Joshua Green & Sasha Issenberg:

His hyperbole and crassness drew broad condemnation from the media and political elite, who interpreted his anger as an acknowledgment that he was about to lose. But rather than alienate his gathering army, Trump’s antipathy fed their resolve.
He had an unwitting ally. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message,” says Steve Bannon, his campaign chief executive officer. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”

Trump’s analysts had detected this upsurge in the electorate even before FBI Director James Comey delivered his Oct. 28 letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. But the news of the investigation accelerated the shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump.

Inside his campaign, Trump’s analysts became convinced that even their own models didn’t sufficiently account for the strength of these voters. “In the last week before the election, we undertook a big exercise to reweight all of our polling, because we thought that who [pollsters] were sampling from was the wrong idea of who the electorate was going to turn out to be this cycle,” says Matt Oczkowski, the head of product at London firm Cambridge Analytica and team leader on Trump’s campaign. “If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing.”

Pradeep Mutalik:

There is only one person who correctly forecast the U.S. presidential election of 2016. His name is not Nate Silver or Sam Wang or Nate Cohn. It is Donald Trump. Trump made a mockery of the predictions of all the erudite analytical election forecast modelers. Uttering the battle cry of “Brexit Plus,” he confidently grabbed the thin sliver of a chance that the models gave him by winning the Sun Belt states of Florida and North Carolina and then, in a near-miraculous example of threading the needle, flipping not just one but three of the ordinarily blue Rust Belt states that formed Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to red.

Like everyone else, I am stunned. In my pre-election Abstractions post below, I commented that the “science of election modeling still has a long way to go,” but I must admit that the distance is far beyond what I had imagined. It seems pointless now to try to dissect the statewide predictions of the various models as I had promised to do — none of them were even remotely in the ballpark. It is unclear how long it will take before election forecasting is trusted again.

Jonathan Moules:

Mark Davis is a New York company director with that most American of qualifications, an MBA. When Mr Davis was in his mid-thirties, his then employer British Telecom paid for him to return to the classroom to do the two-year, full-time course at Baruch College in Manhattan.

A decade later, having switched from a job in a large corporate to helping run a tech start-up called Full Stack Academy, Mr Davis wonders why he took so much time out of his career to study leadership and management theory.

“I can read a balance sheet, which is valuable,” he says. “But it is not something that I needed to spend two years of my life doing.”

Business degrees continue to be one of the most sought-after educational credentials with 11.7m applications to business schools each year. This number comes from a combination of average application numbers to schools, as measured by the Graduate Management Admission Council, the owner and administrator of the GMAT admission exam, and the approximately 16,000 schools offering degrees, as recorded by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the global accreditation body.

But despite being the flagship business qualification, the future of the MBA is under threat from a proliferation of rival courses, opportunities to study online and rising tuition costs. The result is that many of the schools providing the degree worry over what lies ahead.

Universities are concerned, too, given that business schools can be the cash cows of higher education. And it raises the question of where and how many of tomorrow’s business leaders will learn how to manage.

Reuters:

Voters in San Francisco, California passed a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages on Tuesday, unofficial results showed, as the push by local governments to target soda to stem obesity and diabetes gathered speed.

San Francisco Bay Area neighbor Albany, California passed a similar measure, preliminary figures showed and measures in Oakland, California and Boulder, Colorado, were on track to pass as well, with votes still being counted early on Wednesday.

The levies on sugar-sweetened beverages arrive a month after the World Health Organization recommended that governments introduce these types of taxes in a bid to battle obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases.

Ilya Somin

If your only reason to become informed about politics is to make better choices at the ballot box, that turns out not to be much of an incentive at all. The odds that your vote will decide the outcome are infinitesimally small. From the standpoint of the ordinary voter, it makes sense to pay little attention to political issues, and instead devote most of your time and effort to other matters.

As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts it, “[t]he single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh…., before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll…. For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.” This year, the fog is even more irritating – and much scarier – than usual. But it does not seem to have caused voters to become better-informed. Such behavior is perfectly rational. The ignorance of any one voter makes almost no difference. But individually rational ignorance can cause great harm when many millions of voters behave the same way.

In addition to making little effort to seek out information, most voters also do a poor job of evaluating what information they do know. Instead of acting as truth seekers, they instead function as “political fans” cheering on Team Red or Team Blue, overvaluing any information that confirms their preexisting views while ignoring or downplaying anything that cuts the other way.

This kind of bias is exacerbated by the intense partisanship and polarization that has descended upon American politics in recent years. Partisans like to claim that the other side’s voters are influenced by ignorance, and they are often right to think so. But rarely consider the possibility that the same may be true of their own party’s supporters.

By some measures, partisan hatred is now more widespread than racial and ethnic prejudice, and certainly more socially acceptable. Even if voters somehow become significantly better informed than they are, they may not get much value out of their knowledge unless we can figure out how to curb the “tribal” partisan hatred that has engulfed our politics.

Related: Perils of Eroded Civic Knowledge.

Olivia Becker:

Public opinion has been split but leans toward the “no” side on Question 2, according to recent polls. TV ads, fliers, and phone calls coming from both sides of the fight, have been relentless leading into Election Day. If the initiative passes, it will signal a prominent nod of support for the growing charter movement nationally, which has picked up steam in the past decade as an alternative education policy solution.

Charter schools are a controversial issue, especially in Massachusetts, where education policy is not taken lightly. The schools are free and open to any student via a lottery system, but they must meet certain performance standards to stay operational over the course of five-year charters. And they’re still publicly funded: Whenever a student leaves their home public school to go to a charter school, the average cost per student in that district goes with them. So in other words, if 5 percent of a district’s students attend charter schools, 5 percent of that district’s public education funding is siphoned off with it.

Emmmett Rensin

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

Lila Reynolds

The Global Strategy Task Force published their final report on Friday, giving feedback and suggestions to the University about how to become one of the “World’s Premier Universities” by 2020, including plans to establish three new locations by 2020 and increasing global marketing.

Nearly 18 months ago, a group of 12 Northwestern faculty and administrators convened to reimagine how the university engages globally. Last Friday, following research and input from 300 faculty, students, staff and alumni from around the University as well as many others from peer institutions, the task force released their final report, which gives nine major recommendations regarding Northwestern’s global vision.

Sally Blount, the dean of Kellogg and one of the force’s co-chairs, said she is optimistic that the university is putting more emphasis on global funding and adding new locations.

Heat Street:

But some wiped their tears, and pulled themselves together enough to ask their professors to cancel their exams because they were so upset by the results.

And one Yale economics professor heard the cry, and decided to protect his snowflake charges by making the test optional.

He wrote to them saying: “I am getting many heartfelt notes from students who are in shock over the election returns” and “fear, rightly or wrongly for their families” and are “requesting that the exam be postponed.”

Brian Kamanzi:

It is not the first time South Africa has seen student mobilisation. Fees protests, campus shutdowns and mass political violence and repression have been held at historically black universities and colleges for a long time.

What makes the 2015-16 period distinct is that for the first time our student movement spread on to historically white universities, which opened doors to all South Africans after the fall of apartheid in 1994, but continued to retain their colonial foundations.

With this expansion returned the demand for decolonisation of education, echoed in the 2015 #RhodesMustFall campaign at the University of Cape Town, along with long-standing calls for free education and the end to outsourcing practices for campus workers.

Camille Bromley

vetlana Alexievich is someone who often answers a question with a story about other people. She has no lack of these stories, having spent more than three decades interviewing citizens of the U.S.S.R. and ex-Soviet states about their daily lived experience. In her books, each of which revolves around a central event—the Soviet-Afghan War in Zinky Boys; the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe in Voices from Chernobyl; the end of communism in Secondhand Time—history is presented as a chorus of voices, carefully arranged monologues distilled from thousands of interviews conducted over several years (in the case of Secondhand Time, from 1991 to 2012). Alexievich is continually surprised by her characters—by their willingness to talk, by their fortitude, by the depths of their love, by the immensity of their suffering. Her outlook is no less bleak for the vast range of humanity she has been witness to; evil, she says with conviction, is always present in our lives. I spoke with her via an interpreter about her acts of witness.

ZuzooVn.

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Thomas Sowell:

It is especially painful for me, as an economist, to see that two small cities in northern California — San Mateo and Burlingame — have rent control proposals on the ballot this election year.

There are various other campaigns, in other places around the country, for and against minimum wage laws, which likewise make me wonder if the economics profession has failed to educate the public in the most elementary economic lessons.

Neither rent control nor minimum wage laws — nor price control laws in general — are new. Price control laws go back as far as ancient Egypt and Babylon, and they have been imposed at one time or other on every inhabited continent.

History alone should be able to tell us what the actual consequences of such laws have been, since they have been around for thousands of years. Anyone who has taken a course in Economics 1 should understand why those consequences have been so different from what their advocates expected. It is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, advocates of a rent control law are saying things like “this will prevent some landlords from gouging tenants and making a ton of money off the housing crisis.”

The reason there is a housing crisis in the first place is that existing laws in much of California prevent enough housing from being built to supply the apartments and homes that people want. If landlords were all sweethearts, and never raised rents, that would still not get one new building built.

Rising rents are a symptom of the problem. The actual cause of the problem is a refusal of many California officials to allow enough housing to be built for all the people who want to rent an apartment.

Supply and demand is one of the first things taught in introductory economics textbooks. Why it should be a mystery to people living in an upscale community — people who have probably graduated from an expensive college — is the real puzzle. Supply and demand is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge.

Ana Júlia Pires Ribeiro:

In the last two weeks, students have occupied 1,177 high schools, 82 technical high schools, and 96 university campuses in Brazil. The majority of the occupations has been in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, which is known for its conservative politics. Students are fighting against three attacks by the illegitimate government of President Michel Temer, who overthrew the democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff in an institutional coup in August: 1) drastic reforms to the high-school curriculum through a presidential decree with no debate or discussion; 2) a constitutional amendment, PEC 241, which will freeze spending on social programs for twenty years; 3) and efforts by right-wing legislators to force through laws known as Schools Without Parties, which aim to severely limit political discussion in the classroom.

Kelly Lyle Hernandez:

Elizabeth Hinton’s richly researched new book barrels toward one chilling conclusion: beginning as early as the Johnson administration, federal authorities—regardless of political affiliation—systematically constructed a criminal justice regime that targets, criminalizes, polices, and imprisons staggering numbers of young black men, especially in urban areas.

Some readers might wonder whether the history of mass incarceration could really be so unyielding; historians rarely write with so much conviction about change over time anymore. But Hinton’s documentation is thorough and compelling. As the chapters unfold, she makes clear that, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, the federal government slowly built a trap, creating the conditions for the mass incarceration of black youth with which are now so familiar.

Timothy Bella:

As the streetlights flickered along Meadowbrook Drive in Beaumont, Texas, earlier this week, the children running around the yard in front of one of the homes are growing restless. The Hot-N-Ready pizzas from Little Caesars just aren’t cutting it anymore and Wolverine, the Winter Soldier and the Pink Power Ranger are ready to start trick-or-treating. Among the throng are eight boys wearing football jerseys.

These aren’t costumes, though. The boys are members of the Beaumont Bulls, and while you wouldn’t know the names on the back of their uniforms, this is perhaps the most talked-about youth football team in the country.

Monica Dean, the team mom hosting the gathering, recognizes the moment that’s unfolding.

Lenore Skenazy

I guess if kids want to read, they’ve got their phones.

So a local mom wrote to me:

A program my son used to go to as dropoff now requires a parent to be with him. And definitely, in our town, the library is mostly for the preschool set. Don’t they realize that after a certain point, not only do we not need to supervise their every activity but maybe we don’t even want to? Why should I give up two hours on a Saturday, sitting in the library waiting, so my son can use a 3D printing program? Isn’t it okay for us to have separate interests?

Apparently not. Here is the entire policy. Note that unreasonable safety concerns are once again undermining kid independence, as well as parents’ ability to decide for themselves what age their children are capable of doing something on their own. This is how we get parents arrested for letting their kids play outside, or waiting a few minutes in the car. It’s the bulletproof excuse that hijacks freedom.

Jonathan Winslow

An Orange senior and his granddaughter have grown closer than ever thanks to an unexpected partnership developing a new app – with grandpa handling all of the programming.

Luis Guerra, 70, and Alexandra Garcia, 27, have been working for more than a year on “KliqueShare,” an app meant to streamline renting and sharing items, especially in college communities. The app, available on the iOS App Store, lets you keep track of things you’ve shared, make requests for items you need and list items that you’re willing to rent out or sell.

Julian Sancton

Riva-Melissa Tez doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techno-utopian. For one thing, she makes eye contact. For another, she’s a woman in an overwhelmingly male sector. At 27, she is a cofounder of Permutation Ventures, an investment fund and incubator for companies hoping to harness artificial intelligence (when it arrives) for humanity’s betterment. Her atypical path to San Francisco’s futurist culture began in London, where she was born and where she spent four years in a homeless shelter. After studying philosophy at University College London (and cofounding a Notting Hill toy store), Tez moved to Berlin, where she was drawn to the transhumanist community, whose conception of the future seemed cribbed from science fiction: immortality, merging of machine and man, human engineering, etc. Tez—who has lectured on such topics at Stanford and Oxford—here explains why she expects nothing less, for herself and her fellow man, than super-health, super-longevity, and super-happiness.

Tell it to us straight: Are the robots going to take over? Are we engineering our own doom? You have systems right now that could potentially take down markets and start wars. There are huge risks. We just have to make sure people are thinking about using things like machine intelligence to improve the human condition. AI doesn’t have inherent goals, so the thing that poses the most risk is still the humans programming it.

How certain are you that we’ll ever achieve artificial intelligence? I’m probably more skeptical than most people in the field. Right now, we’re just building things that mimic certain aspects of learning, but we haven’t defined an overall principle of intelligence. In the early 20th century we wanted to build planes, so we looked at birds. We built flapping machines. We didn’t have a principle of flight, but then we worked out thermodynamics and the mechanics of lift, and we managed to build planes that work. The same thing is happening right now in AI.

Eliza Ronald’s-Hannon & Liz McCormack:

Barack Obama will go down in history as having sold more Treasuries and at lower rates than any U.S. president. He’s also leaving a debt burden that threatens to hamstring his successor.

Obama’s administration benefited from some unprecedented advantages that helped it grapple with the longest recession since the 1930s. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates at historically low levels, partly by becoming the single biggest holder of Treasuries. The U.S. could also rely on insatiable demand from international investors, led by China deploying its hoard of reserves. Global buyers added $3 trillion of Treasuries, doubling ownership to a record.

Now those tailwinds are turning around. The Fed is telegraphing more hikes at a time when interest costs on the nation’s bonds are already the highest in five years. The government’s marketable debt has more than doubled under Obama’s stewardship, to a record of almost $14 trillion. And the deficit is expanding again, after narrowing for four straight years, just as overseas holdings of Treasuries are shrinking the fastest since 2013.

Monica Disare

It’s 5 p.m. and the open house for prospective students at Pace High School in Chinatown is just getting underway. As students arrive, they are handed a clipboard with a survey.

They scribble away for the first 20 minutes or so, explaining the struggles they have overcome and which components of Pace they like. They indicate whether Pace is their top-choice school, if academic success is important to them, and whether they want to go to college.

Sharan Narang, Greg Diamos, Shubho Sengupta & Erich Elsen @ Baidu Research:

Recent advances in multiple elds such as speech recognition (Graves & Jaitly, 2014; Amodei et al., 2015), language modeling (Jozefowicz et al., 2016) and machine translation (Wu et al., 2016) can be at least partially attributed to larger training datasets, larger models and more compute that allows larger models to be trained on larger datasets.

For example, the deep neural network used for acoustic modeling in Hannun et al. (2014) had 11 million parameters which grew to approximately 67 million for bidirectional RNNs and further to 116 million for the latest forward only GRU models in Amodei et al. (2015). And in language modeling the size of the non-embedding parameters (mostly in the recurrent layers) have exploded even as various ways of hand engineering sparsity into the embeddings have been explored in Jozefowicz et al. (2016) and Chen et al. (2015a).

These large models face two signi cant challenges in deployment. Mobile phones and embedded devices have limited memory and storage and in some cases network bandwidth is also a concern. In addition, the evaluation of these models requires a signi cant amount of computation. Even if those cases when the networks can be evaluated fast enough, it will have a signicant impact on battery life in mobile phones (Han et al., 2015).

Jeff Beckham:

Phil Danaher doesn’t remember who said it, but it was one of the first lessons he learned as a young coach: write down your goals. You may not look at them every day, but writing them down helps you carry them around in your mind.

So, more than 40 years ago, he scratched a few dreams down on a sheet of spiral notebook paper. Be a good husband and father. See his kids get college scholarships. Become a head coach by his mid-twenties and move up to a big school in his mid-thirties. One goal, however, was so audacious that it never crossed his mind to include it: win more football games than any Texas high school coach in history.

Danaher has now done just that. On Thursday, his Corpus Christi Calallen High School Wildcats defeated the Corpus Christi Flour Bluff Hornets, 31-7. It was the 427th victory of Danaher’s 43-year career, pushing him just past coach G.A. Moore, who won 426 games with Celina and Pilot Point high schools.

Rebecca Jeschke:

Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.

In this case, a teenager known in court documents as Ricardo P. admitted to two cases of burglary. One condition of his parole was that he submit his phone to search at any time, whether by his probation officers or any peace officer, even though his phone use had nothing to do with the commission of the crimes.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you cannot treat personal electronic devices so cavalierly. In 2014, the court in Riley v. California recognized that government searches of cellphones implicate personal privacy in ways that few things do, and rejected the government’s claims that cellphones can be searched without a warrant. After all, cell phones contain the sum of all of our lives, including our religious views, our sexual orientations, our health conditions, or physical movements throughout the day, and more. And the privacy implications go far further than the individual juvenile on parole. Everyone the child talks to also has personal information that is exposed to law enforcement. An on-demand search without any probable cause is like letting the government have a long-running wiretap—unprecedented for a probation condition for a juvenile.

Jonathan Kozol:

IT’S NOT EASY to compete with buckets of money pouring into Massachusetts to convince the public to lift the cap on charter schools but, as a former teacher who has worked for more than 50 years with children in the nation’s schools, here’s my entry into the debate.

1. Some charter schools do an excellent job with the students they enroll. Many come up with better test scores than do their public counterparts. It does not mitigate the victories these schools may have achieved to state the clear and simple fact that, on average nationwide, charter schools are not running circles around the public schools that serve the vast majority of children. Some do better. Some do worse. Some have been consistent disappointments. The pattern here in Massachusetts may, for now, appear to be a rare exception to the norm, but as charter schools proliferate, their record seems to be increasingly uneven.

2. Partisans for Question 2 have not been eager to let the public know where their money’s coming from. But we know enough about some major sources of their funds to set off alarm bells for anyone whose political allegiances are even faintly liberal. The primary source of funding is a controversial group of New York hedge-fund billionaires that goes under the misleading name of Families for Excellent Schools and which, in turn, receives substantial sums of money from the Walton family billionaires in Arkansas. In addition, nearly $2 million more has come into the state in individual donations from two members of that family.

Related: America’s Most Influential—and Wrongest—School Reformer:

School reformer Jonathan Kozol likes to present himself as a prophet without honor in his own country, a heroic explorer of America’s slums whose painful discoveries about the institutional racism that stunts poor children go unheard and unappreciated. Pure nonsense, of course; the capitalist society Kozol so disdains has rewarded him richly, turning him into a cultural icon. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations have showered him with grants; colleges and ed schools nationwide have made his books required reading. When his Savage Inequalities appeared, Publishers Weekly—unprecedentedly—dropped five pages of paid advertising to run excerpts, printing on its cover a plea to the president to pour billions into the nation’s inner-city schools.

Far from having no influence, Kozol’s best-selling books have defined today’s education-policy orthodoxy. They have convinced many Americans that inner-city minority children are languishing academically only because their schools are segregated and starved for resources by a heartless society, and that therefore teachers should turn their classrooms into agencies for social change. The education establishment has converted these wrongheaded and damaging ideas into action—with disastrous consequences for the very disadvantaged children that Kozol claims to champion. Kozol’s mistaken but hugely influential diagnosis leads education advocates to keep proposing still more of the wrong cure, while the real causes of school failure—the monopoly public education system, the teachers’ unions, and the ed schools—go on wreaking their damage unimpeded, and inner-city schools keep on failing.

Kozol made his mark on educational policy with his very first book, Death at an Early Age, which set the stage for the nation’s catastrophic experiment with court-ordered busing. Written when Kozol was barely 27, Death at an Early Age recounts the author’s six-month teaching stint in one of Boston’s allegedly segregated public schools. Instantly acclaimed as a classic of urban poverty literature, the book provided authentic, personal witness to the notion that de facto segregation in Northern schools was as evil and deep-rooted as de jure segregation in the South, and only radical surgery could root it out.

Matt Soniak

In 1946, a group of Russian children from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation (sort of a Soviet scouting group) presented a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

The gift, a gesture of friendship to the USSR’s World War II ally, was hung in the ambassador’s official residence at Spaso House in Moscow. It stayed there on a wall in the study for seven years until, through accident and a ruse, the State Department discovered that the seal was more than a mere decoration.

It was a bug.

The Soviets had built a listening device—dubbed “The Thing” by the U.S. intelligence community—into the replica seal and had been eavesdropping on Harriman and his successors the whole time it was in the house. “It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics,” wrote George Kennan, the ambassador at the time the device was found. “I have the impression that with its discovery the whole art of intergovernmental eavesdropping was raised to a new technological level.”

Matt O’Brien:

To paraphrase noted economic expert Obi-Wan Kenobi, many of the truths we cling to about currencies really do depend greatly on our own point-of-view.

Take Venezuela. The good news is that, if you look at it over a long enough timeline, its currency hasn’t changed much the past month. The bad news, though, is that’s because it’s gone from being almost worthless to almost entirely worthless. And the worse news is that it’s actually lost over a third of its value during this stretch.

Now, there’s never been a country that should have been so rich been so poor as Venezuela. Indeed, it has the world’s largest oil reserves, but has still managed to have the world’s worst-performing economy. The International Monetary Fund estimates that its gross domestic product will end up shrinking 10 percent this year, and its inflation rate will reach 720 percent. Nor is this expected to get any better any time soon. Inflation is supposed to get up to 2,200 percent next year, and 3,000 percent the one after that.

Ron Elving

Here’s a little information that Americans have usually been able to ignore.

It’s about the Electoral College, a uniquely American institution that’s been with us from the beginning and that’s occasionally given us fits.

Typically, the Electoral College meets and does its thing a month or so after the election and few people even notice or care. Once in a while, though, people do notice and do care – a lot.

Will 2016 be one of those years?

KanyKrit Vongkiatkajorn:

Mother Jones: You followed these students for six years. What stood out to you?

Sara Goldrick-Rab: A lot of people talk about student loans with regard to how things are after you finish college, such as the challenges of repaying debt. But they don’t talk about the fact that people are so worried about debt even while they’re still in college. Watching people go without enough food to eat because they’re afraid to take out a loan, or decide to not go abroad or not hang out with friends because they’re so worried about what will happen—that to me says that we’ve changed what college is.

MJ: How so?

SGR: Well, it’s always been the case that you go to college and you get a fair bit of choice in deciding where you’re going to go, what you’re going to study and how you want to set that up. And the thing that distinguishes one choice from another is your ability—how intelligent you are and how hard you want to work. Increasingly, that’s not true. What distinguishes you and your choices is your income.

MJ: You say in the book that it’s sort of a failure of the American dream.

SGR: Well, it’s a betrayal. We tell people that the way to get ahead in life is through education, but then we only give them educational options that are unaffordable and end up shoving them backward. Imagine going to college and ending up with debt and no degree. That’s a betrayal.

Larry Sand

As the ugliest presidential campaign in almost a century comes to a merciful end, we get a glimpse into the inner workings of the biggest union in the country: the National Education Association.

Courtesy of WikiLeaks, we have learned that manipulation by NEA bosses helped to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be the union’s choice for Democratic presidential nominee.

On June 13, 2015, four days after Clinton announced her candidacy, her director of labor outreach Nikki Budzinski sent a memo to other campaign officials that discussed possible strategies for the upcoming NEA Representative Assembly, scheduled for the following month in Orlando.

Budzinski’s apprehensions were understandable. NEA had not taken any formal steps to find out who its rank-and-file actually preferred for the Democratic nomination, but it’s no secret that many in the union favored Sanders, citing the socialist’s “opposition to charter schools, support for collective bargaining rights and free tuition at public higher education institutions.”

Then on June 19th, Budzinski warned colleagues of an impending endorsement of Sanders by NEA’s Vermont affiliate. “NEA is concerned their VT affiliate could do a Tuesday (next week) recommendation of endorsement (with potential press release). This is not confirmed. The bigger concern is that RI and MA might go with VT as well.” While Budzinski went on to say that these states’ endorsement was not a “serious concern” for the Clinton endorsement, she felt it to be an “optics problem” and began to work behind the scenes with Carrie Pugh, NEA’s political director.

Amber Walker:

Isabel Rameker, a sophomore at West, addressed the elephant in the room with her question about representation.

“From what I’ve heard, a big goal of this is to close the achievement gap, specifically for African-Americans and students with disabilities. Looking around, it doesn’t look like this is a super diverse group of parents,” Rameker said. “As this goes on, now and in the future, where are you going to get input from those parents?”

Principal Thompson ensured Rameker that there are strategies in place to reach out to diverse communities.

“We are partnering with different facilities in our neighborhoods to make it more accessible for people who can’t make it here for this presentation,” she said.

Fralin stressed that Personalized Pathways is for all students.

“We actually want to create more options for more students, not a small group or a subgroup of students,” he said. “It is not designed to limit, but actually expand opportunities and choices for kids.”

Fralin pointed out that the district is partnering with institutions like Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to expand opportunities for learning and advanced level coursework.

Treiber believes some of the backlash against Pathways by some of the parents who attended the meeting stems from unconscious bias.

“We have a serious issue in Madison that we are not interested in addressing. It is not intentional; it is not meant to be hurtful, but we cannot seem to get over the fact that if something is changing that somehow ‘I’m going to get less,’” she said. “I think we have that in our nation and we have that in our city. (Madison) is a microcosm of our country and we are not really interested in looking at that. We caveat it with ‘I’m worried about my kid.’ Your kid is going to be fine.”

Schools will continue to host informational sessions about Pathways. The list of upcoming meetings is available on the MMSD website.

Previous Madison High School initiatives include: English 10 (one size for all) and “small learning communities“.

– via a kind reader.

Issie Lapowsky:

San Quentin’s dev shop is the brainchild of Chris Redlitz, a venture capitalist who founded the Last Mile as a nonprofit in 2010 to offer inmates entrepre­neurial training. Working with the coding school Hack ­Reactor, Redlitz spun up a tech incubator inside the prison called Code.7370 (after the government classification number for software companies). Inmates learn Java­Script, Python, and WordPress before presenting their portfolios at a Demo Day. By year’s end, the program will be active in three additional prisons.

The Last Mile Works gives Code.7370 grads a way to get real-world experience on the inside. Because they can’t use the internet, the dev shop’s coders work on a closed network, and a manager pushes the results to the outside. Any money the shop makes is funneled back into the nonprofit. The tech industry is the perfect fit for job seekers with unusual résumés, Redlitz says. “It’s about the quality of your work, not your back­ground.” Inmates can’t go online, but coding connects them to the 21st-century economy they’ll enter when they’re free.

Morgan Chesky:

A King County letter that ended up in the mailboxes of thousands of pet owners is raising concerns over privacy.

The letter told pet owners to license their pets or face a $250 fine.

“It feels weird to me, it feels like they’re kind of snooping around in a place where they shouldn’t be,” said dog owner Chris Lee.

Turns out for the last four years, King County has been using data companies to target specific taxpayers, or in this case pet owners. That means every time customers swipe those rewards cards, they’re gathering data.

“This is kind of standard marketing practice or procedure that people use,” said Cameron Satterfield, from King County Animal Services.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

“Inconsistency in grading and academic expectations between the middle schools may contribute to difficulty in transitioning to high school. The differences between the feeder middle schools are significant.”

– MMSD Coursework Review, 2014

A recent tax increase referendum funded the expansion of Madison’s least diverse middle school: Hamilton.

We’ve long spent more than most, now about $18,000 per student annually, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Worth a deep drive: Madison measures of academic progress (MAP) results….

Tyler Arnold:

Bucking the free-speech zone trend, Kansas State University is telling students they are legally permitted to demonstrate or protest anywhere they want for any cause they want.

“The whole campus is a free speech area,” the K-State Office of General Counsel states in its October legal briefing, noting that as a public university, the school cannot and will not require anyone to register with the university prior to having a public demonstration or protest.

“As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended.”

Even when the speech in question is “controversial or offending,” such as a speaker shouting derogatory remarks at passersby, the school’s attorneys declare emphatically that only behaviors rising to the level of criminality are subject to intervention.

“As a general rule, there is no right to not be offended,” they point out, arguing that “if the government started shutting down speech that is offensive to some, it would end up shutting down all speech, because virtually everything can be offensive to some.”

Zach Cmiel

After reading Nathan Bashaw and Hank Green’s articles on the school system, I was inspired to write my own version. (Nathan’s and Hank’s)

I’m a junior in high school and I love entrepreneurship and business. I’ve made 14+ apps on the iOS App Store and have explored design and marketing through an e-commerce t-shirt shop and music discovery newsletter.
I agree with many of the points that both Nathan and Hank stated. Nathan brought up many notable points such as that the internet will continue to push the boundaries in education and push progress forward.

He goes on to say that his version of the education system would be very much curiosity based where students are encouraged to ask questions in which they must find the answers. No courses. No curriculm. It’s a very student led process with guidance by a mentor.

Madison administrators ave attempted a number of redesign schemes on our $18k / student k-12 system. One size fits all (English 10) and small learning communities are just two examples.

Sarah Karp

But Chicago Public Schools officials said the cap does not necessarily mean there’s a district-wide moratorium on expanding charter schools.

“There’s plenty of room for high quality charter operators to apply and to go through our process,” said CPS CEO Forrest Claypool. “There is not a moratorium and there’s room under the cap for high quality charter operators.”

Charter schools are publicly funded, privately run schools that have long been criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union.

The new contract negotiated between CPS and the union states there will be no net increase in the number of charter schools approved by the Chicago Board of Education, the governing body overseeing CPS. The agreement also says the number of students enrolled at charter schools by the end of the 2018 to 2019 school year will not exceed 101 percent of the total number of students in charters during the 2015 to 2016 school year.

Hugo Peyre, Franck Ramus, Maria Melchior, Anne Forhan, Barbara Heude, Nicolas Gauvrit, on behalf of the EDEN Mother-Child Cohort Study Group:

High intelligence may be associated with emotional, behavioral and social difficulties. However, this hypothesis is supported by little compelling, population-based evidence, and no study has been conducted during the preschool period with a population-based sample.
Method: Children (N = 1100) from the EDEN mother–child cohort were assessed at the age of 5–6 years. Behavioral, emotional and social problems (emotional symptoms, conduct problems, symptoms of hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationship problems and prosocial behavior) were measured using the parent-rated Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaires (SDQ). IQ scores were based on the WPPSI-III at 5–6 years. Relevant covariates for children’s cognitive development were also collected.

Results: We found no significant differences in SDQ scores between gifted children (N = 23; Full Scale IQ N 130) and children with Full Scale IQ in the normal range (N = 1058 ≥ 70 and ≤130), except a marginally significant association between high-IQ and emotional difficulties at 5–6 years. Further sensitivity analyses did not support the association between high-IQ and emotional difficulties.
Discussion: During the preschool period, gifted children do not seem to manifest more behavioral, emotional and social problems than children with normal IQ.

Erin Richards:

Saying that Milwaukee Public Schools has not effectively engaged children of color, Superintendent Darienne Driver is proposing a slate of major reforms, including mandating student uniforms, launching the school year in August and imposing principal coaching and potential staff changes at the lowest-performing schools.

If anyone was waiting for a mic drop from the superintendent, who is two years into her tenure and still shy of 40 years old, this might be it.

“I think we’re in the right mind-set for improvement, and it’s time to kick it into action,” Driver told the Milwaukee School Board Tuesday night after she revealed the ideas, which also include creating an office of black and Latino male achievement. More details will be released to MPS staff and parents this week, with a districtwide survey going out Friday.

“We want to get as much feedback about this as possible,” Driver said.

Andrew Palumbo:

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) recently confirmed to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation that we would end our participation in the National Merit Scholarship program and ceased offering scholarships to recipients of the College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Weeks earlier, when we had discussed this move with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a representative of the organization suggested we reconsider. She said that this decision could negatively impact the school’s ability to recruit students who are eligible for other universities’ National Merit Scholarship awards.

Ultimately, this was a consequence that we were willing to accept in order to better align our scholarship offerings with WPI’s institutional goals and values.

T. Rees Shapiro

A federal court jury decided Friday that a Rolling Stone journalist defamed a former University of Virginia associate dean in a 2014 magazine article about sexual assault on campus that included a debunked account of a fraternity gang rape.

The 10 member jury concluded that the Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was responsible for defamation, with actual malice, in the case brought by Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. administrator who oversaw sexual violence cases at the time of the article’s publication. The jury also found the magazine and its publisher responsible for defaming Eramo.

Ashley Jochim

With enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act, responsibility for improving student outcomes is back under states’ purview, empowering them to craft their own evidence-based turnaround strategies. Recent state-initiated turnarounds have taken many forms and all turnarounds aim to catalyze improvement in student outcomes. But the evidence base around these strategies is weak, and existing research provides little guidance to help states develop more effective strategies.

Using the most rigorous evaluations available, this report identifies various mechanisms states can use to intervene in schools and dives deep into nearly a dozen recent turnarounds in eight states. It maps the five common turnaround approaches: state support for local turnaround, state-authorized turnaround zone, mayoral control, school takeover, and district takeover. And it analyzes what is known about state-initiated turnaround in all its forms.

The report is designed to help states ensure their support is more targeted, better received, and, ultimately, more effective. Three core findings emerge from the evaluations:

Fergus Walsh

Having sequenced thousands of tumour genomes, they found a 20-a-day smoker would rack up an average of 150 mutations in every lung cell each year.

The changes are permanent, and persist even if someone gives up smoking.
Researchers say analysing tumour DNA may help explain the underlying causes of other cancers.

Pamela Pugh, 69, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013. She started smoking aged 17 and quit in her early 50s.

Jeff Noonan:

Teaching at the university level is not a practice of communicating or transferring information but awakening in students a desire to think by revealing to them the questionability of things. The desire to think is awakened in students if the teacher is able to reveal the importance of the discipline as a way of exposing to question established “solutions” to fundamental problems of human experience, thought, activity, relationship, and organization. Teaching does not instruct or transmit information, it embodies and exemplifies the commitment to thinking.
2. True teaching is thus a practice, a performance of cognitive freedom which awakens in students a sense of their own cognitive freedom. Both are rooted in the most remarkable power of the brain: not to simulate, not to sense, not to tabulate, not to infer, but to co-constitute the objective world of which it is an active part. In thinking we do not just passively register the world, we transform it by making it the object of thought, i.e, an object that can be questioned and changed. To think is thus to cancel the alien objectivity of the world and to become a subject, an active force helping to shape the order of things.

Abbie Alford:

Since she posted the letter, the family has received an outpouring of support with more than 200 comments.

“They are great parents, great family. You are not defined by your square footage, especially here at the beach,” said a family friend.

Friends and family hope the sender learns to not be so quick to judge.

Laura Krantz:

Suffolk University’s interim president said Tuesday that the college will hold mandatory microaggression training for all faculty in response to an outcry last week after a Latina student wrote a viral blog post saying she was the victim of a professor’s racial bias.

The interim leader, Marisa Kelly, said the school takes the incident seriously and wants to make sure no students feel discriminated against at Suffolk.

Kelly also listed a number of new administrators that have been hired in recent months to address matters of diversity and inclusion and said the school two weeks ago launched an internal climate survey to assess areas that need improvement.

“While these [microaggression training] sessions will not make us perfect, it is my hope that through training and open dialog we will further foster a climate that is safe, supportive, and welcoming to all,” Kelly wrote in a blog post Tuesday posted on the university website.

Constance Grady

As Jessica Ellis pointed out on Twitter, Moore’s assertion is historically inaccurate: Women worked on the Manhattan Project, were instrumental Nazi leaders, and have shot up schools. Women have committed all sorts of atrocities — it’s just that most of them have been erased from history, in the same way that most of women’s more positive accomplishments have been erased.

We don’t learn in school about Elizabeth Graves, who helped to create the first atomic bomb, just as we don’t learn about Cecilia Payne, who discovered that hydrogen is the building block of the universe. We don’t, in general, learn about the women who do things, regardless of whether those things are great or terrible.

Corey Robin:

Yesterday, Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown gave a once-in-a-lifetime talk at the Graduate Center—the kind that reminds you what it means to be a political theorist—about the way in which financialization—not just privatization or corporatization—had transformed the academy. Through a deft re-reading of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures, Brown showed how much the contemporary university’s frenzied quest for rankings and ratings has come to mirror Wall Street’s obsession with shareholder value.

In the course of her talk, Brown briefly dilated on the suspicion of public goods in today’s academy. She referenced one university leader saying, with no apparent irony, that the problem with state funding is that it comes with strings attached. The unsaid implication, of course, is that private funding is somehow free of those constraints, a comment that Brown used to open a window onto our contemporary infatuation, even in the academy, with the world of private money and private funding.

Preston Cooper::

The rule, known as the “defense to repayment” rule because it allows borrowers to defend themselves against repaying their student loans, is another installment in a long saga of government officials using student-aid programs to wield influence over American higher education. Whoever writes the checks makes the rule, and the DOE uses its power to advance an agenda far beyond merely ensuring that taxpayers’ money is put to good use.

Laurent Haug.

Erin Richards:

The Milwaukee Common Council is considering a proposal from Rocketship charter school to buy an empty Milwaukee Public Schools building, and a new state law is on the charter school’s side.

But there’s a possibility the district could be, too: Rocketship leaders say they’ll seek a charter from MPS to revive a school program in the building, which could bolster the district’s enrollment numbers.

The Common Council is scheduled to take up the proposal at its meeting Tuesday.

If the sale of the empty Carleton Elementary School, 4116 W. Silver Spring Drive, goes through, it would pave the way for Rocketship Education to open its second school in Milwaukee, and its first on the north side. Rocketship, a nonprofit charter-management company based in California, would eventually enroll about 500 students in kindergarten through fifth grade there. But it would first need to raise $2 million, leaders say, and obtain a charter from a state-authorized authority to run the program.

Rick Seltzer

The first audits of the employment data that law schools report about their recent graduates have generated concern among watchdogs, with a series of reviews finding several deficiencies that raise questions about the class of 2015’s reported outcomes.
Most notably, a review of 10 randomly selected schools found that half had missed a compliance benchmark for the documentation they are supposed to keep on file when reporting key metrics like whether their students are employed 10 months after graduation and whether they are working in a position that required them to pass the bar. Schools were flagged for not being able to show documentation to support important parts of reported employment data, or if investigators found evidence key pieces of employment data were incomplete, inaccurate or misleading.

Other reviews found issues at a substantially smaller percentage of schools related to handling documentation or posting required information online.

The audits, performed at the behest of the arm of the American Bar Association that accredits law schools, are not final. ABA leaders say they do not have a hard timeline for when the reviews will be completed, but indicated that the issues uncovered tend to be clerical in nature and were not instances of “gross misreporting” or “attempts to manipulate.”

Tiffany Martinez:

My name is Tiffany Martínez. As a McNair Fellow and student scholar, I’ve presented at national conferences in San Francisco, San Diego, and Miami. I have crafted a critical reflection piece that was published in a peer-reviewed journal managed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Higher Education and Council for Opportunity in Education. I have consistently juggled at least two jobs and maintained the status of a full-time student and Dean’s list recipient since my first year at Suffolk University. I have used this past summer to supervise a teen girls empower program and craft a thirty page intensive research project funded by the federal government. As a first generation college student, first generation U.S. citizen, and aspiring professor I have confronted a number of obstacles in order to earn every accomplishment and award I have accumulated. In the face of struggle, I have persevered and continuously produced content that is of high caliber.

Rick Rommell:

About two-thirds of the projected employment growth was in occupations requiring only a high school diploma, or no educational credential at all to get started in the field, the researchers concluded. (A graphic in the report shows mistaken figures.)

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of projections for 2014 through 2024 that, unlike the extension study, included all occupations, found less-discouraging results. But stacked against the country as a whole, Wisconsin didn’t fare particularly well.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 49% of the job growth nationwide through 2024 will come in occupations that typically require people entering the field to have education beyond high school.

The comparable figure for Wisconsin: 40%.

Similarly, 34% of jobs here are projected to be in occupations that typically don’t even require a high school diploma to enter, compared with 29% nationwide.

Wisconsin will have so many job openings requiring a high school diploma or less that the state won’t have enough appropriately skilled workers to fill them, the extension researchers say.

On the other hand, they say, the number of college-educated workers will exceed the number of jobs typically requiring a degree.

Will Fitzhugh:

High School students planning to go to college should know that they will face reading lists of nonfiction books and be asked to write research papers. The vast majority of American public high school students are not asked to read a single complete nonfiction book or to write a term paper before graduation. But they suspect that the safe spaces of fiction readings and personal writing will not prepare them well enough for college. In many cases their teachers have neither the inclination nor the time to help them with History research papers, and while some students, such as many of those published in The Concord Review since 1987, have set up Independent Study programs which let them write such papers, others may want to make use of the services we offer to serious secondary students of History:

One: The TCR Academic Coaching Service matches high school students working on a History research paper online with TCR Authors now at or recently graduated from Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. Personal advice and guidance from a successful older peer (many are Emerson Prize winners) can be inspiring and productive for secondary students struggling with serious term papers. Contact Jessica@tcr.org (Manager of the TCR Academic Coaches).

Two: The TCR Summer Program offers a two-week course on the writing of serious History papers by secondary students, with two sessions in the United States and one in Korea in 2017. Contact: steven.lee@tcr.org (Manager of the TCR Summer Program). tcr.org/summer.

Three: The National Writing Board provides a unique independent assessment service for the History research papers of high school students. Our reports by two Senior Readers now average five pages. Inquire at tcr.org/nwb.

Four: The Concord Review can provide students with examples from the History research papers published by 1,200 high school students from 44 states and many other countries since 1987. This journal remains the only one in the world for the academic History research papers of secondary students. These papers have served many students as useful models of research and writing to inspire and guide them in their own reading, research and writing. Seek them at tcr.org/bookstore.

Will Fitzhugh, Founder
The Concord Review
National Writing Board
fitzhugh@tcr.org; tcr.org/subscribe

Corey Robin:

One of the claims you hear a lot these days is that the new progressive coalition of the liberal left will consist of women, people of color, and urban professionals of the sorts you find at universities or in the media or Google or places like that. This coalition was first mooted by the McGovern campaign, and a lot of breathless commentary now sees the Democratic Party, particularly in its Clintonite wing, as the fruition of that vision. On any given night on Twitter, you’re sure to find some liberal journalist or academic braying about his happy association with this constellation of forces.

But the recent, successful strike of Harvard’s dining hall workers, many of whom are women and people of color, is a useful demonstration of the limits of that vision. While Harvard’s liberal scholars get $10 million grants to study poverty, Harvard workers like Rosa Ines Rivera are forced to manage realities like this:

Adrian Wooldridge:

One of the great things about the emerging world is the service. In the West people spend their lives battling self-service checkouts or mesmerised by automated voices that tell them their custom is very important. In the emerging world waiters compete to pour your tea and masseurs vie to pummel your body. In Delhi I was once approached by a man who, Q-tip in hand, offered to de-wax my ears. But the service economy contains bear-traps for naive foreigners.

I once visited Tata Steel, in the depths of the Bengali jungle. Getting there condemns you to passing through Kolkata airport, which is run by the communist-dominated local government for the express purpose of humiliating itinerant capitalists. The man standing next to me in the security queue struck up a conversation about the evils of the British Empire. It was so humid that I couldn’t see through my glasses. The only thing that kept me going was the prospect of being pampered.

As soon as I arrived in my hotel, the Indian genius for service kicked in. A charming man knocked on my door, introduced himself as my personal valet, and promised to get my suit dry-cleaned, my clothes washed and my shoes polished so that I could see my face in them, and deliver my belongings to my room by sunrise. Exuberant at the thought of being treated like a maharajah, I handed him everything I wasn’t wearing.

Thomas Frank:

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

Laura Waters

It’s just so Jersey. Senate President Steve Sweeney, gubernatorial-hopeful, makes the fiscally responsible decision to delay a Senate vote on a constitutional amendment that would require the state to fully fund teacher pensions. Irate NJEA leaders, still clutching a grudge over Sweeney’s involvement in the state’s 2011 pension/health benefits reform law, hang the eminent legislator out to dry and make an early endorsement of Phil Murphy, a Goldman Sachs multimillionaire who makes fantastical promises about fully funding pensions yet surely knows better..

Hence, New Jersey continues its long history of making promises to retired teachers that it will never keep.

Alejandro Matros

More than 1 in 4 of the nation’s full-time teachers are considered chronically absent from school, according to federal data, missing the equivalent of more than two weeks of classes each academic year in what some districts say has become an educational crisis.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights estimated this summer that 27 percent of the nation’s teachers are out of school for more than 10 days of regular classes — some missing far more than 10 days — based on self-reported numbers from the nation’s school districts. But some school systems, especially those in poor, rural areas and in some major cities, saw chronic absenteeism among teachers rise above 75 percent in 2014, the last year for which data is available.

Thomas Frank:

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Adam Creighton

The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries.

Falling transport costs combined with growing competition for talented workers have seen the ranks of highly skilled immigrant workers living in a group of mostly advanced nations (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) swell 130% to 28 million over the two decades to 2010, with the number from non-OECD (typically poorer) countries surging 185% to 17.6 million.

Daniel Lattier :

Professors usually spend about three to six months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will, therefore, be read by…

… an average of 10 people.

Yes, you read that correctly. The numbers reported by recent studies are pretty bleak:

– 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once.

– Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read.

– Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

So what’s the reason for this madness? Why does the world continue to be subjected to just under 2 million academic journal articles each year?

Many academic articles today are merely “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended.

Stephen Chen:

Chinese and Canadian scientists say they have successfully carried out a form of teleportation across an entire city.

The two teams working independently have teleported near-identical versions of tiny particles called photons through cables across Calgary in Canada and Hefei in Anhui province.
The forms of teleported photons were destroyed in one laboratory and recreated in another more than 8km apart in the two cities through optical fibre.

Similar experiments have been carried out before, but only within the same laboratory.
A physicist not involved in either of the studies said the research was a step forward in the development of a “quantum internet”, a futuristic particle-based information system that could be much more secure than existing forms of digital data.

Quantum networks make eavesdropping almost impossible because the particles used cannot be observed without being altered.

Colleen Flaherty

Faculty members in English at Ohio State University say 18 non-tenure-track lecturer jobs have been saved, at least for this year. The university maintains that their jobs were never at risk. Faculty members said earlier this week that Ohio State had been struggling to come up with approximately $500,000 to fulfill the 18 contracts for first-year writing instructors, which extend through summer. They organized against midyear cuts on social media and in a stock letter to Bruce McPheron, provost. Some traced the funding issue to the university’s conversion from quarters to semesters, but were unsure why it became an urgent problem now, several years after the change and well into the academic year.

Faculty members said they were told Monday that their contracts would be honored, but the university said it was always its intention to fulfill them and attributed concerns to miscommunication. Benjamin Johnson, university spokesman, said via email that Ohio State “values the role that our lecturers and other associated faculty play in supporting and furthering our overall educational mission” and that the College of Arts and Sciences “will be working with the Department of English to address these budget challenges. We acknowledge the concerns expressed regarding the associated [faculty] and regret any confusion.”

Scott Greenfield::

They have a point. What was he thinking, bucking the forces of social justice in academia using that most nefarious of weapons, reason.

Apologia: In the past, I’ve been critical of academics for their failure to call out flagrant intellectual dishonesty, particularly when I’ve been informed privately that they despise what’s happening on campus, but to speak out would be to invite being called “racist” and “misogynist.” I’ve called them coward for failure to take a little heat.

In light of this incident, perhaps I was hasty and unfair. I don’t have to answer to a 12-member committee of “intellectuals” mumbling gibberish, so it’s no big deal to shoulder the SJW’s epithets. They, on the other hand, could be out of a tenured job (which is a pretty sweet gig).

Rowena Mason

British schools deserve to score only 6.5 out of 10 compared with education systems in other countries and would be further set back if new grammar schools were allowed, the chief inspector of schools has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, said the UK education system was getting better since it had been in “special measures, in intensive care, in the 70s, 80s and much of the 90s”, but an expansion of grammar schools planned by Theresa May would stall progress.

James Manyika, Susan Lund, Jacques Bughin, Kelsey Robinson, Jan Mischke, and Deepa Mahajan

Working nine to five for a single employer bears little resemblance to the way a substantial share of the workforce makes a living today. Millions of people assemble various income streams and work independently, rather than in structured payroll jobs. This is hardly a new phenomenon, yet it has never been well measured in official statistics—and the resulting data gaps prevent a clear view of a large share of labor-market activity.

David Dayen

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

New Schools for New Orleans

When I was growing up, my biggest obstacle to academic success was my self-esteem, which held me back from trying hard in school. Although my parents taught me about the impact of a good education, I didn’t believe I could do well, so I never put in the effort I needed to excel. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that that I started listening to my parents and mentors, who encouraged me to pursue my goals and live up to my potential.

That’s why when InspireNOLA took over Andrew H. Wilson in 2015, our goal was to create an environment where both the culture and structure would bring out the best in our students. We had experience taking two other charter schools- Alice Harte and Edna Karr- from a “D” academic rating to an “A,” and we were excited about working in a turnaround environment to support a similar transformation at Wilson.

InspireNOLA started by recruiting teachers and administrators who shared our vision of student excellence, and were willing to use data from our quarterly benchmark assessments to drive instruction and curriculum in the classroom.

Moritz Hardt, Eric Price & Nathan Srebro

We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in su- pervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the protected group are avail- able, we show how to optimally adjust any learned predictor so as to remove discrimination according to our definition. Our framework also improves incentives by shifting the cost of poor classification from disadvantaged groups to the decision maker, who can respond by improving the classification accuracy.

In line with other studies, our notion is oblivious: it depends only on the joint statistics of the predictor, the target and the protected attribute, but not on interpretation of individual features. We study the inherent limits of defining and identifying biases based on such oblivious measures, outlining what can and cannot be inferred from different oblivious tests.
We illustrate our notion using a case study of FICO credit scores.

News & Observer

As part of an assessment of how the state is doing heading into a critical election Nov. 8, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer asked the candidates for governor about their plans for education. Here are answers from Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his challengers, Democrat Roy Cooper and Libertarian Lon Cecil.

Q: North Carolina per-pupil spending lags well behind the national average and behind its neighbors. Should North Carolina spend more in its public school classrooms, and where should it find the money?

Cecil: NC clearly needs more spending in the classroom and teaching positions. This will have to be achieved by reducing the overhead of non-teaching “administrators” and assuring that additional funding be insulated from any new administrative skimming.

Madison spends more than most, $18k/student.

Ana Swenson:

To economic historians like Joel Mokyr, there’s nothing inevitable about the incredible wealth and health of the modern world. But for a spark in a little corner of Europe that ignited the Industrial Revolution — which spread incredible advances in technology and living standards first across the north Atlantic coast in the 1700 and 1800s and gradually around the world — we could all be living the nasty, brutish and short lives of our ancestors centuries before.

Mokyr, who teaches at Northwestern University, dives into the mystery of how the world went from being poor to being so rich in just a few centuries in a forthcoming book, “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.”

September 6 2016 (PDF).

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Will Fitzhugh:

TCR Singles Contains one featured essay from a previous issue of The Concord Review (TCR).

TCR contains essays from a unique international journal of exemplary history research papers by secondary students of history.

This issue features:
“Japan in Korea” was written by Min Ji Cindy Koh while attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts

“The Tudors” was written by Caroline Elizabeth Walton while attending The Summit Country Day School in Cincinnati, Ohio

“Twenty-Year Armistice” was written by Jack Li while attending Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, California

“Henrietta Swan Leavitt” was written by Anya Rosener while attending Clayton High School in Clayton, Missouri

“Smallpox Controversy of 1722” was written by Erin Wenokur while attending San Francisco University High School in San Francisco, California

61 page 4MB PDF. Much more on the District’s budget, here (about $18K/student).

Property tax levy and budget adoption slides.

2017-2018 Madison School District Budget Planning Document. Calendar

David Kirk

When I was in high school, I earned A’s in all my math classes — until I took calculus. In algebra and geometry, I could coast on memorizing formulas, but now I had to think for myself.

It was disastrous, culminating in my getting a charity “C,” and I barely passed my college calculus class.

The reason, I was convinced, was that I didn’t have a math mind. I have avoided the subject ever since.

Zadie Smith

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it’s a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected – compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose – maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers – you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

TIFFANY MARTÍNEZ

My name is Tiffany Martínez. As a McNair Fellow and student scholar, I’ve presented at national conferences in San Francisco, San Diego, and Miami. I have crafted a critical reflection piece that was published in a peer-reviewed journal managed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Higher Education and Council for Opportunity in Education. I have consistently juggled at least two jobs and maintained the status of a full-time student and Dean’s list recipient since my first year at Suffolk University. I have used this past summer to supervise a teen girls empower program and craft a thirty page intensive research project funded by the federal government. As a first generation college student, first generation U.S. citizen, and aspiring professor I have confronted a number of obstacles in order to earn every accomplishment and award I have accumulated. In the face of struggle, I have persevered and continuously produced content that is of high caliber.

Detroit Free Press

That’s our advice to Detroit voters, who’ll be picking an entirely new school board Nov. 8.

There are 63 candidates vying for seven positions, leaving myriad possibilities for coalitions or infighting, for forward-looking governance or dwelling in the past.
Sadly, the Michigan Legislature hasn’t given full control of the district’s finances to the new board, choosing instead to empower a group of overseers to make some of the most crucial financial decisions.

Astonishing. Madison has endured a number of uncontested elections recently.

Robert Pianta:

Recently U.S. Secretary of Education John King announced the Department’s new regulations for a teacher preparation program accountability system. This is the Department’s final rule concerning the Federal role in regulating teacher preparation under Title II of the Higher Education Act, with provisions very similar to prior versions. On cue, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, rejected the rules out of hand.

Will other professional groups, also opposed to prior version of these regulations, break ranks and stand down from obstructing requirements that student learning be an outcome for which teacher preparation programs should be held accountable? Instead, will they stand up and lead the profession, to ensure these regulations are implemented with rigor? If both major teachers’ unions and the association of colleges of teacher education again line up in opposition, painting these as another instance of over-valuing high stakes testing, they will have secured their position as obstructing the long-term improvement of the profession they claim to represent.

Related: Wisconsin’s “toe dip” on teacher content knowledge requirements, adopting a slice of MTEL.

Tawnell Hobbs:

Billboards, glossy mailers and ads at movie theaters here promote the offerings available at public schools. In Los Angeles, dozens of 8-foot-high banners with photos of college-bound students line a busy road, targeting families with school-age children.

Westonka Public Schools in Minnesota sends parents a baby bag filled with a district-logoed bib, a welcome letter from the superintendent and a course catalog.

In an era of school choice, with charter schools and even other districts threatening to cut into their enrollments and funding, traditional public schools are fighting back with expensive marketing campaigns and retooled offerings to appeal to students. Some schools are even adopting the fancy uniforms associated with charters.

Rose Courtreau:

Shortly after moving to New York two years ago, I began volunteering as a writing mentor at Minds Matter, a large, multi-city nonprofit that helps prepare underserved high-school students for college. Just a few months earlier, I’d graduated from a liberal-arts college I’d attended after participating in a similar program, and I felt both obliged to pay my good fortune forward and uniquely qualified to do so. If my experience had taught me anything, it was the power of a compelling personal narrative.

By the time I’d decided, mid-way through high school, that I wanted to attend college—and not just any college, but a competitive one, filled with Gothic Revival buildings and storied histories—I had to contend with a spotty transcript, virtually no extracurriculars, and an SAT math score inferior to that of many middle schoolers. Then I heard about QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects low-income youth with top schools.

Daniel Penev:

1.
“Close down the lending libraries and buy every citizen an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription,” Forbes contributor Tim Worstall wrote in July 2014, arguing that his native U.K. might thus save a lot of taxpayers’ money.
Given that the amount of new digital content produced in 2011 amounts to several million times the combined contents of every book ever written, it is easy to see why technology-fascinated experts and non-specialists alike have propagated the idea that libraries will soon fall prey to Google, Amazon, and other technological giants. However, public libraries around the globe are increasingly disproving hardcore pessimists like Worstall and others who find libraries irrelevant in the modern age. Simply put, these pessimists make a fundamental mistake: They look at libraries as reactionary spaces filled with nothing but shelves.

Beth Mole:

To adjust to our digital world, the American Academy of Pediatrics rebooted its thinking on children’s media use Friday by giving parents considerably looser recommendations than those of the past.

“These are the best recommendations at this point in time based on more recent research,” Anne Francis, AAP spokesperson and general practitioner, told Ars.

Most notably, the academy ditched its strict ban on screen time for kids under the age of two, which had been in place since 1999. Now, the AAP acknowledges that not all screen time is equal, and even very young kids can benefit from certain types of media if parents and caregivers are involved.

Specifically, the AAP now says that for kids of any age—notably infants 0 to 18 months—video-chatting (e.g. Skype and FaceTime) is A-OK with supervision. There’s little data to suggest that this is beneficial, but observational studies indicate that babies younger than 18 months can indeed emotionally engage with remote relatives over video chat. This can “facilitate social connections,” the AAP notes. But, for the 0 to 18-month crowd, video-chatting is all the screen time they get.

Alan Borsuk:

Keep this phrase in mind: Education savings accounts.

It may not be occurring at your kitchen table, but at some tables, people are talking about the future of school choice programs in Wisconsin. And these are, in many cases, important people — thought leaders and political leaders among Republicans and conservatives — who are likely to have strong roles to play when decisions are made as part of the hugely important state budget process next spring.

Among those people, education savings accounts — ESAs, in the jargon of this — are an idea of considerable interest. Vouchers 2.0, some say. The next step in giving parents power over the education of their children, rather than leaving it with school systems (even private ones), some say.

You may think we have a lot of school choice these days, and there is certainly a case for saying that. In fact, let’s summarize things a little bit since I assume only people who are paid to do this understand the landscape.

Bethany Mandel

It isn’t easy being a kid these days: the school day has changed a great deal since the current generation of grade school kids’ parents were in school. With a greater emphasis on school work and testing, something in the school day had to disappear to make way for the focus on more academic pursuits like math, science and reading. For many American kids, art, music and recess are endangered parts of their day. What this means is more time trapped in desk chairs and less time moving around, fewer opportunities for open creativity and more rote memorization. It’s no wonder longtime teachers have noticed kids have a harder time sitting still now than ever before.

Matt Stoller:

One of their first targets was an old man from Texarkana: a former cotton tenant farmer named Wright Patman who had served in Congress since 1929. He was also the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency and had been for more than a decade. Antiwar liberal reformers realized that the key to power in Congress was through the committee system; being the chairman of a powerful committee meant having control over the flow of legislation. The problem was: Chairmen were selected based on their length of service. So liberal reformers already in office, buttressed by the Watergate Babies’ votes, demanded that the committee chairmen be picked by a full Democratic-caucus vote instead.

Ironically, as chairman of the Banking Committee, Patman had been the first Democrat to investigate the Watergate scandal. But he was vulnerable to the new crowd he had helped usher in. He was old; they were young. He had supported segregation in the past and the war in Vietnam; they were vehemently against both. Patman had never gone to college and had been a crusading economic populist during the Great Depression; the Watergate Babies were weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence.

Apoorva Mandavilli:

Kyle starts to bounce on the balls of his feet. Just a small bounce at first, but higher and faster and louder as the minutes pass. He twirls the long shoelace of his toy, a tiny teal Converse sneaker speckled with white stars. When his mother comes back to check on him, he’s too agitated to even look at her. He walks away, turns his head and nips at the underside of his upper arm, then bounces some more, winding and unwinding the lace. He jiggles the handle of a door labeled “ECT Suite,” trying to get in, but it’s locked.

Finally, it’s time. Melinda Walker, the nurse he adores, comes out of the room and gives him a hug. After a brief conversation with him, she says softly, “Come on in, Kyle.”

Van Nguyen

Update 7:02 p.m.: Among the tablers on the West Mall, the Young Conservatives of Texas held a bake sale — but instead of selling cookies for charity, they used baked goods to express their opinions on affirmative action.

The anti-affirmative action bake sale, which took place on Thursday from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., led to protest from close to 300 students for several hours. Prices for baked goods were sold based on the race and gender of the purchaser, and lower prices were allocated to black and hispanic students, while Native American students were offered the sale items for free. Asian students were asked to pay the highest prices, followed by white students.

James Astill:

To sit by our local pool in Bethesda, Maryland, at swimming-lesson time, as I do every Saturday morning, is to marvel at American ambition, positivity and derring-do. Those qualities are apparent in the enthusiasm with which my children are whooped into the water by their relentlessly upbeat instructors. They are there in the short shrift the instructors give to any whingeing. My youngest was just three when he started at the pool and liable to protest; he got a lot of warm-hearted sympathy, but no let-up. “C’mon dude, stop complaining, let’s get on with it!”

Yet my children’s experience of school in America is in some ways as indifferent as their swimming classes are good, for the country’s elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff. According to the OECD’s latest international education rankings, American children are rated average at reading, below average at science, and poor at maths, at which they rank 27th out of 34 developed countries. At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at maths that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up.

Steve Stecklow, Renee Dudley, James Pomfret and Alexandra Harney

A major Chinese education company has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities to help students apply to American schools.

And according to eight former employees of Shanghai-based Dipont Education Management Group, the company’s services didn’t end there.

Six told Reuters that Dipont employees wrote application essays for students. Another said she altered recommendation letters that teachers had written for students. One student was given access to his high school transcript and erased bad grades, one of the former employees said.

Dipont denies the allegations of application fraud but boasts of its special relationship with some 20 U.S. colleges, which include Vanderbilt University, Wellesley College, Tulane University and the University of Virginia. Their admissions officers have visited China since 2014, personally advising Dipont students at an annual summer program on how to successfully apply to U.S. colleges.

“Just once a year, current admissions officers become your exclusive consultants,” an ad from Dipont tells prospective clients. The same ad features a Wellesley student crediting the Dipont program for her early acceptance.

The Daily Beast

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

Lobbying data: AT&T contributions to Russ Feingold, Jim Doyle, Tammy Baldwin, Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.

Keri Facer

These are interesting conversations – but the reality is that we cannot begin to answer these questions unless we actually know what universities are for. And this doesn’t mean something as obvious as pointing out that they should be institutions for the public good rather than private positional benefit. Rather, it means getting into the work that they do and understanding it.

Having spent the last few years thinking about the relationship between educational institutions and social change, I’m increasingly convinced that the university does 5 key things which, when combined, make it a unique institution in helping society to think about, prepare for and create the future. These are:

John Warner:

Administrators and non-tenure-track faculty have at least one thing in common: Both groups appear comfortable with the elimination of tenure.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, this is according to data collected for Envisioning the Faculty for the 21st Century by Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, a new-ish book that seeks to further the conversation about what shape faculty roles will take in our changing universities.

I’ve never been an administrator, but I imagine the explanation for their comfort with eliminating tenure is about power, namely, without tenure, administrators have much more freedom to operate.

I don’t attribute nefarious motives here, however. Lack of tenure means administrations could remake faculty to meet the demands of a changing higher education arena. If one sincerely believes that it’s “adapt or die,” it makes sense to desire the maximum freedom to adapt. I’m sure many administrators confronting these challenges believe that eliminating tenure would be a net good for their institutions. It doesn’t mean they’re right (or wrong), but it’s entirely explicable.

Jon Marcus:

Post-it notes stick to the few remaining photos hanging on the walls of the University of Maine System offices, in a grand brick, renovated onetime W.T. Grant department store built in 1948.

The notes are instructions for the movers, since the pictures and everything else are in the midst of being packed up and divided among the system’s seven campuses.

Only 20 people work here now, down from a peak of 120, and the rest will soon be gone, too, following their colleagues and fanning out to the campuses. Disassembled cubicles and crates of documents are piled in the corners of the 36,000-square-foot space, and light shines from the doors of the few lonely offices still occupied. All of the agency’s three floors in the building, in a quiet part of town near a statue of Bangor native hero and Abraham Lincoln’s first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, have been put up for sale.

Matt O’Brien

America is the land of opportunity, just for some more than others.

That’s because, in large part, inequality starts in the crib. Rich parents can afford to spend more time and money on their kids, and that gap has only grown the past few decades. Indeed, economists Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane calculate that, between 1972 and 2006, high-income parents increased their spending on “enrichment activities” for their children by 151 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, compared to 57 percent for low-income parents.

Wall Street Journal:

Tech giants like Google and Facebook always deny that their platforms favor some viewpoints over others, but then they don’t do much to avoid looking censorious. This week a conservative radio host and author is wondering why YouTube classifies his educational web clips as “potentially objectionable” material.

Dennis Prager’s “PragerU” puts out free short videos on subjects “important to understanding American values”—ranging from the high cost of higher education to the motivations of Islamic State. The channel has more than 130 million views, and the spots tend to include an expert guest and background animation. As you might guess, the mini-seminars do not include violence or sexual content.

But more than 15 videos are “restricted” on YouTube, a development PragerU announced this month. This means the clips don’t show up for those who have turned on filtering—say, a parent shielding their children from explicit videos. A YouTube spokesperson told us that the setting is optional and “based on algorithms that look at a number of factors, including community flagging on videos.” Yet it’s easy to imagine a flood of users reporting a political video—microagressed college students have a lot of free time—and limiting a viewpoint’s audience.

John Morgan

One of India’s biggest private universities, Amity University, aims to host 10,000 students “primarily” from the US at a recently purchased campus near New York, according to its chancellor.

Amity, which adds the US to its list of global campus locations and has plans to establish itself in Australia, has paid a reported $22 million (£18 million) to buy the Long Island campus of private, non-profit St John’s University.