Nicholette Zeliadt:

The latest estimate of autism prevalence in the U.S., released last week, suggests the condition is even more common than previously thought. But the apparent rise in autism coincides with a decline in other developmental disorders, highlighting the complexity folded into this seemingly simple statistic.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 45 children have autism, up from 1 in 80 in 20131. The new figure is based on the annual door-to-door National Health Interview Survey, which asks parents whether a doctor has ever told them their child has autism, intellectual disability or another type of developmental delay.

Wall Street Journal:

At the back of the pack are, in ascending order from the bottom, New Jersey, New York, California, Minnesota, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Ohio and Maryland. The only state to recently break out of this hall of tax shame is North Carolina, which in 2013 slashed its top 7.75% income tax to a flat 5.75% and its corporate rate to 5% from 6.9%. The former 44th is now ranked 15th.

By contrast, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy earlier this year quarterbacked a major corporate tax hike and bumped the top income tax rate to 6.99% from 6.7%. Fairfield-based General Electric is now threatening to sign with another state. As Governor of Maryland from 2007 to 2015, Democrat Martin O’Malley increased some 40 taxes including the corporate rate to 8.25% from 7% and the sales tax to 6% from 5%. This may be one reason he’s warming the bench in the Democratic primaries.

In fairness, some high-tax states are trying to improve. New York last year trimmed its corporate rate to 6.5% from 7.1% while zeroing it out for upstate manufacturers. The reform catapulted the Empire State 12 spots in the corporate tax ranking to 12th, but its sky-high state and local income taxes are still second only to California.

Michael Skapinker:

“All officers ‘should have degrees’,” was the BBC headline. An adviser to the College of Policing, which sets standards for police training in England and Wales, said: “We are looking to have degree-level qualifications for constable and masters for superintendent.”

The college said that France and Spain already demanded that new-entry police officers have degrees and that inspectors have masters degrees.

The college said professions such as medicine, nursing, law and social work all required university qualifications. The high level at which police officers operated today meant UK forces needed to consider degrees too.

It is easy to understand what the college is talking about. Dealing with cross-border terrorism, cyber crime and financial fraud needs sophisticated skills. Police forces that can attract graduates will probably benefit. But the idea that every officer needs to be a graduate seems wrong-headed.

Graphical Linear Algebra:

We are on the home stretch. In this episode we complete the set of equations of Interacting Hopf monoids, the technical name for the equational theory behind graphical linear algebra. Afterwards, we will not see any new equations for some time. Instead, we will explore what this equational theory is good for. In the next few episodes I hope to convince you that I haven’t been wasting your time with all of this!

Michelle Singletary

Many colleges and universities require freshmen to live on campus, knowing that many will have to borrow to do so. (Schools often waive the requirement under certain circumstances, including “extreme” financial hardship or if a student will live nearby with a parent or guardian.)

In pitching the benefits, schools argue that students who live in residence halls have an easier transition to college life.

For in-state students living on campus at public four-year colleges and universities this school year, room and board represented an average of 42 percent of their estimated budget, according to the College Board. Tuition and fees constituted 39 percent.

BBC:

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) says reports it was paid by the FBI to attack software sometimes used for criminal activity are “inaccurate”.

The Tor web browser is designed to let people anonymously explore websites, including those hidden on the dark web which do not show up in search engines.

Sara Ahmed:

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

Paul Hill
Ashley Joachim:

On The Lens today, Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim write: Creating and transforming schools is the core work of education reform. But educational change is inevitably political. It requires adults to work differently, threatens some jobs, empowers parents with new choices, and makes schools’ existence depend on enrollment and academic performance. As education reform efforts in some cities have shown, bypassing local politics is not a sustainable solution.

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

“Beyond Measure” a film, sponsored by MTI & WEAC, paints a positive picture of what is possible in American Education. Ruth Conniff, Editor of The Progressive magazine, will facilitate a discussion following the film. The film begins at 7:00 p.m., at the Barrymore Theater. There is no charge to attend. Tickets are going fast, but can be reserved via: http://www.madisonteachers.org/beyondmeasure/

Roger Kimball:

For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.

To people unindoctrinated by the sensitivity training that is de rigueur on most campuses today, these sentiments might seem unobjectionable. But to the delicate creatures at Yale’s Silliman College they were an intolerable provocation. What if students dressed as American Indians or Mexican mariachi musicians? Angry, hysterical students confronted Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the master of Silliman, screaming obscenities and demanding that he step down because he had failed to create “a place of comfort, a home” for students. The episode was captured on video and went viral.

Charles Kesler:

Claremont McKenna College was once deliberately out of step with academic fashion. I used to tell prospective students and their parents, liberal or conservative, that one of the best things about CMC was that it refused to enforce the little catechism of political correctness. Regardless of political beliefs on campus, I assured them, students did not have to worry about speaking up in class or being persecuted for their opinions.

That is now very much in doubt. Last week the turmoil stirred at Yale and the University of Missouri swept my campus. A coalition of self-proclaimed “marginalized” students presented a catalog of “microaggressions” they had suffered, demanding new forms of “institutional support” in compensation. Demonstrators, who included both CMC undergrads and a few unfamiliar, skulking adults, denounced the dean of students and humiliated her in an open-air trial. Two students went on a hunger strike. Within days, Claremont McKenna—a place I have been proud to call my employer for more than three decades—surrendered ignominiously. How and why did it happen?

Josh Constine:

But Friday night, Kalanick offered new potential options for drivers while speaking on stage at the Summit At Sea getaway conference boat off the coast of Miami. The boat, which had little connectivity, just returned to port.

After an on stage discussion with Google/Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, a nervous audience member bluntly asked Kalanick about the fate of Uber’s drivers as autonomous vehicles hit the road. At first, Kalanick launched into a summary of why the act of driving is fundamentally bad. He cited that 30,000 people a year die of car accidents, billions of hours are spent “decreasing quality of life” during the stressful act of driving, and traffic hurts people’s efficiency. He sees driverless technology as a solution to many of these problems.

Mamie Hall:

My 10 years teaching in the public schools can best be described as a roller coaster of inspiration, innovation and disappointment.

After college, I began working in a pilot year-round middle school program. We had smaller class sizes and a lot of freedom. We set our own schedule, made our own policies and took our students on team-building exercises in the mountains and celebrations of success at nearby attractions. Yes, there were challenges, but being able to use our own creative methods to address those led to a sense of professionalism and accomplishment.

The icing on the cake, not that this is my main measure of my success as a teacher, was that our test scores were higher than any other in the district.

Claremont Independent:

The student protests that have swept through Claremont McKenna College (CMC) over the past few days—and the ensuing fallout—have made us disappointed in many of those involved.

First, former Dean Mary Spellman. We are sorry that your career had to end this way, as the email in contention was a clear case of good intentions being overlooked because of poor phrasing. However, we are disappointed in you as well. We are disappointed that you allowed a group of angry students to bully you into resignation. We are disappointed that you taught Claremont students that reacting with emotion and anger will force the administration to act. We are disappointed that when two students chose to go on a hunger strike until you resigned, you didn’t simply say, “so what?” If they want to starve themselves, that’s fine—you don’t owe them your job. We are disappointed that you and President Chodosh put up with students yelling and swearing at you for an hour. You could have made this a productive dialogue, but instead you humored the students and allowed them to get caught up in the furor.

Wilson Peden

For the last time: No, earning a degree in English, philosophy, art history, name-your-humanities-discipline will not condemn you to a lifetime of unemployment and poverty.

Actually, this is probably not the last time I will write some version of those words. It’s certainly not the first time I have written them. (See, for instance, the lede from another blog post I wrote almost exactly a year ago: “Good news for recent graduates who majored in the arts or humanities: you are not doomed to a lifetime of poverty and unemployment.”) But I feel compelled to keep writing these words because, in the face of all evidence, the myth of the unemployed humanities major persists. It may be more prevalent than ever: Florida Senator Marco Rubio has made snarky remarks about the job market for philosophy majors a trademark of his campaign speeches for the Republican presidential nomination.

Terrell Jermaine Starr:

Video of a confrontation between a news photographer and protesters at the University of Missouri on Monday led to a dispute between journalists and the activists’ sympathizers beyond the campus walls. In response to a series of racial issues at the university, a circle of arm-linked students sought to designate a “safe space” around an encampment on the campus quad. When they blocked journalist Tim Tai from photographing the encampment, reporters complained that media were denied access to a public space.

Certainly, Tai – like any journalist – had a legal right to enter the space, given that it was in a public area. But that shouldn’t be the end of this story. We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.

Laurie Everett:

Ahaan Rungta and his family moved from Calcutta, India, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2001, the same year MIT announced OpenCourseWare (OCW), a bold plan to publish all of MIT’s course materials online and to share them with the world for free. Little did his parents realize at the time that their two-year-old son — already an avid reader — would eventually acquire his entire elementary and secondary education from OpenCourseWare and MITx, and would be admitted to the MIT class of 2019 at the age of 15.

“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.”

When most kids are entering kindergarten, Rungta was studying physics and chemistry through OpenCourseWare. For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.

Julia Serano

And here is how you will do it:

1) Make it clear from the very beginning that you are an open-minded, social justice supporter, preferably on the left side of the political spectrum. This will contrast your take on “political correctness run amok” from those of right wing commentators — you know, those hypocrites who are pro-free speech when it comes to white, straight, Christian people making fun of minorities, but against free speech when it comes to #BlackLivesMatter, or discussions about sex education and women’s reproductive rights, or secular holiday celebrations, or homosexuals and their so-called “agenda.” You are nothing like those hypocrites! Plus, you are pitching your soon-to-be-trending article to someplace like The Nation or The Atlantic, so you will most certainly need to win over liberal readers.

Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman, Shane Shifflett and Sandhya Kambhampati:

A river of cash is flowing into college sports, financing a spending spree among elite universities that has sent coaches’ salaries soaring and spurred new discussions about whether athletes should be paid. But most of that revenue is going to a handful of elite sports programs, leaving colleges like Georgia State to rely heavily on students to finance their athletic ambitions.

In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley:

Students at the University of Missouri recently succeeded in pressuring the institution’s president and chancellor to step down. At other campuses across the country, we are witnessing a wave of similar protests. Frequently, however, the students protesting are being misrepresented and belittled in the news media as childish and coddled. More worryingly still, they are held to be attacking freedom of speech rather than exercising it to call for institutional reform — political action of the very kind this freedom aims at protecting.

What explains this apparent paradox? In a word, propaganda. The notion of freedom of speech is being co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized. All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, “Quiet!”

Patrick Marley:

In 1996, the high court unanimously ruled the elected superintendent is in charge of education, finding the governor and lawmakers could not strip the office of those powers. Now, the court is being asked to overturn that decision.

Justice David Prosser was the speaker of the state Assembly during the legal battle two decades ago, and in that capacity he filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing the Legislature had greater powers over schools.

He lost that argument, but as a member of the court he will get to revisit it.

The case now before the Supreme Court is meant to determine whether the governor can have a say in the administrative rules written by the superintendent’s Department of Public Instruction. Lower courts ruled the governor could not.

Overturning the 1996 decision wasn’t at issue when the case was before the lower courts but was raised when it got to the state Supreme Court. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel is arguing for reversing the decision, as is Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a business lobbying group that filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

Evers argues the decision should not be reversed because courts are supposed to follow precedent and there are no new facts or conflicting rulings that should prompt the court to reverse course.

Roxane Gay:

As a writer, I believe the First Amendment is sacred. The freedom of speech, however, does not guarantee freedom from consequence. You can speak your mind, but you can also be shunned. You can be criticized. You can be ignored or ridiculed. You can lose your job. The freedom of speech does not exist in a vacuum.

Many of the people who advocate for freedom of speech with the most bluster are willing to waste this powerful right on hate speech. But the beauty of the freedom of speech is that it protects us from subjectivity. We protect someone’s right to shout hateful slurs the same way we protect someone’s right to, say, criticize the government, or discuss her religious beliefs.

And so the students at Mizzou wanted a safe space to commune as they protested. They wanted sanctuary but had the nerve to demand this sanctuary in plain sight, in a public space. Rather than examine why the activists needed safe space, most people wrapped themselves in the Constitution, the path of less resistance. The students are framed as coddled infants, as if perhaps we should educate college students in a more spartan manner — placing classrooms in lions’ dens.

Dave Zirin:

I n shocking news that comes in utter contradiction to a statement released just yesterday, University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe has announced his resignation.

The move comes after incidents of bigotry and racial vandalism that scarred the Columbia campus, followed by weeks of protest, a hunger strike by grad student Jonathan Butler, as well as the announcement that faculty members would not be showing up for work.

Yet the tipping point for Wolfe’s departure was the announcement Saturday night that the black football players at Mizzou would be refusing to practice or play until the school president was gone. Their announcement was followed the next day by a widely circulated photo of most of the team, including many white players, sitting with head coach Gary Pinkel, and the statement that the players had full support of the coaching staff in their efforts. Tim Wolfe makes $459,000 a year and the school would have to forfeit $1 million just for missing this weekend’s game against BYU. In other words, math was not on Tim Wolfe’s side and he was as good as gone.

Jonathan Peters:

Hundreds of students, faculty, and staff gathered on the Carnahan Quadrangle to support the 1950 group, whose name is a nod to the year black students were first allowed on Mizzou’s campus. The president’s resignation—and later the chancellor’s—followed weeks of unrest at the state’s flagship university. One grad student declared a hunger strike, and the football team refused to compete as long as the president kept his job, all while the 1950 members camped out in tents on campus. The protests were sparked by anger that administrators had not acted more quickly to address recent expressions of racism directed at black students.

Human Google

FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS. On the first page of Wayne A. Wiegand’s Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library, a stunning statistic from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Internet and American Life Project: 91 percent of respondents over the age of 16 said that public libraries were “very” or “somewhat” important to their communities; 98 percent identified their public library experience as “very” or “mostly” positive; and 94 percent of parents believed that libraries were important to their children. The report also grouped the library with the military and first responders as the only major institutions not to fall in public esteem over the previous decade.

It’s worth pausing for a second to ponder this baffling consensus. In the polarized and paranoid America of the 21st century — these days I picture Uncle Sam with one hand on his concealed weapon, his other hand on his wallet — it’s hard to imagine 90 percent of us agreeing on anything, much less coming together to support an open, tax-funded, socialistic institution devoted (at least traditionally) to the distribution of books.

Christina Farr:

Blake Atkins receives regular messages from his mom when he’s at school. But unlike most teenagers, he doesn’t seem to mind.

That’s because Atkins, 15, who lives in San Carlos, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes four years ago. His mom, Lori, sends him a text whenever his blood sugar levels are out of the normal range.

“I do like that my mom can look at my numbers,” Atkins says. “It keeps me sane. It helps keep her sane.”

While enlisting caregivers might seem like a logical way to manage diabetes, it’s only recently that such tools have been available. Health experts say sophisticated devices to monitor blood sugar have been around for years, but it’s been a challenge to share health data securely with a smartphone — and from there, add it to a patient’s medical record.

By Hannah Oh, Steven Glick and Taylor Schmitt:

The student protests that have swept through Claremont McKenna College (CMC) over the past few days—and the ensuing fallout—have made us disappointed in many of those involved.

First, former Dean Mary Spellman. We are sorry that your career had to end this way, as the email in contention was a clear case of good intentions being overlooked because of poor phrasing. However, we are disappointed in you as well.

We are disappointed that you allowed a group of angry students to bully you into resignation.

We are disappointed that you taught Claremont students that reacting with emotion and anger will force the administration to act.

Michael DeArmond:

We recently released a report that looked at nine indicators to measure educational improvement and opportunity in 50 cities across America. Despite a few bright spots, the results paint a sobering picture of the state of urban public education today, especially for students from low-income households and students of color.

With few exceptions, students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and students of color in the 50 cities were less likely than more advantaged students to enroll in a high-scoring elementary and middle school, take advanced math classes in high school, and sit for the ACT/SAT. Equally important, the odds of a student being in a supercharged school where these education gaps might be wiped out were slim: overall, only about 8 percent of all students in the 50 cities enrolled in a school that “beat the odds” and outpaced demographically similar schools statewide. How can city leaders address these problems? Although the report can’t provide any answers, it offers some clues.

Bethany Gross:

Why would changing school discipline rank among the reforms recommended for a city where the most egregious injustice has played out in law enforcement and the court system? In a recent NPR story, Reverend Starsky Wilson, the co-chairman of the group of leaders known as the Ferguson Committee, explained:

The perception of our police is the same as many teachers who see young black men, particularly, as older than they actually are, as more dangerous than they present. And then they treat them differently with their use of consequences. So in the classroom, it’s out-of-school suspensions, and on the street, it’s extrajudicial killings.

That’s a stark statement, but the link between getting into trouble in and out of school is a reality for many students, so much so that people refer to a “school-to-prison pipeline” that moves students from school into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

Jim Schutze:

The problem there, up until recently, has been that you can’t really do much research on a thing that doesn’t exist yet. So, for example, how does Ravitch know already that merit pay will turn teachers against each other?

Back to journalism and elephants: Just now, in fact, merit pay systems are up and running in a few major districts. Our own Dallas school district may even have the most comprehensive and sophisticated merit pay system in the country, a direct legacy of the tenure here of former Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles.

This year is the first when we have had two years to compare in order to spot trends. But in most of its recent coverage of what is called the “Teacher Excellence Initiative” or TEI (merit pay) system here, The Dallas Morning News has focused only on the criticism of the system brought forward by the teachers unions.

John McWhorter:

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Malcolm Harris:

But what is a “safe space” and why shouldn’t a university be one? This tweet from Dawkins would have been a psychotic response to a school shooting or campus rape, but that’s not the kind of safety he’s talking about. The safe spaces that Dawkins doesn’t like are encroachments onto his turf by queer and feminist activists. All of the sudden a self-styled public intellectual like Dawkins has to use “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun or risk censure. He signed up for science, not social studies.

And Dawkins isn’t alone in his frustration. At the University of Missouri, the president and chancellor have both been forced to resign by student protesters who accused them of failing to create a safe space for Black students. At Yale, a residential “master” earned national condemnation after he and his wife stood up for the principle of racially offensive Halloween costumes. “Safe space” has become a rallying cry for student activists who want to change the way their campus communities operate, but it has an older history.

April Kelly-Woessner

When Samuel Stouffer first wrote on political tolerance during the McCarthy era, he concluded that Americans were generally an intolerant bunch. Yet, finding that younger people were more tolerant than their parents, he also concluded that Americans would become more and more tolerant over time, due to generational replacement and increases in education. However, Stouffer did not predict the rise of the New Left, which I argue has reframed our collective notions about free expression, resulting in a significant decline in political tolerance among America’s youth. I develop this argument in a chapter I wrote for Stanley Rothman’s last book, The End of the Experiment, (Rothman, Nagai, Maranto, and Woessner, 2015) My findings are outlined below.

First, I make the case that young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation and that this marks a clear reversal of the trends observed by social scientists for the past 60 years. Political tolerance is generally defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties and basic democratic rights to members of unpopular groups. That is, in order to be tolerant, one must recognize the rights of one’s political enemies to fully participate in the democratic process. Typically, this is measured by asking people whether they will allow members of unpopular groups, or groups they dislike, to exercise political rights, such as giving a public talk, teaching college, or having their books on loan in public libraries.

Silpa Kovvali Silpa Kovvali:

In December of 2012, many Harvard students woke to an unpleasant surprise that had been slid under their doors. A flyer, circulated by anonymous parties, was seemingly a parodic invitation to a final club. “Inclusion. Diversity. Love.” it read, with footnotes clarifying “Jews need not apply. Seriously, no fucking Jews. Coloreds okay. Rophynol.” (Final clubs are Harvard’s version of fraternities: they are very wealthy, very old, and bear a long tradition of elitism and sexism.)

In response, the (now former) Dean of the College, Evelynn M. Hammonds issued a statement. “I find these flyers offensive,” it said. “Even if intended as satirical in nature, they are hurtful and offensive … and do not demonstrate the level of thoughtfulness and respect we expect at Harvard when engaging difficult issues within our community.” That week, two Harvard House Masters, Nicholas A. and Erika Christakis, wrote a histrionic Time op-ed in which they described the school as a “a free-speech surveillance state.” Their sole evidence was the administration’s response to the anonymous gesture: Hammonds’s declaration that she, for one, did not care for it.

Chana Schoenberger:

Many parents and grandparents love “529” accounts to save for college. But like anything involving money and taxes, not everyone uses them in the most efficient way.

These state-sponsored savings plans, which typically invest in mutual funds, hold a record amount of assets—$258.2 billion in 12.3 million open accounts, says the College Savings Plans Network, a state treasurers’ group.

The attraction is that they come with years of tax-free growth, as well as tax-free withdrawals as long as the funds are used to pay for qualified education expenses.

In effect, these plans are a hedge against the wave of student-loan debt engulfing many recent graduates.

“It is much less expensive to save for college than to borrow for college,” says Angie O’Leary, senior vice president with U.S. Bancorp Investments.

Here are some tips from consultants and other experts on how to use these plans in the best way:

Julie F. Mead & Preston C. Green III

This policy brief addresses the challenge of using charter school policy to enhance equal educational opportunity. Three overriding assumptions guide the brief’s recommendations: (1) charter schools will be part of our public educational system for the foreseeable future; (2) charter schools are neither inherently good, nor inherently bad; and (3) charter schools should be employed to further goals of equal educational opportunity, including racial diversity and school success. The creation of charter schools is just one among a variety of policy tools at the disposal of local, state, and national policymakers. As with all educational policy tools, one challenge is to wield the tool in a manner that will enhance equity and opportunity. Part I of this brief provides an overview of equal educational opportunity and its legal foundations and offers a review of prior research documenting issues concerning charter schools and their impact on equity and diversity. Part II presents detailed recommendations for charter school authorizers, as well as state and federal policymakers for using charter schools to advance equal educational opportunity. Separately, we are publishing a companion document based on these detailed recommendations, providing model statutory code language that can be employed by state policymakers to ensure that charter schools attend to long-established policy goals.

Madison Schools’ charter policy (pdf).

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School several years ago, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Fostering Innovation in the Madison Government Schools.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Dr. Louisa Moats defends the use of the word “dyslexia” in this article: Defending the “D” Word.
​
Two resources are available for teaching bi-dialectal fluency for African American English speakers: Toggle Talk for kindergartners and Code Switching Lessons: Grammar Strategies of Linguistically Diverse Writers for older students. These programs are linguistically and culturally responsive practices designed to boost literacy outcomes for African American students.

Steve Malanga:

It has been a difficult five years for government-employee unions, and the Supreme Court appears poised to strike another blow. During the current term, the justices will hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case challenging rules in 23 states—including California, Illinois and New York—that force government workers to pay hefty “agency fees” to unions that they have no interest in joining.

Labor activists call these “fair share fees,” on the theory that nonunion workers, even if they don’t pay full dues, still benefit from collective bargaining—for example, from a wage increase negotiated by union representatives. In a brief filed last week with the Supreme Court, the California Teachers Association argued that such fees are vital “to avoid labor strife, to secure economic stability, to insure the efficiency and continuity of state and local governments.”

Lorien Kite:

A study of autism has won the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for non-fiction writing.

Neurotribes, by the US investigative journalist Steve Silberman, began life in 2001 as an article in Wired magazine that sought to explain higher-than-average rates of the disorder among the children of programmers and engineers in Silicon Valley.

Combining contemporary reportage with a history of medical approaches and social attitudes towards the disorder, the book that emerged tackles the question of why there has been such a rise in diagnoses in recent decades.

Anne Applebaum, the historian and journalist who chaired the five-strong judging panel, described Neurotribes as “a tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research”.

Times Higher Education:

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016 list the best global universities and are the only international university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

PDF Slides

Madison has changed significantly in the past few decades, and likely will continue to change in the years to come. Since 1990, residents in poverty and residents of color have increased citywide, while MMSD students receiving free/reduced lunch and MMSD students of color have increased even faster.

Looking forward to 2030, Madison likely will look different in other ways – from the technology that affects our daily lives to the type of jobs that drive our economy. The Madison region has a history as a research and innovation hub; recent growth in the bioscience and information technology sectors as well as entrepreneurial start-ups will continue to shape our community’s economy. Although no one can know exactly what changes the next fifteen years will bring, creating a clear vision for MMSD’s future will anchor our work in constantly changing times.

Released in 2013, the MMSD Strategic Framework is a living document that gives the district a vision – that every school will be a thriving school that prepares every student for college, career, and community – and, more important, a strategy for moving forward towards this vision, including a focus on school improvement planning, a common learning agenda, and five priority areas to guide the work of central office. Working with the community, the district has set out to close the gaps in opportunity that lead to disparities in achievement, and to be a model of what a strong successful public school district looks like.

But research suggests that the greatest long-term improvement occurs when organizations know where they are headed and keep finding ways to improve. To maintain momentum, MMSD needed to create something to define clearly the components of its vision, including college, career, and community ready graduates, thriving educators and schools, and family and community partnerships.

The Vision 2030 process was our way to accomplish this goal, bringing life and specificity to these components. By doing so, MMSD can create a vision for the district that serves as an ambitious yet attainablestatementofwhereweareheaded,avividandaspirationalpictureofwhatMMSDcanbe. Thisvisionwill work in concert with the Strategic Framework to guide actions, both big and small, and serve as a beacon to which the district can align our actions and direct our growth in years to come.

Meg Anderson:

Ask yourself this question: Were you aware of inequality growing up?

Your answer may depend in part on where you went to high school. Students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going to school mostly with kids that look like them.

Katherine Beals & Barry Garelick:

“In general, there is no more evidence of “understanding” in the explained solution, even with pictures, than there would be in mathematical solutions presented in a clear and organized way. How do we know, for example, that a student isn’t simply repeating an explanation provided by the teacher or the textbook, thus exhibiting mere “rote learning” rather than “true understanding” of a problem-solving procedure?

“Math learning is a progression from concrete to abstract. The advantage to the abstract is that the various mathematical operations can be performed without the cumbersome attachments of concrete entities—entities like dollars, percentages, groupings of pencils. Once a particular word problem has been translated into a mathematical representation, the entirety of its mathematically relevant content is condensed onto abstract symbols, freeing working memory and unleashing the power of pure mathematics. That is, information and procedures that have been become automatic frees up working memory. With working memory less burdened, the student can focus on solving the problem at hand. Thus, requiring explanations beyond the mathematics itself distracts and diverts students away from the convenience and power of abstraction. Mandatory demonstrations of “mathematical understanding,” in other words, can impede the “doing” of actual mathematics.”

Related: Math Forum: audio/video.

Alan Borsuk:

School takeovers? Who said anything about school takeovers?

Well, Republicans in the Legislature did. Which means it’s in state law.

And a lot of other folks did, including opponents, led by the Milwaukee teachers union. The union campaigned energetically on a theme of “not one school” being taken away from the Milwaukee Public Schools system and put under the control of a charter school operator who would answer to a Milwaukee commissioner of education who would answer to Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele.

But the law doesn’t say school takeovers are required, you know. It just opens the way for them.

Last week’s appointment by Abele of Mequon-Thiensville School Superintendent Demond Means as the first Milwaukee school commissioner means the way is closed, at least for the 2016-’17 school year.

Officially known as the Opportunity Schools Partnership Program, the new effort looked initially like a mini version of the New Orleans Recovery School District, which basically replaced that city’s traditional school system with an all-charter system.

But the Milwaukee initiative emerged last week with a sharply different identity. It looks to me like it has a lot more in common with the initiative known as “community schools” than it has in common with takeovers of public schools. And the community schools idea has been backed by MPS leaders and the teachers union in the last couple years. How interesting.

Jeffrey Sellingo:

Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, ushering in an era of massive federal support for college students through a flurry of new programs: tuition grants, guaranteed student loans, and work-study funds. The law allowed a much greater swath of Americans to earn a college degree regardless of their family income. During the following decades, enrollment at campuses across the country grew threefold, to some 20 million students.

But today, Johnson’s vision of the Higher Education Act as a great equalizer in the American economy is at risk. Indeed, the divide between the haves and have-nots in higher education is almost as great today as it was in the mid-1960s. In the past decade alone, the percentage of students from families at the highest income levels who received a bachelor’s degree has grown to 82 percent, while for those at the bottom it has fallen to just 8 percent.

Roger Kimball:

For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.

To people unindoctrinated by the sensitivity training that is de rigueur on most campuses today, these sentiments might seem unobjectionable. But to the delicate creatures at Yale’s Silliman College they were an intolerable provocation. What if students dressed as American Indians or Mexican mariachi musicians? Angry, hysterical students confronted Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the master of Silliman, screaming obscenities and demanding that he step down because he had failed to create “a place of comfort, a home” for students. The episode was captured on video and went viral.

Wall Street Journal:

It deserves to be quoted at length: “Events this week at the University of Missouri and Yale University should remind us all of the importance of absolute fidelity to our shared values. First, that we strive constantly to be, without exception, a welcoming, inclusive and discrimination-free community, where each person is respected and treated with dignity. Second, to be steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.

“Two years ago, a student-led initiative created the ‘We Are Purdue Statement of Values,’ which was subsequently endorsed by the University Senate. Last year, both our undergraduate and graduate student governments led an effort that produced a strengthened statement of policies protecting free speech. What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Today and every day, we should remember the tenets of those statements and do our best to live up to them fully.”

So a commitment to tolerance can coexist on campus with a commitment to free speech and open debate. What a concept.

Sahil Chinoy and Chloee Weiner:

In 1960, California passed the Master Plan for Higher Education, which established a framework for public higher education in the state. It envisioned a University of California without tuition that guaranteed access for the top one-eighth of the state’s high school graduates, funded by taxpayers who believed in the university as a source of economic and social mobility.

UC Berkeley, in particular, as an elite public school, has aimed to reconcile its responsibility to the state’s people with its status as a highly selective academic institution — a challenge faced by few others.

Today, state disinvestment, rising tuition costs, more out-of-state students, increased private research funding and a greater emphasis on alumni giving have left some questioning whether UC Berkeley is drifting farther from the public ideal of the Master Plan and closer to the private universities with which it has always competed.

PDF Program.

2016 Cut-Off Scores (PDF). Wisconsin is 208, Minnesota 214, Illinois 215, Massachusetts is 223, Texas 220 (!) and Alabama is 209 (!)

Revisit College Station, TX, vs Madison. One spends substantially more per student than the other…

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

The present condition of politics in education is gloomy. School workers report high levels of stress, health problems, and thoughts of abandoning their career. Numerous teachers in Wisconsin already have, and it’s caused a teacher shortage nationwide. Many pinpoint the source – a lack of respect for the professional by far-right legislators and governors, and that has become the new normal. However, a ray of hope broke its way through the malaise, with the announcement this fall of what has been accomplished with the Madison Metropolitan School District Employee Handbook. It is evidence of what the Right couldn’t take. While Act 10 destroyed a 50 year history of collective bargaining for Wisconsin’s public employees, save police and firefighters, it couldn’t take away the voice or the spirit of MTI’s collaborative ability. There is still power in Union.

The Employee Handbook was a result of the Union and District management working together to map out a path for the future of our students, our schools, and workers. One of the most powerful aspects of this Handbook is that it continues a grievance procedure which provides for a mutually-selected independent hearing examiner.

Also, within the Handbook is a process for its modification. Any modification will be the result of a joint employer/employee committee coming together to make a recommendation to the Board of Education. This follows a procedure similar to the process used to create the original Handbook. It honors collaboration and emphasizes the importance of workers’ voices in the workplace.

Scott Jaschik:

The Wall Street Journal couldn’t have been much more excited about what Mitch Daniels said Wednesday about the protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri. “We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, spoke up Wednesday about the children’s revolt at Yale and Missouri,” said the Journal in an editorial.

While many conservatives joined in praising Daniels, his comments angered many black students at Purdue and some critics elsewhere. A rally is planned at Purdue today.

Eva Moskvitz:

Success Academy Charter Schools, New York City’s largest network of free charter schools, has recently been the center of controversy over its policies on student behavior. Our critics accuse us of pushing out children who might pull down our test scores, and in doing so creating what some call “a kindergarten-to-prison pipeline.” In reality, our attrition rates are lower than those of the district schools. How then do our students, chosen by lottery and mainly children of color, routinely outperform even students from wealthy…

Charles Smth:

In the history of higher education in our nation, today was gut check time. Both the president and the chancellor at the University of Missouri have now bitten the dust.

This incredibly consequential event is being widely interpreted as a victory for a college football team. No question, the actions taken by the Missouri football team and coach tipped the balance in the ultimate decision. However, make no mistake, the problems at the University of Missouri were much greater than the grievances of a group of football players.

Ruth Serven & William Schmitt:

One of the MU employees seen physically forcing a freelance photographer to move at a Concerned Student 1950 camp Monday has been placed on administrative leave, effective immediately.

Mark Lucas, director of the Department of Student Life, sent the following statement late Wednesday afternoon: “Effective Nov. 11, 2015, Janna Basler has been placed on administrative leave and relieved of her duties as Director of Greek Life while we conduct an investigation regarding her recent actions.”

In a video by MU student Mark Schierbecker, which has been widely circulated, Basler is seen with her arms outstretched walking toward and eventually touching Tim Tai, a student photojournalist on assignment for ESPN. Basler issued an apology Tuesday night, saying she regretted how she handled the tense situation at the campsite and that she respected journalists. Schierbecker is a senior photographer for The Maneater, a student newspaper at MU.

Heather Wilhelm:

In Tuesday’s Republican debate, Sen. Marco Rubio offered one of the more memorable lines of the night: “For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education,” he said, discussing ways to boost American wages. “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” The audience burst into enthusiastic applause.

By Wednesday morning, however, the applause had morphed into a chorus of studious media tsk-tsking. “Sorry, Marco Rubio,” ran a Washington Post headline. “Philosophy majors actually make way more than welders.” CNN International led off with a sizzling welding pun: “Marco Rubio’s quip about welders gets torched.” The more grammar-oriented, always ready to correct, helpfully reminded Rubio that he really meant “fewer” philosophers, not “less.”

Michael Miller:

“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, then don’t come to class,” Dale Brigham replied in an e-mail that appears to have been sent to his entire class. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class.

“If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them. If we cancel the exam, they win; if we go through with it, they lose.

“I know which side I am on,” Brigham wrote. “You make your own choice.”

Alia Wong:

It seems that nearly every major media publication in the United States these days wants to rank colleges. The latest outlet to get on board? The Economist, which scores higher-education institutions based in part on how much graduates earn. But lots of publications’ rankings look at future earnings and, more generally, ROI—return on investment. The Daily Beast’s “Down & Dirty Guide to the Best Colleges,” for example, uses data on graduates’ salaries to inform its “Best ROI” list (which appears to be far less popular than the guide’s “25 Sexiest Colleges” list). And then there’s Money, whose notably nuanced rankings system recently got a shout-out from the (rankings-less) Washington Post for “[coming] the closest” to “[cracking] the code on answering the ROI question.”

Nicholas Kristof:

This is sensitivity but also intolerance, and it is disproportionately an instinct on the left.

I’m a pro-choice liberal who has been invited to infect evangelical Christian universities with progressive thoughts, and to address Catholic universities where I’ve praised condoms and birth control programs. I’m sure I discomfited many students on these conservative campuses, but it’s a tribute to them that they were willing to be challenged. In the same spirit, liberal universities should seek out pro-life social conservatives to speak.

More broadly, academia — especially the social sciences — undermines itself by a tilt to the left. We should cherish all kinds of diversity, including the presence of conservatives to infuriate us liberals and make us uncomfortable. Education is about stretching muscles, and that’s painful in the gym and in the lecture hall.

One of the wrenching upheavals lately has unfolded at Yale. Longtime frustrations among minority students boiled over after administrators seemed to them insufficiently concerned about offensive costumes for Halloween. A widely circulated video showed a furious student shouting down one administrator, Prof. Nicholas Christakis. “Be quiet!” she screams at him. “It is not about creating an intellectual space!”

Ashe Schow:

We may be seeing the beginnings of a full-blown campus revolution. Not a revolution based on actual oppression, but a revolution stemming from perceived oppression and a desire to attain victimhood status.

The seeds of the revolution sprouted in full force this week, with protests at Yale and the University of Missouri. At Mizzou, students began protesting alleged incidents of racism. In addition to whatever true allegations there might be, false ones have contributed to the mass hysteria, as when Mizzou’s student president was forced to retract a Facebook post informing students that the Ku Klux Klan was on campus.

Heather Mac Donald:

the pathological narcissism of American college students has found a potentially devastating new source of power in the sports-industrial complex. University of Missouri president Timothy Wolfe resigned Monday morning in the face of a threatened boycott by black football players of an upcoming game. Wolfe’s alleged sin was an insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” experienced by students of color at the university. Campus agitators also alleged that racial slurs had been directed at black students and feces had been smeared in the shape of a swastika in a dormitory.

Lorien Kite:

A study of autism has won the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for non-fiction writing.

Neurotribes, by the US investigative journalist Steve Silberman, began life in 2001 as an article in Wired magazine that sought to explain higher-than-average rates of the disorder among the children of programmers and engineers in Silicon Valley.

Combining contemporary reportage with a history of medical approaches and social attitudes towards the disorder, the book that emerged tackles the question of why there has been such a rise in diagnoses in recent decades.

Anne Applebaum, the historian and journalist who chaired the five-strong judging panel, described Neurotribes as “a tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research”.

Wall Street Journal:

By bonfire of the academy we mean a conflict of values about the idea of a university that now threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning. Exhibit A is the ruin called the University of Missouri.

In the 1960s—at Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley and elsewhere—the self-described Student Left occupied buildings with what they often called “non-negotiable” demands.

James Kirchick

In 2003, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman at Yale when the Afro-American Cultural Center invited the late Amiri Baraka to speak under its auspices. Baraka (né LeRoi Jones) had been a founder of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power’s artistic arm, but had more recently gained notoriety for his Sept. 11 themed poem “Somebody Blew Up America?,” a long-winded, malevolent tirade whose most infamous verse asked, “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/ To stay home that day/ Why did Sharon stay away?” Calls came to revoke from Baraka the honor of Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and, legally prevented from stripping him of the title individually, the New Jersey state legislature abolished the position altogether.

Naturally, the decision to host Baraka upset many people on campus, not least Yale’s Jewish community. Appeals to the Afro-American Cultural Center to reconsider its invitation were dismissed. As a 19-year-old Jew from the affluent suburbs of Boston, whose only direct, personal knowledge of anti-Semitism had been as the recipient of elementary school joshing for not celebrating Christmas, I was therefore privileged to witness an eminent Jew-hater being welcomed to an institution I venerated and that I hoped would be my home.

Max Fisher:

There is one thing William & Mary does have in common with Yale: Both have recently endured tumultuous and painful internal fights over the line between free speech and cultural sensitivity. Ours culminated in formal hearings at the state legislature, student protests, a brief faculty strike, and, ultimately, the firing of the college president.

Yet you have probably never heard about what happened at William & Mary. There’s any number of reasons for this. Social media had not quite taken off at the time, so students had less of a platform. Our school doesn’t inspire the same fascination as the Ivies. Where Yale’s dispute is over racism, ours was somewhat different.

I have another theory as well, one that has made it difficult for me to digest the barrage of articles warning that left-wing illiberalism and student intolerance are suffocating campus freedoms: The people limiting free speech and punishing ideological transgression on our campus were right-wing adults rather than left-wing students, and this does not fit into the media narrative du jour of terrifying campus political correctness.

Conor Friedersdorf:

At the University of Missouri, student activists succeeded this week in forcing the resignation of President Timothy M. Wolfe, charging that he has not done enough to address persistent racism on campus. Tim Tai, a University of Missouri student, got a freelance assignment from ESPN to photograph the reaction of victorious activists at the tent city they set up in a public area of campus. As a matter of law, he had an indisputable First Amendment right to photograph events transpiring outdoors on public property.

But student activists did not want their tent city or the people in it photographed, and forcibly prevented him from taking pictures. “We ask for no media in the parameters so the place where people live, fellowship, and sleep can be protected from twisted insincere narratives,” a Twitter account associated with the activists later declared, adding that “it’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces.” Tim Tai is Asian American.

Bill Parlow:

Usually, we at Harvard are more than happy to see Yale students make fools of themselves on camera. The video that emerged this week of Yale students screaming down one of their professors might make for a good laugh, if its implications were not quite so serious. It’s a scene we’ve seen played out far too often at college campuses in recent years, and it deserves to be called by what it is: a nascent form of fascism.

In case you haven’t heard, Yale has recently endured a firestorm of protest after a lecturer that presides over one of the undergraduate colleges questioned whether concerns about the offensiveness of Halloween costumes had gone too far in impinging on free speech.

In response, hundreds of protesters gathered on the quad, calling for Nicholas and Erika Christakis to be removed from their roles. Nicholas voluntarily came to discuss the matter with them, and soon, a crowd of students enveloped him.

Panos Ipeirotis:

Last Fall, it was my first semester of teaching as a tenured professor. It was also the semester that I realized how pervasive cheating is in our courses. After spending a tremendous amount of time fighting and pursuing all the cheating cases, I decided that it makes no sense to fight it. The incentive structures simply do not reward such efforts. The Nash equilibrium is to let the students cheat and “perform well”; in exchange, I get back great evaluations.

But let me give you the complete story, as it contains tidbits that I found, in retrospect, highly entertaining.

T. Rees Shapiro:

The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the University of Virginia filed a $25 million lawsuit Monday against Rolling Stone magazine, which published an article in 2014 that alleged a freshman was gang raped at the house during a party.

The lawsuit focuses on a Rolling Stone article titled “A Rape on Campus,” which detailed a harrowing attack on a freshman named Jackie at the Phi Psi house on Sept. 28, 2012. The article, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, described how Jackie was raped by seven men while two others watched in a second floor bedroom while a fraternity party raged downstairs. The article alleged that the attack was part of a hazing ritual at the long-time U-Va. fraternity.

Heather MacDonald:

What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains.

More from Roger Scruton. Ángel Lamuño.

Wall Street Journal:

Someone at Yale University should have dressed up as Robespierre for Halloween, as its students seem to have lost their minds over what constitutes a culturally appropriate costume. Identity and grievance politics keeps hitting new lows on campus, and now even liberal professors are being consumed by the revolution.

On Oct. 28 Yale Dean Burgwell Howard and Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee blasted out an email advising students against “culturally unaware” Halloween costumes, with self-help questions such as: “If this costume is meant to be historical, does it further misinformation or historical and cultural inaccuracies?” Watch out for insensitivity toward “religious beliefs, Native American/Indigenous people, Socio-economic strata, Asians, Hispanic/Latino, Women, Muslims, etc.” In short, everyone.

Bradford Richardson

The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion.

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

“If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it’s growing automatically absent reforms,” Walker told host John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on New York’s AM-970 in an interview airing Sunday.

The former comptroller general, who is in charge of ensuring federal spending is fiscally responsible, said a burgeoning national debt hampers the ability of government to carry out both domestic and foreign policy initiatives.

Noah Rothman:

It has been said that college is where students go to learn how to learn. That is increasingly looking like an assumption based only in faith. The crisis of enforced intellectual homogeneity on America’s college campuses has been an acute one for several years. Despite the public’s growing concern for the integrity of American higher education, it is a crisis that seems only to get worse.

Colleges have courted a reputation not for shaping young minds and molding them in preparation for entering the workforce, but for mollycoddling a student body that seems forever engaged in one long, defensive, threat display. It is a true paradox that institutions with the mission of exposing students to new ideas, which will inevitably include some offensive or even dangerous ideas, are increasingly under fire for doing their job. Prospective campus speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Condoleezza Rice, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. These women of stature who fail to comport to the stereotype of victimization to which women and minorities are, in the progressive mind, supposed to conform were disinvited from their respective speaking engagements following a revolt of the coddled. It wasn’t enough for those students to retreat to the Orwellian-named “safe spaces” that shield oversize children from discomfort. No, these aspiring totalitarians had to ensure that no one else could be exposed to these speakers’ ideas or the example that they as role models set.

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Robert Tracinski

Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri—known as Mizzou—resigned early today, brought down by…well, it’s kind of hard to say.

A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough—which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.

Clay Shirky:

Thr digital revolution in higher education has happened. In the fall of 2012, the most recent semester with complete data in the U.S., four million undergraduates took at least one course online, out of sixteen million total, with growth up since then. Those numbers mean that more students now take a class online than attend a college with varsity football. More than twice as many now take a class online as live on campus. There are more undergraduates enrolled in an online class than there are graduate students enrolled in all Masters and Ph.D. programs combined. At the current rate of growth, half the country’s undergraduates will have at least one online class on their transcripts by the end of the decade. This is the new normal.

Microsoft Research:

This list is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work included spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, communication, media studies, and legal studies, among others. Our interest in assembling this list was to catalog the emergence of “algorithms” as objects of interest for disciplines beyond mathematics, computer science, and software engineering.

As a result, our list does not contain much writing by computer scientists, nor does it cover potentially relevant work on topics such as quantification, rationalization, automation, software more generally, or big data, although these interests are well-represented in these works’ reference sections of the essays themselves.

This area is growing in size and popularity so quickly that many contributions are popping up without reference to work from disciplinary neighbors. One goal for this list is to help nascent scholars of algorithms to identify broader conversations across disciplines and to avoid reinventing the wheel or falling into analytic traps that other scholars have already identified. We also thought it would be useful, especially for those teaching these materials, to try to loosely categorize it. The organization of the list is meant merely as a first-pass, provisional sense-making effort. Within categories the entries are offered in chronological order, to help make sense of these rapid developments.

Doug Erickson:

Responding to public feedback, Madison school officials said Monday they have taken Thoreau Elementary School off the table for now as a potential site for a Spanish dual language immersion program.

Additionally, Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said her administration will recommend delaying the start of a Spanish dual language immersion program at Falk Elementary School until the 2017-18 school year.

Paul Graham:

school freshman writing a book sent me some interview questions. Here are my answers.)

What are your thoughts on young kids learning to code?

I think all kids should learn how to program at some point. I’m not sure what’s the right age. And of course before they write programs they can do various forms of proto-programming, like combining functional blocks. There’s almost no lower age limit for that if you make it simple enough.

What do you feel should be taught in regards to kids learning how to code?

It’s pretty obvious what will be most engaging for most kids: programs that manipulate something you can see. The set of things you can manipulate grows with time. When Seymour Papert started working on Logo, all you could do was draw simple pictures, and even that took expensive hardware. Now you can manipulate 3D models, or control a robot. In the future it will be possible to do even more interesting things.

Alan Borsuk:

In this space two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on what has been learned in the quarter-century since Milwaukee became the first American city where publicly funded vouchers paid for educating children in private schools.

But there’s so much more to say, especially in the light of the prospect — I’d even say likelihood — of large growth in coming years in the still-young statewide voucher program.

So let’s pose a few questions that you might want to remember in 2017, 2019, or 2021, when new state budgets take shape.

Who’s going to use vouchers statewide, part one.Will it be predominantly kids who would otherwise be going to private schools? Or will there be a lot of students who otherwise would be going to public schools?

Either answer carries major implications. Making a complex picture probably a bit oversimplified, think of it this way:

sas confidential:

The music business was killed by Napster; movie theaters were derailed by digital streaming; traditional magazines are in crisis mode–yet in this digital information wild west: academic journals and the publishers who own them are posting higher profits than nearly any sector of commerce.

Academic publisher Elsevier, which owns a majority of the prestigious academic journals, has higher operating profits than Apple. In 2013, Elsevier posted 39 percent profits, according to Heather Morrison, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies in contrast to the 37 percent profit that Apple displayed.

New York:

Mona Davids, head of the reform-minded New York City Parents Union, is a major thorn in the side of the teachers unions. So the unions and their allies in the city school system are striking back.

Most notably, Davids is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state’s teacher tenure law. Last week, a state judge rejected (for the second time) a motion to dismiss that suit — and the union empire struck back by moving to push her and her allies off her son’s school’s Title I Parent Advisory Council, which oversees how the principal spends nearly $1 million a year in funds. The parents had been questioning use of the money to pay two teachers-union offices to be “floaters” in the school.

Patrick Keneally:

Teaching coding to school students has won some pretty heavyweight supporters over the past couple of weeks. Bill Shorten, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott now all think students from primary school upwards should be taught to code – getting little fingers busy with C++ or Python is becoming something of a political cause celebre in Australia. But as always, it’s worth a pause to think before taking a large gulp of the Kool-Aid.

“Coding is the literacy of the 21st century,” Shorten said in his budget reply speech. Malcolm Turnbull, not to be outdone, the next day said: “If we want to succeed, and continue to succeed as a prosperous first-world economy … the key tool for that is coding.”

And now Tony Abbott, despite ridiculing the idea at first (“Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11?” he asked), has jumped on the coding bandwagon.

blabr:

Cryptography is about encoding and decoding messages. One way to encode a message is to substitute each letter for another in the alphabet (e.g., ‘a’ → ‘q’, etc.)—these are called substitution codes (or ciphers). With a shift code each letter is replaced with another from several steps ahead in the alphabet.

Number Utilities:

Num is a command line tool for mathematics and statistics data processing.

Num calculates sum, min, max, mean, median, mode, quartiles, and more.

Charles Arthur:

about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution.

But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines.

Haven’t we heard all this before, though? From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanisation. And yet we keep on creating new job categories.

Jenny Anderson:

Singapore, the land of many math geniuses, may have discovered the secret to learning mathematics (pdf). It employs a teaching method called productive failure (pdf), pioneered by Manu Kapur, head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.

Students who are presented with unfamiliar concepts, asked to work through them, and then taught the solution significantly outperform those who are taught through formal instruction and problem-solving. The approach is both utterly intuitive—we learn from mistakes—and completely counter-intuitive: letting kids flail around with unfamiliar math concepts seems both inefficient and potentially damaging to their confidence.

Matthew Mallady:

This past Saturday, several hundred thousand prospective college students filed into schools across the United States and more than 170 other countries to take the SAT—$51 registration fees paid, No. 2 pencils sharpened, acceptable calculators at the ready. And as part of the three-hour-and-45–minute ritual, each person taking the 87-year-old test spent 25 minutes drafting a prompt-based essay for the exam’s writing section.

This essay, which was added to the SAT in 2005, counts for approximately 30 percent of a test-taker’s score on the writing section, or nearly one-ninth of one’s total score. That may not seem like much, but with competition for spots at top colleges and universities more fierce than ever, performance on a portion of the test worth around 11 percent of the total could be the difference between Stanford and the second tier. So it’s not surprising that students seek strategies and tips that will help them succeed on the writing exercise. Les Perelman, the recently retired former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, has got a doozy.

Olivia Goldhill:

Those who count themselves as experts might want to re-evaluate their level of self-confidence, as a new study warns that there’s a downside to feeling knowledgeable.

Researchers led by Professor Victor Ottati from Loyola University of Chicago conducted six experiments on 272 participants in a study due to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and found that those who perceive themselves as experts tend to exhibit more closed-minded behavior.

Ottari and his colleagues hypothesize that social norms allow those who claim expertise to adopt a more closed-minded position.
“Because experts have already given extensive thought to issues within a domain, they have ‘earned’ the privilege of harboring more dogmatic opinions and beliefs,” write the authors.

Joy Resmovits:

Students in six schools in Oakland, Compton and Los Angeles that are predominantly low-income and minority were taking these types of classes. The schools are Castlemont High School and Fremont High School in the Oakland Unified School District; John C. Fremont High, Thomas B. Jefferson High School and Susan Miller Dorsey High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District; and Compton High School in the Compton Unified School District.

“Generally, students started school at the same time, and the bell to end rang at approximately the same time,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs and director of Public Counsel Opportunity Under Law. “What was happening behind closed doors was very different depending on ZIP code.”

Sarah DeWeerdt:

In 2013, data from a massive study of more than 85,000 children in Norway suggested that women who take folic acid supplements early in pregnancy lower their risk of having children with autism. In September, an analysis of a similarly designed study of more than 35,000 mothers and babies in Denmark found no link between prenatal vitamins and autism risk, raising doubts about the Norwegian finding. Science is always an iterative process, but in the case of pinpointing risk factors for autism, progress has been remarkably slow and difficult.

Liz Mineo:

“Dear Sister,” wrote John Hancock on May 1, 1754, as a 17-year-old Harvard student, “I wish you would spend one hour in writing to me.”

Before leaving what years later would become his famous signature, he wrote, “Your ever loving brother, till death shall separate us.”

The letter to his sister Mary, shedding light on Hancock’s raw emotions as he studied in Cambridge in the years before the Revolution, is a sample of the riches in manuscripts and archival material available online at The Colonial North American Project at Harvard University.

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

The terms and conditions of the 2015-16 MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement relative to Parent-Teacher Conferences provides the following:

“All teachers are required to attend up to two (2) evenings for parent teacher conferences per contract year as directed by the teacher’s building administrator. Teachers participating in evening parent‐teacher conferences will be provided a compensatory day off as designated on the School Calendar in Section V‐L. In recognition of 4K, non‐ SAGE 2nd grade, non‐SAGE 3rd grade, 4th grade and 5th grade teachers having more parent‐teacher conferences due to increased class size, such teachers shall be released from the early release SIP‐aligned activities Monday during the months of November and March. At the elementary level conferences will be held in lieu of the report cards for the reporting periods in which they are held.”

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

Getting Organized! MTI now has over seventy-five (75) Member Organizers including teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical employees, substitute teachers, and retired MTI members who are committed to helping the next generation maintain their Union. Member Organizers are volunteers who serve as point persons in their building/work location to help build awareness of and support for the recertification election of MTI’s five bargaining units.

Get-out-the-vote! In political elections, voter turnout is critical. Act 10 requires 51% “YES” votes to prevail, not just a simple majority like most elections. Thus, in Union recertification elections, the number voting is even more critical than in any other election. The experiences of other Wisconsin public sector Unions show that when employees vote, they overwhelmingly vote Union YES! Where recertification elections have been lost, it is frequently because less than 51% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. Unlike political elections, in recertification elections a non-vote counts as a “NO vote.”

In MTI’s recertification election, ballots can be cast 24 hours per day, seven days per week, via phone, computer, or iPad. Voting begins at Noon, November 4, and continues through Noon, November 24. The process is quick and efficient and should take no more than a couple minutes. That said, others have reported difficulties where votes were not counted, when they failed to accurately complete each step in the balloting process. It is for that reason that MTI is providing all MTI-represented employees with detailed voting instructions on posters, flyers and palm cards.

Megan McArdle:

College is expensive, and getting more so every year. Since most families don’t have tens of thousands of dollars lying around, the government has responded with ever-more-generous student loan programs.

First there were the loans themselves, with interest subsidized while you’re in school. Then, when that proved inadequate, we instituted income-based repayment, allowing students to cap their payments at a percentage of their discretionary income (stretching out the loan, and getting forgiveness on any balance remaining after 25 years). Then, since that wasn’t quite enough, we made the terms more generous. Now the Obama administration has announced that it’s making 5 million more people eligible for the program.

Michael Rothfeld:

Educators in this Oklahoma City suburb jumped into action when state leaders in 2010 adopted the Common Core academic standards that were sweeping states across the country.

The Edmond school district has a big military population that moves frequently, so officials liked the idea of using the same standards as other states. They also saw Oklahoma’s old standards as inferior. They spent about $500,000 preparing teachers and students, collaborating with educators in other states and buying materials and computers for a new Common Core test, finishing a year in advance.

Nicole Dungca:

If you find yourself chuckling at the seemingly random speed limits of 17 miles per hour around Hampshire College, you can thank David Kelly.

When the longtime math professor retired this summer after more than 44 years, he said he didn’t want a retirement party or ceremony.

Madison Government School District “Final” 2015-2016 Budget (5.2MB PDF):

Page 39: 2013-2014 Total Spending: $408,806,234.75

2014-2015: $411,671,817.67

2015-2016: $454,414,941.93 or $16,724.26 per student (27,171 students)

The United States spends $12,401 per student nationally, about 34% less than Madison.

Much more on open enrollment, here.

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

Over the past few weeks, discussions have been occurring throughout the District about MTI’s upcoming MTI Recertification Elections. One of the most frequently asked questions by newer staff, those who are not aware of MTI’s many accomplishments on behalf of District employees, is “what is at risk if we lose our Union?” To answer, one only needs to look around Wisconsin to see what has happened to employees of other public employers where employees no longer have a collective voice in the workplace.

Act 10 enabled public sector employers to unilaterally establish what employees pay toward health insurance. In many school districts, employers increased the employee’s take-home share to 12% of the premium. Such decreases an employee’s pay up to $220 per month. MTI worked with the District last year to keep to ZERO the health insurance contribution for MTI- represented employees. And, the Union will be working with the District again this year, via the Joint MTI/MMSD Wellness Committee, to collaboratively identify potential sources for health insurance savings rather than implementing a premium co-pay. MTI-represented employees are among the very few public employees in Wisconsin who are not obligated to pay 10-12% toward health insurance premiums. What MTI achieved puts an additional $50 to $171 of take- home pay in each MTI member’s pocket each month, depending on whether they carry single or family health insurance.

For long-time teachers, educational assistants, clerical-technical staff and security assistants approaching retirement, MTI’s Contracts and the new Employee Handbook provide retiring employees with 100% of the value of their accumulated sick leave for the payment of post-retirement insurances. Many school districts have capped or reduced such benefits, given the unilateral authority granted them by Act 10, forcing longtime employees to work longer in order to afford post-retirement insurance premiums.

Austin Dannhaus:

To date, the education sector has seen an over-focus on process and technological change that has led to evolutionary incremental, and sustaining improvements to teaching and learning. It seems we don’t exactly know what to do with all these new tools. In a 2008 op-ed, Clay Christensen and Michael Horn wrote:

“…That schools have gotten so little back from their investment [in technology] comes as no surprise. Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is perfectly predictable, perfectly logical — and perfectly wrong.”

Milwaukee Public Schools (PDF):

MPS seeks proposals to identify qualified providers of T4U services for the remainder of the 15/16 school year and the 16/17, 17/18 and 18/19 school years. Providers hire and pay tutors and invoice MPS for services rendered.
The target population for T4U services are those K5 – 12th grade students, at under-performing schools as identified by DPI or the District, identified as failing, or most at risk of failing to meet challenging Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards (WMELS). Of particular need are services for English Language Learners and Students with Special Learning Needs that are aligned to state and national standards.