Stefan Nicola:

The founder of X, Alphabet Inc.’s research and development facility, is bringing his online education company to Germany to help the likes of Volkswagen AG and BMW AG gear up for technological changes such as the self-driving car.

Udacity Inc., which offers so-called nanodegrees online and has developed courses with Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., is expanding to Germany because its banks, energy companies and carmakers are struggling to equip staff and find enough workers with the right skills as their industries are disrupted by technology, said founder and President Sebastian Thrun, who worked on Google’s self-driving car project.

Beth Fertig:

It’s no secret that the New York City public schools are deeply segregated. Throughout the five boroughs, most black and Latino students attend schools where they are the overwhelming majority, according to both a much-cited 2014 UCLA study and more current city data. Beyond the social implications of racial and ethnic segregation, there is inequity: most of the predominantly black and Latino schools have high concentrations of low-income students, fewer highly qualified teachers and lower test scores.

Lawrence Summers:

We do not want to learn what we can get used to. I’m sure once the historical commission had delayed the bridge for many months, there was an attitude of “What’s another couple?” In a broader sense, the Anderson Memorial Bridge tale tees up a bigger question. Where is the outrage? Why didn’t the governor or the mayors of Boston and Cambridge act? What about the great free press? We seem to be caught in a dismal cycle of low expectations, poor results and shared cynicism.

More than questions of personality or even those of high policy, the question of how to escape this trap should be a central issue in this election year.

Sam Fleming and Shawn Donnan

More than four-fifths of America’s metropolitan areas have seen household incomes decline this century, according to new research that exposes the politically charged reality of middle-class decline at the heart of this year’s presidential election.

The research on urban centres that are home to three-quarters of the US population shows that median household incomes, adjusted for the cost of living in the area, grew in just 39 out of 229 metro areas between 1999 and 2014.

The figures, prepared by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and shared with the Financial Times, cast light on the drivers of the economic discontent that have fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, and Bernie Sanders, the challenger to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Both men’s campaigns have tapped into deep-seated concerns among middle class voters on the right and the left. Pew’s research illuminates one source of that anxiety and raises questions about even some of America’s most celebrated economic success stories.

Melissa Korn & Ahmed Al Omran

Eastern Washington University’s English Language Institute is in crisis mode.

The intensive language training program for foreign students in Cheney, Wash., saw enrollment plummet by more than half in recent months, to 41 students for the spring quarter. It cut its part-time teaching staff to two from eight, and eliminated some student-worker positions.

Seemingly overnight, its core market—Saudi Arabian students funded by government scholarships—nosedived.

“We knew this wouldn’t last forever, but I wasn’t expecting as sharp a drop-off,” said Neil Heyen, the institute’s director.

Jonathan Brogaard, Joseph Engelberg and Edward Dickersin Van Wesep:

Using a sample of all academics that pass through top 50 economics and finance departments between 1996 and 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion that are “home runs” peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns holds for elite (top 10) institutions, for faculty with longer tenure cycles, and for promotion to Full Professorship. We find the opposite pattern among poorly-cited publications: their numbers steadily rise after tenure. The decline in both the quantity and quality of publications points to tenure incentivizing less effort in publishing rather than more risk-taking.

Joanne Jacobs:

I’m not sure this is quite the mea culpa the Times thinks it is. Gates certainly isn’t abandoning the Common Core. The foundation will focus on providing high-quality Core-aligned learning materials and helping teachers choose from what’s available.

“If the knock on the hidebound education system is that it doesn’t change fast enough isn’t the knock on Gates that they change too fast?” responds Eduwonk. “Their small schools investments were not the disaster everyone thinks they were but they pivoted before the evaluations came in. . . . They soft peddled the results of their own evaluations of measures of teacher effectiveness. And while the rollout of Common Core has certainly been a political disaster and the assessment scene is something of a garbage fire, the standards themselves are pretty embedded.”

related: small learning communities, English 10 and Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results

Page F30:

first, a general overview of language Persian is: Persian is an easy language cloaked in an air of seeming difficulty. It’s not easy to learn for two reasons: 1) it uses the Arabic alphabet; 2) it’s just not as easy to find places to use it as with languages like Spanish, French, German, and so on.

The language itself is quite easy to learn though, and because of reason 1) above I would recommend that anybody seriously learning or teaching the language over a long period of time (say over a 4-year period in university) should spend the first six months or so without learning the alphabet. It’s much easier to get an idea of what the language is like when you don’t have to up and learn a whole new alphabet at the same time.

Katie Baker:

The night after it happened, he said he didn’t know my name, said he wouldn’t be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn’t mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room? I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other? When the detective asked if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue. The night after it happened, he said he thought I liked it because I rubbed his back. A back rub.

Annysa Johnson:

After months of trying to get school administrators to deal with the racially charged climate at Westosha Central High School in Salem, Niccole Simmons took her concerns to the elected School Board.

Simmons told the Journal Sentinel she intended to plead for resources that would help Principal Lisa Albrecht address the issues at the high school.

But less than a minute into her comments, Simmons was cut off by Superintendent Scott Pierce, who deemed her remarks a “personal attack” on the principal.

Ah, “we know best“….

Elizabeth Harris:

There are supposed to be 27 children in Harold Boyd IV’s second-grade classroom, but how many of them will be there on a given day is anyone’s guess.

Since school began in September, five new students have arrived and eight children have left. Two transferred out in November. One who started in January was gone in April. A boy showed up for a single day in March, and then never came back. Even now, in the twilight of the school year, new students are still arriving, one as recently as mid-May.

At Public School 188, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, students churn relentlessly in and out. Administrators estimate that nearly half the students enrolled at the school do not last the full year. And how could it be otherwise?

Cory Turner:

What made Mozart great? Or Bobby Fischer? Or Serena Williams?

The answer sits somewhere on the scales of human achievement. On one side: natural talent. On the other: hard work. Many would argue that success hangs in some delicate balance between them. But not Anders Ericsson.

Ericsson has spent decades studying the power of practice, and in his new book, Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise, co-authored with Robert Pool, he argues that “talent” is often a story we tell ourselves to justify our own failure or to protect children from the possibility of failure. He writes:

DOMINIC MAHLANGU AND SIMPHIWE NKWALI:

The corner gets crowded from 3pm until late at night as pupils from schools in Diepkloof share the space to do their schoolwork.

Thabiso Sebola, a part-time first-year project management student at Wits University often spends time on the corner.

“I do a lot of my studying here. I download subject content and review what my lecturer said in class with the assistance of information I get from various internet sites. I come here at least four times a week and spend between three and four hours here – even when it is cold,” said Sebola.

Josh Mitchell:

The government financed a large share of these educations through grants, low-interest loans and loan guarantees. Total outstanding student debt—almost all guaranteed or made directly by the federal government—has quadrupled since 2000 to $1.2 trillion today. The government also spent tens of billions of dollars in grants and tax credits for students. New research shows a significant chunk of that investment backfired, with millions of students worse off for having gone to school. Many never learned new skills because they dropped out—and now carry debt they are unwilling or unable to repay.

AP

Just to get home from school, they climb 800 meters (more than 2,500 feet) toward the sky—on a ladder made of bamboo and secured to a sheer cliff face.

After pictures surfaced of the challenging trek faced by schoolchildren in a poor corner of China’s mountainous west, their village may be getting some assistance by way of a safer, more modern piece of infrastructure: a solid set of steel stairs.

The hardship faced by residents in the village of Atuleer in Sichuan province underscores the vast gap in development between China’s prosperous, modern east and parts of the remote inland west that remain mired in poverty.

The bamboo ladder is the only means of access to the village for the 15 children, between the ages of 6 and 15, who return every two weeks from the school where they board. The 72 families who live there are members of the Yi minority group and subsist mainly by farming potatoes, walnuts and chili peppers.

Nic Kristoff:

OF all the students preparing to go to college this fall, perhaps none have faced a more hazardous journey than a young woman named Sultana. One measure of the hazard is that I’m not disclosing her last name or hometown for fear that she might be shot.

Sultana lives in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan, and when she was in the fifth grade a delegation visited her home to warn her father to pull her out of school, or else she would have acid flung in her face. Ever since, she has been largely confined to her high-walled family compound — in which she has secretly, and perilously, educated herself.

valdour:

Before getting to the point, please consider how the following cultural ideas influence our perspective of life:

Life is lived to make money. The more, the better.

Prioritize material purchases over life experiences. People will judge you based on the things you possess and you want them to think highly of you.

Always strive to have more than what you currently have and better than what others have.

Dedicate most of your energy toward your job or career. Any other pursuits are either risky or lazy.

Seymour Papert:

Introduction

Everyone in this room would agree that we are moving into something called “the computer future,” a future in which everything will be different because of the presence of computers and other new technologies. In some departments of life, the computer presence is already visible. Coming here from my home, I passed through an airport and bought airplane tickets. The computer terminal has become an integral part of that transaction — you buy airplane tickets by dealing with somebody at a computer. In some of our airports in the United States, you don’t even need the person. You can deal directly with the computer: put in your credit card, and out comes the ticket.

These manifestations of the computer are perhaps superficial. They have not changed our lives very much. It even takes the same amount of time to get your airplane ticket. But there are other departments of life in which no one would say that the use of the computer is superficial. No one who owes his or her life to CAT scans in medicine would think that the role of the computer in transforming medical practice is a superficial matter. We are meeting here this week to talk about the computer in a department that, up to now, has been touched only superficially: learning, education, and the lives of children. The presence of the computer in this area will have a very deep impact, not only upon the nature of schools themselves, but upon the whole of human society. The way that the computer enters into learning will play a determining role in the way that both technology and the larger culture evolve in the coming generation.

So we are entering this computer future; but what will it be like? What sort of a world will it be? There is no shortage of experts, futurists, and prophets who are ready to tell us, but they don’t agree. The Utopians promise us a new millennium, a wonderful world in which the computer will solve all our problems. The computer critics warn us of the dehumanizing effect of too much exposure to machinery, and of disruption of employment in the workplace and the economy.

The Economist:

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, a German philosopher, once stated that there was a universal tendency to see success as the result of innate talent, rather than effort. Today it is still common to think of the straight-A pupil as having a “gift” for learning, or of the sports star as miraculously skilful. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that talent is overrated. More important, she suggests, is a blend of persistence and passion—or “grit”. “Our potential is one thing,” she writes. “What we do with it is quite another.”

That character matters is not a new idea. But “Grit”, Ms Duckworth’s first book, is part of a broader trend which is influencing organisations from sports teams to schools.

Anya Kamenetz:

Collection survey.

Since 1968, the federal government has been sending it to the nation’s schools to gauge educational access and enforce civil rights law.

Today, the U.S. Education Department released its 2013-2014 CRDC results, covering more than 95,000 schools and 50 million students.

There’s a lot to wade through, but these are some of the numbers that jumped out at us (links are to previous NPR coverage).

Cédric Villani:

Hidden truths permeate our world; they’re inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of mathematical breakthroughs, Fields Medal winner Cédric Villani speaks to the thrill of discovery and details the sometimes perplexing life of a mathematician. “Beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure,” he says. “They change our vision of the world.”

The Economist:

IN JULY 2012 a man calling himself Sam Bacile posted a short video on YouTube. It showed the Prophet Muhammad bedding various women, taking part in gory battles and declaring: “Every non-Muslim is an infidel. Their lands, their women, their children are our spoils.”

The film was, as Salman Rushdie, a British author, later put it, “crap”. “The Innocence of Muslims” could have remained forever obscure, had someone not dubbed it into Arabic and reposted it in September that year. An Egyptian chat-show host denounced it and before long, this short, crap film was sparking riots across the Muslim world—and beyond. A group linked to al-Qaeda murdered America’s ambassador in Libya. Protests erupted in Afghanistan, Australia, Britain, France and India. Pakistan’s railways minister offered a $100,000 bounty to whoever killed the film-maker—and was not sacked. By the end of the month at least 50 people had died.

“We know best“….

Brad Mann:

In this paper a mathematical model of card shuffling is constructed, and used to determine how much shuffling is necessary to randomize a deck of cards. The crucial aspect of this model is rising sequences of permutations, or equivalently descents in their inverses. The probability of an arrangement of cards occuring under shuffling is a function only of the number of rising sequences in the permutation. This fact makes computation of variation distance, a measure of randomness, feasible; for in an n card deck there are at most n rising sequences but n! possible arrangements. This computation is done exactly for n = 52, and other approximation methods are considered.

Amy Hassinger:

Our lawmakers have spent the last year locked in a staggering budget impasse, with no end in sight. The state is deep in debt, with mountains of unpaid bills, while the Democratic-led Legislature and the Republican governor fight a war of attrition. Another deadline just blew by this week: May 31 was the last official day of the legislative session. Still no budget. Any proposal now needs a three-fifths majority to pass, an even higher bar. Meanwhile, the collateral damage is swirling like sand in a windstorm.

Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Damian Pattinson:

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But what does “excellence” mean? Does it in fact mean anything at all? And is the pervasive narrative of excellence and competition a good thing? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning as used in the academy. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism or boundary object. To investigate whether linguistic function is useful we examine how excellence rhetoric combines with narratives of scarcity and competition and show that hypercompetition that arises leads to a performance of “excellence” that is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, as well as diversity to the stories we tell ourselves as researchers and offer an alternative rhetoric based on soundness. “Excellence” is not excellent, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.

Miriam Jordan and Douglas Belkin:

Ohio State University, a Chinese student took tests for Chinese classmates for cash last year, guaranteeing an A.

At the University of California, Irvine, some international students used a lost-ID-card ruse to let impersonators take exams in place of others.

At the University of Arizona, a professor told of Chinese students handing in multiple copies of the same incorrect test answers.

A flood of foreign undergraduates on America’s campuses is improving the financial health of universities. It also sometimes clashes with a fundamental value of U.S. scholarship: academic integrity.

Jeffrey Selingo:

It’s graduation season at high schools and colleges around the country, the time of year when students are honored for their accomplishments from the classrooms to the athletic fields.

Teachers and counselors have long encouraged students to be “well-rounded.” But the problem with well-rounded students is that they usually don’t focus on any one thing for a prolonged period of time. Too often they seem to participate in activities just to check off a series of boxes, instead of showing the deep and sustained involvement, passion, and dedication that employers seek. Their résumés are filled with what some recruiters refer to as “sign-up clubs.”

Jordan Shapiro:

Nyerere was the first leader of the United Tanzanian Republic from 1960 (when it was still Tanganyika) to 1985. Ujamaa means “extended family” or “brotherhood” — it was the word Nyerere used to describe his vision of economic and social development. “Every citizen is an integral part of the Nation and has a right to take an equal part in Government at local, regional and national level,” he wrote in his Arusha Declaration. His writing was succinct and inspiring, but ultimately, Ujamaa policies did little to prevent devastating economic decline. Today, Tanzania’s hunger level is rated “serious” by the Global Hunger Index, with an estimated 32.1% of the population undernourished.

Nyerere wrote a treatise in 1967 entitled Education for Self-Reliance, in which he called for free compulsory public schooling that would contradict colonial “attitudes of inequality, intellectual arrogance and intense individualism.” He thought Tanzania’s education should focus on agriculture and productivity. His influence is obvious when I’m standing outside the classrooms. The simple rectangular school buildings are built from concrete and arranged symmetrically around a well-maintained courtyard. Late in the afternoon, I spot the students singing together while they tend to the grounds, trimming the grass and pruning the shrubs. Their end-of-day contributions would likely please the former president if he were still alive. He envisioned egalitarian “school farms,” where “students will relate work to comfort. They will learn the meaning of living together and working together for the good of all.”

Charles Murray:

When people learn that I want to replace the welfare state with a universal basic income, or UBI, the response I almost always get goes something like this: “But people will just use it to live off the rest of us!” “People will waste their lives!” Or, as they would have put it in a bygone age, a guaranteed income will foster idleness and vice. I see it differently. I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.

The great free-market economist Milton Friedman originated the idea of a guaranteed income just after World War II. An experiment using a bastardized version of his “negative income tax” was tried in the 1970s, with disappointing results. But as transfer payments continued to soar while the poverty rate remained stuck at more than 10% of the population, the appeal of a guaranteed income persisted: If you want to end poverty, just give people money. As of 2016, the UBI has become a live policy option. Finland is planning a pilot project for a UBI next year, and Switzerland is voting this weekend on a referendum to install a UBI.

Michael Schmidt :

When we were out there, they tasted amazing,” said Sergeant Brown, who went to the gym twice a day when he was overseas to make sure he did not put on too much weight from the dining hall and its honey buns and muffins.

While some American military personnel, in particular Special Operations forces and a number of Marine and conventional Army units, operated out of small, spartan outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bulk of Army troops lived on bases that had running water, electricity and housing units. Some larger bases even had wireless internet, televisions, gyms and coffee shops. Civilian contractors guarded the bases, cooked meals and transported ammunition, food and fuel.

The Economist:

IN A sense, this is a golden age for free speech. Your smartphone can call up newspapers from the other side of world in seconds. More than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blog updates are published every single day. Anyone with access to the internet can be a publisher, and anyone who can reach Wikipedia enters a digital haven where America’s First Amendment reigns.

However, watchdogs report that speaking out is becoming more dangerous—and they are right. As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant.

Erica Green:

Seven years ago 120 girls bedecked in purple polo shirts and plaid skirts walked into an experiment — a Baltimore public school modeled on those originally designed for affluent white girls whose families could afford to send them to “finishing school.”

On Friday, half of those girls, all but one of them African-American and most from working-class families, will don white robes to make history as the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, the city’s first all-female, public middle-high school.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Three months ago, I spent a morning at Auer Avenue School, a Milwaukee Public Schools grade school that is gaining new drive and focus as a “community school.” I liked what I saw.

But one of the things that sticks in my mind is something I said, not something they told me. At the end of the morning, I met with about 10 people involved in the school. One of them asked what I thought of the new law that allows Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to take control of some MPS schools.

chad wellmon:

In nineteenth-century Germany, scholars in the humanities often enjoyed a fame that few of their colleagues elsewhere could dream of. It was with wonder that Mark Twain, who toured the country in the 1890s, observed tram conductors excitedly pointing out a historian whom they had spotted on the street. Yet even there, those in the humanities felt a sense of crisis. This sense was rooted in developments that contemporary discussions of the humanities have obscured. It’s often said that the German university system was founded on the ideal of Wissenschaft, or systematic knowledge and scholarship. American universities, by contrast, were founded on a dual inheritance: on the one side, the British collegiate tradition of building character and on the other, the mission of specialized research, adopted from the German model in the late nineteenth century.

But this is a misrepresentation, because character formation had also been essential to the thinking behind the emergence of the German research university around 1800. In fact, our present-day understanding of what the humanities can do for students is much closer to that thinking than it is to the notion of moral education institutionalized at the religious colleges and universities of antebellum America.

Humboldt’s formula achieved nearaxiomatic status during the nineteenth century. But a few decades after the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, the link between Wissenschaft and Bildung came under serious pressure. As the Prussian state grew in power and size, technological and scientific advances began to play a greater role in the economy. The Prussian state pressed universities for more immediately “usable” research and knowledge. Key figures in Prussian society and the Prussian government developed a nineteenth-century version of the contemporary STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) obsession; and the state awarded research support accordingly. To compete in this funding environment and ensure their own prestige, some in the humanities tried to match the scale and aspirations of research in the natural sciences, as some digital humanities researchers do today, devising data collection projects of unprecedented size – the “heavy industry of scholarship”, as one practitioner put it. Others, like the Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt, wondered whether these outsized undertakings had left any room for real thinking.

American Prospect:

September, The Atlantic published a disquieting cover story about the current generation of college students. According to the article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, young people raised by overindulgent parents increasingly come to colleges and universities demanding protection from ideas that might challenge them. Instead of learning to think critically, students police the air for “microaggressions”—offhand comments that may reinforce stereotypes—and insist that “trigger warnings” be placed on potentially disturbing texts, including classic works of literature such as The Great Gatsby. Entitled, hypersensitive, quick to take offense: This is the new normal among undergraduates, the article warned, fostering a vindictive atmosphere of political correctness “in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

LD Burnett:

A few years after I graduated from college, when I was short on cash, short on space, and short on hope that some significant portion of my days might ever again be spent in reading and writing and thinking about something beyond my immediate material circumstances and familial duties, I made a decision that I have wished many times to take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks. Not just the overpriced and (for me, anyhow) under-studied behemoth from Intro to Econ, nor my well-used but no longer useful grammar and exercise book from French I and II – those weren’t the only texts I culled from my little library.

Shawn:

descriptive word the founder and CEO of the Education Trust used several times during a school funding session at the Mackinac Policy Conference. The trust is a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
“Kids in Michigan are in a free fall relative to kids in other states,” said Haycock, citing the trust’s education data analysis released in a report last month. “We were 28th in the United States in 2003 in reading and 41st in 2015.”

She added 1 in 3 white fourth-graders are reading at grade level, coming in at 49th in the country, according to the analysis.

mrr

Quoctrung Bui:

What do you think the unemployment rate is for 25-to-34-year-olds who graduated from a four-year college? (Hint: for those with only a high school degree, it’s 7.4 percent.)

Kiah Collier:

“It’s important that we keep local tax dollars in local districts as much as possible, while still ensuring that all students have access to quality public schools,” Straus said.

Straus is the first statewide leader to call for action following the state Supreme Court’s unanimous decision nearly three weeks ago that upheld the state’s public school funding system as constitutional, while also urging state lawmakers to implement “transformational, top-to-bottom reforms that amount to more than Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid.”

He already has ordered the House to study the Cost of Education Index, one component of the school finance system, along with the debt load and facility needs of fast-growing school districts.

“Combined with those studies, the newly issued charges will allow the House to take a thorough look at school finance when the Legislature convenes in January 2017,” according to the news release.

Straus’ move drew praise from at least one Democratic lawmaker and school and progressive groups that worried lawmakers would not address school finance absent a judicial mandate.

Richard Fry:

Broad demographic shifts in marital status, educational attainment and employment have transformed the way young adults in the U.S. are living, and a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data highlights the implications of these changes for the most basic element of their lives – where they call home. In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household. 1

This turn of events is fueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35. Dating back to 1880, the most common living arrangement among young adults has been living with a romantic partner, whether a spouse or a significant other. This type of arrangement peaked around 1960, when 62% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds were living with a spouse or partner in their own household, and only one-in-five were living with their parents

K-12 spending has grown substantially over the decades.

David Matthews:

You could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has largely solved the problem of getting ethnic minority students into university. “All ethnic minority groups in England are now, on average, more likely to go to university than their white British peers,” reported a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the end of last year.

Edwin Rios:

his high school career, and taxpayers could pay the price for years to come.

According to a study released Thursday by the University of California-Los Angeles, the suspensions of 10th-graders across the United States in the 2001-02 school year prompted an estimated 68,000 students to eventually drop out of school. Those dropouts, researchers say, cost Americans some $11 billion in lost tax revenue and $35.6 billion in broader social costs—such as health care costs, job loss, and potential earnings—over the course of a lifetime.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Ralph Russo:

Lynch went from starter to backup at Penn State last season as freshman Saquon Barkley emerged as one of the best running backs in the country.

Facing the prospect of spending most of his final season of college eligibility on the sideline, Lynch decided to take advantage of an NCAA rule that allows graduates to transfer and be immediately eligible to play.

Inside Higher Ed:

2016
The University System of New Hampshire is launching a yearlong open education initiative to promote affordable textbooks, collaboration and open-access publishing. The system, which consists of Granite State College, Keene State College, Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire, is this week hosting faculty members from across its member institutions at a conference to discuss the concept of open education and how it applies to course materials, collaboration between students and faculty members, and scholarly publishing. An early pilot with open educational resources that ran last year at UNH saved students nearly $150,000 on textbook costs, the university system said in the announcement.

Raymond Scott:

have ordered fourteen students who scored top marks on their final exams in India’s Bihar state to be retested amid concerns of cheating.
The decision to retest the students was made after one of the students told a local media outlet that political science was about cooking. Another student, who scored high marks on her science examination, said the most reactive element in the periodic table was aluminum.

Stephen Milder:

IN RECENT YEARS, debate about the state of graduate education in the humanities has flourished. This seemingly arcane subject has gained currency since the recession of 2008, amid the burgeoning national discussion of student debt and adjunct instructors’ intensifying efforts to unionize. A new genre of online prose, “quit lit,” articulates graduate students’ anger at the dearth of academic jobs. Perhaps in response to these widely read tales of talented PhDs unable to find long-term employment in the academy, modest proposals from the professoriat have promoted the idea of a “Malleable PhD” at professional conferences and in the pages of scholarly journals. These calls for reform seek to redefine the humanities PhD as a gateway to jobs beyond the academy. They announce plans to funnel unemployed PhDs into “alt-ac” careers, a vaguely defined category that encompasses everything from posts within the university administration to research-focused jobs at nonprofits to positions with commercial firms.

Joel Achenbach:

scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders held an invitation-only, closed-door meeting at Harvard University to discuss an ambitious plan to create synthetic human genomes. Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they’re launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes — a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.

The announcement, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period. Scientists have been honing their techniques for manipulating the complex molecules that serve as the code for all life on the planet, and this same issue of the journal Science reports a breakthrough in editing RNA, a molecule that is the close cousin of DNA.

Joanne Jacobs:

nonprofit called iMentor provided a mentor who helped him stay focused in high school and apply to college. Nominated by iMentor, Mendez was invited to the opening of Reach Higher, Michelle Obama’s initiative to inspire students to go to college. The summer after he flunked out, he was a Reach Higher “ambassador.” He was embarrassed to tell the truth. . . . this is not a story of how I overcame everything to reach success. This is just me telling the truth. This is me finally letting go of all the pain and weight I hold in my heart of not wanting to disappoint anybody. Mendez is now a full-time student at LaGuardia Community College while working almost 40 hours per week at a coffee shop. Mendez has plenty of grit. What he lacked was preparation for college-level academics. – See more at: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2016/06/beating-the-odds-model-was-college-dropout/#sthash.zFBWzHIr.dpuf

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Tulsa Beacon:

Higher education will be cut by 7.66 percent. The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (the state Medicaid provider) will get a 9.24 percent increase. The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services will get a 2.18 percent increase.

Government (redistributed tax dollars) health care spending growth has long crowded out other expenditures.

K-12 spending has grown substantially over the decades.

Arnold Kling:

Diversified knowledge required in the modern economy requires relying on experts, but imbuing these experts with political authority has disastrous consequences.

The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.

However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.

Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.

“We know best and the related Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

The Economist:

VISITING some American universities these days feels like touring the scene of an earthquake, or a small war. Though administrators insist the protests that dominoed across campuses in the past year were therapeutic, grievances seethe. Fears for jobs, and of harm—both reputational and physical—endure. “The campus is traumatised,” says Reuben Faloughi, one of the leaders of the protests which, last November, forced the University of Missouri’s president to resign.

As Mr Faloughi knows, some external observers “just think the kids got upset and had a fit”: that these disturbances conform to the old quip about academic quarrels being so vicious because the stakes are so low. That view is mistaken, and not only because of the impact on the participants. As Eshe Sherley, an activist at Yale, says, “Things that happen in the university don’t just stay there.” Rather, the people and ideas they produce ripple across the country. And just as the energy and issues involved are bound to spread beyond campus, they did not originate there either.

Darrel Bradford:

only watch a dragon eat its tail for so long before you feel compelled to intervene.

As I’ve watched the education community react to Robert Pondiscio’s argument that the left is driving conservatives out of education reform, I’ve been increasingly frustrated to see so many people I like and respect (from Marilyn Rhames to Justin Cohen, Chris Stewart and Jay Greene) take aim at one another. I’m also convinced that the teachers unions are all having a good laugh at us while we play this verbal game of The Dozens amongst ourselves and in public.
At the center of this conflict: A dividing line being drawn between “Markets” and “Equity” as principles driving change in our schools. These two themes are both found in the underlying conflict of Pondiscio’s piece about the contrast between market or conservative solutions like school choice as great equalizers, and the power of a movement like Black Lives Matter, with which the more progressive, social justice wing of the reform movement identifies.

I believe Pondiscio’s piece only featured Black Lives Matter and the agenda of this year’s New Schools Venture Fund Summit (which I attended) as a proxy for capturing the changing view and face of the education reform movement. But using Black Lives Matter as the focal point charged and changed the exchange — and sparked a circular firing squad as commentators staked their ground and pious bullets filled the air.

Quanta Magazine:

posted online in recent weeks, mathematicians have solved a problem about the pattern-matching card game Set that predates the game itself. The solution, whose simplicity has stunned mathematicians, is already leading to advances in other combinatorics problems.

Alexander Russo:

Another notable finding is that 70 percent of education reporters list press releases/events/PR person as a source for stories — the most frequent response for reporters asked about the source of story ideas in the last month.

“Public relations efforts are an important part of education coverage,” notes the report introduction language.” News releases, news conferences, or public relations professionals are the top sources of story ideas for education journalists who took the survey.”

While press releases are tremendously useful, over-reliance on them could be troubling, given how infrequently stakeholders (government agencies, advocacy groups, nonprofits) voluntarily share unflattering information and the public’s reliance on journalism for an independent view.

On Monday night, one of the Boston Globe journalists featured in Spotlight encouraged reporters to focus on the news that stakeholders don’t send/want covered. And yet under 50 percent of those who responded to the survey report that their story ideas commonly come from actual students, parents, or teachers.

Some observers focused on the demographic makeup of education reporters, who are (like most classroom teachers) predominantly white and female. The EWA report compares education journalism to a 2014 study of the journalism industry as a whole, finding that edreporters are more likely to be female and minority than journalism over all.

Rhett Allain:

In the academic world, professors and faculty often meet with representatives of textbook publishers. These book reps like to stop by, or send an email, every so often to ask what my colleagues and I are using. My university uses a textbook rental system, which locks us into a particular book for a few years. When a book comes up for new adoption, you will surely see a book rep encouraging you to pick one of their textbooks.

Let me be up front and say I like these book reps. They are nice people and I enjoy talking to them. Even after adopting a publisher’s textbook, book reps often help out with extra material (like online supplemental material or instructor resources). However, I don’t always agree with the sales pitch. Let me go over a few.

Cyrus Farivar:

A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days’ worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for two criminal suspects.

In the Tuesday en banc decision, the Fourth Circuit relied heavily upon the third-party doctrine, the 1970s-era Supreme Court case holding that there is no privacy interest in data voluntarily given up to a third party like a cell phone provider. That case, known as Smith v. Maryland, is what has provided the legal underpinning for lots of surveillance programs, ranging from local police all the way up to the National Security Agency.

James Grossman:

A historian, however, would know that it is essential to look beyond such simplistic logic. Yes, in the first few years after graduation, STEM and business majors have more obvious job prospects — especially in engineering and computer science. And in our recession-scarred economic context, of course students are concerned with landing that first job.

Over the long run, however, graduates in history and other humanities disciplines do well financially. Rubio would be surprised to learn that after 15 years, those philosophy majors have more lucrative careers than college graduates with business degrees. History majors’ mid-career salaries are on par with those holding business bachelor’s degrees. Notably these salary findings exclude those who went on to attain a law or other graduate degree.

The utility of disciplines that prepare critical thinkers escapes personnel offices, pundits and politicians (some of whom perhaps would prefer that colleges graduate more followers and fewer leaders). But it shouldn’t. Labor markets in the United States and other countries are unstable and unpredictable. In this environment — especially given the expectation of career changes — the most useful degrees are those that can open multiple doors, and those that prepare one to learn rather than do some specific thing.

squeakland:

The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students. We share it for those who want to learn more about some of the writing that influenced him and the creation of Etoys.

Darius Rubics:

discovered set of original Nikola Tesla drawings reveal a map to multiplication that contains all numbers in a simple to use system. The drawings were discovered at an antique shop in central Phoenix Arizona by local artist, Abe Zucca. They are believed to have been created during the last years of Tesla’s Free Energy lab, Wardenclyffe. The manuscript is thought to contain many solutions to unanswered questions about mathematics.

Carol Ann Alaimo

The University of Arizona has doubled down on diversity by hiring two top people instead of one and paying each of them more than the previous person earned.

Faced with choosing between two finalists for the recently advertised post of chief diversity officer, UA officials decided to hire both, creating a new, unadvertised position in the process.

Jesús Treviño will be paid $214,000 a year as the UA’s new senior diversity officer, and Rebecca Tsosie will be paid $215,000 as a law professor and special adviser to the provost on diversity.

Previously, the UA paid $118,000 to an assistant vice president in charge of diversity. But that person’s duties were more limited in scope than those of the two new hires, UA officials said.

The median salary for a chief diversity officer at a U.S. research university is less than $165,000, according to a March salary survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the national association for human-resource professionals in higher education.

Nina Burleigh:

Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land. Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.

Their degrees look the same as ever, but in recent years the programs of study behind them have been altered to reflect the new sensitivities. Books now come with trigger warnings—a concept that originated on the internet to warn people with post-traumatic stress disorder (veterans, child abuse survivors) of content that might “trigger” a past trauma. Columbia’s English majors were opting out of reading Ovid (trigger: sexual assault), and some of their counterparts at Rutgers declined an assignment to study Virginia Woolf (trigger: suicidal ideation). Political science graduates from Modesto Junior College might have shied away from touching a copy of the U.S. Constitution in public, since a security guard stopped one of them from handing it out because he was not inside a 25-square-foot piece of concrete 30 yards away from the nearest walkway designated as the “free speech zone”—a space that needed to be booked 30 days in advance. Graduates of California public universities found it hard to discuss affirmative action policies, as administrators recently added such talk to a list of “microaggressions”—subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at a minority or other nondominant group that unintentionally reinforce a stereotype.

Times higher education:

announced plans for a new and pioneering college ranking for America – underpinned by the launch this week of a major national student engagement survey.

The US college ranking, due for publication in September 2016, has been developed after a year of consultation by THE’s senior data and editorial teams with key US sector bodies and experts, which concluded that the current range of university and college rankings in the US are not fit for purpose.

The new ranking will put student learning at its heart, with a focus on student outcomes – including completion and employment – and with unique features examining the value added by colleges. It will draw significantly on an entirely new national survey capturing student engagement.

Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Yaqin Su:

A college education is an important investment that helps people build their skills and prepare for high-skilled jobs. Historically, those who have made this investment have received a substantial economic benefit that lasts over their lifetime. However, with the onset of the Great Recession and the sluggish labor market recovery that has ensued, there have been widespread reports of newly minted college graduates who are unsuccessful at nding jobs suited to their level of education. According to many accounts, recent graduates are finding it increasingly dificult to secure a job, and those who do nd work are o en con ned to low-wage positions. Stories of this nature raise troubling questions about whether a college degree still helps people find good jobs.

In this edition of Current Issues, we assess just how dificult the labor market
has become for recent college graduates. In doing so, we move beyond anecdotal evidence to examine more than two decades of data on the employment outcomes of recent college graduates. This approach allows us to put the experience of those entering the labor market during the latest business cycle into historical perspective.

Katie Murphy:

In the latest attempt to restore in-state students’ access to the University of California, legislators are proposing changes that would put the system on track to become the nation’s most expensive public college option for nonresidents.

The Assembly proposal, to be debated in the final weeks of state budget negotiations, calls for a 10 percent cap on out-of-state enrollment, paired with tuition hikes that would push annual nonresident tuition from about $37,000 to $54,000 over six years. The changes would help pay for an undergraduate expansion that is the plan’s centerpiece: 30,000 new spaces for California residents by 2022./i>