OGECHI EMECHEBE:

At the direction of the Legislature, the UW System recently created the new Office of Educational Opportunity to oversee the creation of charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee without oversight from local school districts. How do you react to that?

I’m opposed to the concept. I find it objectionable that the state has allowed one person to essentially make decisions that our local community can make through school boards and allow that person to authorize who can operate a school that’s not accountable to the public but has a call on our resources. I find that offensive. It’s repugnant that they think it’s acceptable policy when I think most people in Madison would say it’s unacceptable policy.

The best defense is a good offense and having our public schools be the best public schools we can is certainly one of the strong directions that we need to emphasize. We’re fortunate to have really good schools in Madison but I think we need to do even more to bring in staff voices and parent voices into the schools to have the public own them even more. If we see proposals coming in for non-public charter entities, we can actively organize an opposition to those sorts of things if we’re concerned as a city that we don’t want to have our public dollars controlled by non-public entities without any oversight.

There have been mixed reactions to the district’s new Behavior Education Plan. What have union members said about the BEP?

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.

Sally Weale:

Men are less likely than women to go to university, those who do are more likely to drop out and those who complete their course are less likely to get a good degree, according to a thinktank report.

Universities are being urged to set themselves targets to recruit more male students amid growing alarm about the widening gender gap in higher education.

One of the report’s authors said the underachievement of men in higher education was a national scandal and called on universities to focus funding for widening participation on young men.

Ryan Quinn:

The West Virginia Board of Education has approved alternative teacher certification programs for Kanawha and seven other counties, including a McDowell County program that will begin to bring Teach For America’s services to the state.

At the board’s meeting Wednesday, members also heard criticism from school administrators about their plans to start giving entire schools and counties A-F grades; approved significantly amending a construction and renovation plan at the Romney Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to drop the cost from $45.5 million to $16.5 million; returned control over personnel issues to the local school board in Gilmer County, one of the state’s last two takeover counties; and approved a plan for Kanawha’s St. Albans High to reduce student instructional time in order to incorporate 30 minutes of teacher collaboration into each school day.

Thomas Sowell:

Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited — and then disinvited — to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech.

Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author of a very insightful book titled Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

In short, Jason Riley’s views on race are different from the views that prevail on most college campuses. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. But that was before academia — and the education system in general — became virtually a monopoly of the political left.

Patricia Cohen:

For seniors graduating from the University of Michigan this month, employers have been lining up since the fall to offer interviews and boast of their companies’ benefits. Recruiters would ask when their competitors were coming, said Geni Harclerode, the university’s assistant director of employer development, and then they’d say: “Well, we want to come the week before.”

“This has been one of our largest seasons of hiring,” she said. “The job market has been very good.”

The outlook for many high school graduates is more challenging, as Vynny Brown can attest. Now 20, he graduated two years ago from Waller High School in Texas, and has been working for nearly a year at Pappasito’s Cantina in Houston, part of a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants. He earns $7.25 an hour filling takeout orders or $2.13 an hour plus tips as a server, which rarely adds up to more than the minimum, he said. He would like to apply to be a manager, but those jobs require some college experience.

“That is something I don’t have,” said Mr. Brown, who says he cannot afford to go to college now. “It’s the biggest struggle I’ve had.”

Chris Vick:

That’s a quotation from a blogger’s review of my book, Kook. A response to the risky, and sometimes illegal, activities the characters get up to. Set in a world of die-hard Cornish surfers, Kook is about a young guy (Sam) falling for a girl who is, in every way, trouble. Jade is obsessed with riding the biggest wave she can find, as soon as she can find it. Whether she’s ready to or not. And that’s only part of what Jade and her crew get up to. It’s not just the surfing. It’s fighting, raves, drinking, getting into trouble with the police.

Rachel DiCarlo Currie:

While I normally cast a skeptical eye on fashionable trends in American education, count me among those who fully support the “gap year” between high school and college. Already a growing phenomenon, its popularity will surely increase following the announcement that Malia Obama will delay her inaugural semester at Harvard until the fall of 2017. As the New York Times noted earlier this week, a bevy of research and anecdotal evidence suggests that gap-year students arrive on campus better prepared—academically, socially, and emotionally—than their non-gap-year classmates. University administrators have thus become some of the biggest advocates for postponing enrollment.

What they don’t seem to appreciate is that the gap-year trend represents a subtle indictment of their institutions. After all, if people believe that a gap year will accelerate students’ maturation, help them cultivate practical and/or vocational skills, make them more sophisticated, or give them (in the words of journalist Susan Greenberg) “a newfound sense of purpose and perspective,” the implication is that colleges will fall short in each of these areas. For that matter, the gap year raises important questions about why so many people are attending college in the first place.

Chris Newfield:

The simplest political question posed by the ongoing Katehi crisis is, “Can state government trust the University of California to clean its own house?” The non-firing of Linda Katehi says, “No.” It’s hard to imagine a better targeted confirmation of UC’s reputation in Sacramento for poor management. If we didn’t have the Katehi Affair, Jerry Brown would have had to invent it.

Yes she deserves due process, yes women chancellors deserve it as much as male chancellors do, and yes the campus view should be decisive rather than UCOP’s. But UC’s bureaucracy should have prevented the chancellor’s “mistakes” before they happened, or an internal investigation should have caught them before the Sacramento Bee did, or President Napolitano should have completed her investigation before she tried to fire Chancellor Katehi, or she should have succeeded in firing her on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence she already had. None of these things happened.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom inverviews Tom Mullaney

EFF WASSERSTROM: When we spoke at Microsoft, you stressed that many things about China’s current place in the IT world fly in the face of past conventional wisdom about characters and alphabets. What exactly did you have in mind?

TOM MULLANEY: When it comes to technologies of communication and the Chinese language, we live in a time that hardly anyone could have anticipated at the dawn of the 20th century. Not only are Chinese characters still with us — they are one of the fastest, most widespread, and successful languages of the digital age. More than ever before, Chinese is a world script, and China is an IT giant. This would shock the many people who, for the past two centuries, assumed that such an outcome was conceivable only if China got rid of character-based writing and went the route of wholesale alphabetization — which it did not. This outcome was not supposed to have been possible — and yet here we are. What did we miss?

You argued at Microsoft that once we get to computers, any notion that using Chinese characters rather than letters is a disadvantage gets exploded. Would you elaborate on this — and, for those who haven’t followed these issues, say a little about the long history of claims that using characters inevitably impedes adopting new technologies ?

This is a really important question, and one that comes up a lot when I give lectures and do consultations at tech companies like Google and Microsoft. In the Q&A to my Google Tech talk back in 2011 — “A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley” — we spent a good two hours on this, in fact. This is also a major inspiration for the computing and conference this weekend at Stanford (Shift CTRL: New Perspectives on Computing and New Media).

Ever since the mass manufacture of typewriters began in the U.S. in the 19th century, engineers and entrepreneurs imagined a day when this new technology would conquer the Chinese language and open up a vast new market to Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and more — just the way it had other languages and markets in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

It never did (for reasons I explain in my new book coming out soon from MIT Press), and yet the fantasy didn’t die. It was renewed in the age of computing and, by the 1990s, seemed to many to have come true: computers throughout China began to look “just like ours,” even including the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which today is ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Western world, people began to assume that the Latin alphabet had finally “conquered” Chinese — just like they assumed it always would. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Jillian Kay Melchior

Mizzou’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, Ellen De Graffenreid, received a disheartening email last fall at the pinnacle of the crisis on campus. A disgruntled parent wrote to the university’s Board of Curators, describing how her son, a sophomore, considered transferring out, while their two high-school-aged children “have all but eliminated Mizzou from their college list.”

WATCH: Exclusive: Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up a landmine in the desert

Someone had forwarded the note to the university’s Department of Marketing and Communications, adding: “I’m sure you already know this but you have a PR nightmare on your hands.” De Graffenreid, in turn, forwarded it to the college’s leadership, adding the letter from a parent was “pretty representative of the middle of the road people we are losing.”

New correspondence reviewed by Heat Street and National Review depicts the cataclysmic backlash against the University of Missouri as its administrators grappled with demands from rowdy protestors, a hunger-striking grad student, and a boycotting football team. The protests ultimately toppled both the president and the chancellor.

Nico Savidge:

Just before the UW-Milwaukee professors’ meeting Tuesday, Walker’s office issued a scathing statement deriding the no-confidence votes and faculty tenure.

“Some faculty bodies … appear more interested in protecting outdated ‘job for life’ tenure than about helping students get the best education possible,” Walker said. “The university should not be about protecting the interests of the faculty, but about delivering value and excellence to Wisconsin.”

The governor’s rebuke of faculty illustrates an important limit to their symbolic resolutions: While Cross may be unpopular enough among many professors to prompt no-confidence votes, he still has the backing of the Board of Regents that controls his job, and both he and the Regents have support among Republicans lawmake

Dr Joyce Stallworth:

Over my 25 years as a teacher turned university professor and administrator, I have watched countless numbers of students enter and leave college – most are well prepared to harness the realities of life after leaving the college cocoon while others are less well equipped. Freshmen arrive on college campuses with different levels of academic preparation; different aptitudes and proclivities; and different goals and agendas for their first substantial attempt at making it on their own. Parents, while you still have some modicum of influence over your children’s decision-making, please:

Do all you can to ensure that they do not pursue fields of study that offer very few prospects for gainful employment after graduation. Even if your children decide during their college matriculation to apply to graduate school, they need to pursue undergraduate majors that will yield solid prospects for employment. Graduate school plans change, and you want to avoid their boomeranging back to your house. I have seen, for example, a scant few nursing, engineering, mathematics or science education, accounting, and finance majors without multiple job offers after graduation. I have seen tons of psychology, sociology, English (and I was one!), and political science majors end their university matriculation jobless. The goal must not be singularly focused on getting accepted into college; the goal is graduating from college prepared for the next stage of life. Therefore, post-graduation planning must start with the admissions process, not as an afterthought while sending out graduation invitations.

Molly Beck:

More than 100 school districts have spent $138 million above their state-imposed revenue limits without voter approval since 2009, according to an analysis from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Since that year, school districts have been able to spend above their revenue caps without first going to voters if the money is being used for projects that are intended to improve energy efficiency in the district. In all, 147 school districts have used the exception.

According to the report, school districts rarely took advantage of the exception until 2012 — after Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers tightened revenue limits for districts.

MIT:

An international group of mathematicians at MIT and other institutions has released a new online resource that provides detailed maps of previously uncharted mathematical terrain.

Spotlight team reporters Jenn Abelson, Bella English, Jonathan Saltzman, and Todd Wallack, with editors Scott Allen and Amanda Katz.:

Steven Starr reached into the back of his hallway closet and fished out the old camera, a gift nearly 50 years ago from the man he says molested him.

“It’s like a talisman or a grim reminder,’’ he said, holding the dusty Minolta Autocord in his Los Angeles apartment. Not that he could ever forget what he alleges happened to him when he was 11 at the Fessenden School.

In 1968, he was a lonely sixth-grader from Long Island when he met James Dallmann, a Harvard graduate who taught geography at the all-boys private school in West Newton and was an avid photographer.

Kate Linebaugh:

Third-grader Andrew Calabrese carries his backpack everywhere he goes at his San Diego-area school. His backpack isn’t just filled with books, it is carrying his robotic pancreas.

The device, long considered the Holy Grail of Type 1 diabetes technology, wasn’t constructed by a medical-device company. It hasn’t been approved by regulators.

It was put together by his father.

Jason Calabrese, a software engineer, followed instructions that had been shared online to hack an old insulin pump so it could automatically dose the hormone in response to his son’s blood-sugar levels. Mr. Calabrese got the approval of Andrew’s doctor for his son to take the home-built device to school.

The Calabreses aren’t alone. More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. The systems—known in the industry as artificial pancreases or closed loop systems—have been studied for decades, but improvements to sensor technology for real-time glucose monitoring have made them possible.

Rachel Korn:

On Friday, Harvard University announced its plan to ban students from being in final clubs, fraternities or sororities while at the same time holding leadership positions in official campus organizations, such as the student newspaper or sports teams. The move came after months of heated discussion over the role of such clubs in the Harvard social scene and concerns about sexual assault and gender discrimination.

But at least some of the clubs are putting up a fight. And even in the absence of threatened lawsuits, the school faces challenges just implementing its new rules.

An advisory group of faculty, students and administrators will develop procedures for putting the rules in place, with further details of who is in that group being released in coming months, according to spokeswoman Rachael Dane.

Ken Lorg:

Here are 10 tips on how to do good in school and also get good grades in school.

Know what you are good at, and what you are not good at

Find every single thing you’re good at first, then everything you are not so good at and what you aren’t necessarily the best in. Put both on a big sheet of paper and stick it in your room somewhere where you can see it every day. Once you see your weaknesses every day, psychologically, you will start to try and get rid of them.

Nature:

Before publishing this article, the editors of Nature asked me to declare any competing interests. This is routine practice with most journals and is intended to address the serious issue of bias in research. The problem is that after competing interests are disclosed in published research, almost nothing is done with them.

Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi:

Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi are undergraduate sophomore students at the University of Washington (UW) studying Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and Business Administration, respectively. The two met their freshman year and connected over a shared interest in invention and problem solving.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

College bound high school students can now learn from one of the best sources in the country. The Concord Review is offering a two-week intensive expository writing workshops, led by a Harvard Ph.D. historian. The workshop will be held on the campus of Regis College, just west of Boston in Weston, Massachusetts.

Thirty percent of students published in The Concord Review have been admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale, and many have gone to other Ivy League colleges, and MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Caltech, and so forth. The Dean of Admissions at Harvard has written: “We have been very happy to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by a number of our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admission decisions…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

132 of the TCR authors have gone to Harvard—11%.

The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only journal in the world for the academic history papers of secondary students, now with 1,198 essays (average length 7,400 words) by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.

Students who work on research papers during the TCR Summer Program are not guaranteed to be published in the journal, but the work they will do gives them an advantage in preparation for expository writing in college over their peers who do not have such practice.

There are very few opportunities for high school students to work on serious term papers in history. Most of the emphasis is on STEM and personal writing, and usually high school teachers have so many students that they cannot possibly find the time to advise students on a 5,000-word history paper. A national study, commissioned by The Concord Review, found that a very large majority of high school teachers do not assign term papers, and colleges only ask for the 500-word personal essay. As a result almost all of our high school graduates arrive in college never having written a serious research paper. This is the reason so many colleges, even Harvard and Stanford, now require a writing course for all their first-year students.

The instructor for the course holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Harvard University, and has advised many Harvard undergraduates on their honors theses.

The course is full for this Summer, and includes students from Korea and China, as well as from across the United States. Students are welcome to join the waitlist at tcr.org/summer.

Charles Murray:

I continue my exploration of the scores for the bubble quiz that have been registered on the NewsHour website, now numbering more than 50,000.

If you want your child to grow up clueless about mainstream white America, what are the zip codes that have the best track record?

And the winner is… zip code 10023.

To answer that question, I used the 50,464 cases with a score on the bubble quiz and the zip code where the person lived at age 10 that were available as of yesterday morning when I started this exercise. I asked my statistical software to calculate the median bubble score for every zip code represented in those 50,464 cases. Since I couldn’t make any judgments about zip codes that were represented by just a few people, I chose 10 as the lower limit of scores that I would examine more closely. There’s still a lot of room for oddball results with a sample size of 10, but this procedure gave me a useful starting point for examining patterns.

David Weinberger:

The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers, and, worse still, polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page.

Perhaps our attitude to the net has changed because we now see how bad it is for knowledge. Or perhaps the net has so utterly transformed knowledge that we don’t recognize knowledge when we see it.

For philosopher Michael P. Lynch, our fears are warranted — the internet is a wrong turn in the history of knowledge. “Information technology,” Professor Lynch argues in his new book, The Internet of Us, “while expanding our ability to know in one way, is actually impeding our ability to know in other, more complex ways.” He pursues his argument with commendable seriousness, clarity, and attunement to historical context — and yet he misses where knowledge actually lives on the net, focusing instead on just one aspect of the phenomenon of knowledge. He is far from alone in this.

Elise Young:

Free lectures, admission to athletic games and concerts, even shuttles to Trader Joe’s are some of the perks that neighbors of Princeton University get from New Jersey’s only Ivy League school.

A growing number of residents, though, resent the gestures. Riding a national wave of discontent with nonprofit institutions, they’re suing to challenge the tax-exempt status of Princeton, whose $22.7 billion endowment makes it the fourth-richest U.S. university. The outcome could cut homeowners’ annual property taxes, averaging $17,699, by a third. It also could end the freebies that make Princeton a cushy oasis while other New Jersey towns, burdened by high public-worker costs and flat state aid, struggle to maintain basic services.

Joseph Livingstone:

“As if being 1984 weren’t enough.” Thomas Pynchon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, marked the unnerving year with an honest question about seemingly dystopian technology: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” The Association of American Publishers records that by 1984, between 40 and 50 percent of American authors were using word processors. It had been a quarter-century since novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in which he saw intellectual life split into “literary” and “scientific” halves. Pynchon posited that the division no longer held true; it obscured the reality about the way things were going. “Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors,” he wrote. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.”

The literary history of the early years of word processing—the late 1960s through the mid-’80s—forms the subject of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s new book, Track Changes. The year 1984 was a key moment for writers deciding whether to upgrade their writing tools. That year, the novelist Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer—itself named for the error message it spat up so often; and Gore Vidal grumped that word processing was “erasing” literature. He grumped in vain. By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)

Sarah O’Connor:

One day last week at 9.29am I hunched nervously over my keyboard and prepared to do battle with an entity called Emma. We were each primed to write about the official UK employment data at 9.30am and file our stories to my editor. I was sure Emma would be quicker than me, but I really hoped I would be better.
Her creator, a start-up called Stealth, calls her an “autonomous artificial intelligence” designed to deliver professional services such as research and analysis. Since it is fashionable to predict that AI will supplant white-collar workers including journalists, I wanted to put it to the test.

Emma was indeed quick: she filed in 12 minutes to my 35. Her copy was also better than I expected. Her facts were right and she even included relevant context such as the possibility of Brexit (although she was of the dubious opinion that it would be a “tailwind” for the UK economy). But to my relief, she lacked the most important journalistic skill of all: the ability to distinguish the newsworthy from the dull. While she correctly pointed out the jobless rate was unchanged, she overlooked that the number of jobseekers had risen for the first time in almost a year.

Susan Pinker:

Adults often make snap judgments about babies. First impressions lead us to assign them personalities, such as fearful, active or easy to please, and with good reason. Fifty years of evidence shows that babies begin life with traits that set the stage for how they interact with the world—and how the world reacts to them.

That might be one reason why siblings can have such wildly different takes on their own families. Once a mother has assessed her child as shy or fussy, she tends to tailor her behavior to that baby’s personality.

But what if babies make hard and fast judgments about us, too? Just because they can’t say much doesn’t mean they don’t have strong opinions. New research shows that babies are astute observers of the emotional tenor of adult interactions and censor their own behavior accordingly. Published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, the study shows that infants who get a glimpse of a stranger involved in an angry exchange with another stranger will then act more tentatively during play.

Alan Borsuk:

A couple of weeks ago, Means outlined a plan in which an unknown number of schools (maybe three?) would be designated to be part of the new program — and the agency that would run them would be MPS itself, with oversight from an independent school operator.

The teachers would be MPS employees, the money to run the schools (at the charter school funding rate, which is about $2,000 less than what MPS itself gets) would go to MPS and the schools would go back to being regular MPS schools in five years if performance improved.

There are ideas for programs at the schools raised in Means’ proposal, which generally are in-line with the “community schools” initiative that MPS itself is trying to grow. This involves extending more services to students and their families, while making changes to academic programs.

I spoke to many of the key players last week. Just about everyone is edgy and uncertain what’s going to happen next.

Related: “an emphasis on adult employment“.

Thomas Ricks:

But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.

I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.

Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.

VICTOR WANG & QI XU:

In the wake of a report released last month that revealed the lack of ethnic and political diversity among Yale Law School professors, the law school community has begun a conversation about why that gap exists, and how to address it.
The report, which was written by a committee of faculty and students over the past year and disseminated in March, addresses diversity and inclusion within law school students and the faculty body. According to the report, although the law school’s faculty diversity levels are comparable to those of peer institutions, students still have concerns about racial, gender and political diversity among professors. After the release of the report, law students interviewed by the News voiced concerns about the lack of specificity in the section on faculty diversity, as compared to the section on student diversity. While the student section offered concrete suggestions for improvement, the section on faculty simply urged the administration to reconsider its approach to faculty diversity “more systematically” than it has in the past.

Law school administrators highlighted steps they have already taken steps to improve faculty diversity, such as extending offers to the most diverse slate of faculty in recent memory for next year, and soliciting funding from the University’s new $50 million faculty diversity initiative.

“[The lack of specificity in the faculty diversity section] is both intentional and inevitable,” said James Forman LAW ’92, a law professor and one of the co-chairs for the committee. “It is the faculty that makes the decision about who to hire. All [we] can do is to raise consciousness, put pressure and make sure the faculty understands that the issue is important. I don’t think you will ever be in a scenario where you find much more concrete information than what we got in the report.”

Timothy Martin & Melissa Korn:

Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: Make the wealthiest universities pay for it.

Elite U.S. schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups. State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits—or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.

“College costs have outpaced health-care inflation, and at the same time, there’s this benefit for endowments,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, complaining in an interview about the funds’ tax-free status. “I don’t want to assert a conclusion, but let’s put this in the ‘I’m just saying’ category.”

Mr. Roskam and two other Republican congressional leaders have asked 56 private colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion—including Harvard University, Yale University and Stanford University—for detailed information about their holdings and policies for rewarding large donors with naming rights.

Janet French:

teaching, Lisa Hilsenteger dutifully practised fire drills and mock school lockdowns.

But there was no rehearsal for commandeering a bus full of her young students through a burning city.

“There’s nothing more terrifying than to be in a crisis and not have your children with you,” said Hilsenteger, now out of harm’s way in Athabasca.

As a wildfire encroached on Fort McMurray Tuesday afternoon, Hilsenteger, the principal of Father Turcotte Elementary School, greeted busloads of children arriving from three evacuated Catholic schools in the city. Most families picked their children up from their school, or from Father Turcotte, but when downtown Fort McMurray was evacuated at 4 p.m., 15 children remained.

Julian Ring and Madeline Stocker:

Over the next three weeks, 177 faculty and staff must decide whether or not they want to take the College up on its offer to retire early in exchange for a relatively hefty severance package.

The deal, which administrators are projecting will save the College between $1.5–3.5 million per year, is known as a voluntary severance incentive package and is the first step in the administration’s long-term plan to cut spending while slowing the rate of tuition increase.

The payout is relatively straightforward. If a qualifying faculty or staff member — one who is at least 52 years of age, has held their position for 10 years or more and for whom the combination of age and service is a minimum of 75 years — chooses to take the deal, the College will pay the retiree one year’s salary and waive health insurance premiums for the first year after retirement.

“The places I’m familiar with that have done it have found that it’s really been a win-win,” College President Marvin Krislov said. “It’s helped people retire in a way that preserves their dignity and gives them some extra money, and it helps the institution in that it allows for predictability.”

Related: “An emphasis on adult employment“.

University of Cambridge:

To coincide with our 600th anniversary, Cambridge University Library has released a free downloadable iPad app that allows readers to leaf through the pages of texts that changed the world, including those by Newton and Darwin, and the Bible that sparked the printing revolution in the West.

Words that Changed the World brings together six revolutionary books from the collections of Cambridge University Library and offers readers the opportunity to leaf through the pages as if they were holding the books themselves. See the minds of great thinkers develop the theories and concepts which form the foundation of the modern world.

These unique copies of world-changing books were previously only accessible to visitors to the Library: we are now freeing them to be studied across the world as we celebrate the 600th anniversary of our foundation. Images showing these books from cover to cover give the experience of handing these priceless works, while experts discuss specific points of interest via videos to enable the reader to further understand the texts.

Mike Zamansky:

Yesterday, I ranted on about the College Board. This led to a Facebook hosted discussion which got me thinking a little more:

Advanced Placement exams basically exist because we don’t trust our high school teachers.

I usually use phrases like “society doesn’t trust” but let’s personalize it this time – for parents, think about whether or not you trust your kids teachers? Do you a large private, unaccountable organization more?

If you teach an advanced placement course, in order for your class to be listed as AP you have to submit your syllabus to the college board for approval. This sounds like they’re setting a standard but it’s not. I can point to a bunch of teachers who have submitted identical syllabi where sometimes it’s accepted but ofttimes it’s rejected. This is the syllabus we submitted originally for Stuy. Yes, we have high achieving kids, but given the fact that the syllabus was approved originally and that Stuy students just about all score 4 or 5 on APCS-A should tell you something about the level of care or competence of the College Board.

Related: Dane County, WI AP course offering comparison.

Muut:

required by law to write you a favourable reference letter when you leave. But since the letter must always sound positive, it can be interpreted in the most cynical way.

Flash forward more than a hundred years and we arrive to a situation where Germany, alongside with Switzerland, are the only countries in Europe where the employee has the right to a reference letter in which their performance is graded, the Arbeitszeugnis.

Not only that, the letter must be “kindly” written, not to “impede career advancement”. Should the employer not comply with this requirements, it will be an open invitation for a lawsuit.

This might sound like an advantageous situation for the employees, but after years of interactions, we’ve arrived to a status quo of misleading grades and hidden meanings that allow companies in Germany to grade you positively or negatively on each job you’ve had while avoiding any legal danger.

Olivia Lowenberg:

Are the expectations and demands for public school teachers too high? According to a new poll, they might be.

The poll, which was conducted by the advocacy organization Center on Education Policy, found that while teachers themselves may feel reasonably satisfied with the state of their own classroom, when it comes to the profession itself, the vast majority feel discontented and unheard by policymakers at both the state and national level.

“The last decade has been a turbulent time for many teachers,” Maria Ferguson, CEP’s executive director, said in a press release. “Teachers seem to be growing weary of the demands being placed on them and the inability to get their voices heard.”

CEP found that 46 percent, or nearly half, of teachers said state or district policies impeded their teaching. The vast majority of those surveyed, 94 percent, said their opinions weren’t taken into account in state or national decisions, and 77 percent said the same was true at the district level.

Shaun Walker:

After a buffet lunch, the four returned home and opened a bottle of champagne to toast Tim reaching his third decade. The brothers were tired; they had thrown a small house party the night before to mark Alex’s return from Singapore, and Tim planned to go out later. After the champagne, he went upstairs to message his friends about the evening’s plans. There came a knock at the door, and Tim’s mother called up that his friends must have come early, as a surprise.

At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at everyone to put their hands in the air. Upstairs, Tim had heard the knock and the shouting, and his first thought was that the police could be after him for underage drinking: nobody at the party the night before had been 21, and Boston police took alcohol regulations seriously.

Steven Walters:

The UW-Madison political science professor, an Ozaukee County native, was stunned by what northern Wisconsin residents told her in diners, coffee shops, back rooms and barns between 2007 and 2012.

“I did not expect to hear it, but many of the people I listened to in rural areas exhibited a multifaceted resentment toward urban areas,” Professor Katherine J. Cramer writes in her new book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

“That resentment was part of a perspective. I call it rural consciousness. It is a perspective rooted in place and class identities that convey a strong sense of distributive injustice.”

WHAT IS “rural consciousness”?
“First, rural consciousness was about perceptions of power, or who makes decisions and who decides what to even discuss. Second, it showed up with respect to perceptions of values and lifestyles. Third … it involved perceptions of resources or who gets what.”

Cramer listened over a period that spanned the end of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s second term, the first two years of controversial Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his Act 10, Walker’s survival of a recall vote, and the Great Recession. She left her UW office to bravely walk, often unannounced, into informal gatherings that bond rural residents and transmit gossip and perceptions.

Inside Higher Ed:

Nearly 150 deans of law schools have written to the Law School Admission Council to demand that it stop plans to kick out the University of Arizona for that institution’s decision to accept the GRE as an admissions test, in addition to accepting the Law School Admission Test. Arizona announced the shift in February, following analysis that found the GRE predicts first-year student performance. That prompted the Law School Admission Council to threaten to kick out Arizona for violating a rule to admit “substantially all” applicants based in part on LSAT scores. The law dean’s letter states that the rule should be changed, and that taking action against Arizona denies a law school the right to experiment.

John Perazzo:

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’” said Johnson.

Fon Boudreaux:

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

Think about it. Hard. Carefully.

If you were a 1916 American billionaire you could, of course, afford prime real-estate. You could afford a home on 5th Avenue or one overlooking the Pacific Ocean or one on your own tropical island somewhere (or all three). But when you travelled from your Manhattan digs to your west-coast palace, it would take a few days, and if you made that trip during the summer months, you’d likely not have air-conditioning in your private railroad car.

Reuters:

Facebook lost the first round in a court fight against some of its users who sued the social networking company, alleging it “unlawfully” collected and stored users’ biometric data derived from their faces in photographs.
 
 The judge presiding over the case in a California federal court on Thursday turned down Facebook’s motion seeking dismissal of the suit.
 
 Facebook filed the motion arguing that the users could not file a complaint under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) as they had agreed in their user agreement that California law would govern their disputes with the company, and that BIPA does not apply to “tag suggestions.”

Kaleem Caire:

As a “distinguished alumnus” of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I say “bravo” to Chancellor Blank. I am looking forward to meeting with her to discuss the recommendations that have been put forth, and how quickly and thoroughly they will be implemented. We need transformational leadership, not just a few easy-to-implement solutions, and we need full implementation — soon.

As an alternative to jail time, the university should partner with UW students, faculty, local community organizations and the Dane County district attorney to implement a serious restorative justice process to address both the racist and anti-racist graffiti war that’s been waged on the campus. The three young white men who aren’t students and who were recently arrested for spray painting racist graffiti should be included in this as well.

Jail time, in these cases, can harden hearts, not heal them, and lead to future criminal and violent acts by these young people and/or others. It can also satisfy a person’s wrong-headed desire to be a martyr for illegitimate movements steeped in the promotion of violence and hatred. Is that what we want in our community?

A better strategy to change behavior long-term in these cases is to address the core of the problem — to heal people’s hearts while addressing ignorance and hate head-on. Those directly engaged in the crime, and those directly and indirectly hurt by it, should be included. And it should include more than a few conversations.

Molly Murray:

Hidden behind the state’s steady population growth, economists and planners see an alarming trend. People 55 and over are moving into Delaware from more expensive states in waves large enough to make up for the exodus of young people leaving to seek better jobs and more exciting lifestyles.

In 1980, 30 percent of the population was between 18 and 34. Today that figure has dropped to 23 percent – even as the number of those 18-to-34 has grown exponentially compared to the overall population. These millennials are the largest such population in the last three decades, surpassed only by the “Baby Boomers.”

About 61 percent of people born in Delaware now live somewhere else. A century ago, 40 percent of native-born Delawareans moved out of state. Much of this migration has consistently been young, well-educated people seeking opportunity elsewhere.

Business and industry were the old model for economic growth. High tech jobs are the stars of today’s economy, and wherever there’s growth in that genre, millennials come with energy and ambition to expand urban redevelopment.

Brandon Zatt:

He then launches into a demonstration of free software that presents literature and poetry lesson plans complete with 3D graphics and animation. This particular software, called The Emperor’s New Clothes, is aimed at 12- and 13-year-olds and comes with desert or tropical backdrops, options to view proceedings by day or night and the ability to add animated graphics of the emperor himself, all of which is meant to excite children’s interest and help them better visualise the lessons.

“For a very long time,” says Liu, “knowledge was very expensive. But the internet has somehow solved this problem. Now lots of knowledge, especially information, is free. I think we can all feel this, it’s become a part of our society now.”

Ann Lukits:

A new study challenges the notion that girls are better at reading than boys.

The research, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that boys outscored girls on reading tests if they were told the tests were a game. But boys scored significantly lower than girls when told the tests were assessments of their reading skills.

Previous research has shown that girls read more often than boys, but most studies have focused on the gender gap in math that favors boys, researchers said.

The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls age 9 years old on average, from four third-grade classes at three schools. All classes received a silent reading test that required students to underline as many animal names as possible in three minutes from a list of 486 words (animal names comprised half the list). Two classes were told the test was an evaluation of their reading abilities, and two were told it was a new animal fishing game designed for a fun magazine.

In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls.

Caveat: The study was relatively small and involved children who were still learning how to read.

Fiona McDonald:

No more physics and maths, Finland to stop teaching individual subjects
The future is all about learning by topic, not subject.
FIONA MACDONALD 24 MAR 2015
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Finland, one of the leading educational hotspots in the world, is embarking on one of the most radical overhauls in modern education. By 2020, the country plans to phase out teaching individual subjects such as maths, chemistry and physics, and instead teach students by ‘topics’ or broad phenomena, so that there’s no more question about “what’s the point of learning this?”

What does that mean exactly? Basically, instead of having an hour of geography followed by an hour of history, students will now spend, say, two hours learning about the European Union, which covers languages, economics, history and geography. Or students who are taking a vocational course might study ‘cafeteria services’, which would involve learning maths, languages and communication skills, as Richard Garner reports for The Independent. So although students will still learn all the important scientific theories, they’ll be finding out about them in a more applied way, which actually sounds pretty awesome.

Jeremy Rogalski

The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street.

Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school.

“I thought it was a joke, I couldn’t believe this was happening,” White said.

We asked her son about his classroom experience.

I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?”

Nathanial White: “No sir.”

I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word of French?”

Nathanial White: “Bonjour, but everybody knows that.”

The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school.

Keith Humphreys:

Two years ago, the Washington state began an unprecedented policy experiment by allowing large-scale production and sale of recreational marijuana to the public. The effects on public health and safety and on the relationship of law enforcement to minority communities will take years to manifest fully, but one impact has become abundantly clear: Legalized marijuana is getting very cheap very quickly.

Marijuana price data from Washington’s Liquor and Cannabis Board was aggregated by Steve Davenport of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. After a transitory rise in the first few months, which Davenport attributes to supply shortages as the system came on line, both retail prices and wholesale prices have plummeted. Davenport said that prices “are now steadily falling at about 2 percent per month. If that trend holds, prices may fall 25 percent each year going forward.”

Natalie Marsh:

GFA will use the McGraw-Hill Education software, ALEKS, in a College Algebra and Problem Solving course showing the company’s development beyond its rank as a textbook provider.

Targeting K-20 students, the software gives personalised instruction based on the individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. The GFA deal marks the first time the adaptive software has been used in a MOOC format.

“ALEKS helps us take one of the most daunting classes – college math – and personalise it to meet students where they are and help them steadily master the concepts critical to their ultimate success,” said Adrian Sannier, chief academic technology officer for EdPlus at ASU.

Greg Richmond:

Charter schools celebrate a milestone this year: 25 years. In our nation, 6,800 charter schools serve nearly 3 million students. Many of these schools are achieving extraordinary results.

But instead of celebrating the contributions made by charters to public education over 25 years—and there is plenty to celebrate—I’d rather focus on what must change.

The Economist:

new report from PayScale, a research firm, calculates the returns to a college degree. Its authors compare the career earnings of graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, net of financial aid. College is usually worth it, but not always, it transpires. And what you study matters far more than where you study it.

Edward Snowden:

And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

William Anderson:

The law was not controversial at first. Female college enrollment grew (today, the female-male undergraduate ratio is 57 percent to 43) and women’s collegiate sports were just catching on. Title IX helped increase female participation in college sports, which became the law’s main focus for more than 30 years.

I was on the University of Tennessee men’s track team in the early 1970s, which received substantially more support than the women’s program. We stayed in nice facilities on road trips, while the women piled numerous athletes into one room. Those not lucky enough to have a bed slept on the floor.

After the U.S. women’s soccer team defeated China in the 1999 world championships, broadcaster Robin Roberts claimed Title IX was largely responsible for the team’s success, and most people agreed.

But despite its apparent successes, Title IX—or, more specifically, the government’s interpretation of Title IX—has helped turn college campuses into battlegrounds.

Sean Stevens:

A new book by education professor Joanna Williams explores how changing ideas about the purpose of a university have altered the concept of academic freedom and provided a foundation for student censorship in the U.K. The book is called “Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge” and Williams was recently interviewed by Inside Higher Ed.

In the interview Williams discusses her model of academic freedom as a “marketplace of ideas” where even the most controversial, contentious, and/or reprehensible views are given a public hearing:

@baekdal:

When discussing the future of newspapers, we have a tendency to focus only on the publishing side. We talk about the changes in formats, the new reader behaviors, the platforms, the devices, and the strange new world of distributed digital distribution, which are not just forcing us to do things in new ways, but also atomizes the very core of the newspaper.

But while the publishing side of things is undergoing tremendous changes, so is the journalistic and editorial side. The old concept of creating a package of news was designed for a public that we assumed was uninformed by default, but this is no longer the case.

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus. When writing for the uninformed, your focus is to report the news, which is what every newspaper is doing today. But when focusing on the misinformed, just reporting the news doesn’t actually solve the public’s needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.

Jonathan Bennett:

This text began life as a lecture to the Athénée Royal of Paris in 1819.

First launched: April 2010

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning::

Increasingly college students throughout the United States complain of perceived slights they call microaggressions, they demand safe spaces where they can be protected from harmful ideas, and they ask for trigger warnings to alert them to course material that might cause discomfort. We have argued that these are all manifestations of victimhood culture — a morality in which people display a high sensitivity to slight, handle conflicts by appealing to authorities, and seek to portray themselves as weak and in need of help. Older moral injunctions to ignore minor and unintentional offenses get cast aside, and those who successfully identify as victims or allies of victims gain a kind of moral status.

Moral cultures reflect their social structures, and victimhood culture is no different: It occurs in a context where there is cultural diversity, social equality, and stable authority. Victimhood culture thrives on modern college campuses because these conditions are present. Yet as the contributors at Heterodox Academy have pointed out, the diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender expression at college campuses is counterbalanced by a homogeneity of political views. And though this is not something we’ve discussed previously, we believe the presence of one form of homogeneity amid other forms of diversity shapes conflict on college campuses and is crucial to understanding the moral climate we see there. To see why, consider how the presence or absence of diversity shapes morality.

Te-Ping Chen and Miriam Jordan:

As a high-school student in this eastern Chinese city of 4.6 million, she dreamed of going to college and studying education. But most Chinese universities are uninspiring, she said. She heard cheating was pervasive and that many people skip class. Students are required to study “Mao Zedong thought.”

Just getting in takes years of study for the gaokao entrance exam, which is like the SAT on steroids. Students must memorize poetry tracing back to the 7th century. Few of the millions who take it get into China’s top universities, with competition in Ms. Fan’s home province of Jiangsu particularly fierce.

Going through such a process “where I don’t learn anything” would be soul-crushing, said Ms. Fan, 20 years old. “There’s no meaning there.”

There was another option: America. She had heard it was dangerous and wondered if she’d need to carry a knife. Her parents were against it.

Laurie Futterman:

everyone had the desire and ability to complete a four-, six- or eight-year college program, how would that impact society? Who would maintain America’s transport systems? Who would build its skyscrapers, and space shuttles? Who would wire and plumb our structures? Who would take our X-rays, build and fix the engines that keep our cities running?

Preparing high school youth for success in the world today requires a vastly different educational experience than a generation ago. Today, many of America’s students are not meaningfully engaged or motivated in their high school academic experience. And as they grow closer to the launch pad, students are fraught with anxiety. For some, it’s the stress of being accepted into a university, for others, it is a time to match skills with interest as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Our society and educational systems over-emphasize college entrance while noticeably disregard the merit of trade and vocational career achievement. It is unfair and impractical to think that every high school student desires or is able to attend a four-year university right out of high school. Some students need time to explore before deciding on higher education pursuits, some may not be able to meet the rigors of academic challenge, and others may have a distinct calling altogether. Whatever the reason, choosing vocation over college should be a decision made with the same resources and in the same regard as choosing.

R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy:

neighborhoods of varying degrees of affluence, suburban public schools are typically better resourced than their inner-city peers and known for their extracurricular offerings and college preparatory programs. Despite the glowing opportunities that many families associate with suburban schooling, accessing a district’s resources is not always straightforward, particularly for black and poorer families.

Moving beyond class and race-based explanations, Inequality in the Promised Land focuses on the everyday interactions between parents, students, teachers, and school administrators in order to understand why resources seldom trickle down to a district’s racial and economic minorities.

Related: “THEY’RE ALL RICH, WHITE KIDS AND THEY’LL DO JUST FINE” — NOT!.

Doug Ericsson:

Gary Bennett wants to assure you he’s not out to destroy the Madison School District.

The former legislative staffer leads the new Office of Educational Opportunity at the University of Wisconsin System. That makes him the unofficial “charter czar,” the guy who now has the ability to bypass local school boards and authorize independent charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee.

It’s a controversial idea, deemed by opponents as unnecessary at best, poisonous at worst. Critics believe independent charter schools siphon money and resources from traditional public schools. Supporters contend they’re needed to stimulate innovation and correct failures in the current system.

In an interview, Bennett acknowledged that his new role is viewed negatively by some, but he suggested he’s not the enemy. At times, he spoke rather kindly of the Madison School District.

“We have good schools here,” said Bennett, 33, who has lived in Madison since moving to the city in 2008 to attend UW Law School. “We just need more good schools in more areas.”

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

Eun Kyung Kim:

When he decided against going to a traditional high school, Warner Adams got teased. But now he’s getting the last laugh.

“People always make fun of vocational schools, but now they’re like, ‘Oh man, I wish I went there,’” said Adams, now a junior at Pathfinder Regional Vocational Technical High School, where every recent graduate found a job upon graduating.

In Massachusetts, where the school is located, the average starting salary in manufacturing is about $45,000. “I can make as much money as someone going to college, coming straight out of high school, and I don’t have to pay for college loans or anything like that,” Adams said.

Pathfinder is a beneficiary of a program called “Amp It Up,” a Massachusetts initiative to encourage students to explore careers in advanced manufacturing. Instead of offering dark and dusty shops full of woodworking or table saws, many vocational schools are now full of state-of-the art machines and computers that teach students code, programming and design skills.

Michael Bloomberg:

The most useful knowledge that you leave here with today has nothing to do with your major. It’s about how to study, cooperate, listen carefully, think critically and resolve conflicts through reason. Those are the most important skills in the working world, and it’s why colleges have always exposed students to challenging and uncomfortable ideas.

The fact that some university boards and administrations now bow to pressure and shield students from these ideas through “safe spaces,” “code words” and “trigger warnings” is, in my view, a terrible mistake.

The whole purpose of college is to learn how to deal with difficult situations — not run away from them. A microaggression is exactly that: micro. And one of the most dangerous places on a college campus is a safe space, because it creates the false impression that we can insulate ourselves from those who hold different views.

We can’t do this, and we shouldn’t try — not in politics or in the workplace. In the global economy, and in a democratic society, an open mind is the most valuable asset you can possess.

Hanna Rosin:

A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour is and whether he can wait that long. When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him, although it’s inspired by one. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but has no marks of newness and could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek where a big, faded plastic boat that most people would have thrown away is wedged into the bank. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies.

Elizabeth Bernstein:

I’ve been going on a series of dates lately.

I exchanged numbers with the person sitting next to me at a Cabernet tasting at my favorite wine bar and went for a coffee with a neighbor I met walking my dog. I reached out to people from my past I haven’t seen in years, to see if they’re newly available.

I’m trying to make new friends.

A body of research shows that people with solid friendships live healthier, longer lives. Friendship decreases blood pressure and stress, reduces the risk of depression and increases longevity, in large part because someone is watching out for us.

Charles Homans:

On April 12 last year, Hillary Clinton formally announced her run for the presidency by posting a two-­minute video on YouTube. For the first minute and a half, Clinton was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the video showed a montage of a dozen or so Clinton supporters: a ­middle-­aged white woman tending to her garden; two Hispanic brothers starting a business; a pregnant young black woman and her husband unpacking boxes in a sun-­dappled suburban living room; a burly, bullet-headed white man surveying an American-­flag-­draped warehouse.

It was a carefully constructed portrait of the American middle class, or the parts of it that tend to vote Democratic — like the patchwork of Carhartt and Ann Taylor that Barack Obama gathered around himself for a speech in Cincinnati early in the 2012 campaign, when he proclaimed himself a “warrior for the middle class.” American politicians genuflect toward the middle class so reflexively that failing to do so in a speech or a statement about the economy seems almost heretical — which it turned out was the most remarkable thing about Clinton’s video.

Nicholas Farrell

Let us suppose that along the coast of Normandy up to one million non-EU migrants are waiting to be packed like sardines in small unseaworthy vessels and to cross the English Channel.

Let us suppose that first the Royal Navy, then the navies of a dozen other EU countries, start to search for all such vessels in the Channel right up to the French coast, out into the North Sea and the Atlantic even, and then ferry all the passengers on board to Dover, Folkestone, Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton in a surreal modern-day never-ending version of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Would the British government agree to take them all? What of the British people? And if they did agree, what would the British government and people do with all the migrants? How would they cope?

Well, Italy has been invaded in just this way, by migrants from many nations all coming over here from Libya. And Italy’s unelected government has agreed to take them all. This makes the Italian people — who are among the least racist in Europe — very angry. It’s hard to blame them.

Dylan Williams:

Since the beginning of Psychology as a field of study, psychologists have been categorizing people: as introverts and extroverts, in terms of their conscientiousness, their openness to experience, and so on. While many of these classification systems examine general personality, a number of classifications look specifically at the way people think—what is sometimes called their cognitive style. When solving problems, for example, some people like to focus on getting the evidence that is most likely to be relevant to the problem at hand, while others have a tendency to “think out of the box.”

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst:

In the United States, public policy and expenditure intended to improve the prospects of children from low-income families have focused on better preparing children for school through Head Start and universal pre-K. This school readiness approach differs from the dominant model of public support for early care and learning in Northern Europe, which places more emphasis on supporting families. It also differs from other government programs in the U.S., such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, that support low-income parents of young children by boosting income. Empirical comparisons of the impact on school achievement of boosting family income vs. providing free pre-K for four-year-olds, summarized in this paper, suggest that supporting family income is a more cost effective expenditure. A policy midpoint between more money for families vs. more money for pre-K is more money for families to spend on their young children. All these policy options should be on the table and subject to test as the nation moves towards increased attention to and investment in the early years.

Ben Bland:

Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers. Robotic arms pick up sinks from a pile, buff them until they gleam and then deposit them on a self-driving trolley that takes them to a computer-linked camera for a final quality check.

The company, which exports 1,500 sinks a day, spent more than $3m on the robots. “These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people,” says Chen. “I’ve never had a whole batch ruined by robots. I look forward to replacing more humans in future,” he adds, with a wry smile.

Daniel Cullen:

In the years following the global financial crisis, the academic study and teaching of economics has come in for a bashing. In fact, it has faced the kind of fundamental criticism rarely directed towards entire disciplines.

The apparent failure of economists to predict, let alone prevent, the 2008 crash has led to accusations that conventional economic teaching cannot adequately explain the complex dynamics and risks of modern economies.
Among those championing reform have been disgruntled students, who have demanded that a more “pluralist”, diverse, range of theories be taught on their undergraduate degrees

Benjamin Mullen:

Bloomberg has become the latest news organization to place bets on automation as a measure to cover so-called “commodity news” and free up time for enterprise journalism.

In a memo to Bloomberg’s staff Wednesday, Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait announced that the data-driven news organization is creating a 10-person team to determine how automation can be used throughout the company’s portfolio of editorial products.

Anemona Hartocollis:

Still, he said, “I breathed a sigh of relief.”
In the last few years, small liberal arts colleges have been under financial siege, forced to re-examine their missions and justify their existence. Even several established and respected ones — Bard College, Yeshiva University, Mills College and Morehouse College, among others — have received negative financial ratings.
Not that long ago, colleges across the country enjoyed a seemingly endless supply of candidates and were pouring money into expansion plans. Some added costly luxury amenities like rock-climbing walls to seem more attractive. Some increased tuition on the theory that high tuition connotes prestige, but then cut their cash flow by giving out generous scholarships and grants to lure students despite their price. (At Franklin Pierce not a single student pays the sticker price.)
Now, as times change, the colleges are fighting over a dwindling pool of applicants. In parts of the country, the number of high school graduates is dropping. At the same time, students and parents have started to question the choice of expensive private schools that leave them with high debt and no clear job prospects, taking a second look at public universities. And the reduction in demand is making it harder to pay for some of the overbuilding.

Via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

Mobilizing One City: Early Experiences Elevate Everything

High quality preschool education contributes significantly to a child’s long-term success. Their first 1,000 days of life set the stage for the rest of their lives. We can close the achievement gap that’s holding back children if we start early. Join us as Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, MD discusses how preschool makes a big difference, and how you can help.

Robert Lucky:

“The robots are coming for your jobs!” That was the gist of numerous news reports following the release of the 2016 U.S. Economic Report of the President. My first thought on reading this was that anyone who saw the videos of clumsy robots falling helplessly during the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge must have been incredulous: “That’s what’s coming after my job!?”

My second thought was more sobering. Robots are, after all, only a subset of the computerization leading to the automation of traditional jobs. As engineers we can see steady progress in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data. Contemplating this, it suddenly occurred to me to worry about engineering jobs. Are they threatened as well?

Andrew Ross Sorkin:

He continued: “If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.”

NOLA:

Under Peterson’s bill, the Recovery system would give back oversight of its 52 schools, all of them now charters, as well as control of campuses, enrollment, truancy and expulsion services.

The school system would be reunified, but radically reimagined, like whittling Lincoln Logs to Tinkertoys. The bill would not restore the muscular School Board and superintendent that were undercut in the state takeover; instead, the Recovery schools would return as independent charters run by nonprofit boards, as they are now. The Orleans Parish School Board would be largely an oversight body that sets benchmarks for charters to meet and intervenes to revoke charters if necessary. In fact, the bill includes a provision to give existing Orleans Parish charters the option of gaining more financial autonomy.

And the new system would likely involve some of the same people now in charge. “We will be working to recruit individuals who are currently working at RSD to become OPSB staff,” Lewis said. “That’s part of what needs to happen.”

The bill was a group effort, Peterson said, “heavily negotiated” for more than a month. Lewis and Dobard submitted some of the language themselves, she said, to ensure the compromise would work. Supporters include the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, Stand for Children and numerous Recovery charter schools and networks.

Jessica Wong:

Many high school students face pressure from classmates, peers and parents to work towards attending the best university possible post-graduation, regardless if the school is a world-renowned university or community college. Every year, on May 2, the majority of Palo Alto High School seniors follow the tradition of proudly donning the colors and logos of their destinations for the fall, signifying the end of the exhaustive college process and celebrating the beginning of a new, exciting chapter in their lives. However, even after beginning college, students may face scrutiny for their school of choice, based solely on name and reputation. Those who choose to attend universities notorious for having active party scenes are sometimes looked down upon by others — their accomplishments reduced to the reputation of a college.

John Bohannon:

last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. His project straddles both operations management and behavioral economics, so Rahimi had a lot of ground to cover.

But every time he found the abstract of a relevant paper, he hit a paywall. Although Amirkabir is one of the top research universities in Iran, international sanctions and economic woes have left it with poor access to journals. To read a 2011 paper in Applied Mathematics and Computation, Rahimi would have to pay the publisher, Elsevier, $28. A 2015 paper in Operations Research, published by the U.S.-based company INFORMS, would cost $30.

Lisa Birnbach:

In what could be described as a huge breach of trust, on March 3, 2015, the president of the all-female Sweet Briar College, a 114-year-old mainstay of southern liberal-arts schools, announced that the college would be closing—for good—after graduation a few months later. Citing “insurmountable financial challenges,” he and his board voted to give up and bail out. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media covered it closely. The public (many of whom had been unaware that a place called Sweet Briar still—or ever—existed) assumed that a college for women in rural Virginia meant … what? Iced tea on a porch? D.A.R. meetings in a columned house? Had women’s colleges officially become archaic in this post-feminist, gender-fluid, college-debt-laden era

economist:

COLLEGE degree has never been more necessary: graduates earn, on average, 80% more than high-school graduates. Yet ever more Americans are taking on serious debt in exchange for that diploma. Between 2004 and 2014, student-loan balances more than tripled to nearly $1.2 trillion. The average debtor leaves college owing around $27,000.

Some of this mounting debt is good news. More Americans are going to college—undergraduate enrolment rose by nearly 40% between 2000 and 2010, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics. Many are also staying around for a second degree. But the cost of college has also risen sharply, as state spending on higher education has plummeted. Average tuition fees have surged 40% in the decade to 2015-16 for full-time students at public four-year colleges, and 26% at private ones. Those who take longer to graduate—as many increasingly do—simply rack up more loans.

Motoko Rich, Amanda Cox and Matthew Bloch:

Why racial achievement gaps were so pronounced in affluent school districts is a puzzling question raised by the data. Part of the answer might be that in such communities, students and parents from wealthier families are constantly competing for ever more academic success. As parents hire tutors, enroll their children in robotics classes and push them to solve obscure math theorems, those children keep pulling away from those who can’t afford the enrichment.

“Our high-end students who are coming in are scoring off the charts,” said Jeff Nash, executive director of community relations for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

The school system is near the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina, and 30 percent of students in the schools qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, below the national average.

The wealthier students tend to come from families where, “let’s face it, both the parents are Ph.D.s, and that kid, no matter what happens in the school, is pressured from kindergarten to succeed,” Mr. Nash said. “So even though our minority students are outscoring minority students in other districts near us, there is still a bigger gap here because of that.”

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

Erika Cruz Guevarra:

The hardest thing about being homeless for George Perez was acting like he wasn’t homeless.

During the day, Perez would study at school, go to class or clean up in the campus gym.

At night, the 39-year-old sophomore at City College of San Francisco was downtown, sleeping at BART stations to keep warm.

“No one knew I was homeless,” said Perez, who’s studying business administration and social science and behavior. “I would act like I was OK, but I really wasn’t. At the end of the day it was hard, because I had nobody to talk to.”

Emma Brown:

Jahana Hayes always knew she wanted to be a teacher, but she didn’t always believe she could be one.

She grew up surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence in the fading industrial city of Waterbury, Conn. But she loved school, and her teachers told her she could someday go to college. Even when she became pregnant at 17, her teachers refused to give up on her. They showed her how she could continue her education.

She graduated from high school and seven years later enrolled in a community college. She went on to earn a four-year degree, and then she realized her dream: She became a high school history teacher in the same town where she grew up.

Bourree Lam:

According to admissions departments’ informational pamphlets, the primary reason for attending college is rather noble: Campus is a place to discover one’s interests and strengths, a place for both personal and intellectual development. But in recent years, another narrative has taken hold—that what matters is return on investment. In other words: What kind of job-market value does a graduate get from a college degree?

Post-college job considerations have always been part of the equation. But with the rapidly rising tuition costs, the national student-debt crisis, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs encouraging some students to drop out altogether and enter the job market, this question has taken on new urgency. And it’s an important one, because it begets a whole slew of other anxieties about college. If one of the goals of higher education is to ensure that graduates go on to be financially stable, then a bunch of figures matter: how they fare in the labor market, what they’re paid, and what their loan-repayment and default rates are, to name a few

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

(By Andrew McCuaig, English teacher, LaFollette High School)

Joining a union is an act of faith: a belief that people coming together with similar daily work lives can have an impact on those people who may have goals that don’t take into account anything but the bottom line. By joining a union, you are asserting that you were not put on this earth merely to do what you were told, but that you believe you should have a say in your own livelihood. But more than that, as a union member you believe that wealth should be more evenly
distributed, that supervisors should not have absolute power, and that the details of the actual work should be mutually agreed upon, because you cannot get that coal out of the ground, that car made, or that student to graduate without a contract that respects both sides. Renew at www.madisonteachers.org

But joining a union is also a practical matter. Wherever unions exist, wages are higher. That is one reason why corporate interests throughout history have tried to weaken unions whenever they can. Fair wages, vacation days, sick leave, maternity leave, overtime, seniority, even the notion of a 40 hour work week – all exist because of the Labor Movement, and all cut into a company’s bottom line. When you pay union dues, you are supporting a staff that bargains on your behalf, that defends you when you require defending, or, more likely, defends someone else you might not even know who has your same job and is being treated unfairly. If the accused has truly screwed up, they get due process and what’s coming to them. If they haven’t, they are not simply fired in a Donald Trump dreamworld but are given their job back. The employer, meanwhile, is given a message not to abuse its authority.

Madison teachers are now actively responding to two union-busting rules justified by our state legislature’s notion of fairness: the elimination of automatic dues deductions by employers, and the option for teachers to not pay their “fair share” dues once our contract expires on June 30th. “Fair share” dues refers to the decades-old court ruling that workers who choose not to join a union must still pay for those services that they benefit from. The recent 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock on “fair share” upholds this practice for private sector unions but doesn’t affect Wisconsin’s teachers and other public employees under Act 10. Starting this month, teachers in every Madison school will be encouraging each other to continue their membership with MTI by supplying their bank’s routing number to pay dues. Some will need convincing, and some will want to pocket their dues now that they can. This will surely cause tension among colleagues. Also causing tension will be the teacher who keeps the money and then finds himself unfairly disciplined and in need of union representation he is now not entitled to. It’s a nice divide and conquer ploy, and those responsible deserve credit for their meanness.

On the other hand, heading into this new, mean work environment gives Madison teachers a chance to come together in solidarity, to freshly justify our existence, and to educate a new generation of teachers why we have just cause, paid sick days, and other things we now take for granted. The continued existence and influence of MTI will no doubt keep the meanest politicians up at night, which is just another reason to sign up.

April 11 and April 18 editions.

The Effect of Interscholastic High School Athletics Participation on Student Outcomes for the Classes of 2012-2014 (PDF):

Key Findings

Across MMSD, approximately 50% of all students in the 2012, 2013, and 2014 graduating cohorts participated in interscholastic athletics at some point during their high school careers. Of those participants, 11% participated for one year and 38% participated for 2+ years.

Overall, students who participated in interscholastic athletics at any point in their high school careers demonstrate better academic, behavior, and graduation/postsecondary outcomes than those who did not, with differences particularly pronounced for students who participated in 2+ years of athletics.

MMSD interscholastic athletes outperformed similar non-athletes on all academic and behavioral outcomes.

During 2015, athletics has been a topic of interest for MMSD’s Board of Education. Athletics participation ties directly into MMSD’s Strategic Framework Goal #2: Every student has access to a challenging and well-rounded education, which is measured in part by access and participation data for extra-curricular and co-curricular activities like athletics. In particular, the Board has asked questions regarding whether high school students who compete in school-sponsored athletics show different outcomes than non-participants, in an effort to understand how to prioritize athletic program funding. In this report, we investigate the following questions of interest:

1. For the 2012-2014 graduating cohorts, who participated in interscholastic high school athletics?

2. What are the academic and behavioral outcomes for interscholastic high school athletics participants?

3. How do academic and behavioral outcomes for interscholastic high school athletics participants compare to similar non-participants?

Nationwide, approximately 7.8 million high school students participated in school athletics during 2014-15. Of these participants, about 42% are female, a share that continues to increase over time. The most popular sports for boys are football, track, and basketball, while the most popular for girls are track, volleyball, and basketball. Wisconsin ranks 14th in the nation in athletics participation, with more than 185,000 student athletes (National Federation of State High School Associations, 2015). The four conventional MMSD high schools participate in the Big 8 Conference, which includes 10 local high schools, and are members of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA).

Additional documents:

• Presentation to the School Board (PDF)
• High School Athletics Performance and Eligibility Requirements (PDF)
• Athletic Director Feedback (PDF)
• Parent Survey (PDF)
• Athletic Staff Survey (PDF)

V Vinay.

Christine Campbell, via a kind Robin Lake email:

Teachers have been at the center of most states’ talent discussions to date. Although principals play a critical role in virtually all school-improvement reform efforts, most states lack a coherent school leadership strategy. This is a major oversight.

But a few forces are afoot that may help refocus state attention on principals:

Education policy leaders increasingly realize that policy alone won’t trigger desired changes in schools and student performance. Principals are a key lever to influence any policy’s success since they sit at the nexus between policy and practice: implementation starts with principals.

A growing body of research demonstrates real inequities for students when they are not taught by educators of similar races and backgrounds. While roughly 40 percent of public school students are black or Latino, just 17 percent of principals are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. States have a vested interest in ensuring their pipelines deliver the number, quality, and diversity of school leaders needed.

Rich Miller:

The next two decades won’t be nearly as lucrative, even on the optimistic assumption that the world economy snaps out of its recent funk and resumes growing at a faster clip, according to the McKinsey Global Institute report titled “Diminishing Returns: Why Investors May Need to Lower Their Expectations.”
“We’ve had a wonderful 30-year period in terms of returns, way more than the 100-year average,” said Richard Dobbs, a McKinsey director in London. “That era is coming to an end.”

Bond investors have already reaped much of the benefits from declines in inflation and interest rates from the sky-high levels that prevailed in the 1970s.

Veronique Mistiaen:

For me the most moving moment is when children turn their [family] trees upside down and the roots become branches – branches that will help them grow and blossom,” says Racines founder Vinciane Hanquet.

Racines (or Roots) is a Belgium-based multicultural school programme that helps pupils trace their family history. Through activities such as building a genealogical tree, drawing migration maps and collecting stories and mementos from family members, they discover and learn to value their identity.

A teacher with 40 years of experience, Hanquet wanted a tool that would both help children feel more comfortable with who they are and be more understanding of people from different backgrounds.

George Will:

The United States actually needs to have a salutary crisis in Illinois. It will be salutary because it will be a cautionary example for other states if Illinois suffers, without offloading pain on taxpayers elsewhere, the severe consequences of decades of ruinous choices. And Puerto Rico’s troubles will benefit America if the bond market, sobered by a demonstration that government bonds can be risky, becomes a restraint on state legislatures by raising the cost of borrowing where the legislatures are most irresponsible.

Dustin Volz:

Privacy Act, which updates a decades-old law, authorities would have to get a warrant to access emails or other digital communications more than 180 days old. At present, agencies such as the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission only need a subpoena to seek such data from a service provider.

Supporters of the legislation say it is needed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Technology companies and privacy advocates say that statute was written before the rise of the Internet and so is outdated.

The issue of law enforcement access to private electronic communications has been at the center of an international debate.

Joanne Barkan:

Big philanthropy was born in the United States in the early twentieth century. The Russell Sage Foundation received its charter in 1907, the Carnegie Corporation in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. These were strange new creatures—quite unlike traditional charities. They had vastly greater assets and were structured legally and financially to last forever. In addition, each was governed by a self-perpetuating board of private trustees; they were affiliated with no religious denomination; and they adopted grand, open-ended missions along the lines of “improve the human condition.” They were launched, in essence, as immense tax-exempt private corporations dealing in good works. But they would do good according to their own lights, and they would intervene in public life with no accountability to the public required.
From the start, the mega-foundations provoked hostility across the political spectrum. To their many detractors, they looked like centers of plutocratic power that threatened democratic governance. Setting up do-good corporations, critics said, was merely a ploy to secure the wealth and clean up the reputations of business moguls who amassed fortunes during the Gilded Age. Consider the reaction to John D. Rockefeller’s initial request for a charter from the U.S. Senate (he eventually received one from New York State):

Ana Swanson:

Have you ever sat down to complete an important task — and then suddenly discovered you were up loading the dishwasher or engrossed in the Wikipedia entry about Chernobyl? Or perhaps you suddenly realize that the dog needs to be fed, emails need to be answered, your ceiling fan needs dusting — or maybe you should go ahead and have lunch, even though it’s only 11 a.m.?

Next thing you know, it’s the end of the day and your important task remains unfinished.

Tanva Misra:

In the medieval period, empires battled and colluded with each other in the quest for land. The resulting system, in which nations became the main actors on the global stage, is perhaps the one most of us know best. But it’s changing.
 
 We’re now moving toward a new era where insular, political boundaries are no longer as relevant. More and more people are identifying as “global citizens,” and that’s because we’re all more connected than we’ve ever been before. As a result, a “systems change” is taking place in the world today in which cities—not nations—are the key global players, argues Parag Khanna in his new book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of the Global Civilization. In it, Khanna, who is a global strategist and world traveler, writes:

Stephen Wolfram:

They used to come by physical mail. Now it’s usually email. From around the world, I have for many years received a steady trickle of messages that make bold claims — about prime numbers, relativity theory, AI, consciousness or a host of other things — but give little or no backup for what they say. I’m always so busy with my own ideas and projects that I invariably put off looking at these messages. But in the end I try to at least skim them — in large part because I remember the story of Ramanujan.

On about January 31, 1913 a mathematician named G. H. Hardy in Cambridge, England received a package of papers with a cover letter that began: “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age….” and went on to say that its author had made “startling” progress on a theory of divergent series in mathematics, and had all but solved the longstanding problem of the distribution of prime numbers. The cover letter ended: “Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published…. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly, S. Ramanujan”.

Emma Brown

The nation’s high school seniors have shown no improvement in reading achievement and their math performance has slipped since 2013, according to the results of a test administered by the federal government last year.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, also show a longer-term stagnation in 12th-grade performance in U.S. public and private schools: Scores on the 2015 reading test have dropped five points since 1992, the earliest year with comparable scores, and are unchanged in math during the past decade.

“These numbers are not going the way we want,” said William J. Bushaw, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent panel established by Congress to oversee NAEP policy. “We have to redouble our efforts to prepare our students.”

The sobering news, released Wednesday, comes at the same time the nation is celebrating its highest-ever graduation rate, raising questions about whether a diploma is a meaningful measure of achievement.

Eighty-two percent of high school seniors graduated on time in 2014, but the 2015 test results suggest that just 37 percent of seniors are academically prepared for college course­work in math and reading — meaning many seniors would have to take remedial classes if going on to college.

Related: Math Forum audio/video links.