schoolinfosystem.org
William Galston: For most of my life, I rejected the assertion that America is a “sick society.” This judgment seemed too broad and lacking in nuance. Yes, there was regress in some areas, such as the surge of gun-related crimes in the 1980s. But there was progress on other fronts. Life expectancy increased steadily, and […]
Christopher Snowdon: Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence. After a brief burst […]
Robert F. Graboyes: “Be skeptical of everything you hear, including this sentence.” That was the central message of the 48 semester-long classes I taught to medical professionals—doctors, nurses, therapists, administrators, etc. over 19 years. Officially, my courses were on the economics of healthcare, but they also encompassed ethics and a much broader look at epistemology […]
Michael DePeau-Wilson,: Children have been presenting in large numbers and with more severe viral illnesses than typically seen, physicians at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) said. The CHOP healthcare system, which includes two hospitals and more than 600 beds, is still grappling with a high volume of pediatric patients with viral infections, including respiratory syncytial […]
summarised via Tyler Cowen: But going forward, I think the old metrics that showed large advantages for single payer are going to continue to slide. Unions (formal or otherwise) are going to militate for higher pay. Governments are going to have to deal with one side of the political spectrum going into hoc to the […]
10news: “At this time, Knox County Schools will not be reporting cases or sending notifications,” spokesperson Carly Harrington said. “We do encourage students and staff to stay home if they are sick and to follow the advice of their healthcare provider.” On Monday, the Knox County Board of Education talked about reports and possible new […]
Eugene Volokh: The student government president’s executive orderprovides, among other things, That it shall be prohibited for the Undergraduate Student Government Executive Branch to contract or expend funds to any individual, business, or organization which actively advocates to further limit by law access to reproductive healthcare, including, though not limited to, contraception and induced abortions. This […]
Anna Wilde Mathews, Tom McGinty and Melanie Evans: Nonprofit hospitals get billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for providing support to their communities. A Wall Street Journal analysis shows they are often not particularly generous. These charitable organizations, which comprise the majority of hospitals in the U.S., wrote off in aggregate 2.3% of […]
Jeff Klausner: Moving forward, we must improve our sentinel hospital surveillance to include only those cases likely to be a true COVID-19 hospitalization. Many experts suggest that can be easily done by counting those cases that required oxygen therapy or specific COVID-19 treatment. Population-based surveys would be very useful, albeit expensive and time-consuming, but conducted […]
David Perry: Tech is just a tool or a plaything for him like any other. But we were promised more than that — we were promised a future in which technology would mediate between my disabled son and an ableist world. Instead, what is available to my son is driven more by arbitrary systems than […]
Chang Che: Until 2022, Shanghai was called “the enchanted city.” It was a land of Gucci bags and French wine and weekend jogs along the Bund. It was a land of restless nights spent in the company of eclectic strangers. It was a land of coffee and convenience, of cloud-kissing skylines and flash-delivery bubble tea. There is […]
Peter Sullivan “Right before the election, people would get notices of big premium increases, and that will certainly not reflect well on Democrats,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Vulnerable Democratic lawmakers are trying to sound the alarm. A group of 26 House Democrats from swing districts, led by Rep. Lauren […]
Alex Gutentag: The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 […]
Aaron Kheriaty Japan’s ministry of health is taking a sensible, ethical approach to Covid vaccines. They recently labeled the vaccines with a warning about myocarditis and other risks. They also reaffirmed their commitment to adverse event reporting to document potential side-effects. Japan’s ministry of health states: “Although we encourage all citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination, it […]
Helen Dale America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one. State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s […]
Johan Anderberg; When the epidemiologist Johan Giesecke read the paper, it left him a little puzzled. On any normal day, 275 people die in Sweden, he thought. He’d spent a large part of his life studying just that: where, when, and how people die. The way the world currently thought about death was, to him, completely alien. When […]
Vanessa Fuhrmans and Kathryn Dill: As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to “new collar” roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules. More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions […]
WILL In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local school established policies and procedures that undermined fundamental parental rights to make decisions about their child’s education, healthcare, and overall welfare. AB 963/SB 962 is a response to this common experience for Wisconsin’s public-school parents. Right to review educational materials and access to learning materials: This […]
THURSDAY: Assembly Committee on Education will be hearing testimony on a Parent Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/2zPwBJmbwu — WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 9, 2022 Notes: Parent Bill of Rights: In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local public schools established policies and procedures that undermined the parent’s rights to make decisions about their […]
Ariana Garcia: Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday evening plans to amend the Texas Constitution with a Parent Bill of Rights if he is re-elected. The proposal follows Abbott’s introduction of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights this week. Abbott publicly signed the bill at an event hosted by the Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, where he criticized schools shutting down during the pandemic […]
Dana Goldstein and Noam Scheiber: Few American cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing that classrooms were unsafe amid the Omicron surge. But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that […]
Dr. Amesh Adalja: It was evident almost from day 1 that COVID-19, caused by an efficiently spreading respiratory virus with an animal host, was with us for good. The goal of the public health campaign was not to somehow return the virus magically to bats but to tame the virus and shift its spectrum of […]
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James Benedict, Anna Wilde Mathews, Tom McGinty and Melanie Evans: To get inside healthcare costs, The Wall Street Journal looked at newly public data from one market: Boston, home to some of the world’s most prominent hospitals. U.S. hospitals for the first time this year had to divulge all their prices under a new federal […]
Michelle Fulcher: The emergency is over,’ according to Governor Jared Polis, who explained on Colorado Matters on Friday that vaccines have changed the COVID-19 landscape, rendering masks useful but not required in the state’s fight against the pandemic. Meanwhile, Colorado continues to see a rise in hospitalizations and deaths among unvaccinated patients. With the state’s healthcare […]
Gunter Kampf: High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing. In the UK it was described that secondary […]
A SoCal school board is way overpaying for its superintendent. More than $600K cash/year plus lots benefits. Even after supe &board are long gone, this shrinking district will continue to pay LIFETIME healthcare for supe &family. That will come from $ meant for tomorrow’s kids. https://t.co/9O91y0ccPS — Marguerite Roza (@MargueriteRoza) November 15, 2021
The lengthy 2020-2021 remote experience that Madison’s K-12 students endured made me wonder how the taxpayer funded school district is performing with online services. I was part of a group that reviewed the District’s acquisition of “Infinite Campus” software in the 2000’s. Having been through many software implementations, I asked the District’s then IT/Chief Information […]
University of Utah: “The results suggest it is possible for schools to operate safely and in-person without increasing case rates in the community,” says Richard Nelson, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at University of Utah Health and co-senior author with Westyn Branch-Elliman, M.D., of the VA Boston Healthcare System. “But the flip side is true, […]
Jennifer Calfas: Nearly 40% of U.S. households said they faced serious financial difficulties in recent months of the Covid-19 pandemic, citing problems such as paying utility bills or credit card debt, according to a recent poll. About one-fifth have depleted all of their savings. U.S. households are struggling in many ways over a year into […]
Bretigne Shaffer: But there is a silver lining, and it is this: These governments, and many more around the world, have taken a torch to their own credibility, to their own legitimacy. Never again will any thinking person accept unquestioningly the pronouncements of “public health authorities.” Never again will they turn to CNN, the New […]
Wall Street Journal The U.S. median income for a family of four is about $90,000. Those families would pay 2% of income annually ($1,800) for child care. Taxpayers would pay the rest, roughly $21,000 for two kids in day care, according to estimates by Rachel Greszler of the Heritage Foundation. In wealthy states like Massachusetts, […]
David Zweig: At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even […]
Common Sense Institute: Estimated Expenditures: Homelessness Assistance Programs Within the Metro Denver region, at least $481.2 million is spent annually on shelters, services, emergency response and healthcare for individuals experiencing homelessness. In comparison, Colorado spends $324.5 million on the statewide budget of the Department of Public Safety. Out of the total estimate of $481.2 million, […]
Collateral Global: The COVID-19 pandemic and restrictive mitigation policies have forced millions of children worldwide into poverty, with devastating effects on their access to education, nutrition, shelter, sanitation, and overall likelihood of survival. Before the pandemic, children were already disproportionately affected by poverty. Despite comprising only 1/3 of the world’s population, over half of those […]
Benjamin Lesser, MB Pell and Kristina Cooke: A few weeks after San Francisco’s school district moved to remote learning last year in hopes of halting the spread of the coronavirus, Kate Sullivan Morgan noticed her 11-year-old son was barely eating. He would spend days in bed staring at the ceiling. The mother formed a pod […]
Alec Macgillis: In many parts of the country, particularly cities and towns dominated by Democrats, concerns about virus spread by children has resulted in all sorts of measures: closures of playgrounds, requirements that kids older than 2 wear masks outdoors, rigid restrictions on campus life at colleges that reopened. “We should be more careful with kids,” wrote […]
R. F. Savaris, G. Pumi, […]R. Kunst: A recent mathematical model has suggested that staying at home did not play a dominant role in reducing COVID-19 transmission. The second wave of cases in Europe, in regions that were considered as COVID-19 controlled, may raise some concerns. Our objective was to assess the association between staying […]
Jonas Vlachos, Edvin Hertegård, and Helena B. Svaleryd: To reduce the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), most countries closed schools, despite uncertainty if school closures are an effective containment measure. At the onset of the pandemic, Swedish upper-secondary schools moved to online instruction, while lower-secondary schools remained open. This allows for […]
Joshua Bote: On Thursday, teachers and staff at Los Gatos Union School District received a tantalizing offer in their emails: a COVID-19 vaccine ahead of schedule. According to investigative news outlet San Jose Spotlight, Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Gatos offered district Superintendent Paul Johnson and staff the vaccine as a “gesture” of kindness after […]
Jessie Hellmann: A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that in-person classes at K-12 schools do not appear to lead to increases in COVID-19 when compared with areas that have online-only learning. The CDC study noted that in the week beginning Dec. 6, coronavirus cases among the general population […]
Columbia Students: We are a group of Columbia University students representing all schools and programs, undergraduate and graduate, across the university, including affiliate schools such as Barnard and Teachers College. We are taking action to address several key fronts on which the University is acutely failing its students and the local community, which have only […]
Tim Levin: And according to NYU marketing professor, entrepreneur, author, and podcaster Scott Galloway, the pandemic has accelerated changes that were already brewing in higher education, making the sector more ready for major change than nearly any other industry. “Education, other than maybe healthcare, is more ripe for disruption than any other $100 billion-plus industry […]
Hi, I’m cap tines K-12 education reporter Scott Gerard. Today. Our cap times IDFs panel will discuss how will COVID-19 change K-12 education. I’m lucky to have three wonderful panelists with me to help answer that question. Marilee McKenzie is a teacher at Middleton’s Clark street community school, where she has worked since the school was in its planning stages.
She’s in her [00:03:00] 11th year of teaching. Dr. Gloria Ladson billings is a nationally recognized education expert who was a U w Madison faculty member for more than 26 years, including as a professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction, educational policy studies and educational leadership and policy analysis.
She is also the current president of the national Academy of education. Finally dr. Carlton Jenkins is the new superintendent of the Madison metropolitan school district. He started the districts top job in August, coming from the Robbinsdale school district in Minnesota, where he worked for the past five years, Jenkins began his career in the Madison area.
Having worked in Beloit and at Memorial high school in early 1990s before moving to various districts around the country. Thank you all so much for being here. Mary Lee, I’m going to start with you. You’ve been working with students directly throughout this pandemic. How has it gone? Both in the spring when changes were very sudden, and then this fall with a summer to reflect and [00:04:00] plan, it’s been interesting for sure.
Um, overall, I would say the it’s been hard. There has been nothing about this have been like, ah, It’s really, it makes my life easy. It’s been really challenging. And at the same time, the amount of growth and learning that we’ve been able to do as staff has been incredible. And I think about how teachers have moved from face-to-face to online to then planning for.
Stephen Thomson, Eric C Ip: COVID-19 has brought the world grinding to a halt. As of early August 2020, the greatest public health emergency of the century thus far has registered almost 20 million infected people and claimed over 730,000 lives across all inhabited continents, bringing public health systems to their knees, and causing shutdowns of […]
Shanzeh Ahmad: A 2018 graduate of West High School, Obuseh comes from a military family and moved to Madison in 2016 after having lived in Germany for some six years. Her younger brother is about to start his sophomore year at West. Before Germany, they lived in Delaware, Alabama and Georgia, where Obuseh was born […]
Chris Arnade: The current debates over cancel culture are odd because few involved in them have been canceled, or risk being canceled, while entire institutions are indeed being canceled. Institutions that serve and amplify the interests of the working class, such as local newspapers, unions, and churches. The death of local journalism is at least […]
Emma Young: The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just […]
Sophie Bolich: With the start of the school year rapidly approaching amid a recent uptick in coronavirus cases, healthcare professionals, parents and school administrators are weighing the best options for returning to school in the fall. Options include limiting class size, a modified schedule, restricting access to community areas such as playgrounds, daily temperature checks and […]
Sean O’Brien: “Nothing is known about the boy on the right, who has just finished pouring Madeira (a sweet, fortified wine) into the glasses on the table… the silver collar and padlock around his neck indicate that he is enslaved.” So begins the curator’s comment for a portrait of Elihu Yale, one of three paintings in […]
Chris von Csefalvay: In early March, British leaders planned to take a laissez-faire approach to the spread of the coronavirus. Officials would pursue “herd immunity,” allowing as many people in non-vulnerable categories to catch the virus in the hope that eventually it would stop spreading. But on March 16, a report from the Imperial College […]
Scarlett Strong: The acid test for any model is whether it can predict successfully out of sample. There has been no evidence offered of the model’s ability to forecast. However, we do have a natural experiment to fall back on. In “Intervention strategies against COVID-19 and their estimated impact on Swedish healthcare capacity,” the authors […]
Riley Vetterkind: The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday swiftly rejected an attempt by employee unions to help defend Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order in court. The four unions on Tuesday filed a motion to intervene as parties in a lawsuit the Republican Legislature brought last Tuesday to suspend the governor’s “safer at home” order. Doing […]
Joel Kotkin: What might such “revolutionary” changes look like in our post-plague society? In the immediate future the monied classes in America will take a big hit, as their stock portfolios shrink, both acquisitions and new IPOs get sidetracked and the value of their properties drop. But vast opportunities for tremendous profit available to those with the […]
Luca Vebber: For example, bureaucrats published an entirely new licensing scheme for “real estate appraisal management companies.”[2] That rule has been in the works for almost two years, did we really need to wait until the middle of a healthcare emergency to publish it? I am willing to make the bold prediction that our state […]
Anthony Michael Kreis Not since 1918 has the United States faced the kind of wide-scale public health crisis that Americans face today. The novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 jeopardizes multiple millions of Americans’ lives, especially the elderly and immunocompromised. It also stands to cripple the American economy with the real prospect of the nation plunging into a […]
Kostas Vavitsas: Situation is concerning, but humanity is not at risk The Covid-19 outbreak has rightly gained the attention of health authorities and the media. If the virus were to reach countries with weaker healthcare systems than China’s, the number of deaths will rise significantly and containment will be even harder. Moreover, the long incubation […]
David Blaska: We are a group of educators planning a Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Madison as part of the National BLM Week of Action February 3-7, 2020. The Black Lives Matter movement recognizes the impact of mass incarceration, poverty, non-affordable housing, income disparity, homophobia, unfair immigration laws and policies, gender inequality, and poor access […]
BROOKE AUXIER, LEE RAINIE, MONICA ANDERSON, ANDREW PERRIN, MADHU KUMAR AND ERICA TURNER: Data-driven products and services are often marketed with the potential to save users time and money or even lead to better health and well-being. Still, large shares of U.S. adults are not convinced they benefit from this system of widespread data gathering. Some 81% […]
Nicola Davis: Artificial intelligence is on a par with human experts when it comes to making medical diagnoses based on images, a review has found. The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare has caused excitement, with advocates saying it will ease the strain on resources, free up time for doctor-patient interactions and even aid the […]
Transparent California: The heads of public health agencies are once again atop the list of California’s highest-paid special district workers. Transparent California now has 2018 pay data for over 125,000 special district workers statewide, which includes agencies like fire and water districts, sanitation districts, transit agencies and public hospitals. The top special district earners all […]
Nicholas Diakopoulos: To audit Top Stories, we scraped Google results for more than 200 queries related to news events in November, 2017. We selected the queries to test by looking at Google Trends every day and manually choosing terms related to hard news events. These included names of people in the news such as “colin […]
New Economics Foundation and Public Services International: Whereas universal benefits such as healthcare or unemployment payments are provided to all who need it, UBI is provided to all regardless of need. In- evitably it is not enough to help those in severe need but is a generous gift to the wealthy who don’t need it. […]
Shelby Webb: Houston students enrolled in career-and-technical education courses disproportionately are studying fields that employ relatively few workers in the region, according to a study by the Fordham Institute. The study, published Wednesday, found that more than half of students in the greater Houston-area who are enrolled in CTE courses chose to pursue programs in […]
Richard Milne: Yet finding answers has proved nigh on impossible. Finland’s three-party coalition government collapsed last month over its failure to pass landmark healthcare and local government reforms before an election on April 14. The only long-term issue related to demographic trends that has been addressed in two decades of trying has been pension reform. For Europe, […]
Kira Davis: For parents (and students) who might be out there right now fretting over college tuition and applications and aren’t rich Hollywood players , here are some college alternatives to consider. Free yourself from the “labels” of elite institutions. If they’re thinking of becoming a lawyer (but seriously, how many more of those do […]
Dominic Chopping: As an increasing number of people live longer in retirement, the cost of providing pension and healthcare benefits can rise. Those increased costs are paid for by taxes collected from of the working-age population – who make up a smaller percentage of the population than in decades past. In 2018, those aged 65 […]
Valerie Hopkins: Hungarian women who have four children or more will be exempt from income tax for good, the nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban announced Sunday in a bid to counter a falling population and labour shortages without accepting immigrants. “There are fewer and fewer children born in Europe,” Mr Orban said during his annual […]
Sara Chodosh: For a nation that spends more on healthcare per citizen than almost any other, America isn’t exactly reaping the rewards. Life expectancy has been steadily climbing for decades now, but in the last few years it’s taken a troubling turn in the other direction. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control […]
Lisa arapaport: Life expectancy is declining in high-income countries worldwide, driven in part by the effects of the opioid epidemic on younger adults in the U.S. and the impact of a severe flu season on older adults in other nations, two new studies suggest. A man is seen in silhouette walking a dog at Cunningham […]
Christopher Barca: According to the Democratic nominee in the 14th Congressional District, she and the dozens of area residents who attended the event “talked about race, immigration, healthcare, disability rights and housing.” But unless you were in the room on Sunday, you won’t know what specific community problems were mentioned or how Ocasio-Cortez planned to […]
Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon: In 2017, the University of Virginia reported an operating budget of almost $3.2 billion, assets of $11.2 billion, and liabilities of more than $7.8 billion. The university includes UVA Global LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary based in Shanghai; an athletics enterprise with 25 programs and $24 million in revenues and […]
James Fallows: That being said, my best friend at Harvard is my therapist. Or maybe my psychiatrist, whom I see monthly at student health, and who recently comforted me with an age-old adage: “it’s better to be from Harvard than at Harvard.” They were surprised I had not heard that saying before. Apparently, I’m not […]
Rafia Zakaria: The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. THE drill is well known: every time the results of some sort of worldwide survey are released, women in the Muslim world are towards the bottom. Afghan women usually occupy the lowest rungs of political participation, women in Somalia and Sudan have […]
: “We gotta keep the blood moving,” said union leader Kim Martin as she revved up a picket line of 50 teachers dancing in the freezing rain to Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough. Teachers in West Virginia, who are the 48th lowest paid in the nation, quit school for a two-day illegal […]
umair haque: The people-are-stupid fallacy. Listen. If, as an intellectual, your only response to social upheavals is “people are stupid!”, then you have failed utterly at your job. You are like a doctor who cannot diagnose a disease, gets angry, and begins calling the patient names. You might feel better, but he’s not going to […]
Dave Gershgorn:: Three years ago, after an argument at a bar with some fellow artificial intelligence researchers, Ph.D student Ian Goodfellow cobbled together a new way for AI to think about creating images. The idea was simple: one algorithm tries to generate a realistic image of an object or a scene, while another algorithm tries […]
Daniel Terdiman: That’s the vision of Andrew Ng, a founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, and former head of AI at Baidu–a position he left in March–who is today announcing a set of five interconnected online courses on the subject. Participants in the “Deep Learning Specialization,” available only through Coursera, will be steeped […]
Alan Finkel: This formed the basis of an 850 page report that I published in 1858, saving countless thousands of lives by prompting major reforms in hospital practice. I helped to establish the International Statistical Congress and served as a data consultant to the US Army in the American Civil War. I also invented the […]
Robert Pondiscio: Slowly, slowly, a small but persuasive body of work is emerging which raises curriculum to an object of pressing concern for educators, and expresses long overdue appreciation for the idea that the instructional materials we put in front of children actually matter to student outcomes. A welcome addition to this emerging corpus is […]
Karen Rivedal: Employees of the Madison School District will have one fewer health insurance provider to choose from, requiring just over 1,000 employees to find a new primary care doctor. But the estimated $3 million the district will save from dropping Unity, its highest-cost provider, will help bankroll increased compensation for the district’s roughly 4,000 […]
UBS: We all have seen the headlines: “Google’s AlphaGo defeats world-class Chinese “Go” player”; “IBM’s Watson is tackling healthcare with artificial intelligence”; “Facebook artificial intelligence spots suicidal users”; and so on. Artificial intelligence (AI), which is essentially a set of tools and programs that make software ’smarter’ in a way an outside observer thinks the […]
American College of Pediatricians The American College of Pediatricians urges healthcare professionals, educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality. 1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and […]
Efosa Ojomo: How can we alleviate extreme poverty? It’s the question that underpins the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), and almost all development projects. Because poverty almost always shows itself as a lack of resources in poor communities – food, safe water, sanitation, education, healthcare – it’s reasonable to theorise that poverty is a resource […]
Molly Beck: The law, known as Act 10, required local governments who offer a state health insurance plan to their employees to pay no more than 88 percent of the average premiums. Walker’s 2017-19 state budget will now require the same of all school districts, regardless of which health insurance plans they offer. That spells […]
Evgeny Morozov Amazon also unveiled its cloud-based artificial intelligence services, including systems for recognising objects in images, processing speech commands, and operating chatbot applications. Thus, it’s joining Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM in the already crowded field of advanced AI. For Amazon, this is hardly new territory. By now, it must have built a robust […]
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb: Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so […]
Andrew Ogles and Luke Hilgemann: Tennessee is ground zero for ObamaCare’s nationwide implosion. Late last month the state insurance commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, approved premium increases of up to 62% in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near […]
Kate Irby: With costly healthcare, a stereotype of obesity and a culture of creatively fatty foods, “healthy” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of the United States. But according to the Legatum Prosperity Index’s findings for 2015, the U.S. is the healthiest country in the world. However, when it […]
Tax Foundation: hart 1 gives us a 35-year picture of the growth in federal transfer programs targeted at these middle-income households and compares those trends to the total amount of federal taxes they paid. In 1979, these households paid an average of $10,500 in federal taxes (in 2013 dollars), while the government directed an average […]
David Belk: Without increased transparency and protection from over-billing, no reform will effectively reduce our healthcare costs or even slow the rate in which they’re increasing. Increased transparency in health care costs would make it very difficult for health care providers and insurance companies to continue operating the way in which they do now. Most […]
Jana Kasperkevic Los Angeles city council will hear a proposal on Tuesday to exempt union members from a $15 an hour minimum wage that the unions themselves have spent years fighting for. The proposal for the exemption was first introduced last year, after the Los Angeles city council passed a bill that would see the […]
edx: Developed through a collaboration between HarvardX and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, PH 556x: Practical Improvement Science in Health Care: A roadmap for getting results will provide learners with the valuable skills and simple, well-tested tools they need to translate promising innovations or evidence into practice. A group of expert faculty will explore a […]
by Aleks Berditchevskaia: Many services that we use every day rely on machine learning. Machine learning is used in internet search engines, email filters to sort out spam, websites to make personalised recommendations, banking software to detect unusual transactions, and lots of apps on our phones such as voice recognition. Many services that we use […]
Bradford Richardson The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion. Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national […]
Malcolm Harris: If you visit collegedebt.com, that’s exactly what you find. It’s a stark display, black on white, with an ominous ticker counting up. “Current student loan debt in the United States.” Right now it’s at $1.339 trillion, but by the time you read this, the sum will be larger. The site is owned and […]
Olivia Lowenburg: The school is not a charter school, according to its website, but is “a private, non-profit school” that will partner with the Ravenswood Family Health Center, a nearby health clinic, to provide free healthcare services for students and their families. When The Primary School opens in August 2016, it will offer parent-and-child classes […]
Molly Beck: The number of students using vouchers to attend private schools grew from 22,439 during the 2011-12 school year to 29,609 last school year, according to the DPI. At the same time, 870,650 students attended public schools last year — which is about the same number that did in the 2011-12 school year. Enrollment […]
Karen Finney: Economists have tallied up how much it will likely cost to care for all Americans with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) this year: $268 billion. In 10 years that number is expected to climb to $461 billion, but they say it could top out at $1 trillion if ASD prevalence continues to increase. The […]
Alan Borsuk: Everyone was awaiting word from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau on revenue projections for the next two years. The hope was that the estimates would be raised from earlier figures, which would allow more money to be put into play and allow Republicans to get out from under some Walker proposals that have been […]