Jan Hoffman:

A common impairment with lifelong consequences turns out to be highly contagious between parent and child, a new study shows.

The impairment? Math anxiety.

Means of transmission? Homework help.

Children of highly math-anxious parents learned less math and were more likely to develop math anxiety themselves, but only when their parents provided frequent help on math homework, according to a study of first- and second-graders, published in Psychological Science.

Researchers tested 438 children from 29 public and private schools in three Midwestern states for math ability as well as math anxiety, at the beginning and end of the school year. Their parents completed questionnaires about math anxiety, and about how often they helped their children with homework.

The Economist:

DEBATES over how to fund higher education never lie dormant for long. In Britain, recently, there have been reforms about twice a decade; the last one, which hiked tuition fees, all but killed off the Liberal Democrats, members of the previous coalition government. In America, concerns abound over soaring costs and towering student debts. As a result, presidential candidates have been weighing in with plans to overhaul the system.

Why should the state support students in the first place? One argument is that society benefits from educated citizens, who pay more taxes, generate more jobs and help to advance human knowledge. Typically, such social gains justify subsidies. But the private returns to many degrees are juicy enough to encourage would-be students without a subsidy. The New York Fed reckons that a bachelor’s degree provides a 15% return on investment.

Jonathan Knee:

Watching the $200 million iceberg (Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation was contingent on raising a matching amount) slowly melt into an ocean of recrimination over the course of 256 brisk pages can be a sometimes painful exercise. The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what he felt members should have received in previous years — before agreeing to discuss any labor reforms. The superintendent, Cami Anderson, demanded accountability from schools but set her own performance goals only after the academic year was largely over and relied on expensive consultants — whose total bill ultimately exceeded $20 million — without clear objectives long after she had promised to recruit a permanent leadership team.

The school reform movement’s focus on measurable results and “business-style management” is laudable. But it is downright chilling to watch the leadership team throw around buzz phrases from business best-sellers with minimal focus on the nuanced requirements of applying these principles to the education ecosystem generally or to the Newark public schools particularly. Too many of Newark’s children have suffered unspeakable trauma from their exposure to a combination of violent crime, family turmoil and deep poverty. With all the high-minded talk of revolution and “ripping off Band-Aids” and “changing the engine while flying the plane,” remarkably little thought went into the actual effect these policies might have on this population in desperate need of stability — much less how $200 million could be best spent in this context.

Adam Huttner Koros:

Newton’s Principia Mathematica was written in Latin; Einstein’s first influential papers were written in German; Marie Curie’s work was published in French. Yet today, most scientific research around the world is published in a single language, English.

Since the middle of the last century, things have shifted in the global scientific community. English is now so prevalent that in some non-English speaking countries, like Germany, France, and Spain, English-language academic papers outnumber publications in the country’s own language several times over. In the Netherlands, one of the more extreme examples, this ratio is an astonishing 40 to 1.

Robin Lake:

Paul has legitimate concerns about the “backfill” issue (whether charter schools should be required to take students mid-year or after traditional entry grades), concerns that are grounded in his research with Gail Foster and Tamar Gendler at RAND back in the 80s. High Schools with Character is one of the best things I’ve read about the importance of school-level coherency and is foundational reading at CRPE. Paul is worried that by asking the most effective, “high-output” charter high schools to backfill, they will begin to look like traditional comprehensive high schools, compromising high standards and the learning opportunities for high-achieving students.

We at CRPE have always believed that the real promise of chartering rests on the ability of the school to act as a focused, results-oriented organization. A school should be able to define a clear vision of the skills, character, and competencies of its graduates, and it should be able to define how instruction, culture, and resources are aligned in support of producing those kinds of graduates. It is essential that everyone in the school community—teachers, students, parents, and even the cafeteria staff—is on board with that plan. Focus and coherency are especially important at the high school level, where student interests, skills, and behaviors can vary dramatically. Trying to respond to those diverse needs led us to where we are today, with comprehensive high schools that often produce award-winning football teams and jazz bands but struggle to ensure that every student leaves on a path to success.

Erin Richards:

Wisconsin’s Class of 2015 posted an average ACT composite score of 22.2, tying the state for second nationally among states where the majority of students take the national college entrance exam, according to results released Wednesday.

The results come from the 73% of Wisconsin students who graduated in 2015 and took the exam in high school. Another round of ACT scores will be released this fall, tied to the new mandate that requires all juniors to take the exam — which happened for the first time this spring.

Because that pool of test-takers will include students who may not have otherwise chosen or been academically prepared to take the ACT, Wisconsin’s average statewide composite score is expected to drop.

“By setting a new course and administering the ACT to all high school juniors, we’re helping way more students consider further education after high school,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said in a statement Wednesday.

Nationally, 49% of graduates, or 1.9 million students, took the ACT in 2015, posting a national average composite score of 21.

Compare districts and schools, here.

Black Reconstruction:

Depending on whom you ask, Reconstruction, which lasted from 1863 to 1877, began with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that declared “all persons held as slaves within [Confederate] States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.” Others might say it began the moment the Confederacy, its industry, farms, and railroads ruined, surrendered to Union troops in 1865. Still, a more exacting group might date it at the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which carved the South into five military districts in which a military commander had the final word for an entire decade. Despite these varied beginnings, all ignore the stories of the people central to this revolutionary moment: enslaved Black people.

As we grapple with the radical meaning of today’s Black Lives Matters movement, it is important to look at our history to understand how our ancestors mobilized to secure freedom after the Civil War. It is also important to understand power and the systems that sought to undermine the potential for Black autonomy and freedom in the United States.

While Reconstruction demonstrated the law’s limited ability to reverse the violence of 366 years of chattel slavery, Black people still organized civic associations, won elective office, and established towns—all motivated by an alternative vision of American democracy.

We are indebted to W.E.B. Du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction, the first revisionist account of the racist view that Black people were unequipped for freedom. We will read Du Bois in tandem with other sources past and present.

Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon

In early June, Baylor defensive coordinator Phil Bennett was a guest speaker at a luncheon in Fort Worth for the Baylor Sports Network. During his speech, he dropped a bit of long-anticipated information about the team’s plans: He expected defensive end Sam Ukwuachu—a Freshman All-American who transferred in 2013 from Boise State to Baylor only to miss 2014, his first eligible season with the Bears, for unspecified reasons—to finally take the field. It was a significant announcement for a program that’s a favorite pick to clinch one of four College Football Playoff spots, and it was reported by a breathless sports media eager to talk up head coach Art Briles’ program. No one questioned Bennett’s assertion that Ukwuachu was expected to play—even though Ukwuachu was due to stand trial in Waco for sexual assault in just a few weeks, and if convicted, could spend up to twenty years in prison.

Chester Finn & Brandon Wright:

A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA exams in 2012, the U.S. ranked 17th in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math.

Less well known is how few young Americans—particularly the poor and minorities—reach the top ranks on such measures. The PISA test breaks students into six levels of math literacy, and only 9% of American 15-year-olds reached the top two tiers. Compare that with 16% in Canada, 17% in Germany and 40% in Singapore.

Suzanne C. SwagermanElsje van BergenDorret I. Boomsma:

Highlights
We studied familial transmission of reading ability in twins, siblings and parents.

Evidence was found for additive and non-additive genetic influences.

Assortative mating was substantial.

Parent-offspring resemblance was due to genetic transmission not family environment.

NASA:

The first rockets ever built, the fire-arrows of the Chinese, were not very reliable. Many just exploded on launching. Others flew on erratic courses and landed in the wrong place. Being a rocketeer in the days of the fire-arrows must have been an exciting, but also a highly dangerous activity.

Today, rockets are much more reliable. They fly on precise courses and are capable of going fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of Earth. Modern rockets are also more efficient today because we have an understanding of the scientific principles behind rocketry. Our understanding has led us to develop a wide variety of advanced rocket hardware and devise new propellants that can be used for longer trips and more powerful takeoffs.

Rocket Engines and Their Propellants

Most rockets today operate with either solid or liquid propellants. The word propellant does not mean simply fuel, as you might think; it means both fuel and oxidizer. The fuel is the chemical rockets burn but, for burning to take place, an oxidizer (oxygen) must be present. Jet engines draw oxygen into their engines from the surrounding air. Rockets do not have the luxury that jet planes have; they must carry oxygen with them into space, where there is no air.
Solid rocket propellants, which are dry to the touch, contain both the fuel and oxidizer combined together in the chemical itself. Usually the fuel is a mixture of hydrogen compounds and carbon and the oxidizer is made up of oxygen compounds. Liquid propellants, which are often gases that have been chilled until they turn into liquids, are kept in separate containers, one for the fuel and the other for the oxidizer. Then, when the engine fires, the fuel and oxidizer are mixed together in the engine.

Ericca Klarriech:

Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time.

That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics and statistics. Rather, it’s because of the creation for which he’s most famous: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), often simply called “Sloane” by its users.

Education and Class

I’ve often talked with others about Kahn’s observations of the apparently rigorous curriculum that confirms for the students that they are the best among the best, that they deserve their privileges. The challenge, Kahn notes as a teacher and researcher, is that given the many competing demands on students’ time — all part of their induction in a life of privilege they’ll come to understand as earned –no student has time to do all the required reading.

Instead, Kahn suggests, students learn not to read massive amounts of history and literature, but instead to learn to talk about important books without having read them in any depth. And they learn this well.

It seems an important distinction, that they would learn to act educated, without actually doing the hard work of thinking about challenging ideas.

Matt Reed:

Six months ago or so, Ry Rivard and I (separately) wrote in IHE about the implications of increased control of campus decisions by creditors, and specifically financial institutions. Yesterday IHE followed with a piece on lenders trying to keep struggling colleges alive long enough to bleed out repayments and avoid the loan forgiveness that happens when a college shuts down.

I really don’t think most of us who pay attention to shared governance in higher ed have connected the dots yet. We should.

The term “shared governance” implies an “us” among whom governance is shared. Historically, colleges have tended to define the “us” as faculty, staff, and administrators, with trustees hovering outside. The boundaries have long been contested — adjuncts, for example, are often excluded either de jure or de facto — but they’ve been understood mostly to encompass people who work on campus and who see each other on a regular basis.

But to the extent that colleges become increasingly beholden to lenders, lenders are starting to demand power. And their agendas are entirely different.

Fredrik deBoer:

Jordan Weissmann’s piece today, discussing grad student loan debt today, is a bit of a logical pretzel. The piece is set up as a complaint about the fiscal damage grad students are doing to the budget, with a headline reading “The Newest Scourge of the Federal Budget: Graduate Students.” But as Weissmann points out, grad students are a large money maker for the federal government. That’s because the federal government draws huge interest payments off of grad students, as they do off of all students who take advantage of student loans. Weissmann says that “Graduate degree holders are relatively affluent, meaning there isn’t a great argument for heavily subsidizing their educations.” As Mike Konczal has pointed out (I can’t find where right now), if the government is making money off of a financial program, that’s the precise opposite of a subsidy. Would Weissmann say that payday lenders are subsidizing poor people who take out predatory loans to pay for food or the rent?

Anne Haverty:

We may not be living in the worst of times, although a case might very well be made for it, but anyone with a thought in their head would be entitled to say that we’re living in the stupidest. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, certainly believes we are. In this series of coruscating and passionate essays on the state of culture he argues that we have, en masse, capitulated to idiocy. And it is leading us to melancholy and despair.

This is a book of mourning. What Vargas Llosa writes is a lament for how things used to be and how they are now in all aspects of life from the political to the spiritual. Like TS Eliot in his essay Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, written in 1948, he takes the concept of culture in the general sense as a shared sensibility, a way of life.

Eliot too saw culture decaying around him and foresaw a time in which there would be no culture. This time, Vargas Llosa argues, is ours. Eliot has since been under attack for what his critics often describe as his elitist attitudes – as well as much else – and Vargas Llosa will probably also be tarred with the same brush for his pains.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/21/how-coursera-cracked-the-chinese-market/:

Coursera announced in July that they crossed 1 million registrations as China became their second largest market, overtaking India. Most U.S. consumer Internet companies have a hard time breaking into China.

Cultural differences and the Internet firewall are a huge barrier to entry. Even tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have pulled out or found themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese firewall. So how did Coursera, a relatively young company, achieve this significant milestone?

Max Roser:

Empirical View

In general in the past, when education rates rose, democratization and industrialization of the society also increased. This is also true for early European societies where democratic and industrial societies first emerged. The rise of science and the abundance of creativity that characterise modernity has roots that reach far back into the past.

# The Spread of Literacy in Europe before 1800

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

William R. Emmons , Bryan J. Noeth:

College-educated families usually earn significantly higher incomes and accumulate more wealth than families headed by someone who does not have a four-year college degree. The income- and wealth-boosting effects of education apply within all racial and ethnic groups. Higher education may also help “protect” wealth, buffering families against major economic and financial shocks and mitigating adverse long-term trends. Based on two decades of detailed wealth data, we conclude that education does not, however, protect the wealth of all racial and ethnic groups equally.
Compared to their less-educated counterparts, typical white and Asian families with four-year college degrees withstood the recent recession much better and have accumulated much more wealth over the longer term. Hispanic and black families headed by someone with a four-year college degree, on the other hand, typically fared significantly worse than Hispanic and black families without college degrees. This was true both during the recent turbulent period (2007-2013) as well as during a two-decade span ending in 2013 (the most recent data available).

Why didn’t higher education protect Hispanic and black family wealth from either short-term turbulence or long-term competitive pressures? Job-market difficulties specific to Hispanic and black college graduates probably played a role, especially over the longer term. Financial decision-making appears even more important in explaining large wealth declines among Hispanic and black college-educated families during the Great Recession and its aftermath.

Higher education typically boosts income and wealth. The first row of Table 1 shows differences in 2013 median income between families with college degrees and families without. The median income among all families headed by someone with a degree was 2.4 times the median income among families headed by someone without such a degree. The ratio was somewhat larger among whites and Asians than among blacks and Hispanics, but all were within the range of two to three times.

Table 2 shows that higher education is even more strongly associated with wealth accumulation. The typical college-educated family had between three and 10 times more wealth than its racial or ethnic counterpart without a degree. The white and Asian wealth ratios shown in the table are noticeably larger than those of blacks and Hispanics. One reason why the income and wealth ratios are highest among white and Asian college graduates is that they are more likely than black or Hispanic college graduates to have graduate or professional degrees. Advanced degrees typically provide significantly higher earnings and are strongly associated with greater wealth accumulation.1

It begins early with Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Rebecca Schuman:

hen I was an undergrad in the ’90s, there was little more exciting than the first day of class. What will my professor be like? What books will I be reading? How many papers will I have to write? Answers came readily, in the form of a tidy one-page document that consisted solely of the professor’s name and office hours, a three-sentence course description, a list of books, and, finally, a very brief rundown of the assignments (papers, exams) and their relevant dates. This was a course syllabus in 1996, and it was good.

Guy Boulton:

“We all said, ‘Expense recapture fee? What’s that?'” said Leean, a former state senator and former secretary of what was then the Department of Health and Family Services. “Well, it’s a fancy name for essentially funding their fundraising operation.”

Thomas Hefty, the former chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, also said he did not learn of the 1% fee until the 2010 audit.

“It never occurred to us that they would take such a high fee out of money intended for education and faculty and research and public health,” Hefty said. “This was the third-largest gift to a medical school in history, and they chose to skim some of the money for other purposes.”

“The money was given for one purpose and they used it for another,” he added. “That’s the bottom line on this.”

In January 2012, the UW Foundation lowered its fee to 1% up to $250 million of the endowment and 0.7% on the amount above that.

For the $381 million in the endowment at the end of 2013, that works out to $3.4 million for the year.

“They threw a little bone toward the medical school and the public health grants, but that’s about all they did,” said Leean, who met with the UW Foundation after the first audit.

With the reduction, the total fee was about 0.9% of the endowment.

The Wisconsin Partnership Program — the entity that allocates the money — has a target of spending on average a total of 4.5% of the endowment on grants and administering the program each year. This means that 16.7% of the total money spent from the Blue Cross endowment in 2013 went to the UW Foundation.

Here’s the math: 0.9% equals 16.7% of the total amount distributed from the endowment — the sum of 4.5% for programs plus 0.9% given to the foundation.

At the time the Blue Cross money was donated, no one thought to ask whether the UW Foundation would charge a fee beyond the cost of managing the endowment, Leean said.

<A href=”http://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/government-considering-legal-action-against-former-sallie-ma”>Molly Hensley-Clanc</a>: <blockquote><i>The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering taking legal action against Navient Corp., the country’s largest student loan servicer and a former division of Sallie Mae, after an investigation into the company’s disclosures and late fees. The company disclosed the threat of legal action in a filing today.

Any legal action against Navient could be a significant blow to the company, which was spun off from the student loan giant Sallie Mae partially in an attempt to repair its battered image as a loan servicer. Last year, the two companies were ordered to pay a $60 million settlement over allegations that they had denied benefits to military service members.</i></blockquote> 

The Economist:

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. By Steve Silberman. Avery; 544 pages; $29.95. Allen & Unwin; £16.99.

EVERYTHING about autism, which is among the most common and the most slippery of mental conditions, is contested. The American Psychiatric Association, which determines what ailments American insurance companies will pay to treat, classifies it as a disorder. Many parents of autistic children are desperately searching for a cure, and find themselves easy prey for people who overpromise, selling remedies that have no scientific basis. Plenty of other people think that autism—which is characterised, among other things, by an inward focus that makes it hard to abide by the conventions of social behaviour—is not a disorder at all, and therefore has no need of a cure. America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention thinks that one in 68 children in the country have at least a touch of autism, which if true means there are more autistic Americans than Jewish ones. This too is contested.

Michelle Chen:

The New School was founded as a bastion of progressive thought a century ago, but it’s taking a decidedly old school approach to its students’ labor rights.

Late last month, graduate students seeking to organize a union at the famously liberal institution were thwarted by a decade-old precedent that bars the right to unionize for graduate student instructors and researchers. The regional director for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deemed graduate students with Student Employees at the New School (SENS-UAW) as non-employees, based on a 2004 decision involving graduate-student workers at Brown University, in which the Board ruled that the relationship between the students and institution wasn’t that of a worker and employer, but rather, that “the graduate student assistants have a predominantly academic, rather than economic relationship with their school.” So although they taught, researched and performed administrative tasks in exchange for the school’s financial support for their studies—even when working on a regular schedule with a designated hourly wage, under a supervisor—that labor wasn’t work, but rather, simply a privilege of their academic experience. This realm, supposedly, is one of scholarly discourse, not labor and capital.

Incidentally, this logic is perfectly convenient for a wealthy private institution that absorbs millions of dollars annually in grants and hyperinflated tuitions. Inconvenient for the doctoral student struggling to juggle teaching and research on fast-food wages.

Though the higher-education sector is mostly “not for profit,” the American university system operates as an absurdly lucrative corporate hierarchy, with the teaching workforce at the bottom. But the low teaching salaries are subsidized by a patina of meritocracy, credentials and brand prestige. Still, in a city like New York, scholarly credentials don’t offset poverty payscales, with minimal control over schedules and working conditions.

Josh Mitchell:

Nearly 7 million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal student loans, a high level of default that suggests a widening swath of households are unable or unwilling to pay back their school debt.

As of July, 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t sent a payment to the government in at least 360 days, quarterly data from the Education Department showed this past week. That was up 6%, or 400,000 borrowers, from a year earlier.

Henry Austin :

After B was removed from a flight to Turkey in December 2014 and made a ward of court, Mr Justice Hayden said her parents had appeared to co-operate with police and social workers to stop her and her siblings accessing online terrorist propaganda. But when counter-terrorism officers searched the family home in June, they found “a plethora of electronic devices” including those belonging to the father, containing Isis material.
These included pictures of beheadings and material on bomb-making and how jihadists should “hide” their identities. This showed the parents had carried out “a consummately successful deception” of the authorities, he said.
Of the girl, he added: “I can see no way in which her psychological, emotional and intellectual integrity can be protected by her remaining in this household.”

Rob Port:

“Community experts” are people with expertise and training in a given subject who don’t have a specific teaching degree. An example would be someone with a four-year music degree getting a job as a music teacher despite not having a teaching degree. Or perhaps someone with experience in the building trades taking over a shop class.

It’s an emergency rule, and must be approved by Gov. Jack Dalrymple, but so far this seems to be something that will likely happen. That’s a good thing.

The only real problem is that we weren’t already doing this as a matter of permanent policy.

“Content knowledge is just half of what it takes to be a good teacher,” Baesler said in a Fargo Forum article about her initiative.

Richard Adams and Helena Bengtsson:

Hold the front page: it turns out that the best state schools in England are genuinely very good – and even as good as their famous independent peers. This won’t surprise the families of children who for many years have attended state schools and received an excellent education. But it appears to have come as a shock to the editors of the the Daily Telegraph and Spectator – hence the headline “State pupils put private schools in the shade”.

Yet the chairman of the Independent Schools Council, Barnaby Lenon, called the comparison “grossly unfair”. While appeals to fairness jar coming from an organisation whose schools charge £12,000 a year per pupil, he has a point. What the Spectator and Telegraph have done is crudely compare the top 500 state sixth forms with almost every private school that offers A-levels. The research involved a few simple clicks on the Department for Education’s performance tables.

Wall Street Journal

The plan—dubbed the “New College Compact” and estimated to cost $350 billion over 10 years—would fundamentally reshape the federal government’s role in higher education by offering new federal money, but with strings attached.

States would have to increase their own spending on higher education, and universities would be required to control spending, though the Democratic presidential front-runner hasn’t yet worked out details. Families still would be required to contribute, but students wouldn’t have to take out loans to attend public schools.

Commentary, including Mark Cuban.

US National Debt.

Antonia Malchik:

In 2011, Raquel Nelson was convicted of vehicular homicide following the death of her four-year-old son. Nelson, it’s crucial to note, was not driving. She didn’t even own a car. She and her three children were crossing a busy four-lane road from a bus stop to their apartment building in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. She’d stopped on the median halfway across when her son let go of her hand and stepped into the second half of the road. Nelson tried to catch him but wasn’t fast enough; she and her two-year-old daughter were also injured.

The driver admitted to having alcohol and painkillers in his system (and to being legally blind in one eye) and pleaded guilty to the charge of hit-and-run. He served six months in prison. For the crime of walking three tired, hungry children home in the most efficient way possible, Nelson faced more jail time than the man who had killed her son.

I am writing from a position of privilege. Not white or middle-class privilege – although I am both of those things and those facts play a role in my privilege – but rather, the privilege Americans don’t realise they’ve lost in a nearly Orwellian fashion: I can open the door of my home, take my kids by their hands, and meet almost any need by lifting my feet and moving forward. Food, schools, social centres, books, playgrounds, even doctors and dentists and ice cream – nearly everything our family uses daily is within about a mile’s walk of home and well-served by wide, uncrowded sidewalks.

Alan Borsuk:

That said, I’d call the Kettle Moraine School District the real thing, for three reasons.

First, the 4,400-student district in western Waukesha County has a strong commitment to get the broadest perspective on how its students are doing. Talking about student performance, Superintendent Patricia Deklotz said, “Our results are generally high, but compared to whom?”

How about: Compared to the highest-performing education systems on the planet?

Kettle Moraine has been at the forefront of a still-small movement in Wisconsin and nationwide to compare student performance at a school level against the world. The way to do that is through use of the OECD Test for Schools, a version of the international test that underlies almost everything you’ve seen about how American kids are doing compared to kids in Finland, Singapore and so on.

For the past two years — and, very likely, again in the coming school year — a representative sample of students at Kettle Moraine High School took the OECD test. Last year, a sample of students at KM Perform, a charter school within the district, also took the test.

Overall, the results for the main high school were OK in the first year — not great in reading, better in math and science. School leaders thought one reason scores weren’t higher was simply that students didn’t try their hardest. Results aren’t reported for individual students and carry no consequences for them.

In the second year, participating students got a sales job on why they should give the test their best effort — they got T-shirts, water bottles and pep talks about being the team from Kettle Moraine competing with the world. For the main high school, math and science scores stayed about the same and reading scores jumped significantly. For KM Perform, which is smaller and has an arts emphasis, results were even better.

Overall, the Kettle Moraine students did much better than the United States. If Kettle Moraine was a country, it would be among the top performers in the world.

Meanwhile, nothing of the sort has occured in Madison, where disastrous reading results have long been tolerated.

John Steele Gordon:

Mathematicians often deal in abstractions that are quite beyond the ken of non-mathematicians. For instance, in 1637, the Frenchman Pierre de Fermat conjectured that there is no whole-number solution for the equation An + Bn = Cn where N is greater than two. He famously wrote in the margin of a book that he had a proof for it, but he never wrote it down.

Most people think Fermat was mistaken, for the proof became a sort of holy grail of mathematicians. And it wasn’t until 1995 that the British professor Andrew Wiles published a proof of Fermat’s conjecture, using many 20th century techniques that were unavailable to Fermat. The proof runs 109 pages, and—trust me on this—if you don’t have a Ph.D. in math, you won’t understand a word of it.

Related: Math Forum audio/video and Connected Math.

Charles Liu:

China’s annual university placement examinations, commonly known as the gaokao, have been rocked by allegations of rampant fraud that has led to the immediate arrests of two ghostwriters who were taking the test as paid substitutes. This morning, the arrest count climbed to nine.

The Southern Metropolis Daily, a newspaper in Guangzhou, published a report Sunday that said one of its reporters had successfully infiltrated a gang that specializes in providing paid substitutes to not only take the gaokao, but ensure a passing grade.

The person named in the report as a test-taker was escorted out by police during the examination on Sunday in the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang. Another person suspected of academic fraud was arrested in Yingtan, also in Jiangxi. Meanwhile, the Jiangxi ministry of education says it will check students’ identities more rigorously before taking the gaokao.

Edge.org

Kurzweil argues that you have interlocked curves, so even after silicon tops out there’s going to be something else. Maybe he’s right, but right now that’s not what’s going on, so it unwinds a lot of the arguments about the future of computing and the impact of computing on society. If we are at a plateau, a lot of these things that we expect, and what’s become the ideology of Silicon Valley, doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen the way we think it does. I see evidence of that slowdown everywhere. The belief system of Silicon Valley doesn’t take that into account.

There was a wonderful moment when I went down to cover the DARPA robotics challenge in Southern California. There was a preliminary event in Florida about eighteen months ago where they had the finals. They had twenty-five teams. It was quite an event. It was a spectacle. They built these by and large Terminator-style machines, and the idea was that they would be able to work in a Fukushima-like environment. Only three of the machines, after these teams worked on them for eighteen months, were able to even complete the tasks. The winning team completed the tasks in about forty-five minutes. They had an hour to do eight tasks that you and I could do in about five minutes. They had to drive the vehicle, they had to go through a door, they had to turn a crank, they had to throw a switch, they had to walk over a rubble pile, and then they had to climb stairs.

I’d have been able to do it a lot quicker than five minutes. It took the robot about forty-five minutes. Most of the robots failed at the second task, which was opening the door. Rod Brooks, who’s this pioneering roboticist, came down to watch and comment on it afterwards because he’d seen all these robots struggling to get the door open and said, “If you’re worried about the Terminator, just keep your door closed.” We’re at that stage, where our expectations have outrun the reality of the technology.

Robert Pondiscio:

Every sentence in Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Schools begins with a capital letter. There is also a punctuation mark at the end of each, without exception. I have made a careful study of his nearly three-hundred-page manuscript, and can now report conclusively that its author employs—precisely and exclusively—the twenty-six letters of the standard English alphabet.

Normally, this would not be worth remarking upon. Most of us have come to expect standard English in books written for general readers. But most of us are not Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D. He is “one of the elite thinkers on creativity and education,” whose TED talk on how schools kill creativity in children is “the most watched in TED history.” Sir Ken intensely dislikes standardization in all its forms. So it is at least somewhat disappointing that he has chosen to eschew interpretive dance, semaphore flags, or other means to argue against standards and for creativity in education.

Caroline Bermudez:

A growing amount of scrutiny is paid to the roughly $4 billion private philanthropies give to public K-12 education annually.

Such attention is understandable—even if the amount is dwarfed by the $600 billion in local, state, and federal dollars taxpayers spend every year on public schools. We should be talking about the sway the very rich can have over national policy.

But if “follow the money” is now our mantra, we also need to ask what $600 billion has gotten us if our schools cannot properly educate black, brown, low-income and disabled children—if our system cannot figure out a way to spend that money fairly in a way that does not penalize children most at risk.

In a previous life, I was a journalist. For eight years, I reported for The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the charitable giving of the wealthy. Yes, I interviewed and wrote about the 1 percenters and in some cases, they were closer to the .000001 percenters.

Ministry of Education and Science:

Bulgarian University Ranking System has been developed to support education service users in their choice of a university. The 2014 updated version of the system contains information on 51 accredited universities in Bulgaria, which offer education in a variety of majors that have been grouped into 52 professional fields. Depending on the individual priorities and needs of each user, the system allows for producing comparisons and rankings of different scope and type in each professional field. See more at “Documents and Links” page.

Matthew Yglesias:

If robots were taking our jobs, the productivity of the workers who still have jobs — the total amount of work that gets done divided by the total number of people who are employed — would be going up rapidly. But it’s not. It is rising, but it’s rising slower than it did in the past.

And the slowing rate of productivity growth is an important source of the wage slowdown that people have been worrying about.

The 2015 Economic Report of the President calculated that if productivity growth had continued at its 1948–1973 pace for the past 40 years, the average household’s income would be $30,000 higher today. By contrast, had inequality stayed at its 1973 level for the same period, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers calculates that the average household’s income would be only $9,000 higher.

Peter Cunningham:

Every parent knows that kids must be challenged to be well prepared for life’s tests. The worst thing a parent can do is lower expectations for their children. Yet, that’s precisely what most states in America did.

Until now.

In the months ahead, for the first time, many states will release scores to districts, schools, teachers and parents on the new tests aligned with the more rigorous Common Core State Standards. It is widely expected that the scores will show that fewer students are on grade than previous state tests indicated.

But it’s also likely that the scores will start rising again as students and teachers get used to the higher standards and rise to the challenge. In fact, it appears to be happening.

Laura a Waters:

But for both conservative Republicans and teacher union leaders, this amendment is the hill to die on, the former because of resentment towards federal intrusion into state autonomy and the latter because of resentment towards accountability. Here’s an excerpt of a letter from NEA to the U.S. Senate:

On behalf of the three million members of the National Education Association and the students they serve, and as a follow-up to our letter on the underlying bill, the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (S. 1177), we urge you to VOTE NO on amendment 2241 offered by Senators Murphy (D-CT), Durbin (D-IL), Warren (D-MA), Booker (D-NJ) and Coons (D-DE) expected to be voted on this week. Votes associated with this amendment will be included in NEA’s Legislative Report Card for the 114th Congress.

Despite NEA’s threat that they’ll withhold campaign funding from advocates of accountability and a small degree of federal oversight, Warren and the tiny group of brave Democrats remain committed to educational equity. On Friday CommonWealth, which describes Warren as the “the new face of an unapologetically liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” reported tha

NY Post

The Empire State’s top public-school system is no longer in Scarsdale or any other suburb; it’s right here in New York City — the Success Academy Charter Schools network.

With 11,000 students in schools across four boroughs, Success is a system in its own right. And it romped in the latest state exams: 93 percent of Success scholars passed the math test, against 35 percent for the city as a whole and 75 percent for Scarsdale.

In English, 68 percent of Success kids passed, vs. 30 percent citywide and 64 percent for Scarsdale.

The Success test-takers couldn’t get more inner-city: 65 percent African-American; 27 percent Hispanic. Yet they did better than white and Asian kids in the city’s regular public schools.

These scholars didn’t start off as the cream of the crop: The only thing that set them apart from any other child in the city public schools is that their families applied and won the lottery to enter Success.

The different results come because these children benefit from good-to-great teachers, a sound curriculum and a genuinely supportive school staff in every class and extracurricular, year after year.
“English-language learners” in the regular public schools tend to stay that way. At Success, they become “former ELLs” — because they actually learn English.

Joseph Lawler:

Student loan delinquencies are growing, even as the subprime mortgage disaster and financial crisis recede into the past.

If there’s a student loan crisis, it’s here.

The share of U.S. student debt delinquent for at least 90 days rose slightly to 11.45 percent in the second quarter, according to the latest report on household debt and credit from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

That percentage has nearly doubled from a decade earlier, when it was 6.71 percent.

Chi Luu:

This isn’t a new story but it is one that refuses to die. The thorny question of what constitutes ‘correct’ grammar in English seems to have a cyclical life, aided and abetted by new generations of enthusiastic grammarians.

Natasha Lomas:

A new report into U.S. consumers’ attitude to the collection of personal data has highlighted the disconnect between commercial claims that web users are happy to trade privacy in exchange for ‘benefits’ like discounts. On the contrary, it asserts that a large majority of web users are not at all happy, but rather feel powerless to stop their data being harvested and used by marketers.
 
 The report authors’ argue it’s this sense of resignation that is resulting in data tradeoffs taking place — rather than consumers performing careful cost-benefit analysis to weigh up the pros and cons of giving up their data (as marketers try to claim). They also found that where consumers were most informed about marketing practices they were also more likely to be resigned to not being able to do anything to prevent their data being harvested.

Civitas learning space:

Since 1997 the League for Innovation in the Community College has issued the Trends Report – a compilation of research and surveys designed to catalyze and inform community colleges from the boardroom to the student senate, as well as legislative stakeholders. The sixth installment of the report has recently been released. It comes at a time of significant change for the community college, and it offers insights into future trends and the road ahead. What is clear is the road ahead is a fast lane for change across the colleges.

Josh Mitchell:

Virginia Murphy borrowed a small fortune to attend law school and pursue her dream of becoming a public defender. Now the Florida resident is among an expanding breed of American borrower: those who owe at least $100,000 in student debt but have no expectation of paying it back.

Ms. Murphy pays just $330 a month—less than the interest on her $256,000 balance—under a federal income-based repayment program that has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing entitlements. She plans to use another federal program to have her balance forgiven in about seven years, a sum set to swell by then to $300,000.

Scott Johnson:

“We aren’t teaching students how to think critically!” So goes the exasperated lament you have probably heard and possibly uttered. The thing is, that’s a crazy hard thing to do. It may seem like a logic class should teach you to think in a more disciplined way, for example, but the sad fact is that those mental habits are very unlikely to transfer beyond the walls of the logic course. There are many different styles and contexts of critical thinking, and there is no magic subroutine that we could insert into our mental programming that covers them all.

But despair is not the only option. Effective coursework can build important and useful critical thinking skills. Doug Bonn at the University of British Columbia and Stanford’s N.G. Holmes and Carl Wieman focused on good scientific, quantitative thinking when teaching a group of first-year physics students. And like good critically thinking educators, they put their strategy to the test and published the results so they can be evaluated by others.

In this freshman calculus-based physics course, students worked through weekly experiments in lab sections as most physics students do. But the researchers tried a little something different a couple years ago when a fresh class of 130 students came in. In their early lab sections, the students were guided through comparisons between multiple experimental datasets and between experimental datasets and mathematical models.

By applying some statistics they were gradually learning, they grappled with why their comparisons came out the way they did. Rather than simply chalking up mismatches to “we’re just students, and our measurements probably aren’t perfect,” as students often do, they considered modifying their experiments. How could they reduce their error bars? Were the data telling them the mathematical model was incorrect?

Matt:

Even before I got tenure, folks have told me they’re “looking forward to an academic advice post on tenure.”

I’ve found it easy to write academic posts on just about every topic.

Except this one.

I got tenure over a year ago, yet every time I tried to sum up my views on tenure, I froze.

I think it’s because every path to tenure is inherently unique and non-repeatable.

Even though I got tenure, I wouldn’t wish an exact repeat of the last seven years of my life on even Reviewer Number 3 – for reasons that will soon be obvious.

Victor Fleisher:

WHO do you think received more cash from Yale’s endowment last year: Yale students, or the private equity fund managers hired to invest the university’s money?

It’s not even close.

Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment.

In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes. Private equity fund managers also received more than students at four other endowments I researched: Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton.

Counternotions:

@counternotions: 2014 Yale allocations for
private equity fund managers to manage ~$8B (⅓ of Yale’s endowment): ~$480M, student tuition assistance: $170M

Rob Williams:

For the millions of parents who wonder when their adult kids will move out of the basement, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has some insights about what’s holding back the millennial generation.

The lackluster jobs market, housing affordability, student debt and delayed marriage may keep a lid on household formation for years to come, according to the New York-based bank’s analysis.

“The share of young people living with their parents has increased relative to pre-recession rates for all labor force status groups, not just the unemployed and underemployed,” said Jan Hatzius, head economist at Goldman. “The share of 18- to 34-year-olds living at home might not fully return to pre-recession rates.”

Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner & Michael LaForgia:

In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

Today thousands of children are paying the price, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

They are trapped at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose — five neighborhood elementary schools that the board has transformed into failure factories.

Richard Goldin:

In focusing on the wealthy as the singular source of economic inequality, progressive politics obscures the machineries of privilege which function at all levels of society. Individuals are trapped within these mechanisms; their lives lessened in ways that are far more damaging than the actions of the “one per cent.”

Economic hierarchies are maintained not by brute force, but by strategies which rationalize the privilege of a few and the struggle of many. Within a multitude of economic contexts, structures of inequality are arduously perpetuated, even by those who consistently profess a belief in economic justice. Progressives need to analyze these contradictions and to expose the strategies which are utilized to justify hierarchy.

aCorey Robin:

Wilson’s piece is long and well worth reading, but lest readers overlook three astonishing quotes that Wilson has uncovered, which together comprise a rough definition of what academic freedom at UIUC might mean, I thought I’d highlight them here.

First, education professor Nicholas Burbules, a real piece of work as far as I can see, has emerged in the last few days as one of Chancellor Wise’s close confidants on the faculty. He seems to fancy himself, in these writings at least, as a kind of Machiavellian consigliere. But where Machiavelli’s counselor knew how to mould the prince to his own purposes, Burbules reminds one of nothing so much as those hapless Cold War intellectuals who thought they were taming and influencing the American state—only to discover, after it was too late, that it was it that was taming and influencing them. Christopher Lasch aptly characterized the farce of these buffoons more than a half-century ago:

Matthew Hennessey:

For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of what we were going to do—it was what we weren’t going to do,” she says. In the end, the Wades opted to homeschool. “Homeschooling is in some ways the easiest option. We’re driving our children’s education. We’re giving up a lot to do it, but in the end we thought it would make us most satisfied.”

At first, the Wades knew no other homeschoolers, and, like many young parents in the city, they had no family nearby, so they prepared themselves to go it alone. Before too long, however, they found a growing network of urban homeschoolers. “In a city like this, you can find your tribe,” says Wade. “You can find your homeschoolers. And there are a lot of us.”

Not so long ago, homeschooling was considered a radical educational alternative—the province of a small number of devout Iowa evangelicals and countercultural Mendocino hippies. No more. Today, as many as 2 million—or 2.5 percent—of the nation’s 77 million school-age children are educated at home, and increasing numbers of them live in cities. More urban parents are turning their backs on the compulsory-education model and embracing the interactive, online educational future that policy entrepreneurs have predicted for years would revolutionize pedagogy and transform brick-and-mortar schooling. And their kids are not only keeping pace with their traditionally schooled peers; they are also, in many cases, doing better, getting into top-ranked colleges and graduating at higher rates. In cities across the country, homeschooling is becoming just one educational option among many.

Philip Lemon:

Recently, a number of students on Khan Academy found a way to cheat by taking hints offline and not having them counted towards their online profile. When going through exercises on Khan Academy you answer the problems given to you and receive feedback on whether your answer was correct or incorrect. If you get stuck on a problem you are able to take hints and have that problem counted as incorrect. Check out this exercise if you want to try it yourself. The images below show the user getting a correct answer and taking a hint respectively.

Katie Allen:

In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.

The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?

A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.

Erik Gilbert

Last year the younger of my two sons went off to college. As we went through the search process, we looked at university and department websites, checked faculty research interests, looked for evidence of faculty involving students in their research, flinched at the prices, marveled at the climbing walls, and considered quality of the food on campus. Basically we did all the things a typical middle-class family would do in a college search, along with a few insider concerns like looking at faculty publications and grants and checking that the university libraries had at least one of my books. In retrospect one question that never crossed my mind was, “I wonder what this place’s assessment program is like?” I suspect I am not alone in this.

My lack of curiosity about assessment when making an important choice about my children’s education probably surprises no one, but it should. It’s unsurprising in that no one, higher-ed insider or not, ever seems to worry about this when choosing a college. No admissions officer ever touted his institution’s assessment results. No parent ever exclaimed, “Suzy just got into Prestigious College X. I hear they are just nailing their student learning outcomes!” But it’s still a little surprising in that I am a professor and an administrator who has been involved in assessment in various forms for a long time. I have been dutifully doing assessment in my classes almost since I started teaching a decade and half ago.

Lisa Krieger:

Mother Nature has always been life’s master architect, working off genetic blueprints that are fine-tuned from one generation to the next.

Until now.

Scientists increasingly are designing life from scratch, using inexpensive, fast and accurate tools to create and assemble strands of DNA like tinkertoys — and instructing cells to do things that nature never imagined.

In industrial clusters in the Bay Area, La Jolla and Boston, the competitive gene-building field is doing for biology what Johannes Gutenberg did for printing — turning what was once a laborious and uneven artisan effort into affordable and accurate mass production. With the potential to create an industry that could lead to products worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the fast-moving field is not only prompting investor funding but also sparking calls for oversight.

Thomas H. Davenport & Julia Kirby

Geoff Colvin’s new book insists that humans are underrated. It’s a fun follow-up declaration to his earlier book, which taught us that talent is overrated.

The two are not as incompatible as it might seem. Colvin’s point in the earlier book was that talented people always succeed in the context of a system, and it’s hard to rate talent independent of its context. As a result, stars usually get more credit for their successes than they’re due. (Boris Groysberg’s research backs this up by showing how the high performance of stars in various fields turns out not to be portable when they are recruited away by other employers.) Indeed, it’s often a well-designed system that makes someone valuable; the best systems are able to get “A” results out of “B” players. If you can build that kind of system as an enterprise, there is no reason to break the bank recruiting superstars or otherwise allow the top percentiles of your talent to walk away with “winner takes all” rewards.

One of my fairly regular subthemes here is the increasing power of algorithms over our daily lives and what Ted Striphas has called “the black box of algorithmic culture”. So I am naturally interested in this interview with Cynthia Dwork on algorithms and bias — more specifically, on the widespread, erroneous, and quite poisonous notion that if decisions are being made by algorithms they can’t be biased. (See also theses 54 through 56 here.)

Jim Epstein:

New York released its annual test scores this week, and Success Academy, the city’s rapidly expanding charter school network, posted remarkable results. Again.

Success Academy schools did well in English—68 percent of students were proficient, compared with 30 percent in the city over all—but in math, the scores were astonishing. Ninety-three percent of Success Academy test-takers were proficient in math, compared with 35 percent citywide.

To put that into perspective, of the 1,282 public schools tested, just 12[*] were part of the Success Academy network, or 1 percent of the total. Yet 5 out of the 10 schools that scored highest in math were part of the Success Academy network. Of the 20 schools that did best in math, 9 were part of the Success Academy network. All twelve schools in the network were ranked in the top 40 for math. Results of this sort were unheard of before Success Academy arrived on the scene.

:

When Pure Math is explained to non-mathematicians, the audience always asks “Why?” and “Of what use is it?” The result is that mathematicians always have to motivate their explanations and give applications for the results:

Pure Number Theory is motivated by applications in cryptography,

Pure Calculus is motivated by applications in ballistics and weather forecasting,

Pure Combinatorics is motivated by analysis of computer networks and data processing,

Pure Statistics is motivated by life assurance, insurance and gambling,
Pure Linear Algebra is motivated by optimization problems and Google’s Page Rank algorithm.

The truth is far simpler. Mathematicians are solving puzzles, and some of those puzzles don’t come from the real world at all, and can’t be motivated in that way.

Why do we care that there are only five Platonic Solids? The true answer is because there is an answer, and it would be intolerable not to know it.

Why do we care if every even number from 4 onwards can be written as the sum of two primes? Answer: We don’t, really. But not knowing is an itch to scratch, and who knows what might turn up in our efforts to solve the problem.

It was said by E.C.Titchmarsh:

Nicklas Wyman:

Two other prominent Democratic Presidential candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley issued their own plans to provide relief from rising college tuition costs and increasing student loan debt earlier in the year.

That this issue has come to the forefront of national politics is no surprise. College tuition costs have risen by over 1,000% since the late 1970s, forcing students and their parents to take out ever more excessive loans. The current level of outstanding student loan debt is over $1.2 trillion, and continues to rise.

JOHN O. MCGINNIS And MAX SCHANZENBACH:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has come under fire from academics nationwide for calling on his state’s Board of Regents to reconsider the scope of tenure in its university system. Evaluations of faculty members “should be based on performance,” he said this summer, “they should be based on merit.”

With state universities struggling to keep up with rising costs and technological change, one would expect administrators and educators to at least consider proposals that would save money and encourage change.

hyperlingo:

Firstly, just to be clear, this article is not about tools designed for the use of cats. That would be a different article. CAT stands for Computer Assisted Translation, and refers to the various productivity tools available to the 21st century translator. CAT is not the same as machine translation, where a translation is produced (often badly) by a computer.

Rather, CAT tools help to automate easily-automatable parts of the translation process, leaving the human (that’s you) to focus on the real business of translating. As an example, a CAT tool might help you to automatically translate all instances of «Le Comte de Monte Cristo» as “The Count of Monte Cristo”, saving you from doing the leg(finger)work. Or it might suggest a pre-defined translation of a technical term or brand name, stored in a Translation Memory (we’ll come to these later), saving you from searching for the correct translation each time you come across it.

neurosciencenews.com:

Carnegie Mellon psychologists uncover critical relationship between working memory and strength of information ‘chunks’.

People have more difficulty recalling the string of letters BIC, IAJ, FKI, RSU and SAF than FBI, CIA, JFK, IRS and USA. The well-established reason is that the amount of information we can hold in our short-term or working memory is affected by whether the information can be “chunked” into larger units.

New research by Carnegie Mellon University psychologists takes this learning principle one step further by uncovering how the strength – or familiarity – of those chunks plays a crucial role. Published in Psychonomic Bulletin Review, they show for the first time that it is easier to learn new facts that are composed of more familiar chunks.

Alan Borsuk:

Nowhere else in America have Catholic schools had a better chance to thrive in the last 18 years than in the city of Milwaukee.

In significant ways, that has happened. Catholic school enrollment has been more stable than in many other urban centers, and there are Catholic schools here that have done reasonably to more-than-reasonably well.

But, frankly, the Catholic roster of schools has problems and the system as a whole hasn’t shown the success anyone would want. Catholic leaders, to their credit, have been increasingly willing to say that.

Now they are moving to act. The Milwaukee Archdiocese is launching what leaders envision will be a four-year effort to establish more control over 26 generally smaller Catholic schools in the city and make changes aimed at improving quality.

Most of the changes are similar to improvement strategies for other schools and school systems: a big emphasis on high quality principals; increased training and mentoring of teachers; good use of data in shaping teaching; and effective oversight by boards both at the parish and archdiocese levels.

Much of the work will be behind-the-scenes: more centralized purchasing, better financial management and more professional personnel management.

But both Archdiocese officials and lay leaders involved in a task force shaping the effort are optimistic it will turn a loose system of schools, some of them poorly led, into a network that is more ambitious and more effective both in academics and in building religious identity.

Erin Richards

The state budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker last month gave Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele broad authority to oversee a special district in Milwaukee for the city’s most troubled public schools.

So, what happens now?

Abele must soon appoint a commissioner to oversee the Milwaukee schools selected for new management. But there’s no money to pay the commissioner, no engagement yet of the philanthropic community — or parents — in the project, and little talk of who will staff the schools selected for treatment, if not the employees in them already.

Abele, a lifelong Democrat, said he’s committed to giving the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program developed by Republican lawmakers and passed as part of the state budget a good-faith effort.

“What got passed is nowhere near the optimum, but it’s not the finish line, it’s the starting line,” Abele said in his first interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about his new role in the city’s education scene.

The program is designed to take some of the district’s lowest-performing schools from the control of the Milwaukee School Board and put them under the control of Abele and the commissioner he selects, or directly under MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver, if she chooses to use that authority.

Michael David Smith:

Anyone who’s ever watched Steelers linebacker James Harrison play football knows that he’s an intense competitor who wants to win at all costs. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Harrison is passing along that intense competitiveness to his sons.

Harrison took to social media this weekend to lash out at the idea that his sons should receive participation trophies simply for playing sports, saying that when he found out his sons were given such trophies, he demanded that they be sent back. Harrison believes that a trophy should be something you earn by being the best, not something you receive just for trying.

Dan Dempsey, via a kind email:

Washington State should replace its current one-size fits all diploma with three diplomas, similar to New York State’s Local, Regents, and Advanced Regents diplomas.

It is my belief that Washington State needs three different diplomas to radically improve the current system for all students. The current requirements for a diploma are inadequate because they contribute to a system operating largely as a one-size fits-all system instead of respecting the vast diversity in the student population. It fails to provide an appropriate educational opportunity that meets each student’s needs.

Politicians like aspirational goals that are strong on rhetoric and weak on contact with reality. No Child Left Behind was going to have 100% of students proficient by 2014. Our state legislators want “internationally competitive standards” achieved by all. The current plan of one-diploma with high stakes testing and college ready courses, when universally applied to all students as a graduation requirement, has no chance of success because it makes no sense.

On August 5, the State Board of Education lowered the cut score on the SBAC testing for passing to below the “standard score for proficient”. Then explained that this was done to ease the transition for our system and demonstrate fairness to students. This statement was needed to maintain the dual illusions of fairness and quality in this unfair one-diploma system.

Chris Rickery:

At the top of that list might be the district’s decision to continue basing pay and some employment decisions on seniority and degree attainment, even after 2011’s Act 10 would have made it easy to end those practices.

Research has generally found that teachers with advanced degrees don’t improve student performance, and past a teacher’s fifth year or so, neither does seniority. Both can make it harder to retain and reward teachers of color.

The district has also shown little interest in a year-round school calendar, despite research showing the “summer slide” is real and disproportionately affects poor students.

It offers summer school for students who are falling behind, which might be good — or might serve to further stigmatize an already stigmatized group by singling them out as the ones “dumb” enough to need summer school.

Later starts to middle and high school could help, as research has been building for years that adolescents’ brains aren’t ready to learn early in the morning.

Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended a school start time of no earlier than 8:30 a.m. for middle and high schoolers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed that recommendation last week.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

By Padraig Belton and Matthew Wall:

Digital technology has certainly had a profound effect on the traditional book publishing and retailing industries, but has it also given the book a new lease of life?

At one point it looked as if the rise of e-books at knock-down prices and e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook posed an existential threat to book publishers and sellers.

“Literature found itself at war with the internet,” as Jim Hinks, digital editor of Comma Press, succinctly puts it.

But contrary to expectations, the printed book is still surviving alongside its upstart e-book cousin, and technology is helping publishers and retailers reach new audiences and find new ways to tell stories.

Onion:

Saying the long nights of cramming from the study guide and the constant drilling from flashcards had really worn on his nerves, Arne Duncan told reporters Tuesday that preparing for the upcoming standardized Secretary of Education Test was completely stressing him out. “I know I’ve got the stuff on FSA loans down, but it’s super unrealistic for them to think I’ll memorize every little thing about federal lunch voucher requirements—what if I’m wrong, though?” Duncan said of the yearly four-hour exam, adding that he wasn’t a very good test-taker to begin with and that even thinking about how he would get through the essay portion in just 50 minutes was making him anxious. “Half the multiple-choice questions on the SETs are on things like the Office of Migrant Education that hardly ever come up in everyday life, and the other half seem like they’re designed to trick you. Ugh, why can’t this be over?” Duncan went on to say that he’d probably do far better on the test if he could afford a high-priced tutor like former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Douglas Belkin:

One of the largest providers of massive open online courses is teaming up with several major financial and technology companies to offer new classes this fall, the latest sign MOOC providers are scaling back their ambitions to upend the world of academia to make a profit.

Wall Street Journal Video:

Success Academy Founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz on the latest test score results and the argument for school choice.

Richard Adams

Weeks after students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland sweated through A-level and GCSE exams, their fate is being decided in a windowless basement near the centre of Cambridge – decisions that mean joy for some and despair for others.

There’s a hush of concentration in the room, the only sound the turning of pages and scratching of pens, as the group sit poring over the anonymous exam papers in front of them – but no exams are actually being marked.

Instead, the small group of experts for the OCR examination board is working its way through piles of scripts arranged by score, weighing up where the boundary should fall between an A or B for this particular humanities subject.

This is the most highly regulated and delicate part of the examination system, which the public never sees. OCR, one of the five main examination boards, granted the Guardian exclusive access to its inner workings – revealing a process characterised by caution, rigour and sophisticated technology.

Tanya Abrams, Raul Alcantar and Andrew Good:

Selfies have become the cultural artifacts of our time, the digital mosaic that reveals how society views gender, race, class and sexuality in the 21st century.

In USC’s #SelfieClass — formally known as “Writing 150: Writing and Critical Reasoning: Identity and Diversity” — freshman students critically examine society’s influence on self-identity and how selfies reflect and affect the global culture in which we live.

James Gingell:

ere’s a riddle. I’m a translator, but I only know one language. I can’t talk in my Welsh Mam’s mother tongue and my Francophonic floundering leaves my friends in fits of giggles. I did German GCSE, but plonk me in the middle of Prussia and I’m not certain that asking the way to the nearest Italian restaurant would be enough to keep me out of trouble. I can only speak one language and it’s English.

I call myself a translator because, thanks to five and a bit misguided years doing two biochemistry degrees, I can change things like this:

“p53-p66shc/miR-21-Sod2 signalling is critical for the inhibitory effect of betulinic acid on hepatocellular carcinoma”

into things like this:

“A chemical called betulinic acid can slow down the growth of liver cancer cells, but it’s only effective when a gene called p53 is fully functional.”

It’s now my job to do this every day – to transform scientific language from gibberish and gobbledegook into something more digestible. When I’m feeling particularly puffed up, I think of myself as Hermes, passing messages down to Earth from the gods of science. And while the day-to-day office reality is certainly less grand, I hope that my efforts mean that people can appreciate some of the divine wonder of scientific research without having to spend their youth in dimly lit laboratories and libraries.

Cory Doctorow.

Tara Garcia Mathewson:

Matthew Pittinsky calls it the “quiet revolution.” The CEO of Parchment and co-founder and former CEO of Blackboard has watched the relatively rapid shift from paper to digital transcripts with at least a bit of awe. He admits that as the CEO of a digital credential management company, he’s probably biased, but there’s no denying the fact that 20 years ago, well into the dot-com bubble, virtually no colleges sent or received digital transcripts. It took Parchment — originally Docufide — seven years to send its millionth transcript. Now the service processes that many transcripts every two months.

“Why print and mail transcripts when most receivers of them would prefer to get them as machine readable data and when most students would prefer to request them electronically and have them in digital form?” Pittinsky said.

Higher education institutions have moved en masse toward receiving transcripts digitally, but they’ve been slower to shift when it comes to sending them. Over the last few years, Pittinsky has watched the trend catch on rapidly across institutions. It doesn’t cost more money. Schools already charge for transcripts, so instead of putting that money toward staff time, it goes into vendor contracts. Mostly, Pittinsky said, the delay has been because of culture — getting comfortable with a new internal process, with the idea that digital transcripts are secure, and with the idea that receivers will accept the digital versions.

The Economist:

Student debt in America now totals $1.2 trillion, up more than threefold over the past decade. On August 10th Hillary Clinton announced a $350 billion plan to reduce this sum. It would increase federal subsidies granted to state-school students, and help existing borrowers refinance their liabilities. New loan originations have decreased every year since 2010, and default rates have stabilised.

Daniel Drezner:

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been paying close attention to the War on College for quite some time, and it has concluded that the state of higher education is simply awful. College is just a horrible place to send your children — because you are spending obscene sums of money for a substandard education.

The reasons why it’s a substandard education can get a bit confusing at times, however. Best not to think to much about it.

You still want to think about it? Okay, but I warn you, you’re not going to like my conclusions.

This week two cover stories came out about the state of higher education. Both were very critical of the status quo, but for very different reasons. Let’s start with the Atlantic’s cover story by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt chronicle the rise of a new wave of political correctness on campuses.

80,000 hours:

Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?

To do a test, we made the following game. We’ve described ten major US social interventions, and you’ll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.

The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that’s available on major social interventions to decide whether they’re effective or not. We chose the top ten interventions that were easiest to explain and had the clearest conclusions, so it’s clear what the answers are. There’s no trick!

Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett:

Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.

People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are.

Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data.

Guardian:

A star is born. Geography, for so long a Cinderella subject, the easy option for students who found physics or chemistry too daunting, is soaring in popularity. According to the Royal Geographical Society, 13% more took the subject at A-level this year than last, up to 37,100 – the biggest jump of any of the major subjects.

Part of the explanation is Michael Gove’s determination to make schools focus on more traditional academic subjects at GCSE and A-level, rather than general studies or critical thinking. That is good for those who can benefit from a narrower academic focus, but not so much for those who struggle. It may be, however, that the bigger reason is that geography is a subject for our times. It is inherently multidisciplinary in a world that increasingly values people who have the skills needed to work across the physical and social sciences. Geographers get to learn data analysis, and to read Robert Macfarlane. They learn geographic information systems. They can turn maps from a two-dimensional representation of a country’s physical contours into a tool that illustrates social attributes or attitudes: not just where people live, but how, what they think and how they vote. They learn about the physics of climate change, or the interaction of weather events and flood risk, or the way people’s behaviour is influenced by the space around them.

Leah Constantine:

Whether we’ve admitted to it or not, we live in an extremely digital world. As you read this, I am able to communicate with you digitally. It is an expansion ubiquitous to technological advances and our enhanced lifestyles. So what does this term “digitalism” mean for the art world? Today, it means a change. Art is one of the oldest forms of visual discourse we’ve ever known. From viewing, to sharing, and even buying, we are seeing the world of art change before us. To study this expansion of digitalism in art, I am visiting an article published in 2014 by Jonathan Bowen from Birmingham City University and Tula Giannini from Pratt Institute titled Digitalism: The New Realism? Through this article and other examples of digital expansion, we can observe the important affects of digitalism in art.

The term “digital” has many definitions depending on the context of its use. Before understanding its meaning in the art world, we need to be able to define it as it is used in the contemporary art world. Bowen and Giannini observed digitalism in a cultural and artistic context in order to define and understand its involvement with society. According to their definition, “digital” in art refers to artists’ use of computers and its involvement in the creation and sharing of the arts.1

Jake Flanagan:

On Aug. 10, Democratic candidate for US president Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a $350 billion plan to eliminate college debt and allow young Americans to complete four-year degrees without taking out loans.
Some see Clinton’s plan as a crucial step in the right direction. These days, it’s virtually impossible to self-finance an American college education.

For those not getting help from mom and dad, loans and/or federal grants are a matter of course. “In 2014-2015, the school year just ended, the total of tuition, fees and room and board for in-state students at four-year public universities was $18,943,” reports Anya Kamenetz for NPR. “The maximum Pell Grant didn’t keep pace with that: It was $5,730.” This leaves the average grantee roughly $13,300 to cover annually. (Pell Grants are funded by the US federal government and are based on financial need, as determined by FAFSA.)

Aaron Zitner:

If Donald Trump‘s made-for-tabloid musings have you wondering when the presidential candidates will seriously grapple with important issues, take a look at the brewing debate over college costs.

Even if you don’t carry student debt or have a kid headed to college, the higher-ed debate is worth following. More than any issue, it’s revealing how candidates in both parties plan to show an unhappy public that they have solutions to the current strain of economic anxiety, one arising from wage stagnation, disruptive technologies and tepid growth.

And this debate is yielding a rarity in politics—new ideas—as well as some surprising areas of agreement between the parties.

Cuda Zone:

Deep learning is a rapidly growing segment of artificial intelligence. It is increasingly used to deliver near-human level accuracy for image classification, voice recognition, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, recommendation engines, and more. Applications areas include facial recognition, scene detection, advanced medical and pharmaceutical research, and autonomous, self-driving vehicles.

Mark:

About one year ago, I finished building a book recommender for the Project Gutenberg collection. To do so, I analyzed the style and content of tens of thousands of the books they freely provide (for more details on precisely how I did this, you can read my earlier blog post). Recently it occurred to me to revisit this data with a slightly different aim. Rather than quantifying the similarity of individual books, I could try to estimate the stylistic relationships between authors. From a practical point of view, such an analysis could serve a similar purpose to the book recommender, except at the slightly coarser level of authors. From an academic perspective, determining quantitatively which authors wrote like each other could prove useful to scholars attempting to resolve outstanding problems in literary theory. The results of this effort can be seen below.

Library of Congress:

The Library of Congress, the world’s largest repository of knowledge and information, began a multiyear “Celebration of the Book” with an exhibition on “Books That Shaped America.” The initial books in the exhibition are displayed below.

“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.
We hope you will view the list, discuss it with your friends and family, and most importantly, choose to read and discuss some of the books on this list, reflecting America’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.

Jennifer Maloney:

Last fall, Andrew Vestal found himself rocking his baby daughter, Ada, back to sleep every morning between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Cradling Ada in the crook of his arm, he discovered he could read his dimly-lit phone with one hand. That’s how he read David Mitchell’s 624-page science-fiction saga “The Bone Clocks.”

Mr. Vestal’s iPhone has offered him a way to squeeze in time for reading that he otherwise might have given up. He reads on lunch breaks. He even reads between meetings as he walks across Microsoft’s Seattle campus, where he works as a program manager.

Before he tried it, he wondered whether reading in snippets might be dissatisfying. But to his surprise, he found he could quickly re-immerse himself in the book he was reading. “I want reading to be part of my life,” said Mr. Vestal, age 35. “If I waited for the kind of time I used to have—sitting down for five hours—I wouldn’t read at all.”

GREG LUKIANOFF AND JONATHAN HAIDT
SEPTEMBER:

omething strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Alex:

There is a huge disconnect today in the way we teach computer science to students who wish to become software engineers, and what the industry expects of them when they graduate. Ask a recent graduate what the algorithmic complexity for a binary search of a sorted list, and he’ll (likely) give you the correct answer of O(log(n)), but many recent graduates struggle with designing any kind of complete system from the ground up.

I recently spoke to a friend of mine who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in computer science about the interviews he was going through, and he told me about one particular interview where the question asked was how he would design a system to keep track of the positions of all of the trains in the Washington D.C. subway system.

He also told me how he answered it. He spoke of the data structures one would use– binary tree this; linked list that, but when I asked him how he said the data would get from the train to whatever computer his software was running on, he couldn’t give me an answer. Should there be a computer at each station that communicates with a central computer over HTTP? Again, no answer.

Jessica Lahey

I’ve known the mother sitting in front of me at this parent-teacher conference for years, and we have been through a lot together. I have taught three of her children, and I like to think we’ve even become friends during our time together. She’s a conscientious mother who obviously loves her children with all of her heart. I’ve always been honest with her about their strengths and weaknesses, and I think she trusts me to tell her the truth. But when she hits me with the concern that’s been bothering her for a while, all I can do is nod, and stall for time.

“Marianna’s grades are fine; I’m not worried about that, but she just doesn’t seem to love learning anymore.”

Peter Maas:

Unlike the paranoid eavesdropper played by Gene Hackman in The Conversation, or the quiet Stasi agent at the center of The Lives of Others, Socrates lives in the age of Google and data-mining. Like the rest of us, he cannot remain invisible. Socrates was an evangelical Christian for seven years, got married at 19, divorced at 27 and remarried not long after. He is now a registered Democrat and lives in a Maryland suburb with his son and wife, a public school teacher. I’ve seen the inside of their house, thanks to a real estate listing; the home, on a cul de sac, has four bedrooms, is more than 2,000 square feet, and has a nice wooden deck. I’ve also seen pictures of their son, because Socrates and his wife posted family snapshots on their Facebook accounts. His wife was on Twitter.

Conducting surveillance can be a creepily invasive procedure, as Socrates discovered while peering into the digital life of his first diplomatic target, and as I discovered while collecting information about him. In the abstract, surveillance might seem an antiseptic activity — just a matter of figuring out whether a valid security reason exists to surveil a target and then executing a computer command and letting the algorithms do the rest. But it’s not always that clinical. Sheelagh McNeill, the research editor with whom I worked on this story, was able to find Socrates’ phone number, and although he did not respond to voicemails, he eventually got on the line when I called at night.

FRUZSINA EÖRDÖGH:

People want Instagram followers so much, they don’t care if they’re bots—because when it comes to social media, appearances are reality. The businessmen who are happy to oblige those desperate for fake followers are rolling in the monies but at the same time, they’re locked in a weird arms race of algorithms—one where the bot farmers and social media platforms are constantly trying to outsmart the other.

The biggest battle right now is over Instagram, and one group of bot farmers is winning.

BT:

The numbers of parents being taken to court over their child skipping school is rising, with thousands facing action last year.

Figures obtained by the Press Association also show that growing numbers are being convicted of truancy offences, facing fines, and in some cases even being sent to jail.

In total, 16,430 people in England were prosecuted for failing to ensure that a child went to school in 2014 – equivalent to around 86 cases for each day of the school year.

Vincent Roscigno

Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to organized crime may seem, at first-glance, far-fetched. Deeper reflection, however, has prodded me to take the possibility seriously. Indeed, what began as a “for fun” sociological thought experiment has led to the sad realization that they are really not as distinct as one might like to believe. To be sure, one is seen as legitimate while the other illegal. Yet, if one openly considers the parallels, including: (1) the hierarchical, bureaucratic and coordinated structure of each; (2) the accruing of riches to those on top, (3) how both require explicit or tacit governmental support, and; (4) the extraction of income from and ultimately harm done to well-intentioned families, to adjuncts and lecturers, and to the intellectual mission of public higher education most broadly, the similarities become more apparent, intriguing and certainly troubling.