Heather Mac Donald:

Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas they don’t like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row last week, the more serious incident at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and a less virulent one at UCLA.

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.” A Facebook post from “we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges” announced grandiosely that “as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.” A Facebook event titled “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald” and hosted by “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists” encouraged students to protest the event because Mac Donald “condemns [the] Black Lives Matter movement,” “supports racist police officers,” and “supports increasing fascist ‘law and order.’” (My supposed fascism consists in trying to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law-enforcement protection.)

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Alina Adams:

New York City kids have just finished sitting for the 2017 English Language Arts state tests and so this seems like a good time to talk about the tutoring epidemic that goes beyond four-year-olds prepping to ace Gifted & Talented screenings, and teens cramming for the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

Those exams are for accelerated programs and require going above and beyond what’s taught at the average public school. But thousands of students are also getting outside help to prepare for the English and Math state tests, which are supposed to measure how much they’ve learned during the year. In this case, tutoring obscures school quality and skews NYC’s important attempts at true accountability.

How do I know that there is massive tutoring going on?

To start with, new tutoring companies wouldn’t be popping up literally every day if there wasn’t a market for them. All anyone has to do is walk by a Kumon, Huntington, Bright Kids, or FasTracKids tutoring center, peek in the window, and see all the kids with their state test prep books. When my oldest son, now a senior in High-School, was younger, tutoring was still an under-the-radar thing. Kids who mentioned they had a tutor were quickly shushed by their parents, who would apologetically stammer, “They’re only having trouble with this one thing. It’s just until he/she catches up with the rest of the class.”

Brookings:

In 2015, 42 states and the District of Columbia spent $6.2 billion in state funds on pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) programs, a fact that represents a growing commitment to pre-K as a way to help children from disadvantaged families increase their school readiness. But while numerous studies have documented the success of pre-K programs in preparing students for elementary school, inconclusive evidence about the sustainability of pre-K benefits as children move through their school years is raising important new questions for scientists, educators, and policymakers alike. How can states optimize their pre-K programs to provide both the strongest early learning boost and a solid foundation for future learning?

Mike Hutchens:

Life is becoming increasingly less predictable. From the political volatility of Donald Trump and Brexit to the vast societal changes of globalisation, drastic, seismic change is in the air.

While unpredictability is already problematic for many, for future generations there are no signs of things calming. If we accept that the role of education is to furnish our children with the best understanding, skills and values for a prosperous and happy life, then how do we arm them for a future that we can’t imagine? Do we even need knowledge in a world of Alexa and Siri? Is the skill of agility now more valuable than the gaining of knowledge?

We’ve prioritised the acquisition of knowledge around what we assume society would deem most “worthy”. For much of history, knowledge was rooted in theology: it was about explaining the world in a supernatural way, seeing goodness as a tenet. The industrial revolution saw a vast shift away from this to a way of maximising return on investment in a production-centric environment. In recent years, we have considered maths, reading, and writing as the basic building blocks for survival; the best levers for our labour to produce value.

Alan Borsuk:

The view through the windows of the student cafeteria at St. Francis High School is terrific. You look across S. Lake Drive to an expanse of Lake Michigan. People pay large sums of money for homes with views like this.

That’s not why parents choose the school for their children.

There’s the academic program itself. There’s the sense of personal connectedness in a 540-student high school. There’s the safety and order of the school. There’s the hard-working staff. And there’s the fact — how do I put this diplomatically? — a lot of city of Milwaukee parents prefer suburban high schools.

Make no mistake, St. Francis High is a choice school. To a large degree, the St. Francis district, which includes two other schools serving kindergarten through eighth graders, is a choice district.

Just to be clear, despite the religious-sounding name, St. Francis is a public school district, located near Mitchell International Airport. The municipality has a population under 10,000. Many longtime residents no longer have school-age children and many young residents living in newer developments near the lake also don’t have school-age children. In other words, there is a declining number of kids who live in St. Francis.

Donna De La Cruz:

But that is changing as evidence builds that taking brief activity breaks during the day helps children learn and be more attentive in class, and a growing number of programs designed to promote movement are being adopted in schools.

“We need to recognize that children are movement-based,” said Brian Gatens, the superintendent of schools in Emerson, N.J. “In schools, we sometimes are pushing against human nature in asking them to sit still and be quiet all the time.”

“We fall into this trap that if kids are at their desks with their heads down and are silent and writing, we think they are learning,” Mr. Gatens added. “But what we have found is that the active time used to energize your brain makes all those still moments better,” or more productive.

UBS:

We all have seen the headlines: “Google’s AlphaGo defeats world-class Chinese “Go” player”; “IBM’s Watson is tackling healthcare with artificial intelligence”; “Facebook artificial intelligence spots suicidal users”; and so on. Artificial intelligence (AI), which is essentially a set of tools and programs that make software ’smarter’ in a way an outside observer thinks the output is generated by a human, is starting to break out on the global stage.

In its current state, AI has the potential to benefit businesses through significant cost savings due to its high scalability, an elimination of both omission and commission errors, and the ability to instantaneously document and optimize processes. Like all technologies, AI will continue to evolve as progress compounds from one innovation to the next. And it is likely that by 2030, AI will be as commonplace in society as internet-ready devices are today.

Howard Blume:

Add Long Beach Unified to the list of California school districts accused of improperly spending money intended to help students with some of the greatest needs.

The system, with about 78,000 students, is the seventh to be targeted by Public Advocates. The watchdog law firm has filed a complaint on behalf of Children’s Defense Fund-California, Latinos in Action and parents Marina Roman Sanchez and Guadalupe Luna.

The complaint alleges that Long Beach Unified is improperly spending as much as $40 million this year for district-wide programs rather than targeting that money to help low-income students, those learning English and foster children.

Long Beach Unified received about $108 million this year to help those groups of students, said Angelica Jongco, senior staff attorney for Public Advocates, which is based in San Francisco.

Much more on Long Beach, here.

LA Times:

If you think college campuses are hotbeds of political expression, Kevin Shaw may change your mind.

Shaw, a student at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, says he was handing out Spanish-language copies of the U.S. Constitution on campus last November when he was stopped by a college administrator who told him he was allowed to exercise his 1st Amendment rights only within a minuscule “free speech zone” located near a campus thoroughfare. Not only that — before doing so, he had to obtain a permit from college officials.

Karin Chenowith:

The first thing the principal did, however, was take me into the office of his assistant principal, who was in charge of the school’s schedule; point to a giant chart on the wall-sized whiteboard that showed when every class in the school was taught at what day and time and by whom and where; and say something to the effect of “that’s the reason for our success.”

I look back on that moment as the beginning of my education about systems. I wasn’t prepared, so many of the details of what the assistant principal subsequently told me went over my head. The chart, as any school person can say, was the master schedule of the school. I remember listening to the assistant principal tell me that it was built around the semester-by-semester expansion of AP classes and how he had hand-scheduled hundreds of AP students to ensure they got all their classes. As he walked me through the chart to show me how he juggled all the priorities of the school to focus on giving more students the opportunity to be exposed to and master advanced material, it began to dawn on me that the master schedule was a concrete expression of the school’s values.

My education has continued through more than a decade of visiting unexpected schools. In each one, teachers and leaders have talked about the issues their very vulnerable students bring to school and the systems they have put in place to address them, from master schedules to counseling groups.

These schools not only put in systems but also continually evaluate them so that they can continue and expand the ones that work or change or jettison those that don’t. Here’s a small example of what I mean: The teachers and leaders of Elmont Memorial High School once noticed that their ninth-graders were having difficulty making the transition from middle to high school. They used the master schedule to set up a “ninth-grade academy” in which groups of students would share teams of teachers who could collaborate on how to teach individual students. “It worked. For a while,” said John Capozzi, the former principal. That is to say, for a year or two, ninth-graders were more successful than they had been. They started slipping again because new issues had emerged. Elmont changed the schedule again.

Frank Chen:

My name is Frank Chen, and I am teaching a seminar at UCLA called CS 88S: Safety in the Cloud – Introduction to Cybersecurity in Spring 2017. This course is an preliminary introduction to the field of cybersecurity. We will study a variety of topics that are important for a regular consumer of technology. This course has great relevance in our current society: cyber attacks and data leaks are becoming more mainstream. A shared belief in the journalism field is that “nothing is more important to democracy than an educated electorate”; the same can be said for education in cybersecurity. It is more important than ever for everyone to be cybersecurity-aware.
This is an online form for anyone not enrolled but interested in following along with the course!

No programming or computer science background is required to understand the material – just excitement for a more cybersecurity-aware society! I’ll be sending out weekly emails + resources.

Michael I Jordan:

Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and leading researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Dig into these ML enthusiasts!

Jeff Jacoby:

Of the three R’s, says Will Fitzhugh, the founder and publisher of The Concord Review, the middle R has long been the most neglected. It was true in his own case — when he arrived at Harvard as a freshman 61 years ago, he had never had to write a single term paper — and it remains true now. On the whole, American students graduate from high school incapable of writing a coherent, well-researched essay. Most of those who continue to college don’t become competent writers there, either.

For years, blue-ribbon panels and high-powered commissions have bewailed this state of affairs, to little visible effect. The last time the federal government measured writing skills among middle and high school students, it found that nearly 3 out of 4 could not pass a test of writing proficiency. Employers are forced to spend enormous sums on remedial writing courses for their workers — by one estimate, as much as $3.1 billion per year.

Fitzhugh, who worked for the Apollo space program, Westinghouse, and the Peace Corps before finding his calling as a teacher, didn’t have billions when he launched The Concord Review in 1987. All he had was $80,000 he had inherited from his father, some familiarity with desktop publishing software, and the fervent conviction that what works for high school athletics could work for writing: Promote and praise the top achievers, and other students will be inspired by their example.

Three decades later, Fitzhugh’s journal has become the world’s foremost showcase for first-rate history research by secondary school students. To date, the review has published 1,230 essays by authors from 44 states and 40 other countries, on an astonishing variety of historical topics. These are not short compositions of a few hundred gauzy words. On average, papers published in The Concord Review run 7,000 words, along with detailed endnotes. Among the offerings in the latest issue are a paper on the Opium Wars, written by Stephanie Zhao; an essay on Ronald Reagan and the Cold War by Siddharth Tripathi; and a study of the Treaty of Trianon by Milan Kende Loewer.

Much more on Will Fitzhugh, here.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

The great social psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan wrote that the principal problem with communication is that we think we express meaning to others, when in fact we evoke it.

That is, what we say brings a response in the listener which involves their current thoughts at the time, their feelings, wishes, goals and other preoccupations, all of which affect and alter the meanings of our expression as they hear it.

Psychiatrists are carefully trained to be useful in that situation. They learn to listen. When they do listen, they can derive an understanding of at least some of the ways in which the thoughts of their patients have responded to what was said. They can find out how the patient’s own experiences, thoughts and concerns have interacted with what the psychiatrist said, and this can help the doctor shape what they say next in perhaps more pertinent and more useful ways.

When I was a high school History teacher I was not a bad person, but I almost never shut up in class. If the teacher talks, that can make life easier for students, because they can continue giving their attention to whatever they were thinking about at the time, and if the teacher pauses, most students can easily ask a question to get the teacher talking again if they seem to be slowing down.

Most high school History teachers are not bad people, but they usually feel they have an obligation to talk, present, excite, inspire, demonstrate material and in other ways fill up the time of students in their classes. Some of the best teachers do ask questions, but even they believe they can’t spend too much time on student answers, not to mention on what students are actually thinking about what the teacher has said, or, if other students talk, about what they have said.

This is much less the case in some special secondary schools, like Phillips Exeter, which have small classes meeting around a table as a seminar, specifically designed to gather the comments and thoughts of students about academic subjects. But for public school teachers with five classes of 30 students each, that kind of dialogue is not an option.

Unless they fall silent, high school History teachers almost never have any idea what their students are thinking, and students come to understand that, at least in most classrooms, what is on their minds is of little importance to the process. This doesn’t mean that they don’t learn anything in their History classes. Some teachers really are well-educated, full of good stories, fascinating speakers, and fun to be with. That does not change the fact that even those best teachers have very little idea of what students are actually thinking about the History which is offered to them.

Some teachers do assign short papers, and if the students can choose the topics themselves, and if teachers have the time to read those papers, they can learn more about what some part of History means to their students. Sad to say, the assignment of serious History research papers is declining in this country, with some students working on slide presentations or videos, but many fewer students writing Extended Essays in History.

Education reform pundits all agree that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality, because what teachers do is the lowest level of educational activity of which they are able to take notice. In fact, the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work. Students learn the most from the academic work that they do, but this factor escapes the notice of the majority of education professors, theorists, reporters and other thought leaders.

Since 1987, The Concord Review has published 1,241 exemplary History research papers [average 7,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography] by secondary students from 44 states and 40 other countries [tcr.org]. These papers are on a vary large variety of historical topics, ancient and modern, domestic and foreign, but all of them show what students are actually thinking as they take History seriously. If more teachers of History would read a few of these strong research papers, they would become more aware, first, that some high school History students actually can think about History, and second, that such student writing, based on extensive reading of History, demonstrates a level of sophistication in their understanding of History that can never be discovered in classes where teachers do all the talking.

Great teachers of History should continue to talk the way they do in classes, and their students will learn a lot. But the actual thoughts of students of History should have a place for their expression as well. Students whose work is published in The Concord Review not only benefit from the hard work they have done, they also come to have greater respect for their own achievement and potential as scholars of History.

“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [Founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Academic Coaches [2014]
TCR Summer Program [2014]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

Over the last 20 years, I have been a guests on several dozen local and national radio and television talk shows across the U.S., and abroad.

Tom Joyner, Joe Madison, George Curry, Laura Ingraham, Tavis Smiley, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Juan Williams, Armstrong Williams, Sean Hannity & Alan Colmes, Jean Feraca, Vicki McKenna, Carol Koby, Neil Heinen, Derrell Connor and Mitch Henck…I have learned a lot from these seasoned veterans while talking with them on their shows.

One thing I learned, from all of them, is that they have a tremendous ability to inform people of the issues they discuss. They can inspire thought, provoke action and stimulate new conversations. I hope to do the same with my show, especially when it comes to the laying groundwork for the future success of children, families and communities.

My new show is titled, “Perspectives with Kaleem Caire”. It will air LIVE online every Tuesday from 1pm to 2pm CST at www.madisontalks.com.

The show is produced by Mitch Henck, creator of MadisonTalks, and a prominent talk show host in Wisconsin. My wife, Lisa Peyton-Caire, came up with the name for the show. Several friends, colleagues and my team members at One City Early Learning Centers helped me determine the subject matter that I should focus on.

Tune-in today to learn why I created this show: www.madisontalks.com.

Today, I will talk with Dr. Michael Andrews (photo to the right above), assistant principal of the 1,300-student Sweetwater Middle School in Gwenette County, Georgia. Dr. Andrews and I will discuss:what it was like to grow up in Madison, Wisconsin as a Black male who is biracial, was adopted and raised by two White parents, and who strongly identifies with his African American roots. What contributed to his success? What message does he have for our youth, parents and leaders? What can we learn from his experiences, his challenges and his triumphs? You don’t want to miss this show!

Dr. Andrews holds a PhD in education from Argosy University, M.S. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in history from Florida A&M University. He is a 1989 graduate of Madison’s West High School. His adopted father, Morris Andrews, is credited with building one of the strongest statewide teachers unions in the United States.

How is this relevant to children, families, education and the expansion of high quality early childhood education for every kid? Tune in at 1pm CST at www.madisontalks.com to find out.

Make Your Contribution to One City Early Learning Today!

We are blessed to have Kaleem back in Madison.

He lead the aborted effort to launch the Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

Chris Peterson:

A few students pointed me towards this piece in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not colleges should consider legacy in the admissions process.

For those of you not familiar with the practice, “legacy admissions” means preferring the children of alumni in the admissions process. Why would schools do this? For the money, mostly, because if you make your alumni happy by admitting their kids, they might be more likely to give you money. Advocates of legacy admission, like advocates of “development cases”, will argue that this makes the school a better place for the rest of the students by allowing them to build great labs and dorms and offer fantastic financial aid and everything else. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former President of GWU, made this case in support of legacy admissions, along with citing certain fringe benefits like “bridging” the generations by forming a sort of intergenerational club.

Fredeick Hess:

This frustration is at the heart of the school choice debate. School choice advocates experience this feeling of helpless and think something has to change. They want an option beyond appealing to the tuned-out gate agent. They want to be able to clearly and cleanly signal disapproval by leaving one school or system for another. The more thoughtful advocates remind us that the real promise of markets is not in providing miracle solutions, but in allowing better providers to emerge and worse ones to gradually get squeezed out. Those who embrace charter schooling and private school choice see them as ways to break up big, impersonal systems in favor of smaller, more human-sized ones.

Choice critics think that supporters are misdiagnosing the problem. They read my American experience and observe that American is a for-profit company operating in a marketplace, and that airline passengers already have choice. Clearly, they argue, there’s no magic in markets. They argue that choice and markets don’t speak to the core issues of professional acumen, while a profit-seeking focus on the bottom line helps drain the humanity and responsiveness from an organization. They note that I still had to wind up on American, that I’ll probably fly American next week (due to limited options), and that my vaunted choice didn’t seem to yield much responsiveness.

Sarah Frostenson and Sarah Kliff:

Neighborhoods where kids face the highest risk of lead poisoning exist all across America.

The trouble is that exposure risk is surprisingly difficult estimate, due to a variety of state-by-state differences in reporting standards. So we worked with epidemiologists in Washington state to estimate risk levels in every geographic area in America.

“As a parent, I found it very alarming,” says Holly Davies, who works in Washington’s Department of Ecology on lead exposure reduction. “My son was born in West Virginia, and there it was standard practice that at one year they get screened [for lead poisoning risk]. But here it wasn’t a standard thing; I was the one who had to bring it up.”

Tawnell Hobbs:

Chicago Public School students who want to graduate will have to show proof that they have a plan after high school—such as providing an offer letter for a job or acceptance into college or military service, under a plan expected to be approved next month.

The initiative, pitched by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and carried by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is targeted at encouraging students to plan for life after high school. It likely goes farther than any other public-school initiative to encourage postsecondary preparation. Mr. Emanuel called it a “game-changer.”

“The goal here is to no longer have 12th grade be the end of our responsibility,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. “The economy and business today require a minimum of two years post-high school.”

Students also could show acceptance letters for a job program; a trade or apprenticeship program; or a “gap-year” program, which could include travel, volunteer work or research before resuming the academic career. Those who have a job would be covered.

The Chicago Board of Education will consider the proposal next month. Mr. Emanuel assured that the board, which he appoints, would pass the measure.

The program—called “Learn. Plan. Succeed”—would go into effect for this year’s freshmen graduating in 2020.

But the plan could be challenged legally.

Miranda Johnson, associate director of the Education Law and Policy Institute at Loyola University Chicago, said that while state law allows school boards to adopt additional graduation requirements, a concern with the CPS proposal is that it involves third-party approval that could be out of students’ control.

“My concern is that it seems to go beyond coursework or community service requirements,” Ms. Johnson said.

Mr. Emanuel said the plan would pass legal muster and brushed aside a question on what would happen to those students who don’t have a plan. He said Chicago students have shown that they will adhere to graduation requirements.

School districts in recent years have become more focused on getting students career- and work-force ready as some students don’t want to go to college. Chicago officials believe their plan will help students make the transition.

Related: small learning communities and English 10.

Carlos Lozada:

Someone needs to book Phoebe Maltz Bovy on one of those television shows featuring people who have the most awful jobs in America, because she has just completed a project so soul-crushing that I can’t imagine anyone ever doing it again, certainly not voluntarily.

She has scoured the Internet for every overwrought think piece and self-indulgent personal essay about privilege — and has read all of them, apparently. And if that were not enough masochism, she has also read the comments sections, those swamps of vitriol and condescension that no one is ever supposed to even contemplate or speak of, let alone wade into. And she has drawn on that experience to write a book about why so much of the current debate and online pile-on about privilege tends to be contradictory, embarrassing, superficial and, above all, self-defeating.
(St. Martin’s Press)

The result is “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ ” an often lively and more often meandering book that will be of intense interest to the sort of people who are up on the latest cultural criticism on the state of our cultural criticism. Unless you are steeped in the privilege debates already, the book will be most striking for its obsessively narrow focus, and for its expenditure of Bovy’s analytic and writing talents on a work that explores the vicious and petty ways people talk about a concept more than it interrogates the truth of the concept itself. If this book constitutes a “takedown” of the privilege orthodoxy, as the author suggests, it is very much an inside job.

Must I first define “privilege” in its current use, or should I imagine that if you’ve reached this paragraph, you’re already among the cognoscenti? As it is known today and discussed in progressive circles, a jurisdiction Bovy writes about with the knowing weariness that comes with longtime residence, privilege is not just about having special advantages available only to the few, but it is also about those advantages that are entirely unearned, and usually ones of which the privileged party is blissfully unaware or, even better, somewhat defensive.

Samantha Schmidt:

Connor Balthazor, 17, was in the middle of study hall when he was called into a meeting with his high school newspaper adviser.

A group of reporters and editors from the student newspaper, the Booster Redux at Pittsburg High School in southeastern Kansas, had gathered to talk about Amy Robertson, who was hired as the high school’s head principal on March 6.

The student journalists had begun researching Robertson, and quickly found some discrepancies in her education credentials. For one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. They found no evidence that it was an accredited university.

Andrew Coulson:

Math and Reading scores at the end of high school are unchanged over the past forty years, while Science scores suffered a slight decline through the year 1999, the last time that test was administered. Data from another nationally representative test series show a continuing decline in 12th grade Science between 1996 and 2005, the last year for which we have trend data.2

Presented with stagnant or declining performance in the face of a meteoric rise in federal spending per pupil, it is reasonable to ask: what happened to total spending? If state and local expenditures fell to such an extent that they offset federal increases, that might explain the profound disconnect revealed in Figure 2.

To answer that question, I present Figure 3, showing how the total cost of an entire k-through-12 public school education has changed over time.

Shahien Nasiripour:

Over the past several years, Jack Remondi, chief executive of student loan giant Navient Corp., has gone out of his way to tout the company’s devotion to helping Americans cope with student debt.

He’s mentioned it in meetings with investors, on calls with Wall Street analysts, in testimony before Congress, and even on his Medium blog. “At Navient, our priority is to help each of our 12 million customers successfully manage their loans in a way that works for their individual circumstances,” he said March 20.

But faced with a potential multi-billion dollar lawsuit by the federal government for not living up to that mantra, Remondi’s company, formerly an arm of student lender Sallie Mae, sang a different tune in court filings.

Borrowers can’t reasonably rely on America’s largest student loan servicer to counsel them about their many options, Navient said on March 24 in a motion to dismiss the case, because its primary role is, after all, to collect their payments.

Rob Schultz:

The incumbents were doing their job as defined by the current board culture and that’s to deal with district policy and budget issues only,” Jackson said. “We want to change that.”

Schumacher, who said he spent about $600 on his campaign, said he believes money is behind the rise in partisan-style politics in small-town elections.

“We got outspent and that got (the challengers) the support of the political action committees,” Schumacher said. “I think it’s sort of a shame that it has come down to money. It’s been that way in Madison for a long time. But in small-town America, it’s a shame that seats can be bought.”

Claudia Rowe:

This long-standing trend places Washington in line with other states, and it is raising uncomfortable questions. Like the ones that swirled around Nila Griffin at age 12, as she listened to her mother speaking with a teacher during the first parent conference of sixth grade. Nila’s transcripts, from her previous school in California, were covered with 90th-percentile scores. Impressive, her new teacher said. But was Mrs. Griffin certain they were actually her daughter’s?

Todd J. Zywicki and Christopher Koopman:

The cost of higher education in the United States has risen dramatically in recent years. Numerous explanations have been provided to explain this increase. This paper focuses on one contributing factor: The dramatic growth in the size and expense of non-academic administrators and other university bureaucrats, which has outpaced the growth of expenditures on academic programs. Given that university faculty are typically viewed as the constituency that primarily controls universities, this growth of non-academic employees and expenses appears to be anomalous. Some theories are provided to explain this transition.

Something has happened to the structure of higher education in American universities. Universities have increased spending, but very little of that increased spending has been related to classroom instruction; rather, it is being directed toward non-classroom costs. As a result, there has been a growth in academic bureaucracies, as universities focus on hiring employees to manage or administer people, programs, and regulations. Between 2001 and 2011, these sorts of hires have increased 50% faster than the number of classroom instructors. This trend toward growing academic bureaucracies has become ubiquitous in the landscape of American higher education.

China Digital Times:

In June 2014, a senior inspector from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (the Party’s top graft watchdog) warned that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) (an influential government think tank) had been “infiltrated” by “foreign forces.” This accusation came as two hallmark campaigns of the Xi Jinping administration were gaining momentum: Xi’s ongoing Party corruption cleanup, and a drive to enforce ideological orthodoxy throughout both the Party and society. The warning of infiltration at CASS came after a leaked internal Party memo known as “Document No. 9” exposed Xi’s ideological priorities: to resist “false ideological trends, positions, and activities,” including “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” “Western ideas of journalism,” and “historical nihilism.” (Journalist Gao Yu was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2015 for allegedly leaking the document, but has since been granted medical release to serve the remainder of a reduced sentence under house arrest.) Earlier, as he was in the middle of his gradual accession to top Party and State leader, Xi had warned that a primary reason for the collapse of the USSR was due to “their ideals and beliefs having been shaken.”

Since the revelation of Document No. 9, Xi has overseen many related campaigns aimed at preserving Party ideas and beliefs. Xi has reinforced Mao-era Party views on the role of the media, cracked down on liberal microbloggers, and subjected Chinese reporters to mandatory training in the “Marxist view of journalism.” Meanwhile, the nation’s institutes of higher learning have seen a campaign against “Western values,” and a series of legislation has been passed in effort to maintain “ideological security.”

Matthew Frankel, via a kind email:

Friends –

As we only try to curate and update you on some of the most informative stories regarding this NJ LIFO Lawsuit – I did want to flag these three items for your files:

1.) Here is a moving testimonial interview today showcasing one of the Newark parents involved in the suit. It was published in Laura Waters’ great NJ education blog NJ Left Behind. This piece provides more personal narrative and background than some of the published news stories:

http://njleftbehind.blogspot.com/2017/04/newark-mom-on-lifo-lawsuit-im-just.html

2.) Earlier this week, PEJ Executive Director Ralia Polechronis did a live interview with Eric Dawson and Rashon Hasan, of Newark’s SPLASH RADIO 94.3FM Radio. There is some great in-depth background on the case You can listen to it here –

https://soundcloud.com/user-516806286/april-4-2018

3.) And if you go to the influential news site – Insider NJ – later this week you will see our aggressive video ad buy, which will drive readers to the animated video we produced explaining the LIFO lawsuit. Which in just a couple of weeks have already garnered over 35K views.

https://www.insidernj.com
I know many of you are deeply interested and supportive of these legal efforts and the communication work that is dovetailing this strategy, so I hope this email is helpful…Thanx.

Matthew Frankel
MDF Strategies
41 Watchung Plaza, Suite 355
Montclair NJ 07042
917.617.7914
matthew@mdfstrategies.com
mdfstrategies.com

Much more on the New Jersey Last In First Out Teacher Governance lawsuit, here.

2009, Richard Zimman:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Danny Sullivan:

The past few months have been bad for Google’s search reputation. Long considered the “gold standard” in search, Google has seen its search results questioned as never before. It’s a body blow to a core service that should be safe as Google tries to grow in new directions.
 
 Recovering from that blow isn’t easy. What’s happened to Google search is on par with the Apple Maps fiasco or Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note7 phones.
 
 To this day, people still joke about Apple Maps being bad, even though it’s greatly improved. As for Samsung, the phones might no longer explode, but the jokes continue. Google now faces the same problem. Some of its search results are seen as laughable, embarrassing, or even dangerous.

Clare Ansberry:

How do you deal with your child’s first real rejection?

It is a question that Priscilla Sands, head of the Marlborough School, an elite girls school in Los Angeles, addresses every year when students learn they didn’t make it into their top colleges. She knows they are disappointed and distraught. She also knows that what looks like a setback might not be.

“It’s an issue for parents. They need to understand the pain, but also not rob their child of an opportunity to use it as a growth experience,” says Dr. Sands, who didn’t attend her dream college, worked in a diner as a single mom to support her children, and didn’t get jobs she thought she deserved.

Ryan Avent:

Like millions of people of a certain age, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had occupied a crucial place in Mullings’s childhood. It introduced him to video gaming, gave him a taste for it, made him aware of the fact that he was good at it: a “born gamer”, in his words. Yet the pixelated worlds of the Mario brothers, for all their delights, were nothing like the experiences available to gamers today.

Mullings’s friends invited him to join them in playing Destiny, a “massively multi­player online game” (meaning that lots of different people around the world simultaneously play within the Destiny universe) and a “first-person shooter” (meaning that most of the gameplay involves the player looking out through a character’s eyes and shooting stuff). The world surrounding the players is vast, filled with great, sweeping vistas rendered in extraordinary and realistic detail. It is a world of its own. Within that world, players, often in teams, take on quests and square off repeatedly in matches against opponents.

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.

Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. “I know of people who worked on it for 40 years,” said Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University. “I myself worked on it for 30 years.”

Royen hadn’t given the Gaussian correlation inequality much thought before the “raw idea” for how to prove it came to him over the bathroom sink. Formerly an employee of a pharmaceutical company, he had moved on to a small technical university in Bingen, Germany, in 1985 in order to have more time to improve the statistical formulas that he and other industry statisticians used to make sense of drug-trial data. In July 2014, still at work on his formulas as a 67-year-old retiree, Royen found that the GCI could be extended into a statement about statistical distributions he had long specialized in. On the morning of the 17th, he saw how to calculate a key derivative for this extended GCI that unlocked the proof. “The evening of this day, my first draft of the proof was written,” he said

Amber Walker:

For the last 23 years, the Madison chapter of 100 Black Men of America has hosted the African-American History Challenge Bowl. Middle school students from across Madison participate in the quiz show-style, single-elimination tournament. Each team receives copies of the core text, “Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History” by Henry Louis Gates, and an set of competition questions covering nearly 500 years of black history. The winning team will represent Madison in the national competition in New Orleans in June.

While the bowl fosters healthy competition between schools, it also gives participating students an opportunity to learn more about the rich history of African-American people.

Enis Ragland, founding president of 100 Black Men of Madison, said the African-American History Bowl offers a valuable supplement to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s standard American history curriculum for students who want to learn more about black culture. One of the core tenets of 100 Black Men’s platform is education, as well as mentoring, economic empowerment, leadership development and health and wellness.

wnyc:

The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, allows anyone to petition the federal government for access to its documents. Jason Leopold, senior investigative reporter at Buzzfeed, is a power-user of FOIA who recently filed a lawsuit against the NSA for its failures to act on his three-year-old request for access to internal reports. The agency responded by asking the court for a rarely-used “Open America” stay, which would send Leopold’s request all the way to the back of the line. Bob speaks with Leopold about his attempts to navigate NSA bureaucracy — and the NSA’s attempt to paint him as a “FOIA terrorist” in response.

Mike Taylor:

I’ve been reading the excellent blog of economist Tim Harford, for a while. That arose from reading his even more excellent book The Undercover Economist (Harford 2007), which gave me a crash-course in the basics of how economies work, how markets help, how they can go wrong, and much more. I really can’t say enough good things about this book: it’s one of those that I feel everyone should read, because the issues are so important and pervasive, and Harford’s explanations are so clear.

In a recent post, Why central bankers shouldn’t have skin in the game, he makes this point:

The basic principle for any incentive scheme is this: can you measure everything that matters? If you can’t, then high-powered financial incentives will simply produce short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness or outright fraud. If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability.

I think that last part is pretty much how academia used to be run a few decades ago. Now I don’t want to get all misty-eyed and rose-tinted and nostalgic — especially since I wasn’t even involved in academia back then, and don’t know from experience what it was like. But could it be … could it possibly be … that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?

Anya Kamenetz:

Recent college graduates who borrow are leaving school with an average of $34,000 in student loans. That’s up from $20,000 just 10 years ago, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In that report, out this week, the New York Fed took a careful look at the relationship between debt and homeownership. For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home, compared to college graduates with no debt. The cliche of “good debt” notwithstanding, the consequences of borrowing are real, and they are lasting.

The report paints a mixed picture of how student borrowing has evolved over the last decade, since the financial crisis. There are some bright spots: For example, student loan defaults peaked five years ago and have declined ever since.

The Economist:

CramvilleAmeerpet, India’s unofficial IT training hub

The Hyderabad neighbourhood’s IT courses cost less than $400 for six months
From the print edition | Business
Mar 30th 2017
| HYDERABAD

UNIVERSITY campuses can take a while to get going in the mornings, as students recover from extra-curricular antics. Contrast that with Ameerpet, a squeezed neighbourhood of Hyderabad that has become India’s unofficial cramming-college capital. By 7.30am the place is already buzzing as 500-odd training institutes cater to over 100,000 students looking to improve their IT skills. If there are ivory towers here, they are obscured by a forest of fluorescent billboards promising skills ranging from debugging Oracle servers to expertise in Java coding to handling Microsoft’s cloud.

Expertise in the IT industry erodes fast as software programs are upgraded or become obsolete. Indian outsourcing giants such as Infosys and Wipro spend heavily to keep employees’ skills up to date. But staff looking to change their career paths—to say nothing of those who didn’t crack the interview in the first place—need rapid systems upgrades of their own. Training courses authorised by software providers exist but cost up to 375,000 rupees ($5,765). Fees at Ameerpet’s informal institutes are typically below 25,000 rupees for classes lasting three to six months.

Kelsey Gee:

Even William Shakespeare could have benefited from an M.B.A.—or so the nation’s oldest business school would like young poets to think.

University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is set to launch a new program today for undergraduates studying liberal arts, science and nursing at the Ivy League institution and looking to gain early admission to its prestigious graduate business school.

Investment banker Ken Moelis and his wife, Julie Taffet Moelis, gave a $10 million gift to their alma mater to create the program, which is open to Penn seniors aiming to work for up to four years after graduation before returning to campus to study management.

Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has made a cause of public and private school choice, and liberals who oppose evaluating teachers based on student achievement are now hyping a few studies that have found vouchers hurt student performance. A closer look still supports the case for giving parents choice.

More than 400,000 students in 30 states and Washington, D.C., participate in private-school choice programs whose designs and funding sources vary. Over the last two decades dozens of studies have sought to measure these programs’ impact on student growth. Those with the most rigorous methodologies have produced positive findings.

A meta-analysis last year by the Friedman Foundation found that 14 of 18 empirical studies analyzing programs in which students were chosen at random by lottery found positive academic outcomes. Two demonstrated no visible effect, while two recent studies of Louisiana’s voucher program found negative effects. The Louisiana studies are disconcerting since voucher proponents have hailed the program, and the negative effects were large. Math scores declined in one study by 0.4 standard deviations after one year in private schools, representing a 50% increase in likelihood of failing the state test.

Sebastian Anthony:

A couple of years ago, when I was investigating the UK’s safest ISP, a high-ranking employee at Virgin Media told me there was no NSA or GCHQ Internet traffic interception equipment hiding within Virgin’s network. He also said that, in his opinion, not much traffic interception actually occurs in the UK. I asked him why. “Because they don’t need to. They’ll get your data when it lands in the US.”
While it’s not true that all Internet traffic flows through the US, the addition of a few listening posts at key Internet exchanges in Europe (London, Paris) and some in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo) ensure that the NSA and its Five Eyes partners can analyse and ingest the majority of international Internet traffic.

To visualise the extent of the NSA’s surveillance network, IXmaps is hosting a tool that shows you the location of suspected Internet traffic interception points. You can input your own traceroute data, or if you’re in a rush you can just bring up traceroute data from people living in the same city or using the same ISP. Then click the “layers” button and turn on NSA, AT&T/Fairview, and Verizon/Stormbrew.

Most of the suspected surveillance sites come from Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents in 2013, including the image you see below. The blue dots, which appear to all be at submarine cable landing sites, are the most important: Internet traffic can take many different routes across a country, but there are only a handful of submarine trunk links that most international traffic traverses.

BBC:

For years, it has been rumoured that somebody has been going out late at night, correcting bad punctuation on Bristol shop fronts.

The self-proclaimed “grammar vigilante” goes out undercover in the dead of night correcting street signs and shop fronts where the apostrophes are in the wrong place.

Jon Kay meets grammar’s answer to Banksy and reveals the extent of his one man mission to improve standards.

Bari Weiss:

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

Trupti Rami:

Growing up, the narrative in my household was you’re going to do something in the sciences. Most likely, you’re going to be a doctor. That’s kind of how I had structured my life. I never really thought about other career options. I definitely never thought about teaching.

I was studying physics at the University of Chicago, planning on applying to medical school. Towards the end of my senior year, I realized that I was no longer interested in pursuing math. I just hated everything I was doing. I had been a part of an organization called Peer Health Exchange where we went to schools in Chicago and taught health lessons. I decided that teaching might be something that I was interested in. Now I’m a ninth-grade math teacher at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy on the South Side of Chicago. This is my fourth year.

Betsy Hammond:

In 2011, Oregon lawmakers agreed on an ambitious goal: By 2025, the state should get all its young people to graduate from high school and 80 percent to earn a two- or four-year college degree.

Now, largely at the urging of the state’s teachers union, a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers want the state to drop those goals, largely as an admission the state’s schools and colleges won’t come close to accomplishing them.

“It is not realistic,” Rep. Paul Evans, D-Salem, a community college instructor and the primary sponsor of the bill to end the numeric goals, said Wednesday as he unveiled his plan. Unless the state were to spend $1 billion more a year on education, a drive to get all young people to complete high schools and 80 percent to earn a college credential is just “a fantasy we tell ourselves,” he said.

Other lawmakers, community colleges, the state’s higher education commission and Oregon businesses are pushing back, however. They say it’s essential that the state set measurable education goals and doing so has had a big impact on students.

Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson, Uri Simonsohn

In 2010 or thereabouts, we stopped believing that many published findings were true. We discussed recently published articles in our weekly journal clubs (we were all at different universities then), and those discussions frequently devolved into statements of disbelief. We didn’t think the findings were fraudulent, but it was just impossible to believe that, with only 14 participants per cell, researchers had found that people will pay more for a chocolate bar when it is presented at a 45 degree angle, but only if they are below the median on the self-monitoring scale.1 When results in the scientific literature disagree with our intuition, we should be able to trust the literature enough to question our beliefs rather than to question the findings. We were questioning the findings. Something was broken.
After much discussion, our best guess was that so many published findings were false because researchers were conducting many analyses on the same dataset and just reporting those that were statistically significant, a behavior that we later labeled “p-hacking” (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014).

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

In 1945, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave an influential lecture about two kinds of knowledge. A child knows that a bicycle has two wheels, that its tires are filled with air, and that you ride the contraption by pushing its pedals forward in circles. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—the factual, propositional kind—“knowing that.” But to learn to ride a bicycle involves another realm of learning. A child learns how to ride by falling off, by balancing herself on two wheels, by going over potholes. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—implicit, experiential, skill-based—“knowing how.”

The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.” One afternoon, I watched my seven-year-old daughter negotiate a small hill on her bike. The first time she tried, she stalled at the steepest part of the slope and fell off. The next time, I saw her lean forward, imperceptibly at first, and then more visibly, and adjust her weight back on the seat as the slope decreased. But I hadn’t taught her rules to ride a bike up that hill. When her daughter learns to negotiate the same hill, I imagine, she won’t teach her the rules, either. We pass on a few precepts about the universe but leave the brain to figure out the rest.

Some time after Lignelli-Dipple’s session with the radiology trainees, I spoke to Steffen Haider, the young man who had picked up the early stroke on the CT scan. How had he found that culprit lesion? Was it “knowing that” or “knowing how”? He began by telling me about learned rules. He knew that strokes are often one-sided; that they result in the subtle “graying” of tissue; that the tissue often swells slightly, causing a loss of anatomical borders. “There are spots in the brain where the blood supply is particularly vulnerable,” he said. To identify the lesion, he’d have to search for these signs on one side which were not present on the other.

Nikhil Sonnad:

O’Neil: All of the time when you’re on the internet. All of the time. I have a couple examples that I like to tell because they affect everyone, and everyone is kind of offended by them in a very direct way.

One of them is, you call up customer service, and from your phone number they infer your value as a customer. If you’re a low-value customer you will wait on hold forever. If you’re a high-value customer you get to a customer representative immediately. And if you’re low-value, you’re likely to be told by the rep, “Oh you’re low-value, you’re not going to get what you want.” That happens. I didn’t even know the rep knows your score, but turns out that in that system they actually do. And they can say, “I’m not going to give you what you want.”

Flagg Taylor:

The protest and subsequent riot at Middlebury College during Charles Murray’s recent visit has prompted a great deal of commentary, facing left and right, about ever-increasing intolerance on college campuses. Much of this commentary is reassuring insofar as people from different sides of the political spectrum seem to agree that many colleges and universities are now reaching the point where they are betraying a core element of their mission: to foster atmospheres of rigorous and reasoned debate and discussion. Further, it is finally dawning on many interested observers that the lack of political and ideological diversity on too many campuses (both among faculty and students) might have something to do with this intolerance. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy precisely to increase awareness of this problem and to advocate for viewpoint diversity.

Austin Weinstein:

The bachelor’s degree — long a ticket to middle-class comfort — is losing its luster in the U.S. job market.

Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers.

What you study matters for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates’s paychecks have fallen. A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier.

John Minehan

Professor Vlahos concludes that elites (which he defines more broadly than “the One Percent”) are acting to their own advantage, as elites have done in other times moving towards the point when things fell apart (for example, at the end of Classical times in 6th through the 8th Centuries or after the Black Death in the 14th Century or after the World Wars in the 20th Century).

He further thinks that over what could be a long period of time our current elites have set the stage, by monopolizing resources, for a catastrophic event (perhaps climate change) to change how the cards are dealt.

Professor Vlahos came to that conclusion while teaching graduate courses on how global systems subside. He states that he initially focused on climate change, but came to see such events (like the, probably climate related, Plague of Justinian in the 6th Century) as being a trigger for a course of events that were already in trail.

There have been thinkers who have considered these matters before.

In 1930, the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, published a book called The Revolt of the Masses, which dealt with the “mass-ification” of society, which included “señorito satisfecho” (“Little Mr. Satisfied” or the bureaucrat).

In 1995, the late historian, Christopher Lasch, wrote a book called The Revolt of the Elites, which presciently predicted the perception on the part of many Americans that elites “‘dangerously isolated’ from the rest of the country” mind set and lacked a sense of “noblesse oblige.”

I am vastly less qualified than the people I have cited, but let me offer my own opinion.

English 10, connected math and discovery math.

T Rees Shapiro:

The University of Virginia’s fundraising team for years has sought to help children of wealthy alumni and prominent donors who apply for admission, flagging their cases internally for special handling, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The records from the U-Va. advancement office, which oversees fundraising for the prestigious public flagship, reveal nearly a decade of efforts to monitor admission bids and in some cases assist those in jeopardy of rejection.

U-Va. denies that the advancement office held any sway over admissions decisions. But the documents show the office kept meticulous notes on the status of certain VIP applicants and steps taken on their behalf.

Within U-Va., the records were known as an annual “watch list.” They provide a case study of what is regarded as an open secret in higher education: that schools do pay attention when an applicant’s family has given them money — or might in the future.

Alan Borsuk:

And Holtz said, “There is no scientific correlation between higher spending and higher academic achievement… Adequate funding is important, but money is not the thing that is going to save our failing schools.”

Evers said, “Frankly, our public schools have been deteriorating in their state support, everybody knows that.” Referring to differences in facilities and success between schools in places such as Milwaukee and in more affluent communities, he said, “Resources are at the core of this.”

In short, Evers sees himself as an advocate for more money for schools. Holtz doesn’t.

The state budget. When Walker says he is going to fight for more money for schools, who does he expect to fight with? It seems certain Democrats will back his proposal, as compared to any involving lower amounts. But some Republican legislators are sending signals they are likely to favor smaller increases, given other pressures on the state budget (which is mostly to say, roads).

Alex Good:

The CBC’s Canada Reads radio program was launched in 2001 with the intention of creating a national book club, a way to “get Canada reading.” And over the years it has enjoyed some success, becoming probably the most prominent platform for the discussion of Canadian books in the country.

In 2014, however, something interesting happened when the program announced a theme: pick the one book that could change the nation. For starters, not one of the five panelists was what might be considered, however loosely, a literary figure. And that’s fine. People like celebrities, so inviting a sports star, a television star, a film star, a former politician, and a rapper made a kind of sense. These are, theoretically, the kind of people who can be counted on to provide articulate and entertaining debate.

Phil Shapiro:

As cloud computing has become an integral part of the lives of students at public schools, it has increased the importance of a place generations of students have turned to for much more analog learning needs—the library.

Both public and school libraries have always been a source of information for students. And while the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way students do research, cloud-based tools have actually evolved the library’s role rather than diminished it. Public computers at libraries have become an extension of the classroom, and they’re an important resource for children who don’t have unfettered access to broadband Internet at home. The cloud has only made those public computers more effective.

The Hub:

By using the categories of evidence—strong, moderate, and promising—outlined in the law, Evidence for ESSA makes it easier for school leaders to determine which programs are in compliance. Programs without evidence of effectiveness are not ranked on the website, and the CRRE plans to incorporate new educational studies and new programs into the website as they become available.

“We plan to have a very fast response, so that users can be confident that what they’re looking at is the very latest,” Slavin said.

The website also offers a wide array of filters that allow users to sort through programs that target the needs of different types of students, such as struggling students; rural, suburban, or urban students; English learners; special education students; and low-income students. It also filters for program features, such as whether or not they incorporate technology or opportunities for teacher professional development.

Development of Evidence for ESSA began almost 10 months ago, and key national organizations have provided feedback. Organizations including the National Education Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National PTA, the National Association of State Board of Education, and America Forward were among those stakeholders helping to create the nonpartisan website.

“Our view is this: At the end of the day, you’ve got a school, you’ve got teachers, and you’ve got kids,” Slavin said. “You’ve got to use programs and practices that are as effective as they can possibly be.”

Kat Merck:

The Cuban-American Chicago native graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just three years with a 5.0-grade point average, the highest possible, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard with full academic freedom — meaning she can pursue her own study on her own terms without staff interference.

Pasterski first attracted the attention of the scientific and academic community after single-handedly building her own single-engine airplane in 2008, at age 14, and documenting the process on YouTube.

MIT professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman saw the video and were astonished. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty recalls. “Her potential is off the charts.”

WisPolitics:

Holtz also slammed Evers for the state’s achievement gaps, saying it’s “not acceptable to be the worst” in the country. He said one of the main reasons why it exists is because schools aren’t safe

“We’re turning our back on generations of minority kids and saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t fix the problem,’” he said.

He also asked Evers why he let the achievement gap widen during his eight years as state superintendent.

Evers said the achievement gap is tied to poverty, which he’s not responsible for, but refuted Holtz’s claims that he’s done nothing on the issue. The state has “spent a lot of time, effort and money” to help address the issue and noted there’s lots of collaborations with other state agencies happening to provide mental health treatment, services for parents and developing job centers.

Gayle World:

Thirteen-year-old Alyssa Anderson isn’t quite sure where she’ll be at noon on Friday, since Madison students have no school that day.

But wherever she is, she’ll probably be Googling.

Alyssa, a seventh-grader at Wright Middle School, is Wisconsin’s finalist in this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition, a nationwide design contest run by the search-engine giant since 2008.

The national winner, to be announced online around noon Friday along with four runners-up, will receive a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology award for their school, a trip to Google headquarters in California and other prizes.

“It’s been amazing. Everyone has been encouraging me and telling me they’re rooting for me,” Alyssa said of the process of entering and advancing in the contest. “We’re just keeping our fingers crossed.”

Joe Mullin:

Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The “good” news for Georgia residents is that they’ll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis.

Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn’t cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia’s official laws, known as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state’s legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers.

Christopher Groskopf & Dan Kopf

As the Rust Belt stagnated, coastal metropolises thrived. As Appalachia sputtered, shale country boomed. As Southern manufacturing centers shut their doors, neighboring research hubs opened theirs.

These are just a few the trends that have played out in regional economies across the United States over the past 25 years. This period includes the booms of the late 1990s and mid 2000s, a couple of mild recessions, one huge one, and the slow but steady growth of today. Nationally, workers’ average annual earnings rose by about 24% from 1990 to 2015, or from $42,800 to $52,300 in inflation-adjusted dollars. That works out to a 1.3% real annual raise every year—don’t spend it all at once!

Jasky Singh:

All because the outcomes seem to have been forgotten, and sadly we the technology providers are partly to blame.

So, this Principal continued to go on and on about comparing the benefits of one classroom technology over another in making her decision. She went back and forth asking me about every feature, functionality, and delving other all minute aspects for nearly an hour. And this continued over a number of days.

Every time I raised a suggestion and moved the conversation to the topic where I felt her energy should go, it came across as if I was trying to sway her opinion and was selling her on something that was in my interest.
She was obviously skeptical, this method of decision making had been drilled into her and any possible diversions lifted her guard up. Hence, I realised I wasn’t doing a good enough job.

Juan Perez

A group seeking to open a taxpayer-financed charter school in the South Loop is getting support from a conservative Michigan college that aims to build on President Donald Trump’s school choice agenda.

Hillsdale College, which refuses federal funds in order to maintain its independence from government oversight, has helped open 17 schools in states including Texas, Florida and Indiana through its Barney Charter School Initiative.

K-12 governance diversity….

Patrick Deneen:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

aJeevan Vasagar:

The classrooms at Admiralty are sparsely decorated. When I visit a class of 13-year-olds, there’s a single artwork on the back wall; a paper cut-out of a cherry tree scattering blossom. At the front, where the teacher stands, is a whiteboard, a projector, a Singapore flag and a clock. I am later told that other decorations had been removed to avoid distracting or aiding students during a round of tests.

The subject is English, a second language for most of the children here, who speak either Malay or Chinese at home. At the front of the class, the teacher, Wendy Chen, is showing a film of migrant workers responding to racist comments. It’s a controversial subject: foreign labourers who work in construction, manufacturing and domestic service are often targets of racial prejudice in Singapore. Chen strips the language down to its constituent parts, asking the 13-year-old students to look at the use of the pronouns “we” and “they”. She hands out a newspaper cutting, again about migrant workers, and asks them to analyse it. “Underline who, what, when, where, how,” she instructs briskly.

The atmosphere is industrious. Throughout the day, the children work quietly at their tasks with relatively little chatter. Corporal punishment is permitted as a last resort — for boys only — at Singapore schools. When the teachers need to command attention, they strike an insistent note rather than raising their voices. One teacher, as she senses her class flagging, begins to pepper her instructions with the phrase “my dears”. Further absorbing discipline, many of the children join police or military cadet organisations, and can be seen dressed in uniform and standing to attention in the schoolyard after class. For the boys, who face two years’ national service after graduating from high school, it’s a particularly useful preparation.

Singapore Math.

Math Forum Audio and Video

Wisconsin State Journal:

Q&A

What is the main challenge facing the district and how would you address it?

Elliott:I believe space for increased enrollment will become an issue. Will we need to put a cap on open enrollment? This is a conversation the School Board has already started and one I hope to continue to seek answers to as a board member.

Stuessy:Expanding current facilities and adding staff to meet the educational needs of a growing school district. We have been very fortunate to have a supportive community that has stepped up to fund the needs to date.

In what ways can the district improve, and how would you do that?

Elliott:I would love to add my voice to the conversations and advocate for other parents to continue to move our school in a positive direction. I also feel strongly that we will see challenges trickle down from the national and state level into the local level with the appointment of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education and our current election for state superintendent.

Stuessy:Our schools continue to improve through the efforts of our outstanding superintendent, outstanding teaching staff and outstanding support staff. They have the knowledge to continuously make the changes needed to keep improving the students’ educations.

Chris Rickert:

Instead, candidates are forced to choose which seat to run for, meaning that if there are two seats up for election and three candidates are interested in serving on the board, two of them end up vying for one seat and the third runs unopposed.

This year, two people, incumbent Ed Hughes and Nicki Vander Meulen, filed to run for Seat 7, and Kate Toews and Ali Muldrow filed to run for Seat 6. Then Hughes dropped out (although too late to remove his name from the ballot).

A similar situation happened in 2013, when Sarah Manski dropped out, leaving T.J. Mertz a shoo-in and four other candidates vying for two seats.

But what if voters prefer Toews and Muldrow over Vander Meulen? Or preferred two of the other candidates in 2013 to Mertz? Too bad; Madison’s unusual electoral system has chosen for them.

The School Board’s response to a flawed elections process has basically been: Meh, fair schmare.

“It’s just not that big a deal to me at this time,” board president James Howard said.

Attempts to reach Vander Meulen and Toews were not successful, and Muldrow said she is “willing to talk about the election process after the election.”

2017 Madison School Board Election: Seat 6 and Seat 7.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

“There is abundant research linking levels of student achievement to educators who work in the collaborative culture of a professional learning community”.

– Rick DuFour, 2011

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

William Deresiewicz:

Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.

A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

Jonathan Moules

Rupert Merson fell into lecturing at London Business School after a colleague bottled out of giving a talk. “He said he had double booked with a client meeting, but I think he had lost his nerve,” Mr Merson, who at the time was a partner at accounting firm BDO, says. “He knew I was a sucker for getting up in front of an audience.”

The topic was financing start-ups, something Mr Merson felt confident explaining to a class of MBA students given his experience advising clients and was invited back as a guest speaker several times. A couple of years later he was approached to jointly teach a course on managing growth.

Mr Merson revelled in the lecturing role so after being made redundant from BDO and starting his own advisory firm, he became an adjunct associate professor — a purely teaching role —of strategy and entrepreneurship. He has an office on the top floor of the main LBS campus building, close to Regent’s Park.

change.org:

Have you ever wondered why teachers could not recognize the signs and symptoms of dyslexia in your child, or could not provide appropriate instruction?
Most Universities across the nation do not prepare their teacher graduates to understand, and successfully teach students with dyslexia. Often school personnel tell parents that dyslexia does not exist. Parents who can afford the expense – hire private tutors, send their children to specialized private school or home school. This is an hidden equity issue.

WILL:

“Our study compared outcomes between all K-12 schools in Wisconsin – traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the choice programs. In doing so, it controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors such as race, poverty, etc. As we acknowledged, we did not control for special needs or learning disabilities because the data simply do not exist for an accurate comparison of the two populations. An academic study found that reported disability rates in MPCP schools were lower than actual disability rates because MPCP schools lack the financial incentives to report disabilities that are available to public schools. Our study does control for socioeconomic status – something which may be correlated with special needs status, but we cannot control for what we cannot measure.

“We hope that someday it will be possible to do such a comparison and we have made a request to DPI for such data. This request has, thus far, been ignored. There are reforms that could enhance the likelihood that special needs students will participate in the choice program – such as expanding access to the Special Needs Scholarship Program and increased voucher funding – but, unfortunately Superintendent Evers is not an advocate for that.

Solvejg Wastvedt:

It’s always been a challenge convincing young teachers to put down roots in remote northwestern Minnesota. But these days it’s an especially hard sell.

The northland schools have struggled like never before to fill open jobs the past few years, said Bob Jaszczak, superintendent of the Kittson Central district. “I’d be talking to area superintendents,” he said, “and they’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I cannot find a ‘blank’ teacher.'”

Jaszczak’s kept a file on every teacher job opening the past three years in the region’s schools, how many people applied and how many of those who applied were actually qualified for the job. The numbers are bleak. Places like Hallock — a town of fewer than 1,000 within walking distance to the Canadian border — aren’t the first choice of most teachers looking for work.

Lauren Caruba:

What came next — the 16-year-old being pinned facedown on a bed and sexually assaulted with the threaded end of a carbon dioxide tank — put a haunting image to a host of allegations of sexual assault and hazing that have emerged at La Vernia High School over the past few days.

Since Thursday, nine high school students, seven of them still minors, have been charged with sexual assault in relation to alleged hazing within the school’s football, basketball and baseball teams, police say.

Sam DeBrule:

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) have seized Tech mindshare in a way few topics have in recent memory. A couple months ago I noticed people talking about artificial intelligence everywhere I looked. According to AI experts, everything from our jobs, to the wars we wage, to the food we eat, to the beer we drink, to the software we write will be affected.

Not being one to enjoy surprises, I decided to spend my free time learning as much about the space (and what the future holds) as possible. ML and AI are having a huge impact on our lives, and their roles are only increasing. The better informed you are, the better prepared you’ll be to handle these changes as they happen.

A new government watchdog report finds the DEA grabs cash just for the sake of grabbing cash, raising civil liberties concerns.

A report by the Justice Department Inspector General released Wednesday found that the DEA’s gargantuan amount of cash seizures often didn’t relate to any ongoing criminal investigations, and 82 percent of seizures it reviewed ended up being settled administratively—that is, without any judicial review—raising civil liberties concerns.

In total, the Inspector General reports the DEA seized $4.15 billion in cash since 2007, accounting for 80 percent of all Justice Department cash seizures. Those figures do not include other property, such as cars and electronics, which are favorite targets for seizure by law enforcement.

All of this is possible through civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize property if they suspect it’s connected to criminal activity, without having to file criminal charges against the owner. While law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug traffickers and organized crime, the Inspector General’s findings echo the concerns of many civil liberties groups, which say asset forfeiture creates perverse incentives for law enforcement to seize property.

Vivett Dukes:

Today is day two of of the three-day New York State English Language Arts Exam and in my ten-plus years of proctoring and scoring these exams, it never ceases to amaze me when, just a few minutes into the tests, students’ eyes start to glaze over and their bladders and throats go into overdrive, causing a mass exodus to either the bathroom or the water fountain. What are such behaviors really about? Why am I constantly witnessing students who just don’t have the wherewithal or fortitude to take these annual standardized assessments? By the time they get to me in middle school, they’ve sat for their State ELA exam for at least four years so it’s not like the test is new to them. What’s going on? What’s the problem?

Before you begin with the whole “standardized tests are biased and unnecessary” argument, just pause. That’s not what this post is about and unless there is a radical (and I mean RADICAL) shift in the way this capitalist country educates our children, standardized tests aren’t going anywhere. Are we clear? Okay, good.

Doug Belkin:

Guarantees may be a scary prospect for four-year colleges, but they are built into the business model of the new and rapidly growing for-profit coding boot camps, which depends on students seeing a solid return on their investment.

Schools That Can – Milwaukee (PDF)

The latest Wisconsin School Report Cards indicate the schools we support outperformed their peers, citywide, on every measure. What’s more: students at these schools are growing more and closing achievement gaps faster than average schools anywhere in the state.

Put another way: A student who is behind in his or her studies is better off in the average STCM school than at a typical school anywhere in Wisconsin.

Much more on Schools That Can, here.

The Madison Administrative view: “Van Hise’s Special Sauce“.

Friends –

Please note the very latest on the NJ LIFO Lawsuit – the big piece of information is that the oral arguments on the motions to dismiss have been moved – and are scheduled for 2pm on May 3 before the Mercer County Superior Court.

Hope you are well – and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

+++++++++

Newark Parents Oppose Teachers Unions’ Motions to Dismiss LIFO Lawsuit

Oral arguments before a Mercer County Superior Court judge are scheduled for May 3

Trenton, New Jersey — Six Newark parents yesterday opposed motions to dismiss HG v. Harrington, the lawsuit they filed last November challenging the constitutionality of New Jersey’s quality-blind “last in, first out” (LIFO) teacher layoff law. The motions to dismiss the case were filed earlier this month by local and national teachers unions, who intervened as defendants in the case last December. Oral arguments on the motions to dismiss are scheduled for 2pm on May 3 before the Mercer County Superior Court. Defendants from Newark Public Schools and the New Jersey Department of Education did not move to dismiss the case.

“The teachers unions clearly are not looking out for students’ best interests,” said Kathleen Reilly, attorney with Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, one of the law firms representing the Newark parents pro bono. “With education budget deficits in the tens of millions of dollars, the court urgently needs to hear these parents’ concerns about laws that require schools to keep ineffective teachers while letting effective ones go. If students’ educational rights are valued, these laws cannot stand.”

In their answer to the lawsuit, defendants from the Newark Public Schools overwhelmingly conceded that the LIFO law harms students, acknowledging that enforcement of LIFO in Newark will remove quality teachers, which leads to lower test scores, lower high school graduation rates, lower college attendance rates, and sharply reduced lifetime earnings. They also admit that the current practice of keeping ineffective teachers on the district payroll, including those in a pool of “educators without placement sites” (EWPS) is harmful and unsustainable, and that the EWPS pool would be wholly unnecessary were it not for LIFO.

To learn more about the parent-led lawsuit to end LIFO in New Jersey, please go to edjustice.org/nj. All legal filings related to HG v. Harrington are available online here.

###

Matthew Frankel
MDF Strategies
41 Watchung Plaza, Suite 355
Montclair NJ 07042
917.617.7914
matthew@mdfstrategies.com
mdfstrategies.com

Much more on the lawsuit, here.

Jon Boskin:

Did the Motley regulars know that, less than 400 yards away, the academic vanguard of the Trump administration had been provided with office space and tenure?

Charles R. Kesler, whose class on The Federalist Papers I would be attending that afternoon, is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and presiding chieftain of an obscure (until recently) tribe of political philosophers known as the “West Coast Straussians” — named for the émigré philosopher Leo Strauss. Kesler is also the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, the conservative magazine that The New York Times says is “being hailed as the bible of highbrow Trumpism.” “Like Richard Nixon in ’68,” Kesler wrote in May 2016, in one of his many prescient columns, “Trump felt that this election might test whether the center could hold, whether a silent majority could be mobilized on behalf of the country itself. The issue was not so much a showdown over liberal or conservative policies, but the simpler, more elementary question of whether a majority still wanted America to be great again.”

Noting the virulence of the opposition to Trump on his own liberal-arts campus, Kesler also predicted that, if Trump were to win, “the next four years may be one long demonstration,” as had been the case after the election of 1968. That prediction may yet bear out, but, beyond the fliers, I saw little evidence of unrest as I made my way from the coffee shop to a nondescript basement classroom in the Claremont Graduate University.

Judge Daniel Koval.

Pamela Cotant:

When financial concerns threatened to derail an alternative school that draws students from several school districts in southwest Wisconsin, the Mineral Point School District took the program under its own wing.

It was a leap of faith that some viewed as a risky move, said Joelle Doye, spokeswoman for the district. But the program is now run by the school district, which receives fees from other school districts that send students there. The Mineral Point Alternative Program, formerly called the Renaissance School, was run for 10 years by Cooperative Educational Service Agency District 3, which received the fees. The program was and continues to be housed at the old Mineral Point high school building.

Jim Bender:

There have been a number of conflict-based education stories on the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP) recently. In that mold, a story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looked at expansion of the WPCP in a piece titled “Tensions rise as vouchers pick up traction across Wisconsin.”

Pitting one school type against another creates the structure for this narrative. Unfortunately, to maximize impact, a great deal of context was omitted from the story and positive collaboration was overlooked.

The story begins by painting a wonderful picture of the Chilton school district. However, an ominous, dark cloud is approaching — the WPCP. Cue the dramatic music.

The column insinuates that athletics and theater at Chilton are at risk now that a local Catholic school has joined the WPCP. Allegedly, pending enrollment declines will impose great harm or inflict higher property taxes.

Donald Houston:

This is what happens with the more commonly used Mercator projection, which exaggerates the size of the Earth around the poles and shrinks it around the equator. So the developed “global North” appears bigger than reality, and equatorial regions, which tend to be less developed, appear smaller. It’s especially problematic given that the first world maps based on the Mercator projection were produced by European colonialists.

Why does this problem occur? Simply put, the world is round and a map is flat. Imagine drawing a world map on an orange, peeling the skin to leave a single piece and then flattening it. It would, of course, rip. But imagine you could stretch it. As you did so, the map drawn on its surface would distort.

Kevin Gosztola:

A student group hosting an event at Oregon State University on Palestine, Syria, and Yemen, has received requests to disinvite two Arab journalists scheduled to speak. However, the student group immediately took a stand and refuses to cancel the event scheduled for April 11.

The event is called “Independent Journalism: Perspectives On Palestine, Syria, and Yemen.” It will feature three journalists: Abby Martin, Rania Khalek, and Mnar Muhawesh of Mintpressnews.com.

“We want to make it clear that this event will not be canceled, and we advise that everyone who has these concerns show up or address their questions on the live feed at the event,” the group, Students United For Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER), declared on the Facebook page for the event.

Mathematica:

A new multivolume report provides a national picture of secondary school students in special education and examines how they compare with their peers. The research sheds light on challenges youth can face in socioeconomic status, health, communication, and social functioning at school. It also looks at other areas, such as academic supports and preparation for life after high school.

“This study provides a comprehensive, updated picture of students who receive special education services in the United States,” said Mathematica Policy Research Senior Researcher Stephen Lipscomb, who led the analysis for these two reports. “The findings can help schools address the challenges these youth face given our nation’s changing educational, social, and economic landscape.”

Policymakers have long recognized the importance of addressing the needs of these students, who today account for 12 percent of all youth in the United States. Mathematica is conducting the research, called the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012, for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to examine the characteristics and experiences of secondary school students who receive special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Simon Makin:

One bad apple spoils the barrel, so the saying goes. But what if the barrel itself is rotten?

A number of studies have shown that seeing a peer behave unethically increases people’s dishonesty in laboratory tests. What is much harder to investigate is how this kind of influence operates at a societal level. But that is exactly what behavioral economists Simon Gächter of the University of Nottingham in England and Jonathan Schulz of Yale University set out to do in a study published in March 2016 in Nature. Their findings suggest that corruption not only harms a nation’s prosperity but also shapes the moral behavior of its citizens. The results have implications for interventions aimed at tackling corruption.

The researchers developed a measure of corruption by combining three widely used metrics that capture levels of political fraud, tax evasion and corruption in a given country. “We wanted to get a really broad index, including many different aspects of rule violations,” Schulz says. They then conducted an experiment involving 2,568 participants from 23 nations. Participants were asked to roll a die twice and report the outcome of only the first roll. They received a sum of money proportional to the number reported but got nothing for rolling a six. Nobody else saw the die, so participants were free to lie about the outcome.

Open the books:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

3. In monetary terms, the ‘government contracting’ business of the Ivy League ($25.27 billion – federal contracts and grants) exceeded their educational mission ($22 billion in student tuition) FY2010-FY2015.

4. The eight colleges of the Ivy League received more money ($4.31 billion) – on average – annually from the federal government than sixteen states: see report.

5. The Ivy League endowment funds (2015) exceeded $119 billion, which is equivalent to nearly $2 million per undergraduate student.

6. As a non-profit, educational institution, the Ivy League pays no tax on investment gains. Between FY2011-FY2015, the Ivy League schools received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their endowment funds. In FY2014, the tax-free subsidy on endowment gains amounted to $3.4 billion, or nearly $60,000 per student.

7. With continued gifts at present rates, the $119 billion endowment fund provides free tuition to the entire student body in perpetuity. Without new gifts, the endowment is equivalent to a full-ride scholarship for all Ivy League undergraduate students for 51-years, or until 2068.

8. In FY2014, the balance sheet for all Ivy League colleges showed $194,332,115,120 in accumulated gross assets. This is equivalent to $3.35 million per undergraduate student.

9. The Ivy League employs 47 administrators who each earn more than $1 million per year. Two executives each earned $20 million between 2010-2014. Ivy League employees earned $62 billion in compensation.
10. In a five-year period (2010-2014) the Ivy League spent $17.8 million on lobbying, which included issues mostly related to their endowment, federal contracting, immigration and student aid.

John Gregory:

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

In a letter to parents, the district noted the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple years.

The racial formula was a condition imposed by court decisions dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.

Parents, however, remain frustrated with what the cuts might mean for their children.

“When your class sizes are getting larger and you’re taking resources away from students, I mean ss parents, you do want your kid to go out to college,” one parent, Rosemary Estrada, said.

Scott Adams::

At the moment, the in-person college experience is superior to taking classes online. Today, online teaching is mostly simple videos of people talking and pointing at things. But that advantage of in-person college over online classes won’t last forever. The in-person experience will stay largely as it is, but online lessons will evolve indefinitely toward better techniques, more content, and more scientifically-proven methods. Best practices will propagate quickly online.

Only three things are missing to make this vision of universal free online college a reality:

1. You need an open online platform on which anyone can post a lesson plan, and anyone else can use it or improve it.

2. You need a law that says copyrights are suspended for the online education platform (only), so anyone can copy and improve the work that came before.

Wendy Wilson:

Pronounced “sock-em,” SOCM is an activist group that has been working for “social, economic, and environmental justice” for more than 40 years, according to the group’s website. The group was known for many years by its original name, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, which reflected its early mission of helping in poor coalfield communities in five northern counties in the Cumberland Mountains.

The group continues to be heavily involved in environmental issues with its opposition to mountaintop removal mining and fracking and its promotion of “water quality justice.” However, it has also expanded its reach into other areas. It lists the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) as one of its partner organizations.

Alima Adams:

“I read that New York teachers don’t have to be literate, anymore. Is that true, Mom?,” my seventh-grader asked last week. He’s recently become determined to “fix all education in America” (I have no idea where a son of mine could have picked up such an interest), and was on the Internet doing research. He’d already expressed his surprise at New York City’s less than 50% college readiness graduation rate and the fact that the most frequently failed college course was Algebra.

Now, he wanted to know about the NY Board of Regents decision to eliminate the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) for prospective teachers.

My thirteen year-old son isn’t the only one puzzled by the ruling. I am, too.

Among the move’s supporters are deans of Education Schools. Michael Middleton of Hunter College was quoted by The New York Times as saying, “We already know that our licensure candidates have a bachelor’s degree, which in my mind means they have basic literacy and communication skills.”

First of all, is “basic” really where we want to set the bar for those who educate our children? Don’t we all hope our children progress beyond “basic” themselves?

Related: relaxing Wisconsin’s K-12 teacher licensing requirements.

And, Madison’s long-term disastrous reading results.

Jon Miltimore:

But I have seen nothing better on this front than the 12-minute YouTube video I watched this morning, We the Internet TV’s short documentary “Silence U Part 2: What has Yale Become?” It’s the follow-up to its 2016 viral hit “Silence U: Is the University Killing Free Speech and Open Debate?

According to our friends at FEE, “We the Internet TV is a comedy news channel that has earned millions of views, started important conversations about the role of government in society, received press coverage in major publications, and won two honorable mentions in the online video category from the prestigious Webbys.”

The new documentary explores Yale’s infamous attempt to tell students what types of Halloween costumes were appropriate for students, and the fallout that ensued when one faculty member asked if such a policy was really necessary.

Eugene Volokh:

Say a student is in a professional education program at a college — law school, medical school, nursing school, business school, school of education or the like. May the college expel him from the program, on the grounds that certain speech of his is “unprofessional” and therefore casts doubt on his professional temperament and likely future behavior?

We’re not talking here about speech within a curricular assignment — a thesis, a term paper, a practicum client counseling session or even a seminar discussion in which participation is graded. Colleges have to evaluate the content of such curricular speech, though even there they may be constrained. (If I grade class participation at UCLA, for instance, I can only count it as part of the final grade, and I’m supposed to grade it in a way that’s as ideologically neutral as possible.) Rather, we’re talking about speech outside such graded discussions, often outside class and sometimes even outside school.

Crispin Sartwell:

We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call “linguistic constructivism,” holds that we don’t merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, “Words have power,” reflects that view.

Back in the day,…

Chris Rickert:

Madison School Board candidate Ali Muldrow might be Republicans’ best advertisement for school vouchers in a part of the state that opposes them.

Whether Muldrow and her supporters realize that, though, is not entirely clear.

At a candidates forum last week, Muldrow seemed to endorse the use of vouchers, although she said public dollars shouldn’t go to religious schools.

Vouchers are a source of consternation in liberal, Democratic, teachers-union-friendly Madison. While “school choice”-advocating Republicans have repeatedly made more of them available in more places, Democrats see them as a way to strip funding from public education and undermine one of their main political supporters.

So it wasn’t terribly surprising that the day after the forum, Muldrow sought to clarify her stance. Turns out, she doesn’t support vouchers.

Olivia Solon:

Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.

These are just some of the damning facts presented at last week’s House oversight committee hearing, where politicians and privacy campaigners criticized the FBI and called for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology at a time when it is creeping into law enforcement and business.

Leila Abboud:

It took 25 pages of its annual report for educational publisher Pearson Plc to explain the inexplicable: its decision to award CEO John Fallon a 20 percent pay increase for a year’s work that led to a profit warning, dividend cut and plunge in the stock.It’s a less than auspicious start for new chairman Sidney Taurel, the former CEO of drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co.Shareholders would be right to vent their outrage at the company’s annual general meeting in May — even if their vote will be merely symbolic.

Good Gig

Pearson CEO’s pay increased in 2016, even as the shares have fallen

Via Will Fitzhugh:

Mr. William Fitzhugh
Editor and Publisher, The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776, USA

Sunday, March 12, 2017
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Intellectual ruminations frequently take place within the minds of those exposed to history, philosophy, art, science, mathematics, and other fields of scholarly pursuits. Yet, it is the systematic process of examination, classification, and composition that produces from these ruminations fruitful and insightful contributions to individual and shared learning. I would like to thank you, sir, for giving to high school students the opportunity to share their thoughts about the world around them. Thank you for giving me the honour of sharing my thoughts in The Concord Review.

The Concord Review gave me an outlet to conduct a formal research enquiry into an area of historical study that had always interested me—late imperial Chinese history. Although I am fortunate enough to attend a school where I am given an abundance of learning resources in helping me develop my writing, critical thinking, and argumentative skills, as well as being guided by the aid of superb teachers, this research enquiry was the first time I had formally delved deep into an academic interest outside of school curriculum, out of my own accord. Without the scaffolding provided by a course of study, I had to independently formulate thoughts, define my research parameters, and reevaluate my findings and deductions.

Writing my paper was doubtlessly one of the most academically challenging, but nonetheless one of the most formative and empowering experiences of my high school career. Mr. Fitzhugh, thank you for providing an opportunity where the driven, the curious, and the audacious may dare to think, question, and discover.

Respectfully Yours,

Jason Qu

St. George’s School, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Class of 2017
Author of China’s Self-Strengthening Movement: A Noble Plan Detached from Reality,
[13,760 words] published in the Spring 2017 Edition of The Concord Review.

Mr. Qu’s paper [PDF].