The Times (London):

Teenagers born since the turn of the millennium are the most socially conservative and thrifty generation since the Second World War.

The newly classified Generation Z are much less likely to approve of gay marriage, transgender rights or the legalisation of cannabis than Baby Boomers, Millennials or Generation X, a study has found. They also have a much more prudent approach to saving and spending than any generation, except those born in 1945 or before.

Jeff Glaze:

Seeking flexibility to respond to community dialog over use of school-based police officers, the Madison School Board has proposed a so-called “compromise” to city officials that would keep officers in Madison’s four main high schools, at least for now.

The School Board on Tuesday unveiled a proposal intended to meet the city’s demands for contract length but also offer the district an opt-out should officials eventually decide to remove police from schools.

Contract length has been the sticking point in negotiations between the city and school district, with the School Board favoring one year and city leaders favoring three.

City officials, including Mayor Paul Soglin and Police Chief Mike Koval, have advocated for the longer contract to provide more certainty in budgeting, recruitment and planning. But amid a national conversation over law enforcement tactics, especially during interactions with minorities, opponents have lobbied the School Board to remove police from schools. Heeding those concerns, the School Board has pushed for a one-year deal while an expert hired by the City Council examines Madison Police Department’s policies, procedures, training and culture.

The latest proposal offers the city its desired three-year deal, but includes what the School Board called “a meaningful termination clause responsive to the city’s budget and hiring timeline.”

Edna Bonhomme & Emily Drabinski:

On August 31, the Long Island University Faculty Federation Union contract expired. Faculty and management began negotiations over a new contract, and on September 6, the faculty met to discuss a proposed agreement.

Faculty voted 226 to 10 not to accept the contract that was provided by the administration. Rather than renegotiate the agreement, however, management decided to lock out the university’s four hundred professors.

Lockouts are often confused with strikes — under both, workers aren’t working. But whereas strikes are offensive measures taken by workers against bosses, lockouts are a boss’s tool used to break unions. Such was the case in this lockout.

Marisa Gerber:

The school district just up the street in McKinney plans to break ground within a month on a nearly $70-million stadium — the newest competitor in a spend-off critics call a stadium arms race.

“Oh, it’s a rivalry,” said Adam Blanchet, a junior at McKinney North, one of the three high schools in the McKinney Independent School District that will use the new stadium. “I have pride knowing my district is going to have the most expensive stadium in the country.”

In McKinney, a booming Dallas suburb of about 162,000 residents where the the median household income is $83,000, many seem to share a similar stance on the stadium — sure it’s expensive, but the students deserve it. But one group has fiercely opposed the new project: Grassroots McKinney, an offshoot of the local tea party.

Juan Perez

With the Chicago Teachers Union mulling a possible walkout as early as next month, another school contract fight is unfolding outside the spotlight that could result in a strike at one of the city’s largest charter school networks.

Educators at the UNO Charter School Network, a chain of campuses that’s enrolled about 8,000 students and was once run by the clout-heavy United Neighborhood Organization, are careful to say they’re not sure if they’ll schedule a strike authorization vote, much less a walkout. But United Educators of UCSN leaders have scheduled what a bargaining team’s spokeswoman described as an informational meeting.

Darrell Etherington:

Sebastian Thrun’s online education startup Udacity recently created a self-driving car engineering nanodegree, and on stage at Disrupt today Thrun revealed that the company intends to build its own self-driving car as part of the program, and that it also intends to open source the technology that results, so that “anyone” can try to build their own self-driving vehicle, according to Thrun.

Amanda Finn:

Fifth-graders will soon be coming out of Sandburg Elementary fiddling happy tunes thanks to a major instrument donation making it possible for strings to be part of the fifth-grade curriculum.

The VH1 Save the Music Foundation and Madison-based Musicnotes.com teamed up to provide Sandburg with 36 new instruments, worth about $35,000, to fill gaps in an aged instrument inventory and to provide enough instruments to suit the needs of the children.

The foundation has already been working with the Madison School District to create 12 keyboard labs in various elementary schools.

“We are really fortunate that we began a relationship with VH1 Save the Music six years ago,” said Laurie Fellenz, fine arts coordinator for the district.

The Strings Program has a rather fascinating history, including numerous attempts to abort it.

Megan McArdle:

Venezuela seems to be hovering on the edge of tipping into hyperinflation. Or perhaps it has already fallen into the abyss. Given the paucity of official data — the none-too-believable official figures were last published in February — it’s a little hard to tell. The best guess we have at the value of a Venezuelan bolivar comes from the Colombian village of Cucuta, where people go to buy currency so they can smuggle subsidized fuel and other price-controlled goods out of Venezuela. As The Economist notes: “Transactions are few; the dollar rate is calculated indirectly, from the value of the Colombian peso. The result is erratic, but more realistic than the three official rates.”

Using those rates, economist Steve Hanke recently told Bloomberg that annual cost-of-living increases are running at about 722 percent. To put that in some perspective, it means that a $400 monthly grocery bill would climb to $2,888 in a year. That may not approach the legendary status of Hungary’s postwar inflation, which reached 41.9 quadrillion percent in a single month, but it’s devastating for savers, or for people like pensioners whose incomes consist of fixed payments. It’s also pretty bad for the economy.

Related: US Debt Clock.

John Wilson:

Universities should never suspend courses in the middle of a semester except under the most dire circumstances, where a course has been proven to violate university policies and cannot be fixed, or some kind of extraordinary fraud has occurred.

Nothing like that exists in this case. In fact, nothing like that has even been alleged by the administration, which relies upon bureaucratic snafus to justify suspending this course.

Hans Bader:

The federal government happily subsidizes inferior state colleges that graduate few if any of their students. That includes Chicago State University, which has a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate.

The Obama administration has rewritten federal student loan rules in a way that encourages colleges to raise tuition and effectively subsidizes the worst colleges the most. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that each additional dollar in government financial aid results in a tuition hike of about 65 cents.

The federal government also subsidizes expensive, low-quality third-tier law schools whose graduates are often unemployed. It does so even though many of their graduates will never pay back their student loans because of their low graduating salaries, and the huge amount of money law students are allowed to borrow from the government.

Ethnic Studies:

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, Executive Dean of Letters and Sciences Carla Hesse, et al.,

We, the undersigned, are the students of Ethnic Studies 198: Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis, the student-designed Decal course that was suspended yesterday, Tuesday, September 13th.

We are a diverse group of students that includes Christians, Muslims, and Jews; we are white, Black, Latin@, Asian, North American indigenous, Middle Eastern, and more; we study Peace and Conflict Studies, Ethnic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, Media Studies, Economics and Engineering. In short, we are a sample of some of the wide and varied backgrounds, beliefs, and interests that compose the campus community. One characteristic we all possess in common, however, is a genuine interest in the academic discussion surrounding Israel and Palestine.

Katy Murphy:

The University of California’s debt has ballooned to $17.2 billion since the start of the recession, more than doubling as the system borrowed to repair buildings, fund pensions, and build medical centers and student housing.

In the past decade, as states have cut support for capital projects, public universities across the U.S. have piled on debt to repair old buildings and build new ones. But some, including Gov. Jerry Brown, have expressed wariness about all the borrowing. Along with access to needed cash, UC is locking itself into more costs — and is fast approaching its limit for borrowing cheaply from the market.

But with the board of regents this week considering UC’s first-ever debt policy, university leaders insist the borrowing spree is strategic, given unusually low interest rates and federal tax exemptions on university financing.

“If we had not taken advantage of that and had to build buildings out of our operating budget, it would have been a risky or foolish way of doing it,” university CFO Nathan Brostrom said in an interview this week.

Amy Hungerford:

I refuse to read books. Coming from a critic, this confession sounds both imperious and ignorant, but, truth be told, all of us, especially scholars of literature, refuse to read books every day. I remember someone telling me at a party in graduate school that my adviser — a famous Americanist — had never read Moby-Dick. Was it true? I did not dare ask him. Did the very idea amplify his bad-boy critical aura? Of course. (Recently, I did ask him. “For a while it was true,” he said; “and then, forever after, it wasn’t.”)

The activity of nonreading is something that scholars rarely discuss. When they — or others whose identities are bound up with books — do so, the discussions tend to have a shamefaced quality. Blame “cultural capital” — the sense of superiority associated with laying claim to books that mark one’s high social status. More entertainingly, blame Humiliation, the delicious game that a diabolical English professor invents in David Lodge’s 1975 academic satire, Changing Places. In a game of Humiliation, players win points for not having read canonical books that everyone else in the game has read. One hapless junior faculty member in the novel wins a departmental round but loses his tenure case. In real life, the game has been most happily played by the tenured professor secure in his reputation. Changing Places had apparently inspired my adviser’s confession to someone at some point, and the information then wound through the gossip mill to reach me, standing around in the mid-1990s with a beer, trying to hide my own growing list of unread books.

Davidson Institute:

When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily “fall apart,” experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Their ordeal highlights for them the transient nature of life and the lack of control that we have over so many events, and it raises questions about the meaning of our lives and our behaviors. For other people, the experience of existential depression seemingly arises spontaneously; it stems from their own perception of life, their thoughts about the world and their place in it, as well as the meaning of their life. While not universal, the experience of existential depression can challenge an individual’s very survival and represents both a great challenge and at the same time an opportunity—an opportunity to seize control over one’s life and turn the experience into a positive life lesson—an experience leading to personality growth.

It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely than those who are less gifted to experience spontaneous existential depression as an outgrowth of their mental and emotional abilities and interactions with others. People who are bright are usually more intense, sensitive, and idealistic, and they can see the inconsistencies and absurdities in the values and behaviors of others (Webb, Gore, Amend, & DeVries, 2007). This kind of sensitive awareness and idealism makes them more likely to ask themselves difficult questions about the nature and purpose of their lives and the lives of those around them. They become keenly aware of their smallness in the larger picture of existence, and they feel helpless to fix the many problems that trouble them. As a result, they become depressed.

Todd Richmond:

Wisconsin can slow a growing shortage of teachers if people stop bad-mouthing educators and pay them more, the state’s schools superintendent said Thursday.

Superintendent Tony Evers warned during his annual State of Education speech in the state Capitol rotunda that fewer young people are entering the teaching profession and districts are having a harder time filling high-demand positions in special, bilingual and technical education.

He offered almost no specifics on anything he spoke about, but he told the Wisconsin State Journal in an interview this week that he will propose to “level the playing field” among school districts by giving more money to schools in rural areas that have trouble matching salaries offered by wealthier districts.

Dave Zweifel:

Many in Wisconsin are convinced that the teacher shortage here stems from Gov. Scott Walker’s and the Republican Legislature’s Act 10, the 2011 legislation that not only made it illegal for teachers’ unions to bargain, but required them to shoulder part of the load for their benefits, which resulted in take home pay reductions of up to 17 percent.

Balderdash, counter Walker’s fans, who believe it’s perfectly fine to denude unions and make public employees pay more of the bills. Rightie talk radio host Jerry Bader wrote on Right Wisconsin a few days ago that the teacher shortage is a national phenomenon, not confined to Wisconsin and, therefore, has nothing to do with Act 10.

I’d dispute that cause and effect comparison since many of the other states experiencing teacher shortages have also adopted legislation that has hurt teachers, including Indiana, Ohio and Arizona, where Republicans of like mind rule the roost.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Abigail Becker:

Digital literacy education courses are scheduled in the Allied Drive and Kennedy Heights neighborhoods as part of Madison’s Connecting Madison initiative.

Connecting Madison is an internet pilot project meant to close the digital divide by making affordable internet access available for as little as $10 per month to residents in Allied Drive, Darbo-Worthington, Brentwood and Kennedy Heights apartments.

DANEnet is partnering with the city as the project’s digital literacy partner and have scheduled classes in the coming months at the Boys and Girls Club in Allied Drive and at the Kennedy Heights Community Center.

Kantel Franko

The same qualities that make libraries ideal for studying and reading — unfettered public access, quiet corners and nooks, minimal interaction with other people — also make them appealing places to shoot up heroin, librarians are finding.

In Norfolk, Virginia, a 47-year-old man died after a patron found him in a library restroom. In Batesville, Indiana, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, police revived others in library restrooms using a popular overdose antidote.

The body of a homeless man who frequented the Oak Park Public Library in suburban Chicago might have been there for days, fully clothed and slumped on the toilet in a restroom on the quiet third floor, before a maintenance worker unlocked it on a Monday morning in April and discovered his inglorious demise. The empty syringe and lighter in his pockets and the cut soda can in the trash pointed to the cause, an accidental heroin overdose.

“On both a personal and a professional level, we were all very shocked and of course worried about how this could happen in our spaces,” said executive director David Seleb, who fired the security company responsible for clearing the library before closing.

Jeremy Kahn

Could the armies of lawyers needed to close billion-dollar deals soon be a thing of the past?

That’s what Invoke Capital, the London-based venture firm run by former Autonomy Plc Chief Executive Officer Mike Lynch, is betting with its latest project financing. Invoke said Wednesday that it’s making an investment in Luminance, a U.K. startup using artificial intelligence to process legal documents and automate due diligence in mergers and acquisitions. While the amount of the investment was not disclosed, Lynch said in an interview that the figure was “in the low millions.”

Luminance says its software can read and understand hundreds of pages of legal documents a minute, enabling lawyers to carry out due diligence far faster than previously. Sally Wokes, a partner at Slaughter and May who works on large company mergers and who helped trial Luminance, said the firm found that completing due diligence while using the system was as much as 50 percent faster than doing the same document reviews using only humans.

Berkeley News

The department’s findings do not implicate the accessibility of educational opportunities provided to our enrolled students.

In response, the university has moved swiftly to engage our campus experts to evaluate the best course of action. We look forward to continued dialog with the Department of Justice regarding the requirements of the ADA and options for compliance. Yet we do so with the realization that, due to our current financial constraints, we might not be able to continue to provide free public content under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice to the extent we have in the past.

Alan Borsuk:

Four years of English and three years of math, science and social studies. That sounds like a fairly solid high school career, but not one that demands a super amount of effort.

In fact, that’s what Wisconsin’s graduation requirements call for, starting with the Class of 2017, which is to say, this year’s seniors. Until this year, requirements under state law were actually lighter, including only two years of math and science.

So it got me wondering when the annual report on the performance of Wisconsin students on the ACT college entrance test came out recently. Included was this: Only 55% of students in the Class of 2016 said they were taking what ACT defines as a “core curriculum” in high school. And the ACT definition is: four years of English and three years of math, science and social studies, the same thing Wisconsin is now requiring as a matter of law.

Is there that big a gap between what many students in the state are studying in high school and what they ought to be studying? Nationwide, 69% of students who took the ACT said they were taking at least the core curriculum. That’s 14 percentage points higher than Wisconsin. Is Wisconsin going easier on high school students than other states?

Furthermore, the average ACT score for Wisconsin’s Class of 2016 was down from the scores in a long line of prior years, and the percentage of kids scoring at levels ACT associates with likely success in college was also down (only a quarter of the Class of 2016 hit the benchmarks in all four ACT areas, English, reading, math, and science).

Time to worry? A range of educators I talked to last week generally assured me otherwise.

Kristopher Rivera:

A crucifix necklace hangs from a boy’s neck as he sits on his bed occupied with an art project inside a Fort Bliss complex on Thursday.

Faith seems to be a driving force here, as unaccompanied child migrants seek to get to a better place, leaving behind their culture and homes. Inside the dinner hall of the complex, a drawing of the Costa Rican flag had writing in Spanish that read, “A country of many beautiful women.”

Fort Bliss’ Doña Ana Range Complex, near Chaparral, N.M., is temporarily a shelter to nearly 500 unaccompanied children. The children made the dangerous journey from Central America; primarily El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to either escape violence in their home country, seek better economic opportunities or reunite with family already in the U.S. Central American countries have some of the highest murder rates in the world. The journey puts children at risk of human trafficking, exploitation and abuse.

Gallup:

Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.

Daniel J. Mitchell

When Economic Freedom of the World is released every September, it’s like an early Christmas present. This comprehensive yearly publication is a great summary of whether nations have policies that allow people economic liberty.

I eagerly peruse this annual survey every year (here’s what I wrote in 2015 and 2014 if you’re curious about a couple of recent examples). And this year is no different.

Let’s start with the table that gets the most attention. Here’s a look at the top nations, led (as is almost always the case) by Hong Kong and Singapore. Switzerland also deserves some recognition since it has always been in the top 5.

Cory Doctorow:

O’Reilly proposes four tests to determine whether a black box is trustable:

1. Its creators have made clear what outcome they are seeking, and it is possible for external observers to verify that outcome.

2. Success is measurable.

3. The goals of the algorithm’s creators are aligned with the goals of the algorithm’s consumers.

4. Does the algorithm lead its creators and its users to make better longer term decisions?

O’Reilly goes on to test these assumptions against some of the existing black boxes that we trust every day, like aviation autopilot systems, and shows that this is a very good framework for evaluating algorithmic systems.

Nicholas W. Papageorge &Kevin Thom

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a genetic score variable, are associated with human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We demonstrate that the same genetic score that predicts education is also associated with higher wages, but only among individuals with a college education. Moreover, the genetic gradient in wages has grown in more recent birth cohorts, consistent with interactions between technological change and labor market ability. We also show that individuals who grew up in economically disadvantaged households are less likely to go to college when compared to individuals with the same genetic score, but from higher-SES households. Our findings provide support for the idea that childhood SES is an important moderator of the economic returns to genetic endowments. Moreover, the finding that childhood poverty limits the educational attainment of high-ability individuals suggests the existence of unrealized human potential.

Barbara Oakley

was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering.

One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell—with lots of difficulty! After all, I’d flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. In fact, I didn’t start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I’d be Exhibit A.

Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering. But these hard-won, adult-age changes in my brain have also given me an insider’s perspective on the neuroplasticity that underlies adult learning. Fortunately, my doctoral training in systems engineering—tying together the big picture of different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) disciplines—and then my later research and writing focusing on how humans think have helped me make sense of recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology related to learning.

Joe Queenan

Between now and Thanksgiving, high-school seniors face the daunting task of writing riveting, revelatory personal essays that will make college admissions officers look more favorably on their applications.

Less-verbal students—and plenty of smart ones—routinely seek help preparing these essays. And sometimes, it is more than “help” that they’re looking for; they get their parents or moonlighting academics or impoverished poets or unexpectedly articulate classmates to crank out the essays for them.

Colleges insist that they can spot bogus essays because of anachronistic turns of phrases like “hoist with one’s own petard,” suggesting that a Shakespeare lecturer was trying to pay the rent, or because the entire 1,000-word essay lacks a single use of the words “awesome” or “sketchy.”

Rijksmuseum

The thirty-four drawings, all studies of animals, came from a 17th-century album that once contained 160 drawings of birds by the father and son artists Pieter Holsteijn the Elder and the Younger. The album was donated to the Noord-Hollands Archief in 1888, but the drawings by Frans Post had probably been part of it for centuries. The Brazilian animal studies were completely overlooked until De Bruin found them in 2010.

Dan Solomon:

The complications that come with Little Free Libraries tend to be minimal. Dallas City Council expressed concern that they might become havens for pornography, a concern rebutted by the point that the owners of the libraries’ collections tend to be curated by the residents on a daily basis—if someone leaves smut in the box, it’s not going to be there long. In Austin, meanwhile, a rash of robberies hit a few Little Free Libraries earlier this summer, which Austin police declined to pursue because the libraries have the word “free” in the name. (Dallas-based Half Price Books refuses to buy books stamped with the organization’s “always a gift; never for sale” slogan, so library owners can remove the incentive for theft in that way.)

There’s still time for the Dallas City Council to walk back the vote, according to Wilonsky. The regulation that passed out of the committee has yet to be voted on by the full council, so Dallas can decide if it’s really a problem to tackle with such urgency.

Eugene Volokh:

. On Monday the House of Representatives passed the Consumer Review Fairness Act, which would invalidate most form contracts that limit consumer reviews of businesses. If a business purports to require consumers not to criticize the business (see the KlearGear controversy), that contract would be unenforceable, and the Federal Trade Commission and state enforcement agencies would be able to take action against such a business even if it didn’t try to sue for breach of the contract. The Senate passed a similar bill last year.

There are plausible arguments both for and against the law; the law undermines the ability to agree on certain kinds of contracts, but it also provides more information (of varying quality) to consumers. I won’t engage that debate here.

2. Rather, what struck me about the law is its exemption of certain kinds of contracts (see subsection (b)(3)): The law “shall not apply to the extent that a provision of a form contract prohibits . . . submission of,” among other things, material that “contains the personal information or likeness of another person, or is libelous, harassing, abusive, obscene, vulgar, sexually explicit, or is inappropriate with respect to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or other intrinsic characteristic” (emphasis added).

So speech on all sorts of viewpoints would be protected by the proposed law, even against private contractual restrictions. A business couldn’t require users to agree to a contract that forbids critical reviews. A fur store couldn’t do the same as to anti-fur reviews; a restaurant couldn’t do the same to reviews that faulted it for serving foie gras. A business whose owner was pro-Donald Trump, and who was afraid that clients would learn this and would then publicly excoriate him for it, couldn’t do the same as to anti-Trump reviews. But contracts barring speech that “is inappropriate” (whatever that is) “with respect to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or other intrinsic characteristic” would remain perfectly legal.

LawProfBlog:

You didn’t listen. A dean’s ability to avoid catastrophe is in large part due to the dean’s ability to listen and know what’s going on at the law school. For example, say you have a problem child in one of your departments, and everyone knows that but you. Let’s suppose this person is friends with your most trusted advisor, so you never get to hear about it. You’ve got a serious problem. Especially when you promote him or her and you’re left wondering why half your department staff quit. Why is everyone so mad at you? Because you didn’t listen. The reason you couldn’t listen is because you didn’t ask the right people. People need to feel as though they are being heard, even if you do decide in a way they didn’t want.

You built an atmosphere in which people are afraid to tell you the truth. Ask yourself, do you listen? Of course you do, say your closest confidants. They all agree with you. No problem, right? HUGE PROBLEM, dean. You have been surrounded by “yes staff,” who aren’t necessarily giving you all the information you need to make a decision. How on earth did that happen? It might be that the staff senses, for better or worse, that you don’t listen. Perhaps you dismiss their concerns too easily, without much thought. Regardless, you’re on your way to a complete and total disaster, one that could have been avoided by surrounding yourself with a group of people with sufficiently diverse opinions you’re willing to hear.

Alex Emmons

A new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general concludes that FBI agents can go undercover and impersonate journalists, as long as they sufficiently consult FBI headquarters.

The inspector general’s office investigated a case from 2007 where undercover FBI agents impersonated a journalist from the Associated Press. FBI regulations at the time “did not prohibit agents from impersonating journalists or from posing as a member of a news organization,” the report concluded.

Devin Katayama

John Foster and Sara Diamond didn’t leave the Oakland Unified School District because they were unhappy with their school choices.

They say they wanted an alternative to Oakland schools for practical reasons. Foster worked in San Francisco, where his daughter Claire’s day care was also located. So father and daughter had a routine of commuting together from East Oakland.

“I would take her with a baby carrier and I would read to her on BART, and for several years that’s how we did it,” said Foster.

Alexander Russo:

This past weekend, the NYT Sunday Magazine presented a package of words and images about refugee students in American schools, titled The New High-School Outsiders. Focused some of the roughly 1,300 refugees attending Boise, Idaho schools, it includes an overview essay, photographs, and profiles of a handful of Boise students who graduated high school last spring.

It’s not the first story focused on refugees in American schools — and, given the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America and refugees from the war in Syria, it’s unlikely to be the last. As the Times story notes, roughly 85,000 more refugees will be resettled this coming year, in 190 cities. Many of them will be school-age children who are legally entitled to a free public education. An August story from the Times showed the 231 towns where 10,000 Syrian refugees have already been settled over the past four years — many of them in mid-sized cities like Boise, rather than large hubs for immigration.

The combination of novelty, fear, and curiosity all but ensures that there will be many more refugee student stories during 2016-2017. The two main questions consider as the school year unfolds are (1) whether districts are providing refugee children an education that’s at least as good as the one they’re providing longtime students, and (2) are media outlets producing nuanced and accurate coverage of the experience?

Doug Webber:

In 2000, Temple University was primarily a commuter school. On-campus dorms could house fewer than 4,000 students out of a total student body of more than 30,000. Most facilities were badly outdated, and the average student paid $12,800 a year (in 2016 dollars) in tuition to attend.

Today, Temple, where I work, looks very different. Beautiful new buildings are the norm rather than the exception. A recently built 24-story dorm and adjoining dining center highlights the university’s transition to a residential campus. Each of the dorm’s apartment-style suites comes equipped with a flat-screen TV and other amenities. The number of administrators in management and executive positions has grown by 40 percent to over 900. Oh, and tuition now runs $19,000 for the typical student after accounting for scholarships and other aid.

Rick Riley

The teen was rushed to Northwestern Hospital and pronounced dead shortly after.

“It’s getting senseless out here. That could have been my son, that could’ve been me, that could’ve been my aunty, that could’ve been me, that could’ve been anybody today,” Doss says. “It’s time to go. I love this city that I live in, but it’s time to go. The violence ain’t getting no better.”

Now, police are investigating the shooting.

By Ashkan Soltani and Craig Timberg

As a black sedan pulled into downtown Washington traffic earlier this week, a man in the back seat with a specially outfitted smartphone in each hand was watching for signs of surveillance in action. “Whoa, we’ve just been hit twice on this block,” he said, excitement rising in his voice, not far from FBI headquarters.

Then as the car passed the Federal Trade Commission’s limestone edifice, “Okay, we just got probed.” Then again, just a few minutes later, as the car moved between the Supreme Court and the Capitol, he said, “That’s the beginning of an interception.”

Logan Wroge:

Ninety-five Madison area students have been named semifinalists for the 2017 National Merit Scholarships.

They are among approximately 16,000 high school seniors across the country who have qualified as semifinalists. Of these students, about 7,500 will eventually be offered the prestigious scholarship in spring 2017.

Entering its 62nd year, the National Merit Scholarship Program will have about $33 million available for college-bound students. The money is provided by hundreds of businesses and higher education institutions across the country.

Here are the seniors in area high schools that have qualified as semifinalists:

Much more, here.

2017 National Merit cut scores:

Illinois 219
Minnesota 219
Iowa 215
Massachusetts 222
Michigan 216
Texas 220
Wisconsin 215

Sarah Cohodes and Susan M. Dynarski:

This November, Massachusetts voters will go to the polls to decide whether to expand the state’s quota on charter schools. The ballot initiative would allow 12 new, approved charters over the current limit to open each year.

Would the ballot proposal be good for students in Massachusetts? To address this question, we need to know whether charter schools are doing a better job than the traditional public schools in districts where the cap currently limits additional charter school seats.

There is a deep well of rigorous, relevant research on the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts. This research exploits random assignment and student-level, longitudinal data to examine the effect of charter schools in Massachusetts.

This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.

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Molly Beck

She said the union has shifted staffing to a “new regional structure,” creating 10 regions to which members belong instead of a centralized location in Madison. Brey would not say how many members are in the union.

“After all, our union isn’t a building. Our union is teachers and support professionals who work in public schools,” she said. “Our strength is in parents, communities and educators who unite around the shared value of public education — not around brick and mortar.”

According to federal tax records from 2013 — the latest year available, the organization had $52,435 in cash and $126,246 in savings. Total assets, including their property, totaled $3.7 million while the organization’s liabilities totaled $1.6 million.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Tom Clynes

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn’t enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.

Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy’s talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.

brightside

Child psychologist Yekaterina Murashova describes an unusual experiment in her book showing what happened when a group of teenagers were deprived of access to the internet and modern technology for a single day. We think it’s well worth checking out — you can consider the implications for yourself.

Children and teenagers aged between 12 and 18 years voluntarily spent eight hours alone without access to any means of communication (mobile phones; the internet, etc.). They were also forbidden to turn on the computer, any other electronic gadgets, the radio and the TV. But they were allowed to engage in a number of ’classic’ activities by themselves: writing, reading, playing musical instruments, painting, needlework, singing, walking, and so on.

Joy Resmovits

XQ officials, in announcing the winners on Wednesday, described RISE as a “completely new” model. The idea is to have three to four physical sites sharing space with existing nonprofits as well as an online learning system. A bus also be turned into a “mobile resource center,” to bring Wi-Fi, a washer/dryer and homework help to the neediest students.

That way, if a student suddenly moves or can’t get to school, he or she will have various options to get tutoring or the day’s lesson.

“The model exists outside the traditional confines of space and time,” Croft said.

RISE, which stands for Revolutionary Individualized Student Experience, is in its preliminary stages. It will be a charter school, but the staff is still figuring out governance structure, facilities and partnerships. As of now, the plan is to open with a small group of students next fall, but eventually to serve between 500 and 550.

Los Angeles parents have many charter choices while Madison continues it’s none-diverse K-12 structure.

Christopher Quinn

Gov. Nathan Deal proposes a statewide school district to take over chronically failing schools

There will be a vote on constitutional amendment 1 on Nov. 7 on Gov. Nathan Deal’s proposal to let the state take over chronically failing schools. This issue has attracted a lot of passion as those on both sides argue about how best to address the issue of helping children for whom education may be the one door out of poverty, failure and the “prison pipeline.”

Deal says failing schools are now a generational problem and local districts have already taken to long to fix this serious problem. It’s time for action.

Tawnell Hobbs

“Plaintiffs sit in classrooms where not even the pretense of education takes place, in schools that are functionally incapable of delivering access to literacy,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of students who attend several schools run by the Detroit Public School Community District, formerly Detroit Public Schools; charter operators; and the Education Achievement Authority state-controlled reform school district.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Robert Rector, Rachel Sheffield

Here are 15 facts about poverty in America that may surprise you. (All statistics are taken from U.S. government surveys.)

Poor households routinely report spending $2.40 for every $1 of income the Census says they have.

The average poor American lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair and has more living space than the average nonpoor person in France, Germany, or England.

Eighty-five percent of poor households have air conditioning.

Nearly three-fourths of poor households have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.

Nearly two-thirds of poor households have cable or satellite TV.

Half have a personal computer; 43 percent have internet access.

Two-thirds have at least one DVD player

More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.

One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.

(The above data on electronic appliances owned by poor households come from a 2009 government survey so the ownership rates among the poor today are most likely higher.)

James Kirchick:

Around this time last year, a short video depicting an angry confrontation between a Yale professor and student came to symbolize the nationwide debate over campus political correctness. Four days before Halloween, a university organ called the Intercultural Affairs Council released an email to the entire student body warning them not to wear costumes that “threaten our sense of community.” In the absence of any recent incidents on Yale’s campus involving racist or culturally insensitive Halloween outfits, however, the missive struck many students as patronizing, if not entirely misplaced. Indeed, the email was nearly identical to one Yale’s associate vice president of student life had written to students at Northwestern University five years earlier when he held a similar job at that school. As one Yale professor would later tell me about the message, it “had no applicability to the culture and the actual history here at Yale.”

Sensing this incongruity between their own lived experiences and the prophylactic admonishments of a glorified residential adviser, some students brought their concerns to Erika Christakis, a professor of child developmental psychology and the associate master of Silliman College, one of Yale’s 12 residential houses. In a rejoinder email sent only to Silliman students, Christakis took umbrage with what she portrayed as a cosseting administration, asking, “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?”

US News:

Schools in the National Universities category, such as Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master’s and doctoral programs. These colleges also are committed to producing groundbreaking research.

Karen Herzog:

Campuses in the University of Wisconsin System have been abuzz since last week, when Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos cited data he obtained through an open records request to support his claim that campuses “more times than not” seek “a liberal-minded individual to disperse information to the young, developing minds who pay them thousands of dollars for their education.”

While many professors disputed his claim, and others said it was a valid point to keep in mind, they uniformly took issue with the methodology of data analysis and assumptions behind the politician’s provocative statements in his op-ed piece, “A Free Speech Challenge to the UW System” on www.rightwisconsin.com.

The open records request yielded hundreds of speakers on campuses, and Vos focused on the 50 top-paid speakers of 2015 across the system. His raw data included only names and titles of speakers, the campus group or event to which they spoke, and how much they were paid. It did not include speakers who were invited but declined to make appearances. It did not include the speaker’s topic.

“Any reader of Assembly Speaker Vos’ summary of UW honorary expenditures and his estimation of their political slant would like to know much more,” said David Hoeveler, a professor of history at UW-Milwaukee. “By what measures did he and his team decide whether the recipients were ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’? At my university, those from the list with whom I am familiar balance pretty evenly; the list even includes one prominent neoconservative.”

By their very nature, college campuses are “places for open and progressive thought,” said Scott Adams, a UWM associate professor of economics and department chair. “(Vos) has a fundamental misunderstanding of how college campuses work.”

Adams said the vast majority of campus speakers “aren’t speaking about something political. … Science, the arts, aren’t inherently liberal in a political sense.”

Some may consider social and economic inequality to be liberal issues, but colleges invite speakers to talk about them because they’re important, Adams said.

Suggesting that Michael Sam, the first openly gay player in the NFL, is political because he’s gay “is repressing free speech in and of itself,” Adams said. “That’s reducing him to a political viewpoint. He’s a human being who has a story.”

Sam’s speaking engagement at UW-La Crosse late last year is an example Vos raises in his commentary.
Michael Sam, the first openly gay player in the NFL,

Michael Sam, the first openly gay player in the NFL, had a speaking engagement at UW-La Crosse late last year. (Photo: Associated Press)

Whether it is a liberal position or not, universities try to err on the side of inclusiveness and tolerance, said UWM political science professor and department chair Kathleen Dolan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The University of Chicago’s Dean of Students, Jay Ellison, recently became a folk hero of sorts on the right flank of the culture wars after sending out a blunt warning to the incoming U of C freshman class. To the hand-wringers worried about creeping “political correctness” on the American campus, Ellison’s letter was sweet sauce. Laying out the U of C’s pedagogical mission, he pointedly stipulated that the school’s long-standing “commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces.’” Within hours of the letter’s publication, the familiar tropes of our academic culture wars were once more engaged. Trigger warnings and safe spaces were hotly derided or righteously defended, depending on which side of the ideological railing disputants were on.

And just as predictably, these familiar set-tos missed the larger point. Once more, the anxious reading public was marched through a litany of formulaic questions: Are students being “coddled”? Are things like trigger warnings and safe spaces a threat to open academic inquiry? Is political correctness stifling higher education? But in the overheated climate of PC warmongering, the most important questions tend to go unasked. Many, for instance, like Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Beth McMurtrie, seem to take for granted that Ellison “very likely had no idea his words would add fuel to the national debate over academic freedom and the use of safe spaces and trigger warnings in higher education.” Of course he did. That was the point. The far more momentous, and dispassionate, question we should be asking in the wake of Ellison’s anti-PC broadside is this: How was it deliberately calculated to enhance the value of the University of Chicago brand?

Sam Biddle

The documents also make clear just how easy it is to execute a bulk surveillance regime from the trunk of a car: A Gemini “Quick Start Guide,” which runs to 54 pages, contains an entire chapter on logging, which “enables the user to listen and log over the air messages that are being transmitted between the Base Transceiver Station (BTS) and the Mobile Subscriber (MS).” It’s not clear exactly what sort of metadata or content would be captured in such logging. The “user” here, of course, is a police officer.

“While this device is being discussed in the context of U.S. law enforcement,” said Tynan, “this could be used by foreign agents against the U.S. public and administration. It is no longer acceptable for our phones and mobile networks to be exploited in such an invasive and indiscriminate way.”

Thomas Sowell

The one bright spot in black ghettos around the country are the schools that parents are free to choose for their own children. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular private schools and some are charter schools financed by public school systems but operating without the suffocating rules that apply to other public schools.

Not all of these kinds of schools are successes. But where there are academic successes in black ghettos, they come disproportionately from schools outside the iron grip of the education establishment and the teachers’ unions.

Some of these academic successes have been spectacular — especially among students in ghetto schools operated by the KIPP (Knowledge IS Power Program) chain of schools and the Success Academy schools.

Despite all the dire social problems in many black ghettos across the country — problems which are used to excuse widespread academic failures in ghetto schools — somehow ghetto schools run by KIPP and Success Academy turn out students whose academic performances match or exceed the performances in suburban schools whose kids come from high-income families.

A majority of the Madison school board voted to abort the proposed Madison preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Glenn Smith & Andrew Knapp:

Police forces across the United States are stockpiling massive databases with personal information from millions of Americans who crossed paths with officers but were not charged with a crime.

A person can end up in one of these databases by doing nothing more than sitting on a public park bench or chatting with an officer on the street. Once there, these records can linger forever and be used by police agencies to track movements, habits, acquaintances and associations – even a person’s marital and job status, The Post and Courier found in an investigation of police practices around the nation.

What began as a method for linking suspicious behavior to crime has morphed into a practice that threatens to turn local police departments into miniature versions of the National Security Agency. In the process, critics contend, police risk trampling constitutional rights, tarnishing innocent people and further eroding public trust.

Mike Antonucci:

Save Our Public Schools, the Massachusetts campaign fighting to retain the state’s cap on charter schools, describes itself as “a grassroots organization of families, parents, educators and students.”

But a glance at its campaign finance disclosure shows it to be almost devoid of families, parents, and students, and includes educators only to the extent that their dues money is being spent by the teachers union they belong to.

Of the more than $7.2 million in cash and in-kind contributions received by Save Our Public Schools so far, 99.86 percent came from the nation’s two largest unions: the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and their affiliates. But even that percentage is slightly misleading.

Boston parents have many charter choices while Madison continues it’s none-diverse K-12 structure.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz:

When Kiyonda Hester started the final year of her master’s program in social work, on Wednesday at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, an instructor began a course by acknowledging he was unqualified to teach it.

The temporary instructor, who is an administrator, told the students that he had to be there so he wouldn’t be fired, Ms. Hester said. He took attendance and noted that the syllabus had been posted online.

When students asked why the syllabus bore a date from another year, Ms. Hester said, the administrator responded by saying he hoped things would get back to normal next week.

“They would literally outright let us know that they were not equipped to teach,” said Ms. Hester, who declined to name the administrator.

Anne Boyer:

1. only ask the questions to which you really need answers

2. demonstrate uncertainty

3. reconstruct for your students your own previous errors of thought and elucidate to your students what factors lead to a changed mind

4. do not let the terms with which you understand the world get in the way of understanding it

5. give up any desire to be the smartest person in the room

6. remember that students have bodies and that bodies require movement, sustenance, rest, and relief

7. leave an inheritance of dialectic

8. preserve and sustain whatever delusions you’ve found necessary to behave in good faith

Paul Ibbotson, Michael Tomasello:

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

This conclusion is important because the study of language plays a central role in diverse disciplines—from poetry to artificial intelligence to linguistics itself; misguided methods lead to questionable results. Further, language is used by humans in ways no animal can match; if you understand what language is, you comprehend a little bit more about human nature.

Chomsky’s first version of his theory, put forward in the mid-20th century, meshed with two emerging trends in Western intellectual life. First, he posited that the languages people use to communicate in everyday life behaved like mathematically based languages of the newly emerging field of computer science. His research looked for the underlying computational structure of language and proposed a set of procedures that would create “well-formed” sentences. The revolutionary idea was that a computerlike program could produce sentences real people thought were grammatical. That program could also purportedly explain as well the way people generated their sentences. This way of talking about language resonated with many scholars eager to em­­brace a computational approach to … well … everything.

As Chomsky was developing his computational theories, he was simultaneously proposing that they were rooted in human biology. In the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that our unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of our unique human psychology, and so the theory resonated on that level as well. His universal grammar was put forward as an innate component of the human mind—and it promised to reveal the deep biological underpinnings of the world’s 6,000-plus human languages. The most powerful, not to mention the most beautiful, theories in science reveal hidden unity underneath surface diversity, and so this theory held immediate appeal.

But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Alana Semuels:

Locking out a university’s faculty right before the start of classes seems like a drastic step, but that is just what Long Island University (LIU) did this weekend, when it barred all 400 members of its faculty union from its Brooklyn campus, cut off their email accounts and health insurance, and told them they would be replaced. The move came three days after the union’s contract expired. Now, the faculty is furious, and planning rallies and pickets with support from the American Federation of Teachers. On Tuesday, faculty voted 226 to 10 to reject a proposed contract from LIU, and the faculty senate voiced their support for a vote of no-confidence in the university’s president Kimberly Cline, 135 to 10. Faculty rallied outside the university’s Brooklyn campus Wednesday with a giant inflatable rat as classes began, taught by non-union members.

Labor historians say they can’t recall an example of a university using a lockout against faculty members. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell professor of labor relations, says they’re particularly unwise in the service sector, or any sector where a company has clients such as students and donors to placate. More typically, she says, lockouts are used in the industrial sector, where customers are removed from labor practices.

Even so, she said, such a move rarely works. “Historically, lockouts are bad PR in every industry,” she said. When an employer locks out workers, the media and the public are typically on the side of the workers, she explained, because workers are available for work but employers aren’t allowing them to. “Lockouts normally backfire,” she said.

Mark Schierbecker:

You can learn a lot from ‘Sausage Party’

Given the politically correct invective of the university’s racial protests last fall, new University of Missouri students were surprised to hear a professor celebrate a crude animated movie with “the most offensive stereotypes you could possibly imagine.”

Yet that’s exactly what happened at the mandatory student program Aug. 19, as shown by a recording obtained by The College Fix. A student also said that Islam is a particularly harmful religion – and he was not rebuked.

Free speech advocates at Mizzou who had written off the university as a lost cause for political pluralism shouldn’t get too excited, however: Another professor said some ideas are still unacceptable because they aren’t “respectful.”

Virginia Postrel:

As a child, Ashley Thomas loved to go by herself to a meadow about a 10-minute walk from her house in Ojai, California. Playing on her own let her imagination soar. “You can pretend you’re the Queen of Sheba,” she says. Exploring made her feel independent and grown up. Once, when she was in about the first grade, she even found a snake. “There’s no way I would have picked up a snake in front of my parents,” she says. “The reason I knew it was OK was I had also gone by myself to the library to take a snake safety class.” (Yes, a snake safety class.)

Ah, the olde-time memories of the days when kids could play on their own without someone posting a video online to shame their parents — or calling the police to have mom arrested and the children seized by social services. But Thomas isn’t an aging baby boomer telling tales to her grandkids. She’s just 30.

Kieran Corcoran:

Academic freedom in the UK will wither and die thanks to a generation of lecturers too scared to challenge the status quo, a major new book claims today.

Universities are trapped “worshipping at the altar of progressive opinion”, and individual scholars self-censor to avoid the wrath of their peers, according to the publication by Civitas, an independent think tank.

Lauren Kirchner

The five teenage boys were sitting in a parked car in a gated community in Melbourne, Florida, when a police officer pulled up behind them.

Officer Justin Valutsky closed one of the rear doors, which had been ajar, and told them to stay in the car. He peered into the drivers’ side window of the white Hyundai SUV and asked what the teens were doing there. It was a Saturday night in March 2015 and they told Valutsky they were visiting a friend for a sleepover.

Valutsky told them there had been a string of car break-ins recently in the area. Then, after questioning them some more, he made an unexpected demand: He asked which one of them wanted to give him a DNA sample.

After a long pause, Adam, a slight 15-year-old with curly hair and braces, said, “Okay, I guess I’ll do it.” Valutsky showed Adam how to rub a long cotton swab around the inside of his cheek, then gave him a consent form to sign and took his thumbprint. He sealed Adam’s swab in an envelope. Then he let the boys go.

Josh Mitchell:

The industry warnings are urgent and often dire: The housing market could stall. Marriages are being postponed. Workers won’t have the savings to retire. The nation’s food supply will be disrupted.

They point to one threat: soaring student debt.

A tripling of student debt over the past decade to more than $1.3 trillion has unleashed a torrent of Washington lobbying from outside the education sector, with various industries describing a “crisis” requiring federal intervention.

Real-estate agents, farmers, architects, startup lenders, lawyers, tech companies, benefits administrators—even podiatrists—have sent lobbyists to Capitol Hill over the past two years to push for legislation to forgive or at least reduce what workers and consumers owe on their student loans.

Naomi LaChance

A Google-incubated program that has been targeting potential ISIS members with deradicalizing content will soon be used to target violent right-wing extremists in North America, a designer of the program said at an event at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.

Using research and targeted advertising, the initiative by London-based startup Moonshot CVE and Google’s Jigsaw technology incubator targets potentially violent jihadis and directs them to a YouTube channel with videos that refute ISIS propaganda.

In the pilot program countering ISIS, the so-called Redirect Method collected the metadata of 320,000 individuals over the course of eight weeks, using 1,700 keywords, and served them advertisements that led them to the videos. Collectively, the targets watched more than half a million minutes of videos.

The event at Brookings was primarily about the existing program aimed at undermining ISIS recruiting. “I think this is an extremely promising method,” said Richard Stengel, U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.

Related: The stealthy, (Google Chairman) Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

ihttps://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton.

FT alphaville: 88% of US price increases since 1990 occurred in four highly regulated sectors, including education.  

Madison’s nearly $18k per student K-12 spending. 

Andrew Griffin

Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.
 
 The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.
 
 The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.

Soumya Karlamangla

Two elementary school children in Riverside County could have Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy, according to health officials.

Nursing staff at Indian Hills Elementary School in Jurupa Valley notified county officials Friday of the suspected infections, which will take several weeks to officially confirm, said Barbara Cole, director for disease control for the Riverside County Department of Public Health.

“We have to keep stressing it’s not confirmed,” Cole said. “We’re just at the beginning of the investigation.”

Jurupa Unified School District officials sent a letter home to parents Friday to inform them about the unconfirmed cases and provide resources to learn more about the rare disease, said district Supt. Elliott Duchon.

Duchon said a parent notified the school’s nursing staff of a preliminary diagnosis of Hansen’s disease for a student at the school. He would not say whether the two suspected cases were in the same family.

Brian M. Rosenthal:

During the first week of school at Shadow Forest Elementary, a frail kindergartner named Roanin Walker had a meltdown at recess. Overwhelmed by the shrieking and giggling, he hid by the swings and then tried to escape the playground, hitting a classmate and biting a teacher before being restrained.

The principal called Roanin’s mother.

“There’s been an incident.”

Heidi Walker was frightened, but as she hurried to the Humble school that day in 2014, she felt strangely relieved.

She had warned school administrators months earlier that her 5-year-old had been diagnosed with a disability similar to autism. Now they would understand, she thought. Surely they would give him the therapy and counseling he needed.

Lindsay Gibbs:

Sports fandom is a powerful force, and it seems even judges aren’t immune from its effects.

In a study titled “Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles,” Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, researches at the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that after LSU football suffered an upset loss, judges in Louisiana routinely doled out harsher sentences to juveniles.

These longer sentences disproportionately impacted black offenders.

Black juveniles received an extra 46 days of sentencing after an unexpected loss, an increase of almost nine percent. Meanwhile, white juveniles received an additional eight days.

The correlation was even stronger if the judge received an undergraduate degree from LSU. In that case, the sentences were 74 days longer than usual.

Mary Masculine:

Researchers have devised a way to read books when they’re closed. No, you didn’t read it wrong. Researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech are designing an imaging system that can read closed books.

A paper published Friday in the journal Nature Communications describes a prototype for this ingenious system that correctly identified the letters on the top nine sheets of a stack in which each sheet had one letter printed on it.

“The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don’t even want to touch,” Barmak Heshmat, co-author of the paper and a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, said in a statement. He added that the new system can analyze materials organized in thin layers.

Sheila Black

When I was pregnant with my first child, my ob-gyn referred me to a genetic counselor “just in case.”

I have a condition called X-linked hypophosphatemia, or XLH, which results in a form of dwarfism. I was a spontaneous case; there had no been no history of XLH in my family before me. No road map.

The counselor did not seem too worried. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Frankly, this is so rare, you’d have to marry a guy from the rickets clinic to pass it on.” I gave birth to my first child — my daughter Annabelle — seven months later. She did not have XLH.

Adam Grant

Ask people what’s wrong in American higher education, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. At Harvard a few years ago, a professor complained that the most common grade was an A-. He was quickly corrected: The most common grade at Harvard was an A.

Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm. At both four-year and two-year schools, more students receive A’s than any other grade — a percentage that has grown over the past three decades.

Among older graduates, figures like these usually elicit a comment involving the words “coddled,” “damn” and “millennials.” But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation. It happens whenever teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A’s, the next 30 percent get B’s, and so on. Sometimes it’s mandated by institutions; sometimes it’s chosen by teachers.

Marco Longari

When I got to Gabon to cover the recent election, I found myself the only photographer from a major global news organization in the country. People ask — why bother covering yet another election and unrest in yet another African country? I tell them – how can we not? This is where Africa’s modern history is unfolding. If we are going to tell the story of Africa, of the narratives that are taking place on the continent, then we cannot back off from coming to places like these.

I take pride in the fact that I’m here and telling the story and that we’re not passing on these kind of events.

John Lewis

Technology can lead to workers being displaced in one particular industry, but this doesn’t hold for the economy as a whole. In Krugman’s celebrated example, imagine there are two goods, sausages and bread rolls, which are then combined one for one to make hot dogs. 120 million workers are divided equally between the two industries: 60 million producing sausages, the other 60 million producing rolls, and both taking two days to produce one unit of output. Now suppose technology doubles productivity in bakeries. Fewer workers are required to make rolls, but this increased productivity will mean that consumers get 33% more hot dogs. Eventually the economy has 40 million workers making rolls, and 80 million making sausages. In the interim, the transition might lead to unemployment, particularly if skills are very specific to the baking industry. But in the long run, a change in relative productivity reallocates rather than destroys employment, even if the distributional impacts of that reallocation can be complicated and significant.

Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox

The Big Winners: The Sunbelt And Texas

To measure the states that are most attractive to Americans on the move, we developed an “attraction” ratio that measures the number of domestic in-migrants per 100 out-migrants. A state that has a rating of 100 would be perfectly balanced between those leaving and coming.

Overall, the biggest winner — both in absolute numbers and in our ranking — is Texas. In 2014 the Lone Star State posted a remarkable 156 attraction ratio, gaining 229,000 more migrants than it lost, roughly twice as many as went to No. 3 Florida, which clocked an impressive 126.7 attraction ratio.

Sarah O’Connor

UberEats launched in London in June, promising “the food you want, from the London restaurants you love, delivered at Uber speed”. In a bid to recruit self-employed couriers to ferry food from restaurants to customers, UberEats initially offered to pay £20 an hour. But as customer demand increased, the company began to reduce pay. By August, the couriers were on a piece rate with a fiddly formula: £3.30 a delivery plus £1 a mile, minus a 25 per cent “Uber service fee”, plus a £5 “trip reward”. Then, one day, the couriers woke up to find the app had been updated again. The “trip reward” had been cut to £4 for weekday lunch and weekend dinner times, and to £3 for weekday dinner and weekend lunch times. Outside those periods, it had been cut altogether.

“They tricked us,” roars a man called Manou over the din, hunching over the handlebars of his motorbike. Like many experienced couriers, he left his job with a different delivery company because Uber was offering better pay. Not any more. “They make us feel like they can just use us and destroy us and create new tools,” he says. Imran Siddiqui, one of the leaders of the protest, says he feels bad because he had encouraged other couriers to sign up for UberEats before they changed the pay. “If they don’t resolve this strike it’s going to spread like a fire.”

Katy Schneider

In the U.S. at least, the late-summer season marks the beginning of the school year. How kids commute to class might seem like the least of parents’ educational concerns, but the solutions reflect a daunting matrix of values and opportunities. In the U.S., where 25 million kids pile into golden-yellow buses each morning, new initiatives are encouraging biking and walking to school as important ways to foster independence, overall health, and cognitive development. Meanwhile, parents in some communities have faced censure for letting their kids walk at all. Last school year, a Tennessee mother was charged with neglect after making her daughters walk as punishment for misbehaving on the bus (she was driving slowly near them in a gold Cadillac). “Smartbuses” in Singapore aim to reassure anxious parents with app updates when their kids make it to school, while safety concerns have raised questions in India over the common practice of piling children into autorickshaws.

Liam Fox:

And when I was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and pointed out that the Los Angeles greater metropolitan area has a higher GDP than Saudi Arabia, it makes you understand why we have to start to think about that in a totally different way.

We’ve got to change from the cartographer’s view of the world to the mercantilist view of the world, and start to reshape the structures of government to respond to where the opportunities arise and the size of markets.

And if the US states were countries about six of them would be in the G20, so the idea we regard it as one trading partner is ludicrous. So we are in the process at the moment of moving our UKTI personnel round the world so we match better our footprint on the ground to the markets for British companies. And then we’ll encourage them to export into those countries.

And one other change. We’ve made a fundamental shift in British policy that has not yet been noticed. Up till recently, until the change of government, the government’s policy was to get as much foreign direct investment into the United Kingdom as possible, but to largely ignore overseas direct investment elsewhere. And let me tell you why that’s a problem. Because it’s great the year we get the FDI and we get jobs created, but every year after that all their income flows that go to their parent companies or their parent countries are outward flows in our current account. And unless we have counterbalancing overseas development, overseas investment, we are unable to get those income flows to counterbalance that.

A sweeping ruling from a superior court judge in Connecticut could mean historic changes for the state’s schools, including how it funds its poorest districts.

Now a court ruling in Connecticut that could lead to some big changes in the state’s schools. A superior court judge wrote yesterday that Connecticut has left rich school districts to flourish and poor school districts to flounder. Cory Turner of the NPR Ed team has more on the ruling.

CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The case, like so many legal fights over school money, is older than many of the kids in Connecticut schools. It was brought back in 2005, with the plaintiffs arguing that school funding isn’t spread fairly. Poor schools, they said, in cities like Bridgeport and Waterbury can’t begin to compete with property-rich places like Greenwich. Yesterday, Judge Thomas Moukawsher largely agreed, saying too little money is chasing too many needs.

THOMAS MOUKAWSHER: The state would rather be a little less directly responsible. It points to a tradition of local control that it almost never brings up except to get itself out of a jam.

Vivett Dukes:

Let me get personal and tell you a little bit about me: in particular, what sparked my passion for educational equity and commitment to giving disenfranchised children a shot at success.

When I took 11th grade English with Mr. Frank McHugh at Elmont Memorial Senior High and we read D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” I knew that being an English teacher was my professional heart’s desire. In 2010, after many twists and turns of life (children, marriage, divorce), that dream became my reality when I graduated from Long Island University – CW Post with my Bachelor of Science in English/Secondary Education.

Paul Robbins:

This, the owners of coffee and rubber estates in Karnataka, India, told us, was why they would tear out dense canopies of trees harboring wild hornbills and critically endangered frogs and replace them with more intensive and less wildlife-friendly crops. Compared to the days when their fathers ran these estates, and the workers required for the back-breaking tasks of weeding, coppicing, and harvesting were more pliable, today’s workers had become defiant and demanding. Laborers now insisted on smoke breaks, higher wages, and even electricity. Worse, farmers told us, they had little choice but to either give up labor-demanding crops or to comply with worker demands, lest their laborers vanish.

The shift in labor relations is striking given the locale. Karnataka is a place where the bargaining power of workers has always been notoriously poor, where rural poverty is crushing, and where generations of people have lived without access to modern amenities and education.1

Many factors have contributed to the shift: urbanization, labor outmigration, globalization, and an unprecedented aspirational culture that eschews rural farm labor where other opportunities exist. But one central reason, contributing to and accelerating all the others, is far more surprising: Karnataka is shrinking. As in most states throughout southern India, the fertility rate in the state has fallen to 1.8, and for many years has been well below the rate at which new births can replace those who naturally pass away.2 Population is getting smaller, influencing wages, farming practices, and habitat. Zero population growth has arrived in southern India: a Baby Bust.

As growth has ceased throughout Karnataka, across southern India, and in many other parts of the world3, new social arrangements are evolving, new ecologies are coming into being, and new political and economic conflicts are emerging. What happens to an economy, anywhere in the world, when population stalls or declines? How are relationships between workers and owners reconfigured? What happens in families, when the demands for women’s labor and demands for reproduction come into conflict, especially in historically patriarchal contexts? When labor becomes scarce, do regions shift to land abandonment and incidental rewilding, or instead to increasingly mechanized and intensive agricultural systems?

Turkish Minute:

The Education Ministry has suspended 11,285 teachers for supporting the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Thursday.

It is also reported that the number of teachers suspended is expected to rise to 14,000 after an investigation is completed with contributions from local governors’ offices.

Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım told reporters at a meeting in Diyarbakır on Sept. 4 that there are nearly 14,000 teachers who are somehow affiliated with the PKK and that the Education Ministry is working on a list of probable suspects to suspend prior to the beginning of the new academic year.

Moriah Balingt:

As schools were busy readying students for state exams, teachers at Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology, a high-poverty school in Alexandria, were poring over data to determine which students would probably not do well on the tests.

But according to a school district investigation, the effort wasn’t aimed at giving those students extra help. Instead, Principal Brandon Davis allegedly told teachers this spring to call the parents of students who appeared on the brink of failing the exams to inform them of their right to opt out of the tests, according to the investigation. Three dozen parents decided to pull their children from the state Standards of Learning exams; no parents at the school had done so the previous year.

Fan Fei:

Public colleges play a special role in making higher education affordable, but in recent years, soaring tuition is pushing that dream out of reach. From 2000 to 2014, the average cost of in-state tuition and fees for public colleges in America rose 80 percent. During that same time period, the median American household income dropped by 7 percent.

Sara Matthiesen

he National Labor Relations Board delivered a win for labor this month, ruling that graduate students at private colleges are also employees. The action overturned a 2004 decision involving Brown University that until now allowed administrations to insist that collective bargaining would imperil students’ academic pursuits. A number of media outlets have helped circulate a particularly damning quote that describes the Brown decision as having “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the Act, without a convincing justification.” If you haven’t read the decision in full, you should. The quote is just one of many statements that will resonate with any academic who sees herself as a worker.

But one sentence in particular is especially relevant to the coming inevitable struggles between precarious academic laborers and administrators. “Labor disputes,” the board notes simply, “are a fact of economic life.” Such an unequivocal statement about the academy as a place of labor is a surprising and rare admission; far more common are descriptors of academic work as a “labor of love,” “an intellectual pursuit,” and “a life of the mind.” Unlike many academics, the NLRB decision refuses to romanticize academe. This romanticization of academic labor is one of the most effective ways to obscure its actual costs. In contrast, the NLRB posits the equivalent of: “Hello! Would you please treat the academy as just another realm of economic life?!” This is exactly what we should do.

Let’s start with the subject of the NLRB decision: graduate student workers at private colleges. What would it mean to treat graduate students’ working conditions as “facts of economic life”? For starters, it would mean calling graduate students’ “stipends” what they actually are — paychecks. It would mean attaching actual terms to these paychecks, so that if graduate students work more hours in the lab or teach beyond their class load, they are compensated for their additional labor. It would mean approaching things like health insurance, dental care, and family leave as benefits that should be available to all employees rather than as benevolent gifts that the administration can give or take away depending on the political climate.

Rex:

Jay Ellison’s recent letter on trigger warnings made the rounds of social media late last week, and this week the story continues to circulate. It’s a topic that hits close to home for me. I have two degrees (MA and Ph.D.) from Chicago. As a student, I worked part time in the Social Sciences and Humanities division and full time in Physical Sciences, punching down cross connects in building basements and visiting faculty offices to explain what ‘the web’ was. I sang the Sunday service in Rockefeller chapel, was married at Hillel, and had the reception at Ida Noyes (long story). At one point when I was writing up my Ph.D., working part time, and serving as the Starr Lecturer in anthropology, I joked that I was student, staff, faculty, and alum — simultaneously. I’ve been told that my latest book is featured on the front table of the Seminary Coop. What could be more Chicago then that?

Helen Warren:

The most common reason given for requesting extra support was general assistance with core schoolwork. More than a third said they had tutoring to help with a specific GCSE exam and nearly a fifth were seeking better results for a grammar school entrance exam. The most popular subjects are, in order, maths, English, chemistry, physics, biology, Spanish and French.

Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said that with costs of at least £25 per session, many parents could not afford the benefits of specialist teaching outside school hours.

“No one wants to limit parents doing their best for their children but we need to ensure that extra tuition is as widely available as possible,” he said. “Otherwise, it will continue to widen the attainment gap.”

Abigail Becker

Mary O’Donnell, the city’s youth services coordinator, said in her 21 years with the city, she has seen funding for youth employment increase along with a greater prioritization from the City Council and mayor on providing jobs to youth.

“I would say the uptick really started in the last 10 years with the increased focus on gangs and delinquency and low income neighborhoods,” O’Donnell said. “From the municipal side, we’re really looking at high needs situations, high needs neighborhoods.”

A recent study of a summer jobs program called One Summer Plus, open to at-risk students in high-violence Chicago public high schools, showed a 43 percent reduction in arrests for violent crime among participants over a 16-month period.

Via Chan Stroman.

Tyler Cowen

How much is really at stake? A new paper by Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt (of “Freakonomics” fame) and Robert Metcalfe comes up with a pretty good, dollars-and-cents measure of how much UberX, the main Uber service, is improving the lives of its users.
 
 Based on their study, here are a few ways of framing the value of Uber ride services to Americans:
 
 For a typical dollar spent by consumers on UberX, they receive $1.60 worth of gain.
 
 That’s an unusually high amount of “consumer surplus,” as it is called by economists. It means there aren’t that many close substitutes for Uber at prevailing prices, as moving people around is something the U.S. does not do especially well.

Jonathan A Knee

The now-ailing media mogul Sumner Redstone is widely credited with popularising the phrase “content is king”. The intuitive appeal of this aphorism has separated investors from their money across a wide range of media businesses.
The basic fallacy inherent in the sentiment, however, has ensured that these stories have ended unhappily from a financial point of view, and not just in movie making. In particular, pursuit of the content dream has been behind many disastrous forays into the business of education by some of the world’s most sophisticated investors.

Molly Knefel:

A political battle is being waged over charter schools in Massachusetts right now, and it’s a microcosm of the state of the charter debate across the country. In the lead-up to a November ballot measure in which voters will decide whether or not to lift the state’s cap on charter schools, known as Question 2, Democrats passed a resolution this month opposing charter school expansion. The resolution states that the pro-charter campaign is “funded and governed by hidden money provided by Wall Street executives and hedge fund managers.” In response, the pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform drafted a letter to the coalition behind the resolution, called the “No on 2” campaign, claiming that they misrepresented Democrats’ attitude towards charters. “There is great Democratic support for public charter schools,” wrote Liam Kerr, Massachusetts State Director of Democrats for Education Reform.

Jason Wordie:

Mass inflation’s headlong “race to the bottom” occurs when – seemingly without warning – the general public realises that the over-issued, poorly backed currency they possess is, ultimately, just coloured paper.

Recent news reports that local asso­ciate degree holders earn – after two years of self-funded study – about the same as secondary-school leavers have caused academic soul-searching. A senior official from one leading institutional provider of these courses opined – with unintended irony – that Hong Kong’s employment market has readjusted itself to the large number of sub-degree graduates.

Michael Copperman:

On a blinding September afternoon three weeks after the start of school, Assistant Principal Winston met me in his office. He stood behind his desk as if keeping it between us.

“Son, what’s your approach to classroom management?” He bared his teeth when he spoke, and seemed perpetually about to say something simultaneously cruel and amusing. I wasn’t sure about being called “son,” baby-faced as I was, by a man also in his twenties, but there seemed little choice but to accept his terms of address. I thought about how to answer the question. According to the notebook we received in training, classroom management cannot be separated from student interest. Children who were learning behaved well. Children not learning behaved poorly. Teach well, and you’d succeed, for as one particularly inspired passage had noted, “Children incline toward the light.” I wanted to be prepared, and had read the materials several times.:=

Matt Walsh:

A week or two ago I received a message from a notorious fugitive named Julie Giles. She complained that she’d recently been arrested, shackled, and cuffed for barbaric and shocking crimes against humanity. The courts determined that she was a threat to herself, her family, and her community, therefore she was seized and charged like the scurrilous criminal she so clearly is.

What were these depraved acts, you ask? What sort of atrocities had she committed? What kind of vile transgressions led to her being chained and perp-walked like Charles Manson? Why does this previously law abiding middle aged woman now have her very own mugshot on file over at central booking?

Well, her son missed class a few times.

Gasp.

You see, according to the compulsory attendance policy at her kid’s public school in Georgia, the district will magnanimously allow a parent to keep their kid home from school up to five times in a year without a doctor’s note. Once they exceed that magically arbitrary fifth “unexcused” absence, every succeeding incident must be specifically prescribed by a medical professional. Even if the parent feels the child should stay home, the school will not allow it unless a doctor agrees. Otherwise, the parent could be thrown in jail, which is a totally reasonable response.
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Julie’s son unfortunately made the mistake of getting sick more times than the school allows, and so a warrant was issued for his mom’s arrest.

Phil Baty:

Times Higher Education has opened up its influential World University Rankings to independent audit by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

In a move unprecedented in the global university rankings field, THE subjected its methodological description, its data capture and handling process and its rankings calculations to a PwC audit.

Evelyn Lamb:

“The technology already exists. It’s only the will we’re lacking.” These sentences from Cathy O’Neil’s new book Weapons of Math Destruction have been haunting me since I read it. They come from the last chapter of a book in which she has illustrated again and again how, in the words of her subtitle, “big data increases inequality and threatens democracy.” With Facebook’s new trending topics algorithm and data-driven policing in the news, the book is certainly timely.

Weapons of math destruction, which O’Neil refers to throughout the book as WMDs, are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis.

Sam Biddle

A confidential, 120-page catalogue of spy equipment, originating from British defense firm Cobham and circulated to U.S. law enforcement, touts gear that can intercept wireless calls and text messages, locate people via their mobile phones, and jam cellular communications in a particular area.

The catalogue was obtained by The Intercept as part of a large trove of documents originating within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where spokesperson Molly Best confirmed Cobham wares have been purchased but did not provide further information. The document provides a rare look at the wide range of electronic surveillance tactics used by police and militaries in the U.S. and abroad, offering equipment ranging from black boxes that can monitor an entire town’s cellular signals to microphones hidden in lighters and cameras hidden in trashcans. Markings date it to 2014.

Patrick Thibodeau

The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore.

The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years.