Tech Rung:

The students will be attending classes in 7 different places in Berlin over the next three months. The German Tech and Entrepreneurship Center is hosting the Sunday classes while on Wednesdays and Thursdays, ReDI has arranged mentoring sessions for the students at six coworking spaces in Berlin.

ReDI began its classes with sponsorship from Klöckner & Co, a German steel distribution company that is on the leading edge of digitizing its own industry.

Sarah Lazare:

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.

Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

Matt Barnum:

So how is Denver trying to make the schools stronger? How are you trying to improve your schools?
First and foremost, we’ve elected a Board of Education that is accountable and committed to making sure that every young person in the city of Denver has access to quality schools, starting in their own neighborhoods. That’s been critical because we’ve attracted some award-winning programs to communities, many that have been underserved. Some today that were quite frankly mired in perennially failing schools five, six years ago now have some of the leading schools in the state and that has made a difference.

Secondly, as we grow, being able to recruit the best administrators and teachers to the school district makes an awful lot of difference. We certainly have seen that with the partnerships through Teach For America, and other innovative programs that are helping us to drive new energy and innovation to the classroom.

We’ve also had quite a few state and local laws that have passed that have aided innovation and injection of creativity into the classroom. Those things have made a difference in Denver.

The Economist:

Businesses have been run well without MBAs for millennia. The merchants of Carthage did not need them. Kanye West does not have one. That said, an MBA will get you up to speed on business in a general sense. But so will a good book, for far less money and time.

The MBA is a club like any other: you are either in or out, that is its main selling point. Incompetent people will get in, and they’ll leave incompetent. But they will beat non-MBAs at job interviews because they had the money to attend a prestigious school and scraped through on Cs. You will not leave business school with the next Google, YouTube or Twitter in your head; if it is to happen, it will happen anyway. Reading case studies about Steve Jobs is not enough for you to become like him. To start something takes imagination and courage.

Rebecca Mead:

entilla, AltSchool’s thirty-five-year-old founder, is a native New Yorker who attended Buckley, on the Upper East Side, and proceeded to Andover, the New England prep school. He went to Yale, where he majored in math and physics, and then earned an M.B.A. Ventilla worked briefly for Google, then launched a startup, Aardvark, which developed a tool for “social search”—the ability to direct a question to a targeted group of people. In 2010, he sold the company to Google, reportedly for fifty million dollars. Ventilla rejoined Google as a group product manager, and eventually became responsible for creating a “unity of experience” across the company’s products—insuring that, say, a user’s search results are informed by her YouTube browsing history. When Ventilla quit Google to start AltSchool, in the spring of 2013, he had no experience as a teacher or an educational administrator. But he did have extensive knowledge of networks, and he understood the kinds of insights that can be gleaned from big data.

The first AltSchool opened that September, in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. The idea grew out of the search that Ventilla and his wife, Jenny Stefanotti, a former Google executive, conducted to find a preschool for their daughter, who is now four. (They also have a two-year-old son.) “It was a startlingly miserable experience,” he told me. “You are thrown into this high-stakes world of trying to get your two-year-old into a school, and all the places that are desirable have a hundred times more people applying than they admit, and if you don’t pick your preschool right your child will be penniless and alone at thirty. And there is, absurdly, a little bit of truth to that.” While visiting schools, Ventilla was struck by how little education had changed since he began school. “A three-year-old today isn’t that different,” he told me. But, largely because of technology, “a thirteen-year-old is really different.”

Drew Bent:

Led by IS&T’s vice president, John Charles, the ambitious reorganization began in February 2015 and aims to spur innovation through agile software development practices adopted from industry. Charles emphasizes that this is not a typical reorganization, but rather a complete transformation of MIT’s IT department.

Meanwhile, a number of current and former employees say the transformation has fallen short of improving the organization, and has instead created considerable turmoil in the work environment. This has resulted in roughly 20 percent of nearly 300 staff members leaving since February, instead of the average 8 or 9 percent annual turnover.

Custodians:

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. “It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,” he says, “but you are of no use to the stars that you own”.

There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin1 stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”2 For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the world, and render it a token of privilege.3

Deborah J. Merritt

Last fall, Law School Transparency (LST) released a detailed study of declining LSAT scores among entering law students. Drawing upon data from several sources, the report warned that students with LSAT scores below 150 suffer increasing risks of failing the bar exam. For students with scores below 145, the risk is extreme. One school, for example, reported that only 16% of graduates in that category passed the bar on their first attempt. The eventual pass rate for those students was just 36%.

LST also offered evidence that these high-risk students are paying more for their legal education than students with a better chance of becoming lawyers. Schools that admit a substantial number of high-risk students offer fewer tuition discounts than other schools. Scholarships at high-risk schools are also more likely to be conditional (and forfeited) than scholarships at schools admitting lower risk students.

Ellen Weller:

When Carolyn Stefanco accepted the “disrupter” award inside an Albany hotel Friday, faculty members picketed on the sidewalk.

“Disruptive leadership,” their signs read, “is killing the College of Saint Rose.”

Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.

At Saint Rose, which she joined in 2014, Stefanco’s plans have been contentious. Earlier this month, the faculty voted no confidence in the president, arguing that the cuts were poorly designed and that liberal arts programs were hit particularly hard.

Beth Daley:

Little Kate Summersgill certainly didn’t look like a child with Down syndrome — no upward slanting eyes or telltale flat facial features.

Devon and Mike Summersgill had believed baby Kate was all but certain to be born with the intellect-stunting disorder because of a blood test Devon’s doctor recommended during her 2014 pregnancy. Even after the birth, when their baby looked fine, their genetic counselor, Laura Limone, insisted that the result of the test was not a mistake, Devon says.

Nicole Torres:

We’ve all heard it: Millennials are more narcissistic, entitled, and self-indulgent than generations past. Whether that makes you nod your head or roll your eyes — the evidence, after all, remains controversial and polarizing — the idea that narcissism has increased among college students over the last 25 years is worrisome from an organizational perspective. Millennials are the next generation of leaders. And while we know narcissism can be useful at times, research has linked narcissists’ sense of entitlement and belief that the rules don’t always apply to them to a range of counterproductive work behaviors, such as embezzlement, workplace incivility, bullying, and white-collar crime.

Noah Smith:

The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various U.S. states, and see whether the ones that spend more on education enjoy better outcomes. This has been done many times, with decidedly mixed results. Some studies show little state-by-state correlation between spending levels and educational performance, while others show a fairly substantial one.

The second case against increased spending comes from looking at correlations across time. If more money is better, we’d expect to see increases in school funding followed by improvements in performance. In fact, though public school spending has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, achievement hasn’t really increased much.

So with mixed evidence from state-by-state analysis and discouraging evidence from the history of spending increases, many people are ready to conclude that throwing more money at education is a losing battle. Some spending opponents place their hopes in charter schools and other reform efforts, while others claim that education just doesn’t work — that academic ability is either innate or learned from an early age.

Kansas City dramatically increased spending years ago, and……

Conor Skelding

In an amicus brief filed with the National Labor Relations Board concerning the Columbia University graduate student unionization case, the other seven universities in the Ivy League recommended that the board maintain precedent, under which graduate students may not unionize.

The board has indicated that it may reconsider a 2004 decision which found that graduate students at Brown University were not employees under the National Labor Relations Act.

“Amici submit that there are no facts or changed circumstances that justify revisiting or modifying Brown,” those universities’ general counsels, plus those of Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in the Monday brief.

Victoria Clayton:

Early one Saturday morning last year, Christian Vazquez hopped on his bicycle and pedaled from his Highland Park home to the campus of Cal State, Los Angeles, one of many designated testing facilities for the Graduate Record Examination. The GRE, as it’s better known, is a test required for admission to what may amount to thousands of Master’s- and doctoral-degree programs—from astronomy and English to journalism and zoology—in the United States.

Vazquez, 24, who studied for the GRE over the course of about four months using a free study guide, was already an academic success story. Raised in east L.A. by a mother who worked full-time as a bank-loan processor, he was the first person in his family to attend college. During his undergraduate education, Vazquez lived at home and commuted via bike or bus to California State University Northridge four days a week, a two-hour trip each way, and paid his way through school by working as a cashier at a Kohl’s department store. Vazquez graduated in 2013 with a B.A. in English, earning mostly As. When he went job hunting, he had one thing in mind: “I knew I wanted a job where I made an impact on other people’s lives,” he says. He ended up with two part-time positions, as a teaching assistant at an elementary school helping mainly at-risk Latino children and as a tutor at Pasadena City College, where he also enrolled in literature and writing classes for fun. On his commutes to work, Vazquez dreamed of a grander future: becoming a college English professor.

Kelly Baker:

Almost 39 years ago, Audre Lorde gave a talk on silence, language, and action at the Modern Language Association. “I have come to believe over and over again,” she notes, “that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” When the inevitability of her own death appeared pressing and soon, she found that she regretted her silences most of all. Silence is not a cure-all for our hurts, ills, pains, or deaths. Remaining silent won’t soothe us or stop our suffering. She famously proclaimed, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

Silence, after all, feels antithetical to academic freedom, the ability to teach and research as scholars see fit. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, academic freedom “entitles” scholars “full freedom in research” and “freedom in classroom in discussing their subject.” Though, the AAUP does caution against inserting our opinions, those unrelated to course materials, into our classes. Academic freedom emerged as a crucial component of tenure along with economic security, yet, it was not limited to the tenured. Instead, the AAUP emphasized that academic freedom should protect the “full-time probationary teacher” (those on the tenure track), contingent faculty (part-time and full-time), and graduate students. Any scholar who taught should have academic freedom. Their vision of who was granted academic freedom was expansive and idealistic, which feels a far cry from where we are now.

Yet, the AAUP did not present a concept of limitless freedom. Academic freedom did not include all speech by faculty. Teacher scholars were citizens with rights of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but they also had “special obligations” because of their affiliations with institutions (for better or worse). Academic freedom had to have limits. Faculty could write and speak as citizens, but they should “at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for their institution.” Scholars appeared as representatives of their institutions. Think about your name badge that you wear at conferences. Your name rests above the name of the college, university, seminary, or institution that employs you (unless like me, you lack affiliation). Affiliation requires teachers to make clear distinctions between their private selves and their public personas.

CBS Bay Area:

The University of California paid hedge fund managers about $1 billion in fees over the last 12 years, according to a white paper study released by the university system’s largest employee union.

AFSCME Local 3299 announced Tuesday the release of a white paper study highlighting what they say is the lack of transparency and lack of returns associated with the university system’s current hedge fund investment plan.

The union, which represents more than 22,000 employees at the university’s 10 campuses and numerous other centers, clinics and labs, states that the university’s “experiment” with hedge fund investments “has fallen far short of the expectations on which they were sold” and wasted money on performance and management fees “for returns that largely mirrored the stock market.”

Alan Borsuk:

That’s not a platform. It’s a couple of slogans, a vague concept, and a sort-of position that has been pretty much already settled in favor of Trump’s view. The education law passed a few months ago by Congress stops the federal government from promoting the Common Core education standards and shifts education decision-making generally back toward states.

Trump has a lot of company in downplaying education. In both the Republican and Democratic presidential races, none of the candidates has made kindergarten through 12th-grade issues prominent.

Turning the focus more locally, Milwaukee has a race for mayor underway in which education is not a major issue.

On the other hand, education is a hot issue in the race for county executive, an office that historically has nothing to do with schools. A new state law makes the country executive a key figure in what lies ahead. Who expected that a year ago?

But nationwide, I suggest, education is waning as an issue, after some years in which it was a bigger deal. I suspect a major reason is a broad sense of fatigue with education debates — they’ve gone on for so long and brought so little improvement. The surge of anti-big government sentiment is an important factor also.

How much is education in the backwaters of the presidential campaign?

Akil Bello & James Murphy:

Community organizations can now distribute waivers; in the past only high school counselors could do so. The waiver system could be more efficient — there is often a rush to get waivers out to seniors at the start of the school year in time for the October exam — and the College Board needs to devise a way to distribute them once an August SAT date begins in 2017, but all in all, the fee waiver program provides a real benefit to low-income students.

So, too, does using the Preliminary SAT-National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) to also identify students who qualify for scholarships designed for students of color and low-income students.

This year the applicant pool of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which provides support for high-performing, low-income students, grew nearly 200 percent as a result of its alliance with the College Board. This, again, is clearly a win. (The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is a funder of The Hechinger Report).

Murtaza Hussain:

The ethical issues involved in preventive counterterrorism cases like Sadequee’s are the theme behind much of Homegrown. Following 9/11, law enforcement agencies were given a mandate to halt terrorist acts before they occurred, rather than investigate crimes after the fact. This directive inevitably gave rise to some disturbing ethical questions. When is it acceptable to arrest someone for a crime they haven’t actually committed, but you think they might commit in the future? At what point do a teenager’s online postings turn into a terrorism offense?

The Blaze:

Liberal education aims to liberate the mind from prejudice — the prejudice of birth, public opinion, our own distorted and inflated opinions of ourselves — in preparation for citizenship and freedom,” Milikh said. “But modern universities too often flatter and protect prejudices. It says there’s almost nothing to learn. ‘Come as you are, for you have already attained a kind of perfection,’ they say. Gaining and preserving wisdom takes a backseat to the creation of ’safe spaces’ — shelters, in other words — for prejudice, not from it.”

When Kesler began his segment, he bemoaned the student protesters’ failure to recognize the universal principles that “provide the starting points of demonstration or argument,” adding that the idea of the “university” itself hinges upon the ability to grasp moral and physical values as “self-evident truths.” If the protesters do not recognize these universal values, Kesler believes that they can never truly understand or appreciate the “university’s” original intent.

Cory Doctorow:

Andrew Hacker, a professor of both mathematics and political science at Queens University has a new book out, The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, which makes the case that the inclusion of algebra and calculus in high school curriculum discourages students from learning mathematics, and displaces much more practical mathematical instruction about statistical and risk literacy, which he calls “Statistics for Citizenship.”

Hacker’s idea is based on a course in “civic numeracy” he’s taught for two years, in which students learn to use mathematics to understand current affairs: gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, spotting fraudulent tax returns, and so on.

I have a theory that you can track the rationality of a society by the number of people who play the lottery — and that a significant achievement for an education system would be to graduate a cohort who never bought a single lotto ticket. The rise and rise of Drumpf tracks pretty closely to those eye-popping Powerball jackpots.

,

Alexander Khaytin:

Automation technologies such as the Jacquard loom were ubiquitous in the 1800s during the first industrial revolution. Such machines eliminated some of the most tedious and time-consuming jobs from factories, and raised production to record levels.

Then, in the mid-1900s, the robotic arm was invented. Like the loom, that too is a machine ubiquitous in the contemporary industrial landscape. And with the advent of computing, robotics and automation systems have been increasingly integrated into self-contained production systems, controlled through what might now be considered rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence.

Dana Goldstein:

In his new book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, political scientist Andrew Hacker proposes replacing algebra II and calculus in the high school and college curriculum with a practical course in statistics for citizenship (more on that later).

Only mathematicians and some engineers actually use advanced math in their day-to-day work, Hacker argues-even the doctors, accountants, and coders of the future shouldn’t have to master abstract math that they’ll never need.
I showed the book to my husband, Andrei, a computer programmer who loved math in school. He scrunched up his face. “People don’t use Shakespeare in their jobs, but it’s still important for them to read it,” he said.

“It’s not the same,” I told him. “Reading fiction builds empathy.”

“Math helps us understand the world around us!” Andrei replied. “Like how derivatives demonstrate change over time.” He smiled, and I could tell that for him, it was all clear and beautiful.

KC Johnson

Yale is the only university that regularly issues reports on its handling of sexual assault complaints, the result of a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The university is also unusual in reporting so many sexual complaints, the result of its peculiar decision to broaden the campus definition of “sexual assault” beyond all recognition.

The newest of these reports, issued as always by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, has now appeared. And, as always, Spangler notes that Yale has chosen to redefine “sexual assault,” attributing to the term “broad ranges of behavior” that neither the criminal law nor common cultural understanding would define as sexual assault. Yale has never offered a convincing explanation for why it pursued this course, but the strategy does inflate the numbers, thereby helping to feed the current moral panic on campus.

Stephen Sawchuck:

Minnesota’s teacher-licensing system is broken—and should be overhauled, beginning by consolidating the two state agencies that administer it, the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor said in a report released March 4.

There isn’t any easy way to summarize just how convoluted this all gets over the report’s 100 pages, which detail the state’s “complex, unclear, and confusing” system, to quote from auditor James Nobles’ letter. But are a sampling of some of the findings:

The split between the state’s board of teaching, which sets licensing requirements, and the state education department, which makes decisions about licensing and issues licenses, blur the lines about duties and accountability, confusing teachers and leading to finger-pointing among agency officials.

The state’s licensing statutes and the regulations carrying them out don’t even use the same terms to describe the same type of licenses.
Multiple loopholes and exceptions to the rules, combined with a series of legislative changes over the past five years, have further complicated the issues.

When it denies licenses, the state often doesn’t provide teacher candidates with enough information about why.

Annysa Johnson:

Andy Vitrano corrals a group of school leaders from across Milwaukee inside the main hallway at St. Anthony School on the city’s south side.

They’ve spent much of the last hour discussing the importance of data in assessing a school’s performance, dissecting one school’s attendance figures and brainstorming ideas for improvement.

Now he’s dispatched them, clipboards in hand, on a scavenger hunt, in search of the many ways St. Anthony tracks data — from the daily attendance listing in the front hall to classroom charts that track students’ academic and behavioral improvement.

“They’re looking for things they can use in their own buildings,” said Vitrano, a former principal turned leadership coach with the nonprofit Schools That Can Milwaukee, which runs this monthly “deans’ collaborative.”

The group’s gatherings, says Executive Director Abby Andrietsch, are the only place in Milwaukee, and one of a few around the country, where school leaders regularly work across sectors — traditional public, charter and private voucher schools — to improve educational outcomes for children.

Peter Sipe:

One of my favorite pieces of writing is four sentences long. It’s the statement General Dwight Eisenhower drafted in the event D-Day ended in defeat:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

This noble declaration came to mind as I studied for the exams to become an elementary teacher in Massachusetts. I wondered how I should explain if I did not pass. And I still do, because I won’t learn until March 18.

Much more on MTEL.

Tara Golshan:

One of Michigan’s most controversial public figures had his last day as emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools this week. To replace him is another state-appointed manager: Judge Steven Rhodes, the man who oversaw Detroit’s historic bankruptcy case.

This change in leadership may not be surprising after months of widespread “sickouts,” teacher protests involving calling in sick to protest the horrific school conditions. Rhodes faces a public school system — one that could run out of money completely by April — crumbling in financial ruin and a community that doesn’t really want someone from the state in charge of fixing it.

Joy Resmovits:

one of two major college entrance exams, the SAT has become a dreaded rite of passage for millions of American high school students since 1926.

This Saturday, approximately 277,000 students across the U.S. will take a revamped version of the SAT.

————

FOR THE RECORD

5:51 a.m.: An earlier version of this article stated that approximately 463,000 students are taking the SAT this weekend. Approximately 277,000 students are taking the SAT in its first national administration this weekend; the figure of 463,000 reflects the number of students who will have taken the new test in March, as of this weekend. Some school districts held SAT School Day this week, where all students take the test in school.

Catherine Rampell:

On Saturday, two members of Bowdoin College’s student government will face impeachment proceedings. What heinous transgression did they commit? Theft, plagiarism, sexual assault?

Nope. They attended a party where some guests wore tiny sombreros.

Two weeks ago, some students threw a birthday party for a friend. The email invitation read: “the theme is tequila, so do with that what you may. We’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that :).” The invitation — sent by a student of Colombian descent, which may or may not be relevant here — advertised games, music, cups and “other things that are conducive to a fun night.”

Those “other things” included the miniature sombreros, several inches in diameter. And when photos of attendees wearing those mini-sombreros showed up on social media, students and administrators went ballistic.

College administrators sent multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an “investigation” into a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.”

Partygoers ultimately were reprimanded or placed on “social probation,” and the hosts have been kicked out of their dorm, according to friends. (None of the disciplined students whom I contacted wanted to speak on the record; Bowdoin President Clayton Rose declined an interview and would not answer a general question about what kinds of disciplinary options are considered when students commit an “act of bias.”)

Other students closed ranks, too.

Junaid Mubeen:

Oxford admissions interviews are notoriously challenging, particularly in mathematics. A 25-minute interview is designed with stunning precision to tease out the strongest problem-solvers (the main criteria for selection in mathematics). The competition is stiff. Yet a good chunk of candidates who make it to the final interview stage unravel within moments, ruling themselves out of contention.
These hopeful candidates can execute basic warm-up tasks at will — say, sketching a logarithm — but stumble the moment they are presented with a novel problem that they have not previously encountered —

Ben Carlson:

Each year the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) puts out a study on the investment performance of college endowment funds. It’s a comprehensive report that goes through the asset allocations and performance numbers of funds ranging from a few million dollars to funds with many billions of dollars (in the latest report there were over 800 funds in total).
Institutional investors are obsessed peer comparisons so they all eagerly await these performance numbers to see how they stacked up against the competition.

Here’s the latest batch through June 30, 2015:

Motoko Rich:

The superintendent, Antwan Wilson, who is an imposing 6-foot-4, favors crisp suits and Kangol caps and peers intensely through wire-rimmed glasses, has become accustomed to confrontation since he arrived in this activist community from Denver two years ago. One board meeting last fall reached such a fever pitch that police officers moved in to control the crowd.

Mr. Wilson is facing a rebellion by teachers and some parents against his plan to allow families to use a single form to apply to any of the city’s 86 district-run schools or 44 charter campuses, all of which are competing for a shrinking number of students.

Daily Caller:

Typically, the SAT has been open to anybody who wants to take it, not just those who need it for college applications. Notably, many adults who work in the field of standardized test prep take it in order to improve their teaching ability (while also demonstrating their personal expertise).

But now, the College Board is suddenly cutting them off. In an unprecedent move it says is needed to prevent cheating, the College Board is barring non-students from taking the coming March 5 test.

Numerous test prep workers and other non-students (plus some students over age 21) received an email from the College Board earlier this week saying that security concerns had forced the rule change.

“When we closed registration last week, our analysis of registrants showed an unusually high number of individuals meeting criteria associated with a higher security risk,” the College Board said in its email, published by The Washington Post. “As a result, we have instituted a new security measure, effective immediately, which aims to ensure that anyone taking the test is doing so for its intended purpose: to apply to and attend a college or university undergraduate program, or to apply for scholarship, financial aid, or other programs that require a college admissions test.”

For now, the College Board says adults who have registered for the SAT will be able to take it in May due to enhanced security precautions.

Teresa Watanabe:

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi apologized Friday for her controversial moonlighting activities, which had prompted key state lawmakers to call for her resignation and announce legislative hearings on paid outside activities by university officials.  

Katehi, who earns $424,360 annually as chancellor at UC Davis, had come under fire for accepting a $70,000-a-year position with the DeVry Education Group, a for-profit firm that offers college degrees online and on 55 campuses nationwide, including 13 in California.

DeVry is being investigated by state and federal authorities on allegations of deceptive advertising about job and income prospects for its graduates. The firm has denied the accusations.

Katehi resigned from the DeVry seat this week after questions were raised by public interest groups and Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) who heads the Assembly budget subcommittee on education finance

Robby Soave:

The movement to purge all offensive speech from American college campuses has claimed another scalp. Andrea Quenette, an assistant communications professor, was chased out of her own classroom—not because she was a bad teacher, but because her students said she wasn’t agreeing with them quickly enough.

For months, Quenette has been under investigation by the University of Kansas. She is on academic leave. Her students’ refusal to return to class left her no other choice but to take the semester off.

Tech dirt:

In the last week or so, it became quite clear that a fair number of tech companies and organizations in the civil liberties community would file amicus (friend of the court) briefs urging magistrate judge Sheri Pym to side with Apple over the Justice Department and the FBI. However, now that the briefs are in, it’s fairly staggering just how many companies, organizations and individuals signed onto briefs supporting Apple. Yes, many of them teamed up and filed briefs together, but it’s still a ton. And that’s especially true for an issue at the district court level in front of a magistrate judge. Here’s the big list put together by Apple, including links to various blog posts and press releases about the filings:

George Korda:

I’m writing yet another column about the University of Tennessee’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion because the University of Tennessee won’t respond to questions or requests about its Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

In Sept. 2015 I wrote about the office after an uproar over a series of curious “pronouns” recommended or suggested for use on campus for individuals who didn’t want to be identified by what was called the “gender binary,” which means male or female.

After a Mt. Everest-sized avalanche of national ridicule, the pronouns were dispatched to the outer darkness amid gnashing of teeth by various UT officials.

In an October column I contrasted the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s celebratory approach to the opening of a new Pride Center while “suggesting” that religiously-themed holiday parties were not inclusive.

The following is taken from the column, which references a discussion with State Rep. Martin Daniel on my Sunday afternoon radio show on WOKI-FM. Rep. Daniel has been researching the costs of UT’s diversity efforts, which are in the neighborhood of $5 million system-wide.

Andrew Hanson:

Genetic testing is a medical test that identifies changes in chromosomes and genes to determine whether a person has, or might develop, a genetic condition. Genetic testing is becoming cheaper and easier to do each year. With $199 dollars and some saliva, companies like 23andMe can provide you with personal information ranging from ancestry to whether you are a “carrier” for certain conditions. Today, before a parent even holds their child their arms, procedures like amniocentesis can tell them about their child’s potential chromosomal abnormalities.

Presently all fifty states are required to test infants for at least twenty-one disorders. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, early detection and treatment “can help prevent intellectual and physical disabilities and life-threatening illnesses.” But with these medical advances, there is cause for concern.

Michael Wines:

One hundred fifty miles northwest of here, the residents of Flint, Mich., are still reeling from the drinking water debacle that more than doubled the share of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood — to a peak, in mid-2014, of 7 percent of all children tested.

Clevelanders can only sympathize. The comparable number here is 14.2 percent.

Olga Khazan:

The AP recently asked 1,033 adults what they thought of “Medicare for All,” a cornerstone of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

When asked their view of “single-payer” health care—what such a system is often called—the respondents seemed to like it. “A slim plurality of 39 percent supports replacing the private health insurance system with a single government-run, taxpayer-funded plan that would cover medical, dental, vision and long-term care, with 33 percent opposed,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Emily Swanson write. Just 26 percent, meanwhile, support the existing Obamacare law.

Citizen Ed:

The first student I met at Summit Sierra charter school in Seattle was sharp, soft-spoken, and confident. I visited on a day when students were working independently on their goals, so I was imposing on her time, but she was gracious about the interruption.

She walked me through Summit’s computer based program that keeps track of all the work she completes toward gaining admission to a college program. As a parent I saw the benefit of such a program immediately. She never has to wonder if she is on track. The program provides real time information that keeps her on the same page with her parents and teacher. No need to wait for a report card or teacher’s conference.

Every six weeks students have “expeditions,” which is an elective two week period where students can pursue subjects they care about like videography, cooking, civics, or topical focus areas like criminal justice, the stock market, or the Holocaust. For each area the school connects students with community experts.

Personalization is a key feature at Summit. Each student has a well-developed personal learning plan driven by their own interests, dreams, and goals. It’s a vision of education many schools say they want, but one few achieve for more than a pocket of lucky kids.

Often when I go into a school I see the disparity between their brochure and their reality. Websites promise lots of fanciful bells and whistles (a charter school on roller skates!) but you get in the building and notice kids are dead in the eyes, teachers are curt, and the surroundings are grim.

It’s always a good feeling to find a school with high ceilings, lots of sunlight, buoyant students, and staff who appear to have a good time. Summit is that kind of school.

Jessica Huseman:

Marvell Robinson was in kindergarten when a classmate reportedly poured an anthill on him at the playground. After that, the gibes reportedly became sharper: “Why are you that color?” one boy taunted at the swing set, leaving Marvell scared and speechless. The slow build of racial bullying would push his mother, Vanessa Robinson, to pull him from his public school and homeschool him instead.

Marvell is one of an estimated 220,000 African American children currently being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in homeschooling, with black students making up an estimated 10 percent of the homeschooling population. (For comparison’s sake, they make up 16 percent of all public-school students nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.)

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Sam Sweet:

In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he’d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a “bumpkin portrait,” “part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.” It was captioned “What, Me Worry?”
 
 That bumpkin became Alfred E. Neuman, MAD’s mascot, who turns sixty this year—kind of. The impish, immutable redhead made his official debut in December 1956, when he appeared on the cover of MAD #30 as a write-in candidate for president. He’s appeared on almost every MAD cover since: possessing, spoofing, and spooking cultural icons with nothing more than a drowsy rictus. Though MAD gave him a purpose, a permanent home, his origin story remains elusive. It involves, among other things, a plum-pudding advertisement, a dubious lawsuit, and a traveling nineteenth-century farce

Jenny Anderson:

Chinese kids are smart. The kids of Shanghai cleaners outperform those of British doctors and lawyers in math, and Shanghai’s richest students are about three academic years ahead of the developed-country average. Students in the 90th percentile in the US score below the average Shanghai student on a test given to 15 year-olds around the world (pdf).
But tests only tell you so much about Chinese students’ smarts, says Xiaodong Lin, a professor of cognitive studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College. When they come to university in the US, Chinese students tend to struggle with analytical writing, critical thinking, and communication with peers and professors, Lin wrote in the People’s Daily (link in Chinese), the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party.
“While Chinese education has focused more on mastery of knowledge, the American education seems to emphasize how to learn, even though we may not do as a good job as we wish,” she wrote.

XRDS:

mHow to Get The interview process at Google has been designed (and redesigned!) from the ground up to avoid false posi- tives. We want to avoid making offers to candidates who would not be suc- cessful at Google. (The cost of this un- fortunately includes more false nega- tives, which are times when we turn down somebody who would have done well.) The recruiters and engineers you will speak with want to see where you shine, whether you can do the job, and make sure you’re someone they want to work with. This article is designed to help both you and Google achieve those goals—and help the interview be an interesting, even pleasant, experi- ence, too.

Ray Salazar:

Today, I came across a Boston Globe article from almost a year ago that highlighted the challenges many low-income students at Ivy League colleges face. The article’s title emphasized the students’ economic status: “What it’s like to be poor at an Ivy League School?” But after reading it a few times, after exchanging ideas on social media with a few people, I realized why the article was misleading readers to feel sorry for these students.

Rose Luckin,
Wayne Holmes, Mark Gri and Laurie B. Forcier:

We wrote this short paper on arti cial intelligence in education (AIEd) with two aims in mind. The rst was to explain to a non-specialist, interested reader what AIEd is: its goals, how it is built, and how it works. After all, only by securing a certain degree of understanding can we move beyond the science- ction imagery of AI, and the associated fears. The second aim was to set out the argument for what AIEd can o er learning, both now and in the future, with an eye towards improving learning and life outcomes for all.

Throughout, our approach has been to start with teaching and learning – and then describe how well designed and thoughtful AIEd can usefully contribute. Crucially we do not see a future in which AIEd replaces teachers. What we do see is a future in which the role of the teacher continues
to evolve and is eventually transformed; one where their time is used more e ectively and e ciently, and where their expertise is better deployed, leveraged, and augmented.

Nina Sovich:

April Higgins knows even the sharpest students can get tripped up on a complex subject.

“What is the basic economic problem all societies face?” Ms. Higgins asks her class. Ava Watson, raises her hand: “Scarcity.”

The class responds in unison. “People have unlimited wants but limited resources.”

Not bad for a bunch of sixth-graders.

Scarcity, elasticity, marginal returns are now being taught in some schools to children as young as 10 years old. The push, educators say, was spurred by the 2008 financial crisis and is designed to help students become more comfortable with economics, financial planning and entrepreneurship. Catch them young, the thinking goes, and adult activities like balancing a checkbook or taking out a loan will be easier.

Nihal:

Kids normally go out with their mates or play football during their half term break, but twelve year old Zakariah spent his holidays in the Greek islands with his dad Malik. Not as a short holiday though, but to visit the refugee camps in the islands of Samos and Chios to help give out food and clothing. The refugees have come from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and await their documentation in these camps before being able to travel across Europe. Malik and his 12 year old son Zakaria tell Nihal why they decided to go to Greece.

Audrey Watters:

it’s hardly a surprise that a press release issued by HRL Laboratories, a research center jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, would invoke the film to boast about research it’s published in the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

In the press release, HRL Laboratories claims that, akin to the technology in The Matrix, it has “discovered that low-current electrical brain stimulation can modulate the learning of complex real-world skills” and that “subjects who received brain stimulation via electrode-embedded head caps improved their piloting abilities.” “It’s possible that brain stimulation could be implemented for classes like drivers’ training, SAT prep, and language learning,” the lead researcher speculates.

The press release and accompanying video have been picked up by the media, most of whom have done very little to verify the findings, or hell, even read the journal article in question. From Techcrunch, for example: “Researchers Create Matrix-Like Instant Learning Through Brain Stimulation.” From The Telegraph: “Scientists discover how to ‘upload knowledge to your brain’.”

Thomas E Ricks:

One day last week I drove 500 miles and as the sun set I really needed to stretch my legs. So when me and my little dog got to the Vicksburg battlefield, and the sign said the battlefield road was closed, we just parked across the street and headed out overland. We walked up the Federal line, and then, under the stars, with only the deer and the crickets for company, down the Confederate line.A few things struck me:— If you get a chance to walk a Civil War battlefield at night, do so. There is nothing like being alone on a battlefield at night.— I think I have mentioned before that the older I get, the less ghosts bother me, and the more I welcome their company. These days they feel like old friends who simply got there before me. In the moonless night the deer moved like ghosts, barely perceptible in the haze off the Mississippi until you bumped into them.

Jane Boschma:

In a modern-day tale of two cities, in virtually every major U.S. metropolitan area students of color are much more likely than whites to attend public schools shaped by high concentrations of poverty, an analysis of federal data has found.

In all but five of the 95 largest cities by population for which data is available, more minority than white students attend public schools where most of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income, according to the analysis of data from the National Equity Atlas. In a full three-fourths of cities, the share of minority students attending mostly poor or low-income schools is at least 20 percentage points greater than the share of white students. In 29 of the cities, the gap is at least 40 percentage points.

Across a wide range of cities, the numbers point to a massive racial imbalance in exposure to concentrated poverty. In St. Louis, 92 percent of black, but only 27 percent of white, students attend schools where most of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income. In Dallas, 38 percent of white, compared to 95 percent of black and 97 percent of Latino students, attend mostly low-income schools. In Los Angeles, the numbers are 49 percent for whites, 85 percent for African Americans, and 96 percent for Latinos.

:

There are more than 2,500 schools in nearly 600 school districts in the state of New Jersey. There are more than 1.37 million students enrolled in public schools in the state. There are more than 113,000 teachers charged with the future of these students.

The numbers are astounding. The job of preparing these students is daunting.

How do you prepare them? How do you evaluate them? How do you evaluate the preparation?

According to the United States Census Bureau, individuals achieve the following degree levels earned the following median annual salaries: PhD’s, $100,000 or more; master’s, $63,000; bachelor’s, $55,700; associate’s, $42,000; high school diploma, $32,500. In addition, on average, bachelor’s degree holders earn about $2.3 million over their lifetime, while those with advanced degrees, including master’s, doctoral and professional degrees earning $2.7 million, $3.2 million and $3.7 million, respectively.

Economist:

$33,800), distance learning, over three years. You get books and some tuition, but mostly you are on your own. Students get together to form study groups; some work hard while others are busy with their jobs and families. Everyone passes.

I managed to find £8,000 for the first year. Then the second year came around and I struggled. I spoke to my student support officer who offered little support. I should have had all the money sorted, he said. Welcome to the real world.

I was working in a bar at the time to pay for the course. Most of my cohort were funded by their companies and then locked into contracts for a few years. That is the way to do an MBA: your firm pays and then guarantees you a job.

AK Whitney:

They too often evoke dread in math students. Just as frequently, math teachers — particularly if they’re new to the business — have trouble understanding why.

Ben Orlin, an Oakland-based high school math teacher and writer, describes this phenomenon in his popular blog Math With Bad Drawings: “I was shocked to find how fervently my students despised the things they called ‘word problems,’” he writes in the aptly titled post “The ‘Word Problem’ Problem.” “They treated ‘word problems’ as some exotic and poisonous breed.” His students felt that word problems “had nothing to do with the main thrust of mathematics, which was apparently to chug through computations and arrive at clean numerical solutions.”

Melinda Anderson:

For its most ardent champions, enthusiasm for coding comes close to evangelism. From Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt—“Let’s get the whole world coding!”—and the actor Ashton Kutcher, to the NBA player Chris Bosh and the rap royalty Snoop Dogg—“support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!”—teaching kids to code has gained high-profile support and widespread acclaim.

Perhaps for good reason. Jobs in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math are among the fastest-growing and highest-paying careers for college graduates, and with the pervasiveness of technology in our daily lives, learning to code is increasingly seen as foundational and essential for learning—not unlike reading, writing, and arithmetic. President Obama in a January weekly radio address latched onto the comparison: “In the new economy … it’s a basic skill, right along with the three ‘Rs.’” And the White House has put a lot of stock in that idea, reserving $4 billion in its 2017 federal budget proposal for states to bolster computer-science education, and $100 million of those funds targeted for school districts to establish and expand computer science in classrooms across the country.

PBS Frontline

FRONTLINE spent months following three young girls who are growing up against the backdrop of their families’ struggles against financial ruin. At a time when one in five American kids lives below the poverty line, Poor Kids is an is an intimate portrait of the economic crisis as it’s rarely seen, through the eyes of children.

Robert Pondiscio:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reliably wins applause with a call to “repeal every word of Common Core.” It’s a promise he will be hard-pressed to keep should he find himself in the White House next January. Aside from the bizarre impracticality of that comment as phrased (Which words shall we repeal first? “Phonics?” “Multiplication?” Or “Gettysburg Address?”), the endlessly debated, frequently pilloried standards – love ’em or hate ’em – are now a deeply entrenched feature of America’s K-12 education landscape.

Julie Beck:

And a new paper by Omar Gillath at the University of Kansas and Lucas Keefer at the University of Dayton suggests that the more someone moves from place to place, the more likely they are to think of their relationships as disposable—because they’re used to thinking of things as disposable.

Gillath and Keefer did a series of small studies where people took questionnaires about their willingness to dispose of things and people and their history of moving from place to place. They found that people who’d moved around a lot were more willing to get rid of objects (presumably because they have to do a culling of their possessions when they move), and being willing to get rid of things was associated with being willing to cut social ties. And in an experimental study where they primed people to think about moving in the future before they took the “willingness to dispose” survey, even if they didn’t have a nomadic history, they saw the same results.

Jason DeParle:

Seeking distraction one winter afternoon, a Milwaukee boy takes to some old-fashioned mischief and hurls snowballs at passing cars. A driver gives chase and kicks in the door of the house where the boy lives with his mother and younger brother. The landlord puts the family out. Thus begins an odyssey that in Matthew Desmond’s gripping and important book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, exposes the harrowing world of the ten million or so low-income households that pay half or more of their income for rent and utilities, a long-overlooked population whose numbers have recently soared.

The mother, Arleen, finds a house she likes, and it consumes only 84 percent of her cash income. But the city condemns it. So she moves the teen, Jori, and his brother, Jafiris, to a place she calls “Crack Head City” and then to a duplex where the rent, $550 a month, requires 88 percent of her income. She falls behind and gets evicted two days before Christmas, but the new tenant lets her stay until she finds a place. Living with a stranger causes friction, and Arleen calls ninety landlords before finding a place, from which she is again evicted. The situation worsens. She and the boys double up with a neighbor who is turning tricks. They rent a place where they are robbed at gunpoint. When Arleen’s next apartment takes 96 percent of her welfare check, she can’t keep the lights on. Her worst fear comes to pass: child welfare takes the kids.

Nelson Albino:

EspañolMany progressives in the United States have turned billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch into bogeymen of electoral politics, accusing them of having candidates in their pockets.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, for instance, singles out the Koch brothers almost every time he advances his socialist policies. He would have voters believe that they are the face of “Wall Street greed” and the cause of inequality in the United States.

Both progressives and socialists within the Democratic Party constantly rant about the “evil” Kochs, but they don’t bother to check whether the brothers really are the main donors in US politics.

Official records and serious research paint a very different picture than what Democrats want to believe. Journalist Bill McMorris looked into the matter and found that that no less than 18 unions donate more money to Super PACs than Koch Industries.

Xiani Zhong:

University of Wisconsin is looking at increasing its non-need-based financial aid for students earlier in their academic career, but some say it is just another move in the “arms race” among schools competing for top students in the nation.

Historically, UW’s non-need-based aid, or merit aid, has sat at the lower end among Big Ten schools, according to Inside Higher Ed. The competitive higher education market, however, calls UW to adjust its financial aid policy to maintain its appeal to high-performing students, both in Wisconsin and out of state, Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in the article.

Bertrand Russel:

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and QUOCTRUNG BUI:

Researchers say the rise in assortative mating is closely linked to income inequality. The two have increased in tandem, Dr. Schwartz, the sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, said: “People who are married tend to be more advantaged, and on top of that, more advantaged people are marrying people like themselves, so those people tend to be doubly advantaged.”

The effects could become more pronounced in future generations. Studies tell us that parents’ income and education have an enormous effect on children’s opportunities and achievements — and children today are more likely to grow up in homes in which parents are more similar than different.

Chava Gourarie and Jonathan Peters:

IN 2014, Paula Lavigne, a reporter for ESPN’s Outside the Lines program, began investigating college athletes and the justice system. Lavigne wanted to know whether prominent athletes receive preferential treatment during criminal inquiries, and to that end, she requested incident reports involving football and basketball players over a five-year period from campus police departments at 10 universities. After some haggling, she ultimately received documents from nine of them—but she got nothing from Notre Dame, the only private school on her list.

Gary Kasparov: I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In  practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit  itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of  poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality  is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is  dangerously absurd. 

Carry Kasparov  

Yes, please take Scandinavia as an example!

Implementing some socialistic elements AFTER becoming a wealthy capitalist economy only works aslong as you don’t choke off what made you wealthy tobegin with in the process. Again, it’s a luxury item that shouldn’t be confused with what is really doing the work, as many do. And do not forget that nearly all of the countless 20th-century innovations and industries that made the rest of the developed world so efficient and comfortable came from America, and it wasn’t …..

  

More from Fabius Maximus. 

Barney Jopson and Sam Fleming:

Jennifer Char went to Westwood College in Atlanta, dreaming of becoming a graphic artist. Today she is selling beauty products and wondering whether the two years she spent at the school, which will permanently close its doors next month, were worthwhile.

“I felt that some of the classes were more like electives [optional courses] for high school, or unnecessary for my degree,” she says, explaining that she left the course with too small a portfolio of work to show employers. “It was very upsetting. Why am I paying for something that is not going to be worth it?”

One legacy that Ms Char has not shaken off from her time at Westwood is debt. She says loan repayments of $400-$500 a month are consuming around half of her take-home earnings. She benefits from a forgiving landlord — her mother — but her difficulties with student debt are far from unique.

Nick Cohen:

On the face of it, there has never been a better time to break into the arts, television, music or journalism. Look at the universities, and you can think that all the bragging about London being the creative capital of Europe, and British cultural dominance replacing British imperial dominance, is a simple statement of fact.

Our institutes of higher education offer training for every type of creative career. You can learn how to act, paint and play classical music, as you always could. But universities now train students for careers that no one imagined needed an academic qualification until recently. Every variety of print and television journalism is on offer up to and including sports journalism. (The pedagogues at the University of East Anglia have stepped forward to intellectualise this rough trade.) Every variety of film-making is covered too. Then we have courses on game design, game development, creative writing (both poetry and prose), animation, popular music (this at London’s Goldsmiths University), arts administration, children’s literature, creative and cultural entrepreneurship (“to commercialise on your creative and cultural practices and/or knowledge” — Goldsmiths again), musical theatre (Guildford University offers both the singing and the dancing), and arts festival management (a niche occupation filled by sharp-eyed dons at Leicester’s De Montfort university).

Andrew Hacker:

HERE’S an apparent paradox: Most Americans have taken high school mathematics, including geometry and algebra, yet a national survey found that 82 percent of adults could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and square-yard price. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently tested adults in 24 countries on basic “numeracy” skills. Typical questions involved odometer readings and produce sell-by tags. The United States ended an embarrassing 22nd, behind Estonia and Cyprus. We should be doing better. Is more mathematics the answer?

In fact, what’s needed is a different kind of proficiency, one that is hardly taught at all. The Mathematical Association of America calls it “quantitative literacy.” I prefer the O.E.C.D.’s “numeracy,” suggesting an affinity with reading and writing.

Jennifer DuBois:

When I was twenty-three, I was hired by the CIA. I was working at a Catholic school at the time, coaching squash and teaching seventh-grade social studies—which was funny, since I had never before seen a squash game before and was not even so much as a lapsed Catholic. I lived behind the school in a former convent where the only consistently functioning lights were a pair of glowing red exit signs. My prevailing feeling that year was one of intense personal absurdity, and it was in this spirit that I applied to the CIA (I liked international relations, and who knew they had an online application?) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I liked writing stories, and what the hell?). These things certainly didn’t make any less sense than coaching squash and living in a convent—though they weren’t really ambitions as much as gestures: reflections of my general hope that I would, someday, do something else. Each was something in between a dice roll and a delusion, a promissory note and a private joke to no one but myself.

Daniel Lemire:

Universities require their professors to publish research papers. Yet publishing your research has little to do with most of the teaching that goes on in universities. And with online teaching, we can almost completely separate teaching from research. Yet we are typically happy to dismiss these concerns by pointing out that universities have also a research purpose. But this answer is not entirely satisfying: who gets to decide what universities should do beside provide degrees and teaching?

There was a long student boycott in Quebec in 2012 that attracted worldwide attention. Students asked for free higher education. One of their core arguments for cheap tuition was that much of the university budget goes to support research. Apparently, many students would rather not pay for research. That is, if universities have to do research, then it is up to the government (or to industry) to fund it.

Elizabeth Redden:

With the drop in oil prices compelling the Saudi Arabian government to make steep spending cuts, U.S. colleges and universities are closely watching what will happen with the government’s foreign university scholarship program, which has sponsored tens of thousands of students to study overseas since 2005 and has stimulated a more than seventeenfold increase in the number of Saudi students at U.S. universities in that time. The nearly 60,000 Saudi students studying at U.S. universities in 2014-15 represent the fourth-largest group of international students by country of origin at U.S. universities, after students from China, India and South Korea.

The scholarship program is popular with Saudi youth and with U.S. universities, which have grown to depend on an increasing flow of Saudi students to meet their enrollment targets. A recent analysis from Moody’s Investors Service on the impact of reduced funding and stricter eligibility requirements for the scholarship program noted that “even modest enrollment fluctuations could have a meaningful effect on some universities.”

Hamilton Nolan:

Phil Knight, the billionaire founder of Nike, is giving $400 million to Stanford—a school that already has an endowment of more than $22 billion, and that just last year received more donations than any other school in America. This is the academic charity equivalent of giving a donation to a Michael Bloomberg election campaign: it’s not necessary, and it could do a lot more good elsewhere.

Knight’s grand idea is to establish an endowment for a graduate program that will “attract the best graduate and professional students from around the world.” They’ll receive a full ride to come to Stanford and “commit to working on important issues in small, multidisciplinary teams.” (In a hilarious demonstration of the self-awareness level of the average billionaire, the example Knight uses as a problem that these students might study is Mark Zuckerberg’s failed $100 million gift to the Newark public school system. Judge not lest ye be judged, Phil.)

Rebecca Mead:

Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning. The school is one floor up, in a commercial building overlooking Montague Street. On the building’s exterior is a logo: a light-blue square, with rounded corners, bearing the word “alt.” It looks like an iPhone app awaiting the tap of a colossal finger.

Inside, the space has been partitioned with dividers creating several classrooms. The décor evokes an IKEA showroom: low-slung couches, beanbags, clusters of tables, and wooden chairs in progressively smaller sizes, like those belonging to Goldilocks’s three bears. There is no principal’s office and no principal. Like the five other AltSchools that have opened in the past three years—the rest are in the Bay Area—the school is run by teachers, one of whom serves as the head of the school. There is no school secretary: many administrative matters are handled at AltSchool’s headquarters, in the SOMA district of San Francisco. There aren’t even many children. Every AltSchool is a “micro-school.” In Brooklyn Heights, there are thirty-five students, ranging from pre-kindergarten to third grade. Only a few dozen more children will be added as the school matures. AltSchool’s ambition, however, is huge. Five more schools are scheduled to open by the end of 2017, in San Francisco, Manhattan, and Chicago, and the goal is to expand into other parts of the country, offering a highly tailored education that uses technology to target each student’s “needs and passions.” Tuition is about thirty thousand dollars a year.

Christopher Soghoian:

The author is the Principal Technologist with the Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

What if the FBI could force Samsung to covertly turn on the video camera in your smart TV? Or force Google to deliver a malicious security update to your web browser which actually spied on you and transmitted your passwords and other sensitive information back to the FBI? Sound like something from a dystopian sci-fi movie? If Apple loses its high-profile legal fight with the US government, these scenarios could become a reality. This will also threaten the security of all Internet users.

Peter Dreier:

It’s not just right-wing populists who are worried that some academic humanities and social science fields are veering into irrelevance. The latest issue of the left-of-center magazine American Prospect has a depressing report by the leftist Occidental professor Peter Dreier on his experience submitting a bogus paper to a humanities conference and getting it accepted. . . .

Here’s one representative sentence: “Self-delusion and self-discipline inhibits the reflective self, the postmodern membrane, the ecclesiastical impulse forbidden by truth-seeking and sun worship, problematizing the inchoate structures of both reason and darkness, allowing knowledge, half-knowledge, and knowledgelessness to undermine and yet simultaneously overcome the self-loathing that overwhelms the Gnostic challenge facing Biblical scribes, folksingers, and hip-hop rappers alike.” He also includes examples of the type of real humanities work that led him to undertake this experiment (he saw sentences elsewhere like: “Given the attitudes generated by our sense of a place, critical perspectives that only target overt structures within city systems are incomplete” and “Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations.”)

To make matters worse, most of this “postmodern” analysis is taking place within the context of a hermetically sealed political bubble. As our friends at Heterodox Academy have pointed out, just four percent of American academics in the humanities identify as conservative. This total homogeneity may be one reason that so much work in the humanities has become utterly disconnected from what the general public might consider to be valuable scholarly exploration.

Donna St. George:

One winter morning, Spark Matsunaga Elementary School teacher Greta Fitch asks her fourth-graders to consider the world outside their door — specifically, the businesses that line their suburban streets. What sorts of stores and services and restaurants are there? Is anything missing?

On each desk is a Chromebook, a lightweight laptop that students use to search Germantown, Md., using Google Maps as if they were driving the streets. Fitch says that in coming days she will ask the students to put themselves in the shoes of the diverse town’s residents. What businesses might they want? she asks. What do they not see?

Matthew O’Brien shoots up his hand. The energetic 10-year-old says he’s been looking for sporting goods stores and has come up empty for a certain retailer. He points out that the popular Maryland SoccerPlex is in Germantown, and he has spotted a vacant property beside it where a sports store could be built.

“You’ve even found a location?” Fitch asks.

“People who go to the SoccerPlex would go,” he says.

Fitch smiles. She’s not new to teaching or technology. But she finds that some of its best uses involve student discovery. She tries to be open to the unexpected. Matthew made connections more quickly than she imagined — a sign, she believes, that the lesson is more engaging, more meaningful, than the way she taught it before.

Just two years ago, the class would have visited the school’s computer lab once, but most of the multi-week project on economics would have involved handouts, discussion and a printed list of businesses.

JimQ:

stumbled across an article in the Financial Times the other day revealing why Philadelphia’s infrastructure is crumbling, with absolutely zero possibility of reversing the downward spiral. I find it fascinating a foreign publication had to uncover the ugly truth, while the liberal rag Phila. Inquirer is completely silent on the issue. They just spout the mantra of how the Feds and PA need to give Philadelphia more money. It’s always for the children. The hundreds of billions poured into the public education system in this country over the last decade has been a complete waste of time, mainly because a huge portion of the money doesn’t go towards education, but bloated pensions and administration costs.

More mediocre teachers, more government control, more social engineering, more free breakfasts and lunches, more catchy slogans and more promises have achieved steady declines in SAT scores across the board. The next solution is to phase out SAT scores. Measuring failure isn’t allowed in our politically correct, trophy generation, safe spaces world. Reporting declines in scores on a test that has been an accurate predictor of college success for generations is a micro aggression against the intellectually stunted morons being matriculated through the government run public education system. The $14,000 to $20,000 per student per year spent by the taxpayers across this country just isn’t enough according to those of a liberal ilk. The children would be smart if we just upped the ante by another $2,000 per kid. They’d hire more below average education majors into the teacher’s union. That’s a can’t miss solution.

Ricardo Hausman:

example, rich people wear fancy clothes. Would distributing fancy clothes to poor people make them rich? This is a case where correlation (between clothes and wealth) does not imply causation.
Harvard graduates get great jobs. Is Harvard good at teaching – or just at selecting smart people who would have done well in life anyway? This is the problem of selection bias.

RCTs address these problems by randomly assigning those participating in the trial to receive either a “treatment” or a “placebo” (thereby creating a “control” group). By observing how the two groups differ after the intervention, the effectiveness of the treatment can be assessed. RCTs have been conducted on drugs, micro-loans, training programs, educational tools, and myriad other interventions.

Attracta Mooney:

This is the case when speaking to Rob Dubow, director of finance for the City of Philadelphia, the US local authority, and chairman of the city’s pension fund board.

The numbers for the city’s municipal pension fund are so troubling that there seems to be no point in adopting a softly-softly approach.

This is a scheme with a funding hole of $5.7bn; it owes far more money to present and future pensioners that it has in its coffers. The fund has less than half what it needs, with assets of $4.8bn in mid-2014.

The scheme, which manages the retirement funds of 64,000 current and former employees for the Pennsylvanian city, has been branded one of the worst-funded pension funds in the US. Its financial position has long been labelled the “quiet crisis” of Philadelphia.

Although gently spoken, Mr Dubow does not mince his words when asked about the funding gap. “The unfunded liability is one of the biggest financial challenges we face [in Philadelphia] and we have to figure out how to manage that,” says the 57-year-old.

The former journalist adds that the problems with the pension fund, which was set up in 1915 and now includes 18 separate retirement plans, “developed over decades”.

“We have a very mature pension fund. We have more retirees than we have active members. That imbalance is a big cause of our problem. Also, we got hit in 2008/2009,” he says, speaking by phone from the local government offices.

CBS

With state funding cut off due to the ongoing budget impasse, Chicago State University has announced all 900 employees, including the university president, are receiving layoff notices.

CSU President Thomas Calhoun Jr. said the university has reached a point where it can’t continue to function as it has since the school year began last fall, so layoff notices have been sent to all faculty, staff, and administrators.

“We have the legal responsibility to communicate to our employees that, should our statehouse fail to fund us, and put us in a position where we have to be compromised, we would need to have the flexibility and the legal position such that a reduction in force could take place,” he said.

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

We’ve been told that public colleges and universities have entered a New Normal. It’s supposed to be stable and sustainable. It gives colleges less–to make them learn to do more. Happy scenes like commencement at San Francisco State, at left, are to carry on unimpeded, with lower costs but no loss of learning or research.

This week, this insidious narrative was again undone by several stories about San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, and their private cousin Stanford University.

1. Defunding Democracy

First, a rehearsal: The democratic vision of U.S. higher ed was that the burgeoning masses could get a degree that was cognitively the same as that of elites, even though they lacked the latter’s social networks and private resources. Twins separated at graduation, one going to Stanford, say, and one to UC Berkeley, with a sibling already enrolled at San Francisco State, would have student experiences that would differ in trappings but not essentials. The great faculty and facilities at the two public universities would allow them to offer cognitive gain that was functionally similar to that received by the Stanford twin, who would have social but not intellectual advantages. No one thought they were dooming public university students to second- or third-tier status in a secret caste system.

David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh:

Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, naturally you are angry; voters should distrust a candidate who is not angry.

But there’s more to it than mere anger. Chris Christie was angry, and he’s gone. Trump has hit on important issues—immigration, the economy, appeasement unlimited—in ways that appeal to voters emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that; I trust someone who feels what I feel more than a person who merely thinks what I think. But though Rubio and Cruz are plainly capable of connecting with voters emotionally, Trump is way ahead—for many reasons, but the most important is obvious and virtually ignored.

Political correctness. Trump hasn’t made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong, Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years—havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it—or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.

We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won’t even say “Islamic terrorism.” It sounds like a joke—but it isn’t funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America’s nonelites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don’t belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.

Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What’s more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force—as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles—is rage-making.)

The mainstream press largely ignored the Marines story. Mainstream reporters can’t see the crucial importance of political correctness because they are wholly immersed in it, can’t conceive of questioning it; it is the very stuff of their thinking, their heart’s blood. Most have been raised in this faith and have no other. Can you blame them if they take it for granted?

Why did the EPA try to issue a diktat designed to destroy the American coal industry in exchange for decreases in carbon emissions that were purely symbolic? Political correctness required this decree. It is not just a matter of infantile posing, like pretending to be offended by the name Washington Redskins. Bureaucrats have been ordered by those on high to put their p.c. principles into practice, and the character of American government is changing.

The IRS attacks conservative groups—and not one IRS worker has the integrity or guts to resign on principle, not one. Political correctness is a creed, and the creed holds that American conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil. This has been the creed for a generation, but people are angry now because we see, for the first time, political correctness powering an administration and a federal bureaucracy the way a big V-8 powers a sports car. The Department of Justice contributes its opinion that the IRS was guilty of no crime—and has made other politically slanted decisions too; and those decisions all express the credo of thought-police liberalism, as captured by the motto soon to be mounted (we hear) above the main door at the White House, the IRS, and the DOJ: We know what’s best; you shut up.

It’s a gigantic, terrifying problem—and no other candidate even mentions it! If Cruz and Rubio and Bush choose to be taken seriously by voters (versus analysts), they will follow Trump in attacking this deadly corrosion that weakens democracy from the inside, leaving a fragile shell that crumbles to powder in the first stiff breeze.

The State Department, naturally, is installing the same motto above its door—together with a flag emblazoned with a presidential phone and a presidential pen, the sacred instruments of invasive leftism. Christians are persecuted, enslaved, murdered in the Middle East, but the Obama regime is not interested. In a distant but related twist, Obama orders Christian organizations to dispense contraceptives whether they want to or not. This is political correctness in action—invasive leftism. Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant. If you don’t believe it, go to the universities that trained Obama, Columbia and Harvard, and listen. We live in the Biblical Republic, founded by devout Christians with a Creed (liberty, equality, democracy) supported directly—each separate principle—by ancient Hebrew verses. Christianity created this nation. But p.c. people don’t know history. Don’t even know that there is any. Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born. Radically different levels of violence; same underlying class-warfare principle.

And we still haven’t come to the main point. Many white male job-seekers have faced aggressive state-enforced bigotry their whole lives. It doesn’t matter much to a Washington wiseguy, left or right, if firemen in New Haven (whites and Hispanics) pass a test for promotion that is peremptorily thrown in the trash after the fact because no blacks scored high enough. Who cares? It hardly matters if a white child and a black child of equal intelligence study equally hard, get equally good grades and recommendations—and the black kid gets into college X but the white kid doesn’t. Who would vote for a president based on that kind of trivia? This sort of corruption never bothers rich or well-educated families. There’s always room at the top. But such things do matter to many citizens of this country, who are in the bad habit of expecting honesty and fairness from the institutions that define our society, and who don’t have quite as many fancy, exciting opportunities as the elect families of the p.c. true believers. In analyzing Trump, Washington misses the point, is staggeringly wide of the point. Only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.

Why, by the way, was Trump alone honored by a proposal in the British Parliament that he be banned from the country? Something about Trump drives Europeans crazy. Not the things that drive me crazy: his slandering John McCain, mocking a disabled reporter, revealing no concept of American foreign policy, repeating that ugly lie about George W. Bush supposedly tricking us into war with Iraq. The British don’t care about such things one way or the other—they are used to American vulgarians. But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody’s life properly. Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.

The day Obama was inaugurated, he might have done a noble thing. He might have delivered an inaugural address in which he said: This nation used to be guilty of race prejudice, but today I can tell you that there is no speck of race prejudice in any corner of the government or the laws of this country, and that is an amazing achievement of which every American ought to be deeply proud. An individual American here or there is racist; but that’s his right in a free country; if he commits no crime, let him think and say what he likes. But I know and you know, and the whole world knows, that the overwhelming majority of Americans has thoroughly, from the heart, renounced race prejudice forever. So let’s have three cheers for our uniquely noble nation—and let’s move on tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

But he didn’t.

Worst of all its crimes is what invasive leftism has done to our schools. Trump’s un-privileged, un-classy supporters understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don’t always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.

Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson—even Kasich—could slam thought-police liberalism in every speech. They’d concede that Trump was right to bring the issue forward. Their own records are perfectly consistent with despising political correctness. It’s just that they lacked the wisdom or maybe the courage to acknowledge how deep this corruption reaches into America’s soul. It’s not too late for them to join him in exposing this cancer afflicting America’s spirit, the malign and ferocious arrogance of p.c.

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Anthony Hennen:

High pay for CEOs attracts annual attention and recitations about the immorality of capitalism, but when the focus is on average CEO pay, they make less than half the annual earnings of college presidents, according to CBS News.

The average CEO earns $176,840 annually, an amount that would make a university president into a pauper. In academia, college presidents earn $377,261 annually.

Americans outraged and indebted by high college costs will be quick to draw the parallel between college president pay and their tuition bill. Correlation, though, doesn’t imply causation. Often, college presidents aren’t even the highest-paid college employees; athletic coaches earn more.

Regardless, college presidents “are well into the 99th percentile of compensation for wage earners in the United States,” Peter L. Hinrichs and Anne Chen noted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The median cost of presidential salaries per student is $138.85. Slashing presidential pay could free up some money for student scholarships or additional staff hiring, but students aren’t over-burdened by presidential salaries, as easy a scapegoat as it might be.

Overall staff salaries, however, might be a different story.

Peggy Noonan:

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that. . . . You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

Richard Reeves and Edward Rodrigue:

2. Most Black Middle Class Kids Are Downwardly Mobile

Downward intergenerational social mobility from the middle to the bottom is much more common among Black Americans. Seven out of ten black Americans born into the middle quintile fall into one of the two quintiles below as adults. In some ways, this is an even more depressing fact than the poor rates of upward mobility. Even black Americans who make it to the middle class are likely to see their kids fall down the ladder:

Alan Borsuk:

I’ll focus here on responses from current or retired teachers. All but one agreed that conduct in school had declined. (The one said, in short, that kids hadn’t changed much and there are still a lot of great students in schools.) Many didn’t want to be named, and I’ll extend that to all here.

One teacher wrote, “The easy answer is bad parenting. And that’s part of it, I believe, but certainly not the only thing.”

“To be honest, a lot of my students with severe behavior difficulties have parents that are incarcerated, or absent, or out drinking until all hours of the night…. But some of them are from two-parent, dedicated families.

“In my opinion, I think parents often indulge their children — to be their pals, to make them the center of the universe, to just give in because they’re too exhausted or unknowing to say no or have family time, or whatever.”

A retired teacher and administrator wrote, “When I became an administrator, it was clearly understood that if a student used inappropriate language toward a peer, teacher or staff member, there would be consequences, perhaps a detention or in extreme cases a suspension. By the time I retired, this type of behavior was seen as the student merely expressing his/her feelings in a vivid and colorful manner.”

A recently retired high school teacher recounted in detail how the misbehavior of a single student — often one who had been passed along to higher grades without being on grade level — could get much of a class period off track for learning and school administrators weren’t adequately helpful in responding.

Kelly Baker:

For two years, I’ve been writing about how academia works— and particularly about contingent labor, gender, and the adjunctification of the modern university. I’ve advocated for the impermanent members of the faculty because my own work in academia was only ever off the tenure track.

When I began reading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works, I was convinced that I knew the map of faculty labor in higher education. I assumed his book would complement and shore up what I knew. I’m already familiar with higher education’s increasing reliance on contingent faculty. I’m aware that the job market in the humanities generally (and in my field of religious studies, in particular) is bad because I stayed on it for five years. Tenured professors retire, and their positions are moved off the tenure track. We continually read dire pronouncements about how graduate school ruins your life, and impassioned calls to reduce graduate admissions.

Joanne Barker

UPDATED: Last week at San Francisco State University (SFSU), the only College of Ethnic Studies (COES) in the United States, was informed that next year’s budget would be cut somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000: based on this year’s budget of $3.6 million, that would mean a 13.8 percent budget cut (see table below).

To be clear, the COES has already experienced severe cuts: for instance, in 2009, the COES had 60 full-time faculty and now has only 37 full-time faculty.

The proposed cuts for 2016-2017 could mean no faculty sabbaticals or course release, no lecturers, no research institutes, no student resource center, and the suspension of all hiring initiatives on new and replacement faculty lines most immediately impacting a current search in Africana Studies. Tenure and tenure track faculty would be expected to make up the difference by significantly increasing their course loads and advising responsibilities. Further, with 40-50 percent less course offerings (considering the total percentage of those courses currenty offered by lecturers), students’ time-to-degree could also be adversely impacted.

Amy Lavalley:

Valparaiso University announced Friday that in the wake of declining enrollment for its law school, it is offering buyouts to tenured faculty and faculty members with multi-year contracts.

The school has 21 tenured faculty and six with multi-year contracts and any of them could be eligible for a buyout, said Andrea Lyon, the law school’s dean, adding she couldn’t comment on a target number for the buyouts because that would depend on salaries and the school’s budget.

She said the school is “right-sizing” its faculty because of a drop in students. The school has an enrollment this year of 430 full- and part-time students, and had an incoming class in the fall of 133 students.

Lee Fang:

Journalism 101 teaches that reporters and TV news hosts must properly identify their sources and analysts,” says Jeff Cohen, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College. We reached out to NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC News, but did not hear back.

Stephanie Cutter, for example, has appeared on multiple networks to discuss Clinton, and is typically introduced as a former campaign official for President Barack Obama. What hasn’t been disclosed in any of her appearances reviewed by The Intercept, however, is that the boutique consulting firm she co-founded, Precision Strategies, has been retained by the Clinton campaign for “digital consulting,” according to Federal Election Commission records. Precision Strategies has been paid at least $120,049 from the Clinton campaign since June of last year.

“I think that Hillary Clinton has done everything right. She has run a good campaign. She has outperformed in debates. She’s raised money. She’s got a great ground game,” said Cutter, speaking about the upcoming New Hampshire and Iowa primaries on NBC’s Meet the Press on January 17. She was introduced as “President Obama’s 2012 deputy campaign manager.” Her company’s affiliation with the Clinton campaign was not disclosed.

Doug Erickson:

Students are taking more time to eat now because they no longer are racing to get outside, Lehman said, and any disputes that arise on the playground can be addressed during lunch, instead of expecting children to transition immediately from kickball to math.

Even though the length of the lunch period at Hawthorne technically did not change — it’s still about 20 minutes — children can take a little more time if they need to because there’s more flexibility in the schedule, Lehman said. By combining recesses, kids put on and take off their coats and hats and boots just once during the school day, cutting in half a laborious task that can devour a sizable chunk of school time.

Doug Bierend:

years, Nicole has worked full-time as live-in caretaker for her centenarian grandmother. Looking to make a little extra cash, she signed up last September with Studypool “an online marketplace that connects students with questions with tutors who can answer them.” An Uber for tutors, if you will.
Nicole created a profile, submitted copies of her driver’s license and unofficial college transcripts, and joined the ranks of independent contractors powering the on-demand economy. Within six hours, she was in business, browsing questions posted by a vast diaspora of students connected via a convenient sharing platform. She quickly came across a request from a college engineering student — represented by a Spongebob Squarepants avatar—looking for help with his calculus homework. Nicole bid five bucks and got the gig.

Brownwen Maddox:

As Britain struggles to work out whether it is better off in or out of the EU, it might pay heed to the devastating analysis that shows the really frightening obstacles to a thriving future lie at home. The OECD, the Paris-based think-tank, last month ranked British teenagers bottom of 23 developed countries in literacy, and 22nd out of 23 in numeracy.

That was not the first blow. Another OECD survey in May put British 15-year-olds 20th in the world in maths and science (above the US at 28th, it must be said); Singapore was top, followed by Hong Kong and South Korea. International rankings are controversial, not least because they sometimes compare cities or regions against whole countries; Shanghai’s glittering record hardly reflects the performance of China’s rural poor. Still, the tables help monitor a country’s progress, or lack of it — and point to teaching techniques that can be borrowed.

Michelle Stack:

I often wondered why higher education institutions became implicated in media-business rankings. The major rankings that I analysed for my book, Global University Rankings and the Mediatization of Higher Education, use indicators that tell us more about the wealth of an institution than the quality of students’ educational experience. Rankings have been part of a seismic shift in determining the mission of universities, a shift in who and what is seen as showing evidence of excellence. They play a pivotal role in the dramatic increase in higher education institutions’ spend on marketing and public relations.

I started to write my book on rankings two years ago, and since that time the number of issues plaguing institutions – including top-ranked HEIs – seems only to be increasing. In the US, 157 colleges are under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault. Too often students report academic leadership being more concerned about the institution’s reputation than the safety of students. But how an institution attempts to deal with systemic violence is not included in determining whether a university is excellent at a world-class level.

Tom James:

The central focus of his legal action would be to get the state Supreme Court to rule on the legality of continuing to use local levies to supplement teacher and staff pay. The court has already ruled that paying for essential parts of education is a state duty, not a local one. But local districts continue to collect levies that pay for basic parts of public school

Dorn added that he had been trying to put together some kind of legal action on the issue since before the start of the legislative session. Gathering support for the move and deciding on the right legal approach has taken time.

The Kansas City spending experience is worth reviewing.

Tom James:

The central focus of his legal action would be to get the state Supreme Court to rule on the legality of continuing to use local levies to supplement teacher and staff pay. The court has already ruled that paying for essential parts of education is a state duty, not a local one. But local districts continue to collect levies that pay for basic parts of public school

Dorn added that he had been trying to put together some kind of legal action on the issue since before the start of the legislative session. Gathering support for the move and deciding on the right legal approach has taken time.

Mitch Henck video.

Molly Beck:

The bill that later became Act 10 launched the largest protests ever in Madison, including a temporary occupation of the Capitol; legislative chaos highlighted by Democratic senators fleeing to Illinois to forestall a floor vote; and Walker’s historic recall victory.

The days, weeks and months after Walker’s Feb. 11, 2011, announcement were among the most dramatic in Wisconsin’s history.

Years later, Act 10 continues to influence the state’s political, economic and social landscape. And it will continue to reverberate years into the future.

Today, the Wisconsin State Journal explores five impacts of Act 10 on the five-year anniversary of its introduction.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

The first comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers. According to the report, “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent of computer engineering majors.”

But they’re overrepresented in fields that don’t have high salaries: “21 percent in health and medical administrative services, compared to only 6 percent in the higher-earning detailed major of pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences, and administration.”

Finally, it noted, “They are also highly represented in . . . [the low-paying fields of] human services and community organization (20%) and social work (19%).”

“There’s a huge inadequacy here in counseling,” Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and the lead author of the report, told the Atlantic.

This seems pretty unlikely. Who doesn’t realize computer engineers get paid well? The real problem is that too many black students are getting a hopelessly inadequate K-12 education and by the time they get to college, their best bet is to major in a subject whose exams have no wrong answers and whose professors engage in rampant grade inflation.

Carnevale also argues that’s because blacks are concentrated in open-access schools that have fewer choices of majors. But this, too, is questionable. Plenty of open-access universities offer courses and majors in STEM fields.

The implication is that black students at lower-tier universities are actually less likely to graduate in STEM majors than those at higher-tier ones. Which is patently false. Indeed, the historically black colleges and universities, many of which aren’t selective at all, tend to have among the highest rates of graduating STEM majors.

And if you want to get a job in a lucrative STEM field, your chances of completing your degree are much better at a lower-tier school. But here’s the real kicker: A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that in “fields like science, technology, engineering and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a low-priced one — expected earnings turn out the same.”

Madison, spending more than $17k per student annually, has added numerous programs (complexity) over the decades. yet, it has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

The full Georgetown report (PDF).