebook. English as She Is Spoke (or O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez) was originally intended to help Portuguese speakers dabble in the English tongue, but was penned by a man who spoke little to no English himself. And, instead of helping Portuguese speakers learn a second language, it became a cult classic for fans of inept and unintentional humor.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee’s school kids face enormous challenges — many of those challenges are directly related to the fact that so many of them grow up in impoverished homes. Some are homeless. Some are hungry. Some have only one parent. Some have none. It is difficult — and expensive — to help students in such distress learn. And yet that is exactly what Milwaukee Public Schools must do. It must educate the children it has. Every school year, many teachers, principals and schools do exactly that. But for far too many children in MPS, the educational system is letting them down.

For too long, instead of trying sincerely to improve the schools — to put the kids first — various interest groups have fought one another and pointed fingers. The School Board and MPS administrators have played this game as well. This feels like another one of those times.

Minding the Campus:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Emma Platoff:

Dos Santos said that the school overreacted and that her son made a comment about snacks, not skin color.

“He said they were talking about brownies. . . . Who exactly did he offend?” dos Santos said.

The boy’s father was contacted by Collingswood police later in the day. Police said the incident had been referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The student stayed home for his last day of third grade.

Dos Santos said that her son was “traumatized,” and that she hopes to send him to a different Collingswood public school in the fall.

And she wants an apology. She said she graduated from Collingswood High School and has two other children, a 21-year-old who also went through Collingswood schools, and a 3-year-old. Her husband, the third grader’s father, is Brazilian, dos Santos said.

Lindsay Whipp:

Republican governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic House speaker Michael Madigan have refused to budge in their battle over how to eliminate the deficit — estimated to be $6.6bn according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Meanwhile, Illinois’ pension liabilities have hit $110bn; the state has racked up nearly $8bn in unpaid bills and $9.7m in fines for late payments, according to the state comptroller.

The dysfunction has pushed Illinois’ credit rating to the lowest level among the 50 US states. Fitch recently put Illinois’ BBB+ rating — just three rungs above junk — on negative watch over the implications of an extended budget impasse.

“It’s fairly clear to most people that you could not balance this budget with budget cuts alone, so there needs to be a meeting of minds on how to balance the budget — how to raise taxes,” said Karen Krop, a senior director at Fitch.

Policymakers finally agreed on Thursday afternoon on a stopgap budget to fund schools for the year starting on Friday, without which they would not have been able to open in the autumn. However, the rest of the stopgap budget only lasts six months and does little to address most of the key issues.

Money has been distributed through a series of ad hoc measures, creating a sense of uncertainty over funding, raising fears of school shutdowns and leaving a distrust in the state government that will be difficult to eliminate.

Illinois’ extensive financial problems have been a long time in the making. A pension bill passed 15 years ago delayed responsibility to pay into the fund and even now the requirement is not for full payments, Fitch said. An income tax increase had started to chip away at the unpaid bills and helped balance the budget but it was discontinued more than a year and a half ago.

The Climate of Opinion in Illinois 2008- 2016: Roots of Gridlock.

Kashmir Hill:

Last week, a Facebook spokesperson told me that users’ smartphone location data was among the signals that the social network uses to suggest “People You May Know” in real life. But after I published a story about it (and people freaked out) Facebook retracted the statement and said that, actually, the company isn’t using location data to make friend suggestions.

Facebook’s communications team says the confusion arose because there was a brief time when the social network used location for friend suggestions. It involved a small percentage of Facebook users and stopped last year.

Nathan Yau:

With some occupations, people make more annual income than others. Obvious. But we typically see figures in terms of means and medians when in reality, the difference between the person who makes the most and the one who makes the least can be significant.

The chart below shows the spread for major occupation groups, for several decades. Imagine you randomly select 50 people from each group, and this is what their annual income probably looks like.

Alex Mayyasi:

Pricing a product can be a thorny issue. Will customers interpret a low price as a bargain, or as a sign of a low quality? Is allowing people to pay what they want for a product a profitable strategy?

Despite Econ 101’s promise of finding the perfect price at the intersection of a supply and a demand curve, pricing advice accounts for countless books, management consulting projects, and Harvard case studies.

But the most fascinating case study about pricing does not have to do with iPhones, cable TV packages, or Uber rides. It concerns the price of a very special commodity: a human child.

Typically individuals only talk about a person’s “worth” in abstract terms. Yet there are situations that demand an exact financial figure. In wrongful death lawsuits, parents of a child who died in an accident will demand compensation from the negligent party. This puts a judge in the unenviable position of having to put a price on the parent’s loss.

Sekar Krisnauli

Morocco will receive millions of dollars in funding from the United States government through programs aimed to address challenges that prevent girls in the country from quality education, according to a Monday White House press release.

The Millenium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. Government foreign-aid agency, is expected to give nearly $100 million dollars to invest in a new model for secondary education in Morocco, the announcement stated. The U.S. Agency for International Development will also invest $40,000 to build five girls’ dormitories, known as “Dar Talibas”, by the next school year.

“I am so proud that the U.S. is working with the Moroccan Government to make…transformative new investments to educate and empower girls across Morocco,” stated United States First Lady Michelle Obama in the release.

The announcement was made as Obama visited Marrakesh Tuesday where she was joined by actresses Merryl Streep and Freida Pinto in a panel moderated by CNN’s Correspondent Isha Sesay to promote quality education for girls worldwide through the Let Girls Learn initiative.

Jay Greene:

And on the specific claim the article makes that “half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools” this is what the Stanford study has to say: “In reading, 47 percent of charter schools perform significantly better than their traditional public school market, which is more positive than the 35% for Michigan charter schools as a whole. In math, 47 percent of Detroit charter schools perform significantly better than their local peers, the same proportion as for the charters as a whole statewide.” The study found that only 1% of Detroit’s charters performs significantly worse than the traditional public schools in reading and only 7% in math. (See Table 7 on p. 44) To claim that half the charters perform the same or worse than traditional public schools is a grotesque distortion of the study’s findings.

Look, I don’t accept the Stanford CREDO study as “the gold standard” in charter evaluations. But if the reporter cites that research to demonstrate that one charter management organization has sub-par performance, it is journalistic malpractice not to mention the positive overall results. And those positive overall results contradict the very foundation of the entire article.

Besides a few anecdotes and a mis-reporting of the CREDO study,
the article mostly consists of scary words like “chaos” and “glut.” Imagine if the article were about phone providers instead of schools. Would anyone find it persuasive to wring one’s hands over the glut of phone companies after Ma Bell was broken up, causing “chaos” in the telephone market? I understand there are differences between phones and schools, but reporting should be based on evidence of outcomes rather than just invoking scary words.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results might suggest the benefit of avoiding non diverse governance.

Phienix Fry & Sarah Cox:

PhD student Tom Richards has spent the last three years poring over an unfinished project by Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003), one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music.

Oram was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and is credited with the invention of a new form of ‘drawn sound’ synthesis – Oramics, which was recently the subject of the ‘Oramics to Electronica’ exhibition at the Science Museum.

our world in data.

Yoni Applebaum:

American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.

That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they’ll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it’s why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts education.

Stanford:

Yewno is a discovery tool that provides a graphical display of the interrelationships between concepts. Yewno uses computational semantics, graph theory, and machine learning to extract concepts from scholarly publications including journals, books, and theses, and displays search results in a graphical interface that displays the interrelationships between those concepts. Users can follow links in that display to find the underlying publications from which concepts and relationships are extracted, and the system integrates with library resource licenses allowing users to have direct access to the full text of underlying publications.

James Wigderson:

Opportunity Schools Partnership Program Commissioner Demond Means announced his resignation Wednesday, citing the inability to forge a “collaborative partnership” with Milwaukee Public Schools.

“Over the last several months, it has become clear to me that efforts to implement the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program law will become increasingly adversarial at a time when adversity is the last thing our children need,” Means said. “Moreover, I made a promise when I volunteered for this position that I would not impose anything on Milwaukee Public Schools.”

The OSPP was created by the state legislature to “turn around” up to three failing schools in Milwaukee in the first year. Control of the program was given to Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, who then appointed Means, superintendent of the Mequon school district, as the program’s commissioner.

Hillel Aron:

often preposterously low, and some have suggested that a more prominent figure should be given direct control of the LAUSD. That was one of Antonio Villaraigosa’s major platforms when he ran for mayor in 2005. When he won, defeating incumbent James Hahn, Villaraigosa got the state Legislature to pass a law giving a council of mayors (with the most power apportioned to himself, naturally) control over LAUSD. But the school board sued, and the court ruled the law unconstitutional.

Villaraigosa then shifted tack, vigorously campaigning for school board candidates who supported his brand of “school reform.” He initially was successful, electing a majority, who then hired John Deasy as superintendent. But voters seem to be forever dissatisfied with the state of LAUSD, and have voted out incumbents time and time again. Villaraigosa lost control of the school board, and Deasy was fired.

When Garcetti ran for mayor, he made a conscious decision not to become embroiled in school board politics – though his campaign consultant Bill Carrick argues that Garcetti has hardly abandoned education.

Peter Diamondis:

Before I share the new “data” with you, it’s essential that you understand why this matters.

We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by negative news from every angle. If you turn on CNN (what I call the Crisis News Network), you’ll predominantly hear about death, terrorism, airplane crashes, bombings, financial crisis and political scandal.

I think of the news as a drug pusher, and negative news as their drug.

There’s a reason for this.

We humans are wired to pay 10x more attention to negative news than positive news.

Being able to rapidly notice and pay attention to negative news (like a predator or a dangerous fire) was an evolutionary advantage to keep you alive on the savannas of Africa millions of years ago.

MB Reilly:

Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by subject-matter expert and retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee — who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise — in a high-fidelity air combat simulator.

The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is “the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I’ve seen to date.”

Details on ALPHA – a significant breakthrough in the application of what’s called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes.

Mark A. Smylie, Stacy A. Wenzel with Elaine Allensworth, Carol Fendt, Sara Hallman, Stuart Luppescu and Jenny Nagaoka

This final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project addresses four central questions: (a) Did the Chicago Annenberg Challenge promote improvement of the schools that it supported? (b)

Among those schools, did it also promote improvement in student academic achievement and other outcomes? (c) What factors might explain improvement or lack thereof among Annenberg schools? and (d)

What can we learn from the Challenge’s experiences to promote school improvement in the future? In answer to these questions, this report provides a macro view of the Challenge’s success in promoting school improvement and student learning. Additionally, it looks closely at several Annenberg schools to understand what makes local school improvement successful.

This report focuses on the period between the 1996 to 1997 and 2000 to 2001 school years, the five full years during which the Challenge supported local school improvement. In all, the Challenge supported about 210 high schools and elementary schools, but because approximately 90 percent of these were elementary schools, this report focuses only on them
.
The Challenge’s “bottom line” was improving student achievement and other social and psychological outcomes. Our research indicates that student outcomes in Annenberg schools were much like those in demographically similar non-Annenberg schools and across the Chicago school system as a whole, indicating that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results: 2005 and 2013.

Peter Maass:

The Soviet Union is long gone, but in 2016 we live under the specter of far more surveillance than anything the KGB could have dreamed of with its rudimentary bugs and fearful informers. Not just government surveillance — law enforcement can easily obtain our phone and internet records with a warrant from the nearly always compliant courts — but corporate surveillance, too. It’s not just Google and Facebook that might know more details about our lives and friends than the KGB could have imagined in its most feverish dreams of information dominance, but even Zipcar and Amazon.

There are precautions one can take, and I did that with the Lamb. When we had our video chat, I used a computer that had been wiped clean of everything except its operating system and essential applications. Afterward, it was wiped clean again. My concern was that the Lamb might use the session to obtain data from or about the computer I was using; there are a lot of things he might have tried, if he was in a scheming mood. At the end of our three hours together, I mentioned to him that I had taken these precautions—and he approved.

Rolf Wegenke:

The report is critical of private, nonprofit colleges’ and universities’ six-year graduation rates. By excluding certain students from the calculations, the study makes these graduation rates appear worse than they are.

So what are the facts (derived from the same data used by Third Way) about graduations in Wisconsin? In 2015, the four-year graduation rate for four-year, public institutions stood at 29%, while the four-year rate for private, nonprofit institutions stood at 48%. The six-year rate for public institutions was 59% and for private, nonprofit universities it was 65%. As stated in the article, all of us are committed to doing better, but the way these data were sliced and diced in the study does not reflect reality and does not justify denigrating a particular sector of higher education.

First, in its calculation of graduation rates, the Department of Education considers only full-time students who have enrolled for the first time and remained at the same institution for all four or six years. In today’s economy, many more students are part-time and gain their degree by transferring among a number of institutions. These graduates “don’t count” under the study’s measure.

Second, although colleges and universities take responsibility for improving graduation rates, there are other factors not under our control: government mandates for certain professions (e.g. teachers and CPAs). These mandates increase the time to degree. For example, graduates seeking a CPA certificate are required by law to have 150 college credits, instead of the usual 120. In addition, public policy has been to encourage older workers to go back to school. Often, they do so part-time, which results in a longer time to graduation. Approximately 35% of students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private, nonprofit colleges are age 25 or over. Of those 25 or older, almost 60% are attending part-time.

Rachel Dwyer:

college degree has been the ticket to the middle class in America. That is even truer today than it was before the Great Recession. As the connection between college and the middle class has become common knowledge in our society, more and more young people have sought a college degree while at the same time more and more middle class families have lost the ability to pay for some or all of college, and loans have surpassed grants as a way to fund college education. The result: a generation carrying a large amount of student loan debt. Is this good public policy?

In this paper, Rachel E. Dwyer, a professor at The Ohio State University, examines a key aspect of this problem: whether and to what extent student loans impact graduation from college. This is because, as Dwyer notes “Student loans, then, represent both an opportunity and a risk, just as do other forms of credit.” They can be a good investment in a young person’s future or not. Or, as Dwyer puts it, “Are loans associated with graduation or do they represent a drag on completion?”

Quanta Magazine:

In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor” — a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory — in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry.

Arielle Martinez:

Private urban universities are outperforming their rural and suburban counterparts in enrollment and revenue growth, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service.

Private urban universities can use their locations to their advantages and attract more international students, graduate students, and students in continuing-education programs, according to the credit-rating agency’s report.

Enrollment at private urban universities rated by Moody’s grew 34 percent from 2000 to 2015, compared with 24-percent growth for all private universities, according to the report. Median operating revenue was $343 million for private urban universities and $131 million for non-urban private universities in the 2015 fiscal year.

Andrew Gellman:

Small sample size and variable measurements ensure that any statistically significant difference will be huge, thus providing Kahneman- and Gladwell-bait.

– Data processing choices were made after the data were seen. In this case, two-thirds of the data were discarded because they did not fit the story. Sure, they have an explanation based on ceiling and floor effects—but what if they had found something? They would easily have been able to explain it in the context of their theory.

– Another variable (mood scale) was available. If the difference had shown up as statistically significant only after controlling for mood scale, or if there had been a statistically significant difference on mood scale alone, any of these things could’ve been reported as successful demonstrations of the theory.

Todd Bishop:

“At UW and across the nation, student interest in computer science is booming,” said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in the UW department of Computer Science & Engineering, in an email to GeekWire this morning. “It’s visible in 3 ways: enrollment in introductory courses, interest in upper-division courses by students majoring in other fields, and demand for the major.”

The interest among students coincides with rising demand from major corporate players. The need for computer science graduates has reached new heights in the Seattle region due to a strong startup ecosystem, Amazon’s rapid growth, and the opening of Seattle-area engineering offices by Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies. In addition, engineering is becoming an increasingly important role at non-tech companies.

Steven Handel:

The author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality is a psychiatrist by the name of Elias Aboujaoude who is currently serving as the director at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The thesis of Dr. Aboujaoude’s new book is that the world wide web can have a very profound effect on our sense of self. In fact, it can cause a kind of “digital divide” between our digital self, how we often think and behave online, and our offline self, how we often think and behave in face-to-face, “real world” interactions.

Aboujaoude has observed this divide in many of his own patients who engage heavily in online behavior – anywhere from creating fakes profiles on dating sites to impulsive online shopping to delusional thinking about reality (to the point where individuals begin to consider the reality of virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft more real than their lives offline).

Frank Bruni:

Given all that has happened on so many campuses over the last few years, it’s hard to pick the one that has been roiled the most by struggles over political correctness. But Oberlin College would certainly be in the running.

A widely discussed series of events there included the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading “Antigone”; complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall; and a petition, signed by 1,300 students, calling for a semester in which the lowest possible grade was a C, so that anyone skipping classes or skimping on studies to engage in social activism wouldn’t pay too steep an academic price.

In the view of more than a few observers, these students were taking liberalism to illiberal extremes. But their actions were arguably proof of something else as well.

Open Source Society University:

of you who want to complete a Data Science course on your own time, for free, with courses from the best universities in the World.

In our curriculum, we give preference to MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) style courses because these courses were created with our style of learning in mind.

The Economist:

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Mr Thrun’s was completed by 23,000 people; Mr Ng’s by 13,000.

Such online courses, with short video lectures, discussion boards for students and systems to grade their coursework automatically, became known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In 2012 Mr Thrun founded an online-education startup called Udacity, and Mr Ng co-founded another, called Coursera. That same year Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got together to form edX, a non-profit MOOC provider, headed by Anant Agarwal, the head of MIT’s artificial-intelligence laboratory. Some thought that MOOCs would replace traditional university teaching. The initial hype around MOOCs has since died down somewhat (though millions of students have taken online courses of some kind). But the MOOC boom illustrated the enormous potential for delivering education online, in bite-sized chunks.

Wolfram:

From the company that created Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha comes a revolutionary system for data science. Take numerical, textual, image, GIS or other data and give it the Wolfram treatment, carrying out a full spectrum of data science analysis and visualization and automatically generating rich interactive reports—all powered by the revolutionary knowledge-based Wolfram Language.

Imagine being able to run a completely customizable Wolfram|Alpha instance with your own data, automatically generating rich reports. That’s just the beginning of what you can do with Wolfram Data Science Platform. Building on the vast algorithm, knowledge and interface resources of the Wolfram Language, Wolfram Data Science Platform makes it easy to apply the most advanced algorithms and visualizations to your data, then create beautifully formatted reports that can be deployed in the cloud, on mobile, through APIs, and more.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Big-box stores promise convenience and jobs for suburbs and small towns, but have a mixed reputation with designers and citizens. Many see big boxes as icons of unsustainable sprawl, reinforcing car culture with highway-oriented access and expansive parking lots. These boxy buildings not only take up vast amounts of land but often also require infrastructure around them to be overhauled. Later, when their super-sized occupants leave: a giant empty structure is left in their wake, which can be difficult to reuse unless a similar retailer takes its place.

farnamstreetblog.com:

There are two types of knowledge and most of us focus on the wrong one. The first type of knowledge focuses on knowing the name of something. The second focuses on knowing something. These are not the same thing. The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success. In fact, he created a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.

Karen Farkas:

The board of trustees agreed to slow the rate of tuition increase from 3.9 percent to 2.8 percent in the 2016 fiscal year, which will result in $2.1 million in reduced gross income, the Review said.

Annual tuition and fees total $50,636. Standard room and board costs are $13,630.

But last year, approximately 80 percent of Oberlin students received some form of financial aid, with an average grant of $32,000—a total of nearly $59 million, the college said.

A growing number of colleges are offering incentives to faculty and staff to encourage them to retire, according to a study on higher education retirement trends by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The number of people older than 65 teaching full time at American colleges and universities nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund. College professors, many who say they still enjoy teaching, are among the oldest Americans in the workforce.

Kashmir Hill:

with creepy accuracy the “people we may know” has surprised, delighted, and horrified its users for years. While the magic sauce behind friend suggestions has always been a bit mysterious, it now includes some potentially unsettling information. Thanks to tracking the location of users’ smartphones, the social network may suggest you friend people you’ve shared a GPS data point with, meaning your friend suggestions could include someone whose face you know, but whose name you didn’t until Facebook offered it up to you.

Last week, I met a man who suspected Facebook had tracked his location to figure out who he was meeting with. He was a dad who had recently attended a gathering for suicidal teens. The next morning, he told me, he opened Facebook to find that one of the anonymous parents at the gathering popped up as a “person you may know.”

The two parents hadn’t exchanged contact information (one way Facebook suggests friends is to look at your phone contacts). The only connection the two appeared to have was being in the same place at the same time, and thus their smartphones being in the same room. The man immediately checked the privacy settings on his phone and saw that Facebook “always” had access to his location. He immediately changed it to “never.” (He also did not want to reveal his identity for this story.)

James Wigderson:

Despite the administration’s plan to make sure no employee experienced a net loss in pay in the coming year, Loumos wanted the district to cover the cost of the employee contributions for the first year so every employee could have the full amount of their raises.

“What would it be if we held, if we gave everybody the true raise and added their co-payment on top? That’s what I want,” Loumos said.

However, the other board members balked at the idea of finding another $1.3 million in the budget to cover the employee health-insurance premium contributions.

“My goal was no one takes a net pay cut and I’m happy that we can find $300,000, which achieves that goal,” said board member Ed Hughes.

Glenn Greenwald:

It’s natural — and inevitable — that malignant figures will try to exploit this vacuum of authority. All sorts of demagogues and extremists will try to re-direct mass anger for their own ends. Revolts against corrupt elite institutions can usher in reform and progress, but they can also create a space for the ugliest tribal impulses: xenophobia, authoritarianism, racism, fascism. One sees all of that, both good and bad, manifesting in the anti-establishment movements throughout the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. — including Brexit. All of this can be invigorating, or promising, or destabilizing, or dangerous: most likely a combination of all that.

The solution is not to subserviently cling to corrupt elite institutions out of fear of the alternatives. It is, instead, to help bury those institutions and their elite mavens and then fight for superior replacements. As Hayes put it in his book, the challenge is “directing the frustration, anger, and alienation we all feel into building a trans-ideological coalition that can actually dislodge the power of the post-meritocratic elite. One that marshals insurrectionist sentiment without succumbing to nihilism and manic, paranoid distrust.”

Corrupt elites always try to persuade people to continue to submit to their dominance in exchange for protection from forces that are even worse. That’s their game. But at some point, they themselves, and their prevailing order, become so destructive, so deceitful, so toxic, that their victims are willing to gamble that the alternatives will not be worse, or at least, they decide to embrace the satisfaction of spitting in the faces of those who have displayed nothing but contempt and condescension for them.

There are plenty of nearby examples as well. For example the Madison school district budget continues to be an enigma wrapped in a question.

This is no small matter, given Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results. l

Doug Erickson’s most recent article on the budget only discussed operating expenditures. Does the rest of the budget simply cease to exist?

Clayton d’Arnault:

Information overload is something that’s been plaguing me for a while. It was only recently that I decided to take the time to understand why my brain doesn’t work the way it used to. I needed to do this to understand myself. The first step in admitting you have a problem is understanding that problem. I have an information problem. This is a millennial’s quest to understand information overload while struggling against it. Here’s everything I’ve learned.

Laura Waters:

“Two Mount Olive High School teachers, initially fired in 2013 after allegedly calling students “Negroes,” have been allowed to return to work and keep their tenure, but will lose 10 months’ pay.”

That’s courtesy of the NJ Advance Media, that reports that the two gym teachers, who have taught for almost 30 years, were originally fired by the State Commissioner David Hespe after the school board brought tenure charges, but his judgement was overruled by a state appeals court.

The court returned the case to Comm. Hespe after finding that the two women were guilty of “conduct unbecoming” a teacher, but that the penalty of firing, with removal of tenure, was “too harsh.” Also, explained the court, the teachers were most likely unaware that students were around when they made racist remarks. Therefore, Hespe was forced to reduce the charges and reinstate their tenure. The two teachers’ attorney estimated that they are owed back pay of $200,000.

The teachers have hired another attorney to sue the board for age discrimination.

Jack Stephens:

There are two types of mathematicians, Platonists – who believe that mathematical truths are discovered because they literally exist and they literally are true, and Nominalists – who believe that math is just what we do when we account for things / the process of labeling things.

Nominalists believe that Math is a concept of the human brain for the following reasons:

Julianne Stanford:

Curta: I think that there’s an idealism that most people in academia, specifically in the humanities, share. We live in an era of ideological morass, especially with the collapse of communism that has left no room for those idealists in the academic world. No matter how you can prove that system doesn’t work, with an inclination to go that way perhaps because most people associate socialism with social justice, while the former is an ideology with concrete ideas and concrete historical experiences, while social justice is a very vague abstract notion.

You have to understand, the difference between ideas and facts is what is of major concern here. As my father used to say, it is so much easier to be a Marxist when you sip your coffee in Rive Gauche, left-bank Paris, than when living in an apartment under Ceaușescu, especially in the 1980s.

Alan Borsuk:

It us discouraging how, after decades, the statistics for long-term educational success for low-income and minority students remain low. Many have the talent and smarts to make it. But there are hurdles all along the way, including for those who get admitted to college but, in large numbers, don’t end up graduating. Money is a big problem, of course. But other factors matter.

Talking about MKE Fellows led me to check on some other local efforts to promote success in college.

Kate Hardiman:

After traveling to more than 110 countries to pursue various forms of research, notably cultural anthropology, Stauder described his conversion from Marxism as a process of disillusionment.

“I gradually became disenchanted with Marxism by visiting many of the countries that had tried to shape their societies to conform to its doctrines. I was disillusioned by the realities I saw in … socialist countries – the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc,” Stauder told The College Fix via email.

“I came to recognize that socialism doesn’t work, and that its ‘revolutionary’ imposition inevitably leads to cruelty, injustice and the loss of freedom,” the professor continued.

“I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere. By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.”

Caitlin Hendee:

Hickenlooper said aligning the self-interest of businesses with that of individuals makes system-wide change possible.

“Our ability to generate workforce of tomorrow is going to depend on the success of business today,” he said. “Launch My Career Colorado isn’t the whole answer, but it will go a long way toward integrating all the other efforts going on.”

Such efforts include a recent push by education leaders and businesses to lay the foundation for a model utilized in Switzerland. Under the Swiss model, students typically choose a career path as early as 10th grade, and immediately begin taking specific coursework, as well as work for local businesses in the industry, to obtain a certification or degree.

oxfordjournals:

Cognitive and socio-emotional abilities are powerful predictors of death and disease as well as of social and economic outcomes. Education is societies’ main way of promoting these abilities, ideally so that inequalities by socioeconomic back- ground are reduced. However, the extent to which education serves these cognitive, social-emotional and equality objectives is relatively unknown and intensively debated. Drawing on a Swedish school reform that was explicitly designed as a massive quasi- experiment, we assessed differential impact of education on intelligence and emotional control across childhood socioeconomic position. We also assessed initial differences in abilities by childhood socioeconomic position and how well childhood socioeconomic position and abilities predict all-cause mortality.

Shanahon on Literacy:

1. No, the fact that you do not use a textbook to teach reading does not make you a good teacher.

The idea that good teachers don’t follow a program and weak ones do has been around since well before I became a teacher. It is absolutely silly. The good teachers are the ones who manage to teach kids a lot and the poor ones accomplish less. That has nothing to do with whether a program is followed or not.

mrr

David Matthews:

Rebecca Roache, a philosophy lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, who said she no longer wanted to be friends with Conservatives, and argued supporting the party was “as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views”.

Furthermore, our referendum poll last week found that nine in 10 university staff support remaining in the EU. UK universities have also presided over the emergence of a campus culture in which more than one in four students believes that UKIP should be banned from speaking.

With universities so bereft of Brexiteers, is it unreasonable if Leave voters treat academic research on controversial subjects such as the impact of EU migration with greater scepticism than normal?

Scepticism is not the same as outright Gove-style anti-intellectualism, of course. But regardless of which way the country votes tomorrow, academics and universities urgently need to ponder why such a significant chunk of the population has come to distrust them.

John Finney:

at the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University, families earning 48,001 to $75,000 a year had to pay a significant portion of their gross income to send a student to a public four-year nondoctoral institution. On average, it cost 16 percent (in Alaska) to 33 percent (in New Jersey) of their income in 2013, the latest year for which complete statistics were available for the report.

The burden was higher at public research universities, according to the report, “2016 College Affordability Diagnosis.” Families would have had to pay, on average, 17 percent (Wyoming) to 31 percent (Alabama) of their income to enroll in such state-run institutions as the University of Wyoming or the University of Alabama.

Private institutions offered no relief. Of the states where at least 20 percent of students attended private nondoctoral colleges and universities, families earning $48,001 to $75,000 were required to pay, on average, 16 percent (Idaho) to 45 percent (Rhode Island) of family income to enroll in these institutions.

Lauren Fitzpatrick:

Also as part of the lobbying campaign, CPS has hired a marketing firm with ties to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former transportation commissioner Gabe Klein, enlisted the services of a foreign animation firm that does “fear-based marketing” and employed a consulting company run by a former official of the New Schools for Chicago, a private organization that’s helped fund charter schools, according to the documents obtained by the Sun-Times.

The Chicago school system is facing a projected $1 billion budget gap, officials say.

Andrea Coravos:

We expect our executives to have a strong understanding of the financial performance of their companies. Shareholders would find it strange – or more likely, unacceptable – if a CEO said, “I’m not financially-inclined” and passed along financial performance inquires to his or her CFO. Similarly, CEOs in an increasingly digital world will struggle to say, “I’m not technical” and hand over mission-critical business questions for the engineers to answer.

Would you, as an employer, hire an MBA who graduated from a program that taught strategy, marketing, leadership, and operations — but did not teach finance or accounting? An MBA program that lacks a computer science curriculum is like a program that lacks finance or accounting.

Joanne Jacobs:

“Earned success” is the key to a fulfilling life, said Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and now Purdue president, in this year’s commencement speech at Purdue.

Mitch Daniels told Purdue graduations to own their achievements and failures.

One of the most dangerous ideas of our time is that “we are less masters of our fate than corks floating in a sea of luck,” Daniels said. “Or, even more absurd, that most of us are victims of some kind, and therefore in desperate need of others to protect us against a world of predators and against our own gullibility.”

Annysa Johnson:

Milwaukee Public Schools officials and County Executive Chris Abele sat down Thursday for the first time in an effort to resolve a monthslong standoff over a new state law seen by many as a takeover of MPS.

And while there were no decisions, Abele said he and his school turnaround commissioner, Demond Means, would “take a good faith look” at a proposal floated by school officials last week that would allow them to open an early childhood program in an MPS building.

Abele said they would weigh the financial feasibility of the plan, and whether it would comply with the state law, which calls for the transfer of some of Milwaukee’s poorest performing schools to outside operators.

“Anything we do has to be legal. It has to be something we think will help public education (and) it will have to be OK with the authors” of the legislation, Abele said in the lobby of the Zeidler Municipal Building after the meeting. “We’ll be checking in with the lawmakers to make sure they’re comfortable with this.”

Ethan Zuckerman:

Though he may be best know as co-founder of content marketing platform “Contently”, Shane Snow describes himself as “journalist, geek and best-selling author”. That last bit comes from his book “Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success”, which offers insights on how “innovators and icons” can “rethink convention” and break “rules that are not rules”. That background may help readers understand where Snow is coming from. His blog is filled with plainspoken and often entertaining explanations of complex systems followed by apparently straightforward conclusions — evidently, burning coal and natural gas to generate electricity is a poor idea, so oil companies should be investing in solar energy. Fair enough.

Some of these explorations are more successful than others. In Snow’s essay about prison reform, he identifies violence, and particularly prison rape, as the key problem to be solved, and offers a remedy that he believes will lead to cost savings for taxpayers as well: all prisoners should be incarcerated in solitary confinement, fed only Soylent meal replacement drink through slots in the wall, and all interpersonal interaction and rehabilitative services will be provided in Second Life using the Oculus Rift VR system. Snow’s system eliminates many features of prison life — “cell blocks, prison yards, prison gyms, physical interactions with other prisoners, and so on.” That’s by design, he explains. “Those are all current conventions in prisons, but history is clear: innovation happens when we rethink conventions and apply alternative learning or technology to old problems.”

Related: “We know best“.

odyysey:

In Japanese culture people have a lot of appreciation towards nature and it is very important to be polite towards others. That politeness and the nature appreciation reflected on to its language and created some beautiful words that are not translatable to English.