Kate McGee

According to district data, students in schools with majority low-income students are more likely to fail Advanced Placement tests than students in schools with higher-income students. In low-income schools, students are often not taking Advanced Placement tests at all, instead, focusing on other ways to receive college credit in high school, like dual credit.

Lou Kuhn teaches Advanced Placement calculus and dual enrollment* pre-calculus at Crockett High School, where she’s been a teacher for 11 years. She’s known around campus for her dance videos that she makes with her students.

Kuhn is an experienced teacher who has received multiple AP course trainings by the College Board, but she’s very open about something other teachers may be less likely to admit.

Holman Jenkins, JR:

Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves.

This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Ralph Haurwitz:

A comprehensive safety review after the slaying of a student at the University of Texas recommends that UT hire more police officers and security guards, improve lighting and tighten controls on nighttime access to campus buildings, among other improvements, officials said Wednesday.

The report by the Texas Department of Public Safety also calls for removing excessive vegetation in some areas, upgrading video surveillance systems and developing policies aimed at reducing the presence of homeless people on campus.

UT President Gregory L. Fenves echoed his previous pledge, when he had asked for the review, to implement all of the recommendations.

Mark Oppenheimer

Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.

Eric Boehm

After detailing how the CEOs of charter schools in Florida and Pennsylvania had recently been convicted of embezzling school funds to enrich themselves, Oliver stressed that the two incidents were not outliers.

“In Philadelphia alone, at least 10 executives or top administrators had pled guilty in the last decade to charges like fraud, misuse of funds or obstruction of justice,” he said.

Robert Pondisco

Response to this series of stunning attacks and political reversals has been muted. The usual groups have told journalists where and how they disagree with the antis. But there’s been no outcry of support for the agenda items under attack, and certainly not from any political leaders, prominent columnists, etc.

This week, by marked contrast, the atmosphere inside the edu-bubble was set alight by—wait for it—John Oliver. The British comedian recorded a “takedown” of charter schools that was quickly and correctly dismissed by Reason‘s Nick Gillespie as “clever, glib, and uninformed.” From the reactions of education reformers, however, you’d think Oliver was Edward R. Murrow and that the expose had appeared on 60 Minutes, not a late-night comedy show.

Louis Kauffman

This essay explores the Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce. We concentrate on his notational approaches to basic logic and his general ideas about Sign, Symbol and diagrammatic thought.

In the course of this paper we discuss two notations of Peirce, one of Nicod and one of Spencer-Brown. Needless to say, a notation connotes an entire language and these contexts are elaborated herein. The first Peirce notation is the portmanteau (see below) Sign of illation. The second Peirce notation is the form of implication in the existential graphs (see below). The Nicod notation is a portmanteau of the Sheffer stroke and an (overbar) negation sign. The Spencer-Brown notation is in line with the Peirce Sign of illation. It remained for Spencer-Brown (some fifty years after Peirce and Nicod) to see the relevance of an arithmetic of forms underlying his notation and thus putting the final touch on a development that, from a broad perspective, looks like the world mind doing its best to remember the significant patterns that join logic, speech and mathematics. The movement downward to the Form (“we take the form of distinction for the form.”[9, Chapter 1, page 1]) through the joining together of words into archetypal portmanteau Signs can be

The Renaissance Mathematicus:

Scientific American has a guest blog post with the title: Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere, which argues in its subtitle: The mathematics that is most important to society is the province of the exceptional few—and that’s always been true. Now I’m not really interested in the substantial argument of the article but the author, Michael J. Barany, opens his piece with some historical comments that I find to be substantially wrong; a situation made worse by the fact that the author is a historian of mathematics.

Barany’s third paragraph starts as follows:

In the first agricultural societies in the cradle of civilization, math connected the heavens and the earth. Priests used astronomical calculations to mark the seasons and interpret divine will, and their special command of mathematics gave them power and privilege in their societies.

David Edwards:

The math myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It returned in the late 80’s when the Germans and Japanese were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It’s occurring again now because the Indians and Chinese are better than us in math and science.

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

Vivek Wadhwa has described how there’s no shortage of scientists and engineers. I’ve been concerned with what skills those who are working as scientists and engineers actually use. I find that the vast majority of scientists, engineers and actuaries only use Excel and eighth grade level mathematics. This suggests that most jobs that currently require advanced technical degrees are using that requirement simply as a filter. In particular, I’m working on documenting the following:

Math Myth Conjecture: If one restricts one’s attention to the hardest cases, namely, graduates of top engineering schools such as MIT, RPI, Cal. Tech., Georgia Tech., etc., then the percent of such individuals holding engineering as opposed to management, financial or other positions, and using more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (arithmetic, a little bit of algebra, a little bit of statistics, and a little bit of programming) is less than 25% and possibly less than 10%.

Maggie Angst

The educational opportunities for students include:

A Black Cultural Center in the Red Gym.
Inclusivity and diversity training for teaching assistants.
A new ethnic studies course to be launched next year.
Three new mental health staff members in the University of Health Services.
Additional training for housing fellows.
Instructional materials for faculty and staff to address diversity.
Although the report outlines a number of programs and initiatives to encourage diversity understanding and conversations this fall, the report does not specifically outline benchmarks to determine whether the programs are successful.

Dean of Students Lori Berquam said measures of success vary depending on the program but did not give a specific example of a program’s success benchmarks.

“For example, with Our Wisconsin we plan to do a formal evaluation because we want to make sure it’s accomplishing what we think it ought to,” Berquam said.

Chad Wellmon:

Since at least the nineteenth century, research universities from Berlin to Baltimore have been indispensable institutions. They have conserved, created, and circulated knowledge not just for the specialized scholars within their ivied and bricked walls but also for the communities outside them. Research universities authorized and legitimated knowledge. They helped separate fact from fallacy. The research university, as Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins, put it in 1885, was a civilizing force. Alongside the family, commerce, and religion, it moved civilization forward. It was the motor of modernity.

But all that, as the sages of Silicon Valley tell us, is being disrupted. The research university, they say, has ossified into a bureaucratic behemoth that no longer creates knowledge—or innovates as the disrupters would put it—so much as inefficiently processes and distributes it. For the prophets of entrepreneurship, innovation, and start-up-ism, the research university is a vestige of a predigital age. Like journalism, manufacturing, and music before it, the research university too will soon be destroyed and reinvented in the digital revolution.

The research university emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany, when Prussian intellectuals and government leaders worried that the very idea of a university, whose origins stretched back at least six centuries to Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, was on the verge of collapse. In 1795, the Wednesday Society, a secret salon of Prussian civil ministers and intellectuals, entertained a provocative proposition from one of its members, a Reformed pastor named J.G. Gebhard. Universities, he asserted, should be abolished. “In our age,” he wrote in an essay circulated among the group before one of their Wednesdayevening meetings, had become “dispensable.” Their “purpose” could be achieved by other means, by which he meant other media, namely, print. As printed encyclopedias, lexica, periodicals, and monographs became more affordable and readily available, the university was losing what many saw as its monopoly on knowledge.

Gebhard’s frank proposal prompted a lively debate among his Wednesday Society colleagues about the purpose of the university in an age of print. They quickly moved beyond his vague imperative—abolish universities— to a more nuanced discussion of the ends of universities. What was the purpose of a university? And, perhaps more importantly, what kind of technologies and institutions were needed around 1800 in order to create and share knowledge that people could trust? Could the medieval model of the university survive the political, technological, religious, and economic revolutions of modernity? Gebhard and his colleagues’ concerns about the future of the university, however, revealed deeper anxieties about the fate of knowledge in an age of the proliferation of print. What counted as real, authoritative knowledge?

Adam Clark:

TRENTON — The results of controversial standardized tests that many New Jersey students have yet to pass will carry three times as much weight in some teacher’s evaluations this school year, the state announced Wednesday.

Teachers in grades 4-7 whose students participate in the PARCC math tests or in grades 4-8 whose students take PARCC English exams will have 30 percent of their rating based on students’ performance on the tests, an increase from 10 percent, Deputy Education Commissioner Peter Shulman said in a memo to schools.

The teacher evaluations take into account how much a teacher’s students improved their scores on the annual PARCC exams. So, a teacher whose students earn low test scores can still get a boost in his or her performance rating as long as the students made progress compared to their peers, according to the state.

“As New Jersey now enters into its third year of PARCC testing, schools have successfully transition to the new exams,” Shulman wrote in the memo. “The PARCC assessment can be used as a tool to improve classroom instruction more effectively than any previous statewide assessment.”

Jason Richwine

When the Head Start Impact Study generally failed to show cognitive or behavioral improvements that lasted beyond kindergarten, Head Start’s defenders pointed to possible “sleeper effects” as a reason to keep the program going. The argument is that Head Start may have imparted a benefit that is not detectable in the elementary years but that emerges later on. A new paper from Brookings’ “Hamilton Project” follows in that tradition, claiming that Head Start improves high school graduation rates, college attendance, self-control, self-esteem, and parenting practices.

Conor Williams & Catherine Brown:

School integration has been a critical priority for many waves of education reformers: students in diverse, integrated schools grow up better prepared to flourish in a plural democratic society and economy.

Yet efforts to convert this promise into practice have repeatedly crashed and broken against various intractable interests: familial anxieties, real estate patterns, and scarcely concealed racism or bigotry. Anxious, privileged, predominantly white families have too frequently responded to integration efforts by leaving diverse neighborhoods or cities for wealthier communities beyond the borders of local desegregation efforts.

Miriam Kingsburg:

Part II of the collection is largely concerned with the 18th- and 19th-century rise of commercial cartography. Fed by growing literacy, travel, and urbanism, a market arose for maps of all kinds, including tourist guides, bird’s-eye views, and spatial depictions of current events. A few authors even note the appearance of faux antique maps, illustrating the popular demand for the application of modern technology to the land and cityscapes of epochs past. Ronald P. Toby shows how cartographers inscribed maps of Edo (present-day Tokyo), then as now the world’s largest city, with information about status distinctions, the “most salient reality” of early modern life in Japan. Mary Elizabeth Berry interrogates the Japanese address system. Why, she asks, have urban residents traditionally identified their location by neighborhood (chô) rather than by street (as in Chinese and Western practice)? Although this was (and is) confusing to outsiders, Berry argues that it serves a more important purpose than navigation: it expresses the irreplaceable function and strong consciousness of local community to residents. Even today, the system remains vital: when displaced from their homes by the “triple disaster” of March 11, 2011, refugees organized camp spaces by chô.

Shannon Reed:

Good Will Hunting

MIT Professor Gerald Lambeau is impressed by the intellect of Will Hunting, a janitor who solved an extremely difficult math problem, but Will needs help processing his complex emotions and anger. Lambeau turns to his estranged former college roommate, Dr. Sean Maguire, for help. Sadly, Maguire, an adjunct professor who must shuttle between three campuses in two states and teach 7 classes a semester to stay off the dole, can’t find a minute to call Lambeau back. Will ends up in jail by the age of 23, Lambeau never goes out on a limb for another student, and Maguire is fired for being late to class because of a car pile-up on I-90.

Run Time: 1 hour

Emerson collective:

In 2012, President Obama offered a bright spot with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. While limited in scope, the program grants temporary deportation relief and work permits to select immigrants brought as children to the United States—for some, the only country they’ve ever really known. Finally, these hardworking young people had the opportunity to flourish.

Recognizing the deep impact that immigration issues have on children, Teach for America became one of many organizations to stand up and invite DACA recipients to work as corps members. Today, young people with DACA status are teaching in communities across the country.

Patricia Murphy

Even in the middle of the school day, you won’t find Rebecca and Tim Owen’s children in a classroom.

Instead, on a recent afternoon, six of the seven Owen kids were at Sunnyside Beach in Washington State. 4-year-old Zoe and 6-year-old year Joshua were looking for feathers to make a dreamcatcher, while the others read or explored the beach. The Owens are being homeschooled, and the trip was part of their curriculum.

After Tim joined the Army in 2005, Rebecca Owen says it made sense to homeschool their children because the family moved around so much.

Fix the Debt:

Growing national debt can drive up interest rates throughout the economy, leading to higher interest payments on mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit card debt.

Although rates are currently low – due mainly to the weak economy and temporary efforts by the Federal Reserve to keep them down – they will most certainly rise as the economy recovers, and they will rise much higher if debt continues to grow.

Reducing the debt will help lower costs for middle-class families. Growing debt levels, on the other hand, will increase interest costs, squeeze family budgets, and put important family investments out of reach. In 25 years, interest rates would be 1 point higher because of debt.[2] Put another way, a family with a $300,000 mortgage can expect to pay at least $60,000 more over the course of the mortgage.

Less Room for Investment in Infrastructure, Research, and the Next Generation

Growing national debt means that the government must pay higher interest payments to service that debt. Interest will represent the fastest growing part of the federal budget. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects interest costs will more than triple from about $250 billion in 2016 to about $850 billion in ten years. By 2027, 100 percent of the revenue we collect will go toward interest payments and mandatory spending. That leaves little room for important priorities and investments such as national defense, education, infrastructure, low-income support, and basic research. As more of our budget goes to financing today’s spending and yesterday’s promises, spending targeted toward the next generation will continue to dwindle.

Dan Butin:

have been mulling over David Theo Goldberg’s recent essay: “Coming Soon To You: Uber U.” It is a story of decline, of the university in ruins, of a powerful vision of the liberal arts impaled on the stake of profits. “The immediate future for academe,” Goldberg writes in his penultimate paragraph, “is one of the growing robotification of basic skills and service delivery and smart algorithms autogenerating their own code. The pressures to downsize the human interface of learning, to limit faculty determination of what and how things are valuable to be learned, and to discount critical knowledge and thinking capacity in every sense of the term will only intensify.”

I am very sympathetic to such a perspective. Higher education is one of the only chances and places where students are helped to understand and confront how to be thoughtful and engaged citizens in a complex and contested pluralistic democracy. Helping students to develop such productive habits of mind and repertoires of action – what the developmental psychologist Marcia Baxter Magolda has eloquently called “self-authorship” – is a fraught undertaking and one that we in higher education take extremely seriously even as we struggle to understand how to do it well.

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Rachel Barr, a professor of psychology at Georgetown, says the notion that young children need parents around in order to gain any real emotional or cognitive benefits from technology has been borne out by other studies as well.

In her own work with infants and toddlers, she has found that a parent’s presence can more than double the chances that a child figures out a task on a touch screen and a parent who is “warm and responsive and sensitive and uses clear language” can increase the likelihood of success even more.

Rosie Cima:

Grattan Elementary school is one of the crown jewels of the San Francisco public school district.

It has a lot going for it: a high ratio of teachers to students, an organic garden, enrichment programs that include choir, dance, technology, and “integrated drama,” high standardized test scores, and—despite being a public school—an enormous budget, courtesy of aggressive fundraising by its Parent-Teacher Association.

The school’s elite status is reflected in its admissions statistics. In San Francisco’s school assignment system, parents of students entering the public school system rank their school preferences, and are matched with schools in a system designed to promote equal opportunity. Every year, lots and lots of parents rank Grattan. In the 2015 school year, Grattan had 1,342 applicants for only 65 spots. The resulting admissions rate of 5% was lower than Harvard’s.

But back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Grattan was struggling. The school’s scores were lackluster, its enrollment was dangerously low, and it was unpopular, especially among affluent white families.

Donna de la Cruz:

In her book, Ms. Schwartz writes about mistakes that might have been prevented if she had known her students better. She had a student named Chris who was obsessed with science. Ms. Schwartz thought she had done Chris a huge favor by securing a spot for him in a science-focused summer camp. But she was unaware of the family’s financial struggles and it turned out that his parents could not afford to take time off from work to get Chris to camp.

I am familiar with some private schools that require teachers visit students’ homes.

Larry Cuban

There is a strongly-held myth many academics, policymakers, and reformers repeat weekly: schools hardly ever change. Those who believe in this myth often cite the large literature demonstrating failed innova­tions in schools or point at calcified bureaucracies and stubborn teachers and principals who block reform after reform (see here and here). Like all myths, this one has a factual basis. There have been many failures to transform schooling in the U.S. From open-space schools to vouchers, there have indeed been vain attempts to alter the course of schooling.

Such a myth is useful for those who beat the drums that U.S. schools are broken. After all, they seek changes that meet their view of what constitutes a “good” education. “Troubled” schools is the basis for the profound pessimism that presently exists over the capacity of public schools to improve. So it is a politically useful myth, but it is inherently mistaken nonetheless.

:Robert Kelchen:

As a shareholder of the Green Bay Packers, I keep an eye on what Butte Community College’s most famous student-athlete has to say. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers famously told fans in “Packer-land” in 2014 to “R-E-L-A-X” after the team got off to an uncharacteristically slow 1-2 start. Fans relaxed after the team went 11-2 the rest of the way in the regular season as Rodgers played like his regular self.

In the education policy niche of the world, few things get people more upset than declining standardized test scores. Last year, I wrote about the fuss about SAT scores declining—and how at least part of that decline is due to more students taking the test instead of the American education system failing young adults. Now it’s ACT’s turn to release their newest scores—and my message again is R-E-L-A-X.

Between 2015 and 2016, average ACT scores declined from 21.0 to 20.8 nationwide, the lowest score in at least five years. But as the now-dominant test in the United States (much to the surprise of many folks who grew up on a coast where the SAT is still common), the percentage of students taking the ACT rose from 52% in 2012 to 59% in 2015 and 64% this year. This sharp increase in ACT takers is in large part due to more states requiring all students to take the ACT as a graduation requirement. In 2016, all graduating high school seniors took the ACT in 18 states, up from 13 states in 2015.

Razib Khan:

There is one section of her talk where Dreger waxes eloquently about the Enlightenment, and freedom of thought, which caught my attention. We have always missed the mark, but at there was a point where in Western intellectual culture the idea that freedom of thought and striving toward truth was at least the paramount method and goal. I am not so sure that is the case today.

When Dreger pointed approvingly on Twitter to University of Chicago’s statement on “safe spaces,” I told her that most of my liberal Twitter follows were enthusiastically sharing this piece, UChicago’s anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power. The piece makes some coherent points, but mostly it is self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation. At a certain point the cultural Left no longer made any pretense to being liberal, and transformed themselves into “progressives.” They have taken Marcuse’s thesis in Repressive Tolerance to heart.

Though I hope that Dreger and her fellow travelers succeed in rolling back the clock, I suspect that the battle here is lost. She points out, correctly, that the total politicization of academia will destroy its existence as a producer of truth in any independent and objective manner. More concretely, she suggests it is likely that conservatives will simply start to defund and direct higher education even more stridently than they do now, because they will correctly see higher education as purely a tool toward the politics of their antagonists. I happen to be a conservative, and one who is pessimistic about the persistence of a public liberal space for ideas that offend. If progressives give up on liberalism of ideas, and it seems that many are (the most famous defenders of the old ideals are people from earlier generations, such as Nadine Strossen and Wendy Kaminer, with Dreger being a young example), I can’t see those of us in the broadly libertarian wing of conservatism making the last stand alone.

Paul Finland

They point out that most coverage they analyzed was episodic, about a new report or the latest crime. Instead, they suggest “news media commit to reflexively exploring their community over the long haul, rather than reactively reporting on events as they arise. … This would mean a change in priorities, perhaps ditching the meeting in favor of a community dinner.”

Their conclusion was edgy: “Through their embrace of value-neutral and facts-only reporting, many Madison news outlets failed to build trust, diversify their sourcing, and tell the true stories of race.”

They wrote that reporters “have been schooled that they cannot have ‘skin in the game’ on any issue. They should not sign petitions, put bumper stickers on their cars, or plant a political sign in their yards.” Yet those reporters’ own life experiences vary around race, class, education, upbringing and social circles. “In covering race, their skin, quite literally, is in the game,” the authors argued.

This raises the question of the importance of employing a diverse staff, something the Cap Times and others struggle with. Our only full-time African-American journalist resigned recently to pursue her dream of law school in Washington, D.C. We are happy for her and sorry she left. She made a big contribution.

Much more on the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.

Madison continues to spend more than most on a non diverse largely one size fits all K-12 structure.

Stanford HCI

With the ubiquity of mobile devices like smartphones, two new widely used methods have emerged: miniature touch screen keyboards and speech-based dictation. It is currently unknown how these two modern methods compare. We therefore evaluated the text entry performance of both methods in English and in Mandarin Chinese on a mobile smartphone. In the speech input case, our speech recognition system gave an initial transcription, and then recognition errors could be corrected using either speech again or the smartphone keyboard.
 
 We found that with speech recognition, the English input rate was 3.0x faster, and the Mandarin Chinese input rate 2.8x faster, than a state-of-the-art miniature smartphone keyboard. Further, with speech, the English error rate was 20.4% lower, and Mandarin error rate 63.4% lower, than the keyboard. Our experiment was carried out using Baidu’s Deep Speech 2, a deep learning-based speech recognition system, and the built-in Qwerty or Pinyin (Mandarin) Apple iOS keyboards. These results show that a significant shift from typing to speech might be imminent and impactful. Further research to develop effective speech interfaces is warranted.

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.

Rachel Slade

In November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) can raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed, or increase enrollment in existing charters in underperforming districts. If the referendum is approved, the city of Boston—which currently has 27 Commonwealth charter schools that operate independently of the district and educate about 14 percent of the student population—will likely see an increase in charters over the next several years. It’s an advance that charter advocates firmly champion but opponents see as another little push in the direction of a very steep cliff.

How did public education get so contentious, even as Boston’s public school system is near the top on every available scoring index of the nation’s major urban districts? Why does Brooke Charter Schools founder Jon Clark, a quiet, straight-talking guy from Wellesley, become slightly unhinged when I share some of the views of the anti-charter folks? What is it about this debate that brings out the tinfoil-hatted paranoia in all of us?

Ideologically speaking, charter schools—which are publicly funded but operate outside of typical district and teachers union rules—are the muddiest of all political issues, simultaneously supported by neoliberals and ultraconservatives, progressives and regressives, hedge funders and immigrants. For those who favor them, charters represent our best hope for improving education. In fact, the pro-charter movement is predicated on the certainty that public education is in crisis, and it lays the blame squarely on government incompetence and union hegemony. Well-run charters, they argue, not only educate children more cheaply, but also more effectively. The data back that up: The average SAT composite score in Boston’s charter high schools in 2015 was 100 points higher (about 10 percentile points) than the district schools’.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Alex Zimmerman:

Americans are overwhelmingly against closing struggling schools, divided on whether parents should be allowed to opt their kids out of standardized tests, and more enthusiastic about expanding career and technical education than honors classes.

They’re also split on what, exactly, schools are for in the first place.
Those are just some of the findings from an annual poll published Monday by PDK International, a professional association of educators. And while the study is based on a representative sample drawn from across all 50 states, Josh Starr, a former New York City teacher who is now CEO of PDK, said the findings map onto local debates about the city’s “Renewal” turnaround program, for instance, and state policy on career and technical education.
Here are four charts from the report that connect with conversations that are unfolding in New York City.

Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel Education

The University of Virginia has spent the past decade building an investment fund that now totals $2.2 billion, a pile of money so large that officials say it could finance the entire school and medical center for nine months.

As the balance grew, the university sought to protect the annual funding it gets from Virginia taxpayers and raised its tuition significantly, with the price for in-state freshmen rising 30 percent since 2013.

On Friday, lawmakers in Richmond plan to ask the school to justify stockpiling so much money, outside of its endowment, to generate discretionary revenue for selected projects. Their questions come as the state confronts a possible shortfall of about $1.5 billion in its current two-year budget.

Ernie Smith

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

When I recently wrote about airport stores, one of the most interesting (albeit minor) facets of the piece was the fact that airport travelers are generally considered a captive audience, making it easy for shops to jack up prices.

Airports, though, are amateur hour compared to the college textbook industry.

Any industry that can increase its prices by 1,041 percent over a 38-year period—as the textbook industry did between 1977 and 2015, according to an NBC News analysis—is one that knows how to keep, and hold, an audience. (It’s almost like they’re selling EpiPens.)

Frederick Logevall & Kenneth Osgood

This matters. Knowledge of our political past is important because it can serve as an antidote to the misuse of history by our leaders and save us from being bamboozled by analogies, by the easy “lessons of the past.” It can make us less egocentric by showing us how other politicians and governments in other times have responded to division and challenge. And it can help us better understand the likely effects of our actions, a vital step in the acquisition of insight and maturity.

Judging by the state of our political discourse during this dismal campaign season, the change can’t come soon enough.

Paul Glasteris

• While 19 out of U.S. News’ top 20 national university rankings are private schools, the majority of Washington Monthly’s top 20 are public institutions, including University of California-San Diego, Texas A&M, and Utah State University, schools that rate nowhere near the top at U.S. News.

• While a few elite schools, such as Stanford and Harvard top the Washington Monthly list, others underperform. Columbia, Northwestern, and Washington University in St. Louis, which rank 4th, 12th, and 15th respectively, on the U.S. News list, come in 24th, 40th, and 99th in the Washington Monthly rankings.

• Berea College, ranked 67th on U.S. News’ list of liberal arts colleges, comes in 1st in the Washington Monthly.

While nearly half of all college students today are adults, no national publication has ever ranked colleges based on which serve adult students best—until now. To put together its exclusive ranking of the best four-year and two-year colleges for adult learners, the Washington Monthly compiled reams of data on which schools best meet these students’ unique needs, such as plenty of weekend, evening, and online classes to fit busy work schedules.

The top five four-year colleges for adults are:
• Golden Gate University—San Francisco (CA)
• University of Utah (UT)
• Park University (MO)
• Concordia University—St. Paul (MN)
• University of Colorado-Denver (CO)

Kashmir Hill

Facebook’s ability to figure out the “people we might know” is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the big blue giant know?

While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why.

“I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone.

The next week, things got weirder.

Most of her patients are senior citizens or people with serious health or developmental issues, but she has one outlier: a 30-something snowboarder. Usually, Facebook would recommend he friend people his own age, who snowboard and jump out of planes. But Lisa told me that he had started seeing older and infirm people, such as a 70-year-old gentleman with a walker and someone with cerebral palsy.

Rana Foroohar

When there is wrongdoing in fields that are both complex and opaque, it often takes a whistle-blower to inform the public. That’s exactly what former quant trader turned social activist Cathy O’Neil has become for the world of Big Data. A Harvard trained mathematician, O’Neil spent the last several years teaching at Barnard, working for DE Shaw, one of the world’s leading hedge funds, and launching a technology start up designed to deliver targeted advertising. Her key takeaway from the last two experiences—that Big Data is increasing inequality and threatening democracy—is the subject of her important new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, out on September 6.

Unlike the WMDs that were never found in Iraq, data driven algorithms are all around us. Already, many of our bosses use them to grade our performance. Our children’s teachers are hired and fired by them. They decide who gets access to credit and who pays higher insurance premiums, as well as who will receive online advertising for luxury handbags versus who’ll be targeted by predatory ads for for-profit universities.

In fact, it was that last example that prompted O’Neil, who’s also a member of the Occupy Movement, to write her book. While working at the start-up, she heard a presentation from an investor lauding the fact that the company’s new technology would mean that he would “never have to see another ad for the University of Phoenix,” but would be automatically funneled more offers for “vacations in Aruba and jet skis.” “I realized that far from doing anything good, this technology was actually siloing people into online gated communities where they no longer had to even acknowledge the existence of the poor,” she says.

O’Neil sees plenty of parallels between the usage of Big Data today and the predatory lending practices of the subprime crisis. In both cases, the effects are hard to track, even for insiders. Like the dark financial arts employed in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Big Data algorithms that sort us into piles of “worthy” and “unworthy” are mostly opaque and unregulated, not to mention generated (and used) by large multinational firms with huge lobbying power to keep it that way. “The discriminatory and even predatory way in which algorithms are being used in everything from our school system to the criminal justice system is really a silent financial crisis,” says O’Neil.

The effects are just as pernicious. Using her deep technical understanding of modeling, she shows how the algorithms used to, say, rank teacher performance are based on exactly the sort of shallow and volatile type of data sets that informed those faulty mortgage models in the run up to 2008. Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways—a young black man, for example, who lives in an area targeted by crime fighting algorithms that add more police to his neighborhood because of higher violent crime rates will necessarily be more likely to be targeted for any petty violation, which adds to a digital profile that could subsequently limit his credit, his job prospects, and so on. Yet neighborhoods more likely to commit white collar crime aren’t targeted in this way.

In higher education, the use of algorithmic models that rank colleges has led to an educational arms race where schools offer more and more merit rather than need based aid to students who’ll make their numbers (thus rankings) look better. At the same time, for-profit universities can troll for data on economically or socially vulnerable would be students and find their “pain points,” as a recruiting manual for one for-profit university, Vatterott, describes it, in any number of online questionnaires or surveys they may have unwittingly filled out. The schools can then use this info to funnel ads to welfare mothers, recently divorced and out of work people, those who’ve been incarcerated or even those who’ve suffered injury or a death in the family.

Indeed, O’Neil writes that WMDs punish the poor especially, since “they are engineered to evaluate large numbers of people. They specialize in bulk. They are cheap. That’s part of their appeal.” Whereas the poor engage more with faceless educators and employers, “the wealthy, by contrast, often benefit from personal input. A white-shoe law firm or an exclusive prep school will lean far more on recommendations and face-to-face interviews than a fast-food chain or a cash-strapped urban school district. The privileged… are processed more by people, the masses by machines.”

Kathy Boccella:

A Montgomery County judge has ordered the Lower Merion School District to revoke its latest tax hike, saying the district misled taxpayers by projecting large budget deficits to justify raising taxes 4.4 percent when it actually had socked away millions of surplus dollars.

In what may be an unprecedented win for Pennsylvania taxpayers, Common Pleas Judge Joseph A. Smyth said in his decision Monday that the district could increase taxes for 2016-17, but no more than 2.4 percent.

The judge said he would “leave for another day” the question of rebates, refunds, and credits for those who already paid their current school tax bills. He said he would consider establishing a trust to collect “improperly” accumulated past taxes – an estimated $1,400 per household – if it is determined that all Lower Merion taxpayers are plaintiffs.

Robert Reich starts a Twitter thread. Might avoiding the collective and work rule approach change things?

Edward Schlosser:

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

What it was like before
In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy.

Doug Erickson

Tommy Badger Aug 30, 2016 8:51am

Our school board is living in the past. The state is not going to raise financial support for public schools. Our school board was given tools to make changes to operate in the new Republican reality. They refuse to use these new tools and continue to expect the taxpayers to cover them.

How many charter schools do we have? How many students do we have to lose to Oregon and Verona due to the overcrowded Leopold campus?

This school board doesn’t deserve our support until they make some changes in how they operate.
Middle Man Aug 30, 2016 8:34am

Act 10 works for the vast majority of school boards, puts them in check. Unfortunately for us here in tax town, this school board doesn’t know how to balance a check book, so they blame SW and understand the tax base is socialist Bernie supports…heck you could raise taxes to 75 percent and still blame Walker and get away with it.
KickiceWis Aug 30, 2016 8:58am

“heck you could raise taxes to 75 percent and still blame Walker and get away with it.”

There is plenty to blame Walker for. A 75% tax rate isn’t necessary.

And keep one tiny little tidbit in mind when you laud Act 10 and how school districts raise taxes. Districts raise taxes on average every 10 years. In 2010, with the fear of Act 10 being implemented, 80 of the states school districts raised tax levies. So just because few have since, don’t assume Act 10 was the reason. Time will tell.
Middle Man Aug 30, 2016 9:21am

On average every 10 years, so tell me how MMSD rates on the law of averages. Not lauding Act 10, don’t assume its SW fault either.
array1 Aug 30, 2016 11:54am

So other Wi school districts have not increased taxes to make up for the walker cuts?
KickiceWis Aug 30, 2016 8:32am

Nobody wants to pay more in taxes. And like others, I agree there is some funding that can come from other wasteful spending.

But people freak out when taxes go up to support schools. Schools. Can we find any better way to spend tax dollars than educating our children? The average tax increase on school spending is $60 a year on an average $250,000 home. That is $5 a month. Seriously people, is $5 a month going to break you? This is a whole lot of whining for $5 a month.
joe Aug 30, 2016 9:04am

I think the concern is more about whether the school is using the money wisely, not whether schools are important.

Much more on the Madison School District’s nearly $18k/student budget, here.

Jonathan Rees

Even if Daphne Koller and company are not yet willing to admit this fact publicly, with all that MOOC hype fading quickly into the rear-view mirror their actions speak louder than their previous once ever-so-optimistic words. MOOCs and other forms of automated online education may persist as long as there’s a surplus of money in Silicon Valley anxious to disrupt higher education for the sake of capital rather than students. That ship may sail on indefinitely, but compared to the inflated rhetoric that once blew through their sails, MOOCs are destined to remain ghost ships floating on the open ocean, without the lost crew that had such high hopes to transform education forever at the start of their long journeys.

The new, new thing always takes awhile to emerge. Legacy institutions presumably understand the history of innovation along with long term information trends….

Sarah Karp

Over the past weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools announced that results from the NWEA assessment show that 60 percent of students are performing above the national average in reading and 50 percent in math. This is an improvement since last year and the best the district has done since it began using the NWEA in 2013.

One wonders how Madison (about $18k), which spends substantially more than Chicago per student, compares?

Toni Airaksinen:

When I first discovered women’s studies, I was lulled into a comforting sense that I had discovered the “truth.” It was as if my veil of ignorance had been yanked away, and I was blissfully seeing the world for what it really was.

I have taken seven women’s studies classes; initially at a nondescript state university and later at a women’s college in Manhattan. After taking those classes, I realize that not only was I deluded, but I was led into an absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda.

Indeed, since knowledge itself is considered a patriarchal construct, feminist theories are the organizing principles of classes.

The theoretical backbone of women’s studies is grounded in three main conjectures: that of the patriarchy, intersectional oppression, and social constructionism.

None of these contentions can be proven or falsified. Yet, as a student, good grades are contingent on agreeing with them. So what do they actually represent?

……

Oppression does indeed exist. But, oppression is complicated, far more complicated than can be distilled in an undergraduate academic setting. And teaching students how to view the world through the lens of oppression isn’t just dangerous, but cruel. Nothing is more oppressive than having your professors teach you that you’re a victim.

The Economist

 THE economies of the rich world increasingly depend upon skilled workers, and college degrees are in high demand. In 1972 a university-educated man aged 25-34 could expect to earn 22% more than a peer without a degree, according to the Urban Institute, a think-tank. Today that premium has risen to 70%. But if university pays, its benefits are not spread evenly across all graduates. A new report from PayScale, a research firm, calculates the returns to higher education in American universities. Its authors compare the career earnings of college graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, after taking account of financial aid.

Megan Thielking

A new survey published in Pediatrics on Monday reports that 87 percent of pediatricians in the United States say they encountered parents refusing to vaccinate their children in 2013. A decade earlier, 75 percent of doctors reported they had experienced vaccine refusals.

The most common reason parents gave, according to doctors? The vaccines weren’t necessary.

Graham Brown-Martin

We operate our schools as teacher-centred, subject knowledge focused systems and continually test around that. Not just the students but we also have teachers spending as much time evidencing their practice within these metrics rather than by the kids whose curiosity and wonder they’ve ignited by great teaching.

No wonder excellent teachers are leaving the profession in droves when they have been reduced to content delivery specialists and rewarded on the basis of grades rather than inspiring young minds. The craft of teaching is rapidly diminishing given all it takes is a 6 week course on top of 2:1 degree to call yourself a teacher. In some cases you don’t even need the 6 week course. Imagine if that’s all it took to become a doctor. There would be riots.

Joe Timmerman

Certain classes at this university require students to use an online program to complete and submit their homework — for instance, Accounting 100, Finance 100 Economics 101 and Physics 202. There are certainly some advantages to online homework, like faster feedback and much less work for professors and teaching assistants. However, at what expense? For many of these programs, there are two ways to gain access: either purchase the textbook new or purchase an access code for the program separately. In some cases, access to the online program can cost more than $100 – as much or more than the new textbook itself.

Considering that online coursework programs are priced in such a ludicrous manner, it becomes clear this is nothing more than an attempt by textbook companies to quash the used textbook market.

But why would professors choose to use these types of programs? After all, professors have been through their fair share of school. They understand how budget-busting purchasing textbooks can be. While I’m not a mind reader, allow me to hazard a few guesses.

Josh Robinson:

The SEDA, or Sustainable Economic Development Assessment ranks more than 160 countries across 10 areas including economic stability, health, governance and environment. It uses two measures, the first a current score taking into the most recent data and a rolling score that assesses how countries can convert economic growth into well-being over an eight year period from 2006 to 2014.

Charles Sahm

By painting all states with a broad brush, Oliver presented a one-sided story. A more nuanced, thoughtful take would note that many states take charter accountability seriously and that those states employing the “serious, slow and steady” approach produce better results.

Nick Hillman.

Aaron Hanson:

THE MOST RECENT National Science Foundation (NSF) “Survey of Earned Doctorates” raises eyebrows, not because it paints a predictably bleak picture for the job prospects of humanities PhD students, but because people are surprised that prospects for engineering and science PhDs aren’t looking so good either.

In a fascinating way, the NSF data challenges a long-standing narrative about job opportunities by field of study. We’re used to thinking of — more accurately, maligning — humanities students as idealistic, unsystematic dreamers prone to “Peter Pan syndrome,” irrationality, and reality avoidance. Humanities PhDs struggling to find sustainable employment don’t garner much societal sympathy, largely because it’s considered axiomatic that a person with a humanities PhD has no business thinking she possesses economic value. But when the scientists and engineers — the ones confirmation bias demands we view as rational and pragmatic — are caught in a rough job market flirting with something that looks like quixotic delusion, we’re forced to rethink our assumptions. Once it appears that it’s not just humanities students making unadvisable career choices, it suddenly becomes more difficult to victim-blame unemployed doctors (of philosophy) as a whole.

Brad Wolverton

Fifteen credits were all he needed. That’s what the school district in California where Adam Sambrano works as a career-guidance specialist required for a bump in pay. But when he saw the syllabus for a graduate course he’d enrolled in last year at Arizona State University, he knew he was in trouble.

Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written. The idea of that much research worried Mr. Sambrano, who also spends time serving in the Army National Guard.

Before the class started, he went on Craigslist and enlisted the service of a professional cheater. For $1,000 — less than the monthly housing allowance he was receiving through the GI Bill, he says — Mr. Sambrano hired a stranger to take his entire course.

Via Steve Crandall.

Gilad Edelman

Last year, we profiled ten college and university presidents who, in our judgment, were doing things differently, and better, than their peers. Instead of using their positions to increase their endowments and recruit a “better” sort of student in order to move their schools up the U.S. News & World Report rankings, these leaders were turning their institutions into laboratories of innovation in a hunt for better ways to deliver higher ed—providing quality degrees at lower cost, getting more students to graduate, and so on. One of those presidents, Michael Sorrell of Paul Quinn College, is the subject of a longer feature in this issue (see Matt Connolly, “Labor of Love”).

James Rufus Koren:

If you have a credit card, a car loan or almost any type of debt other than a mortgage, there’s a chance your name and address have been run through Elliott’s algorithm, a complex formula that crunches data from the Census Bureau.

But as it has become more widely used, Elliott’s work and the CFPB’s application of it have found their way into the middle of a fight between the federal consumer watchdog and politicians who want to scrap the agency. Some congressional Republicans have gone so far as to call the CFPB’s use of Elliott’s system “junk science.”

His algorithm is a tool that estimates the probability that someone is white, black, Asian or Hispanic based only on their address and last name. The CFPB has relied on it to accuse some of the country’s largest auto lenders, including the financing arms of Toyota and Honda, of discrimination.

Car dealerships often add an extra bit of interest, called a markup, on top of the rate charged by a lender, ostensibly to pay the dealership for its work arranging the loan. The CFPB, using Elliott’s system to look at tens of thousands of loans, has alleged that dealers charge larger markups to minority borrowers.

Flickr Pool.

DAVID MCANINCH AND CLAIRE ZULKEY, WITH DANA DRISKILL, JOHN HARDBERGER, AND TAYLOR SCHEIBE, ILLUSTRATIONS BY FERNANDO VOLKEN TOGNI

The way we assess school quality is changing fast. When Chicago last ranked public schools, in 2012, we followed standard practice at the time and threw a lot of weight on test scores. For one thing, they were a widely available and consistently reported measure of performance. For another, standardized test results—typically expressed as a percentage of students who meet or exceed state standards on a given exam—offered nice, clean, ostensibly meaningful numbers that could be compared at a glance.

Via Chan Stroman.

Arielle Martinez:

The University of California at Berkeley has indefinitely suspended its proposed “global campus” because of its budget deficit, the East Bay Times reported on Friday, even though the Berkeley chancellor said earlier this year that the project would be off-limits to budget cuts.

The chancellor, Nicholas B. Dirks, said in an open letter to the campus in February that although Berkeley was considering cuts to close a $150-million deficit, the planned global campus would be “entirely supported by philanthropy and external partnerships.”

The global campus, which Berkeley proposed in January 2015, was supposed to be built in Richmond Bay, just 10 miles from the university’s main campus. The project was pitched as a research hub at which partner universities from around the world would offer programs for students both from the United States and abroad.

Jennifer Earl:

Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher at the school, passed out a letter to every parent at a “Meet the Teacher Night” ahead of the start of the school year to explain her new homework policy — or should we say, no-homework policy.

A pleased parent posted a photo of the letter on her Facebook page, and it went viral with more than 59,000 shares.

“Brooke is loving her new teacher already!” Samantha Gallagher captioned the picture.

The mother of 7-year-old Brooke was thrilled to know that her daughter won’t be overwhelmed with homework this year.

“There will be no formally assigned homework this year,” Brandy Young explained in the letter. “Rather, I ask you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside, and get your child to bed early.”

Daniel Näslund:

I have done some programming exercises from code.org together with my six year old daughter. Why? I have mixed feelings about putting a child in front of a computer: On one hand I’m worried about the attention addiction that I see in her peers, they spend way too much time in front of their tablets and tv:s. Do I really want my daughter to start using the computer at this early age. I hear some parents argue that learning to use a computer is a valuable skill, but what does that mean? Understanding the machine? Understanding common UI idioms? Understanding how to access games?

I guess, I’m hoping for her to get a head start, I want her to be able to build things on her own, not just consume what others have created. But what exactly is it that I want her to build? I see her and her younger brother spending a lot of time with their Lego bricks, creating houses, boats, cars and fantasy castles. What is it beyond that, that I’m hoping for her to learn by using a computer?

The 74:

The financial perils threatening Chicago Public Schools are highlighted in the following six numbers.

$6,700,000,000

The size of the CPS’s long-term debt as of June — prior to its request Wednesday to continue to borrow. The district also had $870 million of outstanding short-term debt as of June.

$1,500,000,000

The board approved CPS’s request for a $1.5 billion credit line on Wednesday, which will require setting aside another $35 million for interest payments. Since last August, all three major credit agencies had rated the district’s debt as “junk.” As a consequence, CPS will be forced to pay higher interest on future loans.

$945,000,000

The board also approved CPS’s request to borrow $945 million for capital improvement projects, including school construction and improvement. Some analysts questioned the district’s plan, noting it already sold $725 million worth of bonds earlier this year to investors at an extraordinarily high 8.5 percent interest rate. That debt won’t be paid off until 2044.

$250,000,000

After a year-long stalemate, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and lawmakers agreed in June to approve a stopgap budget that will keep the state afloat for six months and allow school districts to open their doors this fall. The deal allowed the board to levy an additional property tax in Chicago estimated to yield $250 million to cover teachers’ pensions. (The district will still need the state and teachers union to help with pension payments, per below.)

Jonathan Last:

boys have need of some recklessness. If they do not come by it naturally, it must be bred into them. The trick is titrating just enough of the stuff so that they are game for life’s adventures but not liable to do something catastrophically stupid, like going to law school. And so it was in this moment, as I stood on Lee Street, that I resolved to put more adventure into his life.

In the end, I settled on taking Cody to Yellowstone for a week of camping and communing with nature in all her brutal splendor. I emphasize that this trip would be for his benefit, not mine. Because while I enjoy nature, in measured doses, I have matured to the point where I have certain needs. For instance, there is only one pillow on which I can sleep—it is almost completely flat, with small indentations perfectly conformed to my neck from three decades of use. Also, I require a double espresso every morning, before 6:30 a.m. This is a partial list of what my wife delicately refers to as my “eccentricities.”

But parenthood requires sacrifice—the two words are practically synonyms—so in early June, I packed up my son, and a great deal of gear, and took him to Yellowstone, one of the last places in America where you can still have real adventure.

Real adventure requires real risk, and Yellowstone has that in spades. The week before we got to the park, there were two “geyser accidents.” In one, a 13-year-old was burned at a thermal area near Old Faithful. The injuries were severe enough that he was hospitalized. In another, a 23-year-old fell into an acidic, scalding-hot spring near Porkchop Geyser. He died in so grisly a manner that rangers were unable to recover a body.

Judith Scott-Clayton, Basit Zafar:

Prior research has demonstrated that financial aid can influence both college enrollments and completions, but less is known about its post-college consequences. Even for students whose attainment is unaffected, financial aid may affect post-college outcomes via reductions in both time to degree and debt at graduation. We utilize two complementary quasi-experimental strategies to identify causal effects of the WV PROMISE scholarship, a broad-based state merit aid program, up to 10 years post-college-entry. This study is the first to link college transcripts and financial aid information to credit bureau data later in life, enabling us to examine important outcomes that have not previously been examined, including homeownership, neighborhood characteristics, and financial management (credit risk scores, defaults, and delinquencies). We find that even as graduation impacts fade out over time, impacts on other outcomes emerge: scholarship recipients are more likely to earn a graduate degree, more likely to own a home and live in higher-income neighborhoods, less likely to have adverse credit outcomes, and are more likely to be in better financial health than similar students who did not receive scholarships.

Eliot Brown

Legislative efforts in two of the country’s most populous states to boost urban housing construction are facing a common barrier: resistance from construction unions.

In California last week, legislators and interest groups declared dead a measure pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown to allow certain apartments with some low-income units to sidestep the state’s environmental review process. That followed a failed effort by state lawmakers in…

Christopher Emdin:

How can we help black boys succeed in school? One popular answer is that we need more black male teachers.

The logic appears simple: Black boys are not faring well, and the presence of black men as teachers and role models will fix this problem. The former secretary of education, Arne Duncan, brought this theory to national attention with a number of speeches at historically black colleges and universities. His successor, John King Jr., has taken up the argument, often repeating the statistic that only 2 percent of our nation’s teachers are African-American men.

The argument may be well intentioned, but it is a cop-out. Schools are failing black male students, and it’s not because of the race of their teachers. These students are often struggling with the adverse effects of poverty, the inequitable distribution of resources across communities and the criminalization of black men inside and outside of schools. Black male teachers can serve as powerful role models, but they cannot fix the problems minority students face simply by being black and male.

Peter Lawler

Last week, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson lashed out at what he called the “higher education cartel” of tenured professors for blocking reforms that could reduce ballooning tuition and fees: “We’ve got the Internet—you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need disruptive technology for our higher education system.” Johnson went on to suggest that students could learn as much and more efficiently by watching Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War than by taking a history class.

It’s a common complaint among conservatives that many tenured professors “radicalize” students with Marx and gender theory while living royally off of state funding and federal student loans. Online and competency-based education will fix both, according to critics like Johnson and Scott Walker, by limiting professors’ unchecked power and improving efficiency with market-based solutions.

There’s just one problem, according to Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and a regular contributor to National Review, Modern Age, and many other conservative publications: It won’t work.

The number of administrative staff it takes to provide the lifestyle students expect and oversee the increasing amount of paperwork for accreditation is huge. Lawler doesn’t provide any figures, but they are relatively well-known. To give just one example: The number of full-time faculty in the California State University system increased slightly between 1975 and 2008, from 11,614 to 12,019, while the number of administrators nearly quadrupled during the same period, from 3,800 to 12,183.

Paul Perry

With the assistance of George K. Baum & Co., Mapleton’s school board won approval from voters in November 2010 to issue approximately $32 million in debt to match a state grant the district received for $22 million.

The Mapleton Public Schools received more state funding than is typical. On average, local districts contribute about 80% of the fiscal burden—through bond measures—for school construction projects, with the state typically chipping in the other 20%. The federal government has little to no role in the financing of such projects.

Mike Carter

Defense attorneys and some legal scholars suggest the FBI committed more serious crimes than those they’ve arrested — distributing pornography, compared with viewing or receiving it.

Moreover, the FBI’s refusal to discuss Operation Pacifier and reveal exactly how it was conducted — even in court — has threatened some of the resulting criminal prosecutions. Last month, a federal judge in Tacoma suppressed the evidence obtained against a Vancouver, Wash., school district employee indicted in July 2015 on a charge of receiving child pornography because the FBI refused to reveal how it was gathered.

Similar motions are pending in other prosecutions in Washington and elsewhere around the country.

During the two weeks the FBI operated The Playpen, the bureau says visitors to the site accessed, posted or traded at least 48,000 images, 200 videos and 13,000 links to child pornography. At the same time, agents deployed a secret “Network Investigative Technique,” or NIT, to invade their computers, gather their personal information and send it back to the FBI.

Channel3000 video:

MMSD Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham takes questions from our viewers about the coming school year.

Ben Casselman:

The larger challenge for schools, however, may be longer-term: attracting teachers. Tight school budgets — and the broader pushback against public-sector payrolls in many states — have squeezed teacher salaries. Average weekly wages for public school teachers have dropped 5 percent over the last five years, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Moreover, teacher salaries are falling further behind those of other professions that require a college degree; the trend holds up even after accounting for more generous public-sector benefits. The growing gap could have serious consequences: As my former colleague Hayley Munguia wrote last year, evidence shows that fewer top students are going into, or staying in, teaching.

The economic recovery could ease funding pressure in the next few years. But the longer-term picture is darker. The aging of the baby boom generation will put pressure on budgets at the federal, state and local levels as governments struggle to pay for health care and other costs associated with a graying population. Much of the debate over education in recent years, including on the campaign trail, has focused on expanding access to college and preschool. But ensuring adequate funding for the years in between could prove just as important.

Spending continues to grow in Madison, now approaching $18,000 per student.

Chicago Public Schools:

This past school year, CPS students achieved record attainment levels on math and reading, and exceeded national averages of student growth. These results are all-time high scores for CPS, and prove that the hard work of our students, educators, and families is paying off.

More than half of CPS students are meeting or exceeding national achievement averages on this test. This year’s scores represent a jump of 13.5 percentage points in Reading and 9.5 percentage points in Math since 2013 – continuing the exceptional progress our students have made in recent years.

Besides shattering District records, these scores show CPS students outpacing their peers nationally in academic growth. This success can be traced to their own dedication, the commitment of their teachers and principals, and a record-high attendance rate of 93.4 percent in the 2015-2016 School Year.

http://www.cps.edu/schooldata.

Doug Erickson:

The annual report is a selective rather than exhaustive view of the district, with only some grades and some demographic groups highlighted in detail.

Mary Choi

Lara has just updated her Instagram with a picture. It’s of her and her twin sister, Sofia, in bathing suits, doing the backstroke in crystalline water. It’s shot from afar, from a height, and the girls look like synchronized swimmers or else mermaids. They’ve taken dance classes since they were three—jazz, hip hop, and ballet—and the grace and confidence with which they move their long limbs in tandem is hypnotizing. The likes are immediate. The first comment is a classic—emoji with the heart eyes—the second, “cuties.” The third features three emoji with heart eyes.

Lara and Sofia are shy, almost painfully so, with people they don’t know. They move around in the world with heads close, chatting conspiratorially. This belies how substantial their Instagram reach is. Each 16-year-old has more than 1,000 followers, especially surprising when you realize that their feeds are locked, and the girls say they at least vaguely know every single person that follows them. Perhaps more impressive, though: Each post on their feeds has at least 300 likes—meaning that roughly a third of their followers have signaled their approval. Just to give you an idea, only a fraction of Kim Kardashian’s 78 million followers actually like her photos, about 2 percent.

Robin Harris:

Sunday marks the 53rd anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Parts of that speech—specifically, the part that asks for judgement based not on the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character—have come to define King and the Civil Rights Movement, privileging a message of unity, hope, and peace. For years, that dominant narrative of racial collaboration and non-violence has persisted.

Now another civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, has emerged. It begs comparison. So, we instinctively turn to what we know best, highlighting the portion of King’s dream that made its way onto inspirational posters and glazing over the gritty parts of that speech—the urgency, the fierceness, the discontent, the “rude awakening” and “whirlwinds of revolt,” the “marvelous new militancy.” And so it’s much more common to hear the Black Lives Matter movement described by how it differs from the civil rights activism of the 1960s, instead of similarities and lessons to be learned. Instead of seeing a continuum, we see conflict: the content of one’s character is pitted against the particular status of black lives.

Christopher Ingraham:

A surprisingly high number of scientific papers in the field of genetics contain errors introduced by Microsoft Excel, according to an analysis recently published in the journal Genome Biology.

A team of Australian researchers analyzed nearly 3,600 genetics papers published in a number of leading scientific journals — like Nature, Science and PLoS One. As is common practice in the field, these papers all came with supplementary files containing lists of genes used in the research.

David Castelvecchi:

Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. The insight comes from an analysis of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), which aims to connect all mathematicians, living and dead, into family trees on the basis of teacher–pupil lineages, in particular who an individual’s doctoral adviser was.

The analysis also uses the MGP — the most complete such project — to trace trends in the history of science, including the emergence of the United States as a scientific power in the 1920s and when different mathematical subfields rose to dominance1.

Maths whizz solves a master’s riddle
“You can see how mathematics has evolved in time,” says Floriana Gargiulo, who studies networks dynamics at the University of Namur, Belgium and who led the analysis.

Renee Dudley & John Shiffman:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized computers and other material on Friday from Manuel Alfaro, who left his job as executive director of assessment design and development at the College Board in February 2015. The FBI is investigating alleged computer intrusion and theft against an unidentified “victim corporation” involving “confidential or proprietary information,” including tests, test forms and internal emails, according to a search warrant issued in the case.

Alfaro had contacted officials of seven state governments in recent months, accusing the College Board of making false claims about its tests when bidding for public contracts with the states. The College Board, he alleged, misled the states about the process it used to create questions for the new version of the SAT, resulting in an inferior exam. He also aired those allegations publicly, largely through postings on his LinkedIn account.

Hacker News

Top books mentioned in comments on Hacker News last week

Timothy Pratt:

Southern states have been disproportionately cutting spending on public higher education. In a region where the poorest families already face some of the nation’s highest poverty rates, forced tuition increases make their colleges and universities among the least affordable, a slew of recent data show.

This contributes to falling enrollment in states already struggling with some of the nation’s lowest percentages of residents with college educations.

It’s “a vicious circle,” said Dave Spence, the president of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board, or SREB. “You’ve got a region that’s poor. Why? Because it’s undereducated.” Yet budget cuts keep pushing university and college degrees out of the reach of many.

Bain & Company PDF

For centuries, the cost of distance has determined where businesses produce and sell, where employers locate jobs and where families choose to live, work, shop and play. What if this cost fell dramatically, thanks to new technologies? How would the global economy change if manufacturers could produce locally in small batches, without incurring excess cost? Would existing business models and supply chains, for instance, suddenly become uncompet- itive? If people could work from anywhere, would crowded neighborhoods start to thin out?
 

That change already has begun in the world’s advanced economies and is gathering momentum. Over the next two decades, the cost of distance will decline sharply, according to Bain research, altering the way we live and work—faster than most people expect and more broadly than many imagine. This next big economic shift will create an astonishing array of opportunities for businesses and investors—and unexpected risks.
 

The catalyst for this historic shift is an array of new platform technologies that have pushed the cost of distance to the tipping point. Multibillion-dollar investments in robotics, 3-D printing, delivery drones, logistics technology, autonomous vehicles and low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites are giving rise to new products and services that sharply erode the cost of moving people, goods and information. As these technologies combine and converge, change will accelerate.
 

For leaders steering companies through this transition, the change will feel turbulent and unfamiliar. Risks will multiply for industries of all kinds. As the very nature of growth shifts, some of the underlying assumptions of existing business models may no longer be valid, leaving many companies with assets stranded in the wrong locations or with businesses that are becoming obsolete.
Growth opportunities, in particular, will shift dramatically. Today’s high-growth emerging markets, the main focus of business investment for over a decade, are likely to struggle. In contrast, advanced economies will have the poten- tial to embark on a period of sustained expansion.

Kiah Collier:

The issues — scoring delays, in particular — prompted Morath to drop grade advancement consequences for fifth and eighth graders and exclude exams affected by the computer glitch from school accountability ratings. But despite pleas from school superintendents to throw out all scores for the purposes of rating schools, Morath has suggested the issues were not widespread or severe enough to do so.

“ETS apologizes for the operational shortcomings during this year’s STAAR program,” the test vendor said in a news release Tuesday. “Our most important goal is to deliver the high-quality program the students and educators of Texas deserve, and we will continue to improve programs and processes to achieve that objective.”

The company, which administers national exams including the SAT, spent an additional $20 million providing support to school districts and charters as they attempted to resolve testing issues, according to an education agency news release. It noted that those costs will be assumed by the company and are “above and beyond” its state contract, worth $280 million over four years.

Kyrie O’Connor:

Buying a 3-D printer was out of the question, of course. “Our next option was to find somebody who had one,” she said.

This is where the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library, and its staff members Jim Johnson and Patrick Ferrell, came in.

Ferrell manages the Maker Space at the library, part of the Harris County Public Library system, which is a workshop area where patrons can use laser cutters and 3-D printers and the like. It’s the only such library space in Southeast Texas. “It’s just another way libraries can offer new services,” Ferrell said. They see everyone from astronauts to artists to schoolchildren come in to use the equipment.
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An artist’s rendering of NoLo Studios, a residential development planned for artists in Acres Homes.
Race, gentrification, Houston and the de Menil legacy
1973: COLLEGE STATION, TX – JUNE 10: Driver Bobby Allison holds up a confederate flag with Miss Winston, Noneen Hulbert, before the Alamo 500 race at the Texas World Speedway in College Station, Texas. (Photo by Dozier Mobley/Getty Images)
White-trash pride: Working-class whites are having a moment
You know those blue, white and green flags with a tree you’ve been seeing at soccer games? That’d be Cascadia. (The regional MLS championship is the Cascadia Cup and uses the “Doug” flag, hence the confusion.) Depending on who is talking, this secession scheme would have British Columbia, Washington and Oregon as well as bits of the surrounding states and provinces break away to form a Pacific Northwest republic. Note: An earlier version of this item included a photo of Seattle Sounders fans holding the Cascadia Cup. My sincere apologies to those who were offended by being associated with the secessionist movement. Those who corrected me have my thanks. – Levi Pulkkinen, seattlepi.com
Secession: It’s not just a Texas thing
In this composite photo, Renan Brandao, a store manager for two Mattress Firm stores on Rice Boulevard, looks for things to do, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016, in Houston.
The loneliness of the mattress salesman
ZIP code: 77028 Births: 3,357
Unzipped: Shrinking in 77028

But Katelyn’s hand was different.

Ferrell and his team of volunteers had never made anything like it.

The Vincik family drove the two-plus hours to Clear Lake to make sure the hand would be measured and scaled correctly.

“We had to do a lot of analyzing,” said Ferrell.

Lisa Schencker:

Illinois consumers are one step closer to facing sky-high increases for individual health insurance plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace.

The Illinois Department of Insurance said Wednesday it has submitted rate increases to the federal government that for some types of plans average 43 percent to 55 percent.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services will decide rates. But the numbers released Wednesday confirm the fears of consumers, who’ve already watched a number of insurance companies withdraw from the Obamacare exchange because of financial losses, limiting choices as people prepare to enroll for 2017.

Rates could increase by an average of 44 percent for the lowest-priced bronze plans, 45 percent for the lowest-priced silver plans and 55 percent for the lowest-priced gold plans, according to a preliminary analysis released by the state Wednesday.

Here’s what those percentages mean: A 21-year-old nonsmoker buying the lowest-priced silver plan in Cook County next year could pay a premium of $221.13 a month, up from $152.42 a month this year.

LawProfBlog

Most of the time, my students are awesome. There are times, however, when there is that one student who seeks to have drama in his or her life. That drama sometimes comes in the form of a final exam review that goes wrong.

Ordinarily, I’m happy to review final exams with students. Ordinarily, students come to discuss their exams in order to learn what mistakes they made, and how to improve next time. There are times, however, when the exam discussion is not about those two things. In those bad discussions, the issue is the grade, and the student’s very skewed self-perception. After a prolonged discussion, my patience depletes. Here are REAL COMMENTS students have made to me about their exams. What I say to them is in quotations, and what I’m thinking is in italics. I’m not so proud of my thoughts in these times. I very clearly need to work on practicing my patience.

The Economist:

The story of the Melungeons is at once a footnote to the history of race in America and a timely parable of it. They bear witness to the horrors and legacy of segregation, but also to the overlooked complexity of the early colonial era. They suggest a once-and-future alternative to the country’s brutally rigid model of race relations, one that, for all the improvements, persists in the often siloed lives of black and white Americans today. Half-real and half-mythical, for generations the Melungeons were avatars for their neighbours’ neuroses; latterly they have morphed into receptacles for their ideals, becoming, in effect, ambassadors for integration where once they were targets of prejudice.

The two big questions about them encapsulate their ambiguous status—on the boundaries of races and territories, and between suffering and hope, imagination and fact. Where did the Melungeons come from? And do they still exist?

Last of the Phoenicians

At a recent gathering of the Melungeon Heritage Association (MHA), in Vardy, a hamlet in the valley, and over in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, family trees and photographs of swarthy ancestors were compared. But the underlying preoccupation was the Melungeons’ origins—a subject comprised more of legend than of evidence. They are said to be the progeny of Phoenicians who fled the Roman sacking of Carthage, or of pre-Columbian Turkish explorers (making them America’s first Muslims). They descend from wayward conquistadors, from a doomed colony established on Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh, or from Moorish galley slaves abandoned there by Sir Francis Drake. They were sired by shipwrecked pirates or by Madoc, a 12th-century Welsh explorer. They are a lost tribe of Israel.

Native Americans often feature as consorts in these narratives, such as the fable in which Satan briefly cohabits with a Cherokee woman in the mountains of Tennessee. Etymology is as vexed as genealogy. The name Melungeon derives from mélange, an appellation bestowed by early French settlers on the Clinch river. Alternatively, Italian pioneers in Virginia used their word for aubergine to disparage the Melungeons’ skin colour. It comes from melas, Greek for dark or black, from the Turkish expression melun can, meaning “cursed soul”, or from melungo, a West African term for shipmate. Or from an old English word for trickery found in Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.

One of the most widespread beliefs is that they are offspring of Portuguese mariners who arrived in early colonial times; or, as some 19th-century Melungeons would have put it, on the rare occasions when they spoke for themselves, they were “Portyghee”. A newspaper report of 1848 said the community was established by “a society of Portuguese Adventurers”, and now lived in “a delightful Utopia” of primitive disinhibition. (The Melungeon story has mostly been told in the calumnies and hearsay of outsiders.) A sub-theory sees them as exiled conversos, Iberian Jews who hid their faith to escape the Inquisition before fleeing to the New World.

Sonja Isger:

Eric Davis is black. His twin sons, Nigel and Elgin, are black. When they loaded their backpacks and headed for first grade years ago, Davis made sure they walked into a racially diverse elementary school in suburban Boynton Beach.

And yet in their classroom then and for the next eight years, Nigel and Elgin didn’t have any classmates who looked like them – no other black boys.

That’s because from elementary through middle school the twins were in the gifted program. Despite being in separate classes, their experience was similar in one way: the program’s overwhelming whiteness.

Their father, a school police officer at the time who visited the campus to deliver lessons on bullying, couldn’t help but notice.

Anthony Esolen

There’s a chilling image from my youth that I’ve never been able to scrub out of my mind. It might not seem at first glance to amount to much. It was a blue spiral spray-painted on our street, a sort of insect with enormous eyes, with a caption suggesting LSD. In those days, the newspapers were filled with war and rumors of worse than war—of the wholesale collapse of the social order. It was when the Students for a Democratic Society engaged in their violent demonstration against that inoffensive, old-fashioned liberal Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Off the pigs,” cried the Black Panthers, whose tongues were not in their cheeks when they said it; rather their thumbs were ready to cock their pistols if any “pig” of a policeman were to get in their way.

Nick Strayer

In Texas, only the top 10 percent of each high school’s graduating class is promised admission to a public university. Many high-performing students who just miss the cut-off leave for Oklahoma and Arkansas, according to Catherine Horn, the executive director of the Institute for Educational Policy Research and Evaluation.

Wall Street Journal

For a change, we come not to bury a college president but to praise him. His name is Robert Zimmer, and nearby the University of Chicago president defends the educational and societal virtues of free speech on college campuses. Let’s hope he wears body armor to the next faculty meeting.

Mr. Zimmer’s public coming out is all the more notable because it appears to be part of a university-wide message. The school’s dean of students, Jay Ellison, has written a letter to incoming freshmen noting that the desire for “safe…

MyVisaJobs.com.

Christine Rosen:

When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots or post his own, nor does he use Facebook or Snapchat. “I don’t need social media to stay in touch,” he says.

Such abstention from social media places him in a small minority in his peer group. According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 92% of American teenagers (ages 13-17) go online daily, including 24% who say they are on their devices “almost constantly.” Seventy-one percent use Facebook, half are on Instagram, and 41% are Snapchat users. And nearly three-quarters of teens use more than one social-networking site. A typical teen, according to Pew, has 145 Facebook friends and 150 Instagram followers.

But what if a teen doesn’t want to live in that networked world? In a culture where prosocial behavior happens increasingly online, it can seem antisocial to refuse to participate. Are kids who reject social media missing out?

Joel Kotkin:

There’s little argument that inequality, and the depressed prospects for the middle class, will be a dominant issue in this year’s election, and beyond. Yet the class divide is not monolithic in its nature, causes, or geography. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some places are more unequal than others.

Housing represents a central, if not dominant, factor in the rise of inequality. Although the cost of food, fuel, electricity, and tax burdens vary, the largest variation tends to be in terms of housing prices. Even adjusted for income, the price differentials for houses in places like the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles are commonly two to three times as much as in most of the country, including the prosperous cities of Texas, the mid-south and the Intermountain West.

These housing differences also apply to rents, which follow the trajectory of home prices. In many markets, particularly along the coast, upwards of 40% of renters and new buyers spend close to half their income on housing. This has a particularly powerful impact on the poor, the working class, younger people, and middle class families, all of whom find their upward trajectory blocked by steadily rising housing costs.

In response to higher prices, many Americans, now including educated Millennials, are heading to parts of the country where housing is more affordable. Jobs too have been moving to such places, particularly in Texas, the southeast and the Intermountain West. As middle income people head for more affordable places, the high-priced coastal areas are becoming ever more sharply bifurcated, between a well-educated, older, and affluent population and a growing rank of people with little chance to ever buy a house or move solidly into the middle class.

Ironically, these divergences are taking place precisely in those places where political rhetoric over inequality is often most heated and strident. Progressive attempts, such as raising minimum wages, attempt to address the problem, but often other policies, notably strict land-use regulation, exacerbate inequality.

The other major divide is not so much between regions but within them. Even in expensive regions, middle class families tend to cluster in suburban and exurban areas, which are once again growing faster than areas closer to the core. Progressive policies in some states, such as Oregon and California, have been calculated to slow suburban growth and force density onto often unwilling communities. By shutting down the production of family-friendly housing, these areas are driving prices up and, to some extent, driving middle and working class people out of whole regions.

Xeni Jardin:

A report out this week from Bloomberg says that since January, 2016, people in the city of Baltimore, Maryland have secretly and periodically been spied on by police using cameras in the sky. Authorities today effectively admitted that the report is accurate.

In response to Tuesday’s Bloomberg article, Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith today said not to worry unless you’re a “criminal,” and that the flights by a specially equipped spy plane were “effectively, a mobile citywide camera.”

In a feature released on Tuesday, Bloomberg Businesweek reported that police in the mostly black city used a Cessna airplane carrying an ultra-wide-angle camera array developed for use during the Iraq War. The police surveillance flights spent hours flying overhead, sending footage back to massive hard drives.

Monte Reel’s report for Bloomberg begins outside the Baltimore courthouse where ‘not guilty, all counts’ messages were popping up on reporters’ phones, in the Freddie Gray death by police case.

Zeeshan Aleem:

In 2001, the Portuguese government did something that the United States would find entirely alien. After many years of waging a fierce war on drugs, it decided to flip its strategy entirely: It decriminalized them all.

If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty.

Fourteen years after decriminalization, Portugal has not been run into the ground by a nation of drug addicts. In fact, by many measures, it’s doing far better than it was before.

Sally Wealle & David Batty:

Universities’ use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in sexual harassment cases involving staff and students is allowing alleged perpetrators to move to other institutions where they could offend again, according to academics, lawyers and campaigners.

They warn that the prevalence of harassment is being masked because of the use of confidentiality clauses in settlements, which prevent any of the parties discussing what has happened.

Universities that find themselves at the centre of sexual harassment allegations are accused of prioritising their own reputations in an increasingly competitive higher education marketplace over their duty of care to vulnerable students. Those who described concerns include:

Jody Avirgan

Learning new ways to think about math

Jody Avirgan: I read that one of your innovations as coach was bringing in people from the rest of the world to train in the U.S.

Po-Shen Loh: Yes. In fact, when I was on the team in 1999 … [we were] brought to train with the Romanians, in Romania, because the national coach of the United States at that time had grown up [there]. That was very impactful for me. It was really interesting to meet our compatriots from other countries — not in a competitive atmosphere, but a collaborative one.

Avirgan: Are there differences in the way that different countries approach mathematical thinking? I imagine that a lot of people think of math as fairly standardized and universal. So what do you actually learn from another country’s mathematicians?

Loh: You learn things in the same way that you learn from meeting another country’s “X.” Meeting someone from another country automatically broadens your worldview. And especially in the next century, which [these kids] are going to be living in, they will be living in an increasingly globalized environment. So I thought it would be good and healthy for people to start thinking of the world as something much bigger than just the United States.

…. is not for the faint of heart.

A proposed tax and spending increase referendum looms.

I thought it might be useful to publish a “micro site” that is easily found and possibly informative for those who might be interested in spending and achievement data.

https://mmsdbudget.wordpress.com

Justin Cohen

Everyone needs to read Alana Semuels’s long piece in the Atlantic about the historical roots of using property taxes to fund schools. The piece uses Connecticut as a case study:

The discrepancies occur largely because public school districts in Connecticut, and in much of America, are run by local cities and towns and are funded by local property taxes. High-poverty areas like Bridgeport and New Britain have lower home values and collect less taxes, and so can’t raise as much money as a place like Darien or Greenwich, where homes are worth millions of dollars … In every state, though, inequity between wealthier and poorer districts continues to exist. That’s often because education is paid for with the amount of money available in a district, which doesn’t necessarily equal the amount of money required to adequately teach students … the fact remains that delegating education funding to local communities increases inequality.

I am a radical on this issue, as I believe that the link between property taxes and schooling revenues needs to be abolished. I get annoyed when defenders of the education status quo say that we need to “fully fund” schools, not because I don’t want schools to have more resources, but because that’s only part of the problem; the words “fully fund” are meaningless if the definition of “fully” is predicated on the whims of local school boards in segregated, suburban communities, which is where most of the power in public schooling currently sits. This system takes an already classist and racist education system and exacerbates it with all the classism, racism, and segregation built into our country’s housing apparatus. In Connecticut, like many states, plaintiffs are using clauses in the state constitution to argue that a funding system based on property taxes in unconstitutional. Because the US constitution is silent on education, state courts are probably the best current venue for remedies, but the system is inequitable to its core.

Janet Daley:

Politics has passed through many epochs. There have been eras of isolationism, or imperial conquest, or egalitarianism, or nationalist aggression. Now, in the transatlantic sphere at least, we seem to be entering a new historical phase: the Era of Stupid.

American and British politicians at the highest level appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can utter the most defiantly ill-informed, aggressively ignorant statements about precisely the issues that governments have traditionally regarded as life-and-death matters. Somehow, this brazen guilelessness – the shameless display of the failure to understand even the basic meanings of significant words – seems to be offered as a bond with the common man, as if not understanding complicated things was a measure of authenticity.